Revolution had many fathers.

But today's guest paints a picture of Samuel Adams, the cash-strapped publisher and political leader from Boston as perhaps the essential founder whose spirit and maneuvering shaped so many of the seminal events of the Revolutionary era.

She's Stacy Schiff, this week on Story in the Public Square.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) Hello and welcome to Story in the Public Square, where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with The Pell Center at Salve.

- This week we're joined by Stacy Schiff, a Pulitzer surprise winning author whose new book is "The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams," a gripping account of the Bostonian, who may very well be the most essential founding father.

Stacy, thank you so much for being with us today.

- I'm delighted to join you both.

- So, readers probably know you from your other critically acclaimed work, "Vera," which won the Pulitzer prize.

The biography of Saint-Exupéry, which was a Pulitzer finalist.

Another biography of Cleopatra.

Other books about the witches of Salem and Benjamin Franklin.

What led you to Samuel Adams?

- It was in part the fault of the book on the Salem witch trials.

I had finished that book and I was thinking a lot about what courage it takes to make a real moral stand.

I was thinking about the first people who expressed skepticism about the witchcraft court.

And I was looking, it was 2016, I think I was thinking a lot, as we all were, about the fundamentals of democracy.

So I was really looking for some figure who had actually been on the scene early on, and who took that kind of unpopular moral standard, or who took a really strong standard defensive American, what we today consider American values.

And both of those roads led sooner or later to Samuel Adams, who is, in all of his contemporaries estimation, the man of the hour and whom we had largely forgotten.

But if you read the 18th century sources, it's Samuel Adams and George Washington who affect the Revolution.

- So why have we forgotten about Samuel Adams?

And we should stipulate upfront, as you do in the book, nobody called him Sam.

(Stacy laughing) - As a friend of mine pointed out, people might have called him all kinds of things that we don't actually.

(Jim and Wayne laughing) He tends to be run down by his enemies in the 19th century.

And to those men, he becomes Sam.

He seems always to have been Samuel in his day.

He signs himself Samuel certainly.

And he falls outta the scene for a lot of good reasons.

In the first place, unlike his cousin John, with whom he operates quite closely, he's a very modest man.

He comes from that great New England line of people who prefer to melt into the background, who aren't terribly vain, who don't claim undue credit for their work.

So he, in part, dismisses himself from the scene.

But there's all the more incentive, obviously, to do that when you're fomenting revolution.

The idea here is, obviously, not to leave too much of a paper trail, not to leave fingerprints, and a lot of that is erased.

John Adams leaves us this marvelous account of watching his cousin Samuel feeding his papers to the fire in Philadelphia so that none of their friends would be compromised by their revolutionary activities.

And also, the world diverges from his world.

He's very much a creature of old New England.

And as the New America rises and races toward wealth and opulence, this sort of austere, very sort of puritanically minded man falls out of the picture.

- So you describe him as the patron saint of late bloomers.

What was he doing before he, quote unquote, "bloomed"?

- Not a very great deal.

I don't know why, but I find that terrifically endearing, that for the first 40 years of Samuel Adams' life, he runs up a great number of debts, he works at a series of sort of modest town jobs.

He runs his father's business into the ground.

And his mind is clearly utterly dedicated to politics and to the body politic.

And he is transfixed even long before anyone has come to really talk about them by the question of liberties.

So that in the early 1740s and the late 1740s, he's writing a great deal about rights infringed and the enormous importance of having the power of government in perfect equipoise with the power of the people, and that equation should never be disturbed.

And this is long before anyone is really infringing any kind of American rights, long before Great Britain has passed any kind of heinous legislation.

- So, what brings him to prominence finally?

When does he, quote unquote, "burst" onto the public scene?

- I think by most accounts, the Stamp Act is what ushers him to the center stage.

The Stamp Act obviously is met with indignation throughout the colonies.

Massachusetts is out in front in terms of violence, in terms of street violence and street theater when it comes to the Stamp Act.

And Adams is front and center.

The Stamp Act is really what moves him, but elects him to the Massachusetts House of Representatives.

He's out front and center in helping to burnish some of the Massachusetts responses to the Stamp Act.

So he's working as kind of accomplice and an editor to various friends who are already in government positions at that time.

- You mentioned the moral courage that you started thinking about as you were working on the witches of Salem.

Where do you think Samuel Adams' moral courage grew from?

- That's the million dollar question, isn't it?

Why do some people have that firm moral compass?

The family suffers a very early setback because of a piece of British legislation.

And based on his father's response, based on the few clues we have about his father's response to that legislation, which bankrupts the family, my guess is that he does not hail from a family of shrinking violence.

My guess is that there's already sort of a staunch stance toward authority sort of baked in.

Obviously, it's a very New England position as well, but he is idealistic and unwavering to a degree which I think surprises everyone, even his closest friends.

