American politics. If you think it’s bad, now (and it is), let’s consider how it began. Maybe the atmosphere has been mild and more to our liking from time to time, but our leaders have really never come to terms with each other, beyond agreeing that regime change will not happen by a militaristic coup d’etat. There is a public contract among officials that we all will conduct ourselves according to law, of course, but a general and reciprocal sense of high regard and mutual respect among the elected isn’t even an aspiration, let alone a requirement, for office.
Our discourse is vulgar and accusatory, and often beggars belief, but the overall intent to discredit the opponent was the same then as now. Although the founding fathers managed to vote as one for independence, that unified spirit was transitory. Reputations were not protected, intentions were not assumed to be honorable, and enormous egos marched across state lines and sailed across the Potomac.
For all that, here we are, at one more celebration of another revolution around the sun as a Union. So, for one day, perhaps we can refrain from clutching our pearls over what news anchors said about what was said about them, and let our forbearers flip their wigs in perpetuity:
Archived at DelanceyPlace.com:
From the book The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America by Gary B. Nash, Copyright 2005
" 'The history of our Revolution,' fretted John Adams, 'will be one continued lie from one end to the other. The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin's electric rod smote the earth and out sprang George Washington.' Adams complained endlessly about how Franklin was overrated and underhanded, and it pained him immensely to think that the story would go on 'that Franklin electrified [Washington] with his rod, and hence-forward these two conducted all the policy negotiations, legislatures, and war.'
Adams couldn't decide who would be best remembered in history—Franklin or Washington—but he knew for a certainty that both deserved less credit than he. 'I never knew but one man who pretended to be wholly free from [vanity]' Adams wrote of Franklin, 'and him I know to be in his heart the vainest man and the falsest character I have ever met with in life.' Washington wasn't much better. Adams grumbled about 'the superstitious veneration that is sometimes paid to General Washington,' because 'I feel myself his superior.' ...
"The author of the Declaration of Independence also took his lumps, and administered a few, as he and his band of brothers tried to assess the American Revolution after the smoke had cleared and the ink on the peace treaty had dried. Jefferson found Adams impossible: 'He hates Franklin, he hates Jay, he hates the French, he hates the English,' wrote the Monticello patriarch in 1783.
Adams returned the favor. At one point he assured a friend in Philadelphia that Jefferson was not 'a true figure' of the Revolution and that drafting the Declaration of Independence was a 'theatrical show' in which the man from Monticello had 'run away with all the stage effect ... and all the glory of it.' After losing the presidency to Jefferson in 1800, Adams called his rival so 'warped by prejudice and so blinded by ignorance as to be unfit for the office he holds.'
Many of Adams's Congregational minister friends agreed. One predicted that Americans would 'rue the day and detest the folly, delusion, and intrigue which raised him to the head of the United States.' Other clergymen bombarded their parishioners with descriptions of Jefferson as an adulterous atheist and a toadying lover of the hopelessly corrupt French, whose revolution was as attractive as a plague.
"Washington quickly became the avatar of revolutionary achievement because the nation could hardly do without a conquering hero. But privately—and sometimes very publicly—many of his closest associates thought differently. Charles Lee, who became Washington's third-ranking general and had a low opinion of his commander's generalship, sneered at what he called the 'infallible divinity' of the commander in chief and called him 'a bladder of emptiness and pride.' Tom Paine, even after Washington had virtually been sanctified, told the public that had honored him for the crucial essay Common Sense that Washington was 'treacherous in private friendship . . . and a hypocrite in public life.' In an open letter to the retiring president he capped his denunciation: 'As to you, Sir... the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.' "
If John Adams could have picked a song to sing the blues about political rejection and recrimination, perhaps he might have turned to a young Elton John, who sang for “The Top of the Pops” during America’s Bicentennial in 1976:
