The ‘Press’ Is a Machine

The third president didn’t wait in the ground nearly two-hundred years to become controversial. A pre-woke corps of news writers were out to get Thomas Jefferson in print while still alive and kicking. When he died July 4, 1826, exactly 50 years after the Declaration of Independence was adopted, media scuttlebutt included a theory the demise was timed with an intentional laudanum overdose. Federalist broadsheets were loaded with snide, spurious cracks about the first president of the 19th centur...