Swankin-Turner - James S. Turner

Dietary Supplements -- Health Care Reform and The Congress

administrator — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 01:51:58 -0500

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The Core argument of his premise was that every individual had their own Biochemical profile, completely different from every other individual. Very much the way that fingerprints identify people. And that’s how he wanted nutrition to be seen. I think that’s true in all the realms of interaction with nature. And our job, is my argument is to create institutions that allow that kind of expression to emerge. The American system which now has an industrialized food supply that homogenizes food so that the same food goes to all individuals concessionally. That’s the way they do it. And that’s clash. Its a major clash. And shifting. There’s no question of shifting, I am arguing … I have to stop now and answer questions but I just wanted to say that this institution, this group that is certifying clinical nutrition is one of those kinds of institutions that creates the opportunity to take that kind of emerging energy and bring it into the American institutional structure.

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Speech Given by Jim Turner at the IAACN - 1st Annual State Symposium - 1994

If you were here this afternoon and the point that I made at that time was the tremendous power of the FDA and how pretty much all pervasive that it is in controlling 25% of the gross national product. I wasn’t explicit about it but I would just argue that the FDA and most of the other regulators - all the other regulators are an intricate part of the American industrial system.

They are a crucial piece of keeping the corporate sector operating, and mostly they exist to iron out differences between large economic interests The example that I have that I always like is the battle between Florida Oranges and California Oranges. California – I can’t remember how this worked -- one of them is lighter in color, so they add color to it and the other is very heavy and firm so they add water to it because they can get more orange juice out of it. So, one was adding water and one was adding color, and they each sued each other - one said ‘oh you’re bad because you add color’, and the other said ‘oh you’re bad because you add water’ and they’re having this fight.

It was a seven year fight at FDA and it was not resolved until a bunch of consumer groups came in and said, We don’t like adding color or water. They, they were able to resolve that issue.

The Idea I’m getting at is that the FDA is a crucial piece of the whole industrial dynamic for that 25% that it regulates. Now, the point that I wanted to add for this evening is that the whole industrial process and the FDA’s role in that process is taking place inside a major cultural shift that is underway. Probably been underway for 30 years. When I arrived at FDA, in 1968, as I told you, they thought of people who thought about the connection of food and health as quacks. If you connected food and health you were a quack. And that was their operating premise that’s the way they built their rules and so on. That’s completely different now. Now, the public has taken on an enormous connection for the idea that food and health are connected in some way. And, every time the FDA has tried to go against that idea, there’s been a tremendous reaction or outpouring from the public.

Right now on the Hatch/Richardson Bill, with everything going on in the world, there are more letters for Hatch/Richardson than any other piece of legislation and almost more letters than all other legislation combined. Henry Waxman himself, in a two month period, got 30,000 letters. Its just an enormous outpouring from the public. And I think its important for us to think about what that energy or what that drive is that is exemplified in part by the connection of Food and Health.

One of the other major issues that I dealt with when we studied the FDA and continues to be a major issue in the American Food System today is pesticides. And the antidote to pesticides in the larger argument has been organic farming. And organic farming is a concept that is another part of this flowing energy that’s moving along.

In 1990 I was involved with and helped organize a group of people - a group of companies and individuals known as the Organic Food Alliance and were able to lobby the Organic Food Production Act into the Farm Bill of 1990.

What was interesting to me about that is that both the Senate and the House voted substantial majorities for making organic farming a part of the American National Farming Policy. Again, it was a situation where you had an energy dynamic that was different than I found in Washington in 1968.

In addition to that, it so happened that very early on in my career in Washington I ran across a guy named Harry Coulter. You may or may not know of him. He is sort of the modern theorist of homeopathy, or one of them along with Dana Allman and a few others and wrote the book called divided legacy, which talks about the way that the American establishment suppressed homeopathy at the turn of the century.

But Harry came to me because of the unique relationship that homeopathy has to the Food and Drug Administration. Its unique because the Food and Drug Administration operates under a law that specifically defines a drug - anything that homeopathic is a drug - and that makes it a protective class under the American Food and Drug laws. So that it has been allowed to function and thrive over the last 50 years since the Food and Drug Act was passed - about 55 years now, and its been allowed to do taught because of the way that the law was drafted in 1938.

