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Mary E. Stuckey, "Remembering Jefferson: Who He Was, Who We Are" (UP of Kansas, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hi, this is Lily Gorn with the New Books Network, the New Books in Political Science podcast. Today I'm joined by my friend and colleague Mary Stuckey, who is the author of Remembering who He Was, who We Are. This is published in 2025 by the University Press of Kansas and has some great cover iconography of Jefferson on it, but it is a fascinating read about Jefferson. Less. Less about the person himself, but how he is us, and we are Jeffersonians in certain senses, as American people. But I'd like to welcome Mary Stuckey to the New Books in Political Science podcast and ask her to tell us a little bit about herself and how she came to this particular project. Hi, Mary.
- [01:57]
C
Hi. Thank you for having me. Always a pleasure to be here with you. This is. I mean, it's an interesting time, right, to think about what it means to be an American and national identity. And questions about how we decide who we are collectively have been motivating questions for most of my career. And one of the things I learned recently was the word semi sesquicentennial, which is actually easier to spell than you would imagine. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration and, of course, of other things coming down the road, I started thinking about the founding in general. I edited a book on the Declaration. And that really led me to thinking about Jefferson, particularly how he keeps showing up in contexts that are perhaps a little surprising. And so then I started looking into it.
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B
So this question about Jefferson. Jefferson is iconic. Your book is about, to some degree, why he is iconic. Can you talk a bit about, you know, what drew you into sort of examining Thomas Jefferson and his role in our understanding of civic identity as opposed to, say, Lincoln or Washington?
- [03:25]
C
Yeah, partly it's because he's around so long.
- [03:29]
B
Right.
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C
I mean, he is a founder, and he is much more ubiquitous than Washington, which strikes me as being so interesting. And one of the things I found out pretty early on, as I was looking into this, is the number of things that are named for him and how people who want to have separatist states want to name them Jefferson. But he's also a symbol of national unity. And I am, in general attracted to paradoxes and contradictions and conundrums. So he struck me as more interesting. I mean, one of the things that's fascinating about Washington is that there isn't a lot of disagreement about who he is, what he stands for. Even when people are like, but he was also an enslaver. People are like, yeah, but he's Washington. Leave him be. And with Jefferson, people were wanting to take statues down, and even one of his descendants was like, let's get rid of the Jefferson Memorial, which struck me as a fairly improbable argument. But because he seems. He keeps meaning so many things to so many people, I found that indicative of all of the complexities of national identity.
- [04:52]
B
And, you know, I. I've been studying Jefferson from. Since my undergraduate days, when I wrote a thesis about some of his contradictions. And so I was intrigued by the book itself because it is. It is not a biography of any kind of Jefferson, but it is a sort of biography of how Jefferson is in the American imagination. And you dive into a number of different places. You look at memorials, you look at children's literature, you look at popular culture. Can you talk a little bit about how you decided to structure the book in the way that you did in examining the place that Jefferson kind of holds in our imagination?
- [05:40]
C
Sure. That's a great question, by the way, actually. And, yes, I have noticed that your work also deals with the manifold Jeffersons that are out there. I would say that I came to Jefferson as somebody who's not as good on the founding as many of my colleagues. I know a lot about Roosevelt, I know a fair amount about Reagan, but a good deal of my Work, if not most of it, has really dealt with the more contemporary president presidents. And you know, I did in deplorable look at the contested election of 1800. But Jefferson's not one of my better presidents. And so coming to him relatively unschooled, it made it possible to think about him vis a vis national identity without, let's say, being cluttered up with facts and data about who Jefferson actually was and what he actually did. So it was interesting to find him in so many places when I started looking for him in. And of course, I'm a rhetorician as much as I am a political scientist, so I'm super interested in the communicative sides of how we think of presidents. And so for me, the first place I looked was what do other presidents say about him? I have. Most of my work is in presidential rhetoric. I know a lot about it. It's all easily searchable. But also, good heavens, you start looking for references to Thomas Jefferson in presidential rhetoric and I'm like, oh, so I'm going to be doing this for a while. Because really, I mean, Richard Nixon references him in terms of revenue sharing. Like, why? You know, it is not odd that presidents would use him as a touchstone when they're talking about freedom of religion. It's not especially odd that conservative presidents would talk about the small government Jefferson and that other presidents who find themselves who think of themselves as imaginative presidents would reference his manifold talents and things like that. But he shows up everywhere right up until the 1990s when the Sally Hemings. Allegations became proven. And at that point, Jefferson starts becoming extremely complicated for presidents who are Democratic and much and also complicated for Republican presidents. But he gets a lot trickier when the Sally Hemings information becomes extremely public. So I started with presidents and then I just started finding him. You know, it's a natural segue from presidents to monuments and memorials. And then I separated those into ones that were just about him and the ones that were about him sort of more collectively, like Mount Rushmore or Independence National Historical park and then Monticello, of course, and popular culture, all of the. And some of the movies are so bad. I mean. Yes, they are.
