A Good Book

I love a good book.   The only thing that beats it, in my universe, is a good round of golf…but they are both up there together, side by side, on my personal pedestal. 

I just finished an excellent one, Jon Meacham’s Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power.  It is an incredibly well researched biography of the man who more than perhaps any other set the tone and direction of the birth of our nation and his vision still guides this country today.

What I love about a good book is what I learn from it.  I will be the first to confess that in my youth I was an average student.  I can’t think of any subject in school that particularly captured my attention, certainly not history, which seems to be my current obsession.  

I suspect that many readers shy away from pure history, dreading the dryness and lack of excitement.  But when you find an author who is writing to entrance the audience, then the chances are excellent that the history book will keep the reader glued to its covers.  I have found two such authors of history, David Hackett Fischer and now I add Jon Meacham to the short list.

I wish I could list learning after learning from this book, but it would become itself a book.  So, I will put together the short list:

• I have raged for most of my adult life at the horrible antics of politics, especially in the heat of the election effort.  The most recent presidential campaign is a prime example of how vicious the rhetoric of the campaign process becomes.  In The Art of Power I learned that these antics are by no means new.  Terrible, terrible lies were used by both parties in every campaign since the inception of our country.  The only exception to this is the placement of Washington in the presidency…evidentially there was little objection.

•  It is with some concern that I observe the efforts of organized religion to insert itself into government.  During Jefferson’s lifetime ’it was a crime in Virginia not to baptize infants in the Anglican Church; dissenters were denied office, civil or military, children could be taken from their parents if the parents failed to profess the prescribed creeds.  … The church was all too evidentially an institution as susceptible to corruption as any other. …In theological terms, according to notes he made on John Locke, Jefferson concurred with a Christian tradition that held the church should not depend on state-enforced compulsion. … It did not speak well of the power of God, in other words, if He needed a human government to prop him up. …It took incremental legislation and several years but in the end, in 1786, a statute for religious liberty from Jefferson’s pen became law.  The bill, Jefferson said, was ‘meant to comprehend, within the mantel of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometran, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination.’”

•  Jefferson was very concerned, over and over, throughout his lifetime with intolerance, and how far intolerant citizens would go to force their way.

• I did not know that it was Jefferson’s personal library that founded our present day Library of Congress.

•  As we currently struggle with issues like gun legislation I am struck by his stand on innovation and progress: “The past, he thought, should hold no magical, unexamined claim over the present. ‘Some men look at Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the Ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched.’ He wrote in 1816. 

‘They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.  I knew that age well: I belonged to it, and labored with it.  It deserved well of its country.  It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present: and 40 years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading: and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead.  I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions….but I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind…We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. ‘”

Boy, if Jefferson could only see us today!

And so in the end, I wept as I finished the book.  I felt as though I was standing at his deathbed, and that I walked down the path to the Monticello Graveyard.  But I smiled as I read what is written in the end….

“The three achievements he ordered carved on his tombstone – as author of the American Declaration of Independence and of the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty, and as founder of the University of Virginia – speak to his love of liberty of the mind and of the heart, and to his faith in the future.  They point toward the least disputable elements of his long, turbulent life, to the primacy of reason and the possibilities of freedom and the eternal quest for wisdom.  

For Jefferson never gave up on America, a country in many ways he brought into being and which he nurtured through tender, fragile hours.  ‘And I have observed this march of civilization advancing from the sea coast, passing over us like a cloud of light, increasing our knowledge and improving our condition…when where this progress will stop, no one can say, ‘ he wrote in 1824.”