Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Revolutionary Samuel Adams with Stacy Schiff

Episode Date: January 4, 2023

On today’s episode of Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon talks with Pulitzer Prize winning author Stacy Schiff about her masterful bestseller, The Revolutionary Samuel Adams. These days, we think of Sam Adams as a face on a beer bottle, but how much do we know about his role in bringing revolution to Colonial America? As Stacy puts it, Adams was playing chess while Britain was playing checkers; he was always hustling, always fervent in the fight for independence. Tune in to hear Stacy bring the Revolutionary hero to life. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Red One... We're coming at you. ...is the movie event of the holiday season. Santa Claus has been kidnapped? You're gonna help us find him. You can't trust this guy. He's on the list. Is that Naughty Lister? Naughty Lister?

Dwayne Johnson. We got Snowman! Chris Evans. I might just go back to the car. Let's save Christmas. I'm not gonna say that. Say it. Alright.

Let's save Christmas. There it is. Only in theaters November 15th. Amazon's holiday deals are here so you can celebrate the season early. With low prices on decor, electronics, and beauty. Perfect for stocking stuffers. And my stockings looking good. Shop holiday deals early on Amazon now.

Hello, friends. Welcome. Delighted to have you with me. And I'm even more delighted to be chatting today with author Stacey Schiff. If you have not read The Revolutionary Samuel Adams, which is taking the country by storm, huge, huge, huge bestseller, like on every single bestseller list on all of the best books of 2022 lists from coast to coast, you're missing out. And I think you are absolutely going to love hearing more about Samuel Adams in this conversation, more about the American Revolution, and also more about what does it take to write a book of this magnitude. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I am absolutely thrilled. It gives me a thrill to see your book, The Revolutionary Samuel Adams, performing so well. I love it for you. Thank you so much. And I love it for America. I love it for all of us. I love it for all of us that

Americans are so interested in this time period in history, such an important time period in history, that they're interested in Samuel Adams, who, for most of American history, has been relegated to a beer bottle. I love it. I love it for all of us. Okay, I have to ask, first off, why? Why Samuel Adams? A couple of things came together. First of all, it was 2016 when I started. And I think, like a lot of us, I was wondering where we had come from as a country, where we were going, what was our idea of democracy at that moment? So a lot was in play. And I had just finished a book on the Salem witch trials. And one of the interesting things about that year, 1692, is how the trials come to an end. How finally do people begin to stand up and say, there could not possibly have been this many witches in Massachusetts.

This trial is obviously a travesty. We are on the wrong road here, and we need to right the ship. That was an extremely dangerous thing to do at that time because, of course, to express any skepticism whatsoever about the practice of witchcraft, much less the witchcraft court, was to invite a witchcraft accusation yourself. So only very slowly, very quietly, very anonymously did people begin to speak up. And among those people were a few very courageous individuals in Boston who reminded me in some ways of Samuel Adams in the sense that they had the courage of their convictions. They were willing to speak truth to power. They were willing to step out of sync

with the current that was going so much against them. So that was one contributing factor. And then when I went back to actually look at what had been said of Samuel Adams by his contemporaries, I was struck by how much he is the man of the hour. They over and over will say he was the most active, the earliest, the most persevering man of the revolution.

He was the father of the revolution. He was the father of the revolution. He was the leader of the pack. He was the chief incendiary. Everyone, everyone testifies to his significance. And yet here we were 200 and whatever years later, having really lost sight of him completely. So true. That's so true. Most Americans probably, if they've taken a U.S. history class, like if I said, do you

recognize the name Samuel Adams? Of course, they'd be taken a U.S. history class like if I said do you recognize the name Samuel Adams of course they'd be like sure yeah but if I asked them to name any specific activities that he was involved in or like what did he do I don't know and I and that was something else that I found really interesting is that insofar as we retrieve him from the deep recesses of our memories I think we think of him as a firebrand and this sort of ruffian-type figure. And if you read John Adams, who's his second cousin, one of our best sources for these years, you get the sense of a man of exquisite humanity, great erudition, a very decorous human being, extremely affable, very sweet-tempered, very mild-mannered, and a very

