The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

By the reckoning of Dumas Malone, the world's preeminent Jeffersonian biographer, "No other American document has been read so often or listened to by so many weary and perspiring audiences" as the Declaration of Independence. Certainly new records were set this Fourth as the words of Thomas Jefferson about "self-evident" truths and "unalienable rights" were beamed from the base of the Statue of Liberty around the globe. "Those well-worn phrases have never lost their potency and charm," insists Malone, though at the time they were first introduced, Jefferson was still miffed that his original text had been edited by the Continental Congress. Jefferson was not even in the limelight. He was poking around Philadelphia, buying a thermometer and seven pairs of ladies' gloves before going home to Monticello. Years later, he said his intention had been "to place before mankind the common sense of the subject." Jefferson, as much as any man of his time, believes Malone, had already focused on the future and was deeply concerned about the daunting task of translating the Declaration into "legal institutions." Two centuries later, we still struggle at the job.

Many Americans back then gloried in the Jeffersonian eloquence, then turned away from the tasks it prescribed for them. Too many Americans still do that, says Malone, who is 94, and spent 50 years compiling his six volumes on Jefferson, 5 1/2 of which follow the events that came after the moment of creation in July 1776. Common sense about the things that still plague mankind flowed from Jefferson's extraordinary pen for half a century after that date in papers, letters and laws.

Scholars know about Jefferson's insistence that "the earth belongs to the living, not to the dead," and how he wanted that principle applied to eliminating national debts, particularly war debts. But few practitioners of today's politics have read those admonitions. Jefferson contended that one generation, which he meticulously calculated from the rough data available to run about 19 years, should not unreasonably burden its successors. He believed sufficient taxes should be levied to clear the books in that 19-year stretch so that a new generation could face its own problems unencumbered. That pay- as-you-go principle might also be an effective restraint on the "dog of war," reasoned Jefferson, who had seen the European potentates suffocate their subjects with debt from wars of pride and whim.

Jefferson's marvelous mind knew few limits. Laws of a nation and even constitutions should undergo generational revisions, he suggested. "No society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law," he wrote. He felt, like few other men of his age, the inexorable current of humankind in which the only constant was change. But, of course, he was too much the dreamer. His friend James Madison brought him down to earth, pointing out that generations were not mere tidy mathematical certainties and that debts, like those incurred for the American Revolution, could benefit those who were to come. As always, Jefferson acknowledged the wisdom of Madison's view, but he could never rid himself of the feeling that unrestrained debt was as great an enemy of "natural rights" as King George III.

It is notable in this the week after the great party that among the questions facing the U.S. are these: What right do we have to pile up a $2 trillion debt for our children to pay? How can we in good conscience indulge desires that may leave the earth poisoned and exhausted within a few decades? Why, if we must spend $300 billion for our war machine, should we not levy taxes to pay for that burden in our time?

Thomas Jefferson is whispering to us to read on.