The Thomas Jefferson Hour; #0447; Listener Questions/Free Masons

Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with our third president, Thomas Jefferson. Today's program was recorded in mid-November 2004. Today Thomas Jefferson is answering listener questions on such topics as the Free Masons, Gift Giving and Holiday Acknowledgement, and the method that he Thomas Jefferson used to compile the Jefferson Bible, what Thomas Jefferson considered to be the sayings of the real Jesus. The Thomas Jefferson Hour is produced by High Plains Public Radio and New Enlightenment Radio Network, a non-profit organization dedicated to the search for truth in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson. Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. I'm your host today, Janie Guil, and seated across from me as our third president, Thomas Jefferson. Good day to you, Mr. Jefferson. Good day to you. Mr. Jefferson, today we have a listener question program. And the first question comes from a gentleman in California, and he and his father have debated this question multiple times. The question is, were you a member of the Mason's?

There is no documentary evidence of any sort that I was ever a member of the Free Mason Removement. I had friends who were Mason's, George Washington was a Mason, John Adams was a Mason, Dr. Franklin was a Mason. The Mason's are an extraordinary group of people who were committed to a rational and scientific view of the world and a commitment to civic decency and participation to a civility of character that I found remarkable, but I am not myself a Mason. Mr. Jefferson, it does sound like it's your type of organization, so why weren't you a member of the Mason's? I'm not really a joiner for one thing. I also am not very fond of organizations that are exclusive in their membership. In a democracy like ours, it's when we are attempting to create as many types of social equality as possible, or at least to minimize the inequalities that are inherent in the human character.

It's important for us not to add artificial systems of distinction between one person and another. This is why, for example, I objected to the Society of the Cincinnati, which was an officer's organization that emerged from the Revolutionary War, and it was presided over by my dear friend, a man that I respected greatly, George Washington, but it was an aristocratic and indeed a hereditary organization that would be passed down from the officer to his son. It seemed to me that, however much importance it might have as a way of keeping the band of brothers as they were called from the Revolution in contact with each other. It also created a distinction between the officers and other citizens of the United States, and those sorts of distinctions which have bedevelled European society, we need, I think, to avoid where possible in this are happy Republic. So I'm not fond of the Society of the Cincinnati, and I urge George Washington to withdraw from

it, or at least to distance himself from some of its principles, and the Masons, however admirable they are, have an organization which has a secret principle of meetings and ritual, and which does not admit any person who would like to belong to it, and those I think are somewhat erosive of the principles of equality and a Republic. So I can admire the ideas of Masonry, and I could admire my fellow Americans who were Masons without myself wanting to be one. Well, Mr. Jefferson, how did one become a Mason? Well, the Masons were an organization that had roots theoretically, at least, back to the guild movements and the arts and craft skills of the Middle Ages, and the Masonic, and in some regards, the Masons traced themselves all the way back to Solomon and the creation of the temple, and there is an elaborate ritual in Masonry about the temple.

The Masons get their name from the craft, the mystery, as it was called, in the Renaissance of Free Masonry, and they, with some historical legitimacy, traced their lineage deep back into European culture. So at one point, people apprentice to become part of this construction guild, as it became more philosophical and distance itself from building construction. The Masons then would not recruit members, but if someone expressed an interest, he might be invited to seek application. So in some regards, it's like every other fraternal organization, it's not for everybody, but those who are attracted to it are invited to test the waters, and if they find it compelling then to go through the motions that lead to induction into the organization.

Mr. Jefferson, I want to take you back to the salons of Paris for a moment. The salons of Paris, how did they differ, let's say, from an organization such as the Masons? Well, the salons were in formal dining societies, I mean, a salon hostess, like my friend Madame de Tessay, who was related to Lafayette, would hold dinner parties once a week or a couple of times a month, and they would invite, they perhaps would have a court group of people who were always in attendance, and often a salon hostess would have a kind of favorite filisof, a favorite writer, a thinker, a reformer, inventor, philosopher, somebody who would be almost a philosopher and residence at her dinner parties, but she then would invite a range of people to come, and sometimes these would be artists, and other times they would

be musicians, and perhaps they would be people interested in the rewriting of the French Constitution, but these were dinner parties, and they differed from masonry or formal organizations the way a dinner party in your time would be different from, say, a book club. These dinner parties were sprightly, they were lavish in their cuisine and fine wines, but they were characterized by discussion afterwards, by a discussion that was always witty and intelligent and frequently philosophical and important. Thank you very much. One last question regarding organizations, Mr. Jefferson, you were the founder of the University of Virginia. When I took a tour of the University of Virginia just a couple years ago, there is an organization within the University, or the graduates, called the Secret Seven, are you familiar with that organization?