So Harry and I spent a lot of time working on homeopathy and trying to help get it positioned and able to work effectively and in fact I am here today because I was sponsored by the group with the "pump", they told me to say. (laughter)

Peter Sepper worked with them has been involved with me and these battles since 1971 when we started out fighting on all these issues I just described. Now I picked those three as examples for a very specific reason. I believe that they all are invective of a larger way of looking at the world that is expressing itself in various arenas in the country, and I see it in Washington continuously.

The American system is organized around a whole set of analysis that are very rational and very sharp and very materialistic. The concept is that reality can be captured and identified and labeled and standardized. And that is a particular way of looking at things. Its the way we structure out laws, its the way we structured our system of science, and that particular way of seeing things is currently under pressure.

Another area that fits into the overall shift that’s underway in the country that I also worked on is acupuncture. I am the Vice Chair of the National Commission for the Certification of Acupuncturists. And starting out in 1984, when that Commission was organized until now, acupuncture has moved very, very powerfully into the American culture.

It's moved in such a way that now its expressly legal in 28 states by Acts of the Legislature, and it is accepted in one way or another in most of the other states, and we would expect that maybe in the next two or three years it would be voted in by Legislatures in another ten or fifteen states. And its moving effectively into the society.

And again, its a kind of way of seeing that is like what I call organic farming, nutrition and health, homeopathy - these are things that I would call energetic in their basis or as Harry Coulter would call emperical.

I’ll give you a little example.

When I first appeared on the acupuncture commission which is half Asian and half American - you know, half people from Asia and half people from Western Europe essentially where we are all American sitting there talking, and we had this language - we continue to have this language problem that we have to deal with and I don’t mean words, but concepts, so that there tended to be a sense on the part of the Asians that the way you transmitted knowledge through a society was by having a master train an apprentice and when the apprentice learned the information, then the master said, "Great, you’re on your way", And you went out into the world as "Seafood’s so and so’s apprentice who is now a master too.

On the other hand, the American system, the way it was organized, adopted from Europe, was one in which believed very strongly in establishing standards, and then running an examination to see whether or not a large group of people could meet those standards. And if they could meet those standards, then they were allowed to go out and say, "I met those standards" and I can now do whatever it was I was tested on.

Those are two very different ways of seeing reality, and in our acupuncture activity, what we have been working on very vigorously, is trying to bury them together. The way I see it is that there is this tremendous energy bubbling up that’s saying there are many, many more things in reality than our western way of seeing has been able to categorize, standardize, and functualize. There is much more there than meets out Western eyes.

One of the places that I had to struggle most profoundly was with FDA’s definition of an essential nutrient. The FDA’s idea of an essential nutrient is 12 or perhaps 19 substances that they have recognized from the National Academy of Sciences book on recommended bacteria allowances. Now even from the Western point of view, you can see if you read the book, that those are the ones that they put numbers behind, but they have another 20 or thirty that they say are essential, but we don’t know in what numbers. Well the FDA does not recognize those as essential for its purposes. But in addition to that, the argument actually in the NEAS book is that these are markers and if you eat enough of these, you will get the total package of all the things that we know to be essential in certain amounts, all those that we know to be essential but we don’t know in what amounts, and all those that which are essential but we don’t know about yet. That’s the theory. But the FDA doesn’t see it that way.

The FDA’s categorization mentality says there are these 12 that you can talk about and that you can utilize and that you can express information about and so forth and the rest are thrown out. Its not important. But what I believe is going on and that information that I talked about at lunch is how this upwelling of reaching for a broader reality, whether its the apparently mysterious (although it doesn’t seem mysterious to me) energy that the Chinese use when they are working with acupuncture, or the mysterious essential nutrients that we haven’t been able to identify or quantify yet, or the mysterious way that homeopathy in amounts - if the FDA says homeopathy cannot work because there is so little active ingredient in the homeopathic remedy that it does not exist., Though people take these things and they have reactions. If you sit down with somebody and they say to you oh, you have this and this, well take this and this and this will happen. So, you take that and it happens. The FDA’s position is that it didn’t happen.

Now my view is, I sort of round myself in the notion that those things which I see happening, I tend to believe. But its very difficult for policy makers to think that way, because they think of huge categories, with very careful - they’re careful but they’re very blunt - standardized ways of moving the categories around, and so, it doesn’t make any difference to them how many people come forward and say they’ve had an effect with homeopathy, or that the nutrients have helped them or … there’s a whole parade of things that don’t effect policy makers.

