Are We Still a Republic?

We're recording.

We are not. Your machine has a light and the light is not lit.

The light is on the other machine.

Then why is there a machine with a light that is not lit?

It is the coffee, John. The light is for the coffee.

I know it is for the coffee. I have been standing at it. It requires a small cup, a sealed capsule, and forty-five seconds. I have had forty-five seconds explained to me by a young woman who was not certain why the forty-five seconds were necessary either.

It is a very ingenious contrivance. The capsule is punctured on both faces and the water is driven through under pressure. I have asked to see one taken apart.

He has asked to see one taken apart. He asked to see the coffee-house at Passy taken apart. He asked to see the ocean taken apart.

I asked about the currents.

You asked the captain. On the second day. He avoided you for the rest of the crossing.

Gentlemen.

I gave up tea in 1774 and I have not had a cup of coffee since I sat down in this building, and I am seventy-something years dead, and I would like to know why a republic that can put a man on the moon requires forty-five seconds.

That one I can't answer.

Nobody can. It is the mark of a decline.

It is the mark of a pressure valve.

This is The Hitching Post. I'm Peter Corrigan, in Boston, at street level, with two guests, which we do now and then, and with these two, which we do once. They wrote the Declaration of Independence together in a rented room in Philadelphia in June of 1776, the one drafting and the other, by his own account, telling him to. They served together in Paris, ran against each other for President twice, split the country between them, stopped speaking for eleven years, made it up by mail, and died on the same afternoon, the fourth of July, 1826, fifty years to the day. Mr. Adams is on no currency at all. Mr. Jefferson is on the two-dollar bill, which nobody uses, and the five-cent piece, which everybody does.

The smallest note and the smallest coin. I begin to suspect a Federalist at the Mint.

There were Federalists at the Mint, John. You appointed them.

I appointed a great many people. It was the last thing I did, and it was the thing you liked least, and we are going to be asked about it, so let us not begin it now.

We'll get there.

He always says that. He said it to Hamilton.

I want to start with the year you agreed on something. 1813. You'd been writing again for about a year; Dr. Rush had brokered it. Mr. Adams, you'd sent Mr. Jefferson a run of letters that summer on the subject of aristocracy. Mr. Jefferson, you answered on October 28th, and you began by saying you'd take up one subject at a time, "according to the reservation between us."

We had agreed to that. His letters came faster than mine, and on more subjects, and if I had tried to answer them all at once I should have written nothing.

I wrote him seven letters that summer. He answered one. This is the reservation between us.

Mr. Jefferson, you wrote: "I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents." And then: "There is also an artificial aristocracy, founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents." Mr. Adams, you wrote back in November: "We are now explicitly agreed, in one important point." And then you spent the rest of the letter disagreeing.

I spent the rest of the letter explaining. He had granted the premise and mistaken the conclusion. He agreed there was a natural aristocracy and that its grounds were virtue and talents, and then he wrote as if that were the aristocracy that actually governs anywhere on earth. I had written him in September that the five pillars of aristocracy are beauty, wealth, birth, genius, and virtue, and that any one of the first three can at any time overbear one or both of the last two. That is not a preference. It is an observation. A green-grocer's daughter walks the streets of London with a basket of cabbages and by the force of her face becomes Lady Hamilton and moves the fleets of England. That is aristocracy. Nobody voted for her.

And I answered that gunpowder had armed the weak as well as the strong, and that bodily strength, and beauty, and the rest of the accidents, had become auxiliary grounds of distinction and not the main ones. The question between us was never whether wealth and birth exist. It was what to do about them. He wished to put the pseudo-aristoi in a separate chamber of the legislature where they might be watched.

Where they might be contained.

And I wrote that to give them power in order to prevent them from doing mischief is arming them for it. I trusted the people, well informed, to elect the good and wise and leave the rest. And I would remove the artificial aristocracy at its root: abolish entails and primogeniture, so that estates divide; establish general education, so that talent may be found wherever it is born; and divide the counties into wards, so that every man has a hand in some part of the government every day.

You proposed all three in Virginia.

I carried the first. The second was passed in part, thirty years late. The third was never taken up.

Because it was never going to be. Because the men who would have had to vote for the wards were the men the wards would have diminished. I told him so. I told him so in the letter. Mankind have reason to say to us philosophers, as the frogs said to the boys, what is sport to you is wounds and death to us. He laughed at aristocracy from Monticello. It was a very fine place to laugh from.

