The Destruction of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation

In 1985, Daniel Jordan—a Ph.D. in history from University of Virginia—became president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and runs Monticello. He would preside over Monticello for the next 24 years, during which time Thomas Jefferson’s life and legacy would be radically transformed through information made readily available by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

Under his guidance, TJF created a $200-million-plus endowment, built the Thomas Jefferson library, purchased historic Montalto Mountain, established the Thomas Jefferson Parkway and walking trail, brought in the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies (1994), and began many educational programs.

Jordan realized that preservation of Monticello entailed increase in the number and amount of donations as well as telling the whole story of Jefferson. He was successful in the first. Concerning the second, said Jordan early in his presidency to his staff, “From January the first on, we’re going to try to tell the most honest [sic] story we can about Jefferson and slavery and race and the plantation, and it’s all going to be based on serious scholarship.” That was a promise he did not keep.

When Peter Onuf became Thomas Jefferson Foundation Scholar in 1989, things especially came undone.

Presentism, Postmodernism, and Progressivism

In October 1992, Onuf hosted a conference titled “Jeffersonian Legacies.” Said Dan Jordan, an enthusiastic co-host of that conference, in the foreword of the book of the same title:

Revisionist in spirit, innovative in format, the conference sought new perspectives on the Jefferson legacy by measuring Jefferson’s life and values against major concerns of the 1990s. … The premise of the conference was that Jefferson’s legacies—for better or worse—are directly relevant to some of the most crucial concerns of Americans in the 1990s.

Here we have a commitment to presentism.

Jordan, who would be an ally of Onuf during his tenure as president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, went on to say that the world’s leading Jeffersonian scholars, with the exception of Merrill Peterson, were not invited to the conference. Living in Charlottesville, it was perhaps impossible to keep away Peterson, so he was thrown a bone—that is, “limited to a brief commentary at the conference’s final session.” The generation of “new ideas” was the aim of the conference.

The result was an intellectual free-for-all, with polemical discourse, reasoned debates, brilliant insights, wild digressions, and even some egregious misinformation.

There were, adds Jordan, “revisionist zeal, presentism, and a tint of political correctness.” In some attempt to parry the objection that there was a circus-like atmosphere at the conference, conference promoters used the words of Thomas Jefferson:

We are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long reason is left free to combat it.

Use of Jefferson on truth, however, was hypocritical, as the postmodernist methods of presentism, progressivism, and revisionism were not about taking a veridical path, but merely a political path—that is, a politically correct path.

The plan was to have a postmodernist intellectual free-for-all, and so, in the main, fact-grounded scholars were not invited. With the relatively open-ended “canons” of postmodernist history, the aim would be to construct, in the language of a later book of Onuf (The Mind of Thomas Jefferson), “possible Jeffersons.”

Let us look briefly at some of the postmodernist narratives, published afterward in a book, of the conference.

Paul Conkin states that Jefferson “was a creature of mood and sentiment much more than a rigorous thinker.” In consequence,

Jefferson tended to paper over the problematic or inconsistent elements in the thought of his heroes. [In the end,” Jefferson always ended up with such an eclectic mix of ideas as to defy systematic ordering.

Those are the sentiments of a scholarly dilettante.

Rhys Isaac in “The First Monticello” says:

We as humans, and the cultures to which we belong, are largely constructed in, and knowable through, the stock stories we ‘possess’ (or that ‘possess’ us?).

The statement, torturously postmodernist and essentially bafflegab, is in keeping with postmodernist narrativism. The stories Jefferson gathered reveal a troubled mind. While he addressed the “war on humanity” in his Declaration of Independence, in his Notes on Virginia, the focus shifts to

the unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the influence of slavery among us.

His worry becomes the fear that Blacks might successfully revolt and enslave Whites; there is little concern about the enormity of the institution of slavery. Jefferson’s “contrarieties,” says Isaac, are fully on display today at Monticello.  The Jeffersonian vision was of equality, but that could be actualized only by continuance of slavery in the South and dispossession of Native Americans to the West. Women were deserving of “natural equality,” in that they were free in “serving men.” He sums:

His whole system was designed in the unexamined logic of his stories.

