2/27/2023

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal focuses on commemorating Presidents’ Day. Hans Zeiger, President of the Jack Miller Center, argues that George Washington took civic education seriously: “It was a recurring theme in his public addresses to Congress, beginning with his first message delivered in the Senate Chamber of Federal Hall in New York City in 1790.” In that speech, Washington stated, “Knowledge is, in every country, the surest basis of public happiness” and discussed the principles – or what today is called civic education – that are essential to maintain a republican form of government. “Today, we need a new generation of thinking citizens, in our schools, workplaces, public institutions and voluntary organizations,” Zeiger argues. “In America, this is not merely an option – rather, it is a necessity, if we hope to preserve our republic. Civic education is thus a concern and a responsibility for each one of us: Each one of us can, and each of us must, answer Washington’s call to ‘the security of a free constitution.’”

The eminent historian Wilfred M. McClay reviews a recent biography of Thomas Jefferson written by another top-flight historian, Thomas Kidd. McClay writes that in our present culture that has swung hard against Jefferson, Kidd presents a complex portrait of a man who had an “illustrious public career as an American statesman” but whose “private life” featured “such grievous faults that they have, in recent years, threatened to bury his reputation entirely.” Kidd highlights Jefferson’s myriad public contributions to free government, his interest in and knowledge of a wide range of topics including botany, architecture, and farming, and his founding of the University of Virginia. McClay notes that the “underlying spirit of his account of Jefferson is more critical, more insistent that his failings should be highlighted more than they have tended to be in the past.” McClay concludes that despite that greater focus on Jefferson’s shortcomings, Americans should nonetheless remember Jefferson favorably: “For when all is said and done, Thomas Jefferson deserves to be remembered and revered as a great intellect and great patriot, whose worldwide influence, from Beijing to Lhasa to Kiev to Prague, has been incalculable, and whose belief in the dignity and unrealized potential to be found in the minds and hearts of ordinary people is at the core of what is greatest in the American democratic experiment.”

Original Posts

Hail to Our Forgotten Chiefs

Richard Lim, RealClearAmericanCivics

Mark Twain was rarely impressed by politicians. He once wrote “there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” He once even said that the popular Theodore Roo...