In celebration of John Adams’s 289th birthday, Jeffrey Rosen joins a discussion on Adams’s legacy with Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, and Jane Kamensky, president and CEO of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Kurt Graham, president of the Adams Presidential Center, moderates. They explore the constitutional legacy of the Adams family—including John and Abigail Adams and John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Adams—and discuss the importance of resurrecting the Adams family’s tradition of self-mastery and self-improvement to defend the American Idea. This conversation was originally aired at the Adams Presidential Center as part of the 2024 Adams Speaker Series.
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Today’s episode was produced by Bill Pollock. It was engineered by the Adams Presidential Center and Bill Pollock. Thanks to the Adams Presidential Center for sharing the audio for this program.
Participants
Danielle Allen is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University. She is also director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Democratic Knowledge Project-Learn, a research lab focused on civic education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is a professor of political philosophy, ethics, and public policy.
Kurt Graham joined the Adams Presidential Center as its inaugural president on Oct. 15, 2024. Previous to joining the APC, Graham was the director of the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Mo. As director, he oversaw a $30M renovation of the principal museum exhibits and dramatically expanded the library’s educational and public programming. He has also directed the McCracken Research Library at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyo., and the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City. He is the author of To Bring Law Home: The Federal Judiciary in Early National Rhode Island (Northern Illinois University Press, 2010).
Jane Kamensky serves as the president and CEO of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the private nonprofit that owns and operates Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in Charlottesville, Va. For 30 years, Kamensky worked as a professor and higher education leader. Before joining Monticello, she served as Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University and Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. In her years as director of the Schlesinger Library, Kamensky successfully worked to raise the profile of the library to the most preeminent of its kind in the world by partnering with an international network of diverse scholars and thought leaders.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center. Rosen is also a professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic. His most recent book is The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.
Additional Resources
- Jeffrey Rosen,The Pursuit of Happiness (2024)
- Jane Kamensky, The Colonial Mosaic: American Women 1600-1760 (1998)
- Danielle Allen, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (2014)
Excerpt from the Interview: Jane Kamensky highlights Adams and Jefferson's contrasting visions, political rift, and eventual reconciliation, symbolizing the importance of unity through dialogue.
Jane Kamensky: Jefferson didn't enter the equation until the following spring, at the Second Continental Congress in 1775, but from the beginning, Adams is quite dazzled by the differences between the New Englanders and the Virginians, right, the Virginians come in their coach in six, they're much more high-toned people, they're high church and not low church, they have different kinds of cosmopolitanism than Massachusetts does. Gordon Wood, the great historian Gordon Wood, calls Adams and Jefferson the North and South Poles of the American Revolution, and I think one of the interesting things about considering them together, and Monticello is doing this in a concerted way in a special tour for 1775 and 1776, is you see what's missing from both by looking at them against each other.
So the North Pole is a cold place, right, and the North Pole has one kind of highly unstable hierarchy, a hierarchy mostly of what we would call class, what they would have called rank and condition. The South has a highly unstable but seemingly secure hierarchy around race. So Jefferson is the great Democrat because he doesn't really worry about social mobility around the people who count as subjects and potentially as citizens, Adams worries a great deal about social mobility because his own rank is recent and unstable, and he's looking at those Olivers and Bradfords and others. They both come from a world of hierarchies that are cracking apart, and they're thinking about how you build a new polity that is more horizontal from a world that is highly vertical, right, and a world in which the colonies have come out. There's a family analogy that is pervasive in the 18th century. The king is the head, the father is the head, the family are the limbs, and the colonies have come to think of themselves as the trodden under feet of this collapsing colonial hierarchy in 1774 and 1775.
Adams and Jefferson have radically aligned views about what needs to happen vis-a-vis Great Britain, but once they affect that separation, they very quickly have different views of what the country should look like. They're both institutionalists in different ways, but I think Jefferson trusts the people as he imagines them being constituted, and Adams has a profound distrust of the people, right, distrusts elections, distrusts open competition for offices. Adams trusts Britain as the exemplar for the path that the United States should follow, commercial, industrial, eastward facing. Jefferson will not, even in the 1790s, get off the train with the French Revolution, right, like he trusts in the idea of republicanism.
Their correspondence, there are about 1,200 plus letters in all, you probably have the exact numbers, their correspondence touches on every feature of American conditions as they're emerging. They famously fell out in the late 1790s with Jefferson's contest for election as president of the United States in 1800, and didn't speak for 11 years. 11, you know, the competing visions of the United States have come to seem so contentious that part of the revolutionary band of brothers, two-fifths of the drafting committee for the Declaration of Independence can no longer speak, and at Monticello, we're leaning into the telling of that story of coming apart, what is partisanship that does this to friends, how do we organize our differences without losing our civic friendships, but then also leaning into the hopefulness of their coming back together, brokered by the great republican theorist, anti-slavery activist, physician Benjamin Rush.
They're coming back together and exploring only on paper, and I think there's a lesson for us in that, in the slowness of the transmission of ideas, where they've been and where they and the country have been and where they and the country can go. There's an incredibly poignant line in one of Adams' late letters, and it seems characteristic of Adams that in their resumed correspondence, three-quarters of it is Adams to Jefferson. It's his rotundity, you know, knocking at the door of the sage of the mountain, where Adams says, we ought not to die without explaining ourselves to each other. And I think there's a line, that's a sign of where we were and where we are. We ought not to die without explaining ourselves to each other. So a story that is earnest and real, that is brutal at times. They miss each other for crucial moments of their lives, but the coming back together and the thinking that the we is worth more than the I is a story to lean into.
