American Sphinx Read Online Free Page B

Adams touched their lives in any way. (The most common response from my nonacademic friends was that they knew the Adams face because it appeared on their favorite beer, but they were mistaking John for his cousin Sam.) Working on Jefferson, on the other hand, was like entering an electromagnetic field where lots of friends and neighbors—businessmen, secretaries, journalists, janitors—already resonated with excitement. When my furnace stopped working in the dead of the winter, the local repairman noticed the books on Jefferson piled up in my study. As I held the flashlight for him in the basement while he lay on his back replacing worn-out parts of the heat pump, he talked for a full hour about how critics had maligned Jefferson as an atheist. The repairman was a devout Christian and had read somewhere about Jefferson’s keen interest in the Bible. No, sir, Jefferson was a good Christian gentleman, and he hoped I would get
that
right in my book.
    A neighbor who taught in the local high school, upon learning that I was working on Jefferson, promised to send me a book that he had found extremely helpful in distilling the Jeffersonian message for his students. A package then arrived in the mail that contained three copies of
Revolution Song,
which was not written but “assembled” by one Jim Strupp in order to “provide young people with a contemporary look into the beliefs, ideals and radical thought of Thomas Jefferson.” The blurb on the cover went on: “In our country today, true democratic government is betrayed at all levels. As democracies emerge around the world, they are also subtly being destroyed.” The hyperventilating tone of
Revolution Song
was reminiscent of those full-page newspaper ads in which Asian gurus or self-proclaimed prophets lay out their twelve-step programs to avert the looming apocalypse. Actually, the propagandistic model for
Revolution Song
was even more provocative: “This little book attempts to serve as a democratic alternative to the works of Chairman Mao and other non-democratic leaders.” It was designed as a succinct catechism of Jeffersonian thought, a “little blue book” to counter Mao’s “little red book.” No matter that Mao was in disgrace, even in China, and that communism since 1989 was an ideological lost cause, loitering on the world stage only as an object lesson in political and economic catastrophe. The global battle for the souls of humankind was never-ending, and Jefferson remained the inspirational source, the chosen beacon of the chosen people, still throwing out its light from Monticello, his own personal City on a Hill. Silly stuff, to be sure, but another example of how hauntingly powerful Jefferson’s legacy remained at the popular level. 5
    Soon after I had received my complimentary copies of
Revolution Song,
another piece of mail arrived from someone also exploring the Jefferson trail. The letter came from Paris, and the sender was Mary Jo Salter, a good friend who also happened to be one of America’s most respected poets. She and her husband, the writer Brad Leithauser, were spending a sabbatical year in Paris, where Mary Jo was continuing to perform her duties as poetry editor of the
New Republic
and completing a volume of new poems. The longest poem in the collection, it turned out, would focus on the ubiquitous Mr. Jefferson. Although she explained that “98 percent of the facts and 92 percent of the interpretations historians can provide about Jefferson will never get into my poem at all,” Mary Jo wondered if I might help with the history, explaining that it would be “a crime to get my substantive fact wrong if one can possibly avoid it.” 6
    For a poet of Mary Jo’s stature and sensibility, Jefferson was certainly not a political choice, at least in the customary sense of the term. She had no ideological axes to grind, no patriotic hymns to sing. And it made no sense to think that propagandists and poets were plugged into the same