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Freshman Address
Visionaries & Pragmatists
October 2001
by Richard C. Levin

Members of the Class of 2005, it is a special pleasure to welcome you to the Yale family, along with the parents, relatives, and friends who have proudly accompanied you here.

This summer, I, like tens of thousands of others, took pleasure in reading David McCullough’s best-selling biography of our nation’s second president, John Adams.¹ Mr. McCullough, a past winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, is no stranger to this place. Exactly 50 years ago, he sat where you are sitting today as President Griswold and Dean DeVane welcomed the members of the Yale College Class of 1955. He has been back many times since graduating, most recently to deliver the Class Day speech to the seniors of 1997, to receive an honorary doctorate in 1998, and to attend our Tercentennial symposium last spring.

I was captivated by McCullough’s portrait of Adams, who struggled, in theory and practice, with issues fundamental to the viability the new American nation. I was especially intrigued by McCullough’s account of Adams' relationship with his fellow patriot and sometime rival, Thomas Jefferson, and I had an experience that I hope you will have many times in the years ahead. I wanted to learn more. So I kept reading. And the more I read, the more I became aware that much of the best material today’s historians have to work with comes directly from the letters exchanged between Jefferson and Adams, as well as those Jefferson exchanged with Adams' wife Abigail.² And so I turned to the source and discovered to my great pleasure that these 380 letters comprise a treasure beyond imagining—a learned, eloquent, passionate discussion of history, political theory, theology, and the politics of the day. I thought that I might share with you this morning some reflections on the Adams-Jefferson correspondence and the lessons it holds.

It is, in fact, a propitious time to read and reflect upon beginnings, because, as you know, this year marks the three hundredth anniversary of Yale’s beginning. We have had the opportunity this year to recall Yale’s manifold contributions to science, scholarship, and the creative arts. We have observed with pride that Yale has educated leaders of every persuasion for every walk of life. We have also noted that not every contributor to Yale’s history fares well when judged by our current values, and we have documented among Yale’s shortcomings its belatedness in opening itself to faculty and students of every race, religion, and gender.

In a certain sense, reflection on our nation’s beginnings is especially appropriate as we welcome to Yale College an entering class more widely representative of the nations of the world than any of its predecessors. For the first time, we have admitted international students without regard to financial need and granted, to all those admitted, aid sufficient to make matriculation possible. To those of you who come to us from 44 nations around the world, I hope that during your time here you will be challenged not only by the values of this institution—its commitment to curiosity, open-mindedness and unconstrained critical inquiry—but also by the values of this nation—its energy, optimism, and commitment to democracy.

Adams and Jefferson were comrades in the struggle for independence, and they became especially close friends when they collaborated on a diplomatic mission in Paris.³ Estranged after the presidential election of 1800, they did not resume contact until 1812 after both had retired from public life. Although they never saw each other again, for the next fourteen years the two engaged in vigorous and brilliant correspondence until they died, on the same day, July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

I want to tell you something about the Adams-Jefferson correspondence because it is, in a word, inspiring. I want to tell you specifically about three qualities revealed in the letters: a passion for learning, the capacity for independent thought, and a friendship grounded in the deepest respect and admiration for one another.

I hope that you will strive for these qualities of mind and soul, and I profoundly hope that your Yale experience will be as rewarding for you as their relationship was for them.

The letters are, first of all, filled with learning. Adams and Jefferson were voracious readers and prolific writers. Both were fluent in Greek, Latin, and French. Jefferson had the largest library in Virginia, Adams one of the finest in Massachusetts. They suggested reading to one another and ordered books from Europe for one another. They read, and wrote letters about, such diverse subjects as the role of prophecy in native American cultures, the histories of Massachusetts and Virginia, Socrates, Jesus, the French philosophes, Goethe’s commentary on the Ten Commandments, the lives of the saints, and Plato’s Republic, which, not surprisingly, both of them loathed. Jefferson, the great democrat, confesses that while reading the Republic: “I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?”⁴ Adams replies: “I am very glad you have seriously read Plato: and still more rejoiced to find that your reflections upon him so perfectly harmonize with mine."⁵

