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Tag Archives: Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

The Sovereign Subject: Adams, Jefferson, and Krauthammer on Why They Studied Politics

03 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Politics

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Abigail Adams, and Politics, Charles Krauthammer, Collected Wisdom, Government, history, John Adams, Jon Meacham, letter, Pastimes, politics, Public Service, Things that Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

John Adams

“The science of government it is my duty to study… I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”

John Adams, writing to his wife, Abigail Adams, in a letter sent from Paris on May 12th, 1780.

Thomas Jefferson

“Jefferson hungered for greatness, and the drama of his age provided him a stage which he never really left. Writing his William and Mary schoolmate and Revolutionary colleague John Page in 1803 — Page was governor of Virginia, Jefferson president of the United States — Jefferson said: ‘We have both been drawn from our natural passion for study and tranquility, by times which took from us the freedom of choice: times however which, planting a new world with the seeds of just government, will produce a remarkable era in the history of mankind. It was incumbent on those therefore who fell into them, to give up every favorite pursuit, and lay their shoulder to the work of the day.’

In his retirement at Monticello, he looked back over the years, through the haze of war and struggle and peril, and knew that he had done his duty…”

Jon Meacham, describing Thomas Jefferson in the introduction of his new biography Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power.

Charles Krauthammer

“[P]erhaps most eccentric of all, I left a life in medicine for a life in journalism devoted mostly to politics, while firmly believing that what really matters, what moves the spirit, what elevates the mind, what fires the imagination, what makes us fully human are all of these endeavors, disciplines, confusions and amusements that lie outside politics…

While science, medicine, art, poetry, architecture, chess, space, sports, number theory and all things hard and beautiful promise purity, elegance and sometimes even transcendence, they are fundamentally subordinate. In the end, they must bow to the sovereignty of politics.

Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything—high and low and, most especially, high—lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933.”

Charles Krauthammer, reflecting on the relevance of his career choice in the introduction of his new collection, Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics.

__________

I’ve thrown together similar collections of words from a variety of luminaries on a single topic. (As always, if you’ve got any additional references that would fit into these posts, don’t hesitate to send them in.)

Steinbeck

Marching (with Steinbeck, Orwell, and Einstein)

Albert Camus

2+2 (with Camus, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Rand, and Göring)

Albert Einstein

Science as Child’s Play (with Einstein, Newton, and Sagan)

John Updike, Massachusetts, 1984; photographs by Dominique Nabokov

The Existence of God (with Updike, Flew, Lewis, and Wittgenstein)

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Meet Thomas Jefferson’s Father

22 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, History

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

American History, Biography, Dan Zevin, family, fatherhood, history, Jon Meacham, Mark Twain, Patriarch, Peter Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

Peter Jefferson -- Thomas Jefferson's Father

“He was the kind of man people noticed. An imposing, prosperous, well-liked farmer known for his feats of strength and his capacity for endurance in the wilderness, Peter Jefferson had amassed large tracts of land and scores of slaves in and around what became Albemarle County, Virginia. There, along the Rivanna, he built Shadwell, named after the London parish where his wife, Jane, had been baptized.

The first half of the eighteenth century was a thrilling time to be young, white, male, wealthy, and Virginian. Money was to be made, property to be claimed, tobacco to be planted and sold…

As a surveyor and a planter, Peter Jefferson thrived there, and his eldest son, Thomas, born on April 13, 1743, understood his father was a man other men admired. Celebrated for his courage, Peter Jefferson excelled at riding and hunting. His son recalled that the father once singlehandedly pulled down a wooden shed that had stood impervious to the exertions of three slaves who had been ordered to destroy the building… The father’s standing mattered greatly to the son, who remembered him in a superlative and sentimental light…

Jefferson was taught by his father and mother, and later by his teachers and mentors, that a gentleman owed service to his family, to his neighborhood, to his county, to his colony, and to his king. An eldest son in the Virginia of his time grew up expecting to lead—and to be followed. Thomas Jefferson came of age with the confidence that controlling the destinies of others was the most natural thing in the world. He was born for command. He never knew anything else.

Thomas Jefferson grew up with an image—and, until Peter Jefferson’s death when his son was fourteen, the reality—of a father who was powerful, who could do things other men could not, and who, through the force of his will or of his muscles or of both at once, could tangibly transform the world around him. Surveyors defined new worlds; explorers conquered the unknown; mapmakers brought form to the formless. Peter Jefferson was all three and thus claimed a central place in the imagination of his son, who admired his father’s strength and spent a lifetime recounting tales of the older man’s daring. Thomas Jefferson, a great-granddaughter said, ‘never wearied of dwelling with all the pride of filial devotion and admiration on the noble traits’ of his father’s character. The father had shaped the ways other men lived. The son did all he could to play the same role in the lives of others.”

__________

From Jon Meacham’s Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power.

