National Park Service Should Halt Jefferson Memorial Project

In direct defiance of President Trump’s recent executive order saying that the Smithsonian, the National Park Service, and others should avoid “divisive narratives that distort” and “rewrite” America’s history and “inappropriately disparage” our heroes, the NPS is nearing completion of a project that would transform the basement museum at the Jefferson Memorial in exactly that manner. It would turn what was an exemplary presentation of Jefferson’s thoughts and actions into a condemning portrayal that would surely leave many visitors wondering why there’s a Jefferson Memorial at all.

In the wake of the 2017 Charlottesville riots, Catherine Townsend, president of the nonprofit Trust for the National Mall, said, “In the coming weeks and months, the physical symbols of American history and democracy will be scrutinized and challenged.” The Trust’s vice president of marketing and communications, Kate Greenberg, added that, after Charlottesville, “it became clear to us that some of that discussion would spill onto the National Mall” and that “there is an opportunity to re-do the exhibit” in the basement of the Jefferson Memorial to make it “inclusive.”

A reported $10 million in funding for this effort was subsequently given by billionaire David Rubenstein, who has financed lots of bad changes elsewhere, including at Jefferson’s Monticello and James Madison’s Montpelier. (Rubenstein also co-led the search that resulted in the hiring of leftist activist Lonnie Bunch as secretary of the Smithsonian.) Rubenstein brazenly says that the transformation he is funding will make it so that “when people go [to the Jefferson Memorial], they can actually learn about Jefferson.” Never mind that the previous version of the museum was entirely focused on learning about Jefferson—as a founder, statesman, inventor, architect, and educator—whereas this one, if opened, clearly won’t be.

Current signage at the memorial—portraying what’s coming—suggests what sort of learning about Jefferson the Park Service and its outside collaborators have in mind. The overarching heading for the whole museum is, “DEMOCRACY: A WORK IN PROGRESS” (all-caps in the original). Under that umbrella heading, suggesting that the founders had a lot to learn, the NPS asks questions such as these:

“Do our heroes change?”

“Why a Jefferson Memorial?”

“Who Decided to Build the Memorial?”

“How Did Americans View This Memorial?”

The NPS signage also asserts, “The memorial’s designers sought to convey their mid-1900s version of US democracy. . . . Thomas Jefferson became the face of that endeavor. . . . In crafting this image, they selected specific materials, details, and excerpts from his writings. Studying these choices reveals their motives.”

The NPS’s current motives aren’t hard to ascertain. This is an effort to provide a woke portrayal of Jefferson at a monument built to honor him.

Jefferson’s own views and accomplishments would be marginalized in the transformed museum, with the NPS’s own views given at least equal footing. The NPS signage says, “This new exhibit will interpret how visions of participation in US democracy have evolved. We will explore Jefferson’s views from the late 1700s, the designers’ ideas from the 1940s, and invite you to consider modern views—and your own.”

It’s not clear when the transformed museum, originally set to premier last summer, is now slated to open. The signage says only, “Coming in 2025!” Already, the memorial’s restrooms have been redesigned to eliminate the men’s room and women’s room, substituting individual unisex units not ideal for handling summertime crowds but inviting to the homeless people who regularly lock themselves into them and have to be extricated by the Park Police.

Prior to its closure by the NPS nearly four years ago for this “complete renovation,” the basement museum at the Jefferson Memorial provided the best portrayal of our Founders’ thoughts at any monument or museum in Washington, D.C. Opened in 1994 and located underneath the famous statue and rotunda above, the basement museum focused on Jefferson’s own words, life, and ideas. Whereas FDR carefully picked the quotes to be inscribed into the marble walls upstairs—as part of his long-term project to portray Jefferson as a political ally of New Deal Democrats—the basement museum made clear the profound contrast between Jefferson’s commitment to limited government and local control, on the one hand, and FDR’s determination to enlarge and empower the federal government, on the other.

In the summer of 2002, when I had just started as a professor of American government at the U.S. Air Force Academy, I visited the basement museum. I was so struck by its excellence and by some of the quotes from Jefferson that I wrote one down and have carried it in my wallet ever since: “The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen, in his person & property, & in their management.” (FDR never would have said that.)

But even as he sought to obscure differences between his own political ideas and those of the Founders, FDR publicly celebrated the Founders in general and Jefferson in particular. At the memorial’s dedication on Jefferson’s 200th birthday, during the middle of World War II and with the Declaration of Independence on hand (and guarded by Marines), FDR referred to the man being honored as “Thomas Jefferson, Apostle of Freedom . . . Leader in the philosophy of government, in education, in the arts, in efforts to lighten the toil of mankind—exponent of planning for the future.”

Contrast that with how the NPS intends to portray him now. It declares in a press release that the transformed basement museum will provide “more perspectives.” Park Service spokesman Mike Litterst adds that there has “been an awful lot that’s changed in the interpretation of Thomas Jefferson,” so “we want to make sure people know the full story.” That “full story” will focus, predictably, on slavery. But the Park Service is unlikely to note that, in addition to permanently knocking the intellectual supports out from underneath slavery through the words of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote the language that was the basis for the Northwest Ordinance, which prohibited slavery in all territory then owned by the U.S., and then as president signed into law the act outlawing the foreign slave trade.

A park ranger I spoke with said that the current NPS directive for signage across all parks, monuments, and museums is to “dumb it down” and not make language so “scholarly” (like it was a few decades ago) or include long sentences. A further directive is to replace “slaves” with “enslaved persons”—cumbersome, politically correct language that conveys no significant change of meaning from “slaves”—and, more importantly, to replace “plantation owner” or “slaveholder” with “enslaver,” which conveys a profound and deliberate change of meaning.

