America’s Greatest Public Servant | Interview: Bob Crawford

Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention, Daniel Jenkins! Ladies and gentlemen, this is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by the Dispatch and Dispatch Media. Very excited for today's guest, who I had the pleasure of meeting when I was a special guest for a special edition of his excellent podcast, the Road to Now History Podcast. But I first was introduced to his non-historical work when my daughter was a little girl and we used to bang our heads on the dashboard to kick drum heart from the Abbott Brothers, where Bob Crawford, our guest today, is the bassist for the Grammy-nominated band. like a lot of the more famous bass players in rock and folk history. He's also a historian on the sideline. And Bob's new book is America's founding son, John Quincy Adams, from President to Political Maverick. Bob, welcome to the Remnant. Jonah, as a regular listener to this program, it is an honor to be here. And yes, you and I and my co-host Ben Sawyer, we did a Road to Now episode live from the Tallahassee Book Festival a couple years ago, I think it was. That was a great time. Yeah. I consider myself a very amateur student of American subcultures. And the Tallahassee book nerd hippie was one that I did not anticipate being there. But it was full of those kinds of people. lots of tie-dyed book readers. Anytime you have a book festival that features the Flaming Lips as the nighttime entertainment, you know you're in a little different territory. Yeah, sort of out of the typical Jonah Goldberg comfort zone. But still, everyone was super nice and it was really interesting. And you guys were gracious hosts. So really a pleasure to have you here. Sort of serendipitous. I saw you on TV and I knew I had your email somewhere. So just like, hey, dude, I saw you on TV. Why aren't you on my podcast? And you said I'd love to come on. So we have you on. And your book comes out as I was actually doing reading about the wigs. So I'm particularly intrigued with all of this. So first question, as per custom, what's your book about? My book is about America's greatest public servant, John Quincy Adams. Not America's greatest president. Maybe America's most extraordinary ex-president. But all in all, he is, I believe, at least the 19th century's greatest public servant of the United States, greatest public servant, if not our greatest public servant in the history of this country. And so he lived this life in three acts. I look at it. He was, of course, the son of John and Abigail Adams. He is an eyewitness to the Battle of Bunker Hill. He goes to Paris with his father as his father's negotiating France into the war and then peace with Great Britain. He travels across Europe as a young man. He's kind of has an internship in diplomacy. He's going to the opera with Thomas Jefferson. He's, you know, tasting. He's being exposed to exotic cuisines. He comes back. Harvard Boylston, professor of rhetoric, senator from Massachusetts, federalist senator who breaks with his party and supports Thomas Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase and the Embargo Act, then has this incredible diplomatic career where he rises to the office of secretary of state under President James Monroe. He's the architect. John Quincy Adams is the architect of the Monroe Doctrine. And then he has a failed one term presidency. And after that, he goes into Congress for 17 years. And so I my argument, which I feel is I stand on some solid ground, is that he is the United States's greatest public servant, maybe of all time, maybe maybe of all time. Jimmy Carter and J. Edgar Hoover fans are going to be coming at you with hot lead. Herbert Hoover fans, right? Herbert Hoover, yes. Oh, yeah, Herbert Hoover. I apologize. Herbert Hoover fans. It's very different. Of course, I've gotten this question, right? Well, I normally preface it by saying, with all due respect to Jimmy Carter, who deserves. And people ask me, well, who else? And I say, Herbert Hoover, because he lived a long time post-presidency. And he he I think he did humanitarian work. I'm not an expert in this area, but I think he did humanitarian work in maybe during World War Two, maybe after that. And the Republican Party, I mean, he was there at every convention until his passing in the mid 60s. Well, also, just as a public servant pre presidency, he probably saved more lives than any president in America. Again, not as president, but the relief for these, I guess, floods in Belgium and elsewhere was really a big, big deal as an engineer, as an engineering guy. We need to reassess what it means. Like we are raised to believe that you rise to the top, right? Like whatever field you're going to get yourself into, you know, we have this thing inside of us. Like we've got to get to the top. We got to be the boss. We got to get to the best. But I think when you have a true public servant, the top doesn't really matter. There isn't really a top like the presidency is an office that you in which you serve your country. You're limited, right? You're limited to eight years. And that is a time of service. And it would be really great to see more contemporary presidents continue to serve past their time in office. Wouldn't it have been interesting to have seen a senator from Texas, George W. Bush, after his presidency or or Illinois Governor Barack Obama or Obama in the House or even as a mayor? Like when Adams he's going into he's standing for Congress. Right. He's not running for Congress at this in 1830. He's standing for Congress. And his son and his wife were like, this is no, you can't do this. This is embarrassing. This is a demotion. And he says, I would be the selectman of a town if the townspeople, if my constituents believe that I could best serve them, essentially. And so he helps us to and with Hoover and Carter, they help us to rethink what what it really means to serve. Curious question. Like, you know, I told you I was reading about the wigs and there's this book by Daniel Walker, how the political culture of the American wigs that I've been reading. And I learned from that that Adams spoke, I want to say, seven languages. And he says that de Tocqueville was very impressed with how fluent he was in French, which is pretty impressive. And so when you think about who the most scholarly presidents were, he's got to be in the top five, if not the top three, if not number one. I mean, like a professor of rhetoric at Harvard is, you know, who read Cicero and the original Latin for pleasure is pretty impressive. Yeah. And Sean Willens points out that he he brought the study of the German language to the United States. It cut both ways for him, you know, because when he's running for reelection in 1828, I found newspaper articles from Virginia with op eds saying we don't need a professor in the White House. We don't need a professor. We need a strong man. We need Andrew Jackson. We need a leader, not a professor. So what it did was it exposed how aloof he was from the American people during his time in the presidency. I was just going to say, why don't we get into a little storytelling and just tell the story of his political career to the presidency at the very least. So Washington appoints him to his first diplomatic post. He's a young man. His father appoints him to another diplomat. In fact, when Adams, when John Adams, his father is taking over the presidency, he says to Washington, he's like, you know, I'm embarrassed to appoint my son. How would that look? And Washington was like, no, your son is great. We need men like your son to serve abroad. And because he spoke so many languages, he was an asset as a diplomat. And so he serves as a diplomat during Washington's administration, during John Adams's administration. When his father loses election, re-election to Thomas Jefferson, his father recalls him. And I think he was serving in Prussia at the time under his father's administration. And he wanted to save his son the embarrassment