Drinking Coffee with John Adams

Adams probably drank coffee with Jefferson. Here is a bank draft for a coffee shipment ordered by Thomas Jefferson in 1787. Source.

I mentioned recently that the most interesting thing said by vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention was that “America is not just an idea.” It’s a halfway step toward the nationalist conservative position, stated more baldly as “America is not an idea.”

I said I would have more to say about this in a longer article, and it has just gone up at Discourse. Not only is it true that America was founded on the ideas stated in the Declaration of Independence (and re-founded on them by way of the Gettysburg Address, where Abraham Lincoln described America as a nation “conceived in liberty”). I argue that even if you look at America as a set of customs, traditions, and folkways, you will find that all of those were also shaped by our basic ideas.

I have long heard, for example, that the fact that Americans tend to prefer coffee to tea is the legacy of the American Revolution. I was delighted to find a quote on this directly from John Adams, in a postscript to a letter to Abigail Adams written about one year after the Boston Tea Party. I quote a slightly shortened passage in my piece, but I want to give you the full version here (with uncorrected spelling and punctuation).

I believe I forgot to tell you one Anecdote: When I first came to this House it was late in the Afternoon, and I had ridden 35 miles at least. “Madam” said I to Mrs. Huston, “is it lawfull for a weary Traveller to refresh himself with a Dish of Tea provided it has been honestly smuggled, or paid no Duties?”

“No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I’le make you Coffee.” Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better.

Here is my conclusion.

Thus began a tax protest we’re still engaged in 250 years later. Americans still drink less than one-eighth as much tea per capita as the British. We changed our habits and customs to conform to our ideals.

I also point out that if you conceive of America as a “people,” that also has been shaped to fit our ideals.

If America were only a “people”—well, the largest one-day expansion in the people of America was the passage of the 14th Amendment and its recognition of the citizenship of four million former slaves. In this case, it is the American ideal of equality that literally helped create the American people.

Similar ideas have also shaped our immigration policies over the years.

I also promised that I would deal with the bad epistemology in the nationalists’ implied view of ideas. Here it is.

When they say that no one fights for an abstraction, the nationalists are implicitly assuming that ideas are empty of content, mere hot air without substance. (They can speak for themselves on that, I suppose.) But according to the empiricist philosophy that was widely accepted in the founding era, abstractions are based on and refer to concrete facts. When we fought the American Revolution over the abstraction, “liberty,” we were fighting over the very substantial issues of taxes and representation and government power. When we fought the Civil War over the abstraction, “equality,” we were fighting over the very concrete reality of millions of innocent people held in cruel bondage.

Tocqueville inevitably comes up in this piece, because conservatives keep citing a few passages from him that they like while completely ignoring everything else he wrote about the American character, including our eagerness to embrace change.

That leads me to two additional examples that I couldn’t cram into this article. One of the links I cite for the nationalist dismissal of ideas is an awful speech by Rich Lowry, where one of the claims he makes (about five minutes in) is that “if you take a white American and a black American, and they happen to meet on the steps of the Opera House in Paris, they instantly have more in common than anyone around them because they are both products of the wellsprings of American culture that have influenced them.” (I would say that depends a lot on how much they like opera.)

This reminded me of something Tocqueville said. If two Americans meet on the opposite side of the world, he wrote, they instantly recognize each other as fellow countrymen and form a bond of friendship. But this not the case for two Englishmen, despite the fact that they also share a distinctive culture. Why? Because British culture (especially 200 years ago) included clear class distinctions. Englishmen and other Europeans would still hold a certain reserve toward one another because they would be afraid of making associations across divisions of class and status that would be inappropriate when they return home. Americans, by contrast, can make these associations without reserve, because we habitually regard each other as equals.

You can see, in Tocqueville, more evidence for how American culture, down to its smallest details, is shaped by our ideals.

Yet even the English, I should mention, were already shaping their culture and institutions in service of basic ideas a century before the American Revolution. Another nationalist conservative article arguing for the superiority of tradition over ideas begins by gushing over the pageantry of the then-recent British royal wedding. It was the wedding of Harry and Meghan, which in retrospect really undermines this theme. More fundamentally, this writer doesn’t seem to realize that Britain has the royal family it has—descendants of the House of Hanover—because it got rid of the Stuart kings in order to subordinate royal power to Parliament and to the English Bill of Rights.

This turns out to be the very cause in which John Locke articulated the philosophical ideas that would later provide the basis for the founding of the United States of America. England was altering its culture and institutions to fit its ideas even before we did.

This, you will find, is the hallmark of today’s allegedly traditionalist conservatives. They talk endlessly of their reverence for this nation’s history, while ignoring or rewriting most of it.

Like I said, these are some extras I wasn’t able to cram into my article in Discourse, and they offer further support for my overall conclusion about “the basic contradiction of the nationalist conservatives”: “They are trying to conserve a culture that was based on a liberal tradition. They are trying to reduce a nation founded on universal ideas into a nation of static, concrete customs.”

Read the whole thing.

America Is Absolutely an Idea