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Home , Adams Memorial, Alien and Sedition Acts, Boston Massacre, David McCullough, Jefferson Memorial, John Adams

John And the case of the missing

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Listen to Presidential at http://wapo.st/presidential

This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: This week, our second episode of Presidential is starting outside the and I'm asking visitors what they know about .

WHITE HOUSE VISITOR #1: Not too much, no.

WHITE HOUSE VISITOR #2: I watched the HBO series on John Adams with .

WHITE HOUSE VISITOR #3: He was the second president of the .

WHITE HOUSE VISITOR #4: I don't know.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: If you're one of the rare people who do already know quite a lot about John Adams, the chances are good that that's thanks to David McCullough. You either read his Pulitzer -winning biography of Adams or maybe you, too, saw that HBO from a couple years back starring Paul Giamatti. That was based on McCullough's biography.

But even historian David McCullough would say that history has not done a whole lot to keep John Adams top of mind for us today when it comes to American presidents.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: We have to realize that popular symbolism has not been very generous toward Adams. He is the only one of our founding fathers for whom there is no memorial, no statue, no building in his honor in our nation's capital. And to me that is absolutely inexcusable. It is long time when we should recognize what he did and who he was.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I'm Lillian Cunningham and this is the second episode of Presidential.

PRESIDENTIAL INTRO MUSIC

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Of our first three presidents, and Jefferson have iconic memorials in D.C. and Adams has…zip. So, we're going to look at why that is and explore the question of how shape our collective memory of which presidents are important. But

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1 first, let's get a better sense of Adam's character and his early story.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: John Adams grew up in as simple, as difficult a beginning family childhood life as Abraham . There was perhaps only one book in the house, and that was . His mother was almost certainly illiterate, but he was a very bright boy and he worked very hard and he got a scholarship to Harvard. Now, we shouldn't think of the great of the day. This was a small college. But as he said, “I discovered books and read forever.” And he then went on to get a law degree and practiced law as a young man in the vicinity of . He lived in Quincy, , and he made his first big mark in our story as a country when he defended the British soldiers who had participated in what was called the Boston . Nobody else would defend them.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: OK, so just a little context here. The happened in 1770, when British soldiers end up killing five people in Boston. It's possible it's not entirely their fault, but they're likely to get the death penalty and no lawyer in Boston wants to defend these soldiers. John Adams ends up being the only person who says he will. David McCullough says this is because he believed so firmly in the law and the idea that the accused are innocent until proven guilty. But Adams is basically prepared for this to be the end of his career.

Well, instead, he actually ends up winning the trial and gaining some renown for his bravery and his integrity.

Fast forward a bit, and as he becomes more of a public figure, he goes on to take part in the in , which leads to the creation of the Declaration of Independence.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: He was the great on-the-floor spokesman for the Declaration of Independence. He was the one that battled to make it happen. Jefferson wrote most of it with help from Franklin and Adams, but Jefferson would not get up and defend what he felt had to be done. He left that all to Adams. And Franklin much preferred to sit and listen, maybe make an occasional comment. So it was that that put John Adams on the map, and there really was nobody like him.

He could be feisty. He could be critical of other people, but he also had a wonderful sense of humor. He loved to be with people, he loved to have a drink, he loved to gather in the taverns at night and talk with the other delegates. And he was sturdy physically, though he was not a very tall or impressive man compared to someone like Washington or Jefferson. He was hard as a rock and immensely likable once you got to know him.

He's a character. He's a character in the play and I like his determination. He won't give up. He never had any money. He couldn't afford servants or fine clothing or the other trappings that Jefferson and Washington and others were known for. And he had a marvelous wife. I think is one of the most admirable Americans ever. John Adams was the only Founding Father who never owned a slave as a matter of principle, and Abigail, his wife, was even more adamant on the subject.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So before Adams ends up becoming president himself, he served as vice president to . You'll remember from last week's episode that Julie Miller from the talked about how one of Washington's main traits was his self-control.

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JULIE MILLER: So Adams, who came after him, was very different. He emotionally did not know self-control. He just said whatever he thought. He was not silent in company. He talked and talked and talked, and people couldn't stand him. John Adams would always tell the truth and it often got him into a lot of trouble. It often seemed unkind or tactless, but that was in his nature.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: His talkative nature was in contrast to Jefferson, who did not like public speaking. We're going to explore that detail more in the next episode, but in the meantime, it's really hard to talk about Adams without discussing his relationship to Jefferson. When Adams becomes president, he beats Jefferson by only three votes. And because of the electoral process at the time, this makes Jefferson his vice president -- even though political parties have started to form at this point and Adams is on one side with the , while Jefferson is over on the other side as a Republican.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Adams and Jefferson were very close during the time of the Revolution, and particularly when they were both serving abroad in . After they came back and the country got going, and the political parties began to form, they became rivals. And then eventually, they became enemies when Jefferson was found to be hiring somebody to defame Adams and attack him at every chance. And Jefferson was paying for that.

