The Thomas Jefferson Hour; #0429; Defining Features of Government

Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with our third president, Thomas Jefferson. Today's program was recorded in early July of 2004. Our topics today are the defining features of the different types of government and what is sovereign team. Please join us as our temporary host and producer, Janie Guil, speaks with Thomas Jefferson, portrayed by Humanity Scholar Clay Jenkinson. 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 and the tradition of Thomas Jefferson. Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. My name is Janie Guil and I'm the host for today's program. Seated across from me is our third president, Thomas Jefferson. Good day to you, Mr. Jefferson. Good day to you, citizen. Mr. Jefferson, we are recording this program in July of 2004, shortly after the 4th of July, a day that even you, I believe, celebrated. Well, it wasn't known until much later in my life that I was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. And John Adams actually wrote a famous letter to his wife Abigail saying that the second of July would be the day in which Americans would have orations and fireworks and parades and celebrations of our liberty,

because it was on the 2nd of July, 1776, that the resolution for independence was passed and Adams thought that the resolution for independence was much more important than the news release effectively, the Declaration of Independence. He was wrong. It turns out that even in my lifetime, the Declaration of Independence became famous. And around 1800, when I stood reluctantly for the presidency, it became widely known that I was the principal author of it. Mr. Jefferson, just curious, how did it become widely known? Is that something that you had to self-promote or that your political party promoted for political reasons? What was the basis for the citizens becoming aware that you were the author? Well, it was truly a committee piece, and I didn't promote my own primacy in the production of it, because as I said many times over the course of my life, there's nothing original in it. It's an expression of the American mind that it wasn't my own statement about the nature of government and the rights of man.

It was an expression of universal principles and that anybody who had been put into my position and had been asked to draft such a document would have had to come up with more or less the same thing. And for anyone to call attention to himself on that basis would be, I think, vain and illiberal. So I can claim some credit for having been the articulator of the principles in the Declaration of Independence, and John Adams spoke of what he called my peculiar felicity for expression. But I would never have called attention to myself because it would have seemed to me that that was putting the emphasis in the wrong arena that the emphasis needs to be on the very simple principle that all human beings, no matter who they are and where they're born, are endowed by the very fact of their existence with certain rights and that any legitimate government must cherish those rights. Any government that fails to cherish and protect those rights is by that very definition a despotic one and deserving of reform or revolution.

That's the point and that point would have been made by Volterra, or so, or Dr. Johnson, or Samuel Adams, John Adams, Ben Franklin, George Washington, Richard Henry Lee. You either are or are not going to declare independence. If you declare independence, you return to a state of nature. If you return to a state of nature, you have to ask fundamental questions about the nature of society. And those questions get in some regards answered in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence. Thank you, Mr. Jefferson. Could you please tell us I know that there were several clauses that were taken out of the Declaration of Independence. And one, I believe that they dealt with slavery. Why were they taken out? And do you believe that if John Adams or James Madison had written the Declaration that they would have included those clauses in the Declaration? No, I think that probably nobody else would have included the anti-slavery manifesto in the Declaration of Independence.

And it was expunged in the end for several reasons, the chief of which was that the people of the Carolinas in Georgia did not wish to see slavery addressed. In other words, they refused to sign the Declaration of Independence as long as that offensive paragraph remained. And we so needed unanimity on this occasion that Congress in its wisdom decided that it was smarter to expunge that dangerous paragraph than to lose this one supreme moment of national unanimity. That was one reason. The second reason is that it's not strictly speaking true historically that the British crown forced slavery upon us on the slave trade. There's an argument to be made that whenever the colonies, whichever of them, was in the reformist mood, tried to reduce or eliminate the slave trade, the British Parliament or the British Crown vetoed that colonial legislation. And why? Because the British mercantil economy was getting rich on the slave trade.

And so if the colonies had really gotten serious about restraining the slave trade, this would have been an economic crisis for Great Britain. So it is true that from time to time, one or another of the colonies attempted to do something about this and each time that we did, the crown vetoed it. But I think there was a feeling, I'm speaking in retrospect now, because I certainly would not have talked this way during my lifetime. I think there was a feeling at the Continental Congress that I was, that this was a species argument. And a species argument is one that sounds good and plausible, but when you look closer has flaws. And the flaw was that there had been only really half-hearted attempts to do something to restrain the slave trade. And so when you make an indictment of this sort against a tyrant, you want to make sure that they can't defend themselves on a single charge and therefore cast out on the whole series of charges. Great, thank you very much. You are listening to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. Mr. Jefferson, today we would like to talk about government.

