Posted on 03/24/2008 9:07:10 AM PDT by Clemenza
Exchange: HBO's 'John Adams' (Part 3) Two scholars of early U.S. history debate the high-profile miniseries with its writer.
John Patrick Diggins, Kirk Ellis, and Steven Waldman , The New Republic Published: Monday, March 24, 2008
HBO's seven-part miniseries, John Adams, based on David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning book about America's second president, premiered last weekend. The New Republic asked historian John Patrick Diggins and author Steven Waldman to critique the series. Click here to see their discussion of Parts 1 and 2. This week, Kirk Ellis, the series' writer and co-executive producer, will be joining the discussion. Below, Waldman kicks off the discussion with his thoughts on last night's airing of Part 3. Click here to see Diggins's response. Stay tuned for Ellis's response.
Dear Jack and Kirk,
The next time my wife complains that I'm spending too much time at the office, I'm going to say, "Well, at least I'm better than John Adams!"
As the HBO series reminds us, John Adams spent more years apart from his wife than together during this era. Worst of all, several of his overseas years were spent being utterly useless. HBO certainly takes the position that Adams' presence in Paris only complicated Benjamin Franklin's ability to negotiate French support for the year, a view that seems to be echoed by most historians.
It's always amazed me how much of early American politics was determined by whether you were a Francophile or an Anglophile. Of course, at this particular moment--the outset of the war--everyone was for seeking French aid, but that didn't mean they had to like the French. This series nicely captures Adams' disgust for the French's prurient ways--including, most deliciously, the scene of Ben Franklin in the bathtub with his French mistress. (In case you were wondering if HBO would find some way of getting sex into even a show about John Adams, the answer is: "Yes.")
This is as good an excuse as any to mention an aspect of Adams that is invariably ignored (and is ignored in the HBO series, too): his antagonism toward Catholicism. Adams disliked France not only because they powdered their faces and wore frilly clothes; he also disliked them for being Catholic. He believed it unlikely that a Catholic country could nurture a true Republic. "Is there any instance of a Roman Catholic monarchy of five and 20 million at once converted into a free and rational people?" he once asked Dr. Joseph Priestley, a philosopher and Francophile. "No, I know of no instance like it." Writing to Jefferson in 1816 about a recent revival of the Catholic order of the Jesuits, Adams wrote, "This Society has been a greater Calamity to Mankind than the French Revolution or Napoleans Despotism or Ideology. It has obstructed the Progress of Reformation and the Improvements of the human Mind in Society much longer and more fatally."
It's hard to recognize freedom's champion in this letter to his wife Abigail in which he describes a visit to St. Mary's Catholic Church in Philadelphia. His pen dripping with contempt and pity, Adams catalogues the repellant customs: "The poor wretches fingering their beads, chanting Latin, not a word of which they understood, Their holy Water--their Crossing themselves perpetually--their Bowing to the Name of Jesus, whererever they hyertit--their Bowings, and Kneelings, and Genuflections before the Altar."
In fact, one of the causes of the revolution was the Quebec Act, which gave religious protections to Catholics in Canada. This infuriated the colonists. "Does not your blood run cold to think that an English Parliament should pass an Act for the establishment of arbitrary power and Popery in such an extensive country?" wrote Alexander Hamilton. "Your loves, your property, your religion are all at stake." Sam Adams told a group of Mohawk Indians that the law would mean that "some of your children may be induced instead of worshipping the only true God, to pay his dues to images made with their own hands." Fortunately, George Washington realized that it would undermine the colonists' efforts to win support from Canada and France if they were perceived as being anti-Catholic, so he banned the "monstrous" practice of burning effigies of the pope on "Pope Day."
Later in life, Adams admitted to being a bit rash in his anti-Catholic judgments, but I believe (and argue in Founding Faith) that we have not paid close enough attention to the anti-Catholic sentiment as a factor in the revolution.
But otherwise I found Part 3 to be fascinating and well done! Since we have Kirk Ellis from HBO here with us, I'd actually like him to respond to our posts about the first two parts, most especially our sense that the shows didn't quite fully capture the more legitimate reasons why these men rebelled.
And I'd personally be interested in hearing how they figured out what kinds of accents to give each figure.
Well, Higgins got one out of three right.
The link talks about Grant's book and mentions this topic.
One of the key reasons for New York’s emergence as the financial center of America was due to the fact that the Dutch trading houses stayed after British control. Most of the elite of 18th and 19th Century New York was of Dutch, NOT English ancestry (the Schemehorns, Scuylers, Vanderbilts, etc.).
I agree and disagree with your comments. Let me explain.
The history of the Catholic Church going back from the 1700s was one of an extreme authoritarian nature. It wielded a lot of power and to oppose it was to basicly put your life in jeopardy.
Moving forward the Church of England took on the same authoritarian nature after recognizing that problem in the Catholic Church, and having been formed by people who broke away from Catholocism for that very reason.
Many of the people who came to the colonies wanted religious freedom. They were sick in tired of the draconian restrictions of the Church of England and by extension the Catholic Church of the previous centuries.
I would say the Church of England was more of a driving force behind many of the colonists’ decision to move to New England, but I do think a ‘back of the mind’ reference to Catholocism was very much in there somewhere.
Coupla more thoughts about the Catholics, Maryland and the RevWar:
First, Charles Carroll was the only Catholic signer of the DoI. He was also the last Signer to die.
Second, let us not forget the Maryland 400, those incredibly brave largely middle class Irish Catholic lads whom, it may be said with little exaggeration, saved our fledgeling Republic from being strangled in its crib at the Battle of Brooklyn.
