Democracy's Muse: How Thomas Jefferson Became an FDR Liberal, a Reagan Republican, and a Tea Party Fanatic, All the While Being Dead by Andrew Burstein

Democracy's Muse: How Thomas Jefferson Became an FDR Liberal, a Reagan Republican, and a Tea Party Fanatic, All the While Being Dead Reviews

• 
  Al

  With the Warhol inspired cover, how could I not pick this up. (Nor could I resist a subtitle “How Thomas Jefferson became a FDR liberal, a Reagan Republican, and a Tea Party Fanatic, all the while being dead”)
  
  Jefferson, as much as any American, has been twisted over the years to mold into every political ideology. He is considered the father of the modern Democratic Party. He was also an oft- quoted icon for the Tea Party Movement which was erupting when this book was being written.
  
  He was much loved and quoted by Reagan, and often mentioned during the two terms of William Jefferson Clinton.
  
  This book reads much more academically than the cover suggests. It feels like a book that would be assigned in Political Science classes, but that said, it is really very readable.
  
  In many ways, it is the biography of Jefferson starting with his death. A rundown of the “life” of Jefferson changed over the years via his coverage in mainstream media is a big part of the book.
  
  Often the liberal hero of FDR and the Democrats, Jefferson also championed States Rights and had a Libertarian streak. Jefferson was a humanist and well versed in scripture (a favorite bit is from Benjamin Rush- the evangelicals’ favorite Founding Father to quote, who says to Jefferson “Were it possible for St Paul to rise from his grave at the present juncture, he would say to the Clergy who are so now active in settling the political affairs of the world, cease from your political labors - your kingdom is not of this World. Read my epistles. In no part of them will you perceive me aiming to depose a pagan Emperor or to place a Christian upon a throne”)
  
  In short, Jefferson is malleable because we can’t place him in todays context. Times are too different. Even then, he is contradictory. Sally Hemings is covered here in detail, of course. But also the duality of wanting a government that was not intrusive in the lives of families but also wanting the government to help the weakest Americans and fight corrupt power.
  
  Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase, fought the Barbary Pirates and prosecuted Aaron Burr. His religious beliefs probably can be compared to the work of the Founding Fathers- God is invoked in the Declaration of Independence but left out of the Constitution. It is this duality that Diests and Atheists can pull from Jefferson whatever image of them they want to see
  
  This book could be academic at times but I rather enjoyed the thought provoking takes it had on Jefferson. It is explicitly not a biography but at the same time a fascinating insight into the “idea” of Jefferson over the years.
• 
  Thomas

  Fascinating look at how Jefferson's memory has been interpreted to such varying conclusions. Sadly loses focus at times, especially towards the end, and is a bit unfair to Jefferson himself at points. Still, an important reminder of how history is constantly changing in interpretation.
• 
  Pomegranates

  In Democracy’s Muse, Andrew Burstein traces the convoluted and contradictory history of one of America’s most durable legends: Thomas Jefferson. He argues that throughout much of US history, Jefferson has been held up as the symbol of whatever political movement happened to be in vogue, encouraging the development of a historiography as diverse as the political spectrum itself. It’s a thoroughly intriguing read, rife with the drama of both twentieth and twenty-first century politics-- both left and right want to claim the glamour and prestige of the Jeffersonian legacy for themselves. Burstein illuminates our politicians’ knack for twisting and fabricating quotations and analogies, just as adeptly as he identifies the challenges of charting a long-dead man on to our modern political continuum: the context of early American politics is so vastly far removed from our modern-day society that it makes clear-cut equivalences next to impossible.
  
  Democracy's exploration of historiography not only covers those adorning the cover; an assortment of other politicians and academics also make appearances. The most interesting of these is definitely Liu Zuochang, a Chinese scholar who took the New Deal-era interpretation of Jefferson back home with him and kept it alive through his work. The first part of the book, where Liu’s story is located, addresses the latter half of the twentieth century. It’s generous with historical background and heavy on analysis of politicians’ (especially presidents’) invocations of Jefferson. The latter half, on the other hand, feels more personal, perhaps because it is contemporary: it deals with how Jefferson has been roped into the twenty-first century's culture wars. Predictably, Burstein's writing in this section is more invested, more energetic. He chronicles the Randolph descendents' racist crusade to block the Hemings descendents from claiming Jefferson's legacy and denounces the rise of "founder fundamentalism." However, the most fascinating topic he covers here has got to be Jefferson's religiosity, or lack thereof: how evangelicals incorrectly assert that his psuedobiblicism is something deeper than civil religion.
  
  Overall, Burstein traces nearly a century’s worth of political conversation in hopes of illuminating our own shifting attitudes toward our founders’ figurehead. Although it neglects to scrutinize the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with similar rigor, Democracy’s Muse succeeds in its mission to put America's Jefferson obsession in a more critical light.
• 
  Prentice Sargeant

  An excellent study- not only of the philosophies behind the most complex of the Founding Fathers, but also of his adaptation into modern American political discourse. Jefferson, as Burstein argues, has been a key component of both modern political parties and the policies they choose to enact and the philosophies they choose to adopt and ultimately, it seems neither side, nor truly any political figure, can correctly utilize the entirety of Thomas Jefferson into their mindset. He is amorphous, impossible to fully pigeon hole, and is much more complex than many of the other Founding Fathers. I would argue that the clearest argument Burstein presents is that Jefferson, and indeed all political figures, are fallible- and any modern reader trying to bring men like Jefferson to the twenty first century need to remember that.
• 
  Justin Powell

  Jefferson minds me of Jesus. It's a rare thing to find an objective interpreter of either, but it's a sure thing to find admirers who know they agreed with their positions. Complex figures of the past do not fit easily into categories or modern positions. This book shows Democrats and Republicans both using Jefferson to axe-grind for their own political thinking. Well written, but would love a stronger ending on the complexity and difficulty in constructing characters of the past objectively.
• 
  Aloysius

  This is not a biography of Thomas Jefferson. This is a biography of the image and legacy of Jefferson, particularly during the mid to late 20th century. Nice book, but I wish that there was some more insight into the legacy of Jefferson during the 1800s, particularly in the lead-up to the Civil War period.
• 
  Rose

  Nice untangling of how Jefferson has become all things to all men and whether it is warrented (in most cases, no).