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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It, and we are getting ready to discuss our January Get Lit with All Of It book club selection, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Pulitzer Prize biographer, Stacy Schiff. Stacy is no stranger to Founding Father, she's written about Benjamin Franklin before. In her new biography, she argues that though one of the least considered American founders, Samuel Adams, was actually the beating heart of the American Revolution, a radical who helped spur the columnist towards independence. There's still time to read the book, thanks to our partners at the New York Public Library. New Yorkers can borrow an e-copy to read along with us.

You can head to wnyc.org/getlit to find out how, and there you'll also find the link to snag tickets for our January 31st live event with Stacy Schiff, and with musical guest Rosanne Cash. That is next Tuesday, January 31st. Tickets are free but we're close to selling out in terms of space, so be sure to grab yours now. If you can't make it to our in-person event don't fret, the whole thing will be live-streamed. You can register to watch it live by heading to wnyc.org/getlit. To get you ready to either read the book, or join us live, or via live stream. Here's a preview conversation with Stacy Schiff. I began by asking her how she chooses her subjects.

Stacy Schiff: The old adage is often that the subject seems to select you, and there's I think a reaction always too to the previous subject in some way. I opted for Cleopatra after Benjamin Franklin I'm sure because Benjamin Franklin's life is so richly documented that it occurred to me that maybe a relief from the archives might be necessary. In this case, I was thinking about Adams because it was 2016, and I think we were all wondering about democracy and the fragility of democracy, which sent me back to the more vital days of democracy.

If you look at what the other founders say about Adams, every one of them attest to his supremacy in those years. Every one of them calls him the man of the revolution. The earliest, the most persevering, the most active man of the hour. John Adams says that the true history of the revolution can't be written without his cousin Samuel and so where was he. He seemed to be missing from the picture.

Alison: Why do you think he has been so much missing from the picture?

Stacy: To some extent, he by necessity writes him out of the story. Much of though what he's doing over those really dazzling 12 years is fomenting revolution or at least he's guilty of sedition, in any case. He was constantly reading in the papers of how he was about to be arrested and tried for treason. He's covering his tracks. There's a lot of fingerprint. This is the no school no fingerprint school of revolution here. He's a team player and he's extremely modest by nature as well. He very much takes the figure-- prefers to be behind the scenes, propels other people to center stage.

He also does us no favors in the sense that he never collects his papers despite his cousin's insistence he do so. Never writes a memoir, and in fact one of the most harrowing scenes we have from his life is an image that John Adams leaves us with of sitting at the Continental Congress with his cousin Samuel and watching Samuel feed his papers to the fire. When John Adams says, “Aren’t you maybe be overreacting just a little bit.” Samuel explains that he doesn't want any of their confederates to suffer for his negligence.

Alison: You make the point that he never went by Sam Adams, that it's ingrained in us because of the beer.

Stacy: He seems to be adjusted as Samuel by everyone until his detractors move in the 18th century, and to them in a derogatory fashion he becomes Sam.

Alison: My guest is Stacy Schiff. The name of the book is The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, it is our choice for Get Lit. When you begin working on a new biography, what are your very, very first steps?

Stacy: The first step is usually to go directly, to the primary sources. I read those through once when I start-- usually not really entirely understanding what I'm reading because I haven't yet conquered all of the context. I go back to them at the end after I've read the secondary sources and after I figured out who the supporting cast are, and after I've got some sense of where-- have the shape of the book in some way.

Of course, it's very illuminating because you suddenly recognize names that you hadn't been able to contextualize the first time through. Things begin to jump out at you that may not have been meaningful on that first very ignorant read. I feel that's where you have to start just to get the flavor of what you're writing and to know the extent of what you actually have on paper, what's been documented, and what's been lost to time.

Alison: That is actually the most fun part. I've done a little bit of research for a book I wrote-- nothing like yours. I can remember going back to reading the information the first time and then you realize him describing his dinner partner, you realize who that dinner partner might have been. That's just for example. Then all light bulbs start going off.

Stacy: You begin to be able to fit personalities to these names and realize the importance of various documents that you might have read through too quickly. The lack of importance of others where you realize you're just not going to be going in that direction. In this case, there was a marvelous letter to your question of where the material is.

There's a marvelous letter to Adams when he's in Philadelphia at one point from Bostonian whose neighbor appears nowhere else in the archives. Who simply stopped by Adam’s house one day when Boston is occupied by red coats and carted away all of Adam’s papers to protect him. He just spoke to how much he was respected in the town and how many friends he had. Even a friends whose name appear nowhere else in his papers.

Alison: You've mentioned there's that terrible scene-- harrowing I think is the word you used where he is burning his papers. What records do remain from Samuel's life?