In particular, let's start with the defining features of different types of government. There's a whole host of types from aristocracy to democracy. Could you please give us a rundown of the different types of government and what their critical attributes are, how they differ from each other, please? Well, first let me say that these concepts go back to the ancient Greeks. That Greece between the 5th century BC and the 2nd century AD laid down the essential structure of the mind. That most of the literary genres that we have, lyric and elegy, comedy, tragedy, epic, drama, these were developed by the Greeks. That the concept of history was developed by the Greeks, Herodotus first, and then later much more rigorously, Thucydides. The basic precepts and structures of philosophy were first formulated by the Greeks, particularly by Aristotle and Plato.

And in summary guards, all subsequent philosophy hangs upon mental categories that were defined by those two primary philosophers in the Western tradition. Most of our concepts of government come from Greek civilization, including politics. Aristotle wrote a famous book called The Politics, which the politics is the stuff of the palace, and the palace was the city state. So even our terminology in government comes largely from the Greeks. For example, aristocracy is based, the word aristocracy is based upon two Greek roots, Aristos meaning excellence or good, and Crotos the rule. So aristocracy is the rule by the best, the rule by the elites, those who excel. Democracy comes from Crotos, which is rule or ruler, and the deem was the people, so democracy is ruled by the people. Alligarchy means leader or master. Alligarchy is the rule of the few plutocracy, Pluto was the Greek god of the underworld and gold and filthy lucre.

And so plutocracy is the rule of the wealthy. Monarchy is the rule of the king. The Greeks gave us the word tyranny from tyrannos. One of the great Greek dramas is edipus tyrannos, edipus the king. And tyrannos doesn't necessarily mean tyrant in Greek, it doesn't mean necessarily a despot, but it usually does. So if you look at the basic forms of government that have been inherited by the modern world, all of this terminology and these essential categorizations were formulated by the Greeks five centuries before Christ. Thank you very much. Mr. Jefferson, do you believe that a monarchy can stay pure if a monarch begins with the people in mind? Can they stay pure over time?

No, because whenever power is concentrated into the hands of one person, it will become corrupted. The genius of modern government is the concept of checks and balances. In our system, we have a tripartite form of government in which there is an executive branch, a legislative branch and a judicial branch. Each branch is supreme within its own portfolio, but each branch has the capacity to check the other. So if the president behaves badly, he can be impeached, but the House can impeach, but only the Senate can convict, so the Senate can check the House on impeachment. The Congress can check the president by way of impeachment. The president can veto within certain limits an act of Congress. This checks the legislative. The judicial branch can check both. Each branch of the national government has the capacity to thwart the other two branches, if necessary, and that this concept that while I do believe in the goodness of man, I don't believe in the goodness of a man who has power. Because the moment a man has power, there is a kind of intoxication that comes from it, and there need to be systems which restrain him from excess.

The basis of our government is this notion of checks and balances, and there is a further one, and that is that there is a dual sovereign in the United States. The national government is sovereign in certain respects, and the state and local governments are sovereign in other respects, so let's know the state's rights is a way of checking the national government. At the same time, the national government can intervene if the states are spinning out of control, so you have several systems of checks and balances at the heart of our republic, and that's why our system is inefficient, but it's also why our system is intelligent. In a monarchy, the sovereignty is deposited in a single individual. This would make good sense if we could manufacture the individual, but we can't, that the king turns out to be a human being, and he is a human being like other human beings with strengths and weaknesses, with good days and bad days, with prejudices and blindness and areas of insight and intelligence. To put all of that power in the hands of a single flawed individual is a very dangerous notion. If you diffuse it amongst ten individuals, then the other nine can check the excesses of the one, or five can check the excesses of three.

So it's very important not to concentrate power so completely, but rather, in my sense, to diffuse it as broadly as possible. So I don't think that a monarchy can ever be what we might dream of. But there was a concept that was being circulated in the enlightenment during my time by the British social philosopher Bowlingbroke, and Bowlingbroke's view was that there could be a patriot king, there could be a king who was a profound patriot, a lover of the Commonwealth, a selfless man who was never involved in corruption of any sort, whose whole life was given over to sacrifice on behalf of the common good. That he was a kind of uncorruptible supervisor or referee for the civilization, that he always knew what the right thing to do was, and he was above faction and above the pettiness of the political system, and this patriot king, as Bowlingbroke called him, could supervise a civilization benignly.