They say, "well that’s anecdotal". Doesn’t mean anything. And on the basis of dismissing all that kind of activity as antidotal, they end up creating polices that are almost self referencing. So for example, some major amount of cancers start and then go away. Maybe 30%. And they call those spontaneous remissions and don’t count them in the statistics. So that our cancer information is skewered by that much, however much it is, because it can’t be categorized. Now, as I started to say before - what I think is going on is how we use institutions in our culture to create the space for this kind of energy that is expressing itself in the forms that I’ve talked about (and by the way, there are many others, its not just the ones I’ve names).

How do we do that?

By giving example in the nutrition field, I presume that you’re all familiar with Roger Williams, but if you’re not, you should be, and he wrote a book in 1950 called Biochemical Individuality, and the subtitle of the original publication was the Scientific Basis of the Bill of Rights.

That’s the dynamic. That’s the purpose. That’s what it does. And if you conceptionalize that, then the bad things FDA does becomes secondary to trying to get the good things to be expressed in our daily lives and in our system.

The FDA and The Nutrition Community, Past, Present and Future…

administrator — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 01:50:46 -0500

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When I worked with Ralph Nader and wrote the book,The Chemical Feast: The Nader Report on the Food and Drug Administration we analyzed the national television information on food and found that the top ten foods advertised on television, all fell outside the basic four food groups, that was the main way we talked about nutrition in the late 1960’s. Number one was beer and wine, number two was candy, number three was chewing gum and so forth. All of the top ten fell outside of the basic four foods. The result of that from my point of view in 1968 when I began working with Nader, was that the American public was being given one set of information through the mainstream of information that we used, and it was opposite of the information that was useful to them personally.

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Speech Given by Jim Turner at the IAACN - 1st Annual State Symposium - 1994

Now, the purpose of my being here today is to speak about a set of subjects and the over arching idea is FDA and the Nutrition Community - past, present and future. FDA, friend or foe. I’m going to divide that into two sets of discussions: One today at lunch and one this evening at dinner. The one at lunch is Dietary Supplements and the one at dinner is Health Care Reform and the Congressional Nutritional Agenda. All around, the nation of how we look at the FDA. My way that I got into this issue - personally I was very interested in food as a result of the story I just told you, and then I got very interested in Ralph Nader, because as a law student in 1966 I was assigned a class in which my assignment was to read everything written by and about Ralph Nader. And what intrigued me was that in all that I had to do a brief and an oral argument on his position on our safety. What intrigued me was that Ralph Nader was known as an auto safety advocate in 1966, but when you read his technical writing, he was actually arguing that the major corporations in America should have social responsibility. It's important because they make the major decisions about the kind of society that we live in. And then he said for example, lets take the auto industry. And then he wrote all about the automobile industry. When I read this, I said to myself that no one understands that he is talking about a broad social issue and not a narrow one. He is talking about the whole notion of the corporate structure of the American society, not just out of safety.

And so I worked real hard, it took me a year to find him and get hold of him and sit down with him and talk to him, and I suggested that in order for people to understand his larger issue, we needed to look at some other area in American life that had the same problem that autos had. And we kicked it around for a while, and then finally, I said, "look, I’m really interested in food why don’t we do it in food, because food corporations are the ones that define our food supply, They’re the ones who define what people eat. And my experience personally is that what they’re defining isn’t what people who know about food would say that you should eat.

So then we started on our activities on working on nutrition and the food industry, and right at the core of that issue lies the FDA. The FDA is the strongest, single law enforcement agency in the United States. It has more power, more reach, and covers more area than any other law enforcement agency that exists. And remember, always remember it is a law enforcement agency. It is a police force. That’s its job. And it had enormous power. FDA regulates 25% of the gross national product. That’s 25% of every dollar spent in the United States on a product regulated by the FDA. No other institution in the United States government has that kind of reach. In addition, regulating foods and drugs has traditionally been one of the prime rate purposes of state power for 5,000 years.

When you find the existence of a government, you will find one of the things that the government does is regulate the food supply, and regulate health. You can find it in all tests, and so, you take an agency that had tremendous reach and real depth and give them enormous power and now the way we eat and the way me maintain our health is shaped by this institution. Its a powerful institution.

When we began our study of the FDA, what intrigued me was the full range of things that they were doing in my opinion "wrong". Not only the dietary activities, but many others. And my conclusion as I looked at it, and looked at the whole history of regulatory agencies, and its all spelled out in the chemical piece if you ever want to find it at the library, was a very successful book, in print for 11 years and sold well over a million copies.