Anti-catholicism was part of MA in colonial times. In 1647, the commonwealth banned Jesuits or other priests from being in the colony. In 1688, Ann Glover was executed not because she was a witch, but because she was Catholic. In 1750, chief justice of MA Paul Dudley endowed four annual lectures at Harvard; he mandated that be involved in “the detecting and convicting and exposing the idolatry of the Romish church, their tyranny, usurpations, damnable heresies, fatal errors, abominable superstitions, and other crying wickedness in their high places”
Until the 19th century graduates of the College of the Holy Cross in MA were actually conferred degrees by Georgetown, since the Congregationalists would not charter a Catholic (and Jesuit) college. What’s more, MA banned the celebration of Christmas as popery.
Catholicism was banned in Maryland 1688. John Jay called for a loyalty oath for public officers to abjure foreign ecclesiasticl leadership.
I think that Catholicism fared worse in colonies/states which were influenced by Puritans.
Not sure about the entire elite; only one RC signed the Declaration, though he was Carroll of MD.
Was there ever a more authorian state than Puritan Massachusetts?
Ping
Unless you don’t count the Polish/Lithuanian Confederation, which was a Republic with an elected king run by a Senate or the Venetian Republic.
I like history stories, and I really miss Rome. I find the John Adams series very fascinating.
I saw a show on Protestantism this weekend (I think it was on History Channel) that concluded the American Revolution was one result of the Protestant Reformation.
George Washington understood the importance of true religious freedom. Another reason why he is my VERY FAVORITE Founding Father (and President).
“The more things change, the more they remain the same.”
You’re absolutely right. Remember that many of the colonists didn’t see England as the pariah that the revolutionaries did. Many remained loyalists to the core, and I guess that applied to their regligious fervor as well. If the church in the old country was okay, why not develop your own version in the U.S., just as authoritarian?
However, once the Irish took over Boston politics in the late 19th Century, they ruled it as their own petty fiefdom. From the 1880s until the 1950s, the great power struggle in Massachusetts was between the Boston Irish Dem Machine (and their Jewish, French Canadian and Portuguese allies elsewhere in the state) and the Yankee Republicans (and their Italian allies).
Ditto here. I was on vacation and decided to catch up on the HBO series that Rush L. had mentioned was very good and it peaked my intrest. The part where Adams nominated Washington as the Commander in Chief has to be seen. I didn’t think that the actor playing Washington could pull it off but was I mistaken. As one of the delegates kept talking, Washingtons stand up to move across the room and you could hear a pin drop. I will be the first in line to buy this DVD set. I saw part two three times.
Agreed; I was referring the Adams’ era.
It's pathetic that this guy is a professor.
When did the Roman Catholic Church ever stand for freedom?
Too bad Higgins can't address this question to the slaves of the late Roman Empire, or his presumably Irish ancestors, or the Spaniards living under the Arab yoke, or the Hungarians under the Turkish one.
Even in the 20th century, it aligned with Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco.
Idiot.
Franco, to a certain extent - but considering Franco's enemies were totalitarian Communists in the habit of raping nuns and using churches as latrines, one can see why.
To say that the Church aligned with either Hitler or Mussolini is simply beneath contempt, the Catholic equivalent of the blood libel.
Certain courageous Catholic thinkers like Father John Ryan and John Courtney Murray tried to reconcile Catholic doctrine with freedom and democracy, but they were reprimanded by the hierarchy.
John Ryan got into trouble with his employer by advocating Marxism - in other words the diametric opposite of freedom and democracy. John Murray was criticized not for his political writings but for his denial of the theological supremacy of the Holy See. This criticism certainly didn't hurt either his ecclesiastical or secular careers.
In Adams's era, the Catholic Church was anti-Enlightenment and invoked natural law instead of the idea of natural rights--the first demanding obedience to authority, the latter the duty to resist it if rulers violate the social contract.
There is no conflict between natural right and natural law, and St. Thomas Aquinas laid it all out quite perspicuously 500 years before John Adams was born. Adams himself was an opponent of the Enlightenment as embodied by the French Revolution.
The main criticism of Jesuit theologians in the 17th century by apologists for the absolute monarchies of Europe, was their championing of the right of the people to resist tyranny and their rejection of the false doctrine of the divine right of kings.
Edmund Burke, defending the American cause before Parliament in his famous "Speech on Reconciliation," told the British that the colonists would not yield because they were "Protestants," and he spelled out what that meant: protest, resist, defy.
Burke spoke these words as a man who personally wavered between Catholicism and Protestantism all his life, and remained a Protestant largely because he would not have been allowed to serve in Parliament if he were a Catholic. His mother and sister were devout Catholics and he was a Protestant mostly because his Protestant father insisted on it - pointing out that if he were a Catholic he could never receive an officer's commission in the army or navy, or admission to university, or stand for Parliament.
Burke, as a master rhetorician, was playing on Parliament's prejudices in order to further his pro-American sympathies.
This was not anti-Catholicism on Burke's part - it was flattery of Protestants. And Burke also had a horror of the anti-clerical French Revolution.
I disagree. Catholicism considers the political principle of subsidiarity as paramount.
Subsidiarity is compatible with many monarchical and republican forms of government - but it is radically incompatible with the classical absolute monarchy of the early modern period: the Reformation in Germany and England and the Gallicanist heresy in France occurred in large part because of the Papcy's dogged resistance to the claims of absolutist monarchs.
They were, but Catholics were greatly influential in the colony and were represented at the signing of the Declaration.
Yes, but the Catholic minority of Maryland was quite influential still and a free Maryland would have been expected to be a place for subsequent Catholic immigration to the new Republic - which it was.
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