Hemmings and Hawings

If you can't accept that Jefferson was a slaver, do you even know what America is?

They do get a bit dull, don’t they — the recurring tropes of conservatism I’ve been covering for 20-some-odd years. True, the recent MAGA manifestations have been dramatic, even exciting in a witness-to-end-of-democracy way, and there is some grim satisfaction to be had from the knowledge that, back when many Very Serious People were asking us all to give Bush and the Iraq War and “compassionate conservatism” a chance, you and I had some idea why we shouldn’t.

I still think it’s worth noting for the sake of future generations, if we have any, the little changes that come up in those old rightwing equities from time to time, so we can at least give a more detailed description of the decline.

The other day I was looking at the Rightwing Free Speech debates on Twitter. By and large they were dumb in the expected way: You libs ban everything, you banned Dr. Seuss, you won’t even let Mark Twain say the n-word… These arguments never made much sense and now that their own politicians are working to drive any reference to historical racism out of classrooms they make even less.

Still, I want to point out a particular specimen that shows how far we’ve come in this regard. It’s from the New York Post, and concerns the administration of Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson and a popular tourist destination:

Monticello is going woke — and trashing Thomas Jefferson’s legacy in the process

The Charlottesville, Virginia, home of the Founding Father and America’s third president is one of our best-known national monuments, familiar from its appearance on the nickel since 1938.

But the hilltop mansion designed by Jefferson himself, once preserved as a tribute to the author of the Declaration of Independence, now offers visitors a harangue on the horrors of slavery.

Stop and think who the target audience for this story would be. Like most stories in the New York Post it has some appeal at least for people who barely know who Thomas Jefferson is, but do know he was was Good, and also know from repeated applications that Woke means Bad and if something Woke is being done to a Good guy it’s another outrage to spend one’s leisure hours being mad about.

But the story also has its appeal for a more educated reader, a type of history buff who actually enjoyed their high school history classes, many years ago, and may even read popular history (and visit places like Monticello) from time to time, but who entertains a vague, or more than vague, suspicion that history, like everything else in this sad Soros-run world, has gone Woke and Bad.

This reader may have read with pleasure some older biographies of Jefferson like Joseph Ellis’ American Sphinx, and may recall that Ellis like other old-timers doubted the “rumors” that Jefferson had children by his slave Sally Hemmings, despite the testimonial evidence that some historians were beginning to take seriously, because he thought as a Founder Jefferson was above that sort of thing.

They may have read Ellis’ later acknowledgement of the emerging DNA proof that Jefferson fucked his slave and gave her children, and if they did they probably related to Ellis’ tormented attempt to square that with his heroic vision of Jefferson. They may have satisfied themselves with what Ellis called “the romantic heart-over-head version of the story” of Tom and Sally’s love affair, because it was easier to believe than the much more obvious story of the repeated rape of a sex slave by a rich white man they happened to admire.

In any case, they certainly didn’t allow this knowledge to change what they had always believed about the Founders — that they were not only heroic but also godlike — able to see, for example, how important universal gun suffrage would be even in an age of affordable semi-automatic weapons, and how important to our Republic-not-a-democracy it was to restrict the vote, and many other blessings of liberty, to other propertied white men like themselves until such time, far in the future and long after their own deaths, as people got fed up enough to jump the massive hurdles they had cleverly placed in front of Constitutional change.

And if the new information about Jefferson seemed to lend credence to another interpretation of the Founders and their godliness — one that was gaining popularity with the people our Post reader would later learn to call Woke — that, like any other counterintuitive event, was something to be either reconciled or ignored. In either case, our reader would be slightly resentful whenever he was reminded of it. He may have thought more than once, as we have seen other conservatives do when confronted with inconvenient scientific evidence, that maybe the genetic researchers were just trying to pull a fast one because they hated America.

The Post story’s authors Mary Kay Linge and Jon Levine are here to relieve that reader by inviting him to rage at the people who insist on dwelling on the horrible rapey-slaver interpretation of Jefferson — that is, the Jefferson scholars who run the Monticello museum.

I will note here that I have not been to Monticello, but I have been to Mount Vernon, and even St. George Washington’s pad has plenty of stuff about his slaves, which no one complained about when I was there; but then, unlike Linge and Levine, I was not in the company of a quotable libertarian thinktanker:

“The whole thing has the feel of propaganda and manipulation,” Jeffrey Tucker, founder of the libertarian Brownstone Institute and a recent visitor, told The Post. “People on my tour seemed sad and demoralized.”

Tucker is a contributor to the Falun Gong propaganda outlet the Epoch Times, in case you were wondering about his credentials besides the title his dark-money donors let him have. (Tucker also claims a guide on his Monticello tour called Jefferson a mere “tinker” rather than an inventor, which seems rather rich.)

The new emphasis is the culmination of a 10-year effort to balance the historical record, officials of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the nonprofit that owns the estate, have said.

But visitors complain that employees go out of their way to belittle Jefferson and his life.

“The tour guides play ‘besmirchment derby,’ never missing a chance to defame this brilliant, complex man,” Stephen Owen of Enochville, NC, wrote on Facebook.

Aha, vox populi! There are many more ridiculous sections in the thing, my favorite of which is this:

Jefferson’s life story is full of thorny contradictions. The world’s foremost proponent of liberty, who wrote the immortal words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” was nonetheless a committed slave owner until his death in 1826.

That has made him a prime target for the left. 

Linge and Levin claim that “grievance has become the predominant theme at Monticello,” a claim I am disinclined to credit because their hatchet job is so obvious, e.g.:

Interpretive signage throughout the estate places slavery at the forefront of each historical feature by adding the word “enslaved” before every possible job description, often multiple times: “an enslaved cook,” “enslaved postilions,” “Jefferson’s enslaved valet, Burwell Colbert.

I mean, what are you liberals trying to say — that they were slaves? God, everything is “slavery” with you people — including slavery!

The authors also refer to the sex slave Hemmings as Jefferson’s “mistress.”

The climax is a list of “big-money Dem donors and former Democratic officials” who fund the Foundation that runs the place, including “left-leaning philanthropist David M. Rubenstein, who donated $20 million toward that effort in 2015” — no doubt just to tear down America, as opposed to the brave conservatives who contributed generous Facebook comments in America’s defense instead.

Now, in some ways this is just more of the usual for conservatives. The main innovation, to my mind, is the hysteria over facts that the hysterics don’t even dispute, but are enraged to be reminded of because the facts make them feel bad.

When you think about it, it would seem to cost nothing to admit the truth. If you find the knowledge that Jefferson was a slaver such heavy going that you can’t bear to be reminded of it, maybe you can go instead to, say, historical sites dedicated to John Adams, one of the few anti-slavery (in the sense of “had no slaves”) Founders, or to Harper’s Ferry, or other historical sites unidentified with the gruesome hypocrisy that still plagues this country.

Or we could instead continue to lie about the role of black people and women in the Revolution because we can’t bear to admit what it was. You know, like the states with anti-“CRT” laws are doing.

The real issue here is not just some stupid woke-storm about somebody saying some bad words about some old periwigged putz the wingnuts worship, bad and dumb as that would be. The issue is whether we can actually see the racism in our founding, and say that we saw it. Not many will say that the founding itself is illicit because of that racism (the copious lies about the 1619 Project to the contrary).  But even if they did, even if every black and liberal person did, even if every American did (and I tell you, the way conservatives are mangling this, such a result is more likely every day), to try and cover it up with fake outrage would still be a sin — a small manifestation, in fact, of the original sin that has made this country, for all its wealth, divided and increasingly ungovernable.