But the point that we came to is that a regulatory agency has its own agenda, which is secondary to whatever the purpose it was created for. So that the FDA, in addition to having 25% of the market place under its control, in addition to having the long tradition of regulating food and health behind it, it also has its own internal agenda, 30,000 or so employees, several hundred million dollar budget, and it continuously argues for things that it wants to do.

In this situation, the first question I raised with the FDA that intrigued me was the fact that they had 50,000 cards and letters in their files in 1968 opposing the regulation of dietary supplements. 50,000 cards and letters. Went on my first trips over to meet with an FDA official and I said, "Gee this is very interesting. You have 50,000 people opposing you on this. What do you think about that?" And this official said, "Well,that’s 50,000 quacks".

Well, I was due in Washington, so I didn’t know exactly how to respond to that. I went back to Nader and I said, "Gee, the FDA says that these 50,000 people (by the way, the most that they have ever received on a proposed rule before was about 70 letters - cards and letters - on caffeine and Coca-Cola. And that was a tremendous outpouring.) Here, they have 50,000. So I went back to Nader and I said, "Gee, you know Ralph, the FDA says these are 50,000 quacks. What do we say about that?" He said, "50,000 quacks? That’s 50,000 consumers.

So then from then on I was free. I could go out and fight about this issue. But try and get that mentality. I’ve worked now for a long time in Washington to try and break that mentality.

In 1975 the FDA proposed a rule to ban the words "natural, organic and health food" from the marketplace. Fight. I was the appointed Consumer Representative to oppose that, and I did, and we were successful, we won. The Judge said, "You can’t do that". But in the break during one of the meetings - by the way, this whole session was 12 weeks long, and that was one of the issues - I said to the lawyer from the FTC, just exactly how are you going to enforce this law? I mean there are health food store windows all over America that say Health Food Store on them. What are you going to do? I said, "Well, maybe we’ll just get tanks and go up and down the street and shoot the windows out." I mean he was joking. It was a joke, but that’s what he said. I mean, he intended it to be a joke.

I had actually persuaded a whole lot of the people at the FDA that they should not talk like this anymore - not only myself, but many other people. And they actually had taken public positions and the Commissioner and others had said we don’t think these people are quacks, and we don’t think they are bad people and we are going to work with them, its going to be better and so forth, and then I just happened to get a copy of their enforcement manual, it was about two years ago, and there it is, an entire page on quackery in the dietary supplement industry.

Its not an issue of - there are quacks in the dietary supplement industry the argument is that the dietary supplement industry is quacks. That was the argument they were making. Now, again my problem is the enormous power that this institution has, By making statements, it creates realities.

In 1976 a couple of years before that, a number of us, some of the people here, got involved in challenging FDA with Congress about the way it has handling the nutritional questions that it was dealing with, and we were very successful in getting the Proxmeyer bill passed through Congress.

This is a bill that gave a kind of limited faith haven to nutritional products. It said that the FDA could not treat them differently from the way that it treated other food products essentially. It could not put a higher burden on them, it could not treat as a primafacialy bad and forcing them to prove that they were good and so on. And that was the high water mark of resistance to the FDA power that had taken shape over the 50 years or so that they had been enforcing the drug law.

That particular piece of legislation passed the Senate 90 to 10 and passed the house overwhelmingly. And it was like the shot across the bowel of the FDA, saying look, you’ve got to use your power in a restrained and responsible manner. FDA officials who got that message began to talk to themselves in their own culture inside that world where they set their own priorities about the Proxmeyer Bill, the ticking time bomb in the American health care system. The argument was that because the FDA had its wings clipped in this area, some horrible thing was going to happen to create a terrible crisis and it would be the direct result of this bill having taken away some of their authority. And they shopped and they looked and they worked and they really tried hard to find something and then ultimately were able to make an issue out of tryptophane. There they had it. The thing that they had been predicting all along. As I say, institutions with this kind of power create their own reality and they then use that as a wedge to create more and more difficulty around the dietary supplement and nutritional marketplace.

