The conservative freakout
Media Matters did a roundup of right-wing media fussing about Mentioning Slavery At Monticello.
The right-wing media ecosystem is expressing outrage following a New York Post story that Monticello, the estate of Thomas Jefferson, is teaching visitors that the principal author of the Declaration of Independence enslaved hundreds of people.
Note that the outrage isn’t because it’s not true. The outrage is because we’re just supposed to shut up about it. But why should we do that?
The conservative freakout seemingly started with a July 4 tweet from Jeffrey A. Tucker, who complained of “aggressive political messaging” at Monticello. Tucker, who is the president of the Brownstone Institute — formed in May 2021 to oppose COVID-19 precautions — also wrote a column the same day for the conspiracy theory website The Epoch Times complaining about his visit there. The New York Post picked up the story and interviewed Tucker for its July 9 article titled “Monticello is going woke — and trashing Thomas Jefferson’s legacy in the process.”
But Jefferson is the one who “trashed his legacy” by enslaving people.
Fox News devoted multiple cable segments, a digital article, and a podcast episode to expressing outrage over the estate teaching this history:
On the July 10 edition of Fox & Friends Weekend, co-host Pete Hegseth said that the “people behind the foundation that runs it [are] all leftists” and that “they’re committed to telling the worst story of America.” Co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy replied, “This is a diabolical plan on their part to populate these positions that have influence over how America tells its story.”
On July 11, Fox & Friends First also aired a segment highlighting the Post story, featuring Carol Swain, who has previously defended white nationalists. During the interview, she claimed Monticello is trying “to destroy” Jefferson’s legacy.
But this is his legacy. It’s their legacy. It’s the story of this country – a combination of revolutionary ideals and ruthless exploitation, removal, genocide, entrenched racism, imperialist wars. That’s it, that’s the legacy. Throwing a big hairy blanket over it can’t change that.
I’ve regularly said that the Founding Fathers were men who had great ideas–so great that the FFs themselves couldn’t fully grasp them. Talking about Jefferson owning slaves is a vital way to show this.
I think it’s also interesting as a matter of human psychology, and fallibility, and all that. Samuel Johnson – a fierce conservative – pointed out the paradox way back then, and he was right.
But we’re supposed to be kind and not mention it, so that those at the top can claim they got there solely on merit, in this colourblind best of all possible worlds. To point out the ways in which they have benefitted from exploitation, genocide, slavery, etc. is just plain rude, and gets people asking uncomfortable, inconvenient questions about the Natural Order of Things.
Freemage,
Exactly, and it shows one of the flaws in trying to interpret the Constitution by looking at what these particular men, the Holy Framers, thought was legal at the time.
Within a decade of the Bill of Rights being ratified, Congress passed the Sedition Act, which was a blatant violation of the First Amendment and was used to prosecute critics of the federal government. So do we need to re-interpret the First Amendment as somehow allowing such a law? (Don’t give Justice Thomas any ideas.)
Well said. They beheld some transcendent truths as though through a glass darkly. To think that they fully understood everything to the last entailment is a denial of their humanity. It also reflects an attitude held perhaps unconsciously by many, particularly those who subscribe to religions that posit a fall from grace, that who (or what) came before was greater than ourselves. It’s a mindset not far from ancestor worship, with all religious connotations intended.
It’s always (well, since I had a view on the subject) been my view that it’s a dishonor to one’s ancestors to beatify them thus. They were not demigods, perfect and terrible; they were people, flawed and fearful. They ought be admired–or vilified–as such.
It is my opinion that to hold the doctrine of “original intent”, no matter how poorly you practice that, is an oxymoron. Since the original intent of the framers of the Constitution was to create a living document, to follow “original intent” would mean to be open to flexible uses of the document in a rapidly changing society.
The framers certainly suspected the world would change. A lot of people I know think they lived in a static time, when understanding of the world was fixed, and had been for thousands of years. But this was a period of the Enlightenment, changing the way people thought, and also the Industrial Revolution, changing the way people lived. They were living in a time of rather sudden, massive change and they knew they couldn’t write a document that would encompass all of that. That is why they wrote it in a way to make room for amending it…and amended it themselves almost immediately after passing it.
Besides, even if that weren’t true, the doctrine of “original intent” suggests that we should all live in the 21st century by rules laid down in the 18th. I suppose that shouldn’t be much of a surprise, considering the court is predominantly Catholic, and think we should live by rules set down two thousand years ago (of course, most of them weren’t’; a lot grew up later. But we’re not supposed to mention that because it destroys the infallibility of god and Jesus).
And then there are those many British people (including some fairly liberal ones – I know one, a historian) who think that the National Trust is doing terrible things by pointing out that those who built those country houses the NT is now responsible for made their money largely from the West Indian sugar and cotton plantations; money which was also used to fuel the Industrial Revolution. The fundamental feeling among these people seems to be that it is somehow discourteous to upset the families who were so generous as to leave their houses to the NT for the benefit of the great British public. The historian said to me that rather than addressing the matter of slavery, historians should address British colonialism, to which I responded that slavery was an integral part of British colonialism, both profiting from it and helping to advance it, so how could you write history about British colonialism without writing about slavery? The general British attitude seems to be that Britain stopped slavery (which in fact it did not do – the former slaves were certainly no better off than before, and in most cases worse off; and the slave-owners received huge indemnities for the loss of their ‘property’), and therefore that we British people are fundamentally good and the history of slavery, as well as of its aftermath, which continues of course into the present, may be set aside and ignored. There are now a number of good recent books that address the slavery that many Britons prefer to pretend never really happened. They include Padraic X. Scanlon’s ‘Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain’ and Vincent Brown’s ‘Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War’. Slavery of course was never a subject that was addressed in history classes at school years ago (and probably isn’t now), where we studied the Thirty Years War, the Risorgimento, the War of the Spanish Succession, etc