Clinton’s Philosophy Differs From That of His Model, Jefferson : White House: Where President-elect calls for federal activism, the third President used restraint. Two approaches alternate in a historical cycle.

The first inaugural ceremony in the new District of Columbia was short on pomp and pageantry.

A few minutes before noon on March 4, 1801, Thomas Jefferson, the man President-elect Bill Clinton has cited as a model, emerged from Conrad and McMunn’s boarding house on Jenkins Hill and walked the two blocks to the newly finished Senate chamber.

Jefferson had served as America’s ambassador to Paris during the early days of the French Revolution, when royalty and aristocrats of all manner literally were losing their heads. As President of the United States, he wanted to set a model of republican simplicity.

Having defeated the Federalists, who had labored to build up a strong activist central government, Jefferson began a period of retrenchment. The cycle has been repeated throughout American political history.

Jefferson promised a “frugal government” that would leave most power to the states. “Our general government,” he said, “may be reduced to a very simple organization and a very inexpensive one--a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants.”

He would have no elegant coach drawn by a team of white horses, as George Washington had employed on his entrance to Philadelphia. Nor would he have a military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, then described as a “muddy path of ruts hacked through trees, brush and swamp grass.”

After taking his oath of office, Jefferson returned to his boarding house and that evening refused even to sit at the head of the tavern’s dinner table. He was in no hurry to move to the large White House in the distance, dismissing it as “the palace.”

And his inaugural address, which was widely reprinted, reflected the same commitment to a modest and restrained federal authority.

Ironically, his words sound more like former President Ronald Reagan’s than Clinton’s.

Jefferson pledged a government that “shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”

He planned to eliminate not only the annual budget deficit, but also the entire national debt.

Albert Gallatin, his Treasury secretary, calculated that the debt could be paid off if his Administration repaid $7.3 million a year for 16 years. For the next 10 years, under Jefferson and his handpicked successor, James Madison, the government did just that, a staggering feat when you consider that the entire budget for everything else in 1801, including the Army and Navy, was just $2.6 million.

Jefferson’s tight-spending philosophy did not stop him from jumping at a bargain. At 3 cents an acre, the enormous Louisiana Purchase nearly doubled the size of the nation. But the third President reined in the national government’s power and squelched such innovative ideas as building roads with federal funds.

By contrast, Bill Clinton comes into office after 12 years of Republican rule, which began with Reagan’s pledge to cut taxes and to get “government off the backs of the people.” Clinton has promised a more activist government that will reinvigorate the economy, control health care costs, reform the schools, protect the environment and retrain workers. It is an ambitious agenda.

Surveying the 19th Century, historian Henry Adams said thecycles of activism and retrenchment were repeated every 12 years.

In 1825, for example, President John Quincy Adams, the historian’s grandfather, pledged to use the government to build the nation. He financed scientific experiments, new institutions of learning and--most important--new roads and canals, what were then known as internal improvements and today are dubbed the infrastructure .

Sounding like a liberal Democrat of today, Adams even encouraged government to help the downtrodden.

“The great object of the institution of civil government,” he said during his inaugural address, “is the improvement of those who are parties to the social contract.” To “slumber in indolence,” he said, “is to doom ourselves to perpetual inferiority.”

But his call for a bigger national government instead helped doom the second President Adams. Four years later, the rural interests of the South and West swept Adams out and elected Andrew Jackson.

He in turn vetoed measures from the Whig-dominated Congress to finance more national roads. “The people expected reform, retrenchment and economy in the administration of this government,” Jackson explained in his message vetoing a roads bill in 1830. “Our national debt must be paid, direct taxes and loans avoided.”

In the 20th Century, however, the cycle of initiative and retrenchment has seemed to recur every 30 years, as historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. has noted.

In the opening decades of this century, “two demanding presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, exhorted the American people to democratize their political and economic institutions at home and then to make the great world outside safe for democracy,” Schlesinger wrote. They pushed to break up the big business trusts, to prohibit child labor, to assure workers a minimum wage and to set new federal standards for food and drugs.

By the 1920s, Americans were “sickened of idealism . . . and a steady diet of highfalutin and meaningless words,” H. L. Mencken wrote. They elected Republican presidents and were content to ignore the federal government.

But the Great Depression ended the Republican era and put Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House. He called his election “a mandate . . . for direct, vigorous action. We must act and act quickly,” he said in his 1933 inaugural address.

He certainly adhered to that promise, as the New Deal era saw the most rapid expansion of the federal role in the nation’s history. For the first time, the government undertook to regulate the economy, to employ the jobless and to provide pensions for the elderly.

But 20 years later, the Democrats were swept from the White House in favor of Dwight D. Eisenhower. He promised fewer commitments abroad and a restrained government at home.

Peace and prosperity, however, were not enough to ensure a long Republican reign. In 1960, Democrat John F. Kennedy promised to get the nation moving again and won a narrow victory.

The eight years of the Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations saw another flurry of government initiatives. The government finally sought to ensure civil rights. For the first time, it funded health insurance for the poor and elderly, expanded aid for schools and colleges, funded housing for the poor and--as Kennedy had promised--put a man on the moon, not long after Johnson left office.

But Kennedy and Johnson also sought to stop communism in Vietnam, and the division and disruption resulting from that war sent the Democrats into a long retreat.

The high tides of the conservative eras were reached in the 1920s, the 1950s and the 1980s. Shortly after Reagan’s landslide reelection in 1984, Schlesinger observed this pattern again and accurately foresaw what came next.

“At some point, shortly before or after the year 1990, there should come a sharp change in the national mood and direction--a change comparable to those bursts of innovation and reform that followed the accessions to office of Theodore Roosevelt in 1901, Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 and Kennedy in 1961,” he wrote in the “The Cycles of American History.”

“The 1990s should be the turn in the generational succession for the young men and women who came of political age in the Kennedy years,” he predicted.

Those words certainly fit Clinton and Al Gore, two young men of the ‘60s who believe in an activist government. Tomorrow, in their inaugural speeches, they will get their chance to set out an agenda for a new political era.

But even for conservatives, their ascension is not all bad. It means that the next conservative era will soon begin taking shape.

Schlesinger, a liberal and former Kennedy aide, naturally hopes that the new Democratic era will prove long-lived, but he nonetheless foresees a certain end.

“Both conservatism and reform degenerate into excess,” he wrote. “Perhaps toward the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, the nation (will) tire again of uplift and commitment, and the young people who came of political age in the Reagan years will have their turn in power.”