American Sphinx Read Online Free PDF

in any reliable sense an accurate reflection of his many-chambered personality, they suggested wildly extravagant clutter and a principle of selection guided only by a luxuriously idiosyncratic temperament: Houdon busts next to Indian headdresses, mahogany tables brimming over with multiple sets of porcelain and silver candlesticks, wall-to-wall portraits and prints and damask hangings and full-length gilt-framed mirrors. 10
    Perhaps all our lives would look just as random and jumbled if our most precious material possessions, gathered over a lifetime, were reassembled in one place. By any measure, however, chockablock Monticello resembled a trophy case belonging to one of America’s most self-indulgent and wildly eclectic collectors. How did one square this massive treasure trove of expensive collectibles with a life at least nominally committed to agrarian simplicity and Ciceronian austerity? The exhibit suggested that Jefferson lived in a crowded museum filled with the kinds of expensive objects one normally associates with a late-nineteenth-century Robber Baron whose exorbitant wealth permitted him to indulge all his acquisitive instincts. The one discernible reminder of Jefferson’s preference for what he called “republican simplicity” was the most valued item in the exhibit: the portable writing desk on which he had composed the Declaration of Independence. It was on loan from the Smithsonian, where it had resided since 1880, and the only other time it had been permitted to travel was in 1943, when Franklin Roosevelt took it with him the day he dedicated the Jefferson Memorial. The Smithsonian recognized that the writing desk was a sacred relic of American history and insisted on posting a twenty-four-hour guard during the month it was on loan to Monticello. In part because of the sacred desk, the only private dwelling in America to attract more visitors than Monticello that year was Elvis Presley’s Graceland. 11
    The phenomenon deserved a name or title, so I began to call it the Jeffersonian Surge. Nothing like it had accompanied the 250th birthday of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin or John Adams. Nor had Lincoln’s 150th birthday generated anything like this popular outpouring. The Jeffersonian Surge was not a movement led or controlled by professional historians. Jefferson was part of the public domain with drawing power independent of his status in the academic world. The folks who ran publishing houses (seventeen new books with Jefferson’s name in the title appeared in 1993), the producers and directors of films (Florentine Films was now in production, and James Ivory and Ismail Merchant had begun filming in Paris), as well as museum curators and foundation directors, all obviously regarded Jefferson as a sure thing. Compared with the belongings of all other historical figures, things Jeffersonian had a broad, deep and diverse market. It was as if one had attended a Fourth of July fireworks display and, instead of the usual rockets and sparklers, had born witness to the detonation of a modest-sized nuclear bomb. 12
    In the academic world the winds were gusting in a different direction. Not that scholars had ignored Jefferson or consigned him to some second tier of historical significance. The number of scholarly books and articles focusing on Jefferson or some aspect of his long life continued to grow at a geometric rate; two full volumes were required merely to list all the Jefferson scholarship, much of it coming in the last quarter century. 13 The central scholarly project,
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson
, continued to emerge from Princeton University Press at the stately pace of one volume every two years or so (twenty-five volumes had appeared by 1993), though at the current rate no adult was likely to be alive when the editors ushered Jefferson off to the hereafter.
    The problem, then, was not lack of interest so much as lack of consensus about what the man stood for and what his career had