Appropriating Thomas Jefferson, 1929-1945

«I’ll Take My Stand», two different Jefferson memorials, the Library of Congress Symposium, and the «New Masses» special issue testify to the diversity of Jefferson representations and his appropriators. Jefferson panegyrics in Congress and Roosevelt’s borrowing from these speeches in 1945 suggest the various issues Jefferson was appropriated for.

This study counters the view that Franklin D. Roosevelt hegemonically exalted Thomas Jefferson to iconic dominance during the Great Depression. It analyzes the diversity of those who appropriated Jefferson to find answers to the socio-economic crisis and modern industrial capitalism. This discourse analysis, spanning the ideological spectrum between 1929–1945, reveals that the creation of the Jefferson icon—in various forms of representation—generated counterhegemonic varieties of Jefferson because the appropriators grafted their values onto the historical figure which led to its transformation. These competing versions of Jefferson expressed a reformed sense of national values not only through commonalities but through the flexibility of interpretative and representational differences.

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