And there was a great deal of thought about this. John Adams was enamored of the notion of the patriot king. In some regards, George Washington was our patriot king. He wasn't king, but he was that sort of individual. If ever there was an uncorruptible human being, it was George Washington. And so in a sense we approach that, but you can't count on that. No, it's Washington one year, but the next year it could be Aaron Burr or worse, Hamilton. And therefore you have to have the only way that the idea of a patriot king works is if you can generate this ideal individual, but he almost never will be a George Washington. He will almost always belong at best on the second plateau, and maybe on the 10th. And frequently when men have power, they become corrupted, and they use their power for illiberal purposes. So it's, I think, however attractive the chimera of a patriot king or the ideal monarch is, we have a duty to resist it. And I said to George Washington once, when I was observing the courts of Europe, that if you took all of the crowned heads of Europe, and molded them into a single individual, he would not deserve to be elected vestryman of the nearest parish church in Virginia.

Not only, and see the problem is that these people are not only not this ideal patriot king that we're talking about, but they're the opposite. They've been pampered since, since early as childhood, they've never worked today in their lives. All they do is hunt and drink and wension gamble. And they're mere hogs. They're just swine. They're not human beings. They have no virtue. They have no discipline. They've never earned anything. They don't have any sense of the real world. They've lived in a world of luxury and dissipation and sensuality. And this has detached them from the real business of life. They have no concept of what life is for average human beings. And so not only are they not patriot kings, but they're just the opposite there. They're the worst possible people to give power.

Mr. Jefferson, thank you very much. As you were speaking, I was thinking about in your time the male being the head of the household and how that is a small government. How come that works or does it not work? It does not work. You are correct in pointing to this, however, that there was a philosophical and political tradition that really goes back into the ancient world, but its articulator in our time was a British man by the name of Robert Filmer who wrote a book called Patriarchia. And his book argued that the natural form of government is a strong father figure, a king or a dictator, just as the natural leader of a family is the father, that there's a patriarch in the family, the strong father, who dominates his wife and dominates his children for their good. And so said Filmer, by that analogy, the ideal form of government is a patriarchy in which there is a dominant male figure who governs strongly but not ruthlessly on behalf of the entire community. That is wrong, I think. I think that's a Pauline conception. In other words, it goes back to St. Paul whose letters to the Corinthians and so on are profoundly patriarchal.

Contemptuous of women, believing that women should be subordinated to men and so on. I think if you look at the Indians of the American West, you will find that their systems are not patriarchal, that their systems are in a sense are anarchic or egalitarian. That when Lewis and Clark went up the Missouri River, they would come to a tribe and they would say, who's the chief? And over and over again, these Indians would say, well, we don't have a chief. We have somebody who handled the hunt last year and we have somebody else who handles religious ceremonies and these women conduct the harvest. And when we move our village, this person is in a sense the mayor. But when Lewis and Clark said, well, we're really interested in talking to the grand chief of the Mandans, or the grand chief of the Sue. These native peoples would say, well, that's not how we organize our society. Everyone, the chief only serves as long as the people are willing to follow.

So the leader might say, I propose that we go attack the Cheyenne. And if the community thinks that's a good idea, then he's the leader. But if the community thinks that's a foolish idea, they just don't bother. And he loses cast and ceases to be a chief so that, you know, that's a much more independent system than ours. In our system, we elect a president for four years and during that period, we listen to him to a certain degree. But under the Indian system, the leader is only as strong as his last moment of persuasion. So it's varied. It's a very different system. And these people, these Indians are living in a true state of nature. You know, Robert Filmer, this British political theorist never saw a state of nature. He never saw an Indian. He never saw people living in a pre-civilized phase. He only saw the corruptions of Western civilization. And he drew out his concept of government from that. But it wasn't a fair reading. And by any fair reading there in nature, there is there are loose systems of government. Mr. Jefferson, thank you very much. It's now time for us to take a break. While we're on break, I would like for you to think about how your life was governed and also how freedom contributed to your life. We'll be back in just a moment.

Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson. Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson hour. My name is Janie Guil and I'm the host of today's program. Mr. Jefferson, prior to going to break, we were talking about the defining features of the different types of government.

In addition, we were speaking very specifically about the male head of household and how this impacts the family, the society, etc. In your life, how were you governed as you were growing up and then how did you govern as you became the head of household? Well, my father was a very, very strong man and a great man by the name Peter Jefferson. And I looked up to him and he was a very large influence over my development. He had a large library for the time of about 40 books and the family tradition is that I had read them by the time I was five or six years old.