Stacy: Brilliantly for us, there's a tremendous archive at the New York Public Library, what remain of his papers. What he didn't manage to either cut to shreds or sacrifice to the fire is in the NYPL. There are marvelous numbers of letters about him in the British archives because of course he is the bane of the royal governor-- lieutenant governor's existences.

They are constantly writing back to London about this Machiavelli of chaos, Samuel Adams, and how much trouble he's causing, and thinking that if they could simply do away with him they could stop the opposition movement in its tracks. There's a great wealth of material in the British archives, and then there's a tremendous amount of newspaper material. You end up reading a lot of Boston Gazettes from the 1760s and 1770s.

Alison: What's something about Samuel Adams that has become part of legend but is really apocryphal?

Stacy: I think we think of him as a kind of low-life roughian firebrand. From every contemporaneous account and especially from the works of John Adams, we get this sense of a very calm, prudent, decorous man with a certain amount of formality to him. Who's very sweet-tempered, very sane, very calculated in his moves. Definitely not someone who is in any way intemperate. I think it entirely reverses our preconception of who he is. I don't think we ever think of him as one of the most successful revolutionaries in history. I think we think of him as just some Boston lowlife.

Alison: If you could use three adjectives to describe Samuel Adams, what would you use?

Stacy: I would say that he's immensely shrewd. This isn’t an adjective but he’s a master at psychology, so extremely intuitive. For someone who made no plans he's remarkably strategic in his thinking, so strategic.

Alison: I have a impromptu question. Do you happen to have a copy of the book close by?

Stacy: I don't because I'm not at home but I may have a copy on my desktop, which I'm now maneuvering toward as we talk.

Alison: While you still maneuver--

Stacy: Talk about catching me off guard.

Alison: [crosstalk] I'll vamp for a little bit.

Stacy: I've got it, I've got it.

Alison: Stacy Schiff, the name of the book is The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams. I was hoping you could just read a little bit, maybe from the beginning.

Stacy: Shall I start at the first lines of the book? Let's start with Paul Revere's ride because that actually-

Alison: Perfect.

Stacy: -is a surprise to me because I think we all know Paul Revere got on his horse in mid-April 1775, but none of us ever stops to wonder where he's going. Where he's going is to warn Samuel Adams of arrest. A glimmer, a gleam, the hurry of hoofs, a sturdy, square-jawed man speeds through the night, with an urgent message, on a borrowed horse. His top coat flaps behind him.

A bright moon hangs overhead. Within days he will know he has participated in some kind of history, though he will hesitate to attach his name to it for decades and is never to know that his own account will be obliterated-- the adrenaline alone enduring-- by verse, leaving him trapped in tetrameter, a mythic figure, eternally jouncing his way toward Lexington.

It is just after midnight. Despite a near-encounter with a pair of British officers, Paul Revere has made excellent time. Only two hours earlier he had rushed through town to the home of the last remaining patriot leader in occupied Boston. On previous occasions Revere had stood at hand while Dr. Joseph Warren wrote out secret messages for him to carry; already in advance of this evening, Revere has devised a system. Friends await him on the north side of town, where they have hidden a boat in which to row him to Charlestown.

From there, he will ride 12 miles west. He knows he has minutes before British regulars lock down Boston. He knows, too, that Warren has dispatched an earlier rider, by a longer route, with a similar message. Both speed toward Samuel Adams and John Hancock, in Lexington. What the newspapers would later term Revere’s secret and speedy intelligence was simple, “British regiments are on the move. Adams and Hancock are their quarry.” Revere gallops off to warn of imminent arrest if not outright assassination.

Alison: That was Stacy Schiff, reading from the Revolutionary: Samuel Adams is Our Choice for Get Lit for this month. In recent years, people have been reconsidering the founding fathers, given that many of them enslaved people, didn't believe in women's rights. How were you thinking about the place the Founding Father hold in our national mythology as you were working on this?

Stacy: I think it was so fascinating to see these men and they are all men from a completely different angle. What was interesting to me here was that one of those men could also go missing. Someone else could be lost in the shuffle, and it wasn't necessarily the person we thought it was going to be. Adams comes down very early on against the question of slavery.

He really balks at the idea and is very vocal about it. His idea of liberty tallies completely with an abolitionist sentiment, and he makes several attempts to do something about that in the messages, fake colony, obviously, none comes to anything at the time. His idea of liberty is very much intent in keeping with our current idea that ordinary citizens deserve a voice, and that applies to every ordinary citizen. He's very clear about saying also male and female.

Alison: That was part of my conversation with Stacy Schiff, Author of the Revolutionary: Samuel Adams. It's our January Get Lit selection. To find out how to bar your e-copy and to get tickets to our January 31st event with Stacy and Rosanne Cash, head to wnyc.org/getlit.

 

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