Friday, November 12, 2010

Jefferson Memorial: panel three contextomy

A friend on facebook recently posted the following quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson:
God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.
Given Jefferson's record on religion, I was curious what the context was for this quote. I quickly found that this was a truncated version of the quote from panel three of the Jefferson memorial. The full quote is:
God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Establish a law for educating the common people. This it is the business of the state and on a general plan.
However, what I found really surprising was how this quote was created. It was created by taking snippets from 5 different documents authored by Jefferson including: A Summary View of the Rights of British America, Notes on the State of Virginia Query XVIII, Jefferson's Autobiography, a letter to George Wythe, and a letter to George Washington (toward the bottom of image 21, though the snippet is often shown as a quote I couldn't find a text version of the full letter so I linked to the scanned version from the Library of Congress). The other panels do not seem to be quite as bad, but are also quote mined from various sources.

Why? Quote mining to come up with some new statement doesn't serve as a memorial to Jefferson or his ideas. I could comb through his writings and combine a collection of snippets to express just about any view. It's possible he would have agreed with the sentiment, but the actual statement only reflects the views of whomever cobbled it together. Truly disappointing.

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