You laughed at it from Quincy.

I did not laugh. I catalogued.

Let me bring it to now, because that's what you're here for, and I'm going to describe some things and not characterize them, and I'd ask you both to hold your reactions until I've finished.

He asks this of everyone. Nobody has managed it.

General education exists. Every child in the country is entitled to it for twelve years without charge, and most go on past that. There is no entail and no primogeniture anywhere. There is no titled nobility. The Senate you argued about is directly elected. Every adult citizen may vote, without regard to property, sex, or race.

Then—

I'm not finished. The wealthiest hundredth of the population holds about a third of the country's wealth, and that share has grown for forty years. Within the last thirty years, a son of a President and, later, the wife of a President were each nominated by their parties for that office; I'm speaking of nominations, not elections. A man known to the public chiefly for a television program was elected President. Another had been an actor. Candidates and their supporters spent, in the election of 2024, something over five billion dollars, most of it on advertising, and a large part of that from a small number of very rich people. And there is a thing called celebrity, which is a kind of fame detached from any accomplishment, and which can be converted directly into office.

Beauty, wealth, birth. In the order I gave them, and in the same order they have given you. I have been dead two hundred years and I have not been proved wrong once.

You have not been proved right either, John. He has described the pseudo-aristoi and their means of ascent. He has not described whether they govern. Mr. Corrigan, the men and women who hold the offices of your government: are they, in the main, the persons of wealth and birth and fame you describe, or are they persons of talent who have found the means to rise?

I'm not going to characterize the current government.

Then I will characterize the question. You have told us that the artificial aristocracy has every means of ascent it had in 1813 and several new ones. You have also told us that the natural aristocracy has means of ascent it never had: the free school, the open franchise, the abolition of the entail. Both have been armed. That is not a republic overthrown. That is a republic in the condition I always said it would be in, which is contested.

Contested. Five billion dollars. The son of a President and the wife of a President. He hears a green-grocer's daughter become a countess and calls it a contest.

You would call it a tragedy and build a chamber to hold her.

I would call it a fact and build a chamber to hold her, because she is coming whether you build the chamber or not, and you have spent two hundred years proving it. What did you do with the Senate?

It's directly elected. Since 1913.

So the chamber I proposed for the rich is now elected by the same people who elect the other chamber, and is therefore the same as the other chamber except slower, and the rich have gone around it and bought the advertising instead. This is what comes of trusting the people well informed. Who informs them?

That's a longer conversation.

I have had it with Mr. Madison. I gather he was here.

He was.

He is always here. He was here in 1787 and he has not left.

We'll go to Philadelphia.

Is it the Doctor?

It's the Doctor.

Then I should like it on the record that I have not asked to be reconciled with the Doctor and that no Dr. Rush has proposed it.

[on the line] I heard that. The device was already open. Good afternoon, Mr. Jefferson. Good afternoon, Mr. Adams.

Doctor.

Doctor.

Corrigan, I have your question in front of me, and I will answer it, and then I will say what I actually think, which is a different thing. You want to know whether these two gentlemen in a room together are a republic or an aristocracy.

That's not quite—

It is quite. And the answer is that they are the only two men I ever knew who each believed the other to be the aristocrat. Mr. Jefferson thought Mr. Adams a monarchist because he wanted a strong Senate and titles for the President. Mr. Adams thought Mr. Jefferson an aristocrat because he was one: a Virginia planter with two hundred slaves who talked about the people from a hilltop. They were both right, and they have spent forty years and two afterlives failing to notice that they were both right at once. Now I will read you something, because I gather that is how it's done on this program. I wrote to Robert Livingston in 1783, and I have never regretted a word of it: that Mr. Adams means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things absolutely out of his senses.

He has been saying that since 1783.

Because it has been true since 1783. And I would say it of Mr. Jefferson as well, except that when he is out of his senses he writes it down so beautifully that nobody notices. Good day. The device is telling me it has a low battery, which I take to be a metaphor.

Always an honest man. You will observe that even in the insult I am the honest one.

I observed it, John. So did Livingston.

I have a stack of paper here, and I'm going to tell you what it is before I read from it, so neither of you feels ambushed. It's the 1790s. All of it is in your own hands. You agreed, in 1813, to take up one subject at a time; I've read the correspondence and this subject never came up. I'm taking it up.