No, I am not, but at the College of William & Mary, which was my alma mater, there was a secret fraternal organization called the Flat Hat Club, and I was a member, and as I recall, it was a pointless organization whose essential purpose was to create artificial social distinctions between one group of students and the rest. This is the sort of thing that I don't want to say I object to because that puts it too strongly, but I am not fond of this sort of organization, and I believe that however interesting such organizations might be that their tendency is to create envy, social tension, class hierarchy, and that these things are not in the best interests of a republic. I am surprised that the Mason, this is one of the most frequently asked questions of me as a matter of fact, was I a Mason, and I am surprised that the Masonic movement in

the 21st century is so eager to have me as a member. I believe eight presidents of the United States were Masons. My friend, Maryweather Lewis, was not only a Mason, he was inducted into a Masonic society in Obermeral County, and the records exist for that, but he also, I believe, formed the first Masonic lodge in the Louisiana Territory after his return from the Pacific. He created a Masonic lodge in St. Louis, and William Clark eventually joined it, and I am told that Mr. Lewis's Masonic apron is still in existence, and that it is now being displayed in a national exhibition about the Lewis and Clark expedition in the 21st century. So, Mr. Lewis was a Mason, William Clark was a Mason. Many people that I most respect in the world were Masons. I just wasn't one of them, and I don't understand why the Masons are so eager to have me. I think that they have a very distinguished cadre of founding fathers to claim, and this

just wasn't my cup of tea, frankly, the American Philosophical Society was more to my liking. Now, it, too, was an exclusive organization. One had to be invited to join the I nominated Maryweather Lewis before the famous expedition, and he was inducted into the American Philosophical Society. It was an organization created by Dr. Franklin in 1743 for the purpose of promoting useful knowledge. And here's what marks it is different from a fraternal organization of the Masonic sort. The American Philosophical Society inducted its members according to merit. In other words, you don't want the American Philosophical Society to be open to anybody, because it's a scientific organization, and you want everybody who's involved have scientific interests, scientific curiosity, scientific credentials, scientific experiments to report a certain high-mindedness and scientific curiosity would seem to me to be the basis of such

an organization, and there aren't one out of ten people who have that interest. So it seems to me there's an organization which can justly call itself relatively exclusive, because it works according to scientific merit and not according to social prestige. Thank you, Mr. Jefferson. I have a question regarding Lewis and Clark from Roger and Portland, and Roger says that he knows that you celebrated only two holidays. They were July 4th and January 1st. But what about your protege, Mary Weather Lewis? Well, I have no idea. These would be private matters between Mr. Lewis and his conscience and Mr. Lewis and his religion. I frankly don't know what Mr. Lewis's religion was. I never asked another man for his religion, and I resisted attempts by other people to ask me about my religion.

I presume that Mr. Lewis was a deist or an Anglican, but I can't say that for certain. I know that during the White House years, and he lived with me between April of 181 and July of 183, that I frequently, I won't say frequently, I occasionally attended services in the nation's capital, and sometimes he attended them with me. But this was really pro forma and had little to do with religious sensibility of any sort. His journals reflect a certain sarcastic quality with respect to the religious sensibilities of Indians and also of some of the Catholic members of the expedition. All I can tell you about religion and Lewis and Clark is what I read from the journals, and I learned, for example, on Christmas in 184 at Fort Mandan in Dakota that the expedition officers asked the local Indians, the ingenious Mandans, to stay away on Christmas because Lewis and Clark said it was their big medicine day using a term from Indian culture to explain

to Indians that Christmas was a holy day in the Western tradition, and the Indians dutifully stayed away on that occasion. There was some sort of observance of Christmas at Fort Mandan, but I think that it was largely conventional in the same sense that Christmas is largely conventional in your time, and then at Fort Klatsup in the second year, unfortunately my protege, Maryweather Lewis, had gone silent. He had this annoying habit of going silent for significant periods of time and not keeping up his journal, which I find inexplicable and frankly intolerable, but during that period William Clark was keeping up the journal, and Clark reports on Christmas Day 185 at Fort Klatsup at the mouth of the Columbia that he and Lewis exchanged Christmas gifts, small ones to be sure, that small items were given to the men, and much more remarkable that

