The Littlest President

I had this idea, a while ago, that the first four presidents--Founding Father presidents--could easily be compared to the Beatles. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson are obviously the Lennon-McCartney of the group; they do a lot of good work together, they love each other, fight a bunch, then make up. George Washington is George Harrison; quiet, underrated.

That, of course, means that James Madison is Ringo. Because he's short. And fourth.

This is unfair. Madison does some pretty incredible things both before he's president and later during his presidency. He writes a third of the Federalist Papers. He's the Father of the Bill of Rights. He's as insistent as Jefferson--maybe even more so--about the separation of church and state (and as Garry Wills points out, organized religion hasn't flourished nearly as well in any other industrialized country as it has in the US). He gets the country through its first war ever, and in doing so, sets it on its way to eventual world power.

Of course, to do so, he has to reverse his course on almost everything. But, as Wills points out pretty often, consistency isn't his strong point, and several times, one of Madison's faults will turn out to be his strong suit (and vice versa).

But, as Wills also points out, he's got the problem of following those other three guys. He's never going to crack the top ten. And even though Ringo wrote some decent songs ("Don't Pass Me By" comes to mind), he's always going to be overshadowed by John, Paul, and George (Harrison, not Washington).

Outgunned!

Everything I've written below about Jefferson and Monticello is done so much better, and with lovely art to boot, by Maria Kalman in her blog for the New York Times.

The Colonel and Monticello

It has occurred to me already, four months into this project, that writing a biography of someone is an act of love. You become attached to the person, reading his or her letters and diaries and journals, tracing steps across the continents. You start to think that you really know your subject, and certainly you do, more so than 99% of the rest of the populace. It's your job--your duty, even--to translate his or her life into modern-day language, to revivify them. That's a heavy thing to have to do. You might get a little defensive sometimes about the flaws of the person you love.

Or a lot defensive, in the case of Jefferson. Witness the man who led our tour of Monticello; if he told us his name at the beginning of the tour, I forgot it the moment another staff member addressed him as "The Colonel." This is where we met him, on the steps of Monticello:



I was very excited about the steps of Monticello--you see, one of the things I've always liked about Jefferson is his inventiveness--stands that let him read five books simultaneously, closet space in the high, formerly wasted upper space of the house, little lazy susans that allow food and wine to appear magically in the dining room. The ceiling of the front porch of Monticello is the first chance you get to experience this kind of genius:



It's a compass attached to the weathervane; Jefferson the agrarian scholar can step out on his porch during a storm and learn the direction of the wind without getting wet. Brilliant!

We skipped it without a mention, and went inside. Now, to be fair to the Colonel, he did point out Jefferson's days-of-the-week clock in the entry hall, and a few other gizmos, but this set a tone. In side the entry hall, the Colonel pointed out a mastodon tooth of Jefferson's as proof of his scientific curiosity, but did not mention my favorite Jefferson fact: that he told Lewis and Clark to keep an eye out for mastodons while they explored the Louisiana Purchase, as Jefferson was sure they still roamed out there somewhere.

No mention of this from the Colonel. We were doing a Great Lives of Great Men tour today.

And then, in the next room, it kicked into a higher gear. The Colonel had been discussing something or other--Martha Washington, I think, since we were in her receiving room--when, apropos of nothing:

"Now, this business between Mr. Jefferson and a slave of his is NOT scientifically proven, and even if it was true, it doesn't change A WORD of what he wrote in THAT DOCUMENT!" the Colonel yelled, and pointed to a copy of the Declaration of Independence on the wall.

Wait, what? Where did that come from? No one had mentioned Sally Hemmings at this point, and even if we had, it was the official position of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation--the people who own Monticello and the Colonel's employer--that Jefferson fathered at least one child with Sally.

The feeling in the room had shifted. When the Colonel asked for questions, one man raised his hands and asked why Jefferson had died bankrupt (quick answer: he loved spending money), something the Colonel had mentioned in his run-up to the explosion.

"I won't answer that here," he said. "Let's let the man remain solvent while we're under his roof."

Yep, we were definitely in the realm of hardcore subject love. The "Mr. Jefferson" cinched it for me; this guy had to be a graduate of the University of Virginia (ahem, sorry, "Mr. Jefferson's University") back in its all-male days. Nothing like seeing your idol, your model yanked down off his pedestal to make you defensive about him.

The Colonel gives a tour of Monticello that won't be available in a dozen years: the uncomplicated, brilliant genius of the Revolution. A guy who didn't fund the newspaper enemies of his own President (as TJ did while Washington's Secretary of State), a guy who didn't sleep with his slaves, and certainly not a guy who put his genius to work to avoid the more problematic aspects of owning other human beings. Those clever lazy susans I mentioned earlier? They let food and wine reach the table without requiring a single slave to appear in the room.

Sigh. It's been a difficult week for separating the man from his work (paging Roman Polanski and John Phillips). I'm ready to move on to James Madison, who's complicated for a whole other set of reasons.