Cicero and the Founding Fathers (Rebroadcast)

**Andrew Heaton** (0:03)
Happy 250th Birthday, America! This week, to celebrate Independence Day and America's quarter of a millennium milestone, I will be rebroadcasting some of my favorite history episodes about the United States on this program. Then on Thursday, we will have a new bonus monologue episode available for patrons, and on Friday, get psyched for a historical deep dive on America's anti-founding father and why we never descended into a military dictatorship. That will be on Friday. Until then, enjoy this rebroadcast of a fun American history episode.
When it rains, it pours, and John Quincy Adams' 61st year in this world was a year of torrential downpour. In 1828, President Adams was rejected by the country he had spent his entire life serving, and the election of 1828 was particularly vicious. The Jacksonians said all the same nasty rubbish that the Jeffersonians had belched about his father, that he was a monarchist deep down, that he was an out-of-touch elitist, and worst, worst, that he was corrupt. They accused him of putting a billiard table in the White House and charging the government for it. It was his billiard table. A bill for its repair had accidentally been included in the White House expense accounts. Jackson's rabid supporters claimed that Adams, while serving as America's ambassador to Russia, which was pretty cold, by the way, pretty cold, you're welcome, that he had procured a prostitute for Emperor Alexander, like he was a pimp or something, the czar's pimp. Well, that was patent nonsense. He had employed the young woman as his wife's maid, and one of her letters, for some reason, had been intercepted by the Russian Postal Service, and Alexander had asked Adams to bring the young woman to court. Maybe he was impressed with her writing, maybe he wanted to put the fear of God in or about some gossip or something, but it certainly had not been Adams' whoremongering on behalf of a foreign monarch. Foreign monarchs were quite capable of finding bed warmers without assistance from the US. Diplomatic Service. There had been a lot of mudslinging on both sides, to be fair. Adams' supporters had got a little carried away, what with claiming that Andrew Jackson's wife was a bigamist, which was technically true, and that Jackson's mother was a prostitute, maybe, and also that campaign song they came up with about how Satan is coming, if John Quincy be not coming, strongly implying that Andrew Jackson was the personal favorite of Satan, Prince of Darkness. But that horrible stuff had not been Quincy's idea. He hadn't wanted a bitter mudslinging election like that, and he had failed miserably in conducting an election like that. Jackson won 261 electoral votes. Adams limped to the finish line with 83, just 83 And while obviously the slave states had supported Jackson, the popular vote with the non-slave states had put him at 50.3% to Quincy's 49.7, so he couldn't even blame his defeat on the evils of slavery. Nobody enjoys losing an election much less being turned out of the White House, but the election of 1828 wasn't just losing the presidency.
It was bigger than that. It was losing the country. The occupant of the White House hadn't changed so much as politics itself had changed for the worst. Adams is the last politician of an older, more gentlemanly era, or at least he thought he was. Maybe he never understood politics at all, and so he just assumed he was part of something that no longer existed. But he hailed from an era where politics was personal in the sense that you actually knew the people in politics, and elections were swayed by personal relationships. That's how James Madison had become president. He wasn't particularly charismatic or grand or even that good looking, but he was very intelligent, and that raw intelligence had carried him among the electors who knew him and his abilities. And yes, sometimes in this bygone era of personal, gentlemanly politics, the vice president might get into a duel with the secretary of the treasury and shoot him in New Jersey. But even that, if you think about it, had been about honor because honor was so highly esteemed. But that was the exception to the rule. For the most part, campaigning such as it was meant a deep conversational deliberative process, something that was intelligent and meaningful. That was how they selected leaders back then, and that was what John Quincy Adams knew.
So he had run a campaign on policies, on ideas, on promoting his American system and building great canals and roads and lighthouses to link America's disparate regional economies into one big, thriving national economy. And he had thought Andrew Jackson would do the same thing, only with his vision and ideas run as the scion and heir of Thomas Jefferson arguing about decentralization and state's rights and the moral superiority of the gentleman farmer over cities. As Jefferson had done. But Jackson hadn't run a counterposed ideological campaign. That had not been the arena he had fought in. He barely articulated the policies he wanted at all. He had run in opposition to John Quincy Adams. Not the ideas of John Quincy Adams, not the policies of John Quincy Adams, but the person of John Quincy Adams. Well, how can one wage battle against that? How do you run an election against somebody who is running a personal grudge match and a popularity contest instead of offering the people clear, articulated ideas? Adams had run a campaign appealing to the reason of his fellow Americans. Jackson had run a campaign stirring up feelings and passion and emotion. And more to the point, Jackson had politicized the whole presidential election. He went around asking people to vote for him like a fishmonger, a fishmonger of democracy. And the whole thing was obscene. That was clearly beneath the dignity of the presidency. George Washington, who Adams had known, had not loped around major cities giving speeches like some kind of painted mummer, passing a hat around for tips. He hadn't held picnics to pitch himself like a salesman to masses of people or kissed babies, which Jackson was famous for. George Washington and John Adams Sr. and even his rival Jefferson, they had all understood, they had appreciated, that public service was bigger than the servant, that public servants dedicated themselves in their totality to the public good. And that was all they had to concern themselves with. Then the people noticed your abilities and your sacrifice and they called you to serve, not the other way around, no. You make yourself into someone who is respected and dedicated enough that your fellow citizens notice you and they call you to serve. Jackson, Jackson had scandalously flipped the whole thing, going to the people and asking them to vote for him. Was it really so long ago that the country had begged George Washington to leave retirement and lead it and he'd barely agreed to? How could you compete with naked ambition like that? How could the republic stand if the presidency became the realm of careerists and egotists instead of public servants who were called to serve rather than offering themselves for power?