Significant Others - Bonus Episode: Stacy Schiff on Samuel Adams

Episode Date: December 1, 2022

Significant Others is back with a bonus episode! Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff returns to discuss her new book The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, which examines the essential (and somewhat forgotten) role of Samuel Adams during the Revolutionary War. Liza and Stacy explore why he has become more known as “the beer guy” than for his contributions to the cause, and ask - was Samuel Adams the Significant Other of the American Revolution? We’re working hard on Season 2! Until then, we will be releasing special bonus episodes from time to time. Want to support the show? Rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts and keep sending suggestions of Significant Others you’d like to hear about our way!

Welcome back to Significant Others. First of all, I want to say a gigantic thank you to everyone who listened to any part of Season 1. It's so nice to know I'm not the only one who finds these stories fascinating. And I have to say, I'm getting very excited about Season 2, but it's still a ways off. And while I'm deep in research and writing mode, I didn't want to let too much time go by without bringing you some kind of story of a person who's been misrepresented or misunderstood by history. So we're putting out a few bonus interviews with folks who have something interesting to share along those lines. who you may remember from the season one episode on Verna Bokoff, has a new book out that fits the bill perfectly, and she has graciously agreed to come and talk to us about it. It's called The Revolutionary, and it tells the story of a man without whom the American Revolution

might not have happened, yet he has nearly been scrubbed from the record of it by his own hand. Stacey, thank you so much for being here. Thanks so much for having me back, Liza. So on this podcast, we usually focus on people who've been overlooked or overshadowed, historically speaking. But Samuel Adams, who's the subject of your new book, wasn't overlooked so much as he removed himself from view. His cousin, John Adams, is far better known, obviously, but you reveal that, in fact, it was Samuel Adams, maybe more than any of the other founding fathers, who was the prime mover of the revolution.

Is that right? Absolutely. And it was that sort of disequilibrium that I was trying to correct because he looms so large in the story at the time and in the accounts of his contemporaries. And then he's totally gone from the picture by the time we look back at it. So what did we all get wrong? In a nutshell, if you can, what's the truer story? at wrong? In a nutshell, if you can, what's the truer story? Samuel Adams pretty much enters the stage with the opposition to the Stamp Act and is entrusted by the Massachusetts House of Representatives with the Massachusetts reaction, the Massachusetts response to the Stamp Act. And thereafter, he's elected to the House of Representatives, which we are told by the royal governor, much to his dismay, then begins to speak with Samuel Adams's voice. So from that point on, he is kind of wrestling people over to his side of the room. He's standing up for American liberties in a way that no one has had to do before because there hadn't yet been this conflict with Great Britain over the shape of the colonial relationship. And over those next years, Samuel Adams in particular will become the

most prolific writer of opposition pieces in the paper. He will write a lot of sensationalistic material during the years when British troops occupy Boston. He will very much exploit the Boston Massacre by arranging for orations every year to remember these civilians being slain by redcoats, which is a very poignant and obviously very emotional moment every year. And then he will help to mastermind the Boston Tea Party. So for those years, for all of the events with which we are familiar, and many with which we're not, like the pickets and the boycotts and the extra legal committees and the non-importation agreements, he's really the driving force. It's like political theater. Totally political theater. My favorite metaphor for anything I've heard in a long time

actually is the way that you describe the portrait of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Can you do a little summary of that? Like, insofar as I can remember, that's just one of those moments, which I think most of us have burned into our minds from grade school or from middle school anyway, of all of those men being in the room at the same time. And that portrait is something that is painted by Trumbull over a series of years, after many trips up and down the post-revolutionary America, trying to paint as many people from life as possible, and then essentially adding them to this composite image, which composite image never occurred historically. So, it's really kind of invented out of the painterly imagination and out of all of our need to have these men all in the room at

the same time. And I think what you're referring to there is the fact that people then, when the painting is finished, it is displayed at various places. It's an enormous painting and everyone comes out to see it. And the reaction in Boston is interesting because Bostonians look at it and think, but wait, where's Samuel Adams? And Samuel Adams is sort of wedged between two more prominent, wedged sort of behind a more prominent man. And the question is, would he have been happy having been relegated to the shadows because that's where he somewhat lived? Or was that an affront to New England that he's hiding behind a Virginian? So a lot of this has to do with just how the history gets remembered, and then, you know, beginning to see the objections to it from the people who actually

