Plodding through the Presidents: John Adams

Showing posts with label John Adams. Show all posts

John Adams and Hamilton's Superabundance of Secretions

And What Makes Men Terrible

In one letter from 1806, John Adams manages to level his greatest insult at Alexander Hamilton at the same time he shares a bizarre medical theory about why men like Hamilton go mad with power.

The Senator Who Hated John Adams’s Stupid Face

William Maclay was a hater.

Only one diary survives from the United States’ first Congress, and it’s a gold mine of shade. Pennsylvania Senator William Maclay provided detailed firsthand accounts of the day-to-day struggles of the Senate’s first years in New York City, and multiple references to how much he hated Vice President John Adams and everything about him.

What the First 5 Presidents Taught Me About Raising My Newborn Daughter

3 presidential lessons that made fatherhood slightly less terrifying

I’m five books into my quest to read a biography of every president in chronological order. I’ve read about Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and I’m finishing up Monroe now. My already slow progress ground to a halt six weeks ago when my wife and I welcomed our first child, Emerson Paige, into the world.

Now instead of learning about the Jay Treaty and the War of 1812, I’m reading What to Expect in the First Year and asking the internet stuff like "newborn eyes roll back in head normal?" (normal).

The reading and blogging part of me must adapt as I acclimate to this new world of sleep deprivation, diapers, feedings, and a surreal sense of disbelief and awe that this beautiful creature is here to stay and my identity and priorities must shift. Forever.

Stealing moments as both daughter and mother sleep to write this, I reflected on the lessons I gleaned from the first five presidents that I’m applying to raising my newborn daughter – the do’s and don’ts of what it means to be a father of 8 pounds of an utterly dependent micro-human waiting to be shaped by my love and neuroses.

These are the 3 main lessons I’ve learned.

1. Be there.

It’s getting easy to be there when she’s making eye contact or showing early attempts to smile, or sleeping in my arms. It’s harder to be there when she’s wailing at the top of her lungs, spitting up like some kind of milk volcano, or writhing in gassy pain when we just want her to sleep. Those are the times I want to tap out and pass her to mommy or any halfway trustworthy-looking stranger nearby.

Reading about the early presidents was more of a lesson in what not to do when it came to being there for my daughter. The first presidents (except Washington and Madison who had no children of their own but both had disappointing stepsons) spent much of their pre-presidential years in Europe as ambassadors and diplomats. That meant missing out on much of the formative years of their young children's lives.

John Adams spent years in Europe away from his family. The son he took with him, John Quincy, went on to become president and lived to 80. The son he spent less time with, Charles, died of alcoholism at 30. I wonder what difference it would have made if John had been there alongside Abigail to steer Charles in the right direction. Those sons seem like extreme ends of the stick, and I’d like to think there’s a happy medium in there somewhere that will allow my daughter to be a successful social drinker.

After serving in France for years, Thomas Jefferson finally brought his 9-year-old daughter Polly over to join him and she didn’t even recognize him. The poor girl was torn from her home against her will, put on a boat for weeks, and finally delivered to a man she didn’t know. As painful as that was for her, I wonder how Jefferson felt when they reunited and he saw no love in her eyes. I understand service to one's country still separates families, but I could never handle being a stranger to my child.

I started thinking being apart from your young children was normal, essential even, if you wanted to be politically successful in the early 1800s. Then I read about James Monroe. Even though he was sent to Europe multiple times, he always brought his wife and daughter with him – where he went, they went, as a family. He gives me hope that work-life balance is achievable for my wife and I who want to be equal parents and providers.

Monroe also died penniless after a lifetime of public service and needed his children's help to support himself at the end. So the real takeaway for us might be Be there...and have a 401(k).

2. Learn to love poop.

American farmers like George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson were among the first to use manure as fertilizer. They knew its value, and fully understood the dung concoction was something to be studied, cultivated, and revered. John Adams even had a recipe for it in his diary. If I still lived in the Midwest with easy access to all the ingredients, I might have tried to recreate it in an attempt to copy the model of the popular Julie & Julia blog.

It involved freezing over the winter and thawing it in the spring – this recipe was serious shit.

I've recently learned the value and variety of newborn poop. The dark horror came upon us immediately, in the hospital. Most babies have one or two “meconium” stools their first day – a black, tarry substance that’s the product of swallowing amniotic fluid in the womb. My daughter had eight. Eight. Her bowels expelled enough tarry goop to trap a family of wooly mammoths for millennia. She must have passed through the vaginal canal like Pacman, gulping the whole way down.