Incidentally, I will have five or six minutes for questions, and if there are questions about any of these points - I’m sort of skinning across them - but we can try to straighten them out a little bit or when I’m walking around, if you want to ask me something, we can do that. In this atmosphere, the FDA then began - there was one other line of argument going on at the same time, and that was the FDA’s insistence that anything that made a health plan was a drug. If you said eat prunes for regularity, that was a drug. And you had to prove it. And you couldn’t make that claim. In fact, they didn’t. Banned prune extract. Certain point.

This line of reasoning with the FDA was using granted serious problems in 1985 when Kellogg decided to go to the National Cancer Institute and gather evidence that certain brands helped prevent certain cancers and then get permission from the National Cancer Institute to use their name on brand cereal products. And so Kellogg hit the market with the statement, "The National Cancer Institute has concluded that certain brands help prevent certain cancers - for further information, call the National Cancer Institute …" and they put the number down.

This was a direct violation of the law and challenge to the FDA. And in my own guise of doing things end up in strange places, so I was invited to participate with a panel of people to talk about the Kellogg issue at the Kraft companies, one of their meetings, who invited me to come and talk about this along with six people altogether. And the three of us were supporting the Kellogg effort and three of us were opposed, and I made my argument about the effort which said - my argument was that there’s no way that a court is going to throw out the Kellogg ad because the court would have to pick between the FDA and the NCI and no Federal Court is going to do that. They are going to say, "Go back and talk to the secretary of HHS or HEW as it was at the time - go back and talk to them or him and get him to sort this out, because its not my problem.

So, the next guy got up, a very, very well known national nutritionist who got up and said - I said, "as ong as NCI is going to take that position we can’t change the labeling, no matter what the law says." This guy got up and said, "Well, I formulated my positioning, and we believe from the nutrition community (all of you is part of that) believes that its wrong to say that and we never knew were going to have the problem with having a quack running the National Cancer Institute. You know, I - part of the reason why I say Washington is, you know, one hundred square miles surrounded by reality. You have to just kind of shake your head and wonder what these people are talking about.

However, the fact is that that set off - that Kellogg effort set off an enormous policy battle in Washington, which culminated ultimately in the NLEA - The Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990. The NLEA’s empatice for existence is a reform movement to clip the wings of the FDA on health claims. That’s its empatice for existence. That’s where its energy politically came from. However, and this is the most important point I want to make to this group: However, because the people who were the constituency of that impulse, the people who believe that there is a direct relationship between food and health and that the American public ought to be let in on that fact, that group was not politically sophisticated enough to turn its victory into a new positive policy.

So what happened, all this energy, focused on Congress - they got together and they wrote a law, using the energy of a public that was outraged, the drugs, (the narcotics were called drugs if they were food that made a health plan) they took that energy of those people and turned it into the Nutritional Labeling and Education Act, giving the FDA massive new powers to control health claims and the relationship between food and health in the marketplace.

And the way they did that was to do something very, very much out of the FDA’s desire to create its own agenda. They said - the Congress said no health plan can be put on food unless the FDA approves it first. Now this, remember was the reform. The argument was that the FDA doesn’t let any health claims on. So they said, "Okay, we’ll reform that, we’ll say you can put health claims on if the FDA lets you." That was the reform. Tremendous energy. And that was the reform, because the constituency behind the reform was not able to translate the public energy into sound public policy - was not able to win that fight in the detail. On it in the overall, but not in the detail.

So the result is, that in Congress and - for first things we want you to look at - these ten things - we’ve listed ten areas. We want you to look at those first to see whether any of them are things that you’re going to allow a claim to be made in. Those ten areas where the dietary supplement industry thought were the most - by the way the food industry is also upset about this. This is not only dietary supplement, it's also foods. But they happen to be the ten things the dietary supplements people were most concerned about.

There were some food people that were concerned as well. In the FDA (they set about looking at these) basically rejected 6 or 7 of them completely. Just rejected them. And only an enormous public battle got them to accept the notion that folic acid might help prevent tubule pregnancies. Even though the Federal Government was totally on record in every health agency recommending that all women of child bearing age increase the amount of folic acid they take on a daily basis, above what you can get from food - the FDA still would not allow that claim to be on its food products that it regulated. It took five months after the Commissioner said, I adopt the policy for the FDA to finally come up with wording, that is really unacceptable wording but its there - to let that claim on.

Alright - this is the situation that everyone faced at the beginning of Congress a year ago, essentially. And that’s when Senator Hatch and Congressman Richardson began to develop the legislation that known as the Hatch/Richardson legislation, and its design to correct basically, two or three problems, mostly the problems I just outlined to you.