this Indian maiden, by the name of Sir Cognar Wia, apparently a Shoshone Hedotsa girl, gave Clark, the captain, technically lieutenant, two dozen Weasel's tales, now just how she had Weasel's tales to give, and why she gave Weasel's tales to Captain Clark, and whether she gave anything to Captain Lewis, and whether she understood what Christmas meant in our civilization are all open questions, but there's this intriguing small detail in Clark's journal that this Indian maiden, who spoke no English, gave to Captain Clark two dozen Weasel's tales on the occasion of Christmas 185. Mr. Jefferson, thank you very much. Another question regarding Lewis and Clark, it's a kind of a follow up to yours, didn't Sir Cognar Wia also give the captains at some point her blue belt, or was that a trade? Well, that's not clear, but out at the Pacific Ocean, the captains desired a certain type

of robe that the local Indians had, and by now Lewis and Clark were essentially without funds, they took with them $669.50 worth of Indian trade items, and most of these were intended to be given as gifts of respect to the Indian tribes that they met. But some of it was money, you know, in a world without money, and one of the glories of Indian culture is that it was a world without money, that it was so simple, so natural, so close to natural law, that it's still operated by barter. And this, I think, is a much more legitimate form of economy than ours with banks and credit and bonds and stocks and so on, but that's another issue. But Lewis and Clark were traveling through a world where money meant nothing, and therefore they had to have a different way of obtaining services and goods, and their method was

to take items of manufacture, things like kettles and needles and cloth and beads and so on, that they could then swap with Indians for things that they wanted to obtain, chiefly services like guiding services or ferrying services or the purchase or rental of horses, things of that nature. But they also had been asked by me to collect what you would call artifacts, objects that reflected the craftwork and the ingenuity of Indians, and Mr. Lewis at the mouth of the Columbia found a robe that he particularly fancied. He did have a sort of sartorial whimsy about him, and it was interested in clothing in a way that William Clark was not. And they had no money left in their larder, none of these trade goods, really. And so, as I understand it, the Indians would accept nothing that Lewis and Clark offered for this robe, but they were interested in a belt that this woman had.

So, Kaga, apparently she had a blue beaded belt of some sort, that's all we know about it, and she must have been wearing it, the Indians must have seen it and desired it. Apparently, blue beads were sacred amongst them or it's certainly prized, and they made it clear that they would not sell this robe to Mr. Lewis for anything less than the belt that this woman was wearing, and as the journals indicate somehow, Lewis and Clark convinced this Sakagawiya to yield to them her belt so that they could trade it for the robe that they desired, Lewis does report that they gave her a coat in compensation, so she was not without compensation for this contribution to the scientific achievement of the expedition. Thank you, Mr. Jefferson. As another follow-up question on the Lewis and Clark, can you tell us how they acknowledged births, deaths, holidays, and just anniversaries if they even did acknowledge them?

Well, that's an interesting question. The journals, of course, are field notes, and they're not final journals. They're not the finished, polished product that Mr. Lewis was expected to write. He never did write a publishable account of his journey, which was a deeply upsetting to me, and the journals that we have, our fragmentary, Clark was a rather reliable, if pedestrian journal keeper, Lewis is a brilliant, but erratic journal keeper, and Lewis is silent for more than half of the entire expedition. I assume that he kept more journals than exist, but nevertheless his silences are notable and upsetting to a man like myself who believes that in some regards experience means nothing until it's written about. So we have to work from the fragments of the journals that they have. We know that Mr. Lewis knew his birthday in 185 and wrote a now in your time famous journal entry on August 18th, 185 in the Bitterroot Mountains of the American West, bemoaning his

lack of intellectual preparation and saying that it occurred to him on this occasion that his life was about half over, and that he realized that he had hitherto done very little to promote the two great goals of the Enlightenment, that is the furtherance of the happiness of the human race and the increase and dissemination of knowledge about life, that in these two ways he had been deficient and that he had not used his life as a young man properly and with enough discipline, and that therefore he felt inadequate to the command that he had been assigned to. And so this birthday meditation, somewhat melancholy to be sure, marks his 31st birthday in what's now Montana or just into Idaho on August 18th, 185, the Clarks birthday was noted in 184, Christmas was noted, January 1st was noted, the 4th of July was noted, but

none of the birthdays of any of the other men is ever mentioned. Mr. Jefferson, we need to take a quick break, we'll be back in just a moment. Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, I'm your host, Janie Guil, and seated across

from me is our third president, Thomas Jefferson. Today we are taking listener questions, the heart of the Thomas Jefferson Hour. If you have a question for Mr. Jefferson, you may call 1-800-274-1240, 1-800-274-1240, or you may email it at www.thhythinjefferson.org, www.thhythinjefferson.org. Mr. Jefferson, today we have discussed if you were in Mason during your lifetime, and you have told us that you were not, and we have been talking about gift giving on the Lewis and Clark Trail. When we left off, we were talking about how did the Lewis and Clark expedition acknowledge different days such as births, birthdays, deaths, holidays, anniversaries, etc. Please continue with your response.

