If you’ve heard of John Adams, you may know of him as a member of the Continental Congress, an ambassador to France during the Revolutionary War, and the first Vice President and second President of the United States. A few years before the war started, however, in addition to being a lawyer, he wrote newspaper articles about agriculture. But as politics got more turbulent in Massachusetts, he became more involved, and he couldn’t help putting some of his political opinions in his letters to the editor.
Knowing what we know about John Adams — that he became a famous statesman and one of the founders of the United States, and that he wrote and published a lot of things about politics and government — it’s a bit funny to read, in a political article he wrote in August 1768, that it was “the last” time he would write about politics instead of his “principal and favorite views of writing on husbandry and mechanic arts.”
He was an independent sort of person. Not only did he later devote his life to American independence, but he didn’t like being tied to a political party; he liked to do things the way he thought they ought to be done, rather than following the crowd — even if it made him unpopular. In this particular article, he wrote, “I would quarrel with both parties and with every individual of each, before I would subjugate my understanding, or prostitute my tongue or pen to either.” (Note that he wasn’t talking about the Republican and Democratic parties, which didn’t exist at the time; he was just talking about the opposing groups in Massachusetts at that time.) He went to say that
…more pains have been employed in charging desire of popularity, restless turbulence of spirit, ambitious views, envy, revenge, malice, and jealousy on one side; and servility, adulation, tyranny, principles of arbitrary power, lust of dominion, avarice, desires of civil or military commissions on the other; or in fewer words, in attempts to blacken and discredit the motives of the disputants on both sides, than in rational inquiries into the merits of the cause, the truth, and rectitude of the measures contested.
That description, sadly, fits things that happen all the time; people spend more time and energy talking about how bad the other political party is and trying to dig up and throw mud at each other than they spend trying to figure out what is true and what can be done. (If you don’t believe it, maybe you haven’t watched the news lately.) Adams was watching the same thing happen around him, involving some people he knew and even respected, and he wanted less yelling (so to speak) and more honest, rational thinking (the title of his article was “On Self-Delusion”).
Adams wasn’t done writing about politics; his next article, published a week later, began with the words, “It seems to be necessary for me, (notwithstanding the declaration in my last) once more to digress from the road of agriculture and mechanic arts…”
Source
John Adams, The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams, Selected and with a Foreword by C. Bradley Thompson (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000). 4/6/2019. <https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/592> Pages 7-12.