Currently, right at this very time between last Monday and next Friday, there is negotiation under way between five principal members of Congress who will control the outcome of that legislation. Senator Hatch, Senator Kennedy, Congressman Dingle, Congressman Waxman and Congressman Richardson. The five of them and their staff are working on legislation. Senator Kennedy, who is the person who will make the decision, because he’s the committee chair of the health committee and Senate, had said that there will be a bail out of some kind by the end of April - out of the committee - and will have a bill passed through the Senate by May. It will either be the Hatch bill or a compromise.

We would be - anybody interested in this issue would be more interested in a compromise than the Hatch Bill because it would mean that Senator Hatch and Senator Kennedy and Dingle and Richardson will come to an agreement in that whatever bill passes is likely to go all the way through. If it comes out a Hatch bill, that mean that there was not an agreement, and there will be an enormous fight with both the Senates and the House, probably it will pass the Senate - the house will be very much more difficult.

There are currently - The Hatch bill had 68 co-sponsors and the Richardson bill has 240 co-sponsors, well over half of the house. The problem is that many co-sponsors, when put to the test, will have to start trading off their own power inside the house in order to decide whether or not they are going to go with the bill. That’s the situation that we face today. Legislatively. And its very important for anybody whose interested in these issues to let their Congress people know that this is an important piece of information - an important piece of legislation - an important piece of information to the American public, and that the American public deserves that, and they should be participants in this dialog that’s leading toward this resolution.

Every single one of the five people that I have named has said that FDA to some degree has gone outside of what was intended by NLEA. Waxman said that, Dingle has said that, Richardson, Hatch, Kennedy, all of them say the FDA has gone off the reservation. The debate is about what are we going to do it get it back on the reservation. And the Hatch/Richardson people have a set if ideas that they are using and Waxman and Dingle and Kennedy are trying to hold the line and make it less of a restriction on FDA, whatever the reform is.

Now that the situation with dietary supplements, and I believe that the only way that FDA can be made a friend of Nutrition and Health is by being harnessed so that the massive energy can be used to do positive things. And there are positive things that it can do. They raided a group - a store not long ago - 2 and a half years ago and took away a bunch of bran products and they said, "we’re seizing these products because they say that bran will help reduce cancer." That was big headline - That was what the stories reported, but the last paragraph of their press release said, " These products contained no bran."

I personally want guys that put out products that they read "cures cancer" and call them bran rolls and they don’t contain bran to be put in jail. I mean yeah, great. I’m for that. That’s what they should be doing. They don’t have to sit around and argue whether bran does nor doesn’t prevent cancer, but they sure as heck have a job to - role to play when they say bran is here and it isn’t there. And so there are good things that the FDA can do and they should limit themselves to that.

Jefferson's Flaws: Are They Beyond Redemption?

administrator — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 01:48:28 -0500

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A discernible back-and-forth with Jefferson at its core characterized the American revolution, laying the groundwork for America as we know it. First came the Declaration of Independence, a Jeffersonian thrust. A Hamiltonian parry, the Constitution, preceded the Jeffersonian Bill of Rights riposte. The Hamiltonian Federalist government of Washington and Adams, succeeded by the Jefferson electoral sweep of 1800, carried on the duel. The Hamiltonians struck back after Jefferson's massive November 1800 victory by appointing the infamous "midnight judges" (including Chief Justice John Marshall) between election night and Jefferson's March, 1801 inauguration. For the next thirty-five years, Jeffersonian Presidents (Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams and Jackson) battled Hamiltonian Marshall and the courts to shape the nation. At Jefferson's death on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the die was cast.

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Synopsis of a Proposed Response to Conor Cruise O'Brien's
"Thomas Jefferson: Radical and Racist"

In 1889 Henry Adams, carrying on his family's sometime vendetta against Thomas Jefferson, wrote a history of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, trying, apparently, to put a stake through the then barely-beating heart of Jefferson's reputation. As an honest reporter, Adams told the truth about Jefferson's actions, evidently assuming Americans would find them objectionable. Instead, this book rehabilitated Jefferson by pointing out his great nation-shaping feats.

A complete and accurate, examination of O'Brien's charges in the full context of Jefferson's life, the revolution, and the American experience might also lift Jefferson's currently flagging reputation.

