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Jefferson's not a great person, and had some horrid views and actions. However, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. He wrote some great stuff, had some great ideas, and was a pretty good leader in many respects. Yes, he raped slaves. Not cool, but he wasn't much of a shitlord beyond that. The American Constitution was a revolutionary thing when it was created and quite useful. Did it properly address nation building in central Asia or campaign donation in Bitcoins? No. But studying it as a means of understanding the mechanisms of government is pretty important, and not something only idiots with teabags on their hat do. That said, we shouldn't really give a poo poo what the founding fathers wanted. I would instead argue it's good to know their intentions and ideas, especially in the context of their time. One of their biggest tenants was "We don't know everything, so change poo poo if it doesn't work. It's not like we're divine or anything."
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May 19, 2014 04:18
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Install Windows posted:The constitution is James Madison's dishrag, not Jefferson's though. Jefferson did the Declaration. Sorry, wasn't trying to talk about Jefferson, just the FF in general.
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May 19, 2014 04:24
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I wouldn't consider Jefferson particularly evil for his time. A lot of the founding fathers owned slaves and people who owned slaves were big on loving them. He's not some special case. it's more that his other qualities were quite remarkable and the slave poo poo really is in sharp contrast to that. I don't excuse him, but I think it's important to remember the men and institutions that founded the country for what they were. The earnest set out to create a progressive, effective government, and succeeded. But they built it around their worldview and practical realities, which are pretty different from us.
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May 21, 2014 04:16
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SedanChair posted:Yes, the slaveowning founding fathers, and all slave owners were some of the wickedest men who ever lived. That must have been your point, right? American chattel slavery is certainly one of the most wicked institutions that ever lived. But the people who participated in it were not mustache twirling villains. In fact, a lot of them saw themselves as good people, and some of them even did important, good things. Jefferson and his class were blind to a whole section of the country they created, and chronically abused them en mass. However, they fought for a number of progressive values and certainly were important for creating some of the more important parts of America. This doesn't absolve them of the bad things they did, but I wouldn't call Jefferson one of the most wicked men who ever lived. If you want to talk about the founding fathers, you have to take them as a whole. They weren't supermen, but they weren't Hitler either. Granted, most of the books ever written about the founding fathers focus only on the good stuff. However, you're not going to understand their world, or the present one they had a hand in making, if you write them off as evil and bad. They're America's heritage, for better or worse.
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May 21, 2014 05:33
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Sucrose posted:
I wouldn't say he's a good person, I just don't think you need to write off his work because of it. Calling someone who was born and raised in a slaveholding society and kept holding slaves an awful person doesn't mean much. It's a calming black and white way to look at history, but it doesn't help you understand anything better and doesn't help otherwise. Founding myths are dumb, i guess 
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May 21, 2014 05:41
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How would you teach a class on Jefferson and the slave-owning founding fathers? I think ignoring the issue of slavery would be criminal, but so would saying they're as bad as Hitler. Dude wrote good stuff, did some good things, also was a lovely dude to lots of people. The world is complex.
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May 21, 2014 06:30
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Ok, by how would you prefer the biography of Jefferson read? He was a vile manic, a saint, a monster? What would you describe him as? The sad fact is that America was built by slavery and genocide for a long time. We're still not great about treating people as they should be treated, but thing have changed, even improved over the past 400 years, and if you want to account for why, you have to include Jefferson in that to a degree. Not that you shouldn't bring up the stuff he did that held us back.
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May 21, 2014 06:48
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Not really. All slave owners who had children with their slaves and didn't free them are not equal to someone who intentionally killed some 20 millim people with the intention of killing some 20 millim more. Sorry, but I find a fundamental difference in the values of the individual as well as the consequences of the actions. Going off what I've read, Jefferson had a lovely worldview where blacks, even his kids, were not seen as people to him and, though he treated them with a certain paternal duty, they were seen as property. However, he did not want to kill them, or work them to death, and clearly had some conflicting thoughts on how to deal with the institution of slavery. Hitler, however, had no deep conflicts that we know about when it came to murdering millions. There's a difference, and if you ignore that then you're going to get a dumb reading of history.
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May 21, 2014 19:40
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In an attempt to re-rail the thread, I have a related question. Modern American government and society has outright rejected a lot of what the founding fathers preferred. Probably the biggest thing that comes to mind is white supremacy. Many, if not most of the Founding Fathers were clear racists who believed in the superiority of white Christians in society. Were there any founding fathers who especially rejected not just slavery, but racism in their time? Some people, like Benjamin Franklin and the Boston types, were much more opposed to the institution of slavery as a system. However, were there many who were explicitly not what we'd characterize today as white supremacists?
