The Young Jefferson

FOR twenty years Mr. Claude Bowers has been trying to make his fellow Americans aware of Jefferson as a democratic leader. The Young Jefferson, the last volume of Mr. Bowers s trilogy, is a careful and detailed study of the first forty-six years of Jefferson’s life. The thesis of the book is that Jefferson had so distinguished himself by 1789 that if his career had been cut short at that time he would still be regarded as “one of the four immortals among the founders of the American Republic.

His accomplishments were indeed impressive: author of the Declaration of Independence, leader ot the democratic movement in Virginia, governor of the Old Dominion, and United States Minister to France. But it seems probable that had his life ended in 1789 his unsatisfactory record as war governor of Virginia would have tended to make him appear in history as a dreamer rather than as a doer.

One of the most obvious shortcomings of most biographies of Jefferson is that they fail to make him come alive for the reader. Usually he appears as the embodiment of certain ideas rather than as a personality. Mr. Bowers has made a conscientious effort to overcome this deficiency: he gives us intimate pictures of Jefferson with his violin, in the family circle, fox-hunting, and at work in his garden.

But even Mr. Bowers falls short of humanizing Jefferson: democrat and humanitarian that he was, Jefferson lacked the qualities that make Lincoln the man of the people, The Young Jefferson, however, because of its readability, clearness, and relevancy for the times will not disappoint Mr. Bowers’s audience. Houghton Mifflin, $3.75.

JOHN C. MILLER