of being fired, you know, by his successor. But I don't think Jefferson would have fired him. I believe that Jefferson would have kept him on in some diplomatic capacity. Well, so that's when he comes home and he goes into the Senate as a federalist. And he immediately establishes himself as a maverick because he goes against this party and he supports Thomas Jefferson during the embargo act. Kind of like, is the Louisiana Purchase constitutional? constitutional. Well, John Quincy Adams supported Jefferson in that and believed it was. And he gets drummed out of the party. They don't choose to reelect him. And he goes home. Well, James Madison comes into office and appoints him the first minister, U.S. minister to Russia. So he serves in Russia. He's in Russia during the War of 1812. And when it's time to negotiate peace, he is the leader of the commission for the Treaty of Ghent. And so he negotiates the Treaty of Ghent, comes home, and he's appointed James Monroe in, you know, James Monroe fancied himself a unifier. It was a time of like really one political party at this point. The era of good feelings. The era of good feelings. And what's more of a good feeling thing for a president from Virginia to do than appoint the son of John Adams, the man from Massachusetts, his son, the secretary of state. And so Adams has what's arguably one of the more successful two terms as a secretary of state. He negotiates Florida into the United States. He assumes Spain's claims to Oregon territory. We almost get Cuba, but we don't, and parts of Texas. But he has a very successful term as Secretary of State. And at the time, that's the stepping stone to the presidency. But in 1824, when he's standing for election to the presidency, you have four guys running for office. You have the Speaker of the House, Henry Clay. You have William H. Crawford, the Treasury Secretary. And you have Andrew Jackson, who is the hero of the Battle of New Orleans and has kind of begun to assume this role, this leader of this populist movement. White male suffrage is spreading and expanding. We're beyond now just property holders having the right to vote. Now you have tradesmen and farmers in the South and in the growing West. And John Quincy Adams, he's the establishment. And like we said, he's an egghead. And he's not perceived to get the common man. And Andrew Jackson is beloved. In fact, I'm in Nashville, Tennessee in a hotel this morning. Yesterday, Ben Sawyer, my podcast co-host, and I went to the Hermitage, visited the Hermitage. It was my first time there, actually. and when you show up it says Andrew Jackson president of the people take that for what you will but at the time Adams was seen as out of touch and so we can get into the election of 1824 if you want to Adams wins but it's one of the most controversial elections in our history right that's where we get the corrupt bargain allegation right why don't you explain what the corrupt bargain was and and whether you think it in fact happened. Right. Yeah. You know, let me explain it first and then we'll talk about this. Andrew Jackson wins a plurality of the electoral vote and a plurality of the popular vote. He doesn't win a majority. And again, you got four guys standing here for office. and based on the 12th Amendment, the top three go to an election in Congress. And in this election, and I think this was John Eastman's plan in 2020, throw the election into the House, right? He should choose Chesborough and Eastman. So based on the 12th Amendment, the top three vote getters go to an election in Congress where each state's delegation gets one vote. And so the top three were Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and William H. Crawford. By the way, Crawford had a stroke a year before this. And he still wins Virginia and some in New York. And he still had a good chance. And he's really, apparently, it was a terrible stroke. And he does rehabilitate to a point. I think he serves as a judge after his time as Secretary of the Treasury. But he was pretty debilitated, and he had a shot at winning the White House. The man who's not in this final top three is Henry Clay. So he can't be president, but he can be kingmaker, right? And there was no one, and I don't know how much we want to get into this, But there was no one on earth, two men who hated each other more than Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson. Clay fancied himself the star of the West. He was going to be the first president from the he was from Kentucky now at this time. Andrew Jackson's from Tennessee. He's born in North Carolina, but but lives in Tennessee. And Clay wanted to be the first Western president. and it looked like Jackson had stolen his thunder. But there's more to it because General Andrew Jackson was down there fighting these Native American wars in what was then Spanish Florida. Monroe, at some point during his tenure, sends this very vague letter about maybe going into Florida, maybe not going into Florida. If you see an opportunity, it's all very vague. Jackson, being the man he was, goes into Spanish Florida and takes Pensacola and he puts two British mercenaries who are working with the Native Americans to death, creates an international incident. And this is when Adams is negotiating with Spain for Florida. kind of makes Adams' job a little bit easier. The rest of the Monroe cabinet and Congress, Henry Clay in particular, are up in arms. I mean, they have committee hearings about censuring Jackson. There's pressure on Monroe to relieve him of his duty. And the only man actually who stands up for Andrew Jackson in this moment is John Quincy Adams. So fast forward 2024, Clay hates Jackson. He says something like, you know, Jackson's the hero of the Battle of New Orleans. And Clay has a quote. I can't believe that murdering 2,500 British soldiers qualifies you to the highest office in the land. You know, something to that respect. So Clay didn't want Jackson to be president. But Kentucky, the first go around, Kentucky, their votes went to Andrew Jackson. So here we get down. We're in the weeks before this vote in the House and this pretty much unprecedented vote in the House. And men from Kentucky begin to visit, friends of Clay begin to visit John Quincy Adams. And Adams has this, people don't know about John Quincy Adams. he had a diary that was 14,000 pages long. It goes from the time he's a teenager until right before his death in 1848, 80 years, this long diary. And he's a Puritan, right? He comes from Puritan stock. He's wordy. Let's say he's wordy, right? But when the guys from Kentucky come to visit him. He says, we talked about men and things and events, and it's all kind of vague. And it does seem like there was some kind of a quid pro quo. And in fact, Clay and Adams get together in this time period twice. Once they're at a Lafayette had come back to the United States for his 50th anniversary. And they're at a dinner in D.C. and all the presidential candidates are at this dinner. And Clay and Adams are sitting next to each other. And they're like, yeah, we'll get together later. We'll talk. And so the vote comes February 9th, 1825. The vote in the House comes. Adams wins. The votes for Kentucky and some other states flip from Andrew Jackson to John Quincy Adams. Adams gets the 13 votes he needs at that time to secure the presidency. Well all is well and good He asks Andrew Jackson to be his war secretary Jackson declines He asks Henry Clay to be secretary of state then seen as the like I said stepping stone to the presidency And when Clay accepts, that is when the charges of corrupt bargain come from the Jackson press. The man most qualified to be secretary of state, arguably, was Henry Clay. I mean, so it's really hard, but it didn't look good at the time. Not only did it fuel Jackson's immediately running for re-election in 2028, like he's immediately out of the gate running. It coalesced an opposition in Congress, and it was kind of the, with Martin Van Buren's help, it formed the Democratic