Well as I was saying that Lewis and Clark noted their birthdays, and the most famous of all of those is Mr. Lewis's birthday meditation in the Rocky Mountains on August 18th, 185. On August 1st, 184, in what's now Iowa, Clark mentions his birthday and says that in honor of the day, he ordered a fat saddle of medicine and beaver tail and some berries. So he had a special birthday meal prepared for himself and presumably for the rest of the men. None of the other birthdays is ever noted. We don't know Chicago. We as birthday, we don't know John Colter's birthday. We don't know George Drilliar's birthday or York's birthday, and certainly not the birthday of the Indian peoples that Lewis and Clark met. Another Lewis and Clark actually acknowledged individual birthdays is hard to know probably in an age before literacy was very widespread and when the calendar was still rather detached from most people's lives, probably most of the men of the expedition did not know their

birthdays. I mean literally did not have any actual precision about on what day of the year they were born and some of them may not have known in what year they were born. It was a very different sort of age from ours. They celebrated the 4th of July and to a certain degree New Year's and for example on the 4th of July 185 near the great fall at the great falls in what's now Montana, the expedition handed out the last of its whiskey supply. It was inevitable that its relatively small supply of whiskey would not take it all the way to the Pacific coast and it finally played out on the 4th of July 185. My sense is that they used to rather more of it on that day and had a celebration knowing that there would be no further availability of spirits until their return to St. Louis in 186 or possibly they might have expected a resupply ship of some sort in the mouth of the Columbia and if they had found one they almost certainly would have purchased spirits

if they were available to them. So that's the 4th of July 185 in Montana on the New Year's Day 186 at Fort Clatsip Lewis after a long inexplicable silence comes back into life as a journal keeper and writes a rather depressed account of the wetness of the place and the dreariness and says that the celebration of New Year's in 186 was really based in his anticipation of the next one in 187 when he would presumably be back at the White House. He was undoubtedly remembering that I threw open the doors of the White House twice per annum for public receptions once on the 4th of July to celebrate our nation's birth and a second time on January 1st and Washington City was a very small, raw, frontier sort of capital just being born in the wilderness of the Potomac and there were very inadequate

hotels, restaurants, wine shops, public houses and so on and although Congress was some members of Congress were my enemies and were antagonistic towards what they took to be my policy, they greatly enjoyed my hospitality. I was a lavish host, I had learned something about hospitality as a virginian and virginia hospitality means great profusion, generosity and variety and gentility but I had learned even more about hospitality in France where some of the same principles are true but now it involves taste and politeness, the finest wines in the world, extraordinary sauces, a certain type of balance that frankly is missing from virginia hospitality and so I brought

back with me from France this garlic, this continental sense of taste and cuisine and hospitality and installed it at the White House during my 8 years as president of the United States and everybody really without a single exception in Washington looked forward to those days when I opened the White House to public reception because they could count on the most outstanding cheeses and sweet meats and desserts and coffee and so on fruits plus they could expect the best wines in the world and so Mr. Lewis had spent the first day of January 18-2 with me at the White House and the first day of January 18-3 with me at the White House and he had undoubtedly come to regard that as the standard of social activity for what he called this celebrated day, the first day of the year.

And for clats he reported with some disappointment that their only beverage was pure water and that the only food was not French cuisine but an insipid swamp potato called the Wapato Route and Elkmeat, most of which was tainted by the mild wet weather of the Pacific coast. So this was not White House hospitality that he was enjoying on the first day of January 18-6 but in his usual prospective and optimistic way Mr. Lewis anticipated the first day of January 18-7 and he said that there he would permit the hand of civilization to provide for him and indeed I did provide for him. He was in the White House on January 1st, 18-7. It was one of those splendid events. In fact he had an Indian leader by the name of Shehaekha from North Dakota from the Mandan villages with him and I think I hope ample compensation to Mr. Lewis for his difficulties in the wilderness.