prudent revolutionary, in fact, which just feels so contradictory with our preconceptions. Yeah, you don't hear the phrases mild-mannered and revolutionary in the same sentence to describe an individual very often. I'm very, very interested in that concept of him being affable and likable, respected by his peers. People wanted to be friends with him. His contemporaries looked back and were like, you know who did it? It was him. And yet he was advocating for such revolutionary societal change. It seems almost impossible in today's moment to conceptualize a person who could embody those characteristics. Although you begin to realize how charismatic he must have been

to have changed minds so quickly. I mean, what is really fascinating about the run-up to the revolution, which does not begin in 1776, the revolution really begins a good 10 or 12 years earlier, is how persevering he is in his commitment and how able he is to change people's minds, how he moves people from being spotlessly loyal to being willing to say liberty or death. How do you create that kind of change in sensibility in one short decade? And it required a great deal of stamina, but also of personal magnetism. short decade. And it required a great deal of stamina, but also of personal magnetism. What do you feel like were his qualities that attracted people to him, that personal magnetism? I know there's sort of this like je ne sais quoi, this like undefendable X factor that some people have that makes you, you know, like, I don't know what they got, but I want it. But is there

anything that you can pinpoint that you feel like, you know, what his unique brand of genius was, was X? Some of it, I think, has to do with his personal rectitude. I mean, this is a person who is deeply, for whatever you felt about his politics, she's deeply respected. He's extremely pious. He's extremely committed to his ideals. He is unwavering in his beliefs. And I think that in a generally pious town in Boston in the 18th century, that sets him apart to some extent. But I also think he's a man who can read a room and knows his audience. This might sound familiar to you, I would think, Sharon, but it might be your stock and trade. I mean, the other thing that's interesting about him and I think is unique to him trade. I mean, the other thing that's interesting about him and I think is unique to him is that unlike any of the other founders, and certainly in Boston

in particular, he really unites the man in the street with the Harvard-educated elite. I mean, he is himself the holder of two Harvard degrees. He's had the best education in colonial America. And yet he's out in the streets. He's friends with bricklayers. He's friends with innkeepers. He's friends with the men at the wharves. He's really kind of in and out the houses disseminating ideas, but on equal terms and with equal comfort, pretty much at any level of socioeconomic spectrum. And Boston was a surprisingly hierarchical town. He doesn't seem to observe that hierarchy. He seems to believe very much that one man's opinion is as important as another man's opinion and to be able to pitch his message to each of them.

That's a continuing tension in America, turns out. This is literally baked into our history, this tension between the well-educated people who believe that they are the experts and should be the holders of power, and this more populist sentiment that the average person knows what's best for them, and that the elite members of society shouldn't be the leaders of the rest of us. And he managed to straddle those fences. Was it because of a way that he was raised? Was there some event in his life that allowed him to sort of fluidly move between these various statuses within society? There's one moment in the early 1740s, so when he's in his 20s, when by a very stringent act of parliament, a venture in which his father

is involved is very precipitously shut down, ruining the Adams family. And he will see this as parliamentary overreach, clearly very parallel to some of the legislation that will come down the road. And that may be the precipitating factor. To say it certainly changes his status in Boston. It means that he's going to spend the next decade fending off sheriffs who try to repossess his father's estate. And it leaves him actually mostly penniless for the next years. But there seems to be very early on this real commitment to American liberties, and this real idea that the colonies should be in charge of their destinies, not some power 3,000 miles away, which seems at this point

anyway, very much deaf to the needs and the desires of the colonists. I think that's a fantastic point, that the drums of liberty did not begin to fervently beat for quite some time after Samuel Adams really began his advocacy. germinate until quite a bit later. And that's the other thing that I think is so important to remember is that the revolution takes off and kind of fits and starts. It isn't a linear business. And there are periods here where the opposition effort will almost entirely wilt. And Adams is there to revive it, but he's really almost alone in trying to do so. He's alone in pushing this around along. Everyone else has pretty much deserted the cause. After the Boston Massacre, there are a couple of years where Boston is utterly exhausted from all of this noisemaking and troublemaking in the streets. Everyone wants things to just go back to normal, and it would seem as if the effort has come to a complete halt were it not for Samuel Adams. John Adams sometimes even speaks of exasperation of his cousin. It seems like where he's like,