But then after their retirement, it was Adams who wrote to Jefferson saying it is time that we make up and be friends again. And they did. And Jefferson responded to it very warmly, and they began a correspondence that lasted through to the ends of their lives. That's one of the most wonderful treasures of letters between two very important Americans.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Julie Miller took me through some of the correspondence they have at the Library of Congress between Adams and Jefferson once both of them had retired. And she points out how much, even in their old age, they continued to debate these things that had happened during their presidencies. Here's Julie explaining some of their exchanges about the Alien and Acts, in particular.

JULIE MILLER: These were passed when Adams was president in 1798 and the context for this is this thing called the Quasi-War with France. In other words, during this period, England and France were at war, and there was a fear -- Americans had a fear -- which was not manifested, that France was going to invade the United States.

And in fact, Washington was called out of retirement to lead an army -- which he didn't. None of this happened, it didn't happen, but they were worried about it. So, it was in that context that, in particular, the Alien Acts were passed, all of which made it really hard for immigrants to settle in the United States. And the particular immigrants Adams, as president, was worried about were French immigrants. When Jefferson became president, in his inaugural address, he wrote, for example here: He wrote, “I cannot omit recommending a revisal of the laws” -- in other words, the Alien Acts – “on the subject of naturalization. Considering the ordinary chances of human life, a denial of citizenship under residents of 14 years…” -- in other words, the Naturalization Act said that you had to live in the country for 14 years before you could apply for citizenship. Then he says: “…shall oppress humanity by no asylum on this globe.”

So Jefferson is saying, you know, we really shouldn't have these Alien Acts that are unfriendly to French refugees because these are people fleeing from the Terror, and we really should harbor

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 3 them. But then here, many years later -- 1813 -- Adams, responding to very mean things that Jefferson said about Adams at the time, Adams reminds Jefferson, he says: “We were then at war with France. French spies swarmed in our cities and in the country. Some of them were intolerably turbulent, impudent and seditious. To check these was the design of this law. Was there ever a government which had not authority to defend itself against spies in its own bosom? Spies have an enemy in war.” So they're arguing, years later, about these issues that had been meaningful to them.

What's interesting also about it is it's a whole series of letters. Adams's tone is, I think, sometimes really, really funny. So again, 1812, Adams writes to Jefferson. He writes: “You and Mr. Madison had as good a right to your opinions as I had to mine and I must acknowledge the nation was with you. But neither your authority nor that of the nation has convinced me. Nor, I am bold to pronounce, will convince posterity.”

So he did not mince words. But then I think really very touchingly in another letter, written around the same time, he writes -- he writes another letter where he's complaining and he's arguing and he writes: “You may expect many more expostulations from one who has loved and esteemed you for eight and 30 years.” It's really very touching.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I asked David McCullough how he thought this dynamic relationship between the two of them, really over the course of their lives, influenced them, their thinking and their presidencies.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Well I'm sure that Jefferson envied Adam's ability to get into the fight -- "to get into the arena" -- as would say. He just didn't have that as part of his nature. And I'd like to think that Jefferson also realized the hypocrisy of the whole slave system. “All men are created equal,” he wrote. And there he is living on the labors of people that he owns and sells like they were part of his livestock. And I'm sure that, in a way, Jefferson must have envied Adams -- the fact that he had grown up and was raised on the exactly opposite outlook on life -- that nobody should be the master over another or own slaves. Nobody should do that.

We forget how many people were opposed to slavery well before the Civil War. This was an issue right at the heart of the beginning, and the two of them personified the differences there. Adams was always seeing things in the long run, which comes from a sense of history. Because you can see backward, you can also see forward to what's the best -- the right -- decision for the country in the long run.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: John Adams lives to be 90 years old, and he dies at his home in Quincy, Massachusetts, on the Fourth of July. And not just any Fourth of July -- the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And then there's something even more remarkable. dies on the very same day, only a few hours before Adams.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: If you put that in the novel, nobody would believe it. Your editor would tell you to take it out. How can -- how in the world could that happen? But it did happen. And the truth is often far more extraordinary than fiction.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That brings us forward to present day Washington, D.C., where the looms commandingly over the cherry blossoms and the . Adams once predicted that “monuments will never be erected to me,” and so far he's been mostly right.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 4 A John is nowhere to be found in D.C.