- [09:20]
B
Are. Yes, they are.
- [09:21]
C
Wow. So bad. So I spent some time watching bad Jefferson movies for my sins. And I'm also here to tell you that there are a lot more children's books about Thomas Jefferson than I would have expected there to be.
- [09:41]
B
Well, you know, he's the tall red headed founder, so.
- [09:45]
C
And he measures moose and builds libraries and does all kinds of things that are easily, easily translatable into. Let's learn a little bit about government through this violin playing, moose measuring gardener guy.
- [10:03]
B
Yeah. Who was a terrible money manager. So there's also that. I mean, I always tell my students in my presidency class, at least for the first half of the class, if you don't know the answer, it's probably Jefferson.
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C
I do presidential trivia on Fridays for the people at my gym for the 6am workout crew, and they tend to guess either Jefferson or Roosevelt because.
- [10:34]
B
Yeah, yes, exactly. So in terms of the presidential rhetoric, because this is also one of the points that I talk about extensively with my students, is that so many presidents refer to themselves as Jeffersonians and not just in the immediate post Jefferson era. What did you find in terms of the rhetoric? As you said, you know, you were surprised that Richard Nixon sort of referenced himself Jeffersonian in certain sense. But what really struck you in terms of the rhetoric that presidents use that invoke Jefferson?
- [11:20]
C
I think the fact that most of it is so vague that they use Jefferson primarily. And it's not that they don't have quotations. Right. Although I can't offhand remember the particular quotation used in revenue sharing. But the references, it is as if what they are doing is authorizing their policies through a vague reference to the Founding. And Jefferson has so many more words than any other founder that he is much more useful than a Washington who was fairly not verbal. And Jefferson left such a corpus of letters and fewer speeches, of course, but letters and diaries and documents and thoughts that he is extremely useful in ways that I found a little bit distressing because the more we amalgamate the founders into one kind of sacred touchstones grouping, the less we really understand our actual history. And so they use Jefferson as a way to put their own politics beyond question rather than actually drawing any logical line to something that is clearly identifiable as Jeffersonian.
- [13:01]
B
And I think that also goes to the myths about the founders, like, you know, agreeing on everything. When I start to talk to my students about this when we study the Founding and I'm like, no, they really didn't agree. That's why they had these compromises. Yeah.
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C
And they had some. I mean, it's not just Hamilton Jefferson. Right. Which is a fairly well known dispute because of the play. But there were pretty significant disagreements even among Jeffersonians about like what kinds of policies they ought to do, what kinds of things were, you know, Jefferson himself wasn't sure he had the power to sign the treaty for the Louisiana Purchase. Absolutely. Anyway, because of course, of Course he did. But the fact that they had significant, very real and very profound disagreements about how to use power, what power meant at very basic levels, all of that gets alighted when presidents start talking about Jefferson because they just want to say, oh, yeah, Jefferson believed this and so do I, so we're both all good. It's a way of putting things beyond question rather than actually defending them through logic.