Party. the Democratic Party, not in ideology, but the Democratic Party that we pretty much still have today forms in this moment, in the aftermath of this corrupt part. In some ways, the way to think about it is like Bush v. Gore. I don't want to argue with you about Bush v. Gore in the case, but I think we can both agree it left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. And if you just you kick off your administration with this charge that. Cheated or you want it, you didn't win fair and square or whatever. And and so the corrupt bargain. It just puts a taint on on Adams whole presidency, which you can see as being at the birth of American populism. To have one with an inside like I'm a small Republican. I want to go back to smoke fill rooms. I have no problem with these kinds of things. I agree with you on smoke-filled room. We need to bring back the smoke-filled room. There's just no doubt. Yeah, but you can see how at a moment of populist upheaval, having this deal between the teacher of rhetoric at Harvard and the speaker makes it seem like the system's rigged, right? Again, someone like Andrew Jackson. I am really deficient in my 19th century stuff, and I've been trying to fix it in the last year or two. and I've come to the conclusion that Andrew Jackson was a bad guy much earlier than I thought and that I always knew about the, it's probably apocryphal quote the Supreme Court has made its decision let them enforce it kind of thing but he did say things like that and that's sort of what I knew for the most part about Jackson that and the giant wheel of cheese outside of the White House or whatever but he defied orders in the War of 1812. He was just a little Napoleon from a very early age. Yeah, and like, okay, so he's born in 1767. Andrew Jackson's born the same year as John Quincy Adams. They're born the same year. They both experienced the American Revolution in dramatically different ways. Like I said, Adams is in Paris, you know, hanging out with Jefferson going to the opera, whatever they're doing over there, being educated in the finest schools. And Andrew Jackson's in the Waxhalls, which is this border region between North and South Carolina. And he's a messenger for his local militia. And he gets smacked across the face by a British soldier and he's scarred for life. he loses his mother and two of his brothers at the end of the revolution he's an orphan and he's scarred from the British in his soul and like literally on his face and he wanders he gets like an inheritance and he goes to law school in Salisbury, North Carolina and apparently he's like throwing parties and hiring prostitutes or some of the women that came to this party of ill repute. He's like a young guy who's lost, who has got a little bit of money and just enough to get himself in trouble. But he fails upwards. He's constantly failing upwards. And then he goes to Tennessee and he purchases land and he gets into some bad land deals because of the banks. So he's scarred by the banks at a young age. What happens when he becomes president? Look, there are Trump-Jackson things. They're different. There's a lot of Trump-Jackson that is nothing alike, right? But you can write a few op-eds probably about similarities. Like Steve Bannon taught Trump that he was like Andrew Jackson, essentially. And there are things and there are like psychological things like there are the things that Trump does. It's because he was, you know, it's part of like his upbringing and things that happened to him. So anyway, so before I get down a rabbit hole that I forget where we started with this, Andrew Jackson. Like, yeah, yes, he was a bad seed. duels. He carried lead in his body from duels till the day he died. At one point in New Orleans, he recruits from plantation owners, black slaves. He lets them believe that they're going to be freed if they do military service and then he gives them back to their slave masters. Just gross stuff. I bring this up because you're obviously right that this leads to the creation of the Democratic Party. When I was growing up, the party used to have these Jefferson Jackson dinners, and Jackson was considered sort of the equal co-founder of the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party in more recent years has kind of shed that for kind of obvious reasons, but Jackson is essentially responsible for creation of the other major party too, which is the Whig Party, which is the opposition. the opposition it's funny I make this point about the 20th century often that one of the things that we particularly in the 20th century we have this much more ideological understanding of what parties are about and so we miss a lot of stuff that isn't necessarily about ideology even in the 20th century so like when I was trying to get a handle on what the old right in America believed you know these guys prior to the World War II, I would start looking for this old right, and I couldn't figure out what made most of them right wing. And then when you brought it out, there were a lot of people that were simply called right wing in the 1930s because they didn't like FDR. And it didn't really matter what the ideological attack was. It just meant that you were anti-FDR because to be anti-FDR meant you were anti-Democrat, and the Democrats were the good guys, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we see this today too. It was like, there are a lot of, there are a lot of anti-Trump people, you know, you know my opinions about Trump, but there are a lot of anti-Trump people who basically have come to define being that whatever Trump believes defines what it means to be right wing. And the reality is, is that on a bunch of discrete issues, he's moved the Republican party leftward. You know, like the Republican Party is a de facto pro-choice party now. Still much more restrictionist than the Democratic Party, but much more, you know, tolerant of restrictions in, you know, the state level and all that. But it is a nominally pro-choice party now. He's in favor of all this industrial policy stuff. You know, the Democrats were much more the party of protectionism prior to Trump. And there's a reason why J.D. Vance and these people talk about Elizabeth Warren's program being good and Lena Kahn being great and all these kinds of things. But there is this tendency in American politics to think that parties are these coherent avatars of ideological positions when ideology is important, but like personality and cult of personality are really important. And Jackson's control of the Democratic Party was a cult of personality about Jackson. So if you love Jackson, you were a Democrat. And if you hated Jackson, you were a Whig, and then you figured out some of the arguments later. The Whigs, well, first of all, I coined this with Ben yesterday. I think I coined this. Iran is a theocracy. Trump is a meocracy. But look, the Whig party had Puritans, Right. Reformers, reformers, religious, evangelical reformers and nullifiers. People from South Carolina, the vice president, John C. Calhoun at the time, Adams is vice president and then Jackson's vice president for a little while. South Carolina didn't want to pay the tariff. So South Carolina was in revolt. Well, Jackson marched, was about to march troops, sent troops to Charleston to collect the tariff. They didn't come to blows. But there were a group in South Carolina called nullifiers, nullificationists, and that if there was a federal law that they didn't agree that a state, they believed it was constitutionally sound that if there was a federal law that a state did not agree with, they did not have to follow it. And so you had people like, and this is like a nullification isn't secession, but it's a precursor to secession. And so you had nullifiers and evangelical reformers, people who believed in – you had people from South Carolina who didn't want to pay a tariff in the same party with people in the north, evangelicals, who believed that we should spend taxpayer money to fund roads, bridges, and canals and schools and things like that. So we talk about like odd bedfellows. Yeah, or like the FDR coalition, it had Klansmen and progressive communist Jews and blacks from New York City in the same coalition. You know, majority majority coalitions by definition have competing factions in them. That's why they're majorities. It's like small minority coalitions are coherent because that's why they're a minority. