JEFFERSON THE CONTRADICTION

By David White

Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

By Christopher Hitchens

Harper Collins, 208 pages, $19.95

In September  2004, Atlas Books joined forces with Harper Collins to produce a collection of short biographies that would pair notable authors with eminent figures in history. In the final sentence of their latest installment, the always-provocative Englishman Christopher Hitchens concludes by reminding his readers that “history is a tragedy and not a morality tale.” And that’s exactly how Hitchens examines the life of Thomas Jefferson.

Despite Hitchens’ credentials as one of America’s most prominent social critics, he is not a historian. But “anyone who writes about America is writing about Thomas Jefferson in one way or another,” he notes, and his training has brought him the tools to offer an interesting, insightful, and thoroughly enjoyable look at the “author of America.”

In recent years it has become fashionable for historians to demonize Jefferson—along with the rest of our founding fathers—as a slave-owning, aristocratic hypocrite whose actions were driven by greed and self-interest. This reversed earlier efforts that often painted Jefferson as a flawless figure in American history. Hitchens falls into neither trap.

He creates a narrative where contradiction and human compromise abound. Jefferson is the author of history’s most enduring words on human liberty: “All men are created equal.” Yet he owned more than 200 slaves, none of whom were set free (except for the children he is said to have fathered with Sally Hemmings) until his death.

When President John Adams proposed to expand America’s armed forces and create a navy, Jefferson campaigned against such a move both for reasons of expense and to avoid the precedent of a standing army. Yet in one of his first decisions as President, Jefferson dispatched American armed forces around the globe to confront the Barbary States of North Africa. And Jefferson did not “inform Congress until the warships had sailed far enough to be effectively beyond recall.” It goes without saying that Jefferson couldn’t claim ignorance of the Constitution’s stipulation that only Congress can declare war.

When Napoleon offered Jefferson the opportunity to purchase all of France’s American territory for only $15 million, doubling the physical size of the nation, Jefferson “gave the Constitution a close reading” to seek authorization for such a move. Failing to find any, he decided to take the offer anyway.

Jefferson detested pomp and circumstance, yet spent thousands of dollars on wine. He considered Africans “inferior” to whites, yet there is no longer any doubt that his relationship with Sally Hemmings was one of love. He was suspicious of clergy and organized religion, yet he peppered all of his revolutionary writing with religious language and imagery. Hitchens makes no attempt to justify any of Jefferson’s inconsistencies. He writes simply that “Jefferson

was a contradiction.”

Hitchens focuses on the most important details of Jefferson’s life. Some of his more enlightening sections study Jefferson’s Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, his Summary View of the Rights of British America (a 1774 pamphlet lambasting British

rule), his draft of the Declaration of Independence, and the Jefferson Bible. Hitchens also looks closely at the Barbary Wars, Jefferson’s time in France, and the Louisiana Purchase.

The story behind the Jefferson Bible is one of the most fascinating pieces of Jefferson’s life, but it is here that the author’s personal bias seeps into the text. There is no doubt that Jefferson expressed a great deal of ambivalence toward the church. He advocated the complete separation of organized religion and the state, considered Dr. Joseph Priestley’s History of the Corruptions of Christianity among his favorite books, and once predicted that “there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die a Unitarian.”

Yet Jefferson spent much time in his later years thinking about the life of Jesus. And by literally cutting “verse by verse out of the printed book,” he created an 82-page subjective condensation of the Bible, describing it as the “most sublime edifice and benevolent code of morals which had ever been offered to man.”

Such devotion would suggest to many that Jefferson was committed to Christianity (or at least deism). Yet Hitchens—whose own writings are occasionally militant in their atheism—argues that, at the time of his death, Jefferson “was not a Christian,” and may have been an atheist. Such an analysis could be true, but one almost senses that Hitchens is trying to will Jefferson’s legacy toward atheism.

