Democracy's Muse

In political speech, Thomas Jefferson is the eternal flame. No other member of the founding generation has served the agendas of both Left and Right with greater vigor. When Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the iconic Jefferson Memorial on the founderAEs two hundredth birthday, in 1943, he declared the triumph of liberal humanism.

Harry Truman claimed Jefferson as his favorite president, too. And yet Ronald Reagan was as great a Jefferson admirer as any Democrat. He had a go-to file of JeffersonAEs sayings and enshrined him as a small-government conservative. So, who owns Jefferson--the Left or the Right? The unknowable yet irresistible third president has had a tortuous afterlife, and he remains a fixture in todayAEs culture wars.

Pained by JeffersonAEs slaveholding, Democrats still regard him highly. Until recently he was widely considered by many African Americans to be an early abolitionist. Libertarians adore him for his inflexible individualism, and although he formulated the doctrine of separation of church and state, Christian activists have found intense religiosity between the lines in his pronouncements.

The renowned Jefferson scholar Andrew Burstein lays out the case for both Democrat and Republican Jefferson as he interrogates historyAEs greatest shape-shifter, the founder who has inspired perhaps the strongest popular emotions. In this timely and powerful book, Burstein shares telling insights, as well as some inconvenient truths, about politicized Americans and their misappropriations of the past, including the concoction of a Jeffersonian stance on issues that Jefferson himself could never have imagined.

Here is one book that is more about us than it is about Jefferson. It explains how the founding generationAEs most controversial partisan became essential to AmericaAEs quest for moral securityuhow he became, in short, democracyAEs muse. Review: Democracy's Muse is a lively and opinionated look at Jefferson's latter-day admirers.

You won't agree with everything Andrew Burstein says about them--but then they disagree so flamboyantly with each other.--Richard Brookhiser, author of Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln