The Agrarian Democracy of Thomas Jefferson

A. Whitney Griswold

American Political Science Review, 1946, vol. 40, issue 4, 657-681

Abstract: If the past determines or in any way influences the present, the present invariably reverses the process. One of the more striking instances of this rule has been the recent apotheosis of Thomas Jefferson as a national hero equal in stature to Washington and Lincoln. In an atmosphere of industrialism, urban living, and strong, impersonal national government that tradition might lead us to suppose would kill it, the Jefferson legend has blossomed and put forth new shoots. As Mr. Douglass Adair has pointed out, the pioneer democrat and agrarian liberal “discovered” by Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles A. Beard and celebrated by Parrington, Nock, and Bowers, has lately found more complicated, more interesting, and incidentally more timely, portrayal at the hands of Carl Becker, Gilbert Chinard, and Adrienne Koch. These writers, whose company is now joined by Mr. Joseph Dorfman, have been at pains to show the range and diversity of Jefferson's thought, and above all how he moved with his times to espouse the cause of commerce, industry, and national power. Mr. Dorfman crowds all these qualities together under the label, “Thomas Jefferson: Commercial Agrarian Democrat” which, if the trend continues, may have to be stretched to “Commercial Industrial Agrarian Democratic Federalist.”Does the label fit? The legendary Jefferson was an agrarian; and even as modern scholars were finding in his writings political precepts for an industrial age, the farmers of the United States were recognizing him as the founder of American agriculture and adopting him as their patron saint.

Date: 1946
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