and then my cousin is up in here again. It's so funny with John Adams, isn't it? Because he's so starry-eyed when he first meets Samuel. Samuel's a little over a decade older and he's just in awe of him. This man, he can't believe what he's got his hands in every pot. I mean, he's everywhere in Boston at once. He seems to be running everything. And then slowly there begins to be this sort of tumult in the streets kind of feeling. Yeah. Like, oh, great. More shootings in the streets. Yeah. That sort of, I don't know if what he's doing is the best thing at this moment. And obviously John Adams eventually gets on board, et cetera. But I find John Adams a personally very fascinating character. And I wondered if you could speak a little bit more about their relationship. I too have a great weakness

for John Adams, despite the fact that he could never say anything really nice about anybody. This was a man who himself couldn't accept a compliment. I mean, he's just such a petulant character. I adore him. He is, as I said, starstruck when the two of them first meet. They meet in the early 1760s. They're second cousins. They don't seem to have spent a great deal of time together before that. And when they meet, they come together. They are immediately united in their disdain for the then lieutenant governor, Thomas Hutchinson, who will be to some extent the sort of face of the entrenched elite for both of them. But as John Adams tells us, when they first meet, they agree that Thomas Hutchinson poses a greater threat to American liberties than any other man alive. John will somewhat be, Samuel will be very

much the mentor for John in those first years. He'll really kind of lead John around town. John is at this point a very promising, very brilliant up-and-coming lawyer. Sometimes the Sons of Liberty will ask him to do special favors for them, and they'll write what they want to have done. And they'll write, you know, P.S. your cousin sends his regards, which was kind of just a gentle way of saying, and of course you will do this. But ultimately they really work hand in glove. By the time they will ride together to the Continental Congress in the 1770s, they are pretty much equals, Samuel and John. And ultimately John, of course, will eclipse Samuel in the 1770s, they are pretty much equals, Samuel and John. And ultimately,

John, of course, will eclipse Samuel in the sense that John will go on to hold federal office. And Samuel will really return to Massachusetts, very much a Massachusetts man, very much not interested in federalism and very much out of step with the country that he helps to create. Of course, John Adams hated being the vice president. He thought it was the dumbest job that had ever been invented. Like, just, he hated it so much. And it actually makes me chuckle when I read about the way that he writes about being vice president. Like, he's almost like, this job was invented to torture me. But you know, the thing about John Adams is he's so immensely quotable. I mean, you just can't, he steals the narrative, right? Because he always has the best adjectives. And I have a somewhat, I have a somewhat complicated relationship with him because I wrote a book years ago on Benjamin Franklin and his years in France. And during those years, John Adams is entirely the Thorne and Franklin side. And, and, you know, if you want to talk about quotable John Adams, his criticism of Benjamin Franklin is just utterly delicious. He's the love child of Machiavelli and

Muhammad. I mean, it's odd and odd and odd. And yet in this book, of course, he has to be the hero of the tale, the enlightened, ever hopeful, enormously accommodating John Adams. So yes, I feel as if I've now lived with two different John Adamses. Yeah, totally. I can see that. You now lived with two different John Adamses. Yeah, totally. I can see that. You could do the same thing about Benjamin Franklin. You could be like, oh, really? Oh, like abandoned his wife, never saw her again?

Fascinating. And then meanwhile, literally, single-handedly propels forward so many important institutions and causes in American history. I totally think you could do the same thing with Benjamin Franklin. He too is obviously a very fascinating character. I have to know more about your opinion about why is Samuel Adams relegated to the back shelf? Benjamin Franklin didn't hold federal office, and yet he is we got all the pbs specials he's on all the things everyone knows who he is every he's on the office you know like everyone can

everyone can make a ben franklin like what's your favorite ben franklin fact we all have what he invented the catheter you know like have them. What was it about Samuel Adams that made him fade more into obscurity in the rearview mirror? So why do we have no Samuel Adams action toys, you mean, or Halloween costumes? Yeah. Yeah. Totally. To some extent, it's his own fault. He's very much complicit in his disappearance. And some of that has to do with personal modesty. This is a true New Englander. Unlike John Adams, he's not a man who's going to boast about his achievements.