In fact, our Founders were not “enslavers.” To enslave means, “To force into or as if into slavery.” The Founders inherited slaves, and in some instances bought them. But they didn’t round up free men, women, and children and force them into slavery. The connotation of “enslaver” is radically different from that of “plantation owner,” “slave owner,” or “slaveholder”—which is why the Left now insists on using it.

Abraham Lincoln knew the difference. In his remarkable Peoria Address, he talked about how even Southern slaveholders hated slave-dealers: “Again, you have amongst you, a sneaking individual, of the class of native tyrants, known as the ‘SLAVE-DEALER.’ . . . You despise him utterly. You do not recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man. Your children must not play with his; they may rollick freely with the little negroes, but not with the slave-dealer’s children. . . . It is common with you to join hands with the men you meet; but with the slave dealer you avoid the ceremony—instinctively shrinking from the snaky contact.”

An “enslaver” sounds at least as bad as a “slave-dealer”—worse if the former actually rounded up slaves while the latter didn’t. Writing about the use of “enslaver” by woke activists, John Fonte says, “This is, of course, a blatant lie. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were not, by definition, ‘enslavers’—they did not seize individuals who were free and put them in bondage. The three Virginians were slave owners who sought, in Lincoln’s words, the ‘ultimate extinction’ of that institution.”

The Left’s goal in trying to discredit the Founders, of course, is to discredit the country they founded and the Constitution they wrote.

The Smithsonian Magazine writes that the transformed museum will focus on “reinterpreting” Jefferson’s legacy, asserting that he “fathered four children with Sally Hemings.” This widely accepted claim is repeated in myriad books at the Jefferson Memorial’s newly opened bookstore, including in children’s books, and will no doubt be a major focus of the transformed museum. But it is an unsubstantiated assertion that is likely false.

When the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society asked the Scholars Commission on the Jefferson-Hemings Controversy, a group of 13 prestigious scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, to review the evidence underlying the charge that Jefferson fathered even one of Hemings’s children (Eston, her youngest)—let alone four (the woke Thomas Jefferson Foundation instead claims six)—the commission wrote, “Not a single member of our group, after an investigation lasting roughly one year, finds the case against Thomas Jefferson to be highly compelling, and the overwhelming majority of us believe it is very unlikely that he fathered any children by Sally Hemings.” The commission noted that the DNA evidence indicates only that one of “approximately twenty-five known Virginia men believed to carry the Jefferson family Y chromosome” fathered a child with Hemings. Jefferson’s brother Randolph, who liked to fiddle in the slave quarters, and Randolph’s four sons appear to be the most likely suspects.

The authors who have had the most influence in peddling this popular narrative are Fawn Brodie, whose best-selling “psychobiography“ Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974) wasn’t generally taken seriously by historians, and Annette Gordon-Reed, whose Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997) was taken much more seriously. Neither of these authors appears to have been educated as a historian or even to have worked as a journalist. Gordon-Reed has a law degree and a bachelor’s degree yet, apparently without a Ph.D. or even an M.A., is now teaching history at Harvard.

Gordon-Reed made a major splash with Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, in which she egregiously misrepresented historical documents to help make her case—as the Scholars Commission notes. Here’s just one example: Ellen Randolph Coolidge, Jefferson’s granddaughter, wrote of her grandfather, “No female domestic ever entered his chambers except at hours when he was known not to be there and none could have entered without being exposed to the public gaze.” Gordon-Reed presents Coolidge’s sentence as reading, “No female domestic ever entered his chambers except at hours when he was known not to be in the public gaze”—thereby removing ten words, adding another, and fundamentally changing the meaning. (Nor did she merely skip a line in Coolidge’s original.) When called on this and other falsifications, she attributed it to “a mistake.” Then she got hired by Harvard.

Further evidence of what NPS has in store at the Jefferson Memorial can be found a few yards to the southwest along the Tidal Basin path, at the George Mason Memorial. At the entrance of that much smaller garden memorial, opened in 2002, sits an NPS sign that reflects the old and new ways of presenting our Founders, side by side.

On the left side of the sign (entitled “Forgotten Founder”) is language presumably written for the 2002 opening of that memorial (although with “U.S.” later changed to the European-style “US”). It says, “Mason was inspired by Cicero and others when he wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776. A month later, Thomas Jefferson was inspired by Mason’s words when he wrote the Declaration of Independence.” It adds that Mason’s ideas have “lived on,” as they helped inspire the Bill of Rights, which has “protected individual rights in the US for over 230 years.”

On the right side of that same sign is language presumably written during the Biden administration. (The sign mentions funds received in 2016 for a restoration of the memorial’s grounds, so it was clearly produced after that.) The right side says, in full, “While George Mason championed individual rights, he paradoxically also enslaved about 300 people on his 5,500 acre plantation in northern Virginia. The wealth created by Mason’s enslaved workforce gave him the prominence to become an elected and appointed official. Despite voicing concerns about slavery, Mason never used his power to advocate for the abolition of slavery. Rather, Mason favored a ban on the importation of Africans. This position financially benefitted him as an enslaver and potential seller of hundreds of people. In his will, Mason chose not to free any of his enslaved workforce upon his death.”

The left side of the sign reflects the spirit with which our Founders were previously remembered. The right side offers a preview of how Jefferson will be portrayed at his own memorial if the current NPS project isn’t stopped.

Consistent with President Trump’s recent executive order, the NPS should stop its current efforts and reconstruct the previous basement museum at the Jefferson Memorial (presumably with some relatively minor changes or updates) in time for July 4, 2026. On the quarter-millennial anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Americans and foreign visitors alike deserve to see a Jefferson Memorial that celebrates, rather than condemns, the principal author of that glorious document.

Top Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images