Now I've learned to have a love-hate relationship with her poop. Once the maternity nurses showed me how, changing her diapers was one of the few times I actually knew what to do with her in those first days; my purpose was as clear as her diapers were soiled. It's actually a relief now to open those Pampers and see a big load because it means she's digesting her food and growing and thriving, and her awful gas pain has a real, solvable cause.

When George Washington was looking for a farm manager, he said he wanted “above all, Midas like, one who can convert everything he touches into manure, as the first transmutation towards Gold.” My newborn definitely has that Midas touch, but her poop doesn’t look like gold. On the best of days, it looks like basil pesto. On the worst of days, it looks like basil pesto sprayed five feet across the room. She's too young to draw pictures or make macaroni art; poop is all she has to give at this point and she's incredibly generous.

3. Read.

We may get through this biography project sooner than I thought.

The Founding Fathers weren’t born with the innate ability to lead men or found a country. Carving a successful republic out of a monarchy was a new and momentous endeavor, but they weren't flying completely blind. They were extremely well-read on the subjects of Greek, Roman, and English government and Enlightenment philosophy which guided the Constitution. They took advantage of the vast body of knowledge already out there and let it inform their decisions.

Parenting should be approached the same way.

I know (and I’ve heard a million times) that no book can prepare you for what it’s like having a baby. You don't say? I’ve had books that were so good they kept me up at night, but that was on my terms, not at random intervals for weeks straight sucking out my soul.

Obviously real-life experience is different from the advice and warnings you read about, but books have armed me and my wife with knowledge that gives us an inkling of what's normal and helped us form some kind of plan. There is no “what feels right” in the moment when everything is tortuous and you're plagued with deranged insecurity. You can go ahead and wing it, but I’m diving headfirst into Harvey Karp's 5 S's of calming a crying baby and binge-read babycenter.com. Even if our eat-play-sleep plan is literally shit all over by our strong-willed baby, it helps us feel a little less helpless.

All the books in the world won't stop us from making our own mistakes with our poopy little nation-state, but I'd like to avoid some mistakes other people already made. I know my wife and I aren't founding a country, but we’re raising a human being and sometimes it feels like the same thing.

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8 Things John Adams Loved

As I read these presidential biographies, I try to understand each man by discovering what drove him. Then I try to recreate those things with toys, because that's what drives me.

These are 8 things John Adams loved.

#1

He was the “father of the navy” and a leading voice in the war for independence, but deep down, John Adams was a peace-loving hippie. He loved peace so much he referred to his diplomatic notes from Europe as his “peace journal” and he named his farm “Peace Field.”

As much as he loved peace, the country was being sucked into war during his presidency. The final straw was known as the XYZ Affair. France demanded bribes from US ambassadors to restart diplomatic relations after the French Revolution – X, Y, and Z were the codenames for the French extortionists. This insult riled up America's hatred for France, and Adams was never more popular than when he was making a strong case for war against the French Republic.

But he threw it all away when he took a chance to negotiate without bloodshed. Avoiding a devastating war is now seen as one of the best things he ever did, but back then his supposed flip-flop sent him packing after one term, right back to his Peace Field.

#2

What did this dirty hippie grow in his Peacefield? Hemp, of course.

"Hemp is a Plant of great Importance in the Arts..." -John Adams

He added, “and Manufactories, as it furnishes a great Variety of Threads, Cloths, and Cordage” but it’s a much better soundbite if you don’t read the whole sentence. Fabric and rope are great and all, but I'd like to imagine the often-prescient John Adams was talkin' 'bout rock and roll.

There is actually zero evidence that Adams smoked marijuana, but he was a huge proponent of hemp and wrote about its uses and intricate cultivation process: “When it has been well beaten, it must be heckled, or passed thro a toothed Instrument…to seperate the shorter Tow, from that which is fit to be spun.” Adams knew that if you wanted good hemp, you had to physically assault and ridicule it.

#3

If not stoned, John Adams may have at least started each day with a nice buzz. He drank a tankard of cider every morning and often wrote about how he missed it when he couldn’t get it. This wasn’t Mott’s Apple Cider, either. We’re talking the hard stuff. Cider was more popular and available than beer at the time and safer to drink than water, which contained harmful bacteria.