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll react soon with more from the Remnant podcast. but we should we should move to Adams's post-presidency because I mean that's sort of a big part of your case about him being this great public servant I think to the extent most listeners who know anything about John Quincy Adams it's probably from the movie Amistad right it's probably that he's anti-slavery but is it fair to call him an abolitionist? No it is not he would be so pissed off right now if you heard him call him well didn't I ask I knew it was complicated he had criticisms of the abolitionists although the further he gets the more he in line he comes with like he gets to a point where he feels more comfortable in a room full of abolitionists and hanging out like in Philadelphia 1837 at one point he goes it's his birthday he's in Philadelphia he's hanging out with Benjamin Lundy who's this Quaker abolitionist Adams was notoriously cold he was a very cold man he would have some glasses of Madeira be at a dinner party and he would hold court and he loved that but his son Charles Francis Adams said my father wears an iron mask but with these abolitionists you can just tell in his writing Like there are tender bonds. There is a closeness. He respects their genuineness and their integrity and their morality. And Adams was a self-righteously, supremely moral man. And to the point, to a fall, right? And I think he sees in some of these abolitionists, he recognizes that. And he really respects it. And they're coming from a different educational place than he is. They're not as well-read, not as well-whatever, well-versed. But he sees in them a kindred spirit. So there's this one moment, like his birthday. He's in Philadelphia, 1837. He's hanging out with Lundy, and they go hang out with the Mott's, Lucretia Mott and her husband, famous abolitionists, right? And he's writing about it in his diary later. and he's like talking about what a great time he had and the conversation and the anti-slavery conversation. He's like the only embarrassment about the night was that I did too much talking. Like I did all the talking. And then after they left the Mott's, he and Lundy hang out for another couple hours and like continue talking and late into the night. But Adams and even after this point, 1839, he writes these letters to his constituents in the newspaper. He writes these, really, they were letters to the nation, but he framed them in like a letter to my constituents. And he takes the abolitionists to task. He cuts them down to the quick because he's like, it's emancipation. It's not going to happen. You guys are foolish. You're a bunch of like, the rest of the country thinks you're weirdos because not only are you asking for immediate abolition, which is not practical, but you are talking about women's rights and you're talking about no God and you're talking about all this stuff. And he just rips them to shreds. So one minute they are begging him to be the spokesman for their movement. The next minute they are condemning him for chastising them publicly and whipping them, browbeating them. But when you get to the Amistad, which is about a year after he writes this letter. He writes this letter to his constituents, and he completely takes, well, he takes the abolitionists to task, and he also, in the same letter, takes the South to task. Like, he's just cutting everybody down. And then the Amistad happens, and is, for those who don't know, I imagine most people do, But for those who don't, the international slave trade was banned in like, I don't know, it was 1807, something like that. But slave traders would do this thing called slave laundering. They would capture people in Africa. And this particular group of people from the Amistad, they were from what is present-day Sierra Leone. They would take them to Cuba, which was Spanish held. They would land them in Cuba. They would forge their paperwork and then land them on another part of Cuba and say they came from Cuba. Oh, these are Cuban slaves. They're not. They're domestic to Cuba. Well, what happened with the Amistad is they land them on Cuba. They forge their paperwork. They're going to land them again on another part of Cuba, and there's a mutiny. and they kill the mutiny, the captives kill the captain and the cook. And the actual enslavers, the Spanish men, Ruiz and Montez, who first purchased the enslaved people, the captives make them sail the ship. And they say, take us back to Africa. So during the day, they would go west. At night, they would go north and east. and they're wandering. Eventually, the ship is spotted by an American vessel, American cutter off the coast of Long Island. And it is boarded and they realize like, oh, this is a mutiny and they take them into Connecticut, into Port in Connecticut. And there are a series of trials. The Amistad reinvigorates the abolitionist movement Because what happens between 1837 when Martin Van Buren takes office is because of the banking policies of Andrew Jackson, the country is thrown into a terrible depression. And so the abolitionist movement was being funded, like solely funded by the Tappan brothers. These two mercantilists from New York. And so they lost a lot of money. The movement kind of goes bankrupt. Adams eviscerates them in the press. It looks like it's kind of all over for them, the abolitionist movement. And then the Amistad happens. And it becomes like the biggest story in the country. and it kind of coalesces the abolitionist movement to defend these captives, right? And the case goes through the courts, the federal court system. It goes all the way up to the Supreme Court and Lewis Tappan approaches John Quincy Adams to argue the case before the Supreme Court. So that is kind of like the moment of the Amistad and that is when Adams stands before the Supreme Court, a Supreme Court made up of mostly slaveholders. And he points to the Declaration of Independence in his closing arguments. And he says, if this document is true, these men are free. And he wins the case and he wins these men's freedom. And it is that moment that the failed president of 1828, the failed one-term president, who didn't have the gift of gab and didn't have the common touch. He didn't have the feel your painness, right, that so many of the best presidents have. He becomes a folk hero to the American people in the north. And it's kind of, I look at that as the Amistad being the redemption of John Quincy Adams, the failed one-term president. So he's not an abolitionist. I mean like in some ways this is one of the points that Hal makes in his book about the Whigs is that in many ways John Quincy Adams is the oldest of the Whigs right he doesn't it takes a while for him to join the party he from an earlier generation really Jonah and he never if he when you read his diary every time a presidential election is coming up he ripping every he doesn I don think he votes Like in 1836, I don't think he voted for any, I don't know if he voted for in 1840. Like he, every time, it doesn't matter who's running in what party, he eviscerates all the candidates. Yeah, yeah, I have a great deal of sympathy for that. What was it Roosevelt's daughter said, you know, if you don't have anything nice to say about anybody, come sit by me. No, but what Hal makes is that in many ways, Adams' personality was kind of a manifestation of the nature of Whigism generally. That it was full of a lot of contradictions in part because it emphasized the importance of balance between competing concerns. concerns, right? It was this, and also it was wrapped up in the