Sometimes Absolutely Mad: The Maddest Things John Adams Ever Did

His 7 Biggest Blunders

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According to Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin described John Adams as “always an honest man, often a great one, but sometimes absolutely mad.”

Here are seven of the absolutely maddest things John Adams ever did.

1. Disagreeing with Ben Franklin…in Bed 

A great way to tell if someone’s crazy is to share a bed with them. In that respect, Ben Franklin was fully qualified to gauge John Adams’s level of madness.

One night in 1776 on their way to negotiate a possible peace with England, John Adams and Ben Franklin were forced to share a bed in a tiny room with one small window. Adams wanted the window closed, fearing the cold air would make them sick. Franklin insisted it stay open, spouting his previously published thoughts on how stagnant air between people in closed rooms is the real cause of sickness. Adams said Franklin’s “theory was so little consistent with my experience, that I thought it a Paradox.”

Eventually Adams gave in, opened the window, and jumped into bed to hear Franklin’s thoughts “upon air and cold and respiration and perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep.”

Thinking cold air caused colds wasn’t so crazy – it’s how the word got its name. But Adams was challenging the scientific beliefs of the man who harnessed the power of lightning. If Ben Franklin wants the window open, you leave the window open. Then you get back in bed and listen to the old man's thoughts on spooning.

  

2. Humble-Bragging from France

Before Facebook, it was harder to tell the world how awesome your life was by thinly veiling your boasts in phony humility. But John Adams found a way, through this simple process:

Step 1: Do something worth bragging about.

As a diplomat in France working to get France’s aid during the war, Adams went above and beyond his duties to procure a vital loan from Holland in 1782. This gave the fledgling United States international legitimacy and vital funds in the war effort. He had reason to be proud.

Step 2: Complain in your diary about something that really only highlights your greatness.

After his success in Holland, French officials who hardly gave Adams the time of day before were sucking up to him, trying to get inside information. In his private diary, he wrote, “French gentlemen…said that I had shown in Holland that Americans understand negotiation as well as war… Another said, ‘Monsieur, vous etes le Washington de la negociation.’ This is the last stroke. It is impossible to exceed this.”

He was basically saying, "can you believe how ridiculous it is that a silly French aristocrat said that I AM THE WASHINGTON OF NEGOTIATION!!!"

Step 3: “Accidentally” send those braggadocious diary pages to Congress.

Adams must have somehow hit Reply-All on his private journal, because those over-the-top French compliments made their way into a report he sent to Congress.

Few people realize that John Adams invented the humble-brag.

The "unintentional" humble-bragging backfired. Adams's diary pages were read aloud in Congress where he was mocked. He was the Washington of vanity.

3. Pushing for Fancy Titles

John Adams thought it was crucial for the president to have a high-status honorific, or title. As vice-president, he advocated that Washington be called “His Highness the President of the United States of America and Protector of the Rights of the Same.”

Washington atop The Iron Stainless Steel Throne

Jefferson called Adams’s proposal “the most superlatively ridiculous thing I ever heard of” and it earned Adams his own honorific, “His Rotundity.”

Representative John Page of Virginia penned this verse about Adams's haughty attitude during these debates:

I’ll tell in a trice-

‘Tis old Daddy Vice

Who carries of pride an ass-load;

Who turns up his nose,

Wherever he goes,

With vanity swelled like a toad.

Fun fact: This is one of the earliest known uses of the term “ass-load.” In my previous post I lamented that there were no words named after John Adams, but I'm glad to see he inspired others to expand the English language to new depths.

After an ass-load of debate, Congress put the kibosh on flashy executive titles. This is why today the highest officer in the United States is addressed as “Mr. President,” and the judge overseeing a traffic ticket in Los Angeles must be called “Your Honor.”

4. Praising Monarchies

Adams's critics already thought he was out of touch with American customs and democracy, so the absolute worst thing he could have done was publish a series of essays praising the British form of hereditary succession. In his Discourses on Davila published in 1790-1791, he didn't exactly support kings but he did ponder that hereditary succession might be more peaceful for a country than divisive elections. That was enough for some to brand him a dreaded “monarchist.”

After Adams's obsession with titles, this was the nail in the coffin for the close friendship Adams and Jefferson forged in France. When Thomas Paine's Rights of Man was published months after Davila, it included a prefatory note from Jefferson hoping it would answer “political heresies which have sprung up among us.”

