In Celebration: The 220th Anniversary of the Academy

The 220th Annual Meeting of the Academy was dedicated to John Adams, the Academy's founder, and Abigail Adams, his equally remarkable wife. The Academy officially came into being on May 4, 1780, when "an act to incorporate a society for the cultivation and promotion of the Arts and Sciences" was passed by the Massachusetts House of Representatives. But it was conceived in the mind of John Adams much earlier, largely as a result of his experiences as a delegate to the Continental Congress and as the American representative to France. Bernard Bailyn, Adams University Professor and James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History Emeritus at Harvard University, opened the meeting with a commentary on the personal characteristics of John Adams as revealed in his diary and his autobiography. Bailyn has twice received the Pulitzer Prize (1967 and 1986) and was named the Jefferson Lecturer, the nation's highest honor for scholars in the humanities, in 1998.

Historical Commentary

By Bernard Bailyn

The trouble with attempting to say something general about John Adams to set the stage for the reading of some of his letters -- which is my assignment this evening—is that one hardly knows where to begin. He had such a long, complicated career, was such an important public figure from the origins of the Revolution to the consolidation of the nation thirty years later -- yet, unlike most public men, then and now, he was introspective, socially awkward, fiercely dutiful, and puritanically upright—which is probably why Benjamin Franklin said of him that he "means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things absolutely out of his senses." The feeling was mutual, and so it is not from Franklin, whose American Philosophical Society was a goad to Adams's founding of this Academy, that one will find a judicious assessment of Adams's character, the personality setting of his career. There is another contemporary who throws more light on the founder of this Academy.

James Boswell and John Adams were contemporaries, and while their careers could scarcely have been more different, they had a great deal in common. Both had a protracted adolescence; both had a passion to succeed, to star in the world and to command the respect of their peers; both had an absorbing, at times almost paralyzing self-consciousness; both had the capacity to express their inner feelings in vivid, natural, unaffected prose; and both were the kind of people for whom experience is not fully concluded until it is recorded, until it is expressed in words. So both left moving testimonies of their inner experiences - Boswell in his journals and great biography, Adams in the diary of his early years, his later autobiography, and his letters, especially those to his wife.

Only Boswell could match the young John Adams for self-dramatization, for the innocence and poignancy of his confessional writings, and for the unintended humor of his portrayal of his plight.

I am resolved [he wrote in his diary at age 21] to rise with the sun and to study the scriptures on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings, and to study some Latin author the other 3 mornings. Noon and night I intend to read English authors... May I blush whenever I suffer one hour to pass unimproved.

He will seize upon every opportunity life offers him, and create some that it does not. As a law student he pledges to "attempt some uncommon, inexpected enterprize in law… I will push myself into business. I will watch my opportunity to speak in court, and will… surprize bench, bar, jury, auditors, and all." Reputation, he tells himself, "ought to be the perpetual subject of my thoughts," and he considers ways to "spread an opinion of myself as a lawyer of

distinguished genius, learning, and virtue."

As a young man he was driven into fits of despair by what he believed was his social stiffness and maladroit conversation. At times he felt that he "behaved with too much reserve…and with…pale timidity." At other times he failed easily to "chatter with a girl…objects before me [he wrote] don't suggest proper questions to ask and proper observations to make," so then he overcompensated, babbled, overextended himself, and was easily tripped up by calmer men with sharper wits. "I talk to Paine about Greek, that makes him laugh. I talk to Sam Quincy about resolution and being a great man and study and improving time, which makes him laugh…I talk to Hannah and Esther about the folly of love, about despizing it…which makes them laugh . . . Besides this I have insensibly fallen into the habit of affecting wit and humor, of shrugging my shoulders and… distorting the muscles of my face." At night, alone, he brooded on, rehearsed, the devastating, witty comments he should spontaneously have made.

Humor flowed so naturally from Adams's dramatic objectification of himself and the world he saw that one can hardly keep from quoting. At one point, as a student, he describes himself, alone, heroically declaiming the Catilinarian orations, savoring the "sweetness and grandeur of [Cicero's] sounds," but then catches himself in this rhapsodic mood and explains that there are perfectly practical reasons for doing this: it "opens my pores, quickens the circulation, and so contributes much to health." Years later he snaps up an Englishman's compliment to his wife, but then stops short: "Down vanity," he writes, "for you don't know who this Englishman is." And then there is B. Bicknells' wife, who was anxious and trembled on her wedding night, until "she recollected she had put her hand to the plow and could not look back, so she mustered up her spirits, committed her soul to God and her body to B. Bicknell, and into bed she leaped."

What makes his prose so vivid, it seems to me, what made it possible for him to transform ordinary events into heightened dramas, was his sensuous apprehension of experience. He responded first and fundamentally to the tangible, audible, visual qualities of life. He felt the world, directly and sensitively, before he thought about it; and since he was immensely articulate and verbally inventive, his writing sparkles with unstylized, personally idiomatic images of the tangible, the tactile world.