Today marks the birthday of my dad, a reader of this blog and the guy I thought about as I first flipped through these pages.

Now on the quotes page:

“Lately all my friends are worried that they’re turning into their fathers. I’m worried that I’m not.” – Dan Zevin

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” – Mark Twain

In case you don’t come here often, there’s more Jefferson-related stuff to see.

Thomas Jefferson

Meet Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson engraving after painting by Rembrandt Peale.

How Jefferson Fostered Compromise on the National Debt

Thomas Jefferson Randolph

Jefferson’s Advice to His Teenage Grandson

Top: Peter Jefferson; below: Thomas.

Thomas Jefferson

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Meet Thomas Jefferson

23 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, History, Politics

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American History, American Philosophical Society, Biography, election of 1796, Government, history, James Bowdoin, John Adams, John Hancock, Jon Meacham, politics, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, U.S. history

Thomas Jefferson

“He loved his wife, his books, his farms, good wine, architecture, Homer, horseback riding, history, France, the Commonwealth of Virginia, spending money, and the very latest in ideas and insights. He believed in America, and in Americans. The nation, he said in his first inaugural address in 1801, was ‘the world’s best hope.’ He thought Americans themselves capable of virtually anything they put their minds to. ‘Whatever they can, they will,’ Jefferson said of his countrymen in 1814.

A formidable man, ‘Mr. Jefferson was as tall, straight-bodied man as ever you see, right square-shouldered,’ said Isaac Granger Jefferson, a Monticello slave. ‘Neat a built man as ever was seen … a straight-up man, long face, high nose.’ Edmund Bacon, a Monticello overseer, said that Jefferson ‘was like a fine horse; he had no surplus flesh.… His countenance was always mild and pleasant.’…

A philosopher and a scientist, a naturalist and a historian, Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment, always looking forward, consumed by the quest for knowledge. He adored detail, noting the temperature each day and carrying a tiny, ivory-leaved notebook in his pocket to track his daily expenditures. He drove his horses hard and fast and considered the sun his ‘almighty physician.’ Jefferson was fit and virile, a terrific horseman and inveterate walker. He drank no hard liquor but loved wine, taking perhaps three glasses a day. He did not smoke. When he received gifts of Havana cigars from well-wishers, he passed them along to friends.

Jefferson never tired of invention and inquiry, designing dumbwaiters and hidden mechanisms to open doors at Monticello. He delighted in archaeology, paleontology, astronomy, botany, and meteorology, and once created his own version of the Gospels by excising the New Testament passages he found supernatural or implausible and arranging the remaining verses in the order he believed they should be read. He drew sustenance from music and found joy in gardening. He bought and built beautiful things, creating Palladian plans for Monticello and the Roman-inspired capitol of Virginia, which he designed after seeing an ancient temple in Nîmes, in the south of France. He was an enthusiastic patron of pasta, took the trouble to copy down a French recipe for ice cream, and enjoyed the search for the perfect dressing for his salads. He kept shepherd dogs (two favorites were named Bergere and Grizzle). He knew Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish.

He was also a student of human nature, a keen observer of what drove other men, and he loved knowing the details of other lives…

A guest at a country inn was said to have once struck up a conversation with a ‘plainly-dressed and unassuming traveler’ whom the stranger did not recognize. The two covered subject after subject, and the unremarkable traveler was ‘perfectly acquainted with each.’ Afterward, ‘filled with wonder,’ the guest asked the landlord who this extraordinary man was. When the topic was the law, the traveler said, ‘he thought he was a lawyer’; when it was medicine, he ‘felt sure he was a physician’; when it was theology, ‘he became convinced that he was a clergyman.’

The landlord’s reply was brief. ‘Oh, why I thought you knew the Squire.'”

__________

From the prologue to Jon Meacham’s biography Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power.

If you enjoyed the above excerpt, check out a similarly readable and expansive biographical sketch of one of Jefferson’s chief political rivals and late-life companions, John Adams, in an excerpt pulled from David McCullough’s eponymous biography:

John Adams

Meet John Adams

Click here for the rest of the Bully Pulpit’s posts relating to Jefferson or the American founders.

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How Jefferson Fostered Compromise on the National Debt

22 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, History, Politics

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Alexander Hamilton, American History, Biography, compromise, debate, debt negotiations, economics, founding, founding fathers, Government, history, James Madison, Jon Meacham, Monticello, national debt, partisanship, Patsy Jefferson, politics, public debt, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, U.S. history

Thomas Jefferson engraving after painting by Rembrandt Peale.

“Hamilton had argued for a national financial system in which the central government would fund the national debt, assume responsibility for all state debts, and establish a national bank. Money for the federal government would be raised by tariffs on imports and excise taxes on distilled spirits… The assumption proposal, however, instantly divided the nation.