And he instilled in me a love of learning that stayed with me for the rest of my life. He also believed that humans should be self-reliant, that we should never ask anyone else to do what we can do for ourselves. And never put off till tomorrow what we can do today and that our motto as Americans should be nil desperate on them that there's nothing that we can't accomplish. Nothing is to be disparate of by an American because of our capacities and our resources, our continent filled with resources and the gumption of the American character. So I learned all that from my father and his last desire was that I be classically educated by which he meant in Greek and Latin and with a strong interest in the history of law and the history of ideas and so on. And thanks to him, I was classically educated and I really regard that as more important than any inheritance of land, slaves or money, agricultural equipment or anything else that I might have received from him. So he was a strong man. My mother was a very strong woman and my father died when I was 14 and I later said that I was cast upon a world without anybody competent to guide me.

So I think what you're getting at is that there was a certain patriarchal quality to my life. My father was a patriarchal head of household and I didn't have the same respect for my mother that I had for my father. I didn't see them equal in any regard. And I was a strong father. I had six children, four of them died very young but my two surviving daughters, Martha and Maria, learned early on that I was a man who had high expectations for his children and I would say that if you expect my love, you will learn to master Livy or read Don Quixote in Spanish or learn to draw or show discipline and all that you do. And so I was, I suppose, by the standards of your century, a very strong father, maybe a domineering father even, and the women in my world, my wife, Martha, my daughter, Martha, the women, my sisters, my friends, the women in my world would have automatically assumed a deferential attitude towards men and especially towards me. I could not have been married to Abigail Adams. I would not have been able to stand a strong-minded, sharp-tongued, opinionated sort of woman. I like women to be intelligent and to have thought, to be well-read, to be highly cultured, certainly to have exquisite manners, to be excellent at home economics, from plucking a chicken, to churning butter, to managing accounts, to managing a garden.

But I think that women are happiest and certainly men are happier when women show a deference towards the men in their world rather than compete with them for mastery. But this doesn't come from St. Paul and I certainly wouldn't spin out any theories of government based upon this. These are family dynamics and I don't think they're the same as government. You don't think that government starts in the home and the way that people think starts in the family circle? It can, but I think that the question you ask in government is, who's a citizen? Every citizen under a republic has an equal capacity to affect public policy.

So you start by defining who is and who is not a citizen. In my day, I believe that all white males should be citizens. That was seen as radically dangerous. Most Americans felt that white males of a certain property base could be citizens but that it should never extend to all white males. I would not have thought as females as citizens in my time. I certainly didn't think of African Americans as black people as citizens or Indians as citizens. So I would start by asking who is a citizen. But let's just assume for the moment that all white males are citizens. If that's the case, then white male A who grew up in a hovel in Tennessee is equally important and should have equal access with the white male who grew up in a tidewater plantation in the Chesapeake. A New England merchant who is worth a million pounds sterling should be no more powerful in a republic than a craftsman who perhaps makes sales for ships or works with hemp. That under a republic, the idea is that every citizen is equal and there are hierarchies of status for citizens.

So it really depends on who is a citizen. If you in your time you include African Americans, women and Indians as citizens. In other words, in your system, every person bored in this country and certain people who come from elsewhere who is over 21 years of age as a citizen, then under the concept of a republic, each one of those irrespective of their skin color, their gender, their wealth or even their intellectual capacity should have equal status under your constitution. Mr. Jefferson, I understand what you're saying, but let's go back to the concept of power. What you said was that in government you want power defused. And I think even in your time with the male head of household, sometimes when you just have all the power concentrated in one person, it can go a bit askew. I believe you had a granddaughter and who had a husband who was abusive towards her.

That is correct. I don't believe in unlimited power for the men and families. We have laws to restrain men and we need those laws. I also argued in my reform legislation for Virginia that we should loosen the divorce laws so that women who exist in abusive marriages have some recourse to an alternative life. I don't think that we should give unlimited power to anybody under any circumstances, not in a family, not in a commonwealth. But I do still reject the notion that there are analogies of government to be drawn from family structure. I think that in a good family there is a diffusion of power. The woman, I mean John Adams said this in a comic letter to his wife in 1776 when she was arguing in a kind of proto-feministic way that men have all the power in American life. And he said, that's of course just silly. They have all the power in the constitution.

