Jack Rakove says: Sorry, HBO. John Adams Wasn't That Much of a Hero.
[Mr. Rakove is a professor of history at Stanford.]
Here's one scene that did not make it into the epic HBO miniseries on the life of John Adams that ends tonight. It is June 23, 1775, and members of the Continental Congress accompany George Washington as he sets off to command the provisional army outside Boston. Adams rides along, then returns to his Philadelphia digs and writes in self-pity to his wife Abigail: I "must leave others to wear the Lawrells which I have sown; others to eat the Bread which I have earned -- A Common Case."
Coming at the zenith of the colonists' revolutionary fervor, two months after Lexington and Concord, this was a stunning statement. It was also classic Adams. At the very moment when selfless feelings of patriotism ran highest, he was already fretting about whether his countrymen and history would treat him fairly, whether his contributions to "the common cause" would be justly recognized.
This outburst of envy and self-doubt -- one among so many -- goes to the heart of our John Adams problem. Was Adams, as his admiring biographer David McCullough would have it, the one leading founder who has never received his due? Or was he his own worst enemy, succumbing to a temper and vanity unique among his contemporaries? HBO is keen to usher him into the canon, but Adams did a great deal to earn the devastating assessment that has trailed him ever since Benjamin Franklin first quipped it in 1783: "He means well for his Country, and is always an honest Man, often a Wise One, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses."
For Adams could not let that nagging sigh of '75 go. Fear that he was not getting the credit he was due was not a passing sensation but a virtual obsession. For Adams, politics was always deeply personal. Ten years earlier, he had called the Stamp Act "an execrable Project [that] was set on foot for my Ruin as well as that of America in General." Five years later, he began treating his diplomatic colleague Franklin as a vindictive rival plotting his political destruction. Though Adams mellowed a bit in his quarter-century retirement (1801-26), he left this earth -- famously dying on the 50th anniversary of independence, the same day as Jefferson -- fearing that history would do him wrong. Or, perhaps, remember him accurately....
Read entire article at WaPo
Here's one scene that did not make it into the epic HBO miniseries on the life of John Adams that ends tonight. It is June 23, 1775, and members of the Continental Congress accompany George Washington as he sets off to command the provisional army outside Boston. Adams rides along, then returns to his Philadelphia digs and writes in self-pity to his wife Abigail: I "must leave others to wear the Lawrells which I have sown; others to eat the Bread which I have earned -- A Common Case."
Coming at the zenith of the colonists' revolutionary fervor, two months after Lexington and Concord, this was a stunning statement. It was also classic Adams. At the very moment when selfless feelings of patriotism ran highest, he was already fretting about whether his countrymen and history would treat him fairly, whether his contributions to "the common cause" would be justly recognized.
This outburst of envy and self-doubt -- one among so many -- goes to the heart of our John Adams problem. Was Adams, as his admiring biographer David McCullough would have it, the one leading founder who has never received his due? Or was he his own worst enemy, succumbing to a temper and vanity unique among his contemporaries? HBO is keen to usher him into the canon, but Adams did a great deal to earn the devastating assessment that has trailed him ever since Benjamin Franklin first quipped it in 1783: "He means well for his Country, and is always an honest Man, often a Wise One, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses."
For Adams could not let that nagging sigh of '75 go. Fear that he was not getting the credit he was due was not a passing sensation but a virtual obsession. For Adams, politics was always deeply personal. Ten years earlier, he had called the Stamp Act "an execrable Project [that] was set on foot for my Ruin as well as that of America in General." Five years later, he began treating his diplomatic colleague Franklin as a vindictive rival plotting his political destruction. Though Adams mellowed a bit in his quarter-century retirement (1801-26), he left this earth -- famously dying on the 50th anniversary of independence, the same day as Jefferson -- fearing that history would do him wrong. Or, perhaps, remember him accurately....