formal art of rhetoric, which we now don't really recognize as a form of literature, but we did back then. Like, it's like the speeches of Henry Clay at the time were seen as like the greatest contributions to American literature. And now, because we've denigrated what rhetoric means, we don't think of it in those kinds of terms. But when I try to figure out what a lot of these people, what a lot of the Whigs believed, I mean, Southern Whigs are different than Northern Whigs and all of these kinds of things. But, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, first of all, the abolitionists, as you describe them, were right. Right? Like, you could actually give women rights. You actually could freeze ladies. Right. And they were a minority of a minority. And they were looked at as being the wackos. Like, they were like the, because no one hated abolitionists more than northerners. They were sort of like the vegans of their day. They just wouldn't shut up about it, right? And many of them were. They were Grammites. There you go. He was anti-slavery but not an abolitionist. What actually is his positive vision about what slavery what the policy on slavery should be? He does at one point lay out a constitutional amendment to end slavery and it's one of these so many 20 years, 25 years, and this and this and this. And it wasn't practical, but it was a plan. Okay, first of all, to get back to a rabbit hole, he writes about having a bunch of these congressional abolitionists, like the anti-slavery congressmen over to dinner, and he says about them, he's like, they don't drink wine, they don't eat meat. Okay, anyway, Adams was a defender of freedom of speech. that's where he thought he could serve the movement best. Because I can't believe we haven't talked about this. But when he was in Congress in 1836, Jonah, if you and I want to talk to our congressmen, we have something to say. We will go online. We'll send an email to their office. We'll call them. We'll call maybe their local office. Maybe we'll call them in D.C. Maybe if we're in D.C., we'll stop by their office. Right. The First Amendment to the Constitution allows for us to petition our government for a redress of grievances. You talked about the higher quality of the of the speeches and the speech making. Right. This is the golden age of the Senate. What we would do as citizens is we would send a petition to our congressman. It could be Mr. Goldberg from Washington, D.C., is praying for the fulfillment of his father's Revolutionary War pension. And then it would be sent to a committee, right? This or that. The anti-slavery movement feels like this is their end. They begin to flood Congress with anti-slavery petitions. and many of them because it was understood that the Congress had no ability to mess with slavery in the states where it already existed, but the Congress had power over territories of which DC was a federally controlled district. And so a lot of these anti-slavery petitions, like the protest was a petition to end slavery in Washington, D.C. And there were a handful of congressmen who would read these. One was John Quincy Adams. And he would even say sometimes, he would say, I don't agree with this petition. I got 15 petitions here. They're all of the same character. so I'm going to read this one from 12 ladies from my district, and he would read it. By 1836, these things are starting to show up at the Capitol by the wagon load, and they're really starting to annoy Southern congressmen because what is happening in South Carolina? Denmark V.C. uprising. What happens in Virginia? Nat Turner uprising. like we can get into what started all this but like it's beginning to get a little paranoid in the south about their enslaved property and they're they know that these speeches being made and these petitions people will enslave people are hearing about them and they realize they have allies and so southern congressmen get together with their northern allies and they pass something known as the gag rule. And in the most basic form, it basically, you could no longer mention slavery on the floor of Congress. And these petitions, when they arrived, they would be not read, not printed. They would be immediately tabled like they never existed. And that moment radicalizes John Quincy Adams in 1836 because it goes from being an issue about slavery, which he abhorred, but he knew there was no solution for it. In 1820, when we're talking about the Missouri Compromise, when the debate over the Missouri Compromise is going on, he's confessing in his diary that the only way slavery is going to end in the United States is through a civil or servile war. There's no other way that it's going to end. He doesn't really have a, no one really has a solution for how emancipation would look before the Civil War. The most radical abolitionists, they said, immediate emancipation now and we'll figure it out. Like it's the right, slavery is a sin, so it's got to stop. And what comes next? We're going to figure that out. So Adams, after the gag rule, his sole purpose is to end the gag rule because he's like, now you're talking about freedom of speech. Now you're talking about the First Amendment. And so he becomes this arch defender of the Constitution and the First Amendment. And when the abolitionists come to him and say, be our leader, speak for us. He says, I can do more for you defending the First Amendment and your right to petition the government. Because once I become one of you, I become small. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll react soon with more from the Remnant Podcast. So it's a really interesting point. And you're right, we should have gotten to it earlier because it's so central to his post-presidency. It also, like, one of the things I appreciate about it is there are a bunch of people on the new right who support what they call common good constitutionalism or some version thereof, right? And their critique is that originalism or textualism, all of these things are insufficient because the Constitution itself is a morally neutral document that is just about proceduralism. And this enrages me. I mean, there are a lot of things that these people say that enrage me. But this probably more than almost anything else intellectually, I find it so offensive because you start going through the Bill of Rights about the rights and privileges that we are granted as American citizens. They are not morally neutral. Right. And your right to a fair trial is not morally neutral. It's like one of those hard won, hard learned lessons of the last thousand years. Right. The right to confront your accuser, the right to be safe in your possessions in your home. These are not morally neutral. These are like the cornerstones of a decent society. And, you know, I recently had this, I recently did this episode you might like about Hannah Arendt. And part of Hannah Arendt's argument is that truth is, final truth, consensus on truth is going to be really, really hard in any society. But what is required is conversation, right, is discussion, is free speech. And the idea that free speech has no moral content to it is just this utterly neutral thing is preposterous because the right to petition government and the right to speak out about your grievances is the only path short of war, short of violence that allows you to pursue moral ends, you know, and persuade your fellow man about stuff. And like, so like, I'm very sympathetic because I think Adams was right. If he had become an abolitionist, it's sort of like the hardcore lefties who say they're for free speech, but only in the context of the issues they care about or the hardcore right wingers who say they're only for free speech. But it's only for like the right to make post Nazi memes, you know, not to criticize them. If you actually defend the process itself, you're creating an opportunity for the better argument to win. So the abolitionists, they really held the Declaration of Independence. Like they made it sacred, right? It became a