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Jefferson Randolph Kean and six other members of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Commission filed into the second-floor studio of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, near the White House, at 2 p.m. on Sept. 30, 1941. Outside, the city hummed with military officials monitoring the latest news from European battlefields. But here in this serene setting of portraits and landscapes, the commissioners had orders from President Franklin D. Roosevelt for a different task: to shape a foundational chapter in the nation’s history.
For decades, ever since the death of Thomas Jefferson, his friends and family strived to secure his legacy, making good on his request to “take care of me when dead.” A grandson prepared papers for a biographer that put Jefferson in the best light. Family members monitored criticism and wrote rebuttals. Now the responsibility had fallen to Kean, Jefferson’s great-great-grandson, at a time when the reputation of the nation’s third president had faded.
The Declaration of Independence that Jefferson wrote was still revered, but Jefferson’s personal and political reputation had suffered ups and downs. It was not just that he had been an enslaver, but also that many of his other best-known views were seen as wrong, contradictory or outdated.
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The country was not filled with farmers as he had hoped early in his career but thrived on industry and cities he once detested. He had been so anxious to try to please people of different beliefs that historians were forever mulling if his views on states’ rights laid the groundwork for the Civil War, or emboldened President Abraham Lincoln to write the Emancipation Proclamation. His 1822 prediction that “I trust that there is not a young man now living in the US. who will not die an Unitarian” woefully misestimated the future of religious beliefs. And, while his anti-federalism view still echoes among many, the United States has thrived with one of the world’s strongest federal governments — a victory for Jefferson’s rival, Alexander Hamilton.
There was no doubt that Jefferson could be celebrated for his scientific mind, his visionary call for religious freedom and his overarching concept that the combination of monarchy and an unrepresentative government was antithetical to liberty. But Kean knew, as Jefferson knew, that his reputation would always be tested by the contradiction between his advocacy of equality and his enslavement of 607 human beings in his lifetime.
So Kean set out to revive his great-great-grandfather’s image by portraying Jefferson as an abolitionist, not an enslaver.
A statue of Thomas Jefferson, pictured on July 9, stands at the center of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
It was a delicate task at a time when calls for civil rights clashed with ongoing segregation and Jim Crow laws. Some in Congress didn’t see a reason to celebrate Jefferson, either because he was an enslaver or because they objected to his being portrayed as an abolitionist. Kean needed a powerful backer, and he found the ultimate one in Roosevelt, who was elected in 1932 and relished the opportunity to associate himself with Jefferson. After years in which Jefferson’s reputation had diminished, Roosevelt did everything in his power to revive it. For years, statuary had become a political display, with the party in power promoting memorials to their favorites. The president anointed Kean as his proxy, and together they worked to create a memorial to Jefferson in Washington.
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