Everyone knew that was a straight-up personal attack on Adams. Jefferson wrote to his old friend saying he never meant for that remark to be published, and that it was taken from a letter he wrote to the printer. I might buy that if he'd sent the letter to a blacksmith, but he sent it to a printer. Between Jefferson's note and Adams's diary, I'm wondering if anything back then was published intentionally.

5. Outlawing Free Speech

Nobody likes it when people talk shit about them, but John Adams made it illegal. One of the absolutely maddest things Adams ever did, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 gave him the power to imprison any journalists who criticized the administration. The rationale was to quell anti-government anarchy from erupting in the wake of the French Revolution, but really it was about silencing his political opponents.

This is what John Adams thought of freedom of speech in 1798.

Fourteen journalists were prosecuted before the acts expired, including Ben Franklin’s grandson, newspaper editor Benjamin Franklin Bache, who died of yellow fever before his trial. (I wonder if he took his grandfather’s advice on keeping the windows open at night.)

The acts were so controversial they helped cost Adams the election of 1800 and ushered in a dynasty of Democratic-Republicans from Virginia that lasted 24 years and was broken only by his own son, John Quincy Adams.

6. Skipping out on Jefferson’s Inauguration

One of the hallmarks of democracy is the peaceful handover of power from one person to another. Washington had been there for Adams’s inauguration, but at four in the morning on the day of Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration, John Adams rode out of Washington, D.C. and never looked back.

He was too honest to put on a show of friendliness, or too stubborn to suck it up for America. When actors or musicians hate each others' guts but still come back for a reunion show, it sends the message that some things (like art, or money) are more important than bitter rivalries. Seeing Simon and Garfunkel together lets us know things might seem bad, but everything is going to be okay. Adams’s “morning flight” didn’t do that – it said to America everything is fucked bye-ie!.
 

It’s not surprising given how contentious the election of 1800 had been, but it made him look like a sore, bitter loser. Of course, his actions the night before didn't help...

7. Stacking the Courts Against Jefferson

A few weeks before the end of Adams’s term, he signed the Judiciary Act of 1801, both a much-needed overhaul to the judicial system and a last-ditch effort to protect America from the perceived threat of Jefferson’s godless anarchist Democratic-Republican party.

The Judiciary Act lowered the size of the Supreme Court from six to five judges, making sure that the next vacancy could not be filled by Jefferson. More egregiously to Jefferson, it expanded the circuit courts, further strengthening the federal government. Adams filled these new positions (mostly with Federalists) up until his very last night in office. These were his infamous “Midnight Appointments.”

This was like stepping onto a crowded elevator, farting, and getting off on the next floor. These judgeships would be filled for life with men opposed to Jefferson's every move. Well...not exactly. Jefferson's Republican party responded by simply repealing the parts of the Judiciary Act they didn’t like and eliminating those new circuit court positions. When it came to playing politics, Adams was no match for Jefferson. But he knew someone who was.

In his final months as president, Adams nominated his secretary of state John Marshall as chief justice of the United States. The new head of the Supreme Court for the next 34 years, Marshall was a stalwart Federalist. Adams later said, “My gift of John Marshall to the people of the United States was the proudest act of my life.”

Marshall was also a bitter political enemy, and cousin, of Thomas Jefferson. Over the years he caused Jefferson and his party an ass-load of headaches.

Well played, John.

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Sources: John Adams by David McCullough; Thomas Jefferson:The Art of Power by Jon Meacham; James Madison by Richard Brookhiser

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Presidential Eponyms and Why John Adams Doesn't Get Any

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Sorry, John.

I'm a bit of a word nerd. There was a time when I lusted after nothing more than the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary. A record of every single word in the English language (including obsolete ones) and their etymologies... I had to own it. I stalked that set like a lion in the savanna until its price dipped just below exorbitant and I struck.

On the glorious day those five heavy boxes arrived from Amazon, I'm not ashamed to say I did the same thing I would have done when I was ten years old. I immediately looked up the worst words I could think of to see what new treasures I could find.

I was rewarded handsomely:

I’ve never felt more like Robert Langdon as I raced for Volume 20 (Wave - Zyxt) to unlock the secrets of the mysterious windfucker.