knew the history. Yeah, and I'm, as we discussed, I'm researching a figure from the same moment, and noticing, because I have not been a student of this history at all, ever, I'm noticing how mercurial it was. Day to day, things shifted so much and people, there was no kind of hard and fast line of, you know, it's easy to try and boil it down, at least for someone like me, into patriots and loyalists and which side are you on and were you pro-revolution or pro-crown? And that really doesn't have any meaning on a day-to-day basis in the 1770s, right? a moment like the Stamp Act where suddenly, and I'm trying to think what the modern equivalent would be, but a moment where indignation is general, where everyone suddenly becomes political and politicized, and to see how quickly people come to that position or to their convictions,

but how much difficulty they often have in doing so. And I'm thinking there of someone like the Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, who, like everyone else, believes that the Stamp Act is a really bad idea, that this is overreach on Parliament's part, that the colonies can't afford to pay this kind of tax, that this is taxation without representation, words he actually uses, but who can't, because of his official position, say as much. So, you know, you get people who are kind of stuck in the middle as well. Well, the middle was an uncomfortable place to be, right? Dangerous. And also, again, the middle kept shifting, right? As the revolutionaries got increasingly radical, and there kind of was no way to hide from any of this, it seems like.

Well, it seems like a lot of Samuel Adams's job was to make sure that no one occupied the middle, was to sort of coax everyone to the more revolutionary terrain and to get them off of that sort of tepid middle ground. One of the things you said that I found so interesting, and again, it speaks to this sort of people sort of making sense of what they were living through at the time and the reports being relatively unreliable, I guess, and how sometimes Adams was overlooked or, you know, underrepresented. And other times he was, people attributed things to him that he had not done. And he loomed much larger, in fact, in certain stories than he should have. Yes, at some point he gets to play the ogre. And I think, you know, in an interesting way, when you look at so much of this,

you realize what a just gross miscalculation this is from the British point of view. It's not even that the Americans, that the colonists really know what they're doing. It's that the British keep making error after error after error on which the Americans capitalize. the British keep making error after error after error on which the Americans capitalize. But a lot of that early miscalculation is just this misapprehension that there are just like two or three desperados, two or three dissatisfied Massachusetts men. And if those men could simply be eliminated, all of this dissent would evaporate. And in that respect, Adams lives terrifically large because he's always the chief of those kind of three most annoying human beings. He's the first with John Hancock to be prescribed as a traitor. There are constantly hints that he should be arrested or finally ans how general is the dissatisfaction, which is obviously a miscalculation that comes into play once people began firing at each other

in 1775. This idea of Samuel Adams as a person, and by the way, I'm training myself not to say Sam Adams because- It's hard, right? Yeah, he was never called Sam Adams, right? It's the beer that's done that to us. It's going to ruin your beer orders for the rest of your life. Exactly. It's fine. There are bigger tragedies. But Samuel Adams, as a person who was intentionally flew under the radar, obviously makes sense in when you think about him being, you know, public enemy number one to the crown and he's,

you know, sort of being hunted. But his intention to sort of evaporate and disappear into the background seems to be about more than just that. Is that fair to say? I think that's right. I think, to some extent, we don't entirely know the answer about why he erases himself later. There is always at work a really, to me, appealing modesty to this man. He doesn't have a vein bone in his body, which differentiates him tremendously from his cousin John. So that even at one point when he writes his wife from Congress, he's in Philadelphia, she's outside Boston, and says something like, you know,

I have long had to accustom myself to relinquishing the sweeter things in life for the sake of my country or for the public duty. But then he realizes that that sounds boastful and he kind of walks it back. I mean, that's the level of modesty we're talking. So some of it is the modesty. Some of it is the sense that he is not, as were his contemporaries, playing to posterity. He's really only concerned with one judge, the final judge. He's not really concerned with what the history books are going to make of him. John Adams will say to him after the revolution, your 40 years of writing is the only thing that

will really explain the years we've just lived through. Everyone's going to want to read them. You owe it to history to collect them. And Samuel Adams never does. And we're left without an explanation, and I'm sure the modesty plays something of a role there. But that unwillingness to sort of write himself into the history is something for which he pays the price. But I can't help but think he would have understood the price he was going to pay, that that was on some level intentional. We also, of course, have that, to me, devastating picture of John Adams sitting with Samuel Adams in Philadelphia as Samuel feeds all his papers to the fire. And this is where the biographer's heart just stops dead. And John says to him,