The most vicious attack on Jefferson was the gloves-off essay of Paul Finkelman. Finkelman’s essay was an attempt to grasp the enormous gorge between Jefferson’s assertions and his actions. That is not the crime of presentism, he asserts. Jefferson was the “author of the Declaration of Independence and a leader of the American Enlightenment,” and so we cannot satisfice with testing to see if Jefferson rose above the “worst of his generation,” but instead whether “he was a leader of the best.” Following the lead of Brion Davis, for Finkelman, Jefferson’s interest in abolition was theoretical, not practical: He wished to appear as an advocate of abolition, while he privately championed the institution.

“Jefferson was the intellectual godfather of the racist pseudo-science of the American school of anthropology,” he “fails the test.

The issue of political correctness came to the fore in Stephen Conrad’s essay “Putting Rights Talk in Its Place.” How precise do we wish to be vis-à-vis Jefferson’s “visionary ideas”—rights among them? Making them precise,

we encounter questions about how accurate—however ultimately salutary—it is, after all, to invoke Jefferson … uncritically … to legitimate a rights-based reform of American constitutional law and international law.

He endnotes the claim with reference to a comment by philosopher Richard Rorty, who

eloquently made the case for setting aside questions of historical accuracy and philosophical justification in order to sustain the present-day cause of international human rights, a cause that has lately invoked the Jeffersonian tradition to profound effect.

That sentiment by Rorty, I maintain, is what has driven the Thomas Jefferson narrative at and around Monticello to this day. We can ignore historical truth to promote human rights. Yet in ignoring philosophical justification, how can we be sure that the cause of human rights is just, or at least worthwhile?

An Amateurish DNA Study that Changed the World

Then there was Dan Jordan’s precipitous reaction to the sham 1998 DNA study in Nature, headed by Eugene Foster, which claimed that Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings and very probably all other of Sally Hemings’ children. The misleading title was “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child.”

Within 24 hours of the 1998 release of the study linking Jefferson to the paternity of Hemings’ son, Monticello held a press conference, posted public statements on the web site, and instructed interpreters in how to initiate conversations on the subject with visitors. The Foundation pledged to continuously evaluate all relevant evidence [my italics], advancing “our firm belief in telling a story here that is accurate and honest—and thus inclusive—about Jefferson’s remarkable life and legacy in the context of the complex and extraordinary plantation community that was Monticello.

Given the shocking news that Eston Hemings almost certainly carried the Jeffersonian Y chromosome, then-president Daniel Jordan of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation issued a statement shortly after reading the 1998 DNA study. In the statement, Jordan said:

Dr. Foster’s DNA evidence indicates a sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, an African-American woman who was one of his slaves.

Use of “indicates” is untoward, because it is much too strong; “suggests” is probatively apposite.

Jordan quickly formed an in-house committee to investigate the role of Jefferson in the paternity of Eston Hemings and perhaps of the other children of Sally Hemings. Members of the committee were the following:

Chair: Dianne Swann-Wright, Director of Special Programs;

Whitney Espich, Communications Officer;

Fraser Neiman, Director of Archaeology;

Anne Porter, Education Instructor;

David Ronka, Interpreter;

Lucia Stanton, Shannon Senior Research Historian;

Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, Head Guide;

White McKenzie Wallenborn, Associate Interpreter; and

Camille Wells, Director of Research.

The report of the committee, published in January 2000, is titled “Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings”—hereafter, Research Committee Report (RCR). Members met 10 times from December 1998 to April 1999 to discuss the scientific data and relevant historical evidence. They formed subcommittees and consulted with persons from other committees.

After combing through the available DNA and historical evidence, the research committee came to the following two conclusions. First, there were no perceivable flaws with the 1998 DNA study that might lead anyone to question its data. Second,

the DNA study, combined with multiple strands of currently available documentary and statistical evidence, indicates a high probability that Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings, and that he most likely was the father of the five other of Sally Hemings’s children appearing in Jefferson’s records: Harriet (1795), Beverly, an unnamed daughter who died in infancy, a second Harriet, and Madison.