We agreed not to.

We did not agree, John. We simply did not.

That is what agreeing not to is.

Mr. Jefferson. April 1791. Thomas Paine's Rights of Man is being printed in Philadelphia, and you send the printer a note with the manuscript, which he puts on the first page without your permission. You wrote that you were pleased something was at last to be publicly said "against the political heresies which have sprung up among us." Everyone in Philadelphia understood which heresies. Mr. Adams had just published the Discourses on Davila. You then wrote to Mr. Adams, in July, that the note was never meant for print, that you'd thought so little of it you hadn't kept a copy, and that you were "thunderstruck" to see it at the head of the pamphlet.

I was. I did not intend it for the press.

He intended it for the printer. He did not intend it for the press. There is a distinction there that has kept me warm for thirty-five years.

Mr. Jefferson, April 1796. You wrote to your friend Philip Mazzei in Italy that there were men in America "who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England." The letter was published in Paris the next year and then in every Federalist paper in the country. Everyone understood it to mean General Washington.

It did not name him.

It did not have to. There was one Samson. Everyone knew which harlot had been at his hair, and it was not England. It was you, sir, a year before, at his own table.

Mr. Jefferson, 1787. A letter to William Stephens Smith, Mr. Adams's secretary in London, and by the following year his son-in-law. On Shays' Rebellion: "God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion." And: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."

To my daughter's husband.

To a young man of sense, in a private letter, on the subject of a Massachusetts rebellion that you and your Senate had put down with troops.

I did not put it down. Governor Bowdoin put it down. I was in London reading letters about manure that had been sent to my son-in-law.

Mr. Adams. Your turn.

I had expected it.

July 1798. You sign the Sedition Act. It makes it a crime to publish "false, scandalous and malicious writing" against the government, the Congress, or the President. Not the Vice President. Mr. Jefferson was Vice President. Under it, your administration prosecuted, among others, the editor of the Aurora, a Vermont congressman, and a pamphleteer named James Callender, who went to jail for nine months for calling you, in print, a hoary-headed incendiary.

He called me a good deal worse. That was the part they could prove.

Mr. Jefferson had been paying Callender.

I had assisted him. I considered him a man of genius unjustly persecuted, and I gave him money as I gave it to many men in want. I did not direct his pen.

You did not need to direct it. You fed it.

And when Mr. Jefferson became President he pardoned him, and Callender, unpaid, turned on him and published the story of Sally Hemings. Mrs. Adams wrote to Mr. Jefferson about that in 1804, and the two of them exchanged letters for a summer, and Mr. Adams, you said you hadn't known about the correspondence until it was over.

I did not. My wife had her own quarrels. She generally won them.

Mr. Adams. March 3rd, 1801. The night before Mr. Jefferson's inauguration. You sign commissions for judges and marshals until late in the evening, under the Judiciary Act that your Congress had passed three weeks before, creating the offices. Then you leave Washington at four in the morning by the public stage, and you are not at the inauguration.

I was not invited.

Nobody was invited. It wasn't that kind of event. Mr. Jefferson walked to the Capitol from his boardinghouse.

Then I was not not invited, and the stage left at four. I filled the offices Congress had created because they were vacant and it was my duty to fill them. It is what he would have done. It is what he did, for eight years, with every office I had filled.

I removed some.

You removed mine.

Here is what I want to ask both of you, and it's the only question I have on this. In 1813 you agreed to take up one subject at a time, and for thirteen years you took up religion, and aristocracy, and the ancient Greeks, and the Indians, and Napoleon, and your grandchildren, and never this. Mr. Adams, you wrote in July of that year, "You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other." Your letter of July says so. Did you?

No.

No.

We explained everything else. We explained ourselves on the immortality of the soul, on which we differed by a hair and pretended it was a mile. We did not explain 1800, because there was nothing to explain that either of us did not already know. He knew what he had done. I knew what I had done. I knew that he knew. There is a point past which explanation is merely a fourth party to a conversation that already has two.

I would add only that we were old men who had each buried a wife and most of a family, and that the reservation between us was not that we would take up one subject at a time. It was that we would take up the subjects on which we might still be of use to each other. On 1800 we could not.

And now?

Now you have read us the letters, and we have both survived it, and I observe that Mr. Adams is not looking at me, which is how I know he is not angry.

