Doubtless, many of you here in this room know mhs is home to the adams family papers and an extensive collection largely comprised of correspondences, letters, books, diaries, literary manuscripts, speeches, legal and business papers of both the senior and junior president s adams as well as all the members of this preeminent political dynasty. These documents remain so vital in our efforts to understand the evolution of american democracy, diplomacy and identity. Mhs strives to make the adams papers and our entire 40 million item collection available to anyone with an interest in american life, culture and history and we do it for free. If you have value resource and enjoyed programming like todays talk and you are not an mhs supporter i encourage you to do so. Tonight represents one of many programs seminars, exhibitions and workshops that we host. If you dont already have a copy of our new Spring Summer calendar grab one on the way out and its on her website. I want to mention we will have copies of the problem of democracy for sale after the program in the lobby and i think we could get them signed by the authors. Now it is my great pleasure to deduce todays speaker, professors Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein. Doctor isenberg is the key Harry Williams professor at Louisiana State university and for 2016 bestselling trash untold history of Cross America has become an International Sensation and tackles one of the intense social themes of class, division and inequality of america and doctor burstein is also finds a home at the Louisiana State university as the professor of history and his 2015 book democracys views illustrate how Thomas Jeffersons life and legacy have been used to support modernday partisan politics on both sides of the aisle and Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein have in regular country bidders and contribute to pieces about modern political and Cultural Affairs for a variety of National News outlets including cspan and mpr. Please join me in welcoming Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein. [applause] thank you, catherine. We love the Massachusetts Historical Society. Thank you all for coming today. Is the candidate likable enough . Inquiring minds want to know. You have to come across as likable and the it factor to be electable. That is what democracy has come to. Like high School Elections the right book in the common touch and its less a question of knowledge or judgment than a popularity contest. This is one problem of democracy and there are others, too. Why should our vehicle be the adams is . John and john quincy, president s two and six because of how profound yet how oddly unknown they are interwoven public lives were because of how they struggled with the perception that their deep study and practical experience would backfire despite being two of the most recognizable faces of American Pride in the courts of europe they were to be remembered as symbols of entitlement, artistic corruption and stodgy resistance to a glorious fullblown democracy. We have written this book because until now no historical investigator has dissected the intertwined lives of the first of only two parents, father and son president. The president s bush were dyed in the wool republicans. The president s adams strongly resisted Party Affiliation and to be true to the values they had to be independent of any Party Orthodoxy and let us start with undisputed fact that the founding generation did not treat the idea of democracy as we do. That is where the adams come in. They foresaw defects or others basked in the american imaginary and we all know how quotable Thomas Jefferson is from we hold these truths to my personal favorite, composed in 1800 i have sworn upon the author of god my total hostility for every form of tyranny over the mind of men. Jefferson wants us to believe in the human spirit. John adams is quotable, too. Though, you would not know it. He perceives jeffersons troops as halftruths. Hes ironic, sarcastic and earthy. This in 1778. A man must be his own trumpeter. He must get his picture drawn, statue made and he must make the mob stare and gape and perpetuate his fame. In later years johnny q, as nancy and i effectually called the son, he denoted himself by the initials j qa and he recalled jefferson as one as, burning ambition coupled with an inventive memory led him to mistreat the first president adams. The second president adams perceived the cold surrounding jefferson as a mass deception. I have always been a prophet of ill and punished accordingly, adams the father to adams the sun. A martyr complex, we might also attribute to him. The adams refused to pander and they do not harm, they did not brewed beautifully like Abraham Lincoln with lincoln melancholy but they argued, stickered, rye and idiosyncratic, hardly mysterious with the slightest in hand shaking the warm and genial but all of that was merely a matter of style. The pair are painted as antidemocratic conservatives yet they were neither antidemocratic or conventionally conservatives. They conceptualized democracy in ways that make sense to a modern student of history and concern concerned, as we are, and should be with the gap between rhetoric and reality. If jefferson is associated with the optimistic crucibles that a democratic spirit lodges and rational educable voters, the adams, older especially probed human psychology and came away with a different, less static view of popular democracy. A tendency to corruption existed on all forms of government and john adams felt even the most educated class of men with hunger for power. They should be isolated in a senate