Volume 47, Number 12 · July 20, 2000
Back to Basics
By Edmund S. Morgan
Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench
by Vincent Crapanzano
New Press, 406 pp., $27.95
Thomas Jefferson, as Garry Wills recently suggested in these pages, is memorable for a vision of human equality that has moved later generations to achieve more than he did or even tried to do.[1] Near the center of that vision was a belief embodied in every social revolution and articulated in Jefferson's dictum that the earth belongs to the living, that 'one generation is to another as one independent nation to another.' To fulfill the equality of generations, Jefferson, in letters to his friend Madison, made a declaration of generational independence. Each generation was entitled to wipe the slate clean, to throw off any burdens thrust upon them by their predecessors. No people should be required to pay public debts incurred before they were born. All laws and constitutions should be periodically reconsidered.
Review, 3931 words
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