Jefferson played well a key role on a team of revolutionaries whose ideas and actions continue to hold the world's imagination and affect its actions. Americans need to come to terms with their Jeffersonian heritage, whether or not Jefferson held (as he probably did not) unacceptably radical, racist views.

American revolutionaries were of many minds. Some early patriots went to Canada when war broke out. Fervent kaleidoscopic activity typified politics during and after the war. Allies and enemies often, if not routinely, changed sides. Events confounded politics. As Gary Wills points out, it took Lincoln to establish 1776 and the Declaration of Independence, not 1789 and the Constitution, as the birth of the nation. The Gettysburg address, Wills says, transformed the United States into The United States.

Jefferson tended toward political liberty and economic independence. His foil, Hamilton, urged economic efficiency and political order. Their struggle defines America. In 1876, Henry Cabot Lodge - and a hundred years later Walter Lippman - called America a Hamiltonian nation governed by Jeffersonian forms. Americans tend, consciously or unconsciously, to see reality as a balance of efficiency, independence, liberty, and order. Viewed this way, America without Jefferson will not be America.

The Hamiltonians struck back after Jefferson's massive November 1800 victory by appointing the infamous "midnight judges" (including Chief Justice John Marshall) between election night and Jefferson's March, 1801 inauguration. For the next thirty-five years, Jeffersonian Presidents (Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams and Jackson) battled Hamiltonian Marshall and the courts to shape the nation. At Jefferson's death on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the die was cast.

Marshall's decisions cut executive government power. The Jefferson "mob" controlling central government scared Federalists. One 1819 case, Dartmouth College v. Woodward, set corporate rights against federal power. The nation split. Government, ruled by Jeffersonian principle (affected people need a voice - i.e., vote - in decision making) squared off against corporations (semi-governments) ruled by Hamiltonian principle (only property owners - i.e., stockholders - have decision-making rights).

For the next hundred years increasingly "democratic" government (more issues presented to more voters) battled increasingly powerful (more land, money, authority) corporations to allocate national resources. The nation prospered and suffered. Painful pre Civil War agrarian/industrial struggles, cast as free v. slave, led to bloody war and increased corporate power. Post war boom/bust collapses (from railroads in the 1870's to agriculture and industry in the 1920's) destroyed confidence in Hamiltonian corporate economic structures.

Enter Roosevelt's activist government, with which we are just now coming to terms. Roosevelt, like Lincoln and Jackson before and Kennedy after him, drew on Jefferson to help America through complex times. Expelling Jefferson, so entwined with America, from the pantheon for politically incorrect radicalism and racism (even if guilty) poses a greater challenge to America's core viability than O'Brien's thesis considers. Ripping Jefferson from America's heart, necessary or not, will be bloody work.

A broader, more textured appreciation of Jefferson and of history might alter the O'Brien-created impression of Jefferson's pantheon future. "Someone should write a thesis on "The Influence of Thomas Jefferson on Hendrik Verwoerd,"' O'Brien says. Jefferson, racism, South Africa. Point made, further comment not needed. A less obviously anti-Jefferson point could be made by suggesting a thesis on Jefferson and Frederick de Klerk. This might present a different Jefferson for any needed redemption.

For example, O'Brien connects Jefferson to violent radicalism (too slow to condemn French Revolution excesses, alleged Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh wore a tee shirt with a provocative Jefferson quote). He does not mention attacks by contemporaries (and Henry Adams) on Jefferson for being too pacifist - impose an embargo rather than fight the British, buy rather than conquer Louisiana, and move Virginia's capital from Williamsburg to Richmond to avoid armed conflict.

O'Brien says "...the orthodox multiracial version of the American civil religion must eventually prevail -- at whatever cost against the neo-Jeffersonian racist schism" (emphasis added). "At whatever cost" sounds like the kind of unrestrained exhortation O'Brien condemns in Jefferson. One cost (considered by O'Brien?) of dumping Jefferson from the pantheon because of his violent rhetoric might be to lose him as the primary American example of limiting the use of violence as a tool of foreign policy.

By adding resistance to the federal government to his Jefferson indictment, and making it the moral equivalent of racism, O'Brien further weakens his historical case. Northern states like Wisconsin issued ringing states rights endorsements against federal government enforcement of fugitive slave laws. Nothing makes federal government power intrinsically multiracial. Nor do contemporary Americans, individually or collectively, see the federal government as uniformly superior to state or local governments.