I am looking at the coffee.

Mail. Gentlemen, you're welcome to listen.

We are not welcome to leave, so we will listen.

When Mr. Madison was here, on the government holding a key to every citizen's cipher. A listener in Lowell writes: "Madison did the thing he always does, which is to describe the problem so beautifully that you don't notice he hasn't answered it. He said the key would help every President including him. He said the amendment doesn't forbid it. He said the citizen should be allowed to build a house the magistrate can't enter. He did not say whether, if he were in Congress today, he would vote for the law. Ask him." We did reach out to Mr. Madison.

[recorded] The gentleman in Lowell has read me correctly and I will not pretend otherwise. He asks whether I would vote for the law. No. I would not. I did not say so on the program because I was asked what the amendment permits, and I answered what the amendment permits, and a man who answers a different question from the one he was asked is a man who has decided the questioner is a fool, which I did not. But he has now asked the other question, and the answer is no, and the reason is the one I gave: it would have helped me, and I do not think a power should be created on the ground that it would help the man who holds it. Mr. Adams may wish to comment. He generally does.

Mr. Madison has said no in a hundred and twenty words. It is the most economical thing he has ever done.

He said it in the same number of words I would have used, John, and you would have used four hundred and said yes.

I would have said yes in 1798 and no in 1813, and I would have explained the difference, which is more than either of you ever did.

Let me come back to the question we came for, and I'll put it to each of you and then I'll put it to you both. Are we still a republic?

Define your terms.

He always says that too.

No. You define them. That's the interview.

Then I will use mine. A republic is a government in which the power is held by the people and exercised by representatives chosen by them, for terms, and removable. You have told me every adult citizen votes, that the Senate is elected, that the schools are open. By that definition you are more a republic than we were, and I say that as the man who wrote that all men are created equal and meant it more narrowly than it is now read. Whether the people are well informed is a separate question, and the one on which I always said the whole thing depended, and you will not answer it.

No.

Then I will say the republic is intact and the question of whether it is wise is open, as it always was.

He has just told you it is a republic because the forms are republican. I told him in 1813, and I will tell you now, that the forms have never been the question. Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. I wrote that to John Taylor in December of 1814. I did not write it to be gloomy. I wrote it because every one of the pillars I named has survived every constitution ever written to abolish them, and you have just described a country in which beauty, wealth, and birth have new roads to power and the roads are paved with five billion dollars. Is it a republic? Yes. Is it the republic Mr. Jefferson thought he was making? It is the one I thought he was making, and I told him so, and he laughed. From the hilltop.

And yet it has lasted, John. Two hundred and fifty years. Longer than Athens.

Athens did not have the Senate I designed.

Athens did not have five billion dollars.

Athens had Alcibiades, and he cost less and did more damage. Mr. Corrigan, you asked whether we are a republic and we have each answered yes and each meant something different, which is what we always did, and which is, I suppose, the answer. A republic is a country in which two men can say yes and mean different things and both keep their heads.

I would accept that definition.

You would accept it because I made it and you will take it home and improve it.

Probably.

Last question. Same for everyone, one sentence. Mr. Jefferson, your first inaugural: "We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists." Are we?

You are all something, sir, and it is not my business to name it, but I notice that the two parties you have described to me are each certain the other is the aristocracy, and I have sat across from that certainty for fifty years, and it is a republic.

Mr. Adams. The same question.

We were never all anything, and he knew it when he said it, and it was the finest thing he ever said, and I would have given my right hand to have said it first, and that is one sentence, because I have used and.

One more thing, and then we're done. You died on the same afternoon. Mr. Jefferson, about one o'clock. Mr. Adams, a little before six. Mr. Adams, your last words are reported as "Thomas Jefferson survives." He'd been dead five hours.

I am told. I am also told I was wrong.

You were wrong, John.

I had been wrong about him before. I was always corrected by letter. That was the one time the letter did not come.

It came. It was merely late. I was in arrears to you for most of thirteen years.

You were in arrears to me for most of fifty.

That's The Hitching Post for this week. Our thanks to Mr. Adams, to Mr. Jefferson, to Dr. Franklin and his battery, and to the listener in Lowell, who got a straight answer, which is rare. Next week we're on the road, one guest, in her own house, and no coffee machine at all.

Forty-five seconds.

It is the pressure, John.

It is always the pressure.