Congressmen Seek To Honor America’s Founding Family

A bipartisan group of congressmen is advocating for the Adams Memorial–Great American Heroes Act. Their goal is a monument at Washington, D.C., to honor the family’s contributions — including two presidents — for America’s 250th anniversary year.The Adams legacy began with President John Adams, dubbed “the Atlas of Independence” for working to secure European funding for the patriot cause. He and his family dedicated themselves to the Revolution and sustained the nation through four generations.Last Friday in the Hill, Congressmen John Moolenaar of Michigan and Howard Morgan Griffith of Virginia, Republicans — and a pair of Massachusetts Democrats, Congressmen William Keating and Stephen Lynch — backed the memorial. “Honoring the extraordinary contributions of the Adams family,” they wrote, ought to be a common goal.A park ranger at the Adams Presidential Center at Quincy, Massachusetts, told this columnist that father and son were long forgotten. He said that prior to “John Adams,” David McCullough’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner, “anyone who named John as their favorite president was lying.” The second president is the only Founder without a monument at the capital.Contemporaries often dismissed the Adamses, too. When John served as the Senate’s first president, members instituted a gag rule. President John Quincy Adams, chosen by the House despite winning fewer votes than President Jackson, was dogged by unproven allegations of a “corrupt bargain” with Speaker Henry Clay.The homes where Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams were born at Quincy, Massachusetts, in a 1849 oil painting by G.N. Frankenstein. Via Wikimedia CommonsYet the Adams family has the last word in history thanks to their faithful letter-writing and diary entries. The wife of John and mother of John Quincy, Abigail Adams, wrote her husband often — letters addressed “my dearest friend” by both — giving insight into the times.Both President Adamses admonished themselves for “vanity” and cultivated humility. The short, stout John, dubbed “His Rotundity,” envied how his fellow patriot, Benjamin Franklin, enchanted Paris where French was the language of diplomacy. John was determined to be fluent rather than to depend on the gifted John Quincy to translate.When John mastered French, he made a shocking realization: Franklin was almost illiterate. It was the Pennsylvanian’s charisma that won hearts and opened wallets. That charm was something neither father nor son could ever master. Even the great general, President Washington, kept his vice president at arm’s length.George Peter Alexander Healy’s portrait of President John Quincy Adams, 1858, detail. Via Wikimedia CommonsJohn Quincy, who watched the Battle of Bunker Hill at seven while holding his mother’s hand, went on to serve as a senator and secretary of state but never mastered politics. When he sought to cultivate Jackson as his running mate, he earned a life-long enemy because Old Hickory believed false stories about his rival undermining him.John had a legendary feud with his vice president, Thomas Jefferson, until Abigail’s death in 1818 sparked a rapprochement. The second and third presidents died on July 4, 1826, the Declaration of Independence’s 50th anniversary. After serving just one term like his father, John Quincy spent 17 years delivering abolitionist stemwinders in the House.Of the first seven presidents, only the Adamses didn’t participate in slavery, and, in 1841, John Quincy mounted a successful defense before the Supreme Court of the captured Africans aboard the Amistad. The boy of Bunker Hill had grown into “Old Man Eloquent.” It took a stroke on the House floor to silence him; he died in 1848 in the Speaker’s Room.Abigail backed equality, too, including for women. “Don’t forget the ladies,” she wrote to John at the Continental Congress in 1776, urging against giving husbands “unlimited power.” She added that “all men would be tyrants if they could,” capturing the new government’s ethos.Henry Adams at his desk, photographed in 1883 by Marian Hooper Adams. Massachusetts Historical Society via Wikimedia CommonsJohn Quincy’s son, Charles Francis Adams, was ambassador to the United Kingdom. When The New York Sun broke the Crédit Mobilier Scandal in 1872, it helped him end the patronage system and push civil service reform. His son, Henry Adams, wrote “The Jeffersonian Transformation,” in 1899. The Sun called the historian’s epic “magisterial” with a “gorgeous, rolling cadence.”The Adams Memorial Foundation aims to “create a lasting tribute that will inspire generations to come.” The Adamses might call it vanity. A monument, though, will serve the nation they built, advancing the belief that “liberty,” as John Adams wrote in 1764, “cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.”

Congressmen Seek To Honor America’s Founding Family

Congressmen Seek To Honor America’s Founding Family

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