Zadek’s favorite founder
The show states the preference plainly. Introducing the episode on Dr. Benjamin Rush, Zadek recounted reading Joseph Ellis’s Passionate Sage on Adams’s retirement years: “John Adams has since become my favorite founder” Founding Healer (2019). The same episode is the origin of his interest in Rush, who reconciled Adams with Jefferson.
The revolution in the mind
C. Bradley Thompson’s book America’s Revolutionary Mind takes its subject from Adams’s observation that the revolution was not the war but the change in the minds of the people in the fifteen years before Lexington and Concord: “at that moment, I realized that the true story of the American Revolution was this intellectual, moral revolution in the 10 or 15 years before independence” C. Bradley Thompson on America’s Revolutionary Mind (2019). Thompson also identified “the Adams cousins, John and Samuel” as the earliest revolutionaries to argue from the rights of nature rather than the rights of Englishmen, at a time when most colonists still considered themselves loyal British subjects.
Alien and Sedition
When the show discusses presidents acting beyond the Constitution, Adams is the first example. Introducing Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, Zadek said: “He wasn’t the first president to take steps like that. John Adams, the second president, got the Alien and Sedition Act passed, which basically said if you say nasty things about the president, you go to prison” America’s Second Founding (2021). The point in each case is the same one the show makes about emergency powers generally: the precedent outlives the emergency.
Men are not angels
In the episode on Frank Buckley’s The Republic of Virtue, Zadek grouped Adams with Madison as evidence that the founders’ hopes for virtuous officeholders were not naive: “As Adams, Madison famously mentioned, ‘If men were angels, we wouldn’t need laws.’ They knew that men were far from angels. So while one would hope that public officials would govern with virtue, the founders did not rely upon that as a protection, but they built in … safeguards” [[episodes/f_h__buckley_on__the_republic_of_virtue|F.H. Buckley on The Republic of Virtue (2017)]].
The correspondence, and the coincidence
After the bitter election of 1800 — decided in the House on the thirty-seventh ballot, as Harlow Unger recounted — Adams went home to Massachusetts and the two former presidents did not speak for twelve years, until Rush engineered a letter Founding Healer (2019). The resulting correspondence, roughly 154 letters, is described by Zadek as a first-person history of the country that would not otherwise exist. Skipper Young supplied the coincidence the show returns to: Adams and Jefferson both died on 4 July 1826, fifty years to the day after the Declaration, and Monroe five years later on the same date Skip Young on The Wisdom of 76: Young America’s Way to Wealth (2016).