And I think that at a time when other people are willing to sort of pack up camp and sort of say, "Okay, we've resolved this issue, now back to business," Adams is still insisting, is always on the prize on resolving this question of who is going to determine the fate of the American colonists?

Is that going to be us here in the colonies or is that going to be London?

For that sort of determination, I don't really have a winning formula, but it's very much there and it's astounding.

- So, the city of Boston was restive long before the Tea Party.

What was the relationship between the city of Boston and the Mass Bay Colony during that time period?

- So, Boston itself is generally a little bit out in front of the rest of the colony.

It begins over these revolutionary years as the more disruptive, the more tumultuous place.

There are all kinds of protests, there are various collisions with imperial authority, whereas the countryside is much tamer.

And that's an equation that will begin to reverse itself largely through the work of Adams.

So that by this early 1770s, certainly by Lexington and Concord, the countryside is much more radicalized and the town of Boston is a tamer place.

- Yeah, Stacy, I teach a little, and I struggle sometimes to convey to my students just how exciting the ideas of the enlightenment were in the middle of the 18th century, and then I come to the account that you offer of The Advertiser, the first newspaper that Adams helps found.

And the way he engages in those political discussions in that era.

If you're talking to students, how do you convey just how exciting and powerful ideas were at that moment in history?

- It's such an exceptional thing, isn't it?

That he's got his mind around those ideas at a time where there would've been no illustration of them really for him to look at except on the page, except on the pages of John Locke, which indeed he seems to have swallowed whole.

I think I would probably point up the modern parallels.

I mean, today, for example, I think it's very hard to read about China without also thinking back to some of the Boston street theater, to some of Samuel Adams' tactics in Boston.

It's thrilling stuff and these are resounding anthems, and he, I think, polishes them to be really evocative lines.

And his prose really rings on the page.

But I think the way to drive it home is really to point today to countries where those liberties are being infringed upon, where people are not enjoying those kinds of liberties and where there is the kind of overreach to which a revolutionary America was reacting.

- Can you talk, in general, about the role of the press during this period?

You mentioned the average, you mentioned The Advertiser.

Benjamin Franklin, of course, had a newspaper, newspapers.

And there were many others.

Just talk in general about the importance of newspapers.

And of course, looking at today, newspapers are in a very different place, but talk about the importance and the role that newspapers played during this pre-revolutionary period.

- It's utterly paramount and it points up in part why Boston is so much out in front of other towns in the colonies at this time.

And there's a wonderful line from a very frustrated Crown officer where he essentially says, "How do you expect to have any kind of order in a colony where you have five newspapers?"

(Jim laughing) It is this very disruptive independent press.

It is the absolute bane of the existence of the Crown officials.

It is bristling with sedition from the years, early beginning with the chagrin Stamp Act through the early 1770s.

It's uncontrollable, it's insistent, it's extremely popular.

The Boston Gazette, which is really the most popular of the papers, and the one for which Adams writes most regularly, is read by most of the town, much to the dismay of Crown officers.

And so the dissemination of ideas, you have an extremely literate colony.

You have a very, very healthy news system, and the dissemination of ideas is therefore electrifying and extremely easy in that realm.

Adams benefits from that, benefits from one of the practices of the day and from that system in that it's largely a pseudonymous press.

Most contributors are writing under pseudonyms.

And the availability of those pseudonyms, Adams uses something like 30 of them, makes it possible to seem as if it is a legion of people who are writing.

So you could read Vindex and you could read Candidus and you could read Alfred.

And you didn't realize that in all of those cases, you were reading Samuel Adams.

So he makes it seem as if the discontent is really general.

He can put a different spin on the ball in different pieces.

He can use a different tone.

He can attack a different individual.

But it does feel as if you have this just eruption of discontent even when there's only one man behind it.

- Do you see any parallel between the Crown's reaction to the press during this period and the reaction of some politicians during the modern era, during the contemporary era, in terms of fake news and enemies of the people and so forth?

- There are a lot of parallels in every possible direction.

(Jim and Wayne laughing) Possibly the best case, well, I mean, I think the most immediate parallel is not so much with the press as with Adams' committees of correspondence, which are these, essentially, committees that he helps to found in all of the towns of Massachusetts and ultimately throughout the colonies, who are meant to communicate to each other, who meant to broadcast to each other about American rights and to collectively see that those rights are not infringed.

He wants it to be possible for any infringement of rights of one to be understood to be an infringement of rights of all, because he sees that as the only way to get redress in Great Britain.

And those committees of correspondence, when you read through their responses to, for example, the Boston Tea Party, you do feel like you're reading Twitter.

They are all using the same language.

They're all resorting to the same imagery.

It's as if they're retweeting each other's remarks.

So you see it there in the sense of this just cacophony of voices.

There's a lot of misinformation fluttering about.

Adams is responsible for some of that misinformation.

He uses it very effectively once troops arrive.

And Boston did not expect to find itself a town occupied by red coats.

In 1768, it is.

And Adams does his best to inflame tempers in the town by distributing all kinds of fictitious and pretty lured accounts of what's going on, not only in the Boston press, but throughout the New York and Philadelphia papers as well.

So there is a system there of what we would today perhaps call fake news.

- Yeah, so I spent most of my scholarly career studying the power of information, and one of the things that I learned from your book, Stacy, was just how successful and important a propagandist Samuel Adams was.

And I don't say that in a pejorative sense of the word propagandist.

He used information for political intent.

Do you have a sense, was he innovating and experimenting and seeing what would work and trying different things?

Or did he have some theory about the power of information and the flow of information?

Because it's not just the committees of correspondence, he has a couple of other efforts where he's trying to spread the news of what's happening in Boston throughout the other colonies.

Did he have an understanding, formal or instinctive, that you were able to discern about the power of information?

- My guess is that it's largely instinctive, but he's profoundly gifted in all of these realms.

And possibly, one of the best illustrations of that is the way in which he's always careful to make the fanatical hotheaded New Englanders take the backseat and let someone else take over.

So at various junctures, he will reach out, for example, to a Rhode Islander and say, "Maybe could you suggest this?

Because if it comes from us, you know that it's going to be shot down immediately."

And that kind of behavior continues at the first and second continental congresses when the Virginians are always charged with doing things because it's always understood that the New Englanders are way out in front of everyone else and far too radical, whereas those more decorous Virginians should perhaps put an idea forward.

And Adams is behind a lot of those efforts.

But I think it's an instinctive feel for how to propel these things forward.

I mean, one of the most amazing things about him is his capacity for patience and temperance.

He's a very prudent revolutionary, and he is very careful when necessary to bide his time.

He's by no means advocating violence.

He really feels that time is on the American side and that often it is best to just wait something out.

And that's not, I think, the idea that we initially have of him.

- So Stacy, he grew up with some means, but he was poor as an adult.

Did that shape him and his thinking?

And if so, how did that affect him, his economic circumstances from beginning of his life toward later years?

- I think it shapes him profoundly.

I think someone who winds up largely indigent but who didn't begin that way is a very different person from someone who was used from an early age, used to deprivation of some kind.

It is a badge of honor with him.

There's something pure in his mind about his poverty, which he does nothing whatsoever to, he makes no attempt whatsoever to improve on his material position in life.

He grows up in a very beautiful home.

And most importantly, the family has the means to send him to Harvard for not one, but two degrees.

So you have an extremely well-educated person who, unlike his peers, finds no career, has no investment in any kind of industry, gives himself entirely to politics, which is something one didn't do in the 18th century, especially in an industrious, aspirational town like Boston.

So he has all of this education and he has all of these contacts among the educated elite, and yet he is comfortable and often in the streets of Boston.

So in addition to his other talents, he has this ability to sort of connect different parts of the town, different parts of a very hierarchical society.

But there is an insistence throughout his life on the poor man being the man who had no vested interest.

A politician who was coming to his office without any kind of business interest was by definition likely to act in the interests of the people as opposed to a politician who had his own fortune to protect.

And he writes a sort of endearing letter to his wife at one point from Congress, in which he talks about how he's learned to give up, as he says, the sort of sweeter things in life for the sake of his country.

But then he catches himself because he realizes that that sounds boastful and he sort of tries to walk it back.

But that was very much the attitude was the sense of self-sacrifice, which I think is something of which we've lost sight entirely today.

- Did he bemoan his poverty toward the end of his life, or did he wear it as a badge of honor, or how did he come to grips with that or how did he present himself?

- I think very much as a badge of honor.

He lives in a very shabby home.

He dresses shabbily enough that when he, in fact, is dispatched to the first continental Congress, the town of Boston will see to it that a chest of clothes is delivered to his doorstep.

Because clearly, Massachusetts didn't care to be represented by someone who dressed as poorly as did Samuel Adams.

So in this kind of fairytale moment, a wig maker and a tailor and a shoemaker will call at his door and take his measure and refuse to say who has sent them and then deliver this new wardrobe with which he travels to Philadelphia.

But it's clearly something on which he prides himself insofar as he goes in for pride, which he doesn't often.

And then there's some sort of uncanny twist at the end of his life.

His son is killed, his son dies, and his army pension accrues to Samuel Adams.

So finally, at the end of his life, because of this terrible loss, he actually inherits some money.

- [Wayne] Wow.

- Wow.

Stacy, you mentioned the power of Samuel Adams' words, some of your words really struck me as I was reading as well, describing one of Adams' core beliefs, you wrote, "A corrupt people would not long remain free."

What was he worried about?

