T.J., You Know, Thomas Jefferson, Comes To Chicago

By: Mark Fitzgerald They unveiled a new statue of Thomas Jefferson up in my neck of the woods in Chicago last Saturday.

It's an unusual statue. Rather than loom from a pedestal, the figure of the Founding Father stands at ground level in front of the buses lined up at the entrance to the Jefferson Park mass transit station.
He's a little hunched over as he lifts his pen from the Declaration of Independence. Around him on the ground reads the quote, "The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government."

The unveiling ceremony on a blistering hot morning reflected the Far Northwest Side neighborhood's unique sensibility, combining an appreciation of Chicago clout politics with a sort of sweet small-town atmosphere. The pols were there, though not so many they had to jostle each other for place the way they do at St. Patrick's Day parades. There were Daughters of the American Revolution ladies in Colonial costume, a troop of Revolutionary War re-enactors and a Junior ROTC color guard from Senn High School. The John V. May Funeral Home distributed Jefferson bookmarks, and the local state senator handed out pens with his name on them. The senator's name, that is, not Jefferson's.

We haven't erected many statues to champions of the free press in Chicago recently -- although, oddly enough, two of the more recent ones honor media figures. There's the statue at Wrigley Field of broadcaster Harry Carey exhorting Cubs fans, and right near Tribune Tower, there's a bust of Jack Brickhouse, another beloved sportscaster.

As the ceremony got underway, New York Times reporter Judith Miller sat in jail for her 17th day, convicted rapist Roman Polanski had just successfully used a foreign court to sue an American magazine, Vanity
Fair, for damage to his reputation, of all things, and a federal judge had ordered prosecutors to investigate how The Plain Dealer in Cleveland got hold of two sealed court documents.

But on this Saturday, at least, Jefferson's strong views on the press went unmentioned. There was nothing about his fierce fight for an expansive First Amendment, his dismantling of the repugnant Alien and
Sedition Acts, or the loathing he came to express privately for a press he believed had abandoned truth-seeking for partisanship.

The Jefferson who in 1787 could declare that, "were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter," was, by 1807, complaining in a letter to
John Norvell: "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle."

Jefferson might have seen some irony, then, in the fact that the campaign to erect a statue of him in the Jefferson Park neighborhood on the Far Northwest Side of Chicago originated with a newspaper publisher, Glenn Nadig of Chicago's Northwest Side Press and other Nadig Newspaper weeklies. Nadig and other neighborhood leaders raised money the old-fashioned way, namely by button-holing area businesses and soliciting quarters and dollar bills from neighborhood residents with contribution cans at stores, laundries and restaurants. No city, state or federal money was involved.

In his remarks before unveiling the statue, Nadig also left Jefferson's free press legacy to the historians, and instead talked about another Jeffersonian controversy: whether the Chicago neighborhood was actually named for our third president. Back in 1850, he said, the area was not yet part of Chicago and residents wanted to organize as a township. Following the example of many other townships at the time, Nadig said, the local leaders decided to name their township after a president -- James Monroe. But Monroe was taken, and the people settle on Jefferson instead.

In the ensuing century and a half, though, the builder of Monticello in Virginia has come to seem like a native to the Chicago neighborhood. After the unveiling, State Sen. James A. De Leo exhorted the
crowd, "Step right up, and welcome T.J. back to Jefferson Park!"

The statue fosters that feeling of familiarity. Publisher Nadig noted that it's low and detailed so that people can actually read the Declaration in bronze.

So if on this Saturday nobody mentioned Jefferson's free-press advocacy, perhaps over the years, as Chicago commuters stand waiting for the 56A or the 270 bus, they will have many occasions to read the document that not only declared the Colonies' independence from Great Britain, but did it in terms that sounds like a modern-day newspaper's complaint about restrictions on freedom of expression and information and access.

When Jefferson wrote that, "he has called together Legislative Bodies at Places unusual, uncomfortable and distant from the Depositor of their Public Records for the sole Purpose of fatiguing them into Compliance with his Measures," he was referring to King George III. But Chicagoans reading from the document in Jefferson's bronzed hands at a subway and bus stop may well wonder if he was also predicting the secrecy-obsesses City Hall of the present Mayor Richard M. Daley, or the White House of President George W. Bush.