Thank you Mr. Jefferson. We have a question from Brent from Bakersfield, California and this is in regards to your Jefferson Bible. You can explain quickly or briefly what the Jefferson Bible is but what his question is is how did you determine which sayings were authentic and which ones were not? That's a great question, very thoughtful and a provocative question. First let me say that at the urging of my friend Dr. Joseph Priestley I did edit the Bible as a private citizen during my time as president to the United States and my the result of my research labours is called the Thomas Jefferson Bible and listeners who are interested and can purchase copies of it at any bookstore or certainly order them at any bookstore. People in print in your time it was not in fact printed during my lifetime and I at the urging of Priestley not looking at the Old Testament whatsoever merely cut out of the New Testament a brief biographical sketch of Jesus taken from the synoptic gospels chiefly

Matthew and then I made a compilation of what I regarded as the authentic sayings of Jesus. And so the question is how does one presume to know what is authentic Jesus and what not and how does one even without the question of presumption how does one from an intellectual or historical standpoint find the authentic sayings of Jesus and and cut them away from the in crustaceans that have appeared since and so it really begins with a simple catacism and I would ask every one of your listeners to ask himself the following question do you believe that all of the sayings attributed to Jesus and the Bible were his? You either do or you don't I don't I frankly don't think that any rational being believes that everything attributed to Jesus was actually said by him so if if some things that are attributed to Jesus weren't actually said by him why is this the case well there can

be several reasons first there can be faulty transmission of the texts you know the course of the copying of the text things creep in by mistake honest mistakes there can be people who thought that they heard the sayings from Jesus who actually didn't if you think of the quotations that are frequently in your time attributed to to celebrities and turn out to be entirely baseless there's just a natural there's a natural problem in celebrity that the things utterances get attached to celebrity when they have no basis in fact and then there were people who were politically motivated to make Jesus speak their doctrine or support their religious worldview and this happened quite a bit in my opinion between the death of Jesus and the time when the Bible was finally put into its final form in the early middle ages so my view is that not everything attributed to Jesus is authentic and that some portion it's hard to know exactly how much is inauthentic for one of the reasons

already stated and that the real work of a humanist and you know the word humanist really goes back to people like Erasmus who were effectively textual scholars who who sorted out and established the great texts of Cicero and Tacitus and St. Augustine and Jerome and so on that a textual scholar using internal evidence you know consistency context sometimes making wordless to see which vocabulary words are common to a person in which not a textual editor tries to compare manuscripts and to use principles of good sense and intuition to clarify the textual tradition that has been passed on whether it's Cicero or Jesus and so what I did was to try to bring to bear some of those capacities myself in looking at the New Testament now I should say several things about this first of all my approach

was an a historical one I began by by deciding who Jesus was in my opinion and therefore using that as my principle of inclusion or exclusion I believe that Jesus was a man I don't believe that he was the son of God I don't believe that he believed that he was the son of God I don't believe that Jesus spoke in in riddles I think that Jesus spoke in parables sometimes because he loved homely natural metaphors but I don't think that he was a metaphysician I think that his general doctrine is very clear and is intelligible to a six year old child and so I tried to use these principles that Jesus was an ethicist a human being a a man who liked agricultural metaphor and a man who didn't speak in doctrinal metaphysics and that we're using that lens or that set of criteria I went through the New Testament and authenticated what I regard as the actual sayings of Jesus other people would disagree

with that methodology but keep in mind I didn't do this to publish it as a scholarly addition of the New Testament I did it as a private meditation to sort of get at my Jesus who is my Jesus and how does how do I respond to the ethical teachings of Jesus not how does one how does a human being generally speaking respond to Jesus so that was my method I I suppose it probably doesn't hold up historically because my methodology was a relatively biased one but I do believe that as a meditative exercise it was valuable and I urge in fact everyone who is listening if you are a Christian in any sense of the term to take the New Testament and read it and to try to mark at least in your mind those passages which you regard as an authentic and those which you regard as as improbable. Mr. Jefferson thank you this brings us back to the Lewis and Clark Trail. Lewis and Clark took several books with them on the trail was a Bible one of the books or did any of them into our knowledge have a Bible on the Lewis

and Clark Trail? No and no the traveling portable library that Lewis took with them was a scientific reference library it included Kerwin's Minerology and Linnaeus's binomial system of classification and our own Benjamin Smith Barton's Elements of Botany which was the first scientific textbook published in in the United States it also included works of history but specific history deprotzes history of Louisiana which was an account of lower Louisiana effectively and McKenzie Alexander McKenzie's voyage is from Montreal which was an account of his transconfidential journey across Canada in 1790s. Mr. Lewis also took with him nautical almanacs to help him ascertain latitude and longitude and he took with him a four volume dictionary of arts and sciences which had been compiled by a man named Owen so he had an interesting reference library which was designed for him to