aren't you overreacting a little bit here? And Samuel says that he wants to make sure that none of his friends suffer for his negligence. He's really covering the trail. So there's also just that piece of it of, you know, you're fomenting sedition, you're fomenting revolution. This is the no-fingerprints school. You want to make sure that the pieces of paper don't fall into the wrong hands. It's fascinating. And he evolved into this, right? He was not someone who was marked from his early years as a virtuous ideologue, right? Entirely, entirely correct. The idealism may have been there. The discipline, the resolution, the restraint were certainly not. I mean, he really, he kind of flits around, he ambles his way into the future for years. And from those kind of carefree years where he

never develops a profession, never makes any money, emerges this just intensely disciplined revolutionary. So it is kind of, it's not an overnight transformation, but it is shocking to see. I mean, at one point when the royal governor was trying to sort of differentiate among his least favorite people in Boston, he says, you know, well, John Adams is bad enough, but he's not as stalwart. He's not as, he doesn't have the starchiness of his cousin Samuel, who's just impossible. But it's really that, the sense that he is absolutely unflagging and unwavering in his goals. And that did not manifest when he was younger by any means. We're living in a moment where things are pretty obsessively

documented as they're happening often. But in Samuel Adams' time, how atypical is this withdrawing from the record by choice? Nobody spends more time reviewing the history of the 1760s and 1770s and rehashing it than does John Adams, who in letter after letter, most of them in the early 19th century, distributes, redistributes, and then re-redistributes the credit for what happened. So he's constantly kind of keeping a list of, you know, who the most important person responsible, who the greatest revolutionary was, who's most important in Massachusetts, how Massachusetts is more important than Virginia, how the Massachusetts

men had accomplished so much before Patrick Henry even caught on. You know, there's just this amazing competition. It's John Adams who will later say that he's very much afraid that the revolution is going to boil down to basically a co-production between Ben Franklin and George Washington, and that he's going to fall out of the picture. So he does more kind of re-litigating of the past, if you will, than anyone else. And in those letters, he generally circles back to Samuel Adams. And those are the letters in which he points out the fact that Adams, his cousin Adams, is very much the father of the revolution, an original, a man who was born to sever the cord between

the two countries, you know, someone whom, you know, against next to whom Patrick Henry just pales. Oh, John Adams Adams where would we be I love him without him to entertain us exactly because you know that's the other thing he writes better letters than anybody else so he so there's a little Cicero component he did and exactly would you say that he in sort of through the lens of this podcast and the types of conversations that we've been having, would you say that Samuel Adams is in a way John Adams' significant other? Or is it more that he's the revolution's significant other? You know what I mean? If not for him, we wouldn't have so many things, clearly. But where do you think he was most profoundly influential in terms of creating that revolution in thinking to which John Adams refers when he says there was a revolution in hearts and minds that preceded the actual revolution. And that's the work of Samuel Adams. And also just in the sense that he makes it possible for

word to travel from New England throughout the colonies as quickly as it does because he invents this kind of hardwired communication system that no one really, it's called the committees of correspondence. It sounds very trite or very anodyne anyway. And it functions in this sort of extraordinary way after the Boston Tea Party to bring, to unite the colonies in their common cause. So for those two counts, I'd say he's essential and he represents that sort of anarchic, you know, street fighting, less decorous piece of the revolution that we tend to forget. But in terms of the two cousins, I love that you've put them together because I don't think

anyone ever does that. They, I mean, they're 13 years apart. It's Samuel who recruits John. Contrary, I think, to our understanding, Samuel comes from a very wealthy background. John born in a farmer's cottage in Braintree. Samuel grows up in Boston. John in the country. Harvard was a very hierarchical institution at the time. Samuel is ranked much higher in his class than is John in his. And it's Samuel who, as he will with many promising young Boston men, really kind of lassoes John into the cause. Samuel is the better known at the time that he's not only older and he's not only sort of the recruitment bureau in Boston,

but that he's far more prominent so that when John Adams arrives in France, everyone thinks he's Samuel Adams and he has to disappoint them in 1778 by admitting he's a different Adams. Of course, they don't believe him. That the king, when Thomas Hutchinson finally stands before him after the years of Boston unrest, after the Boston Tea Party, and the king is asking Thomas Hutchinson, you know, how did this happen and who are the opposition leaders? Who are these crazy radicals? The king will say, I've heard of one Mr. Adams, but who's the other? Because Samuel's reputation so far exceeded John's at the time. Amazing. It's just so hard not to relate when historical events are well presented as you always make them it's so hard not to relate it to our current moment and it makes me wonder if there is anyone

