Sam Adams: Forgotten Founder?

Historians, like clothing designers, are slaves to fashions. We strive to create them, to follow them, and when the time is right, to destroy them. As with the rag trade, the trends we follow are shaped by the times we live in, expressing something about what used to be called "the spirit of the age" or "the national mood." Perhaps the identification between scholarly developments and the broader society is part wish fulfillment. But historians, despite what we may like to profess to others, live in society and are as subject to its angst and obsessions as anyone. We are of trends, and they of us.

For the last fifteen to twenty years, the founding fathers and founding events have been a central focus of research in the early American field. Although foreshadowed by the scholarly celebrations of the bicentennials of 1976 and 1987–88, this trend truly sprang to life after the Soviet bloc collapsed in 1989–90. In our moment of national triumph, the market for biographies and histories of the great men (and some women) who set us on the road to unipolar global domination and unparalleled economic prosperity seemed insatiable. So powerful was the demand for such books that it soon attracted not only professional historians, but high caliber non-academic authors, and, in time, high monetary advances from non-academic publishers. And it is within this trend of what has been called "founders' chic" that Ira Stoll's Samuel Adams: A Life should be situated.

Stoll, like David McCullough, Richard Brookheiser, and a number of others who have participated in this celebration of the founders, is a writer rather than a professionally trained historian. And I think it is fair to say that his lack of professional training explains much about the book for good and for ill. Stoll's biography may be one of the last of its kind for a number of years to come, and it thus provides us with a fruitful vehicle for examining the rise and what I believe is going to be the imminent fall of founders' chic.

As is typical in this genre when it is executed by writers rather than academics, Stoll has created a chronological narrative of Adams's life, in this case organized into ten chapters. He examines Adams's origins, his introduction to revolutionary politics, his rise toward the center of the Whig resistance movement, his relationship to others in that movement, and his actions in the Congress before and after independence and in the new nation. We thus see Adams the tax man, Adams the opposition writer, the rabble rouser, the planner, the political fugitive on the run in the morning of April 19, 1775, the revolutionary leader in Congress, and eventually the pseudo-populist governor of Massachusetts in the new nation.

Stoll is a better writer than most professional historians, and he presents an easily readable book. Samuel Adams: A Life, is not heavy or painful; it flows well from point to point, chapter to chapter. Stoll has, unlike some others in the most recent burst of scholarship in this vein, taken the time to get to know Adams via his papers and public writings. Unencumbered by academic baggage, Stoll, I think, reads Adams as the Protestant New Englander he was: conscious of God's terrible power and the role of Providence in human affairs; fearful of spiritual popery and its secular equivalent—overreaching, arbitrary government; and provincial in the manner that only an eighteenth-century New Englander could be, believing himself living in the contemporary equivalent of biblical Israel. "In this," Stoll believes Adams's "mixture of religion and politics, his skepticism of a powerful federal government, his warnings about extravagance and influence of money on elections, his recognition of the power of the press, and his endurance in a war of freedom, Samuel Adams had much to say to modern Americans" (p. 11). Stoll lets Adams have that say without too much interference, and he should be commended for so doing.

That...