Facebook. Com. Check out the listing of the upcoming programs. We have one for members only next week on congressional term limits and programs ranging from the constitutionalism of the civil war to experts of nyu Barry Friedman and on and on, check out the program for our various events. If youre interested in becoming a constitutional member visit the table outside the theater here and again, were late starting and want to get right into the program. And everyone silence your cell phones. So without further ado, were going to be talking about two books here today about john adams and both of them touch upon his account of aristocracy and his life. We have we have john adams republic, the one, the few and the many, a warm National ConstitutionalCenter Welcome to Luke Mayville and richard alan ryerson. [applaus [applause] dick and luke, thank you for being here. Im excited for this conversation. My john adams is inappropriate with my High School Musical 1776, and describes john adams as obnoxious and disliked. Luke, start with you, you spent a lot of time with john adams, how he compared to the other founders . Yeah, i suppose the impression from 1776 is better than the impression of hamilt hamilton that leaves him out entirely. The only brief mentions are leaving him out entirely. I come from the perspective of john adams and what brought me to john adams was the recognition that he wasnt just a founding father figure, president and statesman who also had some ideas about politics. He really was Something Like a political scientists in his own time. Yet, he was a rigorous analytical, political and social thinker and i really came to think that john adams deserved to be thought of among what we think of as the first rate political and social thinkers of American History. So the thinkers you might study in college today, like even in 20th century thinkers like john roles or hannah or wb dubois and those in politics. John adams deserves to be thought of among that list and not just as a historical figure, not just as a basement. And adams really did the major work of Political Science that he wrote, defense of the american constitution was probably the most systematic treatment of constitutional theory ever written by a american. We have other Founding Fathers like James Madison, Alexander Hamilton who wrote, for example, the federalist papers that are also very impressive and first rate political thought, but john adams really more so than any other figure of the time was a political scientist and thats what really engaged my interest. Host in your book, in part you described john adams among the folks of the revolutionary generation as sort of most gripped by the past. You know, luke has talked about him as a political scientist. This actually grows out of his interest in law. He begins, of course, as a lawyer and its often said that a great many of our foundings fathers were lawyers and that is nominally true, technically true. Some of them were lawyers and planters, lawyers and businessmen, lawyers and something else. John adams in his early career was strictly a lawyer, a fulltime, very hardworking lawyer and he became by 1770 when he defended soldiers in the boston massacre, he was already by that time the leading attorney in massachusetts, a role that he held until he got in the continental congress. As a lawyer he was determined very early to master a wide range of fields of law, including the institutes of justinian, so he would learn about continental law and i think it was from this that he began to get into ancient medieval and early modern history and started reading a lot of history and political scientist from europe that his contemporaries did not read. I would point out that one scholar argues that adams was the only one of the foundings fathers who read anything by machiavelli except for the prince and the others read the prince and they had a low opinion of machiavelli. Adams read machiavelli and learned a great deal with him. Thats the way i think he comes into his appreciation for the past. And were going to dig in detail about, here, adams constitutional vision. Just right at the outset, luke, if were looking at john adams as a political thinker, what does his constitution look like broadly speaking . Well, one of the big differences between adams constitutional thoughts and the constitution as we know it is that adams understood the different parts of the government as corresponding to the different parts of society. So, richards book and the title, the one, the few and the many, that society is fundamentally broken down into different parts. And for adams, government was supposed to reflect that, the governor was supposed to reflect Something Like the monarchical of society and then aristocrats of society and the popular chamber that we call house of representatives was supposed reflect the democratic the popular part of society. And thats quite different in a fundamental way from the way that weve many could to think of the relationship between government and society. With the advent of the federalist papers, which are and the kind of arguments for the constitution that we find there, we see a departure from john adams constitutional thought and that people like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton start describing each part of society each part of government as representative of the people as a whole. Theres one American People and even though we have a senate and a house of representatives, they all represent the people, but in different ways. So we find a kind of eclipse in a way in modern constitutional thoughts of this idea that was based on different classes, and john adams, i suggest in the book, is interesting in this current moment because in a way americans in the last several years as especially as economic inequality increases, are becoming again much more interested in class, in the difference that class makes for politics. Thats something