Book 3: Faux Thomas Jefferson – A 20th Century Fiction
Faux Thomas Jefferson was a propaganda tool that the Political-Historical Complex completed in the 1930s. His purpose, James Thompson explains, was to settle Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s benevolent government in the minds of the American people. Thompson traces the development of the caricature from Paul Leicester Ford in the final decade of the 19th century. Ford, a member of the progressive movement that mobilized them to combat the evils of capitalism, cast Jefferson as the leader of the proletarian “masses”. His brainchild was revised after World War I when America’s intelligentsia answered John Dewey's call to improve the quality of life for America’s working poor. Jefferson was the spiritual leader for the scholars who advised Congress on the 100th-anniversary commemoration of Jefferson's death in 1926. These brahmins completed the transformation of the 18th-century enemy of hierarchical tyranny into the symbolic leader of a progressive reconstruction of America's society. In the years after that, the real man was gradually eclipsed by the useful fiction.