But the real power, said John Adams, was with women, that women control men, women whisper to men, women have ways of coercing men, women have ways of attracting men. And this is an enormous power that goes back throughout human history and that you must never underestimate the power that women have that might be called pre-constitutional or sub-constitutional or extra-constitutional. Now he was joking of course, but he was pointing to something important that there are many ways to organize life and constitutional structures are just one of them. But I think that in a good family women have a substantial amount of power. They determine where the house shall be built, how many children there shall be, what the sequencing of children shall be, how much pace, how much time a woman needs to rest between pregnancies. I think women have very substantial power, but I do think that I lived in a patriarchal world and that I was quite comfortable in a patriarchal world within the family. Mr. Jefferson, thank you very much. I'd like to move off of this and go on to the subject of what is sovereignty? The U.S. just transferred sovereignty to the public of Iraq. And I would like for you to define what is sovereignty and also what the critical attributes of it are.

And I also believe that in your declaration of independence that you had a list of what sovereignty involved, could you please address this issue for us? I will. I'll start and then I assume you will ask follow-up questions. Sovereignty is the source of final authority and a civilization. So in a monarchy and an absolute monarchy of the British sort in the 17th century, the king is sovereign and whatever he decides he can put someone to death. He can raise taxes. He can declare war. He can confiscate land. If all power finally exists in the person of the king and as the British and other absolutists used to say, the king can do no wrong. The king decides he wants your farm. He can come and take it and he may choose to compensate you and he may not. But if he is truly sovereign, he can do anything he pleases. So the sovereign is the source of final and absolute authority and a civilization.

I believe, of course, that a kingship of that type would be despotic and tyrannical and illegitimate. I believe as do all Republicans, when I say Republican, I use that term of the small r, philosophic Republicans, believe that sovereignty rests in the people. The people is a kind of a woolly abstract concept, but what I mean is that if there are 100 people in the community of Dakota and they create a government that those 100 people are the sovereign and the government is a creature that they have caused to exist, but they can dissolve that government at any time and and restore sovereignty amongst themselves. So the people are the final arbiters under a Republican system of government. It's quite hard to gather the people and it's even more difficult to canvas the will of the people. What do the people want? Do the people want war? Do the people want peace? Do the people want taxation? And if so, at what level do the people want to have a liberal immigration policy or a stringent one? Deciding what the people really want is not at all simple, especially in a culture like mine, which was so decentralized and the infrastructure was so weak, but assuming that you can decide what the will of the people is under our philosophical Republican approach to government, that will deserves to be enacted into law.

So sovereignty is the final source of authority in a civilization. So the question that you would ask with respect to Iraq is once the United States went through the motions of transferring sovereignty to the Iraqi people, did they mean it? Could the Iraqis tomorrow say we want the United States and all of its troops to leave our borders within three weeks? Could the Iraqis say that they were going to form a theocracy? Could the Iraqis declare war on Israel? Could the Iraqis shut down their oil supplies and decide that no oil would ever be exported from that nation again? The Iraqis are only sovereign if they actually have the authority to do any or all of those things. But if the United States or any other nation or the United Nations or any entity whatsoever has veto power over the acts of the sovereign state of Iraq, then it's not sovereign at all.

It is a pretended sovereignty. So let's say that tomorrow the people of Iraq ordered the Americans to leave within 48 hours. I'm guessing that the United States would indicate that that wasn't a decision that it was willing to respect. If that's the case, the Iraqis are not sovereign. Let's say that the Iraqis decided to declare war on Iran or Israel and the United States said we will not permit that to happen. That means that Iraq is not sovereign. Let's say that the Iraqis decided to hold free elections and that the radical Shiites won the election through majority rule and wanted to establish a Taliban-style theocracy in Iraq, but the United States found that unacceptable and vetoed that, that would mean that Iraq is not sovereign. So Iraq is only sovereign if Iraq has authority to do whatever it wishes to do without having to look over its shoulder at any higher authority.

Wow. So Mr. Jefferson, as you look at the world today, is there any country that is sovereign? Of course, Britain is sovereign. No one tells the British what to do. France doesn't like what Britain does. It can invade Britain or declare war on Britain, but nobody can tell Britain what to do. Nobody can tell Germany what to do. Nobody can tell the United States what to do. Nobody can tell Canada what to do. These are all sovereign nations. But it is quite clear that Iraq in the summer of 2004 is only a quasi-sovereign state or a sovereign state in name only. But it is quite clear to anyone who is a rational human being that Iraq has not been granted actual final sovereignty over its own internal affairs. Thank you. Mr. Jefferson, in your Declaration of Independence, you had a list of what you considered was involved in sovereignty. Can you go through that list with us, please? What happened was, of course, that we declared independence from Great Britain, and in doing so, we left a state of culture and returned to a state of nature.