The images, the metaphors, are at times brilliant: "a cabin filled with straw where…the master of the house, his wife and four children all pigged in together"—a cow's teats that "strutt with milk"—a Moravian prayer meeting where "the women's [covered] heads resembled a garden of white cabbage"—kissed girls "glowing like furnaces"—the Spanish landscape "like a bird deprived of its feathers"—a "small, spungy, muscular substance growing fast to the rock, in figure and feeling resembling a young girl's breast."

Such sensuous vividness, such idiomatic concreteness, was not restricted to the single metaphor or phrase, nor is it to be found only in the writings of his youth. In his tour of France before taking up his duties as co-ambassador at Versailles, he visited the chateau at Chantilly and wrote:

Walked around the gardens, fish ponds, grottoes, and waterspouts. And looked at the carps and swan that came up to us for bread...Whistle or throw a bit of bread into the water and hundreds of carps, large and fat as butter will be seen swimming near the top of the water...and will assemble all in a huddle before you. Some of them will thrust up their mouths to the surface, and gape at you like young birds in a nest to their parents for food.

While we were viewing the statue of Montmorency, Mademoiselle de Bourbon came out into the round house at the corner of the castle dressed in beautiful white, her hair uncombed, hanging and flowing about her shoulders, with a book in her hand, and leaned over the bar of iron. But soon perceiving that she had caught my eye and that I viewed her more attentively than she fancied, she rose up with that majesty and grace which persons of her birth affect if they are not taught, turned her hair off of both of her shoulders with her hands in a manner that I could not comprehend, and decently stepped back into the chamber and was seen no more.

It was the vividness of his apprehension, the drama he saw in everyday life, and his fierce and strict puritanical integrity that made him view Franklin's life in Paris with horror. The great man, Adams recorded in his autobiography, slept late, and when he managed to finish breakfast he was surrounded by all sorts of odd types—"philosophers, academicians, and economists...atheists, deists, and libertines"—and by crowds of women and children who flocked around just to look at him. Eventually, Adams reported, they would all amble off to dinner and the theater and an evening in the salons.

As far as Adams could see, Franklin did very little work, and what he did was done with an appalling lack of secrecy. Versailles was a snake pit of intrigue, and Franklin's desk, Adams said, was a regular sieve. Spies were everywhere, but Franklin seemed not to care. He had nothing to hide, he said, so the more people knew about him and his work, the better. "If I was sure…that my valet…was a spy," Adams quoted him saying, "as probably he is, I think I should not discharge him for that, if in other respects I liked him." Adams could not believe that such a bland innocence was sincere, hence it was highly suspicious; and then, to compound the mystery of Franklin's behavior, it turned out that the loose flow of secret information worked to America's advantage, since in effect it played Britain off against France in such a way as to stimulate France's interest in supporting the American rebellion.

But Franklin's slack behavior and the negotiations with the French government did not wholly absorb Adams's mind in Paris. He became keenly aware of France's leadership in science and scholarship and particularly recognized the importance of its Royal Academy of Sciences (where, in 1778, to his immense chagrin, he had to witness French high society's joy in seeing Franklin embraced by Voltaire, kissed on both cheeks by Europe's greatest intellectual "and the cry immediately spread," Adams wrote gloomily in his autobiography, from "this great theatre of philosophy and frivolity...through the whole Kingdom and I suppose over all Europe, Qu'il etoit charmant, Oh! Il etoit enchantant…to see Solon and Sophicles embracing.")

He quickly saw in the French Academy of Sciences a model vehicle for the advancement of the cultural life of his beloved state and nation. And it did nothing for his peace of mind and much for his ambition that again and again French academicians and men of science and letters "entertained" him with questions about Franklin's Philosophical Society, speaking "with eulogiums on the wisdom of that institution and encomiums on some publications in their transactions."

So it was in 1779, on a short return trip to Boston, with the memory of the French academy and all those encomiums on Franklin's creation burning in his mind, that Adams made the proposal that resulted in the founding of this Academy. The occasion was a dinner in honor of the French ambassador, held in a second-floor room in Harvard Hall on August 24. Adams was seated next to the Reverend Samuel Cooper, a fervent patriot and member of the Harvard Corporation. Adams was no one to waste time in idle chatter, and so he instructed Cooper on the natural history of America, the wonderful scientific collections he had seen in France, and the great fund of talent in science he believed existed in Boston—ending with the proposal to Cooper that the Massachusetts legislature establish an Academy of Arts and Sciences. Cooper had grave doubts. There either were, he replied, or were not enough people interested and versed in such subjects to populate an academy. If there were not, then the venture would fail. If there were, then it would inevitably ruin Harvard "by setting up a rival to it that might draw the attention and affections of the public in some degree from it."