- He, early on, is looking not so much to Great Britain as he is to the Crown officials in Boston, the entrenched elite in Boston, the few families, he calls them the Haudie families, who really among them have distributed all of the titles in town and all of the administrative tasks and who control all the fortunes.

And he feels that there is, at a very basic level, a corruption there, a collusion there.

And that American interests are going to be compromised by this very tight oligarchy, which controls everything.

And to him, that is in a funny way, the obvious face of tyranny.

And he makes that in a very personal way, the face of despotism.

So that is really what he's guarding against.

He doesn't feel that any of these people, many of whom hold multiple titles, and in particular, Thomas Hutchinson, who's lieutenant governor, then acting governor, and then governor, who has a multitude of titles.

How is it possible for one person, asks Adams, to serve in several branches of government and to do so honorably?

And at the same time, in Thomas Hutchinson's case, for example, to be profiting from the tea trade.

All of those things tangled together can't possibly yield a public official who has the public's interest at work.

And there's a wonderful line of his where he essentially says, "To have a villainous ruler imposed on you is a misfortune, but to elect one yourself is a disgrace."

I mean, he really feels that it is up to the people to be able to make these kinds of adjustments and to wisely find someone who has the public, has the common wheel at heart, as opposed to his own private interests.

- In contrast to so many of the founders, he refused to own a slave.

What do you take from that?

- There are a number of encounters in the papers of Adams with anti-slavery petitions.

He was clearly the person to whom you went if you were trying to launch, in the 1760s even, if you were trying to launch some kind of petition against the slave trade.

Adams was very central to several of these discussions.

At his second marriage, his former mother-in-law attempts to give the couple a slave as a wedding present, which was a not unusual gesture at the time.

And Adam's baulks and says that this woman, Surry, may come to live with them, but she must be free if she's going to live in the household and arranges for her emancipation.

And indeed, Surry lives with them for many decades as a close member of the family.

But Adams is firm in that position.

It'll come up several times over the course of the next years.

Actually, in the wake of the Boston Tea Party, one of the towns, Medfield, Massachusetts will write to Boston and say, "All of this activity on behalf of liberty is brilliant, but how can you possibly take this stand and still engage in pulling people away from their lives and enslaving them?"

And Adams later will hesitate to ratify the Constitution, largely because it fails to include a Bill of Rights.

And one of the things he feels that the Bill of Rights should guarantee is an end to the slave trade.

- So here's a question that I'd like to ask you.

If Samuel Adams could come back today, what would he think of America?

- Well, I think first of all, any 18th century figure would be rather staggered by the idea of political parties, which was really not on the agenda anywhere.

I think in Adams' case in particular, and there was plenty of divisiveness, but the idea of parties would've been just staggering.

In Adams' case in particular, I think income inequality would've been the most difficult thing to digest that was so much baked into his idea of what made democracy work, that there should be a commonality of interest, that there should not be an entrenched elite.

That privilege should step aside to make room for genius and industry.

That education, in particular, should be available to everyone.

And in that case, he's very clear about the fact that he includes both boys and girls in that statement, but that education was meant to be both a great gate to opportunity and a great leveler.

So I think looking at a world that in many ways resembles his, in the sense of a tight elite, billionaires who feel they can buy communications services, I think those kinds of things would shock.

- Hey, Stacy, we're just about out of time here.

We got about a minute and a half left.

But one of the things that I loved about this book was that I thought it also provided real insights into the experience of the Crown officers, particularly Thomas Hutchinson and the challenge that they faced because of the threat of violence against their own person.

What should we in the modern era take from that experience when we think about the threat of violence in American politics today, which seems reborn in a lot of respects?

And we've got about a minute left here.

- So you'd like me to solve this problem in one minute or fewer.

- [Jim] Yeah.

60 Seconds, please.

(Wayne laughing) Yes.

- So, I guess the one thing I would wanna say on that front, yes, if you wanna hear that Samuel Adams was the most wanted man in America, you read what the Crown officials had to say about him because they just can't believe what this man is doing.

I think the problem that they all face is a very familiar one, which is that to clamp down with any authority is only to incite.

And so it's a very delicate balance in the sense that to in any way invite troops to Boston, to punish Boston, to in any way attempt to corral this resistance is only to fuel it further.

And I'm sure there's some kind of lesson there about hitting the right notes, but you can draw a fairly straight line between the troops occupying Boston and the Boston massacre, between the punishment for the destruction of the tea and the reaction of the first Continental Congress.

It's these overreactions which very often provoke more than they in fact appease.

- Stacy, we need way more than 30 minutes to talk to you about all of this stuff.

Thank you so much for being with us.

She's Stacy Schiff.

The book is "The Revolutionary" and it's exceptional.

That's all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about Story in the Public Square, you can find us on Facebook or visit pellcenter.org, where we can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more Story in the Public Square.

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