Paying the Fiddler Over Celebration of Jefferson's Birth

Jefferson Memorial Lit. After the new lighting (Courtesy of Osram Sylvania)

Jefferson's birthday, known as Founder's Day at the University of Virginia, has been celebrated by an array of groups for decades. President Bush marked the day in a White House ceremony Monday night. And in Charlottesville, the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society marked the day, as it has for 176 years, with an evening dinner and a dawn pilgrimage to Jefferson's grave at his nearby home, Monticello.

Talley said the group gathered at the memorial just before midnight. His video shows the inner chamber of the memorial with about 20 people dancing and talking with each other.

A security guard soon appears, insisting that the group leave.

Oberwetter was among those ushered out and was arrested after she kept returning to the chamber. Talley, meanwhile, can be heard arguing with another officer:

"So you're saying the state is going to reject us?" Talley says. "It's Thomas Jefferson's birthday. We're here to celebrate that. And the state is throwing us out. There is something wrong with America when we get thrown out of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial when we're silent and peaceful and celebratory!"

"Thomas Jefferson's looking down, and he'd be very dissatisfied," Talley says.

Quite the contrary, says Peter Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation professor of history at U-Va.

"What they're referring to here is Jefferson's endorsement of popular resistance to tyrannical authority," he said yesterday. "What these folks were involved in was provoking authorities into having to enforce the law. Jefferson was very anal about obedience to the law.

"It trivializes Jefferson to suggest that in his name or spirit someone would ignore the will of the people as expressed in law," Onuf said. "I don't think he'd bother to turn over in his grave in this case."