do preliminary field analysis in the field this was not a library of novels or poetry he did not take a single work of imaginative literature with him because books of course are expensive and heavy and this was a scientific mission and he simply couldn't afford to have any excess weight that could not prove itself to be useful in the course of his tour so there was no Bible there were probably members of the expedition who knew the Bible very well including perhaps Mr. Lewis and there may have been members of the expedition who had memorized portions of the Bible this was not at all uncommon in our era but there was no copy of the Bible with Lewis and Clark they never quote from the Bible in any of their journals there is one however very intriguing moment on the return journey in 186 when they are coming downstream from the Mandan and the Hedazza

villages in what is now North Dakota and they are traveling with a man that I later met Chaheka a white coyote or the wolf from the North Dakota Mandan Indian villages and they drifted down from the knife river which is near Washburn North Dakota past what is now Bismarck and Mandan North Dakota and that had been the historic homeland of the Mandan Indians including this rather extraordinary leader of Mittun Tonka the lower village of Mandan name Chaheka so he's on board with a translator and as they go by his historic villages he tells the origin story of the Mandan people apparently their origin story is that they had lived underground in a giant subterranean lake of some sort a cavern with a lake and that they're a vine it's sort of a jack-in-the-been stock sort of story there was a vine that went up to the to the upper world and that at some point one of their

cultural ancestors climbed that vine into the into the the upper world found that it was rather splendid and then invited the rest of the Mandans to join him and so the Mandan then began to climb up this vine and that's how they emerged onto the earth itself this is a fascinating and intriguing origin story I would say Mith but of course perhaps it's actually meant as literal amongst these ingenious Mandan but what it makes it remarkable is that when William Clark Lewis again is silent wrote a description of this Mandan origin story he almost inadvertently slipped into the cadences of the book of Genesis in the King James translation of the Bible that he recognized that this was a Mandan analog to the book of Genesis this was their Genesis story and that although Clark was a notoriously bad-speller poor grammarian and not a gifted writer in writing

about this he just in a sense automatically slipped into the cadences and the vocabulary of the King James Bible so it shows that Clark had had been trained in the in the biblical tradition and that Clark knew a good Genesis story when he saw one thank you mr. Jefferson we need to take a short break and when we come back we will be speaking with the scholar behind Thomas Jefferson humanity scholar Clay Jenkinson Clay Jenkinson's latest book entitled Becoming Jefferson's People Reinventing the American Republic for the 21st century will be available December 7th 2004 again the title is Becoming Jefferson's People Reinventing the American Republic for the 21st century please call 1-800-7-4-1240 for more information 1-800-7-4-1240 if you would like to ask mr. Jefferson a question or for more information about humanity scholar Clay Jenkinson's upcoming

performances please visit our website www.thifanjefferson.org again the website is www.thifanjefferson.org please stay tuned we will be back in just a moment welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson hour my name is Janie Guil and I'm your host for today seated

across from me as humanity scholar Clay Jenkinson Clay good day good day to you Janie you know it's I have to say that this question of the masons is one of the most frequently asked questions that I get everywhere and I can tell you that I would love to be able to say that Jefferson was a mason because people want it so badly you know I don't know what it is but the masons are wonderful people I had a father-in-law who was a 33rd degree mason and I have the deepest admiration for the free mason movement and there I've worked with a group of young free masons as you know up in the Seattle area and have a lot of respect for what masonry was and is and I think Jefferson was a free mason at heart as you I'm sure know free masonry found its way into our coinage if you look at a one dollar bill all those bizarre pyramids and so on make no sense unless you understand Rosa Crucian and free mace and free masonic iconography so Jefferson was was right in the heart of this he's

a deist he's a believer in civic virtue he's a believer in rationality and science and it's just sort of surprising that he wasn't a mason but he wasn't I mean believe me people have scoured the tradition trying to ascertain that he was a mason and no one has ever been able to prove it there are president there are posters of the presidents of the United States who were mason's Jefferson has never put on those posters but certainly if ever there was an honorary mason I think it was it was Thomas Jefferson but this is a form of wishful thinking that never quite plays out well clay I had to laugh when you were portraying Thomas Jefferson and you said that you didn't understand why the mason's wanted to claim you the Latter-day Saints claim you in a very special way what you're aware of well not be careful you know these are faith structures now the the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints of LDS or the Mormon church as it's popularly known believes

right at the heart of its doctrine that only those go to heaven who have been baptized in the in the LDS church so this of course creates a problem because the LDS church really didn't rise until the middle of the 19th century so what's happened is that they have a system known as proxy baptism and the the LDS leaders have gone back and baptized everyone that they want to share heaven with and so this is this is why the for example the LDS tradition is so committed to genealogy because if if I'm LDS and I want to share heaven with my ancestors I have to find out who they were and baptize them by proxy so that's why if anyone is interested in genealogy the natural first choice until the internet was the the enormous files that have been