The committee then acknowledged certain challenges in moving forward: that so much of what went on between Jefferson and Hemings is unknown (the nature of the relationship; whether Hemings really had a child by Jefferson in France and if so, how long it lived; and the identity of Thomas Woodson). The committee, thereafter, having committed to the concubinage of Jefferson and Hemings, added that they would explore the implications of their relationship.

It is worth noting—and this is an astonishing fact!—that the chair of the committee, Swann-Wright, edited a published book, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture (1999), prior to the pronouncement of the results of the study. Jefferson’s paternity of all Sally Hemings children, it seems, was a fait accompli.

One member of the committee, White McKenzie “Ken” Wallenborn, a man of high probity, dissented. He maintained that the committee, instead of searching for the truth, was engaged in a witch hunt. It was not only preoccupied with incriminating Thomas Jefferson, but it also manifested an obvious hatred of the man. Wallenborn writes:

I was right when I reported to Dan Jordan in early March that the committee had reached their decision long before all of the information had been studied, and that sure enough, all of the evidence that would have exonerated Mr. Jefferson had been discarded.

Wallenborn thus prepared his “Minority Report to the DNA Study Report,” which he sent to Swann-Wright, chair of the DNA Study Commission (and who was in the process of editing a book on the relationship of Jefferson and Hemings while the study was being conducted!), and gave personally to Jordan, president of the foundation. Neither Swann-Wright nor Jordan shared the dissenting report with any other committee members. Wallenborn, frustrated, began to circulate copies of his report to committee members and was eventually called into Jordan’s office to discuss his furtive activities. Jordan was ultimately persuaded to attach Wallenborn’s “Minority Report” to the Research Committee Report and make it available to all committee members. The report, however, was not circulated.

Wallenborn’s report addressed flaws in the historical scholarship that putatively inculpated Jefferson.

The majority of the committee feels that in view of multiple strands of documentary and statistical evidence combined with the DNA findings substantiates the paternity of all the children listed under Sally Hemings name in Jefferson’s Farm Book. The minority report agrees that there is significant historical evidence that would show that Thomas Jefferson could be the father of Eston Hemings but also strongly feels that there is significant historical evidence of equal statue that indicates that Thomas Jefferson was not the father of Eston Hemings (or any of Sally Hemings’ children).

Wallenborn’s assessment of “significant historical evidence of equal statue” against Jefferson’s paternity is misstated. There is no significant historical evidence.

Wallenborn’s Minority Report fell on deaf ears. Jefferson had been found guilty of paternity, and racism, prior to Monticello’s DNA Commission Study.

Head of the DNA study, Eugene Foster, would say:

This whole affair has been conducted by amateurs. I include myself.

Upshot

Dan Jordan, who passed not long ago, was an energetic president who did much to turn Monticello in a fiscally thriving direction. He was an energetic and amiable leader, yet his legacy is probatively tainted. If we are “to try to tell the most honest story we can about [Jordan],” then it must be based on a full assessment of Jordan’s role in tarnishing Jefferson’s legacy. Under Jordan, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation became Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Moreover, Jordan worked in concert with the nefandous Peter Onuf to give us a defiled picture of Jefferson that has been iterated and reiterated to visitors at Monticello for over 35 years. Much damage can be done in such a span of time. Much damage has been done.

When Jordan retired in 2008, the presidency of the Foundation went to Leslie Greene Bowman—the subject of next week’s episode—under whose leadership, Jefferson and his legacy were taken to new lows.

Enjoy the video below.

The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily the views of the Abbeville Institute.

M. Andrew Holowchak

M. Andrew Holowchak, Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy and history, who taught at institutions such as University of Pittsburgh, University of Michigan, and Rutgers University, Camden. He is author/editor of over 70 books and over 325 published essays on topics such as ethics, ancient philosophy, science, psychoanalysis, and critical thinking. His current research is on Thomas Jefferson—he is acknowledged by many scholars to be the world’s foremost authority—and has published over 230 essays and 28 books on Jefferson. He also has numerous videos and two biweekly series with Donna Vitak, titled “One Work, Five Questions” and "The Real Thomas Jefferson," on Jefferson on YouTube. He can be reached at [email protected]

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