So now we have 13 former colonies that aren't quite sure what comes next. And in the Declaration of Independence, I said, we therefore, this is the end of the document, we therefore, the representatives of the United States of America in general Congress assembled. In other words, we are suddenly declaring ourselves to be a nation. We were 13 colonies that had independent relationships with the Crown or corporations in Britain. Suddenly, we have severed all of those relationships, and now we are looking at each other as 13 highly independent former colonies and trying to decide what next. And instead of becoming 13 separate nations, which we might easily have become, we chose to become a united confederacy. So that was the first act. We banded together. And then we said, appealing to the supreme judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions. So this is an attempt to establish our legitimacy. Do in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, there's popular sovereignty, solemnly publishing declare that these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states. So there's the Declaration of Independence. Now here's what follows. It says we absolve all the agents to the British Crown and so on. And then it says that as free and independent states, we have full power. And here's the list to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce. And then there's a kind of elastic clause and do all other acts and things which independent states may have right do.

So what is it? What is a sovereign state? A sovereign state can declare war. Can Iraq in the summer of 2004 declare war? A sovereign state can conclude peace. A sovereign state can levy taxes. It has to have public funding of some sort. It has to have a system of fiscal structure, contract alliances. These are things that sovereign states do. They govern themselves and they have relationships with other governments or other entities in the world. And they do that without being dependent upon any nation whatsoever for that basic set of sovereign rights and duties. Thank you, Mr. Jefferson. Can you please explain something you said that we left a state of culture and went into a state of nature. What does that mean?

It means that if you take the Constitution in the United States and tear it up that suddenly there's no government. This has happened in Iraq recently that the Iraq, I mean to put it in classical American terms and leaving the United States out of it for the moment. The Iraqi people by, by deposing Saddam Hussein have shattered their de facto Constitution which was a tyranny. And once Saddam Hussein was dethroned and the, the Bothist party was declared illegitimate, the Iraqis returned to a state of nature. In other words, there's no government. It's true anarchy. There's no system. There's no control. And as you saw when the war came, there was widespread looting and mayhem. People were getting revenge on their enemies or their neighbors or anyone that had bothered them. There was looting of government offices, of palaces, of museums, of stores. There's no order.

When a system breaks down that fundamentally, order dissolves and you have a state of chaos. And the people soon realize, I mean it doesn't take more than a handful of months. People realize that disorder is too crazy and that some order has to be developed. And at that point then they create a new system of order which could be called a Constitution with a small C. Mr. Jefferson, thank you very much. We have to go to a break. And when we return we will be speaking with the scholar behind you, Clay Jenkinson. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. My name is Janie Guil and seated across from me is the scholar behind Thomas Jefferson, Clay Jenkinson. Clay, what an interesting program today. You know, it is interesting. I'm always glad when you're the host, our friend Bill Crystal is on assignment. He's down in St. Croix. He went down to the world of Alexander Hamilton's birth and is giving a learned paper on John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. So we miss Bill, but we wish him well on his Caribbean holiday. Thank you. Clay, can you go back through sovereignty and how the United States is claiming that Iraq is now a sovereign nation?

Well, this is a really interesting problem and I don't want to approach it as a cynic. You know what happened was the United States invaded Iraq and deposed Iraq's leader for the Iraqi people. At least that's what we have said. Once we did that, we returned Iraq to a state of nature. Now we've policed it. You know, that's what our troops are doing there is making sure that it doesn't descend into absolute madness. But Jefferson would probably say that there needs to be a period of madness. Donald Rumsfeld said more or less that when there was the great excess in the museums were looted and so on and after this, he said, well, this can be expected. And he was right. He sounded cruel and indifferent, but he was right that when people have lived under a tyranny for a long time, when they regain their rights, there will be riots and excesses and there will be a reign of terror. That's the nature of that's almost an expected structural response to decades of misrule and tyranny.

So the first step is that you cut off the head of the king. Well, that hasn't happened yet and it may not happen, but and it didn't happen the way that Jefferson would have wanted it to happen that is he would have wanted it to come from the people of Iraq, not from the United States military. But the first step is you depose the tyrant. That's that has occurred. The second step is that there's a period of chaos, just as there was in the French Revolution and to a much lesser extent in the United States Revolution. Then there is a first attempt at order, this is sort of the articles of Confederation period, where a provisional and highly imperfect system of government is installed which fails. It attempts to bring about a better nation, but for many different reasons it fails. And then there is a kind of a counter revolution where some kind of stronger authority occurs. In the case of France, this led to the dictatorship of Napoleon and in the case of Iraq, it might lead to a dictatorship. It's far from clear what will happen.

