Becoming Jefferson's People: Re-Inventing the American Republic in the

Deepak Chopra, author of Books of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life, December 2004
Clay Jenkinson has provided a truly welcome invitation for the American people to return to their best selves.

Landon Y. Jones, auther of William Clark and the Shaping of the West and former editor of "People" Magazine, December 2004
Jenkinson rediscovers the vital and robust Jefferson and restores our trust in boldness, optimism, and self-reliance.

Tom Robothman, editor of the Port Folio Weekly

Becoming Jefferson’s People is not merely a good read. It is one of those volumes that every American should peruse and discuss with friends, family members, neighbors and co-workers. It is one of the most important books of 2005.

Product Content: (Excerpt)
JEFFERSON HAS been dead since July 4, 1826. He lived on the other side of the industrial revolution, the other side of the Civil War, the other side of the emergence of the United States as a world power, the other side of the Marxist and Freudian divides, on the other side of the pell-mell peopling of the American continent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some of what he believed (the possible racial inferiority of African-Americans, the primarily domestic destiny of women) has been resoundingly discredited. Many of his ideas made sense in his own time and place, when, in Jefferson’s terms, the continent appeared to be a vast tabula rasa waiting to be inscribed with whatever civilization the American people could agree to create, but those same ideas are harder to maintain now that we have become an urban-industrial, consumerist, world empire. Jefferson’s profound agrarianism, for example, is still perceived by many as the path the American people ought to have taken, but since we did not take that path, there is little point in pretending that a nation of family farmers is still a possibility.

The last thing Jefferson would have wanted would be to be remembered as the champion of lost causes. Jefferson was a flexible visionary, a dynamic rather than a static thinker, and he preferred to envision the future rather than cling to the ways of the past. One of his mottos was nil desperandum, nothing is to be despaired of in America, and we are never to permit ourselves to be enslaved by the artifices of civilization.

It is certain that stupendous advances in our technologies—from refrigeration and automobiles to the World Wide Web and the electronic economy—have worked revolutionary changes in American civilization, and that these changes render many of Jefferson’s ways and ideas inapplicable to our lives at the beginning of the twenty-first century. For example, the Founding Fathers (particularly the author of the Second Amendment, the cautious and pacific James Madison) would probably think differently about guns at a time when an uninformed, uneducated, uncivil, and unsupervised individual with crack in his veins and a chip on his shoulder can posses a weapon that fires one hundred bullets in less than a minute.

With a modicum of careful reading, it is possible to determine what the historical figure Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) believed. He was, after all, both prolific and astonishingly articulate. It is more fruitful, and more challenging, to try to determine what Jefferson might make of our world, and what parts of his vision of America are still applicable two hundred years later.

So what endures of a Jeffersonian worldview at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Acknowledging the obvious fact that we are no longer a pre-industrial nation with a small and relatively homogenous population, and that Jefferson would have been the least likely of the Founding Fathers to cling to the systems of his own time and place, how does a modern Jeffersonian see the world? That is the purpose of this book.
Product Details: Hardback, 131 pages, 4” x 7”.