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May 21, 2014 21:47
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In terms of raw numbers, most American Indians were killed by diseases that Europeans brought over. The destruction of their communities by Europeans was, like American Slavery, something that was set up and went on for generations, with peaks and valleys in terms of the intensity the oppression and violence. This came about more as structural result of who had the technological power and political ability to exploit the other for resources, and was less of a master plan or a specific ideology. Hitler and his regime, however, set up and committed their crimes in less than 12 years. There was significant intentional policy that caused the majority of the murder and oppression, and it was done in a much more centralized and organized manner. I don't think separating the Holocaust from the Native American oppression and Genocide has mark one as a smaller tragedy. However, they came from very different things, happened in very different ways, and comparing them blindly as Sedan Chair has been going on about is pretty useless in terms of having any discussion on either one.
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May 22, 2014 16:21
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SedanChair posted:
His argument is that you're just taking some simplistic, bad history lesson you had ("Founding Fathers GOOOD!") and are taking the opposite ("Founding Fathers HITLER!) and are struggling with the idea of something being morally nuanced. I don't think everyone here learned the 1950s textbook version of history you're so pissed about. I remember my 2nd grade text book brought up that Washington and Jefferson owned slaves and probably would not share some of the same values we have. None the less, that class of people is the reason we have the government we have now, as well as a lot of the political philosophy that's shaped how things have turned out. Yeah, hagiographies suck, but the reverse is just as useless.
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May 22, 2014 16:34
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Maybe we could frame the discussion in a little better way. Comparing Jefferson to Hitler is working a little backwards. Maybe a better question: in what ways was Hitler's kind of scientific racism and industrially-committed genocide a descendent of the kind of racism and imperialism that Jefferson believed in and acted through? I would say Jefferson clearly had a hand in the centuries-long genocide of his lifetime, was around during a key period of slavery, and probably had a hand in the early stages of the same scientific racism that Hitler's era of killers subscribed to in Europe. However, I think the racism of his era was specifically less murder-oriented then Hitler's era. Jefferson's kind of oppression had a bit more empathetic view of its victims, where Jefferson saw himself as a "father" in charge of his plantations "children," and as a result didn't want to kill them for being unfit to be in his world. What Jefferson writes about his slaves shows that he doesn't intend bad things for his slaves and would like them to be happy if possible, but also that he has a clear cut off for where his concern ends when it crosses paths with his own personal well being. Case in point, Jefferson kept and fathered children with a woman he owned, but didn't free his kids, even in his will, because it would have been a poor financial move. Hitler's era of racism encouraged people to not only outright murder someone of a different background, but also made it very easy to do that on a much wider scale. It evolved beyond simply exploiting someone for material benefit and instead the act of the crime was the end goal of the whole process. This breaks down a bit when it gets to Native Americans. If Jefferson would have had gas chambers, railroad trains, machine guns, and good record keeping, I wouldn't see him or any other founding father taking too long to call out for something like an Auschwitz or Dachau for American Indians.
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May 22, 2014 20:36
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Not to mention we sided and had sympathy for Russia, not Stalin, because they were fighting a war against our enemy, who was intent on killing the entire population of occupied Russia. You can't really call Americans hypocrites for not supporting the USSR then. Edit: Look at US or British propaganda, does any of it push a pro-Stalin image? It's all about Russia.
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May 23, 2014 02:58
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Dude, if the US became a bunch of competing Balkan states in the 1820s, they would be shoving each other out of the way to kidder Indians and take their land. I don't buy slavery engine easier either. I won't defend the US policy as anything but genocidal, so many sources across so much time have outright called for the destruction Indians outright. For much of American history, that was the intent of just about any community that lived beside Indians.i don't think that would change if the British had been in charge, or there were competing smaller states.
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May 23, 2014 21:21
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I just don't recall reading of any people until the 1880s of white Americans saying "whoa, all this blatant exploitation and murder is lovely. It's not cool." Sure, when the early colonists were living in somewhat equal proportions to the Indian communities around them, there were plenty of people who argued that they had to maintain proper balance and be good christians to the Natives. But once the power balance changed, I've never heard of anyone, save some missionaries, acting like American Indians deserved fair and equal treatment under the law.
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May 23, 2014 22:02
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