Being the word nerd I am and fascinated with the way words enter our language, there is a special place in my heart for eponymous adjectives – adjectives named after people. Sometimes a person or character comes along who makes such a dent in our culture that their name takes on a meaning all its own. That’s the case for each of the first four presidents except John Adams. You can describe a noun as being Washingtonian, Jeffersonian, and even the rarely-used Madisonian. Heck, even the first Secretary of the Treasury got in on the fun with Hamiltonian.

If we go beyond adjectives into the wild world of nouns, we find other founding fathers have been eponymized as well. “John Hancock” became synonymous with a signature partly because of his oversized name on the Declaration of Independence and partly because creepy salespeople love saying, "Put your John Hancock right here!" Ben Franklin not only got the eponymous Franklin Stove, but Puff Daddy helped make his first name stand for $100 bills with “It’s All About the Benjamins.”

Elbridge Gerry, another signer of the Declaration of Independence and vice-president under James Madison, got himself a verb. Gerrymander means to divide electoral districts in a way that give the party in power an unfair advantage, and wondering how it's legal can make your head explode. Thanks, Gerry.

John Adams doesn’t get an adjective, a noun, a verb, or a stove. His first name doesn't mean money – it's only synonymous with bathrooms and wenchers. Say, for example, the late John F. Kennedy, Jr. had tried to solicit a prostitute in a restroom – you could refer to him as John-John the john john. If John-John paid by check instead of the more customary Benjamins, he would need to bust out his John Hancock.

So why no eponymous love for Adams? To get an eponymous adjective often requires a distinctive style, as in Hitchcockian, Lynchian, and Kafkaesque. John Adams was a brilliant, grandiose, and possibly essential champion of American independence, but he wasn't unique enough for the English language to need a shorter way of saying "That's so Adams!"

Even if he had a truly one-of-a-kind voice, it might not have helped. People tried to use the term “Adamsian” to capture the essence of Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The term might have caught on if it sounded better, which is the real problem. We like our eponymous adjectives to roll off the tongue, like Victorian, Christian, Machiavellian. Ah, Machiavellian...how could something so conniving and manipulative sound so beautiful?

“Adamsian” doesn’t roll off the tongue; it falls back in the throat and makes you gag. You need ice cream after saying it like you just had your tonsils removed.

Early versions of Microsoft’s Clippy were even more aggressive.

But just because John Adams's name doesn’t lend itself to a melodic tongue party of an adjective like Niccolò Machiavelli doesn’t mean he can’t have an adjective all his own. So let's give him one.

Forget those boring common suffixes –ian and –esque. Those are for regular incredible people. I propose giving Adams the less popular –ic suffix:

Adamsic: [uh-dams-ik]
adjective
1. Of or pertaining to President John Adams, his presidency, or his personality.
2. Characteristic of the man Benjamin Franklin described as “always an honest man, often a brilliant one, but sometimes absolutely mad.”
The defense attorney used her Adamsic speaking skills to keep the jury engaged during her lengthy closing arguments. 

If history considers Adams a mediocre president, it seems fitting for his eponym to share a suffix with other disappointing terms, like "Platonic" love and the "Bubonic" plague.

One surprising presidential eponym that is certainly not disappointing is the teddy bear. The children's toy was named for an incident on a hunting trip where Teddy Roosevelt refused to shoot a black bear tied to a tree. The other kind of teddy, the sexy lingerie item, was named because its puffy form reminded someone of the stuffed bear. A form-fitting teddy doesn't seem "puffy" by today's standards, but this was the 1930s where wire corsets were still a thing. If women back then weren't being brutally choked into an hourglass shape, they apparently looked like floppy little fur-beasts. Who knew?

I made a longer list of the most popular presidential eponyms I could find in the chart below. Some are in the Oxford English Dictionary, more recent ones are on dictionary.com or Wikipedia, and a few of the older ones are so legit they pass the red squiggly line spell check test in Word – that’s how you know you’ve made it.

Click to enlarge:

Let me know if you can think of more or have suggestions for new ones, and maybe I’ll let you into The SSW (Secret Society of Windfuckers.)

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Sources: Oxford English Dictionary, dictionary.com, Wikipedia, word-detective.com

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Love in the Time of Smallpox

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John & Abigail's inoculation letters, and my own modern love.

