In 1993, when it grappled with fundamental questions the state’s educational finance system, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court used language from the state’s more than 200-year old constitution as the basis for a groundbreaking decision that forced the state to give much more aid to its poorest cities and towns. That clause was written by John Adams, who because he was born on October 30, 1735, is the focus of today’s #stampoftheday.
The language, which Adams drafted and (as best scholars can tell) was adopted with little or no edits, is a bit dense for my contemporary tastes so here’s an edited version. The state constitution states: “wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people [are] necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties.” It continues by noting that “these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people.”
Therefore, the document explains, “it shall be the duty” of the state legislature and the governor “to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them; especially the university at Cambridge, [and the] public schools and grammar schools in the towns.”
Doing so, the constitution asserts would not only advance “agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufacture” but also “inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality…sincerity, good humour,…and generous sentiments among the people.”
Like many people who hadn’t followed the case closely, I was surprised by Adam’s central role in the decision. I grew up learning that Adams was a somewhat pompous and difficult man, who had done some decent things in Massachusetts, been vice-president under Washington, served one term after Washington, before he was defeated by Jefferson in a bitter campaign. In short, he was a backbencher on the team of all-star Founding Fathers.
Adams’ poor reputation is illustrated by the fact that today’s stamp, which was issued in 1938, was the first time he appeared on a US stamp. Before that time, numerous stamps had featured George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, as well as Ben Franklin, the country’s first postmaster general. But by 1938, lots of less notable presidents also had appeared on stamps. A series issued in the late 1920s and early 1930s, for example, included stamps that pictured such notable luminaries as Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, and Warren G. Harding.
Although the Massachusetts court decision reminded people of Adams, his reputation really took off after David McCullough published a laudatory biography in 2001. McCullough initially set out to write a dual biography of Adams and Jefferson, two men who had both worked together to secure America’s independence and then had a bitter falling out before ultimately having a powerful reconciliation before they both died on July 4 1826. When he started, he McCullough was afraid that Adams could not hold his own when compared with Jefferson. But over time, his concern shifted to asking whether Jefferson could stand up to Adams. The contrast was so great that in the end, he wrote only about Adams, who comes across as a central and principled person who remained true to his values and morals while Jefferson did not.
As McCullough documents Adams’ had an extraordinary and important impact. Jefferson, for example, said he ‘the colossus of independence,” the delegate most responsible for the Continental Congress’s adopting independence in 1776. Adams was a key diplomat for the US during and after the Revolutionary War. While he wasn’t in Philadelphia when the Constitution was written, the US Constitution drew heavily on the work he had done in drafting Massachusetts’ constitution.
Still, he could be difficult to work with. Franklin, for example, said “he means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.” Adams admitted as much in his old age when he recalled that when he was president “I refused to suffer in silence. I sighed, sobbed, and groaned, and sometimes screeched and screamed. And I must confess to my shame and sorrow that I sometimes swore.” But he also contended, “Thanks to God that he gave me stubbornness when I know I am right.”
Adams also was a realist about human nature whose observations are oddly timely. “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion,” he once warned. “Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
For McCullough, what’s most striking is that Adams and his contemporaries understood human nature but were able to rise above it. As he explained in a 2005 lecture, “those who wrote the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia that fateful summer of 1776 were not superhuman by any means. Every single one had his flaws, his failings, his weaknesses. Some of them ardently disliked others of them. Every one of them did things in his life he regretted. But the fact that they could rise to the occasion as they did, these imperfect human beings, and do what they did is also, of course, a testimony to their humanity.”
He then added, “there’s a line in one of the letters written by John Adams where he’s telling his wife Abigail at home, ‘We can’t guarantee success in this war, but we can do something better. We can deserve it.’ Think how different that is from the attitude today when all that matters is success, being Number One, getting ahead, getting to the top. However you betray or gouge or claw or do whatever awful thing is immaterial if you get to the top. That line in the Adams letter is saying that how the war turns out is in the hands of God. We can’t control that, but we can control how we behave. We can deserve success.”
Hopefully, in this challenging time, we, like Adams, can find the courage to rise above our limitations and meet the daunting challenge of our time.
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.