That warmed up the conversation considerably. Adams was not a successful lawyer for nothing, and he quickly demolished that little syllogism: 1) Boston alone, he was prepared to prove, could now easily populate such a society, and as time went on it would certainly do so more and more easily; and 2) the Academy would not be a rival to Harvard but "an honor and advantage to it," and he proposed to make sure of that by providing that the president of Harvard and its "principal professors" would always be members of it, and that the Academy would meet at Harvard (which it did for its first sixty years).

Cooper was convinced that Harvard would survive the founding of the Academy, with the result that on the following May 4, 1780, the new legislature of Massachusetts incorporated this society in order to promote and encourage the knowledge of the antiquities of America and of the natural history of the country …to promote and encourage medical discoveries, mathematic disquisitions, philosophical enquiries and experiments, astronomical, meteorological, and geographical observations, and improvements in agriculture, arts, manufactures, and commerce; and, in fine, to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.

Adams's satisfaction in the establishment of this body was enormous. Let the French savants of the future, he wrote, entertain their American visitors with enquiries about the American Academy of Boston as well as the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, and with similar "eulogiums on the wisdom of that institution" as well as of the earlier one. Over the next ten years, which he spent in Europe, he wrote at length about the Academy, again and again complimenting its officers on their accomplishment, circulating the Academy's early Transactions, and memorializing his role in its founding. His pride in the Academy was sincere and, in the end, disinterested. It was an expression of the great surge of idealism that was at the core of his passionate engagement in the Revolution—of which, in an important way, he believed the Academy was a fulfillment.

Readings from the Letters of John and Abigail Adams

The President called on four fellows of the Academy: Stephen G. Breyer, associate justice of the United States Supreme Court; Anthony Lewis, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting (1955 and 1963) and editorial columnist for the New York Times; Margaret H. Marshall, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the first woman to hold that post; and Rosanna Warren, Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, an accomplished poet and a gifted translator from French, Latin, and Greek.

The Fellows read from the correspondence between Abigail and John Adams, emphasizing passages from their early courtship, letters exchanged during the American Revolution, and letters written when John Adams was representing the interests of the new nation in Paris and in London. Among the readings was the following excerpt from a letter written by John to Abigail on August 4, 1776, in which John forecast the establishment of the Academy:

Went this Morning to the Baptist Meeting, in Hopes of hearing Mr. Stillman, but was dissappointed. He was there but another Gentleman preached. His Action was violent to a degree bordering on fury. His Gestures, unnatural, and distorted. Not the least Idea of Grace in his Motions, or Elegance in his Style. His Voice was vociferous and boisterous, and his Composition almost wholly destitute of Ingenuity. I wonder extreamly at the Fondness of our People for schollars educated at the Southward and for southern Preachers. There is no one Thing, in which We excell them more, than in our University, our schollars, and Preachers. Particular Gentlemen here, who have improved upon their Education by Travel, shine. But in general, old Massachusetts outshines her younger sisters, still. In several Particulars, they have more Wit, than We. They have Societies; the philosophical Society particularly, which excites a scientific Emulation, and propagates their Fame. If ever I get through this Scene of Politicks and War, I will spend the Remainder of my days, in endeavouring to instruct my Countrymen in the Art of making the most of their Abilities and Virtues, an Art, which they have hitherto, too much neglected. A philosophical society shall be established at Boston, if I have Wit and Address enough to accomplish it, sometime or other… My Countrymen want Art and Address. They want Knowledge of the World. They want the exteriour and superficial Accomplishments of Gentlemen, upon which the World has foolishly set so high a Value. In solid Abilities and real Virtues, they vastly excell in general, any People upon this Continent. Our N. England People are Aukward and bashfull; yet they are pert, ostentatious and vain, a Mixture which excites Ridicule and gives Disgust. They have not the faculty of shewing themselves to the best Advantage, nor the Art of concealing this faculty. An Art and Faculty which some People possess in the highest degree. Our Deficiencies in these Respects, are owing wholly to the little Intercourse We have had with strangers, and to our Inexperience in the World. These Imperfections must be remedied, for New England must produce the Heroes, the statesmen, the Philosophers, or America will make no great Figure for some Time.

Footnotes:

Historical commentary C 2000 by Bernard Bailyn.
Excerpt from letter by John Adams to Abigail Adams, August 4, 1776, from The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family, 1762-1784,edited by L.H. Butterfield, Marc Friedlaender, and Mary-Jo Kline (Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 149-50. Copyright C 1975 by the Massachusetts Historical Society.

This presentation was given at the 1834th Stated Meeting and 220th Annual Meeting, held at the House of the Academy in Cambridge on May 10, 2000. For a fuller account, see Bernard Bailyn, Faces of Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1990), chapter 1, and Realism and Idealism in American Diplomacy: The Origins (Princeton, NJ: Institute for Advanced Study, 1994).

Back to the Fall 2000 Bulletin