Another flaw of the book is that it requires the reader to arrive already somewhat familiar with Jefferson’s life and times. For a series that promises “ideal introductions...to the general reader,” this is a bit misleading.

Most Americans, however, will start with enough familiarity with Jefferson to navigate this life. For Jefferson is, as Hitchens points out, one of the few figures in our history “whose absence simply cannot be imagined.”

David White is a TAE assistant editor.

HARD DAYS AT HARVARD

By Naomi Riley

Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class

By Ross Gregory Douthat

Hyperion, 304 pages, $24.95

Harvard, I discovered early in my undergraduate career, enrolled students with a range of abilities, from the young man who could name all 535 members of Congress without prompting, to the young woman who thought a dominatrix was “like a printer.” My former classmates also had a wide range of interests and views. Amazingly, most of them—from the large self-described “polyamorous black woman” to the gay Republican “Jeopardy!” contestant from Kentucky—seemed to find themselves at home at Harvard.

But not right away, as Harvard’s administration does little to guide students socially or academically. “Mother Harvard doesn’t nurture her young,” a dean there once told me.

Ross Douthat, now three years out of Harvard himself, spent a lot of time as an undergraduate searching for his niche. In this memoir, he documents his search in detail. Readers will find the book a quick and often amusing read. Most will also find it self-indulgent.

Shortly after arriving on campus, Douthat is “punched” for a couple of final clubs. Formerly havens for upper class gentlemen, final clubs have become Harvard’s equivalent of fraternities, though no one lives in them. Douthat, whose family is by no means poor, marvels at the wealth and status of the young men around him. Their jokes about the sailing team, their travels abroad, their names (particularly how many they have in common with Harvard buildings) set him to coveting. “The Porcellian boys were part of a magical pampered ruling class, and I wanted in.”

Which brings us to Douthat’s examination of “Ruling Classes.” The first ruling class is the old one whose members got to be where they are because of their ancestors’ presence on the Mayflower. Douthat claims this group is slowly disappearing, but that it’s still got a certain hold on the undergraduate imagination. At any rate, he claims little respect for this group—all of the prep school boys hanging out, spending gross amounts of money on liquor and fancy dinners. (Douthat went to prep school too, though not the right one.) But he also notes that several of these individuals went into national service after graduation, “as if some residue of the older world of noblesse oblige remained in those institutions and had rubbed off on them.”

The second ruling class, the newer one, is the meritocracy. Its members are admitted to Harvard because of their perfect GPAs, their high SAT scores, and their long lists of extracurricular activities (which must always include a nice balance of sports, clubs, and community service). They continue on this path once at Harvard, juggling as many activities as possible in order to buff shiny resumes for McKinsey. (Rule of thumb: If a Harvard student can’t become president of a club, he will start a new one. Why else would you need more than one Model United Nations Club?)

One of Douthat’s greatest concerns is that all of these activities overshadow the substance of the education students are receiving. He laments that it is possible to get through Harvard without studying major historical events, works of literature, or scientific theories. “A computer science major, his head spinning with endless lines of code, might be well served to take a break by dousing his head in ‘The Two Koreas’ or ‘The Cuban Revolution 1965-1971,’ but under the current Harvard system, those could easily be the only two history classes he ever takes.”

Douthat’s observation is valid. But it’s a criticism only of Harvard’s requirements, not of its opportunities. As of a few years ago, core classes could also include E. O. Wilson on evolutionary biology, Richard Pipes on the Russian Revolution, James Kugel on the Bible, and Martin Feldstein on economics.

Even in a worthwhile class, says Douthat, Harvard students put too much effort into figuring out how to put in very little effort. The stories of students who wrote their senior theses in three days, or who never do the reading or come to class, or who got themselves deadline extensions by “accidentally” dropping off a paper with several blank pages in the middle, and then handing in the real version the next day, will probably infuriate some, and certainly make many wonder, What exactly is the merit in meritocracy?