- [14:28]
B
And so from the presidential rhetoric, you moved to monuments and memorials, and you said you sort of grouped them in two ways, in ones that were specifically Jefferson focused, say the Jefferson Memorial, which was something that FDR put into place in Washington, D.C. on the tidal Basin, or the weirdness of carving faces into mountains, which is Mount Rushmore. Can you talk a little bit about what you saw in the sort of two different areas of Jefferson's presence in memorials?
- [15:10]
C
Yeah. So whenever you try to. I mean, one of the things that's important to remember, and this is of course me rhetorician speaking here, is that whenever we choose to commemorate something, somebody's making a choice. This guy, not that guy, this moment, not that moment. And we're going to do it this way, not that way. And it is literally an attempt to put your politics in stone, to preserve them in a way that is unalterable. And of course, that fails, because nothing is unalterable. There is a statue of Jefferson Davis that used to be on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, now lying prone and covered with graffiti in a local museum. Because Jefferson Davis statue, it was unalterable for a long time, but now its meaning has been changed by the people who did that. And so busts of Jefferson. So there's a couple of things. One of them is that how you do it matters. And the other one is where you do it matters. So if you put Thomas Jefferson next to Alexander Hamilton, you're going to evoke certain things about him. If you put him next to 600 bricks, each brick standing for a person he enslaved in that national museum of African American history and culture. It's going to evoke different kinds of things. Right. So what I was really interested in the first monuments chapter is what kind of choices are being made about which aspects of Jefferson to evoke, and where do those show up? Are they all in the South? Are they everywhere? Like, what does this mean? And then the second chapter on monuments puts him as a. Is mostly about him as a founder. So how he appears in Independence National Historical park in Philadelphia, or why is he on Mount Rushmore? Why is he collected with these other people around George Washington? And Richmond, those kinds of questions, they're all about what's being evoked and with what intent, and then how is that being read now, which is not necessarily the same. So his headstone, his original headstone, which I was somewhat surprised to find out is not actually at Monticello where he's buried, so many people took chips of it that they had to give him a new headstone. Who knew? And now the original one is encased in plexiglass on the University of Missouri campus. So that was a fun day. I got to drive to Missouri and find the memorial and turn around and drive back.
- [18:23]
B
And so in terms of the, the memorials themselves, when you see Jefferson in the, in the chapter where you're seeing him included in the Founding, because this is also something that I have to drill into my students heads, that he was not at the Constitutional Convention, that he did not participate in writing the Constitution, that he was in France the entire time. And then they always forget it and write that in their midterms.
- [18:52]
C
He wrote the Constitution. I remember grading those midterms.
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B
Yeah, exactly. And so when we talk about Jefferson as one of the founders, what is it that we are now experiencing in terms of say, taking that image of him on the side of the mountain in Mount Rushmore or in Philadelphia at Independence Hall?
- [19:20]
C
Yeah. So what's interesting about the difference between those two places in particular is that the Philadelphia Jefferson is really the author of the Declaration. But also at inhp, they make it super clear like there was a committee of five. Yes, he was the main author, but there were four other guys. And they're interested in the pivot from colony to war. And also they're interested in the pivot from war to government. Right. Because both of those things happen in Philadelphia. And so Jefferson becomes, in Philadelphia, kind of a weirdly minor character because he's not involved in the congressional. He's not much involved in, you know, he's one of Jefferson's cabinet, but it's, I mean, sorry, one of Washington's cabinet members, but it's really about like the Executive Mansion and the, you know, the slave quarters under it, and it's about. So he's there, but he's not primary, I would say. And then when you go to somewhere like Mount Rushmore, which is a monument designed by an avowed white supremacist for very particular reasons in his own thinking. Right. So Washington's there because of the Founding and Roosevelt's there because of expansion. Jefferson is there because of the Louisiana Purchase, you know, because he helped Expand the nation that it was. He's there as an imperialist. And so that's a very particular version of Jefferson that doesn't necessarily show up in, like, the Jefferson Memorial, where Roosevelt designs that memorial and carefully edits the quotations there to make him the apostle of democracy, you know, the. The guy who was for human rights at a moment when Roosevelt desperately wanted to authorize that view of what it meant to be a Democrat and an American. And that's not the Jefferson of Mount Rushmore, even a little bit.
