Who's Your Founder?

[unrepentant progress]

Excellent post from historian Robin Marie on the curious pole vault to popularity of John Adams.

Of course, the how of the rise of Adams is pretty easy to answer. In 2001, David McCullough published the succinctly titled John Adams, a book that went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. (Hilariously, I have this distinct memory of being in the same bookstore I later bought Founding Brothers in and seeing McCullough’s book and thinking dismissively, “John Adams? Who cares about John Adams?!”) Seven years later, the seven-part miniseries based on the book aired on HBO. A critical success, John Adams brought into the limelight a previously fairly obscure figure in a manner substantially more thoughtful and textured than any such previous treatment of a “founding father,” rocketing Adams to the top of founding father stardom and stimulating an emerging cottage industry in books about him, his family, and his very touching and thus incredibly marketable relationship with Abigail. Indeed, surveying the answers my students provided me with, I couldn’t help but imagine that many of them who wrote down the names of Jefferson and Franklin or Adams did so because they either saw or indirectly encountered the scene in John Adams that depicts the three discussing Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration. (A scene that, incidentally, has to be one of the two most hilarious moments in the series, the other of which also involves Jefferson.)

But if this is the how of Adam’s rise to glory, the why is a bit trickier. What, indeed, was and is the big deal with John Adams? Whatever the arguments for his historical significance might be, they are certainly not new, and so the question of why he suddenly became so attractive, and so marketable, remains. I ask this question only intending to float one possible answer, and thus am very much hoping readers feel free to contribute their thoughts – because, other than the almost too easy and obvious reason, I’m really not sure.

And that reason is, of course, the downfall of Jefferson. Perhaps “downfall” is a little too dramatic, but suffice to say that the reputation and symbolic usefulness of the man certainly took quite a hit in recent decades. For it finally became abundantly, undeniably clear that Thomas Jefferson fathered many children with his slave Sally Hemings. After nearly two hundred years of skepticism, DNA evidence left everyone who had ever hedged their bet against the relationship being sexual (most famously in scholarly circles, Joseph Ellis’ own inaccurate instinct on the question) having to incorporate this new information. This revelation was particularly profound if, as myself, you consider the nature of the drastically unequal power dynamic between Jefferson and Hemings to be far more important in understanding their relationship than whatever personal dynamics may have passed between them – if in your eyes, in other words, Jefferson was revealed to be a rapist.

More: http://s-usih.org/2015/01/whos-your-founder.html

Also... Obligatory posting of "Sit down, John!"

[Bucky]

1. I'm still waiting for Gouverneur Morris to have his day in the sun

And after that Roger Sherman... the guy who outmaneuvered Madison at the Convention of 1787.

[unrepentant progress]

2. I've always been a Button Gwinnett fan myself :D