where the able, as he wrote were separated from the mass and unable to dominate on their own. It is why he detested the Unicameral Legislature that benjamin frequent proposed one house was more prone to corruption then two. On the other hand john adams concern about across the board popular election lodged in one highly pertinent fact, the multitude has always been credulous in the few are always artful. Let that sink in. Clever speech could convince Common People just about anyone to support that idea and the system had to protect the public from artifice, imposture, hypocrisy and superstition. Above all, both father and son believed democracy required unfailingly Accurate Information flowing between citizens and their representatives. It is neither conservative nor liberal to campaign for an informed citizenry. Our book is about one made this beautiful imperfect political dynasty tick in the intimate understanding between a father and a son and they shared a library and marveled together at the roman republican Marcus Cicero and profound ways pattern their inner lives after him. Cicero respected the concept of law in favor of justice and prescribed the three branches of government we adhere to today. In their abundant correspondence which history has sadly overlooked the two president s adams resisted local talk of dynasty and was never about outright power but about feelings of inner satisfaction and perhaps their protestations should not always be believed nevertheless across decades of correspondence any reader can see emotion move from the mind to the page with little self censoring. We give emphasis to the. In their public life when they were diplomats in europe and as a teenager and largely without rental supervision john quincy trekked across Eastern Europe and scandinavia. Once he and his father braved the stormy crossing from the english coast and set ashore on an obscure cold backwater in the netherlands and johnny, as he was known, preserve the life of his fate and fragile father who was subject to all sorts of bodily ills. Johnny expertly guided them both back to civilization. The bond formed between the adams is, father and son, and europe from 17781785 condition everything that followed. Representing their Young Country abroad they were literally citizens of the world and to a greater extent than anyone else of the founding era pantheon. They stood as proud americans, not converts to old world forms, as many wrongly indicated. They believed in expertise and in government that promoted expertise over popularity and yet remarkably it was John Quincy Adams, the second president adams who was the first to pronounce in his 1825 inaugural address that america deserves to be called a functional Representative Democracy and it wasnt jefferson who is typically seen as the first man of the people. It wasnt of the freewheeling Andrew Jackson either, the impulsive, clannish, vindictive jackson. Here he is stringing up his hapless predecessor, John Quincy Adams, jackson had composed as formal speeches and created loyalty and richly rewarded his friends and that was his style. Making the land and safer more upstarts like himself to profit in the southern manner as a slave owner and entrepreneurs. Jackson did not read history, let alone imbibe political thought. Jackson was not predisposed to enact democracy in any real way and it seems an odd thing to say but johns adams lived with the frugal republican than Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams was a better democrat than Andrew Jackson. Wrap your mind around that one. Democracy is proclaimed more than it is practiced. That is all the president s adams were saying on the basis of their company as of studies of history and human psychology. John adams was a disciple of the enlightenment is money as jefferson. At the heart of this revolutionary movement was the impulse to unmask superstition like the divine right of kings and cultivate independence of thought. John adams held that a desire for fame could be found in every heart. Fame needed an audience and the ruling few needed the masses to worship their riches and their might. This is why he identified the danger of the cult of personality heard the cult of personality is when the personality of the leader is equated with the nation. The worship title replaces we, the people as the soul of the body politic. Now, adams watched the cult up close and personal, first when he was in france. There, franklin seduced the educated elite as americas first rock star. Adams understood the desire among human beings to be seen and loved. He zoomed in on the forces of spectator ship and then there was the opposite. The fear of obscurity, of insignificance. Long before andy warhol mused that every american wants 15 minutes of fame, adams placed the danger of appellation at the center of his constitutional theory. What glittered in the eyes of men and women was often the superficial of dazzling distraction. He explained that first riches and beauty shored up power and aristocracy. Societies invariably divided people into classes and that Political Parties used the same method and marketing candidates, and attractive appearance, a prominent name, a glamorous reputation. If that was not enough lies, flattery and quackery, his delightful word, would keep supporters mesmerized. John adams understood that politics was a crooked connate game as far back as 1790. His point was that these impulses emerge in all governments. Republics and democracies alike. A society that rewards ambition cannot avert the mad scramble for public recognition. He went further, Group Psychology which was responsible for the sham