- [21:56]
B
And so even in these sort of, as you say, statues or memorials or weird carvings into the side of mountains, which I still think is the strangest thing ever, that JeffersonThe Jefferson we are consuming in 2025 is different in each.
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C
Venue, I would say so, yes. And I think, too, it's different for every audience. So there are people who don't go to Mount Rushmore because they find the carving of stone on native sacred land to be a heinous injustice, and they don't want to visit this site. There are people who were there at the same time I was, who were enjoying a kind of very simple patriotism.
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B
Right.
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C
This is what it means to be American. The flags are waving, the presidents are carving, there's firework shows. It's a very Fourth of July, uncomplicated moment for them. The site itself privileges this kind of technological prowess of, wow, look at how hard it was to do this thing. And how cool it is that Americans had the technological ability to do it. So I think it's not just. I think these sites privilege a particular kind of Jefferson or a particular valence from Jefferson, but I also think that audiences come to these sites with predilections and preferences, and those are hard to upset or to change. And so the Jefferson that they bring with them may also be the lens through which they view those sites.
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B
And so I wanted to then move you to my favorite area of discussion, the bad Jefferson movies.
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C
They are so bad, aren't they?
- [23:56]
B
They are so bad.
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C
I mean, there are, you know, I guess 1776 isn't super terrible, but the movies about Jefferson and Sally Hemings are universally dreadful, in my view.
- [24:12]
B
I think you are correct, and I think, in fact, the critics agree with you. But this is also, you know, again, how we as individuals and Americans consume our ideas in a lot of ways, is we get them through these imaginary spaces where a founder is presented to us. Life in the musical Hamilton, where, you know, very consciously, obviously, Lin Manuel Miranda, you know, wanted to sort of pivot and Sort of make everybody's thinking skewed by casting people who didn't look like the people who they were supposed to be. But of course, in movies and in, you know, TV series and so forth, like John Adams, you have Jefferson. So what did you see in terms of the popular culture rendering of Jefferson?
- [25:13]
C
So the thing that I really enjoyed about the popular culture, Jefferson. And here I'm really leaving literature aside. So not only does children's literature get its own chapter, but if there is a literate, like a fanboy, you know, literature about Thomas Jefferson, I didn't look at it. And what I found in the popular culture aspects is that the way we portray Jefferson also orients us towards questions of race and slavery more specifically. So the ones, the movies that portray Jefferson and Hemings as sort of devoted hearts, you know, separated by the incidental obstacle of slavery. What I call in the book the romantic Jefferson. Right? That there was a real relationship here, that they loved each other, that she had agency. I mean, all of the things that were not true for women or enslaved people at this moment in history allows us to kind of let white people off the hook for both questions of slavery and racial inequalities as they proceed through time. Right. So if it's really just a matter of two people who are in love and slavery becomes this kind of incidental thing, and it doesn't require repair. There were movies that had him as a more complicated figure where he clearly loved her, but was also kind of trapped by slavery. I would like to point out at this point that other people who had slaves freed their slaves and decided to escape the trap. Jefferson did not make this choice. But the idea that his relationship with Hemings was complicated allows us to. To take the position that, well, yeah, this is all complicated. It's hard to fix. Nobody's really responsible for fixing the thing. And I think there aren't a lot of examples in popular culture, although I would say that Monticello has the capacities and allows opportunities to do this, where you just say, yeah, it was wrong. Like, enslaved people at Monticello, there's a lot of work done there that shows how, you know, and most of his enslaved workers spent more time, significantly more time at Monticello than Jefferson did. It was their home much more in many ways than it was his. And so the. The tourist sites of. And the tours available at Monticello allow you to see. See how enslaved people created their own lives even within this larger context of injustice. And that orients us a little bit differently. I want to Say, than the trapped Jefferson or the romantic Jefferson.
