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Paranormal
Reports from Monticello - 20081102
By Rebecca L. McMurry and James
F. McMurry, Jr.
With a heavy pre-release advertising
campaign, Annette Gordon-Reed’s magnum opus, The Hemingses
of Monticello, was launched by her publisher W. W. Norton
in September 2008. What followed was an extensive book-tour
to sell this “non-fiction” tome of 798 pages of
garbled facts and half-truths. It expands for page after page
on the tiniest shreds of history. It seems clear that Ms.
Gordon-Reed has been getting paranormal help. One reviewer
claimed Ms. Gordon-Reed was able to “make silent records
speak.” She is an expert at literary slight of hand—taking
an innocent fact and spinning it to prop up the insupportable.
In an interview by Publisher’s Weekly
in October 2001, she announced her contract to do a book on
the Hemings family. Gordon-Reed noted there was so little
material available that the book couldn’t be a biography
of Sally Hemings, but would “follow a couple of the descendants”
and “probably stick to the 19th century.” Seven
years later her book is a shameless exploitation of a handful
of well-known and lesser known historical figures who have
become in her own words “vehicles” to politically
condemn America from the beginning as racist, sexist and classist.
The reader is forced to view American history through the
distorted lens of the author. The “moral” of her
story is that “white supremacy” and its offspring
“oppression” created the “down-right mean”
country that we live in. She makes the incredible statement
that of all the degradations suffered by “workers”
and women in the world today—“none of these conditions
approach the systematic degradation and violence of American
slavery sanctioned by state and church.” Torture and
death camps in Dachau, the Gulags, the killing fields of Cambodia
or Darfur are not excepted by her view. This single statement
is reason enough to eschew this volume.
The book is neither a user friendly travel
guide to the past, nor is it helpful to researchers who have
in fact studied the “origins” of the Hemings family
and the “immigrant” John Wayles, father of Thomas
Jefferson’s wife who Gordon-Reed alleges is the father
of Sally Hemings and several of her siblings. She takes no
pains to go into any more depth of research than our book
published in 2002 which described in detail the life of John
Wayles and provided documented material on the Hemings family
origins. Borrowing heavily as she followed our steps she vigorously
argued, while failing to acknowledge us as her mystery opponents.
The back cover of this book has praising blurbs
from Edmund S. Morgan, Joseph J. Ellis, David Levering Lewis,
David W. Blight, Peter Onuf, and John Hope Franklin. In addition,
Dr. and Mrs. Edmund Morgan had a lengthy, praise-filled article
on the book in the New York Review of Books. Professor Eric
Foner of Columbia University, although neither quoted nor
featured in Gordon-Reed’s book, nevertheless graciously
endorses the book in the New York Times and the International
Herald Tribune. He does warn the reader that she is repetitious
and that the book is too long. However, he fails to warn the
reader that she is repetitious in her condemnation of white
people. Numerous reviews of the book have appeared in the
“MainStreamMedia” with similar praise and no criticism
of the length, repetition, or racist rants. At two hundred
pages, it may have been a bad book still, but it would have
been a little more tolerable. With the media buzz that has
been created, you can expect the book in your local public
library.
To best understand Gordon-Reed, one should
read David Horowitz’s 2000 book, Hating Whitey—and
other Progressive Causes first. If you think Rev. Jeremiah
Wright and Annette Gordon-Reed are oddball and not representative
of a slice of America today, you must read Hating Whitey soon.
America has been under attack for years by the radical left
who have used the politics of victimization to denigrate and
condemn Western Civilization.
A country that has been exceptional for the
opportunity that has been offered to all who are willing to
work and assimilate deserves a better family story.
History written in the manner of The Hemingses
of Monticello is not about understanding ordinary people who
lived long ago. It is all about the radical politicization
of history and the ingratitude of a middle-class woman who
has done very well in this “oppressive” society.
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