JULIE MILLER: You know, I think he wasn't remembered nearly as well as the other early presidents. And I think it's because he had a very hard time. He had a single term as president. And he spent it, in a sense, struggling to keep the United States out of the war. And he passed these very unpopular , which we know it was felt at the time -- and I think people still feel -- were a mistake. Really a mistake. And he was personally difficult. You know, he didn't get along that well with people. But it was also understand that he was very brilliant, very dedicated, very patriotic.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: It's involved with several things. First of all, the Party vanished. We don't have a lot of Federalists around who would love to see Adams given his due recognition. You have to have a constituency to get Congress to really do something about the memory of a particular person. And there is no great John Adams constituency that will go out and march and try to lobby Congress to do something to justify this glaring omission.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: While there may not be a huge constituency, it turns out there is an effort underway to get an Adams memorial in D.C. There's a group called the Adams Memorial Foundation, which is mostly made up of family descendants of Adams. And in 2001 they got authorization by the Congress to move forward with a plan for a monument.

What that authorization means is basically that they have seven years to go through all the steps to get a building permit for a memorial. Well, they didn't do that in the first seven years they had. And so the authorization expired and then it was renewed again, and then it expired, and it was renewed again. So, it's currently on its third authorization and they have until the year 2020 to go through all of these steps for the permit. So I talked with 's art and architecture critic here, Philip Kennicott, to figure out what exactly is holding things up.

He did some digging, and he said it just doesn't look to be a very active project. Their tax forms seemed to show that they haven't yet raised anywhere near the amount of money that they need for a monument. They also don't seem to have a location yet, which is particularly tricky since D.C. is essentially not allowing new monuments along the .

PHILIP KENNICOTT: It seems that the efforts to create an Adams memorial have been kind of concurrent with a greater complexity of the memorial-making process in Washington. It's always been hard. It's always been contested. But in the past years and decades, there's been a feeling that Washington is full of memorials, at least at the center of Washington -- what we call the ‘monumental core.’ And in fact there's actually been legislative action to say that the monumental core of Washington is a substantially completed work of civic art. Translated, what that means is it's kind of done, down by the mall.

This was sort of a sad case, in a way, especially if you like the Adams family. It's sad not to see them memorialized, but it's also -- it would've been an interesting memorial. Because unlike previous memorials, it really wasn't designated to be just about John Adams, the Founding Father. It was really about Adams and the Adams family legacy. So, in the authorizing legislation, they mention not only his son Adams, but his great-grandson , the great 19th century writer. And that would have made, I think, for a really interesting design challenge for a contemporary architect, because it's not about celebrating a single figure -- or even a single political figure -- but celebrating the legacy of accomplishment that the family had over decades.

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And I think the notion of an Adams family memorial -- looking down the generations at not just the political accomplishment, not just the leadership on the issue of abolition, but the literary accomplishment -- that could really bring forward new ideas that we haven't seen. And so, I might actually squelch my usual reticence about wanting new memorials and say this could be a fun project that would be a really interesting challenge to the typologies of Washington memorials.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Kirk Savage is a professor at the University of and the author of the book "Monument Wars." He's one of the country's leading experts on public monuments and spaces. So, I decided to also ask him what he thought the value of an Adams memorial might be.

KIRK SAVAGE: I think the relationship of Adams to slavery would be a really, really key part of the memorial. You know, you have to make them relevant to what's happening today, and the whole issue of slavery has been so overlooked in the monuments on the Mall, for the most part. It's really misleading in the Jefferson Memorial, for example. The Jefferson Memorial sort of makes him look like an abolitionist, when he was actually a huge slaveholder. The also was limited in how it could deal with the issue of slavery; and the , of course, doesn't at all.

So, I think, especially now, since we're really beginning to deal with this legacy in a different way -- we're looking at the relationship of slavery to Black Lives Matter and other issues that are really current right now -- I would figure out some way to try to make that a leading issue in the memorial, because that's what's going to really make it come alive for people. The fact that he was a great man and did this or that, or did some things we don't like, like the Sedition Acts, is less relevant. I mean, that's more for academic historians to parse out. But using him as a kind of lens on the issue of slavery in the founding of the nation would be really interesting.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So what's the likelihood we might actually see a John Adams memorial?

PHILIP KENNICOTT: Well, they have time, but they're going to have to make a huge organizational effort. You know, the tax forms that I've seen suggest they're not bringing in a lot of money -- certainly nothing on the scale that it's going to take not just to build a memorial, which we're talking dozens of millions even over 100 million depending on what you plan, but to have in place the people to do this. You have to have really skilled Washington rainmakers to get through the process. I mean, there are environmental statements, there are historical issues. Simply putting together an office and knowing how to negotiate all the various committees and commissions that you have to go through -- that takes a lot of expertise. And at this point, they don't seem to be anywhere near getting that kind of assault on this project underway.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Given all the money and time and red tape it takes to get a monument, it seems worth asking the question whether the effort is worth it. And what's really the power today of a huge stone edifice to someone?

