THE name by which we call the men who made the American Revolution -- "Founding Fathers" -- suggests just how fraught our relationship with them can become.
In many minds, time has attenuated the Founders into vague demigods, participants in a gauzy national creation myth. Among those Americans willing to seek for the men who made our nation, most seem frozen in adolescent conflict -- oscillating between adulation of an impossibly idealized father and disillusion with the fallible, flesh-and-blood man who actually had sex with their mother.
None of the Founders has suffered more from this than Thomas Jefferson, who has become in some strange way a kind of mirror of Americans' anxieties about themselves. Nineteenth century historians tended to value the Sage of Monticello for the universality of his political doctrine and his standing as a gentleman revolutionary, out to overthrow tyranny but not the established social order. All this view required was a studied indifference to the implications of Jefferson's real political thought.
Philosophically, he surely was the most radical man ever to attain the presidency. In the aftermath of World War II, commentators, living through a turbulent period in which rights were extended to all sorts of Americans and egalitarian notions became increasingly common currency, asserted the comforting vision that all this was as Jefferson intended. A careful silence prevailed, however, concerning the aristocratic character of his actual life and the elitism of his tastes. This, after all, was the man who made neoclassicism in all its manifestations our national style.
More recently, Jefferson has fallen deeply out of fashion, suspect as the slave-holding country squire and sexual exploiter of the much younger Sally Hemings, the bondswoman and mistress who bore him children. This is the view of Jefferson as Bill Clinton and demands that one agree that the contradictions of his life bring all the force of his thought and influence to naught.
The best response to this notion was delivered years ago by the late I.F. Stone, who was asked -- as a radically egalitarian man of the left -- how he could so admire Jefferson. He replied: "It's because history is a tragedy and not a melodrama."
