Forensic histories explain what really happened and are the antithesis of “designer” histories, which author James Thompson says are designed to serve political purposes. Because “designer” histories use past events to support contemporary political purposes, they can not accurately report what once happened.
In his American Revolutions Series, Thompson presents forensic histories for three revolutions that took place between 1764 and 1985. The fourth book is a forensic history about Faux Thomas Jefferson.
In the preface to his first forensic history, Thompson reconstructs the activities of Englishman John Wilkes during the first decade of King George III’s reign (1760-1770). Biographer Arthur Cash described the rascally Wilkes as “the scandalous father of civil liberty.” Thompson recognizes Wilkes’ (successful) campaign to promote his own political career as a source of inspiration for the “patriots” who were then launching a “revolution in the minds of the people” in the King’s American colonies (1764-1775). John Adams later claimed that during this revolution the American people rejected their political relationship with England and abandoned their willingness to be subjects of an English King. Thompson corrects Adams’ misleading claims in The First Revolutions in the Minds of the People.
The second revolution Thompson investigates began in 1790 and continued through the presidential election of 1800. Thomas Jefferson ended this revolution on 17 February 1801 by defeating Aaron Burr on the 36th ballot tie-breaking ballot in the House of Representatives. His victory made him the nation’s third President.
Thompson characterizes this insurgency as “the party revolution” because during its ten years Thomas Jefferson and James Madison created the nation’s first political party. They used it to win control of America’s new majoritarian government. During this revolution, Thompson observes, the adversarial political system was established. Thompson calls his second forensic history The Second American Revolution: How Two Virginia Partisans Poisoned America’s Political System.
The third revolution Thompson investigates was rooted in America’s (first) progressive movement (c. 1895-1915). Thompson says the Third American Revolution began after Franklin Roosevelt’s election as President in 1932. It continued, the author contends, for five decades (1933-1985), during which time two societal “reconstructions” were undertaken.
The first was the “Roosevelt Revolution” in which President Roosevelt replaced an American government “of, by, and for the people” with a benevolent government by an unelected bureaucracy. This phase of the third American revolution continued through FDR’s death in 1944. By then, says Thompson, America had become a welfare state controlled by a Machiavellian cartel.
The second reconstruction was the social justice revolution that sprang to life with the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-1950s. This societal reconstruction continued into the mid-1980s, when the new people of Woodstock Nation began supplanting the reformers who had spent their careers laboring to create a socially just society.
The author notes that propaganda, an advocacy media, and money in politics where then undermining the nation’s majoritarian political system.
Thompson contends that an “imperial hierarchy” gained control of the country as television became its primary sources for news and entertainment in the late-1950s. By the early-1960s, the imperial hierarchy had established itself as an all-powerful governing class. By the mid-1960s, it had made itself the shepherd of the American flock and fulfilled the prophecy Alexis de Tocqueville made in Democracy in America (1840). During the Vietnam War, these Nietzschean shepherds abused their power, divided against themselves, and effectively undermined their power base.
Their successors in the rising generation matured during the 1970s and supplanted their mentors in the 1980s. When they had the power, they abandoned the reconstruction programs of the post-New Deal reformers and set off on their own path. Thompson characterizes this new path as liberation and deconstruction.
Thompson calls his third forensic history The Third American Revolution: Institutionalizing America.
Thompson explains in his fourth forensic history that Faux Thomas Jefferson was a caricature invented by politicized scholars in a murky organization that formed in the 1930s. Thompson calls this organization the Political-Historical Complex.
The purpose of the P-HC’s scholars was to build public support for the welfare state Franklin Roosevelt’s New Dealers brought into existence during the first two terms of his presidency. President Roosevelt apotheosized the iconic bellwether the P-HC invented while dedicating the Jefferson Memorial in 1943. The figure in temple beside Washington’s Tidal Basin, the President announced, was “the Apostle of Freedom.” Merrill Peterson, Thomas Jefferson Professor of History at the University of Virgina and Dean of the Jeffersonians, updated President Roosevelt’s wartime figurehead in 1960. The Apostle of Freedom then become the “Father of Human Rights.” This bright idea dimmed, Thompson notes, after Fawn Broady published her “intimate history” of the real Thomas Jefferson (1974).
The real Thomas Jefferson directed that three of his accomplishments be inscribed on his tombstone. They show him as a statesman and philosopher. His biographers have largely cooperated with the real man’s wishes to be remembered this way. Dumas Malone, for example, portrayed Jefferson as an unblemished social visionary with no political motives.
Thompson corrects this fanciful record by showing that the real Thomas Jefferson was a fierce, tireless political partisan who spent six years dividing the American people against themselves (in his campaign to vanquish Alexander Hamilton) and four more years undermining the government of John Adams to prevent his re-election as President. He did this with the help of his loyal lieutenant, James Madison.
Thompson explains Jefferson’s contribution to each of the three he remembered on his tombstone. He then replaces them with two “unheralded” works that the real man actually accomplished. The first is the partisan political system that Jefferson and Madison created during their party revolution against Alexander Hamilton. The second was the transformation of the federal government into a party tool, which Jefferson directed immediately after he became the nation’s third President.
Thompson calls his fourth forensic history Faux Thomas Jefferson – A 20th Century Fiction.