Saturday's holiday could just as easily be called Thomas Jefferson Day.
The Continental Congress actually voted to declare independence on July 2, 1776, which is why John Adams thought that date would become the "most memorable" in the history of America.
But Congress didn't formally adopt the Declaration of Independence document, the premier example of Jefferson's brilliance in articulating ideas, until July 4 after members had edited the draft ("mangled" it, according to Jefferson).
When Franklin Roosevelt issued a presidential proclamation calling for annual commemoration of Jefferson's birthday in 1938 in schools and churches, he described the third president as "the advocate of great causes and high ideals of human freedom." He reminded the citizenry that Jefferson was a lawyer, statesman, philosopher, scientist, farmer and architect who "lived a life of such rich diversity that it encompassed the full scope of the knowledge of his time." (Italics are mine.)
Roosevelt concluded his high praise by acknowledging it was "of happy significance to his country" that Jefferson also knew how to carry theory into practice.
He didn't mention that Jefferson was a slaveholder, and that omission may yet have detrimental consequences for FDR statuary and other eponymous memorials, parks, buildings and bridges scattered across the nation.
In the course of human events, political progress has historically been dominated by "the art of the possible," to use Otto von Bismarck's oft-quoted verbiage.
Success attained by doing what can be done at a given moment, even when it falls short of the ideal, is still success.
Today's hard-left trend toward a "cancel culture" conversely celebrates destructive regression, where perceived single-issue failure outweighs demonstrated massive, multidimensional achievement. It's an almost comical caricature: the loudest cattle-calls of condemnation for "racist" revolutionary-era leaders are launched from the privileged perch of protected freedoms that flow directly from the founders' greatness.
The flawed concept of "presentism"--projecting contemporary moral judgments or worldviews on past figures and events--undermines not only the study of history but also the essence of free speech. The very act of challenging or disagreeing with revisionist presentism is considered racist itself by proponents.
Presentism is problematic because it distorts our view of the past, and consequently warps our ability to learn from it. Simplistically reducing any historical figure to a modern single-dimension interpretation is both damaging and silly. Will the founders soon be disparaged and disqualified as well for denying a woman's right to abortion?
Collective historical illiteracy has enabled a sort of "tooth fairy" attitude to prevail about our state of liberty. We're not exactly sure of how it came to be, but we have it now and enjoy it and are confident we deserve it.
Would those who seek to tear down Jefferson's statues, efface his name from schools and buildings, perhaps even dynamite his visage on Mount Rushmore, truly want to erase his countless accomplishments as well?
Jefferson's words and deeds--along with those of all founding-era leaders--are responsible for every privilege, blessing and preservation of rights that we as Americans daily and hourly take for granted.
A genuinely Jefferson-free America would be a drastically different place, with:
• No Declaration of Independence (and thus no "all men are created equal" foundation for our republic) and no American Revolution pledged to universal principles of liberty.
• No Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom (which formed the basis for our First Amendment).
• No separation of church and state (the concept was coined in an 1802 letter to a church group).
• No Louisiana Purchase (from which 15 states came, including Arkansas and five others in their entirety) and no Lewis and Clark expedition to establish an American presence in the territory.
• No University of Virginia as a model for enlightened, specialized higher education beyond medicine, law and religion through state-sponsored institutions.
Besides those losses and whatever disastrous effects their absence would have produced, blotting out Jefferson would have also eliminated many anti-slavery acts he undertook, including:
• The 1778 law he drafted that prohibited further importation of slaves into Virginia.
• The 1784 proposal to outlaw slavery in western U.S. territories, which paved the way for passage of the Northwest Ordinance (the Reconstruction Congress in 1865 pulled Jefferson's 1784 language almost verbatim for Section 1 of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery).
• The 1806 effort as president to successfully pressure Congress to abolish the slave trade.
T he fact that Jefferson was born into a culture and economic model that had become utterly dependent on slavery was a limitation under which he and all others of his time (the key phrase in Roosevelt's proclamation) labored.
Jefferson was a prolific writer, and penned numerous notable and eloquent opinions abhorring slavery. "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free," he wrote in his autobiography; the same words are carved into a panel on the Jefferson Memorial.
In his time, by every weighing of comparative world-changing merit, Jefferson was one of the greatest Americans worthy of the utmost reverence by FDR and any half-serious student of history.
If we now choose, in our time, to think otherwise, we only diminish us, not him.
--–––––v–––––--
Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.