sacred document for them. And the ideals of. And that's the tradition Lincoln is drawing on, right? Right. In the Gettysburg Address, yeah. Yes, yes. And so for Adams, it was like two halves of the whole, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Unrestrained liberty, unrestrained democracy, right, is chaotic and ultimately dangerous. the constitution is the rules. It puts all of the idealism into a form. It creates a form for it. So that protects and defends and restrains and restrains. That's what I think of in response to what we're talking about, the morality of the constitution. I think Adams would talk about the Three-Fifths Compromise, and he would say, when he was in Congress, he would say, it's a bargain. It was a bargain. He's like, I wouldn't make that bargain if I was there and if we had to do it again. I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do it, but it's a bargain, and so I'm going to adhere to it. But you mentioned Lincoln. And so the day the gag rule is passed in May of 1836, the next item on the agenda, war rations for the victims of Native American incursions and war in Alabama and Georgia. Okay, so there's been Native American wars in Alabama and Georgia. It's like we would think of it like terrorist attacks, right, on white settlers who were on their land probably. But so Congress is voting to send them food and aid. So they just passed this rule where you can't mention slavery on the floor of Congress. And Adams gets up to speak on these war rations. And he says, I'm going to vote for this because I think it's the right thing to do. It's moral. But I don't know where the Constitution gives us the right, the ability to send these people aid. He's like, unless it's in the war powers. It's within our war powers. Similarly, I'm condensing this amazing speech that you can find online and in books. He says, you know, come to think of it, in the case of a civil war or servile war, the Congress or the executive may have to negotiate peace. And in doing so, they may have to free enslaved people, free slaves, free the slaves as part of that emancipation. And so he draws out this whole argument of how the same power, if we have the power to send aid as Congress, which he doubts we do, if we do have that ability, it's in our war powers. It is held within our war powers. And you say we can't interfere with slavery in the states where it exists, but maybe we can. And maybe it's our war powers. And this is the same argument that Lincoln will use with the Emancipation Proclamation. I am sure a lot of your talk radio interviews and that kind of thing, people are like, hit you with the, what does this mean for today? kind of questions. And I kind of hate those questions because I kind of... But at the same time, I understand for people, do you think there is a path that you can see, right? We can all just sort of imagine things, but do you think there's an actual path for the kind of statesmanship and political leadership that John Quincy Adams led coming back into fashion in the United States these days, it feels like it's going to be a long ride before it does. It will only look like that if it comes from the right. Right? It's like when people have asked me this question, but they'll still say, who is John Quincy Adams today? Like, that's a good one, I get. I say it's John McCain with a 3 a.m. thumbs down defeating the signature legislation of the man who defeated him for the presidency, defending that. But now imagine John McCain had been president before that. Or Liz Cheney after January 6th, but imagine she had been the president. The thing about the John Quincy Adams story. Okay, first of all, it touches, like Washington appoints him to his first diplomatic post. He serves alongside Lincoln in Congress. I mean, oh my God, like he's the bridge between these two errors. Like you're talking about like, yeah, I need to go back over my 19th century. Jackson, I know a little bit, but it's because we don't learn it. Like it's not one of the highlights. The highlights, you're going to hit the highlights. Revolutionary war, civil war, World War II, Great Depression. So this is a time when there's no leaders, right? There's no unifying figure. So Adams is kind of the man standing in the gap for that time period. It feels like we're in a moment like that. We don't know because we can't see what's around the corner, but we have been kind of leaderless for a while, for a long time, I think, in this country, you know. And so without that, a leader for good, right? Like, so it's so arbitrary, right? Like we could say like, you know, looking back on it, whether you elect him or not, Reagan was a positive force for this nation. Or you could say that about Bill Clinton. Like maybe, you know, it's so hard, but I know, I think it's pretty easy to say that right now that Trump is not a force for good. I mean, I think even if you support them, you just look at trashing the Pope or saying you're glad Robert Mueller's dead or sending out memes of yourself as Jesus Christ. Yeah. One shorthand for that, I think some of these rhetorical approaches can be taken too far, but what parent would raise their kids, tell their kids you want to be like him one day. You should behave like, ask yourself what would Donald Trump do and do it. No parent, I don't care how MAGA you are, you wouldn't do that. The MAGA parents are telling their kids share, don't steal, be respectful. They're telling their kids. You're not Jesus. Nope, it's not Jesus. We're not Jesus. No. And I don't know. There are aspects. So I was a big Daniel Patrick Monahan fan. There's this famous line about Jews in America that they live like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans. One could say the same thing about Daniel Patrick Monahan in the Senate is that he wrote like John Quincy Adams with this, you know, as a serious scholar, but he voted sort of party line. Nonetheless, he was a serious person who made serious arguments in the public space. And we have less of that. My friend Ben Sasse, I think, you know, who's struggling these days, a great sign about Ben was he was so ecstatic that he requested Moynihan's desk in the Senate because Ben also cares about making like serious arguments about serious things and all of that. But I feel like the Jacksonians have just swamped the party for the time being. And it's just a lot of populism and not a lot of well-considered argumentation and drawing of careful distinctions going on. the thing that has made me like well no I have no optimism about what you're talking about like that we're going to have the leaders who will rhetorically articulate a positive vision of the future for this nation like I don't or even a grown up vision right just like here are some choices that people have to make kind of vision I'd settle for that in a heartbeat if you take the meocracy out of Trump and you just go to like the policies a more coherent policy on immigration most people agree like 80 of the country agrees about that Or healthcare There are so many things that we all agree on but yet there's arguments over funding healthcare. Will it hurt businesses? Like you talked about, the practical arguments that a civil society will have formulating policy. I have limited optimism that that's going to get any better anytime soon. Where I've had more optimism is that we as a nation collectively put Donald Trump in office for his first term and his second term. We made that decision. Maybe I didn't personally make that decision. Maybe you didn't make that decision. But we as an American body electorate, corporately, we made that decision. I feel like the American body has seen things in the past year that they're like, yeah, Minnesota. I don't like that. Like just like water hoses on people fighting for the right to vote in the 60s. Christies. Like seeing that, it's kind of like it took it too far. It just took it too far for a lot of people. And so I do feel like just like the populace brought us into this, the populace will bring