compiled by the LDS church in Salt Lake and in some of its satellite areas so one of the very early bishops of the LDS tradition had a dream had a revelation which the founding fathers appeared at his bed which must have been surprising indeed and I mean literally appeared and demanded to be baptized in the LDS tradition and he went about it and and this the set of baptisms by proxy occurred Jefferson has been baptized in the LDS church which he probably would have objected to he would have been I think objected to being inducted into any religious organization of any sort but there is a famous painting in southern Utah in the temple so I have not seen it I've only seen versions of it reproductions of it but a famous painting of this early LDS bishop being visited at his bedside by the founding fathers and their requesting baptism into the LDS church. Clay there's what 55 founding fathers so how many of them are we talking about the primary five

Alexander? No they all got in and then the Declaration of Independence I mean this is a very I do not want to make light of this because this is this really is quite important to the LDS tradition and they have spent you know millions maybe billions of dollars making this possible this baptism by proxy through genealogical research so this is very important to this tradition and and it may seem unusual to people looking at it from the outside but but it there's a real discipline about it and a real commitment to creating a community of believers so all the members of the Declaration of Independence all the all the authors of the Constitution virtually everybody who matters historically has been baptized by proxy and then of course members of the LDS church are encouraged to find out who their ancestors were however many they were and many of

them are not famous of course but to baptize them too and so this is this is one of the main things that the LDS church does. Well I think it's very fascinating that there's religious groups that do want to claim Jefferson or do want to embrace his thoughts I think that's fantastic. Well he wouldn't think that it's fantastic because Jefferson was a free thinker and a private man and the idea that that he would be without his permission inducted into anything whether it's a civic organization like the Masons or a religious organization like the LDS church would trouble him I think mightily you know he I was recently interviewing a friend of mine named Dayton Duncan who is the co-producer with with Ken Burns of all those marvelous public broadcasting documentaries and Dayton Duncan was saying that President Clinton in one of the last acts of his presidency promoted Clark to the captaincy that he was denied during his lifetime and also made York and

Chicago we are honorary official members of the Lewis and Clark expedition and you know although I greatly admire everyone whose name I just mentioned Dayton Duncan, Chicago we are Lewis and Clark and York it something it seems ludicrous to me in a certain way that we would go back historically and now that they've been dead for 200 years give them honors that they didn't get in their lifetime there's just something about these sorts of ceremonial strike me as absurd and somehow missing the urgencies of life but I guess if you're going to go down that route somebody who sits in here and tights in a wig and pretends to be a dead president there's something absurd there too I wasn't going to say a word about that now it's the 22nd floor of the new enlightenment radio network tower I'm here in full regalia looking out on the splendors of the American West and feeling a little absurd I might say Clay thank you very much I would like for you to tell us just a bit about your new book that will

be available in early December and it's entitled Becoming Jefferson's People reinventing the American Republic for the 21st century will be available December 7th 2004 yes we're recording this early in November of 2004 pre thanksgiving and I am delighted to be able to say that my new book is in press that is being printed at this very time and will be available probably in the second week of December and time for Christmas and it's a different sort of book most of my work is in history I've written a book about Maryweather Lewis which is a historical analysis of his interesting character and I've written a book called Thomas Jefferson Man of Light which is about frequently asked questions about Jefferson and I have written and I've edited an edition of Lewis and Clark in North Dakota and so on this is my first book which is I suppose about current events in a way what I've tried to do Janey is to ask if there is room in the 21st century for a

Jeffersonian worldview or if individuals can be more Jeffersonian and if that is useful to them in the 21st century so the book is a series of essays about what a Jeffersonian is not Jefferson we know who Jefferson was I'm not interested in this book in who Jefferson was he's just the articulator of these principles I'm more interested in whether we can apply a Jeffersonian set of ideals to conditions that he did not live to see so what is a Jeffersonian a Jeffersonian believes in public education a Jeffersonian believes in limited government Jeffersonian believes in a thoughtful nuanced deeply learned international policy for the United States hey Jeffersonian believes in self-reliance a Jeffersonian believes in moderation and physical

health and so on and so forth so what I've tried to do is just go along the sweep of Jefferson's ideals and to excavate them from his own great achievement and then to apply them to our world and try to try to a mass a portrait of what a Jeffersonian would be in the 21st century and here's the exciting part about it I think that we can still be Jeffersonians that it's not you know most people sort of throw up their hands and think oh god there's no way we can be Jefferson's people you know we're now not it's too late we've become something else that was then and this is now and maybe it was never that valid in the first place there's a sort of a there's this sort of what I would call an anxiety about the Jeffersonian in people's minds and frankly a discrediting of Thomas Jefferson over questions like race and slavery and so on but I think that we can actually