that john adams cared a lot about and he cared quite a lot more, i argue, than his contemporaries did, many of his contemporaries. So both of you really explore john adams view of the few of the aristocracy, your book is largely about that, dick, you certainly touch on that as well. Beginning with you, dick, how did john adams understand the few. What did he mean athe aristocracy . Well, one thing i find that adams doing is his thought developed very dynamically on aristocracy, but i think its the surprise to him himself and how much he becomes interested in that. Up until the declaration of independence he had lived in a society, that is the province of massachusetts, that had a very visible aristocracy. He did not, i think, think very consciously about it and if he had thought about it, if hed been asked about it, he would have said, well, yes, these are people with more money, more education, and theyre doing a good job in the various higher positions of massachusetts government, culture, society, education, whatever. He would have defended that particularly in the town he lived in, then now the city of quincy. The big family was the quincy family. He admired them and his own family had been supporters of the quincys for generations. He had no trouble with that. Then the war of independence comes and he suddenly sees many men in massachusetts and all over making a lot of money off the war. I mean, when we think of the war, we think of the great sacrifice of the soldiers on the line and the sailors and the women and children at home and the war brought a lot of suffering for a lot of people. It made a few people very wealthy. These people were supplying the continental army. They were financing the priva privateers that were seizing valuable cargo from british ships. Adams began to look at these people and thought they werent behaving well. They were being too greedy and muscle their way into politics at the highest level and congress and this is something that he every single year for a decade after the declaration, he saw this more and more and sat down to write the defense of the constitutions, which is a defense of the state constitutions in america, as they existed in 1786. The point of that book was to argue for strong executives and to argue that aristocracies were threatening and dangerous, they must be controlled, but they couldnt be avoided. They couldnt be defeated. They couldnt be denied. They had to be controlled and harnessed for an effective republic. Thats what he argues. So, aristocracy is a discovery for him and they would add as he goes on in his life, he begins to see a need to define aristocracy in ways that fit americas culture. No title, no monopolies. Instead, personal equality, family inheritances, various things like this that give some men advantages over others and thats where he ended up on the subject. And luke, you mentioned in terms about economic inequality of today. And a few, we see this across the spectrum from supporters of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders talking about the 1 and President Trump and his supporters talking about a rigged system and draining the swamp. To what degree did adams diagnosis and account of the few similar to what we see in political current today and unique to his own time . One of the surprising moments for me in researching this book was when i was flipping through in an unrelated moment, actually, flipping through a book written in the 1950s by marxist socialist named C Wright Mills who wrote the famous book called the power elite, which is probably the most authoritative study of american socialeconomic elite in the 20th century and in a chapter at the very end hes writing about a certain element of his theory of the power elite and he says theres this figure in American History who pretty much already said all of this and thats john adams and he goes on to, you know, quote john adams, especially another major book that john adams wrote while sitting as vicepresident of the united states. One thing about john adams thinking thats very similar to current contemporary ways of thinking of economic elite, he focused on the power of elites. So and this was very different than his contemporariecontempor to give one example many of his contemporaries thought that the American Revolution had turned decisively against aristocratic titles and the constitution had, you know, completely prohibited titles of nobility. Hadnt he solved the problem of oligarchy and aristocracy . Adams thought even though you had done away with titles, qualities, richard began mentioning, qualities like family name or what he called birth. Qualities like physical beauty and especially wealth would continue to generate a lot of power for elites. And a second part of this, and maybe this is something we can discuss more because its in both of our books, the second part of this is he was very skeptical of the notion that many of his contemporaries, especially Thomas Jefferson had, which was that, yes, we have done away with the old aristocracy, but we have a new aristocracy in america, but its not a dangerous one, but its an aristocracy of talent, a natural aristocracy as opposed to the old aristocracy. We have an aristocracy of talent and virtue. Adams agreed to that notion to a point, but one of the themes of his late writings especially, the later part of his life is this idea actually qualities like wealth and again, birth and beauty, what he called qualities given to us by fortune are much more powerful than qualities like talent and virtue, which are, you know, you could call m mericratic or given. And even writers like jefferson who in other ways were very worried about financial elites and things like this. Host so, dick, we have in adamsaccount an inevitable view, this inevitable aristocratic in a sense, as a matter of constitutional design how did he think we might control and perhaps even harness the few for good purposes . Well, i