KIRK SAVAGE: I think most people don't really remember very much from their history books, from textbooks. But they do really remember what they see, especially on the Mall in Washington. You visit it, and you have a very clear kind of mental map of what the main monuments are there. So I think this is really significant -- not so much for the facts that are represented there, but more for which figures or which events we set aside as being important; you know, which people are really valued and remembered, which ones aren't.

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Those kinds of things, in a way, sort of shape people's sense of history. They really produce history by making those decisions. And often those decisions are really haphazard, but people don't know that. They don't know necessarily one person has a monument and another person doesn't for very odd . But the net result of it is that we have a landscape that honors certain people and certain things and doesn't others. And that really shapes the sense of what the nation is.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What's really interesting to me in talking with Philip Kennicott, was that I learned it's actually quite surprising we have any big monuments in D.C. at all. George Washington initially worked with the French civil engineer Pierre L'Enfant to plan the city of Washington, D.C. They mapped out the grid of streets, the long green space of the National Mall where the White House would go, where the Capitol building would go. In all of these ways, it had sort of the design and feel of a European city. But there was one way in which they did not want it to be European. And that was this American sense that we did not want the European of grand monuments.

PHILIP KENNICOTT: All the forces, all the winds are against the idea of making memorials. There's a feeling in the 18th century that you remember people through their words and through their deeds and through their actions. You remember them through a kind of process of living memory in history. So, not only is there a sense that monuments made out of are outdated, but that they're also dangerous -- that they celebrate the cult of a single person, that they elevate the meaning of somebody's accomplishments above the masses; they're a relic of authoritarian rule, and we shouldn't do that; or if we do it, we should make really, really simple ones -- just a plaque on the ground or a simple stone marker.

If we're looking at the current state of how we memorialize and how we build monuments today from the perspective of someone who was sitting in one of those Congresses in the early 19th century, they will find our moment today really corrupt. They'd say, 'Look, you've totally forgotten the notion that you want these things to live through history. You want people to be educated about their history; to understand, to read the words of the person. And to build a memorial is a corruption of that notion.’

What's happened in a very bizarre way is that we now use memorials to teach. So we don't even expect people to come to the memorial with that understanding of the importance that somebody in the early 19th century felt was absolutely central to perpetuating history. We build the thing and then put interactive screens and a lot of text panels, and we have brochures in bookstores. So the memorial has kind of merged with the museum function. Now there's a real urgency about building them because, frankly, of a failure of civic education. So now the feeling is that we have to build these things really as a defense against forgetting.

There are other reasons: To be a little bit more cynical, basically political partisanship. You know, when a president leaves office -- we live in contentious times -- his legacy is up for grabs. People have to keep contesting him. They keep having to fight and say, 'No this is what this really means.' A monument literally fixes things in stone. If you say something in stone, you put it beyond argument.

With somebody like Washington, that wasn't a problem because there was essentially universal agreement of what his accomplishments were and what they meant and that he was a great man and why. But there aren't that many figures like Washington, certainly not Jefferson. I mean

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 7 there's a lot of stuff to argue with in Jefferson's past. So the more text you add, the more explanation, the more educative the memorial comes, the more definitive things you're saying about that person -- in a sense the more things you're setting in stone that you'd rather be still in argument.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Monuments, of course, are far from the only art form that has been used to cement presidential legacy. We see legacy building all around us in presidential libraries and photography and paintings. The usefulness of each of these art and architecture forms, though, of course changes somewhat as the times themselves change.

PHILIP KENNICOTT: It's still not uncommon for an old-fashioned portrait to be painted. And there's something sort of charming and quaint about that. But I don't think anybody believes that the painted portrait is a means to control the image of the person anymore. That's gone.

What I find interesting about Obama's presidency is that he's often criticized -- and praised -- for doing a lot more appearances within popular culture, like going on the late-night talk shows. People will say, 'Oh well that's not presidential.' Other people will say that humanizes the man, that brings him closer. Political strategists will say this is a way of bypassing the filters of the mainstream media, getting the president in front of a friendly audience and thus controlling and projecting an image.

All of that's probably true, but it also strikes me that there's something canny about this that has to do with legacy. Because if you think forward, say, 20, 25, 30 years -- whether it's YouTube or some successor medium to YouTube -- very likely the first clips that come up when you search his name are not going to be the address or a press conference. They're going to be those appearances in popular culture. And given that we are only progressing more and more toward media celebrity entertainment culture, that's where memory is going to cluster.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So it's possible that a television series to John Adams might actually have done much more to revive his memory than a huge monument in D.C. could ever do. Still, it'll be interesting to see if he does ultimately get his place among the other monuments along the National Mall.

While this is the end of the road for the John Adams podcast, It's not all over for the Adams family. In a few short weeks, we'll be talking about his son: .

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