Smallpox ravaged the world from 10,000 BC up until 1979. In the 20th century alone, it killed between 300 – 500 million people. I have trouble putting numbers that big in perspective, so I created this helpful chart.

That should clear things up.

250 years ago, smallpox was also responsible for the first of many separations between John and Abigail Adams. An epidemic in April 1764 forced them to postpone their wedding while John got inoculated. Their letters during this time provide fascinating insights into both the inoculation process and their unique relationship. In their intimate lines I found glimpses of myself and my own spirited wife, Jess, and the foundations of our relationship.

Inoculation back then meant at least three weeks of quarantine while suffering through a mild version of the virus to build a lifelong immunity. One percent of patients didn’t survive the process. For weeks leading up to the inoculation John was put on a strict diet – no meat, milk, or butter. He ignored this advice. Right before the procedure he drank an ipecac to cleanse his system. I’m guessing “ipecac” is an onomatopoeia named for the sound you make when your guts violently evacuate through your throat. 

Compared to the prep, the inoculation procedure itself was fairly painless and about as sophisticated as growing a flower. A deadly flower. The doctor cut a small slice in John’s left arm, deposited an infected thread in the wound, and put a bandage on it. They basically planted smallpox in John Adams and waited for the pustules to sprout. 

That waiting period produced more correspondence between John and Abigail than ever before, which is impressive since it wasn’t easy getting letters through his quarantine. To protect her from the virus, John had to “smoke” each letter before sending and Abigail’s family’s slave, Tom did the same on her end. She described her excitement when receiving a letter from John by asking him:

“Did you never rob a Birds nest? Do you remember how the poor Bird would fly round and round, fearful to come nigh, yet not know how to leave the place – just so they say I hover round for Tom whilst he is smokeing my Letters.”

This speaks to her love, impatience, and penchant for bird torture.

Smoking your mail was the 18th century version of Norton Antivirus.

Their letters almost came to a stop when John’s doctors forbade him from writing, encouraging him instead to stick to amusements like checkers and cards. That didn’t make sense to Abigail any more than it would to my wife, who has anxiety dreams about exactly this sort of scenario where some authoritarian force is keeping us apart – usually at a shopping mall. My love sleeps with furrowed brow. If, God forbid, a real-life doctor told me I couldn’t communicate with her, she’d probably sneak herself into the sick house and take her chances. 

Instead of infiltrating his quarantine, Abigail fought this injustice with humor. She supposed “it may be those who forbid you cannot conceive that writing to a Lady is any amusement, perhaps they rank it under the Head of drudgery, and hard Labour.” She followed with a subtle trap: “However all I insist upon is that you follow that amusement which is most agreeable to you whether it be Cards, Chequers, Musick, Writing, or Romping.” So he should only write to her if he enjoys it. In 250 years, not much about the female language has changed. It still must be decoded.

John kept writing. And, I can only hope, romping.

They teased each other often, which led to John sending Abigail a helpful list of all her faults. Most were playful and actually compliments – she doesn’t play enough cards and has bad habits of reading, writing, and thinking – but he took the opportunity to let loose with real problem areas too. 

“You could never yet be prevail’d on to learn to sing… you very often hang your Head like a Bulrush, you do not sit erected as you ought…another Fault, which seems to have been obstinately persisted in, after frequent Remonstrances, Advices and Admonitions of your Friends, is that of sitting with the Leggs across.” 

So she can’t sing and she’s an utter failure at sitting. What about walking? 

“A sixth Imperfection is that of Walking,” he told her, “with the Toes bending inward. This Imperfection is commonly called Parrot-toed, I think, I know not for what Reason.” One of John’s imperfections is commonly called being a dick, I think, I know not for what reason. 

Regarding her scandalous leg-crossing, Abigail shut him down with, “I think a gentleman has no business to concern himself about the Leggs of a lady." She also said he shouldn't complain about her lack of singing because she had “a voice harsh as the screech of a peacock.” An interesting choice for a comparison since peacocks are known for their outstanding beauty and not their voice. Well played, Abby.

Everything comes back to birds for her – she hovers like them, screeches like them, and does a shit job walking like them.

She leveled her own criticism on Adams too, telling him he was intimidating and it was “impossible for a Stranger to be tranquil in your presence.” She felt at greater ease expressing her feelings in letters than she did in person.