But much more to the point, those were achievements about which it was dangerous to boast at the time because, of course, this is sedition, this is treason, he's trafficking in very dangerous plans here. The idea was to very much deal from the no-fingerprint school, was very much to leave no trace behind. We have this marvelous scene in John Adams' writings of the two of them sitting at the Continental Congress and John watching as Samuel feeds his papers to the fire. And John essentially says, you know, maybe do you think you're overreacting just a little? And Samuel explains that he doesn't want any of their friends to be in danger because of his negligence.

So to some extent, he is obscuring the fingerprints. He's covering the trail here because what he is doing is dangerous at that moment. There are other reasons as well, and some of them have to do with how the country proceeds after the revolution. I think after a revolution, you want the revolutionaries to be hustled off the stage. What you're interested in, obviously, is a settled government. You don't want anyone who's likely to upset the apple cart. He's also older at that point. He's older than most of the other revolutionaries except for Benjamin Franklin. And he really believes,

in a way he expresses quite beautifully on paper, in only one judge. He's not interested in how posterity is going to judge him. John Adams, as we know, is always posing for posterity. Samuel Adams believes that he answers to only one judge alone. And for that judge, he doesn't really need to assemble his papers. So that when someone like his cousin John says, if you put together your writings of the last three decades, you alone could explain the revolution and everyone's going to want to read that. And Samuel Adams never does that. He's really only reporting to one particular address. That's fascinating. Do you feel like the American revolution is still relevant today? I feel that religiously. And I guess one of the interesting

things with this book to me is how resonant it feels. It feels to me almost more resonant now than when I began, partly in the sense that this was also a moment when government felt deaf, when people felt government was not listening to them. And there was this obviously extreme sense of disenfranchisement, but also in the political elite being clueless to some extent. And here I'm talking about the crown officials, really, in the colonies, and particularly the Hutchinson and Oliver families in Massachusetts, who know that something is afoot but can't quite figure out what's going on. The world is kind of changing around them. They can't quite get a grip on it. Adam seems to be running circles around them. There are all these strange new ideas in the air. And that feels to me very

much like today where we have an elite who feel as if they're running the show, but the show isn't quite what it used to be. It just feels to me like there's a strange parallel between those two. And in the midst of this, you have this tremendous explosion of media, which was true in Adams' day as well, in the sense that you suddenly had this flurry of newspapers, thriving newspaper trades in all the major American towns, and an ability, therefore, to get out word in a way to which I think we can relate today, as you had not been able to do before. The idea that people could write anonymous articles, you talk about this in the book quite a bit, anonymous articles under a pseudonym that the newspaper would be like, we're definitely printing that. And we're just like put in the newspaper for people to absorb. Obviously, the media has far greater reach. There's more virality today than there was in the past. But this is another concept that is baked into American history. You know, the impartial press was an astonishing invention, right? The custom of the day is to write under pseudonyms. And what that meant, the latitude that that allowed you was immense. And what's interesting with Adams, who's, as I

said, writing under a good 30 plus pseudonyms, is that he can be different people and sound as if he's a multitude. So you could read three different articles in the course of a week under three different names, all of them written by Samuel Adams. But it gave you the sense that the disconnect of which he was speaking was general. ability to propel ideas that were perhaps not entirely correct into the paper, but also an ability to make it seem as if there was a whole army behind you. And in fact, you were actually one man raising a ruckus. That's such a great point that he, because he was writing under so many pseudonyms, he was able to give the impression that like, dang, a lot of people feel this way. When in reality, it was just what him. I also love the letter from the country,

which would actually be a letter from Samuel Adams in town, right? So you're posing as various people from different vantage points. Very, very smart. He was playing chess. He's playing chess while the crown officials are playing checkers, unfortunately, yes.