Excerpt from Interview: Danielle Allen argues that the Educating for American Democracy Roadmap improves K-12 civics education by balancing ideological divides and emphasizing "constitutional democracy."
Danielle Allen: There's a whole story to tell here in our theme of storytelling about the Educating for American Democracy roadmap and to explain what it is and why this conversation about what are we educating kids for anyway? What do we live in, a democracy or a republic? Why does that conversation matter? So the Educating for American Democracy Roadmap is a framework for excellence in history and civic learning for all learners, grades K-12. And it was released in March 2021, funded by the National Endowment for Humanities and the US Department of Education under both the Trump and the Biden administrations. And that's very unusual. I bet you can register that. But it's a very important part of the work that a group of 300 scholars, educators, practitioners from across the country came together across all lines of difference, so demographic background, regional expertise, and political viewpoint, with the goal of answering the question of what should our kids learn? This is a question that as a society we haven't been able to answer for generations. And when the adults can't answer the question, what should the kids learn, the kids don't get to learn. It's as simple as that. There was a very weighty responsibility to figure out how to break through our polarization to answer that question.
And what the roadmap does is it's got sort of seven thematic areas and then sets of questions. So it's not answers so much, it's not lists of things kids should know, but it is lists of the questions all kids should have the chance to encounter in their history and social studies classes over time. But you might well ask, how on earth did anybody manage to do something that was supported by both the Trump and the Biden administration? Were you wondering that? A little bit? And the answer to that is that we started out, before we became a group of 300, we started out as a group of six and built ourselves from the get-go to have that ideological diversity in our mix. We said to each other, look, Jane was a member of this group, so we're both telling the same story here, and Louise and Peter, who are here, are also members of that group. We said to ourselves, we have an incredibly important purpose here. Kids are not getting the opportunity for civic learning that they deserve. And so although we disagree, and although we're gonna build a group with a lot of disagreement in it, we're gonna just link arms and commit to getting this work done. That means when we hit something we disagree about, we're stop. We wrestle it through until we figure out a compromise. We're not gonna have paper over disagreements.
So we'd been working for about two weeks when we hit our first roadblock. Is this thing a democracy or a republic? It was exactly that question that was the first thing that we had to stop on and think about. And for historians, it can be a little frustrating because it's a bit of a red herring of a question. Yes, there's a distinction between direct democracy and representative democracy, but both terms, democracy and republic, were used at the founding. Both were used. Hamilton argued for the Constitution as a representative democracy in the New York Constitutional Conventions, ratification conventions. So both terms were used. But in Utah, It's a matter of state law that kids are taught that this is a republic, not a democracy. So there's really a real issue here, how to think about it. So exactly as Jane said, we sort of talked and talked and wrestled. I think it took us about two weeks to wrestle this through. We came to the recognition that for our colleagues on the right, the word republic communicates values of constitutionalism, rule of law, order, and structure. For our colleagues on the left, the word democracy communicates the values of universal inclusion, popular sovereignty, and full participation. So our compromise was constitutional democracy. That's what we educate kids for.
Excerpt from Interview: Jeffrey Rosen emphasizes the transformative power of deep reading, inspired by Jefferson’s rigorous reading schedule, for personal growth and understanding the founding principles.
Jeffrey Rosen: Just to echo both the observations about the Republic of Letters and the importance of deep reading, of course, foreign policy is central to John's presidency and his decision to make peace with Britain in the Jay Treaty, which lost him the election of 1800 was an example of principled moderation that saved the republic. And when he's over-engaging in his diplomacy, Quincy is accompanying him as a secretary, Abigail's worried that Quincy's checking out women in the streets, that he's not mastering his passions, but based on that, he becomes, of course, the great diplomat minister to St. Petersburg writes the Monroe Doctrine and views, America's global role is central to its domestic success. But Danielle puts it so well about just how inspiring their deep reading is. And I have to share that what got me into this project of trying to figure out what the founders meant by the pursuit of happiness was discovering an amazing reading list that Jefferson would send to anyone who asked him when he was old, how to be educated, kids who are going to law school or adults. And it's inspiring both 'cause of the range of the reading and the schedule that he prescribes. The range is international and it's in French and Greek and Roman, and its moral philosophy and political philosophy and science and novels.
But the schedule is even more striking. You have to get up before dawn, read moral philosophy for two hours, watch the sunrise, read Locke and Sidney and political philosophy until lunch, then ancient history and light science, then dinner, then you're allowed some Shakespeare and poetry then to bed 12 hours a day, seven days a week. And it was that reading list that inspired me to do this crazy reading project during Covid, where I tried to follow the Jefferson schedule. And got up every morning before sunrise, read the moral philosophy, wrote sonnets after watching the sunrise. It was this crazy kind of project. And then it turns out that Quincy Adams wrote sonnets too. There's something in the air. But I'm saying this in a serious way, 'cause the takeaway for the project for me was rediscovering the transformative power of deep reading 'cause I'd fallen out of the habit of reading 'cause I'm so addicted to these screens like everyone else.
And just the unexpected discipline and habit and practice of getting up every morning and reading changed my life and changed my understanding of the founding and how to be a good person and a good citizen. And since this project, I have a new rule that I can't browse or surf in the morning until I read for a half hour or an hour.
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