that samuel adams reminds you of in our current political arena I hope it's not too much of a cop-out to say that I wish there were. One of the attractions for me here, and one of the reasons I wanted so much to write the book, was because of that strong moral compass. And this is someone who not only has pretty much grown attached to these ideas and wants to do everything he can to disseminate them, but never deviates from them for a single moment. I mean, there's a moment of two and a half years, really, where the opposition falters, where there's no one really who's objecting to anything. The town of Boston has gone quiet. It's in the wake of the Boston massacre. Everyone's just exhausted by all of this objecting and picketing and rioting. And the one person who's still hounding everyone, who's still wailing about American rights and liberties is Samuel Adams. So, you know, for someone that's steadfast, I mean, I'm sure he or she is out there. I'm just,

I don't really know the name. It's really the qualities I think that we most associate with him, you know, that integrity and that resolution and that modesty, they feel like military qualities, but they also feel like antiquated qualities right now. And the humility. Very much the humility. Something short supply these days. What does that mean exactly? I know. I know. That is not, social media does not favor the self-effacing. Well, you know, someone had mentioned this to me. There's a moment where his committees, after the Boston Tea Party, the committees in which

he has set in motion and which exist in most of the towns in Massachusetts or in New England, in fact, begin to write to Boston to talk about how much they approve of, applaud the Boston Tea Party. And it's really like a Twitter fest that all of these people are, you know, everyone's appealing to the same language, everyone's invoking the same biblical illusions. It's this sort of mass outpouring. But I did realize in thinking about it that it would have been hard for him because he is so elusive and so much doesn't want to be at the center of attention. So, you know, how to translate that other in terms of being influential in the course of his development or the development of his interesting case because Otis is, during Adams' early years, the most, he's just an extraordinary speaker, he's the most er something which begins to sound like mania and which may have devolved into something worse than that. So that Adams adores him and clearly learns a great deal from him and helps Otis, in fact, to hone his writing style, which is really how Adams comes to everyone's notice. But then as Otis begins to, Otis' health begins to take a turn for the worse and he begins to, you know, speak for whole afternoons without drawing breath and sort of annoying people by his prickly comments, Adams has to go around town sort of apologizing for him and sort of fitting him onto committees where Otis can sit but not too much vacuum the oxygen out of the room. So there's a lot of, you know, sort of cleaning up work that

he has to do behind Otis, which he, there's one very poignant letter where he says he almost has tears in his eyes when he thinks about his great friend Otis and what he's come to. So it's really a matter of kind of finding a position for his former idol where he will do the minimum amount of damage. And much of that is because Otis has Tory days and Whig days, days where he thinks the Stamp Act was a great idea and times, days where he thinks the Stamp Act was a terrible idea. And he's very unpredictable. And somehow, Adams has to contend with all of that while holding straight to the cause. Where does this fall in the spectrum of difficult subjects for you? You notoriously tackle Holy Grail type biography subjects, and I'm wondering how this one, you sort of seem to thrive in an atmosphere of difficult primary source material. I'm wondering where this one falls in the spectrum. I'm wondering where this one falls in the spectrum.

Well, I would say the material was better than Cleopatra, where there was no material. There are always sort of the holy grails that you never find. The heartbreak with this one was a memoir of Samuel Adams. It's mentioned in the 19th century, which was written by his daughter and which never turned up. And I just assumed that when those pages turn up, I would be able to fill in more of the home life, more of the marriage, more of the, he has two children. They obviously adore him. There's very little to go on in terms of the home, of the domestic life. You're often reading backwards from what the crown officers are yelping about to figure out what Adam's doing. So there's often that Machiavelli of chaos,

look what he's done now. And of course, he's never said he did it, but we know what he's done from what the lieutenant governor or the governor is carping about. So a lot of it is what was reading in the British archives to find out what Adams had done in Boston. And that particularly becomes the case with something like the Boston Tea Party, where obviously this is a truly no-fingerprints operation. The chests of tea seem just to have leapt of their own accord into the water. No one in Boston, no one of the thousands of people who witnessed this event in Boston that night has seen a thing. No, no one has seen a thing. No one can name a name. Everyone's very exact that it was 342 chests of tea but no one can say another word about it but when you read the depositions that were taken from 12 men