But in the United States, it was more benign counter revolution and it led to the Constitution of 1787, which was a fairly conservative document by the standards of the Enlightenment, but it nevertheless preserved the revolution rather than destroyed the revolution. But all those things can be expected. Now, in this case, it's highly artificial because all of this is being supervised by the United States government. The United States government, and this has to be said, and I know this will offend some, but it's simply the case. The United States government does not intend for the Iraqis to be sovereign if the Iraqis use their sovereignty in a way that offends us. In other words, the Iraqis only get to be sovereign if they please us. But if they declared war on us or said that they would no longer supply oil to us or that they were going to wage war against Israel or that they were going to form a Taliban style Shiite theocracy. We wouldn't accept it. So we've given them, we've given them what might be called low level probationary semi sovereignty. And they are now required to use it in a way that does not displease the United States. If they do that, we will slowly withdraw and over the course of the next decade they will gain more and more control of themselves.

But the United States does not intend the Iraqis to be sovereign. If the Iraqis were sovereign, one of two things would almost certainly occur. Either they would descend into a terrible bloody civil war, which is actually quite likely. Or they would, the majority, the Shiite majority would form a theocracy and maybe along the Iranian model, probably not as severe as the Iranian theocracy. But an Iranian style Shiite theocracy that would violate the very principles of secularity that the United States is trying to create in the Middle East. So you made a comment about our constitution. You said that our constitution was adopted in 1787. That's a decade plus after we declared independence. Why did it take us a decade plus? Is this normal? We're also watching the European Union go through and try and form a constitution. How long will it take Iraq?

Yeah, Jefferson would say centuries. You know, because the Iraqis don't have a Magna Carta. They don't have, you know, look at the countries in the Islamic world that have attempted to produce a western style settlement. Really, the only two, really the only one is Turkey. Turkey was modernized by Ataturk. And Ataturk, interestingly enough, was a student of the work of Jefferson. And I have a book, which is called Ataturk and Jefferson. And Ataturk attempted to do for Turkey. What he thought Jefferson represented for the United States. And Turkey is an officially secular country. I've been to Turkey several times. And when you ask them, what's the status of Islam in Turkey? I keep in mind, you know, 98% of the Turkish people are Islamic. Whoever is there will say we are officially not an Islamic state. We are an Islamic friendly state, but the state is not Islamic.

That's the closest we have to a western style Islamic nation. Jordan is sort of a benevolent monarchy. And it's also quite western in certain regards. Iran is officially non-Western, but it's the demographics. The people of Iran are quite western. And a growing problem is occurring there because the people would like to be progressively western in the state. They would like them to be fundamentally Islamic. But if Turkey is the best we have, Turkey is barely able to contain the anarchy within its own borders. And it does so in a way that violates human rights so deeply that it defends the United States and it defends the EU. And our President George Bush got himself in trouble with the French President Jacques Shirok by saying that it's time for Turkey to be in the EU. And Shirok said, mind your own business. You're not the EU or the EU. And the EU doesn't want to admit Turkey until human rights violations have been diminished and until capital punishment has been outlawed in Turkey. But the Turks say they can't control their own population without those repressive tools.

And so Jefferson would say this is going to take centuries. Even after most of a century of a western-style Turkish government, by European or American standards, Turkey would get a D minus in its basic commitment to constitutional rule of law. And that's the best state there in terms of western infrastructure and western constitutionalism. It will take centuries for the Iraqi people if they ever even want this. You know, the fact is they don't I don't think they want to be a western-style country at all. But if they were going to be a western-style country, it would take men of the charisma and vision of Attiturk. And these are extremely rare in any society, ours or theirs. And it would take decades of careful nurturing for this to have any chance of success at all. The idea, and this is where Jefferson, I think, would be so upset by America's role in the world, the idea that the United States can basically come out of nowhere. And in a couple of years impose an American-style or a western-style constitution on Iraq and believe in its naïvetate that this has the slightest chance of really taking root there.

