Stepfather of the U. S.

THE LIVING JEFFERSON--James Truslow Adams--Scribner ($3).

On Thomas Jefferson's tombstone (which, like nearly everything else in his philosophically regulated life, he designed himself) he had chiseled the three achievements he wished his countrymen to remember him for; the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the founding of the University of Virginia. Historian Adams thinks Jefferson was too modest. Having listed such other claims to fame as his being Governor of Virginia, Minister to France, Secretary of State, twice President of the U. S., he calls Jefferson "the greatest Liberal America has produced and the most intensely 'American' of all the great figures of his time." The Living Jefferson is not so much a formal biography as a defense of Jeffersonianism. In the last chapters Author Adams applies his hero's attitude to the whole course of U. S. history to date, thus making his book a campaign document that will please neither New Dealers nor Republicans but only such Jeffersonians as still exist.

This Virginian aristocrat, whose natural ability and profession of the law drove him against his inclinations into public life, had the same background, the same attitude as Washington, but a "far wider" range of intellectual and esthetic interests. A fine figure of a man (his sandy hair was six feet two inches from the ground) and brave, but no soldier, he served the Revolution in Congress and as Governor of Virginia. When Jefferson was Washington's Secretary of State Alexander Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury, and out of their struggles to control Father Washington's ear arose the biparty system. Author Adams admits that Hamilton was the favorite child and that his gospel of Federalism won out, at least temporarily; but swears that Jefferson's liberal precepts and example have been as good an influence on the U. S. as Hamilton's have been evil.

Jefferson's terms as President were not particularly happy. Among their achievements that he did not wish posthumously boasted was the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the U. S.'s territory. His public service over, he was glad to get back to his books and his beloved Monticello. In 1819 he laid out the University of Virginia almost single-handed and down to its last architectural and administrative detail, served as its first Rector. Bad times wasted his patrimony away, but he died without knowing that Monticello would have to be sold. His last years were enlivened by a correspondence with John Adams, a friend of long standing with whom he had quarreled over politics and with whom he was pleased to be reconciled. The two old ex-Presidents died appropriately on the Fourth of July, 1826, within a few hours of each other.

Cassandra-like, Jefferson could sometimes read the future: "I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be any vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe." Shays's Rebellion did not horrify Jefferson nearly so much as it did Washington, Said he: "I like a little rebellion now & then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere."

According to Author Adams, there have been ten "pulse beats of democracy" in U. S. history. The Revolution was one, and Jefferson was the healthiest, reddest corpuscle in it. When Bryan failed, by a little, to get the Presidency in 1896. that pulse beat faltered. The election of Roosevelt II in 1932 was not a real one; it was "no echo of a cry for liberty or reform. It was a yell for cash and jobs." Says Adams darkly: "The real pulse beat may or may not come, out of due time, in 1936."

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