us out of this is what I feel like. But who will be at the front of the parade? And can we get away from the memification of politics, right? Like who needs Henry Clay's two-hour speech? And by the way, for you and everyone out there listening, I encourage you to read Margaret Bayard Smith. She was a Washington socialite in the 1820s and 30s. And she was friends with Madison. She was friends with Jefferson. She was friends with Clay. And she gives the greatest description of going everybody, like if Clay was going to give a speech, the house was packed. And she tells stories of like the ladies like sitting in a middle row and it's going on for like 45 minutes, an hour, and men are putting oranges, bags of oranges on poles and hanging like so the women can grab the oranges for like sustenance during this long speech. Like the descriptions, it puts you it just makes us all human like it puts you there and she talks about like after one of like clay gives a speech and he's done and the poor fellow who's the poor no-name backbench congressman after him is getting up to speak and everybody leaves right for this guy and she uh is sitting on the steps outside the capitol and henry clay comes out and he sits right next to her and they're just talking and he's like you know and it just like what is this book about what is my book about john quincy adams president political maverick it's about history doesn't repeat human beings don't change we're the same people and that's what i discovered writing this book like people are going to read this book and they're going to see very familiar faces or very familiar types. And it's because we're like here, you and I are hundreds of miles away from each other, but it's like we're in the same room. Technology advances, medicine advances. Look at Artemis too. Like we can do, we can do great things, but our hearts and our souls are what they are. And they've always been the same thing. Underneath it all, you're a closet conservative because the essence of conservatism is human nature has no history. Somebody asked me, was John Quincy Adams a liberal or conservative? And I said he's conservative. I thought he was a very conservative man. And then he had a failed presidency because in his first Emanuel message, which is for people listening, that's like the State of the Union back then. He tells the fellow congressman, he says, look, Europe is investing in infrastructure and technology. so he lays out this program of federally funded roads bridges and canals uh a national university which was always washington street and a naval academy and lighthouses of the sky which are telescopes for scientific research and so this guy like so i'm doing this book event and i'm like the guy looks at me he's like yeah he was a tax and spend liberal right doomed his presidency by the way well it's funny so like um there's this book that i bring up from time to time on here that i'm increasingly sympathetic to not in every regard but um called the myth of left and right and one of the really useful historical takeaways i got from it was that which i guess maybe i knew intuitively but i never really thought about the right way is that basically nobody in the 19th century talked about left and right in America. These were not categories that people thought in, right? No. And I have big arguments with people I respect a great deal about how much left and right are real and important categories and how much they should help us, you know, how much of a prism we should use them as. But I think one thing is absolutely clear is that the left-right thing does make people a little intellectually lazy. And because it's just such an easy sorting mechanism. And so then when you go back and you look at the 19th century and you try to figure out what's going on, you actually have to like, well, wait a second. This guy is 22% left wing on this and 58% left wing on that and 100% right wing on this other thing. Because the terms left wing and right wing really don't mean very much in the American context of the 19th century. and it's the self-sorting by left and right in the 20th century that it just makes it easier to follow it as like shirts versus skins kind of stuff. But it's like, I think it's one of the reasons why we don't know a lot about the 19th century in America is because we have this sort of these lazy easy prisms that we throw things into and when we try to do history, it's like trying to get kids to figure out what the glorious revolution was about in England. It's just very hard for them to get their heads around because there's none of those like the training wheels that come with just sort of ideological categorization of left, right. Every newspaper in the 1830s and 40s was partisan. Like every newspaper was partisan. Like there was no – like everything was MS Now or Fox News. Like there wasn't like a CNN, right? Or like as much as like that idea of an impartial media landscape didn't exist. Idea of the media landscape didn't exist really. But so do you think, may I ask you a question? Like do you think the self-sorting aspect is a part of media in the 20th century? like the of the changing landscape of media and like radio and television and and you know definitely the internet for sure like that is like an accelerant on self-story yeah no i i do i mean i think you're right you know like there was definitely partisan you know the press was a thing and and we think of that today as like thinking like the press was inherently corrupt and bad. And that's not really true, right? I mean, there were some like crazy partisan press, but there's also some like responsible partisan press. And like when a responsible Democratic paper criticized the Democrat, it meant something, right? But, you know, de Tocqueville talks about this in Democracy in America. He says, you know, the key to understanding America's association and the key organ of association are newspapers. They were the things that formed kind of communities. And he thought that was a positive have been a good thing. And so you don't get the idea of the objective press. Really, it starts with the telegraph and then accelerates with radio and then finally with TV where you get this fully formed idea, which is a very American and it's kind of related to the Henry Adams talk about technology. But, oh, if you just put a camera on stuff, you don't need an interpreter, right? You don't need someone telling you the significance of something you can see it for yourself and we can be objective and you are there right and that was sort of the the worldview the epistemology that goes into Cronkite's closing on CBS Evening News where he says that's the way it is right and um and I think that one of the things a lot of people in America don't understand is that And that ideal of the objective press was really a construct of a certain moment in American history that was made possible by technology and massive consensus formed from the New Deal and then World War II. And you had a big establishment where a handful of media organizations, basically in one square mile in Manhattan, controlled 80% of the press and controlled the messaging. and one of the benefits of all that was that if you were a big newspaper or big television network and 30% of your audience was serious Republican and 30% of your audience was serious Democrat, it actually imposed on you as a market thing a certain amount of responsibility to be down the middle. And now we live in this era where everyone is fighting for the sticky 2% or 4% of the market and that causes people to tell their audiences what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear. And our view at the Dispatch, this little startup that we've got, is that if we're not pissing off 30% of our readers on any given day, we're doing something wrong because the whole point is that we want to be able to be trusted and to tell people what they don't want to hear from time to time. And so I think that's a big part of it. I think another big part of it, I