be Jefferson's people I think we we must be Jefferson's people if we wish to recover if we wish to be a true republic and I think that even if the nation is not going to become measurably more Jeffersonian individuals can without great drama or revolution in their private lives become much more Jeffersonian than they are and that this would have the effect of making their lives an American life infinitely better than it now is so this is a book of hope about how we can reignite what Jefferson called the little flame that was lit on the 4th of July 1776 Well Clay it is an interesting book and you have a very eclectic set of endorsements on the back of the book because it isn't just a book about current events well I blushed to mention them so I won't but I do believe that the book has is a useful thing for people to read if they if they agree with me in this sense that something went wrong in America we are not the people

we need to be that when Europe and the rest of the world and ourselves decry what's happened to America and wish that we were more the country of our national ideals that this is a measure of how we slipped you know we we are now an ill-educated people watching too much television overweight addicted to consumer activities addicted to large government lacking woefully in self-reliance and important respects and we all know that this can't be what the the founders dreamed of when they dreamed of America if we need to recover and I've tried to provide a modest intelligent recipe for national recovery using the greatest dreamer in American history as our as our guide Thomas Jefferson Clay thank you very much let me just briefly mention that you are going to be

a Norfolk on January 21st 2005 at the TCC Roper and that what's that the TCC Roper is a performing arts center and okay and the you will be there as Jefferson and all news to me as usual but this is good and the topic will be the second American revolution of the book will be ready by then will it it will be ready by then my goodness so anyway tickets go on sale on December 6th and again the title will be the second American revolution and you can get your tickets at the TCC Roper or ticket master well you know I go to the center of all in California once a year also in in North Dakota recently we did two live broadcasts of the Thomas Jefferson hour to raise money for the program there and for the national signature event for Lewis and Clark and and now Norfolk and this is something I love to do for two reasons first of all we need money to keep the Jefferson hour going this is a labor of love for you and for me and for Bill Crystal and so we need operating

funds and marketing funds for the program and so this is a way to do that in a sort of effortless fashion but also I love to meet the people who are listening to this program it just delights me to have someone come up and say who they are where they live what they're interested in what sorts of programs they like what they don't like it's a great reality check for me and now when I sit here in the on the 22nd floor of the new enlightenment radio network tower jane I can envision some of the people that I meet in Montana and the Dakotas and Colorado and Seattle and Virginia and and California and so on and I can I can picture people that I've met and whose hands I've shaken and it gives me somebody to think about as I'm trying to utter reliably Jefferson's view of the world clay thank you very much clay did you have a passage that you wanted to read to us before we yes indeed you know I was talking about this extraordinary Genesis story of the Mandans the Clark records and listen to it this is from volume 8 of Gary

Molten's national standard 13 volume edition of the journals of Lewis and Clark and this is a shehaka it was a white coyote and here's what Clark says the winds blew hard from the southeast all day this is the 18th of august 186 all day which retarded our progress very much after the fires were made I set myself down with the big white man chief and made a number of inquiries into the tradition of his nation as well as the time of their inhabiting the number of villages the remains of which we see on different parts of the river as also the cause of their evacuation so Clark's asking ethnographic questions he shehaka told me his nation first came out of the ground where they had a great village a grapevine grew down through the earth to their village and they saw light some of their people ascended by the grapevine upon the earth and saw buffalo and every kind of animal also grapes plums etc they gathered some grapes and took the vine to the village and they tasted and found them good and determined to go up and live upon the earth

and great numbers climbed the vine and got upon earth men women and children at length they large big bellied woman a woman pregnant and climbing broke the vine and fell and all that were left in the village below has remained there ever since the man ends believe that when they die they returned to this village etc etc well Gary molten in one of the best footnotes in his 13 volume edition says that Clark's biblical phrasing here suggests that he recognized the religious nature of this origin story and its kinship to the book of genesis and indeed you can hear those cadences from the book of genesis in Clark's story of the mandan shehaka's account of the origins of the mandan nation play thank you very much we will be back next week see you all later in Norfolk music for the Thomas Jefferson Hour was provided by Steven Swinford of Las Vegas Nevada to ask mr. Jefferson a question or to donate nine dollars and receive a copy of today's program on CD please call 1 888 458 1803 again the number is 1 888 458 1803 thank you for listening and we hope you join us again next week for another entertaining

historically accurate and thought-provoking commentary through the eyes of Thomas Jefferson