who had witnessed it in london weeks later on every one of those depositions samuel adams's name figures first as the most active party that evening as the person who seemed to have be directing things His name comes up over and over and over again. So it's reading backwards from things like that and having to fill in the blanks or leaving the blanks, which as you know, I sort of have come to feel comfortable doing, which is to say that you write about the parts you know, and you either speculate intelligently or about the rest, or you just say, we'll never know this. I also, as you're talking to me, not that I have anywhere near experience with any of this, but

in the little teeny bit of it that I've experienced, it's not necessarily easier to go off of material that's been overly presented. Meaning if, you know, if you're going off of, I guess that would be secondary sources, but if you're going off of other people's reports, there's a lot to carve away in terms of that person's filter. And so to only go from these sort of refracted echoes in the moment, it might be, it's already stripped down. It's a different kind of difficult, but in a way it's purer, purer information. It feels pure and it feels virgin, which is kind of thrilling from an archival point of view. I mean, one of the interesting things with this material is that Adams' papers, for the most part, are published and have been for years. But the letters to him, the other side of the correspondence

is not published. And obviously, it reads very, everything reads very differently when you have both sides. And that side, which is fortunately for me in the New York Public Library, is hugely telling in terms not only of how he operated, but of how much loyalty and affection he inspired in colleagues. I mean, John Adams is very clear about this, but we tend to think of Samuel Adams as a firebrand or a sort of hot-headed radical. And John Adams makes really clear that he's a man of great softness and delicacy and steadfast integrity and genteel erudition is what John's exquisite humanity says, John Adams, which I love.

And in those letters to him, you see a lot of that. I mean, you see, for example, someone who writes to him when Adams is first in Philadelphia, and it's someone whose name appears nowhere else in the archive. And he writes to Adams and says, you know, I took advantage of a little trip I made over to your house where I removed all of the papers so that the soldiers couldn't, they wouldn't be able to take the papers that they would so love to have from your house. I just kind of removed them all for you. And it's those kinds of tributes that you don't see elsewhere. Fascinating. So I spend about a month or two with the characters that I'm learning about and then writing about. And you spend, I mean, I can't do the math, but that's vastly more time with them. How does that relationship affect you?

Like, do they invade your life? Do you feel sad when you're done with the book? How does that work? I feel like that's one of the thrills or the sort of secret beauties of biography. It's that you're always walking around with sort of a double vision. You're always living your life. You know, you're emptying the dishwasher at the same time you're back in 18th century Boston. Then you're always thinking about things both as you see them and as your subject sees them. And I mean, I find that just so rich and thrilling most of the time. At a certain point,

I do think that your subject can begin to overstay his welcome or her welcome. Or they start just taking up too much of your emotional space, or they smoke too much, or they've just plain been too long in the household and your family is starting to object. And it's funny with Adams,

I haven't quite been able to liberate myself yet and i think i'm i mean he's so idealistic and he's so in such a strong and to me appealing way he's so moral that i think i'm clinging to him for some kind of solace um so i haven't i haven't yet wanted to let him go and then there is a very cathartic moment at some point where physically, for better or worse, because you have to, you end up moving the files and the papers and all the documentation you have out of your office, which feels like a kind of weird, you know, sort of exorcism in some way, because you need to make room for the next subject. But I'm not with Samuel Adams on by no means, by no means there yet, exactly. I wonder if his reticence to be known makes him more enticing for you. I think so. And I think, you know, there's something about,

as you know, about biography generally, where you're the more recessive partner, you're, you know, you're putting your subject before you. And I think that's very much how he operated in some way. And I think so. I think there's a certain kind of secret community of some kind between what he was doing and what I'm doing. Sure. That's great. Now we're getting into therapy though. That's right. Well, I'm never more than half a step away. Giving, receiving, I don't know.

It's such an interesting relationship. It's a very, it's a, you know, it's such an interesting relationship. You know, it's always the biographer and subject. They're always compared to a love affair. And they are, but they're also all kinds of love affairs. That is true. I do not want to take up any more of your precious time. This has been absolutely so much fun. I'm so grateful.

Thank you so much for sharing this time with us. Thank you so much. Stacey Schiff's The Revolutionary is in stores now, and I'll be giving it to everyone on my Christmas list. Thank you so much for checking out this bonus episode. You can look for more in the usual place. They'll be coming out about once a month, and you never know where they might take us.