ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, April 16, 1996 TAG: 9604160051
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAMES P. PINKERTON
THOMAS Jefferson turned 253 Saturday. Two new books underscore the enduring relevance of our third president - and illustrate how his legacy can be used and misused. One work praises Jefferson's leadership in expanding the horizon of American influence. The other cites Jefferson's writings to advance policies that Jefferson would vigorously oppose if he were alive to blow out all those candles.
Stephen E. Ambrose's ``Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West'' reminds us that Jefferson was the driving force behind Lewis and Clark's transcontinental expedition of 1803-1806. Not only did he plan the most minute details of the trek, but the inventive president helped design the boat used on the way west.
Harvard Professor Michael J. Sandel's ``Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy'' excerpts Jefferson to make a different, gloomier point. ``At a time when democratic ideals seem ascendant abroad,'' Sandel writes, ``there is reason to wonder whether we have lost possession of them here at home.''
In his well-researched and well-written - but highly selective - survey of U.S. history, Sandel identifies two contending strands of political thought.
One strand is ``procedural,'' emphasizing individual freedoms and rights. The second strand, which Sandel prefers, is ``civic'' - concerned with community-building and national purpose.
Sandel associates Jefferson's decentralized agrarian vision with the latter strand and seeks to update Jeffersonianism into a ``stronger conception of community'' for today.
Jefferson always championed the sturdy virtues of independent farmers, writing in ``Notes on the State of Virginia'' that ``Those who labor in the Earth are the chosen people of God.'' By contrast, urban workers lived lives of ``subservience and venality.''
Yet Jefferson was that rarest of political idealists - one who did not seek legislation to remedy his lamentations. Jefferson had his particular conception of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; yet if others had a different idea - well, it was a free country. Indeed, toward the end of his life, Jefferson conceded that industrialization was inevitable: ``We must now place the manufacturer by the side of the agriculturalist.''
By contrast, Sandel shows much less restraint. Although critical of the liberal ideas on welfare and entitlements, he provides mostly friendly advice to contemporary Democrats amid sharp criticism of Republicans, especially Ronald Reagan and the Religious Right. And, finally, after 300 pages of set-up, he invokes Jefferson to put forth a distinctly un-Jeffersonian policy platform of higher taxes, tougher zoning and land-use controls, and more funding for '60s-style community-development corporations.
Fred Siegel, a professor of American history at New York's Cooper Union, wonders, ``If Dr. Sandel wants to strengthen Jeffersonian citizenship, then why is he for the Great Society?'' Siegel adds, ``Jefferson would have been horrified by the Great Society,'' because it ``treated people as clients, in need of therapeutic tutelage, rather than as citizens.''
Still, Sandel is on to something when he asserts that ``The American welfare state is politically vulnerable because it does not rest on a sense of national community adequate to its purpose.'' Indeed, the dilemma faced by liberal advocates of civil society is this: the bigger the government, the smaller the sense among citizens that their active participation is wanted or needed.
Of course, Sandel is not the first to make creative use of Jefferson's legacy. Franklin D. Roosevelt cited Jefferson continuously as he advanced the New Deal. It was FDR in 1938 who put Jefferson on the nickel and began construction of the Jefferson Memorial on the Mall. So it's time for a reality check, to recall what Jefferson actually believed.
In his 1801 Inaugural Address, he listed the preconditions for ``a happy and prosperous people.'' One was ``a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, 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.''
At the end of his book, Sandel veers off into advocacy of world government that would have had the Sage of Monticello summoning the local Albemarle County militia. Jefferson thought globally, too, but as an unabashed American nationalist: combating the Barbary pirates, engineering the Louisiana Purchase and, as Stephen Ambrose reminds us, sending the American flag to its Manifest Destiny on the shores of the Pacific.
James P. Pinkerton, a policy adviser in the Bush administration, is a columnist for Newsday.
- Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
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