Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 5, 1995 TAG: 9502030051
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GEOFF SEAMANS ASSOCIATE EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Elected governor in 1993 on a platform of longer prison sentences for violent criminals, in 1995 he wants to start paying for it by cutting taxes. In a low-tax state forced by the recession of the early '90s to retreat from its commitment to public schools and higher education, he wants to continue the retreat in the recovery of the mid '90s.
Official legend holds that Allen, while a history major at the University of Virginia, drank deep at the fount of Mr. Jefferson's minimal-government wisdom.
I don't buy it.
Jefferson's alleged allegiance to minimalist government is found in places like his First Inaugural Address in 1801, in which he defined "the sum of good government" as "a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned."
Jefferson, though, is easier to quote than to know.
We ink-stained wretches of the press, for example, are fond of this one, from a 1787 letter: "[W]ere it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
We're not so fond of Jefferson's disinclination, a few years later, to order his Republican supporters to quit throwing Federalist editors in jail. (Granted, the Federalists had gone at Republican editors with even greater zeal.)
As biographer Dumas Malone observed, the 1787 comment wasn't really an assessment of the relative merits of newspapers and government. Rather, Jefferson was employing a turn of hyperbolic phrase to underline his point that a republic to function well must have a well-educated and well-informed electorate.
That belief helped make Jefferson an apostle for certain kinds of governmental activism.
After he left the presidency, of course, he got the state of Virginia into the university business. He also pressed for establishment of a comprehensive system of public schools.
As president, not long after the 1801 Inaugural Speech, Jefferson pushed the constitutional envelope with his Lousiana Purchase, and eagerly recruited an expedition to expand scientific and geographic knowledge by exploring the newly acquired lands.
The limited-government folks of Jefferson's day were neither his Republicans (organizational ancestors of today's Democrats, sort of like how Roanoke College is in Salem) nor the opposition Federalists, but rather the crowd that preferred the weak Articles of Confederation over the stronger union created by the Constitution.
In France when the Constitution was written, Jefferson initially held reservations about it. But one reason for his ultimate acceptance was his fear that the United States needed a central authority for the more effective regulation of commerce.
Jefferson possessed a wide-ranging intellect and a philosophic bent, and he was a sometimes lonely champion of freedom of conscience. But at bottom he was a pragmatic practitioner of politics, not a systematic philosopher, and any libertarian streak within him was significantly modified by a host of practical considerations.
Allen's no-parole and more-prisons policies, which struck so responsive a chord in the 1993 gubernatorial election, presumably are in accord with Jefferson's 1801 recognition of government's obligation to "restrain men from injuring one another."
In looking at Jefferson's career, however, what's striking is how much broader and more future-oriented was his notion of what "wise and frugal government" should entail.
Jefferson looked to public education as the guarantor of society's security; Allen looks to prisons to keep us safe. The purpose of education is to prepare for future successes; the business of prisons is to punish past misdeeds.
The governor's cheery view that everything will somehow work out for the best if, say, community mental-health services are slashed, similarly bespeaks an un-Jeffersonian insouciance toward the future.
Allen's present-mindedness may be a legacy from his late father, coach of the Washington Redskins during the '70s. A shrewd judge of football talent, the elder George Allen produced winning teams by trading future draft choices for quality veterans with a season or two left in them.
But I doubt that Thomas Jefferson has much to do with it.
by CNB