I mean, I think the greatest creation in his part, in terms of the media, is his paper that he founds with friends after troops occupy Boston in the 1760s, which, by the way, is something I think we also forget, that Boston is an occupied town well before the Revolution. press home to the other colonies, Boston's martyrdom. Adams and his friends dispatched these sensationalist, very lurid pieces of encounters between the awful, threatening troops and the poor, defenseless civilians. And they send these articles, which are largely manufactured, to New York and to Philadelphia. And only later are those articles reprinted in Boston when, of course, nobody remembers if these things ever happened or not. So that was a kind of masterful use of the press as well. Once you understand the conditions under which Bostonians were living, you can understand why some of the amendments were added to the Bill of Rights. To us now, it's like, why would we need

that? No soldiers are living in people's houses. That seems obsolete. But if you truly felt oppressed by an occupying forces military on your street corner, you might want to add that. You know, you're so right. And that's true, even at the Declaration, where you have some of these odd, supposed crimes that the Crown has committed, and moving an assembly from one place to another, or shutting down an assembly, or making it impossible to administer impartial justice. Those were actually all things that the Crown had done in Massachusetts in the preceding decade, about which Adams and his friends had been hollering for years. And those things to us now sound so sort of quaint and odd, but those were precisely the abuses to which they were reacting.

But those were precisely the abuses to which they were reacting. This episode is brought to you by Dyson OnTrack. Dyson OnTrack headphones offer best-in-class noise cancellation and an enhanced sound range, making them perfect for enjoying music and podcasts. Get up to 55 hours of listening with active noise cancelling enabled, soft microfiber cushions engineered for comfort, and a range of colours and finishes. Dyson OnTrack. Headphones remastered. Buy from dysonCanada.ca. With ANC on, performance may vary based on environmental conditions and usage.

Accessories sold separately. Y'all afraid of ghosts? How about ghost peppers? It's the moment you've been waiting for. The ghost pepper sandwich is back at Popeyes. A buttermilk-battered chicken breast served on a brioche bun with barrel-cured pickles. And here's the best part. It's topped with a sauce made from ghost peppers and on show chilies. If that doesn't send a chill of

anticipation down your spine, nothing will. Get your ghost pepper sandwich today at Popeye's before it ghosts you for another year. People are very curious about what does it take to write a book of this magnitude first of all this is like a huge bestseller which again as i mentioned at the outset i'm absolutely thrilled for but this is not just a like let me write a little article here Here's 10 Sam Adams facts that I got for you. You know what I mean? Like this is a tremendous undertaking, takes years. So walk us through the process because I know people are very interested in behind the scenes of how works like this are conceptualized and how they're created. So you get in your mind, you finish this book about the Salem Witch Trials. they're created. So you get in your mind, you finish this book about the Salem witch trials.

Get in your mind, you know who would be a great person to write a book about? Samuel Adams. What happens next? Do you have to pitch it to somebody? Give us all the insider scoop. So actually, I thought I was writing a book about someone else. And I work at a local library, which is an open stack library. And if I went into the library and read about this other person who I thought was my next subject, I would go to the right, but I kept turning left where the Adams papers were. And by three in the afternoon, I would be sitting on the floor, still reading the Adams papers. So at a certain point, I confessed to my agent that that was what was happening and that I, even though I meant to be going right, I was turning left. And he said, rather brilliantly, I think you want to write a

book about Samuel Adams, don't you? And I said, very observant of you, my dear. So yes, then he and I pitch it to my publisher. Honestly, I think probably was expecting that I was going to write a book about a woman next because I had written previously on the witch trials and then before that on Cleopatra. So I kind of was heading in that direction. But this to my mind really connected with, it was like the missing link between the Ben Franklin book and the witchcraft book in the sense that it's America making its way from Puritan America to the enlightenment ideals of Franklin and Jefferson. So we pitched to the publisher and then hope that the publisher will see the light. So I read a short proposal, which is kind of like a very rich, Samuel Adams in six pages, everything you need to know about why he's not really a beer,

but he was actually an essential founder. And then I head off, assuming the publisher has signed off, which in this case, happily they did. Then I head off into the archives. And what I generally do is to read the primary documents, the most central documents first, without any context. So in this case, I read through the papers of Samuel Adams, which are in the New York Public Library, both sides of the correspondence, both what he wrote and what people write to him. And I read through them sort of straight through without any context, not knowing who was who necessarily or what was happening in the background. Then I would back up a little bit and do the secondary research, read about the other people in the story, read about the context, read everything

