Jefferson vs. Hamilton

Theater of the Republic

American People

Liberty & Prosperity

The Public and Sporting Gents of the United States are respeetfully informed, that Tom Jefferson Champion of the People and Alexander Hamilton The Giant, Champion of Corporations

Together with Banks & Various Powerful Trusts

Intend taking a battle for the soul of our nation on Monday next

In consequence of many concepts being announced in print for the Set-to and then not appearing, the following Principles will positively Set-to on this occasion, or the Money will be returned

Banks & the People

Science and Religion

The Evenings Amusements will conclude with a grand display of science and analysis

By World Authority,

Gore Vidal

Stage $300--Box $200--Pit $100

Unique among the founders of our republic, Thomas Jefferson has a reputation that has been something of a fever chart recording the wild ups and downs not only of the simple-minded politically correct who periodically, at the dark of the moon, learn to their horror that a dozen or so of our early presidents were slave owners and ought, retroactively, to be consigned to the trash bin of American history along with that racist republic for which they stood. To the more serious-minded, the very idea of what we like to refer to as our democracy is suddenly thrown into shadow--no bad thing, since the peculiar system of slavery has kept us from ever achieving a democracy, that rule by the people, which, to be fair, was tried only once in human history at Athens, briefly, and has never been repeated anywhere else to this day. (The jury, of course, is still out on those model states Iraq and Afghanistan.)

Meanwhile, the image of Alexander Hamilton is being refurbished in order to preside over a society in thrall to the golden calf. Ron Chernow's recent Alexander Hamilton is a workmanlike biography for what he refers to as "an auspicious time to reexamine the life of Hamilton, who was the prophet of the capitalist revolution in America. If Jefferson enunciated the more ample view of political democracy, Hamilton possessed the finer sense of economic opportunity. He was the messenger from a future that we now inhabit." Fair enough, if you like the "finer things." But this does not quite account for recent Jefferson bashing, ostensibly because he was a slave owner.

Even so, why should Thomas Jefferson, the most interesting--and interested--of the founders, be singled out as peculiarly guilty of profiting from an economic system that so hugely benefited such paladins as Washington and Jackson? Perhaps this is the result of Jefferson's virtues, not his weaknesses. Although as given to hypocrisy as any major politician, he was also fiercely consistent in certain unpopular beliefs, such as "I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." Note that he does not say "over man," because with his tacit acceptance of slavery, the condition of his time and place, he must go even deeper into the matter with "over the mind of man" (which means to him, above all, established religion, a daring position to take since the church was a bulwark of his personal great beast, monarchy, as personified at the time of the revolution by the British king and, worse, later by homegrown religious fanatics eager to traduce a thinker as free as he). He also had other surprises for his fellow republic builders: "The earth belongs in usufruct to the living...the dead have neither powers nor rights over it." This certainly set on edge the teeth of his friend James Madison, who wondered how laws without a history of generational usage could command respect. Jefferson was ready for that one: He suggested a constitutional convention every 30 years or so.

What was he really after? The recognition of an evolving, living state, designed for the living to live in and change as it needed changing. Jefferson was a natural democrat, as the polio-ridden Franklin Delano Roosevelt--a politician of equally great ambition--grasped as early as 1925, when he reviewed for the New York Evening World Claude Bowers's study Jefferson and Hamilton: "I have a breathless feeling as I lay down this book," he wrote. "Hamiltons we have today. Is a Jefferson on the horizon?" Did he suspect even then that he--the first president for life, as it turned out--was Jefferson's avatar? From Social Security to the GI Bill of Rights, he would extend and enrich the world of the living of his time, even to providing us with the great imperial globe itself so like Jefferson's weird Empire of Liberty, otherwise known as the Louisiana Purchase.

As FDR predicted so many years ago, we always seem to have a great many Hamiltons on the scene, including in the election of 2004, which offered us one relatively sane Hamilton and one with a bit too much froth about the lips. But the Jefferson that book reviewer FDR yearned for was not in sight last November, as he had been when Roosevelt made his first plea to the gods of the republic, no doubt suspecting even then that he was Jefferson's heir. Corporate America, as we know and revere it, is pretty much in Hamilton's image. And government by the best (richest) people continues to exert total governance over the entire homeland's alabaster cities--along with those amber fields of marijuana (or was that Wonder bread?) now asphalted over--as we go forth in Halliburton's name and bring creative accounting, soft-money elections and Diebold electronic voting machines to all the world.

Finally, there was Jefferson the poet of what humanity freed from superstition might become if granted, by majority governance, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This last was something new under the political sun and so was recognized by that other great presidential poet Abraham Lincoln, who wrote, "All honor to Jefferson--to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document [that "merely" announces the presence of a great writer on the case] an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression." Incidentally, Lincoln was notorious for his lack of enthusiasm for his predecessors--except, sadly, Henry Clay, who favored, as did Lincoln for a time, the removal of millions of former slaves to Africa or Central America.