- [28:28]
B
And I, I went to Monticello and then I went to Mount Pelior, and Mount Pelier has not. Has not done the same thing, shall we say.
- [28:37]
C
And it is also possible, again, to get to the question of audiences. It's super possible for white people or for anybody to go to Monticello and avoid the question of slavery in any significant way. It doesn't. I mean, I think you have to work at it more and more, but it is possible to probably go there. And I know, for example, that there are many plantations. You know, having lived in the south as long as I did, you can visit lots of plantations. And this story is all about the family in the great house. And they don't really. They talk about the enslaved people as servants. Like, they don't use the slavery word at some of these places. Because, honestly, who wants to have a wedding at a forced labor camp, Right. But having a plantation wedding, that skews differently. And so I want to say these different kinds of stories that we tell about Jefferson and about slavery and that moment in history more broadly, of course, facilitate different attitudes toward questions of inequality and injustice.
- [30:00]
B
And so one of the chapters that you wrote that I wasn't anticipating before I started reading the book, but makes perfect sense once I read the book, is that you have a chapter focusing on how Jefferson comes through in children's literature. Can you explain, first of all, how you sort of went down that path and also what you found?
- [30:25]
C
So it's easy to go down that path when you're spending two years of your life visiting Jefferson sites, because all of many of the Jefferson sites have bookstores, and many of the bookstores are include, you know, books on presidents in general, Jefferson in particular. It's interesting that if you go to the National Museum of the American Indian, you will not find a reference to Thomas Jefferson person, and there are no books on him in their bookstore. That has got to be a conscious choice.
- [30:59]
B
Yes.
- [31:00]
C
All of the people who make that choice were unavailable on the day that I was there. So there. I mean, and I don't think they were dodging me. I think they were legitimately not in the building. But it is also true that when you see a bunch of these books, you start going, huh, look at how. I mean, it is interesting that there are more books about Jefferson than Washington, than Monroe, than at, you know, Adams not being, I guess, nearly as flashy. Yeah. Not as flashy an individual. And, you know, Jefferson did some big things, right. The Louisiana Purchase, which is consistently misportrayed in the universe, which started to really drive me more than a little bit crazy. But the whole way that children are taught civics and citizenship and Jefferson becomes a vehicle for that. And I just fell into that rabbit hole. And it took me a while to glom myself out because there's just so many interesting stories that are told to children about Jefferson, and they're secretly a way of teaching children what it means to be a citizen, what it means to be an American.
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B
And so was there anything that stood out in terms of so much of the children's literature that you ended up reading?
- [32:38]
C
The thing that struck me the most clearly is that even authors who are trying to just write a delightful little story in rhyme about Jefferson have to deal with Sally Hemings and the children. So there's this one book that starts off with this sort of bouncy, Jefferson liked cheese and bees kind of tone. And this is the book that almost gave my niece a coronary, because, like, six pages later we're learning about Ms. Ignatian, and my niece is like, how old did these children get in the last six pages? Like, what just happened? But it is this because that information is out there, because it is so central to who Jefferson is, that really, unless you want to just talk about Jefferson and measuring the moose, then you really do just end up having to deal somehow with the question of race.
- [33:40]
B
And so, I mean, Jefferson is so much embedded in the American understanding of who we are. I often think about it as being him wrapped in the Declaration of Independence. And that's where people sort of glom onto him.
- [34:00]
C
Always portrayed, too, right? Like every statue has him holding a quill and a document.
- [34:07]
B
And so the thrust of your book, though the thesis of your book, is essentially, what does Jefferson being embedded in the American psyche, in the American myth, in the American imagination, in the American understanding of civics and citizenship. What does it tell us about us? So I'm posing that question to you.