worship of the lustrous view and since the majority of people would never have taken to the stage they lived vicariously through their idols. Vicarious was his word but he was saying that the people felt a special kind of sympathy for the powerful and it was not just the corrupt politicians rode into office on inflated reputation but it was that voters lived for the show. We document these things in our book and they are not selectively drawn so as to simply resonate with the current political scene which a lot of people think and forget we started researching this book long before the current political scene. Americans tell themselves they value independent thinking in the enlightenment sense of that phrase. But in fact, citizens still swoon over the rich and famous and join crowds as cheering fans and adams strap equated from this to say that my mentality is a dangerous force contained within democracy and it is inflamed by the partisan press. Party organizers from Alexander Hamilton forward have found a way to exploit the imaginary bond between voters and their heralded leaders. In the first president ial election in 1788, 89 hamilton made sure that southern electors withheld their votes for adams by spreading a rumor that new englanders might steal the election from washington. From hamiltons perspective there could be only one surrogate king, one idolized star. Washingtons presidency borrowed the trappings of royalty, the chief executive was housed in a grand mansion, he rode in a lavishly equipped carriage and he held intimate courtly receptions with a capital elite. He made two grand National Tours like the king of england, his birthday was a holiday and washingtons image was known to all. A visiting russian dignitary remarked that americans kept treasured portraits of washington in their homes much like the russians worshiped icons of the saints. Now, adams cleverly dissected the cult of washington and used his satirical skill to explain the worship of washington. The generals first and most important trait was, as adams emphasized, his handsome face. Next, his tall stature. He was 63 and elite briefing was evident in his elegant form and his graceful movements and his large estate. Washington was a man of few words and adams joked that his fellow virginians adored him because among the plantar elite the geese are all swans. Image matters more than genius. Adams knew this. We know it to be true as well. Voters take manufactured qualities as signs of innate character. Adams, of course, suffered by comparison to washington. He acquired the nasty nickname of his rotunda d, a label started while Vice President and was used in the election of 1800. Political gamesmanship became more circus like by the time the second adams entered the president ial contest. In 1824 when then secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, was seeking the presidency a cartoon captured the foot race socalled. It went into posters and pendants to this day that term president ial horse race. This is relevant because tonight is the kentucky derby. In the cartoon John Quincy Adams is ahead of the george and William Crawford by a nose while Andrew Jackson dressed in his military uniform is on their tail and coming up fast. All john adams stands at the front of the crowd cheering on his son. Spectators place wages on the outcome. This is democracy at its worst. Its a spectacle. The Election Campaign isnt about philosophies or policies but a gavel did the excitement of the race is what matters mo most. In 1828 when the second president adams lost the election to jackson he found himself not only running against a National Hero but against a far better organized projects and party machine. The new yorker martyr Martin Van Buren was jacksons electioneering group. Building on the earlier new yorker, hamiltons playbook. Jacksons admirers tried to read mold him into the air of the noble washington but the effort failed. Jackson was known to be imperialist, impulsive and blustering and too many concerned autocratic. The general was promoted with a lavish campaign biography, the first of its kind, his rash, arbitrary behavior was recast as a cardinal virtue and that is, he exhibited frontier boldness and manly vigor. The incumbent, adams, was overly cerebral. There was something even darker at work here. John quincy adams concluded that jacksons lowers were really, this is his words and very important, obsequious champions of executive power. Jacksonian democracy was, in fact, a warrior cult of conquest. Democracy was a smokescreen. Western expansion drove politics. Slaveholders wanted slavery to expand to the pacific and behind screen was a union of land speculators and southern slaveholders. John quincy adams was elected to congress in 1830 after his one term presidency ended. It was an unusual move never to be repeated. He remained in the house onto the died at his desk in 1848. Parties rule in the art of party drilling as he called it was because i military. Party membership became riotous and that is his word, too. Sanctimonious called to liberty allowing southern democrats to purchase auxiliary support for slavery from freemen of the north. What could be a greater irony . Jackson head of the democratic party, jefferson supposedly Small Government Party was now a party of unchecked executive power. Election rhetoric test John Quincy Adams as a princely air, a man comes about with titles and rich rules of the royal european courts where he had so long served with the diplomat. Somehow, like his father before him, he was a secret promoter of monarchy. The sad truth is this, the cult of personality [inaudible] twist the truth and