What the attack on Monticello cost was not the truth. The truth is in the ground, in the archive, in the oral histories collected beginning in 1993, in the names Stanton and Swann-Wright recovered, in the descendants’ faces in the photographs taken on the West Lawn steps. Those things were put in the record by specific people doing specific work over three decades, and they remain; the work was done carefully enough that it survives the institution’s retreat from it. What the attack cost was the institution’s willingness to stand in front of that truth without flinching. That is a real cost. It is not the same as losing the truth.
Bridget Gillespie in The American Prospect. What Broke Monticello
How a right-wing smear campaign tried to silence the reality of Thomas Jefferson’s life, and in some ways succeeded.