- [34:32]
C
I think it tells us that there isn't an us. There are a lot of us's. There is the dominant view, which is the Jefferson of the Jefferson Memorial, the apostle of democracy, that the United States stands for certain immutable principles and has always been dedicated to enacting those principles. And while we have always failed, you know, we're still committed to the task of trying. And I think Jefferson is remarkably useful for that view of the US which is a remarkably attractive one and is not wrong. Right, because he was so flawed and because many of his flaws are now Such public knowledge, he becomes sort of a metaphor for how or a symbol of how complicated it is to navigate the political world. But there have always been Americans who have noticed that Jefferson, you know, had 600 slaves, that he enslaved his own children, you know, that he is an important figure in the perpetuation of the system of slavery and of other injustices. You know, we could talk about indigenous people and, you know, we could talk about the Louisiana Purchase in that regard. And to people who have been subject to those injustices, I want to say, like, you know, their view of Jefferson is like, yeah, that was him. But they have a little more trouble with the apostle of democracy, Jefferson. I think the most dangerous portrayal is the one that we talked about earlier that homogenizes all of the founders into one sort of simple, uncomplicated mass of people, because then people try to claim them on political ends, and I don't believe they're easily claimable that way.
- [36:57]
B
Yeah. And I agree with you in terms of that, you know, and again, Jefferson wasn't there when the Constitution was written. He wrote letters to Madison, but he wasn't there. Yeah.
- [37:08]
C
And it's not clear that he was all that supportive of the Constitution without a Bill of Rights, as I remember. But I want to say that whenever we commemorate, whenever we remember, whenever we pick one of these people, whether it's Jefferson or Lincoln or Roosevelt or any of them, we're making choices. And those choices are never neutral.
- [37:32]
B
Right.
- [37:32]
C
They're always going to favor some set of interest. And it's an interesting question when you look at any monument and go, huh, Whose interests were being served here?
- [37:46]
B
Yeah. As somebody who has also worked on sort of nostalgia and memory studies, this is. This is exactly where a lot of that is, is, because what is the memory, what is the nostalgia capturing in a memorial or in a vision? And, you know, and I continuously blame Jefferson for the attachment that Americans have to the ideal of the yeoman farmer in those.
- [38:18]
C
Yes.
- [38:19]
B
And those who till the land as being the true Americans.
- [38:24]
C
Yeah. When they were. In fact, even in Jefferson's day, they were merchants themselves. There were not a whole lot of yeoman farmers wandering around Jefferson's republic.
- [38:36]
B
True. But he wrote about them with such.
- [38:38]
C
Oh, my goodness, he did.
- [38:40]
B
And with such romance.
- [38:42]
C
It's on peculiar set of, you know, and so, like the romantic Jefferson, you know, there's a certain wistful nostalgia of, oh, it wasn't that bad, you know. Well, yeah, actually, things were not great. There were significant injustices. People died at the age of 40, indoor plumbing is a thing.
- [39:13]
B
So are vaccines, but that's. That's another story.
- [39:16]
C
I wasn't gonna go there, but.
- [39:20]
B
Well, what are you working on now that you've written this beautiful and really amazingly thoughtful book about Jefferson?
- [39:30]
C
At the moment, I am, of course, semi retired and so working on Less and Less, which is something of a joy to me. I'm editing a. I'm one of the editors of a forthcoming handbook on political comm. So I'm working on that. I got a couple of essays, you know, that I'm working on that have to do with the nature of democracy, some of them specifically evoking Donald Trump. So, you know, I'm back to my.
- [39:59]
B
More contemporary presidents after your sojourn into the 1800s.
- [40:06]
C
Yeah. Yeah. I came back to a world with indoor plumbing, and I would say vaccines, but I won't go there.
- [40:14]
B
Okay. All right. Well, I said it, so. Yeah. Well, I hope that I will be able to interview you about whatever the next publication is whenever it comes out, because I did very much enjoy this book.
- [40:29]
C
Well, thank you very much.
- [40:31]
B
And the book is Remembering who He Was, who We Are, by Mary Stuckey. And this was published in 2025 by the University Press of Kansas, and it is available at the University of Kansas Press and other places where you might look for brick and mortar stores that sell academic authors. Thank you, Mary, for joining me today.
- [41:01]
C
Thank you. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. You.