I called my brother, Kevin, to ask if he would spend Independence Day with Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and me.
Monticello – which was Jefferson’s primary residence and planation in Virginia – has a new tour focusing on the fond and fractious relationship of Jefferson and Adams, which culminated in an exchange of 158 letters in their last 14 years of life.
Historian David McCullough deemed this attempt of the fiery Bostonian and reticent Virginian to overcome their political feuds and understand each other “one of the most extraordinary correspondences in American history”.
My favourite anecdote about Adams and Jefferson, who loved Shakespeare and used the Bard’s psychological insights as inspiration when they conjured the country, concerned their visit to Shakespeare’s house in Stratford-upon-Avon. As Abigail Adams recalled, her husband cut a relic from Shakespeare’s chair, while Jefferson “fell upon the ground and kissed it”.
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Our family trip to Monticello on Wednesday was suggested by Jane Kamensky, a very cool historian of the American Revolution and the president and chief executive of Monticello and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. She thought that my Trump-supporting brother and I might appreciate the new tour, “Founding Friends, Founding Foes,” as inspiration for “a thoughtful dialogue across the divide”.
Kevin laughed when I told him about the invitation.
“I’m amused,” he said, “that we are the example of modern-day comity and civility.” Americans are at one another’s throats, living in a world of insults, coarseness and cruelty – a world where Donald Trump and JD Vance excel.
At Monticello, we talked to Ken Burns, who was giving a preview of his upcoming PBS documentary on the American Revolution. He is finishing it in the nick of time, given Trump’s attempts to slash public broadcaster PBS’s federal funding.
“The Revolution – no pictures, no newsreels, and more violent than we could possibly imagine,” the film-maker told us. “The Revolution was not just a quarrel between Englishmen over Indian land and taxes and representation, but a bloody struggle that would involve more than two dozen nations, Europeans as well as Native Americans, that also somehow came to be about the noblest aspirations of humankind.”
A year from now is the 250th birthday party for the country. In retrospect, the odds seem impossible. When the patriot militias engaged at sunrise at Lexington Green in April 1775, Burns noted, “the chances of the success of the operation were zero”. Then, somehow, eight years later, “we created something new in the world. We were the original anti-colonial movement. We turned the world upside down”.
Adams and Jefferson constantly talked about virtue and what virtues would help mold our antimonarchical society.
Trump, who plays at being a king, is not interested in virtue; only in humiliation, conflict, enrichment and revenge. (The popular president of the University of Virginia, the school here founded by Jefferson, just announced that he would resign because of Trump’s anti-diversity, equity and inclusion pressure campaign.)
As Trump rammed through his horrible Bill, a humongous wealth transfer, he scoffed at those who suggested there was no virtue in hurting the most vulnerable to make the obscenely rich richer. He keeps insisting that no one will lose Medicaid benefits, but Republicans are cutting more than $1 trillion from the programme, so a lot of people are going to suffer. The Declaration of Independence aspired to equality, while Trump’s Bill deepens our inequality.
He wanted it rushed through for a flashy July 4th ceremony so he could sign this dreckitude on the same day that our soaring origin statement was adopted. He timed it for maximum drama at 5pm, with military planes flying over the White House.
I asked Burns if it was possible now to persuade anyone across the aisle of anything, or is everyone just howling into the storm?
“The best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s point of view,” he said. “The only thing that can do that is a good story. Good stories are a kind of benevolent Trojan horse. You let them in, and they add complication, allowing you to understand that sometimes a thing and its opposite are true at the same time.”
Reading the Adams-Jefferson letters, I felt that these founders were able to resurrect their relationship the same way I’m able to preserve mine with my siblings. We approach politics carefully, without venom or overblown expectations of changing one another’s minds. We look for slivers of common ground: None of us thought Joe Biden should cling to office when he was clearly declining, and none of us like it when Trump belittles people or cashes in with cheesy products like his new $249 perfume, “Victory 45-47”.
We talk about other things, movies and sports, just as Jefferson and Adams discussed wine, books and ancient Greek philosophers, with Jefferson sometimes throwing in Greek phrases.
“Lord! Lord!” Adams exclaimed with exasperation. “What can I do, with So much Greek?”
Burns said that his half-century of making documentaries about America’s wars and pastimes has taught him to embrace contradictions.
“The binaries that we set up are the biggest trap, whether they come from the left or the right,” he said. “When you see somebody making a ‘them,’ you have to be careful. That’s antithetical to what the Declaration is saying. I hope that what we do on the Fourth of July is try to put the ‘us’ into the US.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times