That struck a nerve in me, as I too have been called intimidating. I'm not sure why. It could be that my default facial expression lacks humanity and seems to say "Get out of my way, I gotta crap." I can't help it, and it's less creepy than my forced smile which suggests I'm relieving myself right then. I also have trouble judging the distance between things, namely my body and people in the way of where I'm going. It's best to keep me away from children and the elderly at airports and supermarkets.

Also, I have a tendency to lace my strong opinions with condescending humor aimed at whoever dares to disagree with me, and I do it loudly so they can't hear their own wrong thoughts. These are things I'm working on – as I plod through the presidents, so too do I plod through self-improvement. But that could be why Jess, like Abigail, felt it was easier to be open with me in writing...especially when it came to one of the most important things she ever asked me.

Late on the night of June 8, 2010, after two years of platonic friendship, she used our favorite form of written communication, instant message, to ask me out.

If she had seen my face then, she wouldn’t have been intimidated. I was on a giddy high, trying to play it cool while being absolutely certain I understood her feelings before putting my own on the line. The tricky thing about writing, as John Adams knows, is that it can forever preserve the moments when you're kind of an ass.

I'm sure it's crossed my mind?! It's a miracle she stuck with me through this conversation, let alone matrimony.

I promise I was a better human being in the rest of our chat. Eventually. It's bizarre for me to look back at those words and not see the affection so ingrained in our relationship now.

John and Abigail's affection for each other was always evident, despite their teasing. He called her “Miss Adorable” and “Diana” after the goddess of the moon and she called him “Lysander” after the Spartan war hero. Their early letters show a playful tenderness that set the foundation for a lifelong love.

Miss Adorable wasn’t shy about letting her intimidating Spartan know how to behave, but she was crafty. As his quarantine drew to a close, she wrote about an unemotional reunion she just witnessed between a couple who barely said “how do ye” and smiled at each other. “I was affected with it,” she said, “and thought whether Lysander, under like circumstances could thus coldly meet his Diana, and whether Diana could with no more Emotion receive Lysander. What think you?”

In other words, she was hoping for a passionate display of emotion after their separation. Can’t wait to see you soon, babe! Don’t fuck it up. 

Nearly two years after our fateful online chat, Jess had similar fears about our wedding kiss. I guess because I didn’t usually kiss her passionately in front of other people like some kind of depraved exhibitionist, she feared our nuptials would be sealed with a peck on the cheek and a high five. Looking back, it's possible my coy coldness in our relationship-initiating chat caused this complex of hers, but her fears turned out to be unfounded. Our actual wedding kiss was perfect, and the practice runs she required were pleasurable too. 

Sometimes I wish we wrote long expressive letters like the Adamses did, but then I realize they only wrote so much because of their long frequent separations. I couldn't imagine any prolonged separation from the passionate force of nature that is my own Miss Adorable. And we do actually write to each other often in our own modern correspondence:

John survived his inoculation with flying colors. The worst parts for him were “a long and total Abstinence from every Thing in Nature that has any Taste, Two heavy Vomits, one heavy Cathartick, four and twenty Mercurial and Antimonial Pills, and Three Weeks close Confinement to an House.” 

He was much luckier than those who got the disease in the “natural way” like a man he described to Abigail. “They say he is no more like a Man than he is like an Hog or an Horse – swelled to three time his size, black as bacon, blind as a stone.” It makes me feel very fortunate to be born into a world where this disease is eradicated and bacon is not burned beyond recognition. 

Smallpox may be gone, but many potentially life-threatening diseases are not, and John Adams would have no kind words for modern parents who choose not to vaccinate their children. Even with the risks back then, he was upset with Abigail’s parents for not letting her get inoculated, saying, “Parents must be lost in Avarice or Blindness, who restraint their Children” from inoculation. 

Today there is no chance of a smallpox resurgence as the disease exists in only two of the most peaceful places on Earth – a federal facility in Atlanta and a research facility in Russia. So we’re totally safe.

Just in case, it couldn’t hurt to drop a line to those you love while you have the chance. Don't wait for a quarantine to tell them how you feel – even if they’re overcritical asses or graceless birds who think too much and suck at sitting.

Rare photo of the Jess-Bird in flight, 2013.

Sources: John Adams by David McCullough, Abigail Adams by Woody Holton, masshist.org 
Top Images: Abigail Adams and John Adams by Benjamin Blyth

 

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