would have to say i think in terms of adamsstructural solutions to the problem, this may be the weakest part of this whole argument and anyone who reads my book, i think, would see that i am very deeply in love with john adams, theres no doubt about that, but when he came to think about how he would control the aristocracy, he had one solution that made sense, but its certainly opened to criticism over time and that is to have a very powerful executive. Now, he argued that the aristocracy is the the natural enemy of a powerful executive and that a powerful executive is the natural ally of the people and the republic works well when the people and the strong executive Work Together to keep the aristocracy under control and he further said that you could in fact do this by putting the aristocracy in a special constitutional body, the upper house of the legislature, the senate, and they would be in a sense ostracized and you could see them, and one of these is a writing, a swiss writer who praised the british constitution and the ostracism idea may have come in part from that. The reason i say that this is the weakest part of this argument is that first of all, i think the ostracism idea probably doesnt work particularly well. His notion was if you get all of the aristocrats in the senate they wont be in the house of representatives where theyll distort and overawe and intimidate the representatives of less social standing. Once society gets large, you can have so many aristocrats, a hundred persons, and begin to contain them all, theyre going to spill over into the house of representatives and they already have, a long time ago actually. Not recently. So that i see as a weakness. Strength i see in adams is that he is telling people, youve got to admit you have an aristocracy. You cant get rid of it. Theres no way you can get rid of it. So you have to try to be vigilant against the power of an aristocracy. And that lesson, plus his insistence on a very broad publicly funded system of education, putting the two things together, i think gives the best possibility of control of that aristocracy. I mean, there may be basic limits in a wealthy country, which we certainly are, a large country with a lot of economic interests and maybe certain basic limits to how much you can control in economic aristocracy. But adams said you have to try and you have to do what you can about this truth. I just wanted to add to that. I share that, i share the skepticism about adamssolution and one really fascinating points, adams has a beautiful late correspondence, late in life, retirement era correspondence with Thomas Jefferson i highly recommend if theres one set of adamsreadings you should read this. But at one point adams is writing to jefferson about aristocracy and he insists its Something Like his ostracism scheme and jefferson responds with and says Something Like, you think that with the senate you can coordinate the aristocrats, but whats much more likely is that the aristocrats were capture the coordinates and so what he meant was is what you are basically doing is handing over government to the aristocrats by ensuring that they have one part of it and then theyre going to likely have the other part. And i think that adams never really had a compelling response why that wouldnt happen and i think arguably, Something Like that has happened. Most of congress is millionaires. The vast majority, i think, is millionaires. And, but and i agree with richard on this, i think that the lesson is isnt so much the specific institutions that adams proposed, but its that its too raise the question of how is it that we as a society, we as a political system, build institutions or failed to build institutions that can somehow counter balance the power of social and economic elites. So, i would suggest one institution thats been very relevant in this record in the 20th century is labor unions that served as Something Like that served the role of Something Like what john adams imagined the Popular Assembly is doing. They were a Political Force in society that represented the lower orders and counter balanced the power of the higher orders. Political parties used to do, arguably, a much more effective job than they do today. At organizing the interests of middle class and working class people. There is a time when people when journalists described the Democratic Party as, you know, the Franklin Roosevelt era, described the Democratic Party and in the house of representatives that it dominated as the house of lords for the parole prolitariot. Part of working class in politics. Thats not the case anymore, many parties are dominated by economic belief, but these are the questions, i thinks that reading adams encourages us to ask. Host and you mentioned adamsvision of a strong constitutional system. Where did his few of the strong executive come from . When did he begin to adhere to this and did it develop at all over time . It did develop over time, but actually he came to the belief in the strong executive first, that is before he started even thinking very much about an aristocracy. In one way its a little curious that he did because he didnt have much use for the royal governors of massachusetts, particularly Thomas Jefferson who he hated. And hutchinson was the last one and the general that clamped down and failed completely. But adams, i think, he thought that a virtues executive, an executive chosen by the people could be could be effective. An important part of this was he didnt want the executive to be chosen by the legislature and right as the revolution was beginning to heat up,the various provinces, as they moved to independent statehood decided well have legislatures and then the legislatures will choose the governor or even choose an executive council, a quorum executive. You want one executive, you want that chosen independently from the legislature. So when he got his chance to show how it should be done in 1779 he