Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
Volume 112 / Number 1
ABSTRACT:
First from the Right: Massive Resistance and the Image of Thomas Jefferson in the 1950s
- By Robert G. Parkinson, pp. 2–35
In the years after World War II, a group of prominent historians depicted Thomas Jefferson as the "Apostle of Liberty";
an interpretation that accentuated the more heroic sides of the Virginian's life, character, and ideas. These scholars, including
Dumas Malone, Merrill Peterson, and Julian Boyd, portrayed Jefferson as a universal symbol of freedom, equality, and
progress. Within a few years, the "Apostle of Liberty" interpretation gained wide acceptance in the academy. According
to received wisdom, in the 1960s some scholars began to criticize this heroic image. Questioning Jefferson's views on race,
slavery, and civil liberties, several leftist scholars contended that Malone, Peterson and others of the so-called "Jefferson
establishment" had ignored many of the Virginian's less heroic sides. This debate—emboldened by the persistent
issue of Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings—gained a public audience in the late 1970s, and, by the 1990s,
it had reached such a pitch that a few iconoclastic historians called for Jefferson's banishment from the American pantheon.
But 1960s leftists were not the first to question the Apostle image. A decade earlier, critics from
the right denounced claims that Jefferson was a heroic symbol of universal rights. Southern defenders
of Jim Crow in the late 1940s and 1950s vigorously proclaimed Jefferson the patron saint of white
supremacy and states' rights. In order to legitimize their efforts to defy the Supreme Court's school
desegregation order, Southern leaders of massive resistance invoked Jefferson in a flurry of highly
publicized newspaper editorials, political speeches, and books. Challenging the scholar's liberal
hero, they claimed a better understanding of Jefferson's "true views." In short, by examining the
segregationists' heretofore neglected "recruitment" of Jefferson, this essay seeks to shed light upon
the intellectual defenses made by the massive resisters and to revise historians' understanding that
the initial challenges to the Apostle of Liberty came not from the liberal academy, but were shouted first from the right.
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