mean, the smoke-filled rooms thing is a big part of it. the weakness of the parties has caused, and of Congress, have caused a lot of institutions outside of politics, outside of the parties, to do party functions. And that's bad, too, because the whole Madisonian scheme was to impose compromises on the members of the coalition. But now if you're the NRA or Planned Parenthood, you're doing direct appeals to your funders. You have 100% position for your people and you can do voter mobilization, voter education, all of these things based on your single issue thing rather than the big. The whole point of parties was like ranchers and farmers disagreed with each other about a lot of things, but they agreed with each other more than they agreed with bankers and railroad dudes. And so you have a party coalition where you're like, hey, look, you give in 30 percent on this, you'll get 70 percent of a loaf. But we got to do right by, you know, it's got to be this mutual thing. And now people don't the institutions that form these coalitions are all maximalist. Like the NRA is 100 percent on their position. They don't want to compromise. They stop giving to Democrats. and MS Now, try to put a modestly conservative, you can put a conservative person on MS Now to beat the crap out of Donald Trump. You cannot put them, like Charlie Sykes used to be on there, he's as anti-Trump as I am or as anybody and whenever he would start saying, but actually I think the Trump tax cuts, there's an argument for him, the audience would freak out and scream, what are you having this fascist on for? and you can see the same thing at Fox like you can it's everything is through this again this prism of pro-Trump and anti-Trump rather than like any ideas and arguments and I don't know how well I mean Trump will I don't believe he's Jesus I don't believe he'll I think he will pass away at some point either for constitutional or actuarial reasons he's going to go away as we all will so does it do we fall into I mean it'll never go back to the way it was it can't but do we fall into something more less less being driven by an icon or I'll push my bureaucracy post Trump will be less stupid yeah no it will be and I think the cult of this idea that J.D. Vance is this unique talent who's going to take over the party is wildly exaggerated. But my problem, and I didn't invite you on to interview me, though I'm happy to talk about this. Oh, I love it. I've come to the conclusion, people have heard me say this a million times now, but that I want the Democratic Party to become a sane party in part because I've come to the conclusion you can't have just one sane party. You need two sane parties. Yes, you do. Absolutely. Because if one party is insane, it gives permission to the other party to be just slightly less insane or more insane in some other way. And the GOP will not come to grips with sanity unless the median voter says, well, you know, Democrats aren't that scary. Look, they're kind of responsible people. And similarly, the GOP is not going to win the median voter in a post-Trump era if it's taken over by the Star Wars cantina that is there with a Mar-a-Lago crowd. And so, like, I'm very sympathetic to people like Rahm Emanuel. I don't agree with him on a lot. He's too liberal for me on a lot of issues. But he's a grown up. And he's willing to say shut up to the dumbest parts of his own base, which I really appreciate. And that's what the Republican Party needs is someone to say to the base, hey, look, you guys are not the party. There's a reason you're called the base is because we have to build on top of you to have a majority. So like get with the program. But I think some of those fixes can't come unless there's like some actual institutional things that need to be done. We have to fix primaries. We have to figure out something about, I mean, I'm a mixed mind about campaign finance stuff because I think there are constitutional issues on one side of it. But when the parties lost control of the purse strings, that was a huge problem for democracy. And we got to figure out a way to keep people from stupid game shows and reality shows from running for president. Yeah, yeah. And we can't we can't have this illusion post Trump that we're going to all get along like that's not going to like the parties need to be opposed to each other. And politics is OK. And politics has always been a little dirty. So we can't we can't be looking for this like utopian society where we gentlemanly disagree about this or that. That was the lesson of the era of good feelings is that without a party, you can't hold one set of people accountable. You can't organize people for a shared goal because no one knows what team they're on. You can't have a baseball league with only one baseball team. You need another team to play against. It inspires corruption within the party. And I just I describe in in my book, I describe it as like the real the cabinet, the Monroe cabinet. It was the area of good feelings, but that was branding. And it was really the real housewives like there was like a real housewives vibe going on in that cabinet because there was a lot of backstabbing and a lot of dirty dealing going on. And to the point where William H. Crawford, Treasury Secretary, and James Monroe come to blows, almost come to blows in the executive office where Crawford raises his cane at Monroe and Monroe picks up a fireplace poker. And like, you know, so I mean, yeah, you need we need to have differing opinions and politics is politics because people are people and people. They do people things. Democracy is about disagreement, not about agreement. Spencer Cox, who I think is part is the governor of Utah on the way out. Is one of those guys who I think wants to be part of the solution rather than the problem. And he had this campaign about disagreeing better. right I mean like the whole point of the constitution is to foster positive disagreement where people argue about what the best thing for the country is not and we need to get back to that sort of conception of things and that's sort of the John Quincy Adams point about the gag rule too right we need to make the make people have a right to make their arguments people have a right to say crazy things yeah and with that uh Bob Crawford thank you so much for doing this I'm going to have some colleagues who are going to be very mad at me that I didn't ask you all sorts of questions about the Avid brothers and my friend Mike Warren wanted me to ask you about the album Minionette but I'm not going to do that. Oh man, yeah. Let's do another two hours. Let's do it. For sure. But thanks again and I hope to have you back, man. Oh, anytime, man. Anytime. And I'm a big fan of The Remnant, big fan of Dispatch. You guys are doing great work. All right, Bob Crawford has left the studio and I feel like we should just play some We should roll out to some kick drum heart or something like that. It's a fun book. You know, I only got this idea to have him on when I saw him on TV last week. And between moving and all this, I have not. I read the intro and I scanned around for various things that I'm interested in, but I have not read the whole thing. But he's a good writer, you know, for a guy who came in. He was truly an amateur historian in some ways. He knows his stuff. He does his homework. I was really impressed with him when I met him, you know, at that Tallahassee. book festival thing and just a super nice guy and a great musician, which is something you cannot say about a lot of our guests. I mean, maybe Harvey Mansfield plays a crazy jazz flute that I don't know about and he can do some serious Jethro Tull action that I'm unaware of. Anyway, there you have it. No further great observations to have because we went so long. But thanks for listening. Thanks again to Bob. and do get America's founding son, John Quincy Adams, from president to political maverick. And thank you all for listening. And I will see you next time. No, you won't. This is a podcast. Thank you.