Still, this was what he did in the morning. Why would he stop there? After breakfast it was 5 o'clock somewhere so he probably broke into his favorite Madeira wine. I don't know how anyone got anything done back then.

The constant drinking would be comical if it weren't for the fact that John's son Charles died of alcoholism at age 30. Maybe having booze for breakfast every day doesn't set the best example. Then again, his other son John Quincy went on to become the sixth president of the United States and worked as a Congressman until his death at 80. John himself lived to 90.

I guess the moral of the story is that if you're going to drink something every day, you could do worse than cider.

#4

In vino veritas is Latin for “in wine, truth.” It might apply to cider too, since John Adams deeply valued truth and it flowed freely from his mouth and pen.

He considered “honesty, sincerity, and openness” to be “essential marks of a good mind,” and he believed men should “avow their opinions and defend them with boldness.” That belief perfectly captures the best and worst of John Adams, as he was a world-class avower of his opinions, both popular (George Washington should lead the Continental Army!) and unpopular (the president needs a fancy title like His Highness!).

His honesty and boldness made him a good friend and a fantastic political philosopher, but a pretty mediocre politician.

#5

John Adams looked at the margins of his beloved books the same way he probably looked at people taking a breath – as an opportunity to interject his thoughts. The books in his library are filled with his handwritten reactions to the authors, and some have more than a thousand of his own words added.

He treasured his volumes and the joy they brought him. During one of his many separations from his family, he wrote “But above all except the wife and children I want to see my books.”

But you can see the ^except the wife and children part was actually an afterthought. Nice save, John.

He once told his son, John Quincy, “You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.” That’s such a beautiful thought it inspires me to want to carry a book of poetry around. But then I remember I have an iPhone. You will also never be alone with a constant supply of cat videos.

#6

John Adams was a bookworm and an earthworm who didn’t mind getting his hands dirty. He didn’t have slaves to work his land; he worked his New England farm with his own hands and he loved it.

As a young boy, John hated school and told his father he wanted to be a farmer like him. His dad took him out to help cut thatch along the muddy creek. At the end of the hard day he asked John how he liked being a farmer. John answered, “I like it very well.” His father responded, “Aya, but I don’t like it so well, so you will go back to school today.” John said he went “but was not so happy as among the creek thatch.”

As an adult, his farm was his pride and joy. He mended fences, dug stumps, cut ditches, planted crops, and carted dung. Oh yeah, he loved manure – it was a relatively new fertilizer at the time and he wanted the best. He even wrote a recipe for it in his diary. Apparently good manure was only about 30% dung. I’ll spare you a picture of that.

#7

John Adams had a love-hate relationship with himself. Mostly, he hated that he loved himself so much. He called vanity his “cardinal vice and cardinal folly.” By vanity he meant pride and conceitedness, not his physical appearance. When he looked in the mirror he only saw weakness: “My Eye, my Forehead, my Brow, my Cheeks, my Lips, all betray this Relaxation.”

But he always saw a greatness within. In 1760 he predicted, “I never shall shine, till some animating Occasion calls forth all my Powers.” He was right, and in 1779 he wrote what has become my favorite quote of his:

“Some great events...have at Times, thrown this Assemblage of Sloth, Sleep, and littleness into Rage a little like a Lion.”

This quote makes me identify with John Adams on a deeper level than I ever thought possible. I want to start a band called Assemblage of Sloth and play a cover of Katy Perry's Roar dedicated to John Adams. Then I want to start another band (a side project) and call it Rage a Little Like a Lion, and we would play the same song, only... faster. That is how much I love this quote.

#8

More than his manuscripts, his marijuana, his manure, and his own mighty mind, John Adams loved his "Miss Adorable," Abigail.

Abigail Adams served as a lover, supporter, confidant, adviser, and calming influence on her tempestuous husband. “You who have always softened and warmed my Heart,” he told her, “shall restore my Benevolence as well as my Health and Tranquility of mind.” She made him a better man.

He once wrote to her, “You bid me burn your Letters. But I must forget you first.” John did not burn her letters – he preserved more than a thousand of their exchanges, ensuring future generations would know what an intelligent and amazing woman she was.

On a personal note, I'd like to think I know how John felt. My own heart-softening wife, Jess, is my confidant and the calmer of my storms. I love her like John loved Abigail, and I'm thrilled she'll be my partner in raising the little girl we’re expecting later this year.

Together those two ladies will surely make this assemblage of sloth and sleep roar.

Sources: John Adams by David McCullough
http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/

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