One reason so many Americans, including a lot who are not right-wing fanatics, find "liberal" irritating grows out of a perception that "liberals" tend to claim a special identification with "orthodox American civil religion." History suggests that the political Jefferson would shun association with such a concept. In fact it is likely that orthodox civil religion will find less room in the American pantheon than will Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson's vitality resists classification. Americans tend to suspect orthodoxy.

Dumping Jefferson from the pantheon comes down on one side of a deep, wrenching, centuries long, social/political battle, predating America's revolution. This battle divides those who, like Jefferson, demand that governments keep hands off individuals' right to use their life and liberty to pursue happiness from those who, like Hamilton, say power concentrated in properly motivated, competent, economically and socially elite hands best ensures the orderly society essential for individual enjoyment of life.

Dumping Hamilton comes down on the other side making more French Revolution type excesses likely. Americans stand astride this divide, one foot firmly in each camp. Each person develops a pragmatic mix of liberty, order, independence and efficiency for personal expression and gain. The combined Jefferson/Hamilton blood in American veins creates collective decisions pundits find odd-divided government 22 of 28 years; pro choice/pro life abortion consensus; anti-government/anti-corporate anger, etc. The American dynamic rests on "the pursuit of happiness,' staked out by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, dumped from the Constitution by central government advocates, reintegrated by Lincoln. Dumping Jefferson risks losing "happiness" as a central social value. Cutting the ground from under the Jefferson foot risks toppling Americans into a morass of individual rebellion against government intrusion into privacy, family, and personal values. A bloody business at best. Americans might prefer redemption for Jefferson.

O'Brien's self-described task, ensuring "at whatever cost" that "the orthodox multiracial version of the American civil religion" prevails "against the neo-Jefferson racist schism," has far greater risks and fewer benefits then O'Brien presents or appears to have considered. This fact, combined with O'Brien's brittle historical picture, makes a further, more faceted, reassessment necessary before individual Americans make a pro- or anti-Jefferson choice.

In summary, O'Brien chose to narrow and obscure the Jefferson legacy -- even if he had accurately reported the part of Jefferson's life that he addresses (which he did not). He leaves important aspects of Jefferson's life and actions that bear directly on his thesis, out of his argument. He leaves contradictory assertions unaddressed. And he makes poorly thought-out rhetorical flourishes that, when examined, weaken his argument. O'Brien's topic is too important not to be addressed more completely.

Adam Smith Without Arrogance

administrator — Tue, 22 Jul 1997 01:11:11 -0500

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Mr. Glassman quoted Smith, saying, "In a mercantilist [or protectionist] system, the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer." Smith then said, "It cannot be very difficult to determine who have been the contrivers of this whole mercantile system; not the consumers, we may believe, whose interest has been entirely neglected; but the producers, whose interest has been so carefully attended to; and among this latter class our merchants and manufacturers have been by far the principle architects."

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Unfortunately, space did not allow James K. Glassman to report Adam Smith's complete 1783 quote on consumption ["Why We Trade," op-ed, July 1]. Mr. Glassman quoted Smith saying, "Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production." Smith continued "and the interest of the producers ought to be attended to, only in so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer."

Max Lerner's 1938 forward to "The Wealth of Nations" commented on "the curious paradox of Smith's position in history; to have fashioned his system of thought in order to blast away the institutional obstructions from the past, and bring a greater degree of economic freedom and therefore a greater total wealth for all the people in a nation; and yet to have his doctrine result in the glorification of irresponsibility . . . . A reading of Adam Smith's work and a study of its place in the history of ideas should be one of the best solvents for smugness and intellectual absolutism."

As Mr. Glassman suggest, today's merchants and manufacturers and their political allies often contrive to recreate many of the special protections and irresponsibilities Smith sought to eliminate.

Swankin-Turner - James S. Turner

Dietary Supplements -- Health Care Reform and The Congress

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Speech Given by Jim Turner at the IAACN - 1st Annual State Symposium - 1994

The FDA and The Nutrition Community, Past, Present and Future…

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Speech Given by Jim Turner at the IAACN - 1st Annual State Symposium - 1994

Jefferson's Flaws: Are They Beyond Redemption?

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Synopsis of a Proposed Response to Conor Cruise O'Brien's "Thomas Jefferson: Radical and Racist"

Adam Smith Without Arrogance

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Synopsis of a Proposed Response to Conor Cruise O'Brien's
"Thomas Jefferson: Radical and Racist"