Why should these cynical kids, who have been playing the system since they were eight, be rewarded for their behavior with a Harvard diploma? Why should the fact that they went to the right high school and took the right SAT preparation classes earn them another notch in their belts? All good questions, but what are the alternatives?

We could go back to the old system where your name and your money got you in. Or we could open admission to everyone. That didn’t help City College of New York much. Harvard’s admissions are already blind to financial need, and tuition is free for anyone whose parents make less than $40,000 a year, so money isn’t the obstacle.

There is no obvious solution to the kind of inequality that Harvard and schools like it engender. Harvard, as it turns out, is an imperfect place, in an imperfect society. But at least it will get you a book contract.

Naomi Riley is an editor at the Wall Street Journal.

WHITEWASHING THE BLACKLIST

By Henry Holzer

Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film

Colony’s Long Romance with the Left

By Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh

Encounter Books, 292 pages, $25.95

“How and why,” ask the authors of Red Star Over Hollywood, did so many film artists in the first half of the twentieth century “become enchanted not only with the Left, but with its totalitarian expression, the American Communist Party?” “What were their aims and objectives, and how did they set about achieving them?” To answer these questions, Ronald and Allis Radosh present a detailed mosaic of communism in Hollywood before, during, and after World War II.

Some elements of the communist seduction of Western citizens are well known: Moscow’s creation of the revolution-exporting Comintern in 1919; the duplicitous 1935-1939 “common front”; 1939’s gear-shifting Hitler-Stalin Pact; the “Cold War” struggles—all of which the authors have researched meticulously and related directly to their study of Hollywood’s Communists.

Other pieces are less familiar. Original research by the authors (their book contains 552 footnotes and extensive bibliographical support) depicts the psychologies of the principal Communist players in Hollywood; the pipeline that linked New York City’s radical theater to Hollywood’s movie studios; the infighting over Communist attempts to co-opt the movie studio unions; the inside story of the major cinematic accomplishment of Hollywood’s Communists, the 1943 film Mission To Moscow.

Red Star Over Hollywood depicts a relatively small coterie of largely ineffectual writers, actors, and directors who mindlessly followed the Comintern’s orders to imbue Hollywood films with Communist propaganda. These true believers defended every twist in the party line, raised and contributed money for Communist-backed causes, and sought control of the movie unions. There was no shortage of fellow travelers. And there were also some prominent opponents. Familiar names abound: Reagan, Cagney, Kazan, Schulberg, Bogart, Bacall, Zanuck, Wayne, Garfield, Gable, DeHavilland—all players in a real life drama pitting totalitarian ideology against America’s fundamental freedoms.

When the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Hollywood’s aggressive Communists, the Left portrayed those investigated as martyrs. Urged on, we now know, by the Party and radical lawyers, the so-called Hollywood Ten turned their testimony into a political circus. The Radoshes (who find fault with HUAC’s procedures and goals) identify a perverse symbiosis: The committee needed fall guys to expose, and the Hollywood Ten used their subpoenaed appearances to convert themselves from reviled Communists into heroic victims of a right-wing witch hunt.

In this way, the myth of the “black list” took root—claiming that the Hollywood Ten and others were abused by a red-baiting witch hunt conducted by political zealots for their own aggrandizement. The Radoshes characterize this as a “fable of innocence destroyed by malice [that] has acquired an almost irresistible sanctity during half a century of telling and retelling.” Exposing the blacklist myth is a goal of their book, and they achieve it admirably.

They irrefutably demonstrate, however, that the Hollywood Ten truly were militant Communists. They wrapped themselves in the American flag when it suited them, and in the Soviet flag when they were ordered to. Far from being heroes or victims, they were merely pawns used by a totalitarian system they embraced warmly—a system that in the end chewed them up and spit them out.

Which was no less than they deserved.

Henry Mark Holzer is professor emeritus at Brooklyn Law School.