Jefferson knew matters were dire. The Congress seemed paralyzed…

The beginning of wisdom, Jefferson thought, might lie in a meeting of the principals out of the public eye. So he convened a dinner. Jefferson believed things could be worked out, he said, for ‘men of sound heads and honest views needed nothing more than explanation and mutual understanding to enable them to unite in some measures which might enable us to get along.’

No deal meant disaster. It was clear, Jefferson wrote, ‘that if everyone retains inflexibly his present opinion, there will be no bill passed at all for funding the public debts, and… without funding there is an end of the government.’…

The final result, Jefferson believed, was ‘the least bad of all the turns the thing can take.’ It was true that he hated the financial speculation that would result from the Hamiltonian vision of commerce. ‘It is much to be wished that every discouragement should be thrown in the way of men who undertake to trade without capital,’ Jefferson said. ‘The consumers pay for it in the end, and the debts contracted, and bankruptcies occasioned by such commercial adventurers, bring burden and disgrace on our country.’

Yet Jefferson also believed in compromise. He advised his daughter Patsy to approach all people and all things with forbearance. ‘Every human being, my dear, must thus be viewed according to what it is good for, for none of us, no not one, is perfect; and were we to love none who had imperfections this world would be a desert for our love,’ Jefferson wrote in July 1790. ‘All we can do is to make the best of our friends: love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out of the way of what is bad: but no more think of rejecting them for it than of throwing away a piece of music for a flat passage or two.’ It was sound counsel for life at Monticello—and at New York.

In December 1790, a Virginian wrote Jefferson about the state General Assembly’s official protest over the debt assumption. ‘One party charges the Congress with an unconstitutional act; and both parties charge it with an act of injustice.’

So be it. Jefferson had struck the deal he could strike, and, for the moment, America was the stronger for it.”

__________

From the end of chapter 23 in part VI (“The First Secretary of State: 1789-1792”) of Jon Meacham’s new biography Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power.

Gordon Wood called The Art of Power, “probably the best single-volume biography of Jefferson ever written.” Pick it up if you’re interested in the man, or take a look at additional posts about Thomas Jefferson.

Check out another text from American history which is especially relevant to the recent debt-ceiling/government shut-down machinations in Washington, DC. In this one, Abraham Lincoln considers political compromise on the eve of the Civil War:

Lincoln

A Shallow Pretext for Extorting Compromise

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Jon Meacham and David Brooks on Jefferson, Hamilton, and the Art of Power

24 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Politics

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Alexander Hamilton, David Brooks, Jon Meacham, Monticello, Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

Thomas Jefferson

Jon Meacham on Thomas Jefferson:

“He fell in love with his wife. It was a great marriage. Her early death was, for him, an almost suicide-provoking episode. He wandered the woods of Monticello with his daughter afterward, and his friends — Madison, Edmund Randolph, others — worried he wasn’t ever going to come back down from Monticello.

At that point in the traditional biography, the ‘Jefferson-as-lover’ story ends. And then you enter the alleged speculation about Sally Hemings, who was an enslaved person at Monticello. She was also Jefferson’s late wife’s half sister.

I think Sally Hemings reminded Jefferson of his wife.

And I believe that they had a relationship that lasted from 1787 to the day he died. Nearly forty years — the longest relationship he would have with any woman. They had, I believe, six children.

There is DNA evidence — and I think to argue that a man who had an endless appetite for art, for power, for food, for wine, for ice cream, for collecting, for land — to argue that, somehow or another, he would then stop short of engaging in the most sensuous of activities beggars belief.”

____

Alexander Hamilton

David Brooks on Hamilton:

“This is my big beef with Jefferson. Let me start with Hamilton. I’m going to get the dates wrong, but you’ll get the idea.

So when Hamilton was thirteen, his mom died in the bed next to him. He was adopted by his uncle who died — who committed suicide — then he was adopted by his grandparents who died within a year. So by fourteen he’d lost everybody he ever loved except for his brother. A court came in and took away his property. So at fourteen he essentially had nothing. By twenty-five he is George Washington’s Chief of Staff and a war hero. By thirty-five he’s been the author of The Federalist Papers and is one of the top lawyers in New York. By forty or forty-five he has retired as the most successful treasury secretary in U.S. history.

And so he is a story of intense upward mobility. And his philosophy was to create a system of government which would allow poor boys and girls like him to succeed. And there were two things in the way of that.

One was there were these local oligarchies that were holding down economic dynamism, run by rich plantation owners like that bastard Jefferson. And two: technology. Technology was not advancing as far and as fast as he thought it should. And therefore he created federal research projects. He created in New Jersey a research park which became America’s first industrial center. And so he was an enthusiastic embracer of technological innovation, whereas Jefferson, that old stick in the mud, believed in the yeoman virtues. You know, out there in the fields with the tobacco.”

__________

Excerpts from a conversation between Jon Meacham and David Brooks about Jefferson, Hamilton, and the art of power. Watch the entire entertaining and illuminating discussion below.

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