Jefferson would find pathetic naive, appalling, simplistic, and arrogant. Well, thank you. Clay, let's move on to today's letter. Instead of being a letter that Jefferson wrote, today's letters actually come from John and Abigail Adams. So I thought I would read a portion of Abigail Adams's letter to her husband, John. That's about who's a citizen. This is the famous, remember the ladies' letter. Too bad Bill Crystal's not here to defend himself, but if you would read just the relevant part of Abigail's famous spring of 1776 letter to her husband, John. She's in Massachusetts, he is in Philadelphia. This letter was written on March 31, 1776, and she says, I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And by the way, in the new code of laws, which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.

Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation. The sex or naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy, willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless, to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity? Men of sense in all ages aboard those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your sex. Regardless, then, as beings placed by providence under your protection, an imitation of the supreme being make use of that power only for our happiness. Well, interesting, you know, this letter is one of the most widely quoted letters in American history. It's a beautiful letter.

It's not clear whether she was fully serious or half serious or playful. You know, there's a nice little piece of wit in it when she says, remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. She's playing on the two senses of men. The statement comes from the principle that all human beings would be tyrants if they could, men as the collective noun for humankind. But she twists it, doesn't she? All males, she means all males would be tyrants if they could. She's trying to make a point. She's trying to make a point and it's not, I mean, it's really hard to decide whether, I mean, I wish we could actually snap her here and say, well, how serious were you? Was this where you really feel this way or were you playing with your husband, we have serious, were you testing him? You know, not sure how far you could push. I mean, I tend to think that she was serious, but she's also playful and they don't necessarily have to be divorced.

Clay, I one time read something that said that Abigail had a couple friends that were being abused by their husbands and that this may have been something that was going through her mind as she was writing this to her husband. Yes, and keep in mind that she speaks for a movement that led to the full participation of women in the public life of the United States by the early 1920s that she's writing in 1776. She's, if ever a woman was before her time, it's Abigail Adams, but today, I mean, everyone would assume that this is obvious that when humans create new constitutions that they have to embrace women and what we call minorities, that today you couldn't create, at least in the United States, a constitution that disenfranchised women and minorities. Whether Iraq will do that is another question because under the Islamic Code, women have decided, at least politically, publicly subordinate place to men. And if the Americans tried to impose Abigail's attitudes and principles on the Iraqis, they might well ball.

And so there's another reason why one culture system doesn't translate very well to another. The point is Abigail wrote this letter and it is widely seen as a proto-feminist letter. And I think probably you're right that we should take it seriously. I'll ask you now whether you think John Adams took it seriously. Here's what he wrote on April 14th, so what two weeks later, 1776. I wish Bill were here to voice this, but here's what John said, as to declarations of independency, be patient. As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bans of government everywhere that children and apprentices were disobedient, that schools and colleges were grown turbulent, that Indians slated their guardians and Negroes grew insulin to their masters. But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest, were grown discontented. This is rather too course a compliment, but you are so saucy. I won't blot it out. And clearly he thinks she was being playful.

Depend upon it, says John Adams. We know better than to repeal our masculine systems. Although they are in full force, you know they are little more than theory. We dare not exert our power in its full attitude. We are obliged to go fair and softly, and in practice, you know we are the subjects. We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petty-coat. I hope General Washington and all our brave heroes would fight. Well, obviously, I mean, anyone who hears this has to wish they were John and Abigail Adams. I mean, it doesn't everyone wish they were in the primary relationship of their life were that intelligent, that playful, that passionate, that saucy. That's why they are such a wonderful couple. Jefferson could never have written either of those letters. Jefferson's wife would never have dared write Abigail's. This is a particularly fascinating couple, John and Abigail Adams, and in some regards, they are way more like us than Thomas Jefferson is. Yes, if our listeners want, they can go to our website and find these two letters posted on our website.

It's an improved website. The website is under new management and is growing and changing, and I have posted some editorials on the website, and I want all of our listeners to go to it. It's www.th-Jefferson.org. Clay, we are actually out of time today. It's been a fascinating program, and we look forward to visiting with you again. Clay Jenkinson is recently completed a chatbook, a pocket-sized booklet on Lewis and Clark and Iowa. The Thomas Jefferson Hour is offering this 69-page autographed chatbook as a fundraiser. The format of this chatbook is the friendly question-and-answer format Clay is so well-known for. The questions covered in this chatbook range from, what happened on the Lewis and Clark expedition in Iowa, to what is revealed about the character Ameriwether Lewis and William Clark in Iowa? For a donation of $15, we will send you Clay's latest chatbook, Lewis and Clark in Iowa. This offer ends August 31, 2004. Please call 1-888-458-803-1888-458-803 and ask for Ian or Jamie.

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