But let us put to one side the praise of Roosevelt and Lincoln. What is the real case against Jefferson today? The admirable Gary Wills, usually a Jeffersonian, is now undergoing yet another of his agonizing reappraisals. In Negro President he makes the case that Jefferson's election to the closely contested presidency in 1800 was entirely due to a wicked definition in the Constitution highly favored by the South. This is not exactly news, but Wills gives weight to the "three-fifths clause," which reduced each Negro slave from full humanity to that of only three fifths of a voteless person in order to add his three fifths to the total votes commanded by his owner; when all those three fifths of a person were neatly added up into orderly five-fifths slices, it fleshed out the infamous electoral college, a straitjacket still in place to ensure that a true democracy will forever be denied us. That Jefferson used the so-called slave power to gain election is hardly surprising. But he could hardly use (even if he had wanted to) Article V of the Constitution, which makes it practically impossible to amend the Constitution--until, of course, it was finally invoked after a bloody civil war had abolished slavery. Nor could he alter Article I, which by mandating two senators for each state, no matter how few its inhabitants, thus perpetuated the power of the nonpopulous South in the electoral college. But we must not in our righteousness forget that Jefferson was obliged to play chess with all its eccentric moves and not the easygoing Chinese checkers we like to insist that presidents of the past, not lucky enough to live in our enlightened time, were obliged, constitutionally, to play.

Thirty years ago I wrote a book centered on Aaron Burr, who added to Jefferson's slave votes in the election of 1800 the votes of the nonslaves of New York state. Under the cumbersome electoral procedure of those days, Burr and Jefferson each got the same number of votes for president. As previously agreed, Burr honorably committed himself to Jefferson's election and behaved well. The edgy Jefferson busied himself to ensure his own election. Wills is so good on this shadowy business that one cannot think what the ghost of Dumas Malone (author of a wondrously dull multivolume life of Jefferson) would make of so much heresy. In 1973, when I made mention, prematurely it would seem, of Jefferson's children by his slave Sally Hemings, Malone denounced my portrayal as "subversive." Today, thanks to recent DNA decoding, we know that Jeffersonian blood is indeed mingled with that of Hemings. Even so, white loyalists maintain it could not have been the blood of the great man but of his kinsmen, which presents a curiously raffish picture of Monticello as teeming with youthful Jeffersonian males promiscuously impregnating what was, in effect, the aging lady of the house.

Rather worse has been some of the recent rejection of Jefferson because he did not free his slaves; since they were his capital, he could not give up his slaves any more than the wealthy Washington could until death freed him and he them. As for Jefferson, Lincoln explained his greatness in the Declaration of Independence, while his dedication to the freedom of religion (and the necessity of that wall between church and state) puts us all, even to this very bad day, in his debt. Although criticized for his apparent willingness to break up the union over the Alien and Sedition Acts, he had foreseen the necessity of some mechanism to keep a president and a partisan Congress from arbitrarily overriding the Constitution.

In old age, Jefferson began to rethink the idea of the state itself. Ironically, he who had added more than a dozen states to the union was brooding on the necessity of ever-smaller units of community. He wanted to divide the nation's counties into self-governing wards. "Each ward would thus be a small republic within itself, and every man in the state would thus become an acting member of the common government, transacting in person a great portion of its rights and duties." Thus the poet of 1776 saw happiness as best pursued in an Athenian-size community, to whose inhabitants Pericles once said, "The man who says politics is not his business has no business." Years ago Murray Kempton chided me for my criticism of Jefferson, which was not entirely unlike our neocon laments. "After all," said Kempton, "we need Jefferson in a way only bankers will ever need Hamilton."

Today's odd worship of Hamilton and odder denigration of Jefferson is simply reflective of our current political and economic arrangements. A writer in The Nation seems unaware that we commentators of the 1970s were quite conscious that we were living in a Hamiltonian world and that "Jeffersonian regression versus Hamiltonian progress," to use The Nation's oddly discordant description, were not--then--in any significant contest. But lately something more subtle, even sinister, is going on, of which our current polemicists seem unaware. Although most of the founders were imperialists in the sense that they were expansionists when it came to the American continent, the Hamiltonian genius was expansionist economically through manufactures, banking and, finally, as we have lived to see, enormous multinational corporations that are dissolving nation-states like so many sand casdes during a rising money tide. That is the Hamiltonian legacy today, while the Jeffersonian "regression," as the polemicist sourly puts it, seems quaint, even "musty," but less apt to blow up the world. Compare that to the Hamiltonians, who regard the fiery loss of any city as a great opportunity for Halliburton's very special gift for urban renewal. No one can argue with so much progress.

Except, apparently, me, because the Hamiltonian writes, "Given Vidal's roots in the Virginia (concluded on page 184)Vidal(continued from page 126) gentry [sic], Inventing a Nation is consistently hostile to Hamilton, the great modernizer of the period, while apologetic about Jefferson.... In his first draft of a resolution eventually adopted by the Kentucky state legislature in 1799 Jefferson argued that states had the power to nullify--refuse to execute--federal policies they viewed as unconstitutional." He indicates that I am in agreement on this principle. Certainly, in the instance of the Alien and Sedition Acts favored by the Federalist president Adams and his Federalist Congress, it would have been a very good thing if Jefferson could have devised an escape hatch from what one contemporary rattlebrain has called, by no means inaccurately, the Frozen Republic. In any event, presently Jefferson's failed attempt of 1799 will soon be confronted by a war of the people at large against our imperial masters, when they decree, despite riots in the street, the restoration of the military draft. Have a good day, Alex.

Incidentally, I have no roots in the Virginia gentry. This is one of a number of grotesque inventions concocted by neocons to prove that I am some sort of Confederate sympathizer. Actually, the Gores entered political history during the Reconstruction, when we helped organize the Party of the People throughout the South. And so I largely remain to this day a Jeffersonian populist, currently governed by a commercial cabal devoted to spending trillions of dollars (of declining value) to increase a debt Hamilton himself would disown, in order to fuel a garrison state at war not only with much of the world but, more somberly, with We the People of the United States, now being erased financially by Hamiltonian "progressives."