A Question of Authorship

...Writings of his were handed about, remarkable for their peculiar felicity of expression...

...Now Pauline Maier, a professor of American history at MIT, claims in American Scripture that the Declaration is not Jefferson's work...

...They include John H. Hazelton, Carl Becker, Julian P. Boyd, and Garry Wills...

...In her Introduction Maier declares, "I bear no animus toward Jefferson"—then admits that she once "nominated him as the most overrated person in American history...

...And that part is 99 per cent pure Jefferson...

...The sentence is a masterpiece of compression that distills a whole library on moral philosophy, political theory and natural religion...

...Her book in effect perpetuates this humbuggery through numerous disparaging statements...

...He must have thought to himself that if he had not been appointed or elected to those positions someone else would have filled them, but only he, Jefferson, could have written the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, or founded the University of Virginia...

...Eliot's most famous poems...

...Of course, that left three-quarters of the text intact, but Maier is preoccupied with stressing the contribution of the Congress as it went over Jefferson's text word by word...

...The Declaration of Independence: "Its conspicuous quality [is that] it states clearly, reasons lucidly, expresses felicitously...

...She even casts doubt on Jefferson's authorship of the famous opening sentence, claiming it owes its clarity and power to "a series of editorial changes that were made either on his own initiative or on the suggestion of other committee members...

...Maxwell Perkins, as editor of Charles Scribner's Sons, made substantial cuts in the massive manuscript of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel...

...Reflecting on its author, he noted that Jefferson's hallmark qualities were "his clear, alert intelligence, his insatiable curiosity, his rarely failing candor, his loyalty to ideas, his humane sympathies...

...Wills' Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (1978) is the most recent source study of importance...

...Jefferson had no books or pamphlets in front of him during the day or two it took him to write the Declaration, but he had a memory that was a treasure house of the writings of John Locke, Algernon Sidney, David Hume, Adam Smith, Cicero, and Seneca...

...if it is accepted, it is routinely subjected to scrupulous copyediting...

...Yes, it is emphatically his—and not the product of the Committee of the Whole...

...Others, in the course of their intensive examinations, have simply pointed out who contributed this or that word, phrase or sentence...

...I wonder whether Maier has ever heard the witticism that a camel is a horse created by a committee...

...But no one would suggest that because of such redactions the person who submitted the article should be deprived of the right to have his name appear as the author...

...To Maier's credit, unlike her predecessors she gives serious attention to some 90 declarations of independence drawn up and adopted by the various colonies, towns and counties between April and early July, 1776...

...Reviewed by Milton R. Konvitz Professor emeritus of law, and of industrial and labor relations, Cornell University Shortly before his death, Thomas Jefferson wrote a memorandum listing the achievements by which he wished to be remembered...

...No historian, so far as I know, has ever before attacked Jefferson for claiming to be the author of the Declaration of Independence...

...It is the first section that is transcendently and permanently valuable, not only for Americans but for mankind...

...Yet, as Richard Kluger's Simple Justice shows, there was much arguing and maneuvering, much give and take among the justices for several years before Warren managed to consolidate the decision and gain approval for the opinion...

...The construction stubbornly marginalizes Jefferson while granting his colleagues every benefit of the doubt, despite there being no apparent reason for doubt...

...That is a beguiling, remarkable self-portrait coming from a man who was a philosopher, scientist, architect, and statesman...

...This does not, however, mitigate the thrust of her curious thesis impugning Jefferson...

...When Jefferson joined the Continental Congress in 1775, John Adams said he brought with him "a reputation for literature, science, and a happy talent for composition...

...The initial sentence of the Declaration's second paragraph is a superb example of what Adams had in mind: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness...

...Reflecting upon the document as a whole, Carl Becker wrote in his classic book...

...She invents the possibility...

...a man who had been Governor of Virginia, U. S. Minister to France, Secretary of State in the Administration of George Washington, Vice President in the Administration of John Adams, and a two-term President...

...Similarly, when an article is submitted to a scholarly publication it is typically sent out to a board of editors for their assessment and input...

...Would anyone question the propriety of crediting that novel to Wolfe or those poems to Eliot...

...The list, inscribed on his tomb at Monticello, reads as follows: "Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia...

...that he had no right to assert authorship...

...She belittles Americans' esteem for it as well, characterizing our devotion to it as a "national obsession...

...But Maier does not content herself with belittling Jefferson's role in composing the document...

...Its real author, she says, was the Continental Congress, whose members, sitting as a Committee of the Whole, reviewed and edited Jefferson's "draft...

...The changes made by the Committee of the Whole were in the section where Jefferson listed 21 charges against King George III—a part of the Declaration that, in the long view of history, is of relatively little interest...

...And she keeps on inventing: "Jefferson—perhaps with some help from [Benjamin] Franklin—made the same kind of careful editorial adjustments in the opening lines of the next paragraph...

...Entitled "Jefferson: Real and Imagined," it concluded by asking, "Do we still need to credit one man with the contributions of many...

...One wishes she had taken to heart Samuel Johnson's wise warning: "Life is barren enough surely with all her trappings...

...Jefferson, added Becker, "communicated an undefinable quality to the Declaration which makes it his...

...Perhaps...

...Its high virtue [is] that it makes a bid for the reader's assent...

...But she supplies no evidence whatsoever that any other member offered Jefferson a single suggestion concerning the sentence...

...It alone makes the Declaration one of the world's great charters of human rights and liberties...

...One needs to read the King James Bible or Jeremy Taylor's The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651 ) or Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial (1658) for a sentence of comparable quality...

...Chief Justice Earl Warren is known as having authored the Supreme Court's unanimous opinion on school desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education...

...Six of these generally forgotten documents, in fact, are included in an Appendix...

...Maier contends that Jefferson was appointed "not as an author in the modern sense but as a draftsman" of the Declaration...

...Although his bottle, by her own reckoning, is three-quarters full, she chooses to see only the quarter that is empty...

...She seems unaware, too, that editing is not synonymous with authoring...

...She previewed her argument in a July 4 New York Times Op-Ed piece...

...These acts, in short, emanated from his soul...

...Ezra Pound made many changes in some of T.S...

...Looking past the offices he held in making his self-assessment was a reflection of Jefferson's philosophical mind...

...The compact Declaration clearly is no camel, nor could it have been created by a committee...

...Boyd not only wrote The Declaration of Independence: The Evolution of the Text (1945), a landmark work, but subsequently edited the Papers of Thomas Jefferson and provided the scholarly note accompanying the first volume (1950...

...Consider the wonderful beginning sentence: "When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation...

...In American Scripture she asserts that the Continental Congress "rewrote or chopped off large sections of his draft, eliminating in the end fully a quarter of his text...

...let us therefore be cautious how we strip her...