that surrounds this moment, and then head off into the other archives as well. So in this case, the great wealth of material was either in the Massachusetts Historical Society, where there are a lot of diaries from the period, a lot of letters that mention Adams, and all the newspapers, which were hugely important because, of course, that's where the Samuel Adams riches are. And a lot of this was, of course, deciphering which pseudonyms were his. And also, you want to know the weather, and you want to know how Boston sounded, and how it smelled, and what you could buy at the market, and what the preoccupations were, and what the scandals of the day were. You want all of that material. And then I went to London where, in a funny way, you get the best dose of him because he never says, of course, here's what I did. Here's what I wrote. Here's the ruckus I caused.

Here's how we threw tea into the harbor. But the governor and the lieutenant governor and the customs officials are all of them regularly and lavishly writing back to London to report on the activities of, as they call him, the principal incendiary, the chief incendiary, that Machiavelli of chaos, Samuel Adams. So in a way, from his enemies, you get the best portrait. Sometimes they overreact, and sometimes, in fact, they attribute articles to him which are not by him. But for the most part, you get a sense not only of him, but of the frustration and the dismay that he's causing in the upper echelons of colonial administration. the papers of Samuel Adams, ladling in this time the Boston Committees of Correspondence, which are these astonishing reports from town to town through a set of committees that Adams had founded, which explains how the indignation basically electrifies the continent after the

Boston Tea Party. And only after I've read all of that do I realize I should probably sit down and probably start writing a book. So I researched probably for about three and a half years. And then the writing takes a year and a half after that, during which time I occasionally make another foray into the archives because either I'd forgotten something or something new has turned up or an archive opens that I hadn't known about or something else comes to light. That's fascinating. Here's the thing. something else comes to light. That's fascinating. Here's the thing. Maybe you know this, Stacey, that people think doing research is conducting a Google query. You know, that guess I could have done it in fewer than five years had I done that.

That's right. You could just be like, who is Samuel Adams? Type, type, type, type, type. That's what people today, when people say, well, I did my own research, what they mean is I Googled it. Right? It doesn't mean that they went to the archives and then they went to London and they figured out what his pseudonyms were and they read the original newspaper. But you know what else that means? That means that they didn't, as I did, have to spend an inordinate amount of time deciphering 18th century handwriting, which is really difficult sometimes. I mean, there are a few people whose, you know, whose penmanship tutors should be, you know, drawn and slaughtered. It's really, some of it is really indecipherable. But for the most part, you know, touching those pieces of

paper and being able to see where someone has crossed out. It's interesting with the papers of Thomas Hutchinson even, he does an enormous amount of crossing out when he's in distress, when he's anxious about something. And it's really interesting to see where those moments are, because those are the pressure points, right? That's where the opposition movement has really got to him. And you don't see it if you don't see the original document, if you don't see those transcriptions, you really don't. You just miss that completely. It's just interesting to see, you know, where the blots on the paper are, where someone

hesitated, where something gets repeated, what's on the other side of the paper. It's just, you know, it's thrilling. Yeah, because if somebody, if something is like hastily jotted on a scrap of paper, that has a different energy behind it, a different feeling behind it than somebody who sits down and writes a carefully composed letter with no mistakes. And you wouldn't get that sense if you're just reading where somebody transcribed what was written on the piece of paper and put it in a blog post on a website somewhere. You wouldn't have that same sense of understanding

somebody's mental state. The best of those may be Benjamin Franklin, who very often, when he's angry, writes an angry letter. And then he decides it's too angry, so he writes a milder version. And then he decides that's too angry, so he writes a yet milder version. And then he puts the entire thing in his desk drawer and never sends it. Hey, therapists tell you to do that today. The Benjamin Franklin technique. Exactly. The Benjamin, I think today, Stacey, I know it's been a rough day. You should use the Franklin method. Exactly. And write a series of scathing letters. Many marriages have been saved by the Benjamin Franklin method, right?

saved by the Benjamin Franklin method, right? When you go to begin writing, after having done years of research on this, original research, first of all, when you get to these archives, do you take pictures of everything? That is what a lot of authors do today, is they take pictures of the documents. Okay, as if you didn't already know this, I'm a bit of a dinosaur, but my feeling is that if I type it into my computer, I have somehow absorbed the information. Whereas if I take a picture of it, I have a picture of it, but I haven't necessarily read it. So I just feel like there's some kind of osmosis that takes place if I am forced to take notes on what I'm reading. Occasionally I'll take a picture of something if I can't decipher it or if I know I'm going to want to go back and review it. picture of something where if I can't decipher it, or if I know I'm going to want to go back and review it. But for the most part, I like to take the notes then as I'm reading, because I

feel as if it just gets into my system in some way. Because what you are going to do ultimately is spend a year or two trying to somehow distill all of this material and thread it together. And if it doesn't get into your actual cells, I'm not sure how you ultimately do that. If you're really pressed for time and you're only in a foreign archive and the clock is ticking and your advances running out, maybe, but for the most part, I really like to take notes as I'm sitting there and as I'm going. And then when you're writing, most authors, especially an author who's working on a book of this nature, most authors have some kind of methodology. Most authors that I speak to

have their own little idiosyncratic methodology. With authors, there's one part idiosyncrasy, and then there's a big part, which is superstition. If it worked yesterday, then it's going to work the same. If I use the same pencil, it will work the same way today. I don't stop in the middle of a sentence, although I've heard that one before and it's kind of genius. I do feel when I'm writing that I have to produce two pages. I don't have to write when I'm in my office, but I can't do anything else as sort of the ground rule, which is not my rule, but a well-adopted one. And I used to be able to turn out three pages. Either I have become slower or I'm writing a more difficult book. For the last few books, it's really been a two-page-a-day process. And I find that early in the morning, very clear-minded, by the time the

coffee begins to run out, by the time around one o'clock when the caffeine feed is sort of lingering, is less effective, not as good, that any day out of the office is a very costly thing because it's almost like you have a patient in the emergency room on the operating table and to leave the room for too many hours is to risk cardiac arrest in some way. So I'm very difficult to live with because I will maybe take a day of the weekend off, but I don't like to be out of the office for more than one day in a row. So usually I'll work Sundays, but not Saturdays or some version of that. And sometimes between chapters, it's possible to pull away, but my feeling is very much once you've started, the momentum is with you and it's best to sort of continue on.

And also you're just kind of in the thick of it. You're living it on some level. You're really in those years. And I find anyway, very cranky if pulled away from them in some way. And my only trick other than the fact that I drink a massive amount of coffee and eat a massive amount of sugar, I might add, is that I write by hand, which slows me down. I'm a very fast typist and I'm not as fast a thinker. And somehow the writing with a pencil on a legal pad means that I am more concise, I think, in my prose. And also, it's laborious. It's hard to write by hand, if we all remember what writing by hand was like. So it slows me down and I think forces me to be a little bit more pointed in my prose

than would typing on a keyboard, where I think I'm a little bit more sort of freestyle, free-spirited anyway. And then do you pay someone to transcribe it for you? Oh, no, no. Then I type it into the computer myself. So I'll write two pages in the morning, and then usually the afternoon, I'm probably transcribing what I had written the previous day. So the second draft is on the computer, which I've typed in. And the subsequent, the edited drafts are all of them either on the screen or I'll print them out and I'll mark them up with a pencil and put the changes in. The interesting question

always, of course, is with a project like this, where do you start? And with this one, it was an easy choice because very early on, it occurred to me that we all know that Paul Revere gets on his horse one April night and rides frantically west. None of us stops for a minute to think, where was Paul Revere riding? And of course, where he's riding is to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that they're about to be arrested or assassinated for treason. But none of us really puts that together. So I realized that the book had to start with Revere getting on his horse with a very specific destination, which I'd like to think was going to signal to the reader that you know this story, but you don't really know this story.

I love that. The same thing is true, I felt like in this book of things, circumstances surrounding some of the other very well known events in US history. I'm not going to give anything away because I want people to read it. But let's just say that the versions that we learned in second grade are meant to be easy to understand and internalize by a seven-year-old, but they do not represent the complexity and nuance of the situation as a whole. I have one last question about the writing process. Are you in a constant state of revision, or do you get everything down and then begin

again with fresh eyes, looking at it a second time? I can't figure out where I'm going until I have revised what I'm working on. So it's a little bit polishing everything as I go. And then every chapter gets kind of repolished and polished again after that. I anyway don't ever end up at the end of the day where I thought I was going to end up when I sat down that morning. So once that is established, I can usually go back and kind of buff and polish a little bit. Then the whole thing obviously gets compressed or one hopes it gets compressed afterward and the creases get ironed out and things like that. I feel as if most of us would like to continue to revise even after the book

has been published. That seems fair, doesn't it? Yeah. I feel like the revising though is so much more gratifying because you're not staring at a blank page. There is that, the reason to end in the middle of a sentence, you know, that fear when you sit down at your desk that you just can't get there from here. That feeling of just that you're slightly stalled or there's just a resistance. You don't have that when you're editing.

You've got something in your hands. You've got something with which you can work. It's easier to launch yourself. I totally feel that. I get that. It's a different mental state. And you're right that it's less daunting than like, and now I have to write a whole book. One should never have that thought because that's just so off-putting. If you want to write a book, Stacey Schiff says, the worst thought you could have is I have to write a whole book. I think what you think is I have to write two pages today and two pages tomorrow and two pages the next day, right? And then ultimately they do begin to add up. That's a very good piece of advice. Okay. First of all, I have to say that I loved this book so much that I chose it to be one of

the selections in my book club. And so I'm super excited to be bringing this story to a wider audience. We have not read a book yet about the revolution. I've been like, waiting for the right work and the right author. And so I'm very excited to be able to discuss this with you further in our book club, et cetera. But I want to close with, what do you wish more Americans understood about either Samuel Adams or about the American Revolution? What is something that you wish that people knew? I guess there are two things, because of course I couldn't answer the question with a single one. The first is that one rather ordinary, somewhat flawed individual can make a difference.

I mean, it is astonishing what Samuel Adams accomplishes in many ways when nobody is looking. And the other is, and this is, I think, at the heart of what he truly believes, that democracy fundamentally rests on two pillars. One of those is integrity, it's some sort of moral spine, and the other is civic education. And that without those twin pillars, really democracy doesn't have a future. sees that early on. I think everyone is on the same page. Those are largely the issues with which he will contend later when he sees the country kind of rushing toward a more capitalist, more luxuriant future. But I think those ideas should remain with us. Those ideas are no less essential today. I love that. That's our shared history. And those are our shared ideals, no matter what it is that somebody believes about tax policy or school lunch programs, that we do have, as Americans, we have a shared history and we must have shared ideals because those are the pillars upon which democracy rests.

A wonderful line of Thomas Jefferson's around the time of his first inaugural, where he writes to Adams very admiringly because he considers Adams the time of his first inaugural, where he writes to Adams very admiringly, because he considers Adams the sort of picture of republicanism and says, your principles have been tested in the crucible of time, and they have come out pure. And it's just, you know, that's precisely the point. This is really the heart of the republican experiment. I love it. Thank you so much for doing this. You're fantastic. Your books are fantastic. It's not just this book that's fantastic. The Witches, Cleopatra, all fantastic. You're fantastic. Your books are fantastic. It's not just this book that's fantastic. The Witches, Cleopatra, all fantastic. You are just, I love your work. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much, Sharon. Stacey's book is called The Revolutionary

Samuel Adams, and I think you are going to love it. I chose it for one of my book club selections for good reason. This is a person with incredibly unique experience and insight into the American Revolution. More people need to know about him. And Stacey Schiff is just the author to take us there. Thanks so much for being here today. I'll see you again soon. Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. If you enjoyed this episode, would you consider sharing it on social media or leaving us a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform?

All those things help podcasters out so much. The show is written and researched by executive producer Heather Jackson, Valerie Hoback, and Sharon McMahon. Our audio engineer is Jenny Snyder, and it's hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. We'll see you again soon.