It’s not only the breadth of their learning that impresses, but their passion for it. Adams writes: “So many subjects crowd upon me that I know not with which to begin."⁶ On the particular subject of government, where their passion was most intense, Adams insists: “You and I ought not to die, before we have explained ourselves to each other."⁷ Jefferson concurs,⁸ and later, in his more reserved manner, expresses his own appreciation for their learned exchange: “But why,” he writes, “am I dosing you with these Antediluvian topics? Because I am glad to have some one to whom they are familiar, and who will not receive them as if dropped from the moon."⁹

Yet despite a common mastery of Classical, Christian, and Enlightenment texts and common experiences as revolutionaries, diplomats, and presidents, each of the two patriots had a powerful mind of his own. Each held religious views so radical that they could only express them to each other, and perhaps to a few other intimate friends. They differed most sharply in their views of government. Jefferson, the eloquent idealist, envisioned true democracy at the most local level, in communities sufficiently small that everyone would recognize a “natural aristocracy” based on talent and virtue, and these natural aristocrats would rise to leadership. Although he expressed confidence that a larger population would also select talented and virtuous leaders, he believed that the powers conferred to successively higher levels of political organization, state and national governments, should be nothing more than the minimum necessary for defense and commerce. Adams, the brilliant pragmatist, wrestled with the complexities of governing a growing nation, one destined—in the prescient opinion of both—to span the American continent. Adams feared tyranny, and thought it as likely to emerge from a democratic election as from a seizure of power. He emphasized the importance of multiple sources of power with checks and balances among them. He was never entirely confident that the U.S. Constitution had designed these checks and balances just right, possibly because the task had been left to Madison, Hamilton, and Jay while he and Jefferson were busy in Paris and London.

As passionate and enthusiastic as he was, Adams worried about the future. Five years before his death, the 86-year-old Adams writes to Jefferson: “Must we, before we take our departure from this grand and beautiful world, surrender all our pleasing hopes of the progress of society? Of improvement of the intellectual and moral condition of the world? Of the reformation of mankind?” He reports on ambiguous signals from around the world and concludes, skeptically but not without hope: “I think a free Government is necessarily a complicated Piece of Machinery, the nice and exact Adjustment of whose Springs Wheels and Weights are not yet well comprehended by the Artists of the Age and still less by the People."¹⁰

Jefferson, the eternal optimist and idealist, responds: “I will not believe our labors are lost. I shall not die without a hope that light and liberty are on steady advance.” He notes that the printing press and the wide dissemination of books would alone preclude the possibility of Dark Ages descending as they did after the collapse of Rome.

And he continues, in words that foreshadow those of Churchill: “And even should the cloud of barbarism and despotism again obscure the science and liberties of Europe, this country remains to preserve and restore light and liberty to them. In short, the flames kindled on the 4th of July 1776 have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism."¹¹

A passion for learning, the capacity for independent thought, and friendship rooted in deep respect and admiration—let me touch upon this last of the striking qualities of these letters, qualities which I hope will come to characterize your Yale experience. One finds so many expressions of friendship in these letters that it is hard to select the best example, but Jefferson’s last letter to Adams will suffice. In a passage that says so much about their classical learning, their consciousness of their place in history, and their friendship, the 83-year-old Jefferson writes the 90-year-old Adams, introducing his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph: “Like other young people, he wishes to be able, in the winter nights of old age, to recount to those around him what he has heard and learnt of the Heroic age preceding his birth, and which of the Argonauts particularly he was in time to have seen. It was the lot of our early years to witness nothing but the dull monotony of colonial subservience, and of our riper ones to breast the labors and perils of working out of it. Theirs are the Halcyon calms succeeding the storm which our Argosy had so stoutly weathered. Gratify his ambition then by receiving his best bow, and my solicitude for your health by enabling him to bring me a favorable account of it. Mine is but indifferent, but not so my friendship and respect for you."¹²

In praising Adams for his enthusiasm, integrity, and pragmatism, recent scholarship has been somewhat harsh on Jefferson, who is seen, by contrast, as cool, disingenuous, and hopelessly idealistic, not to mention a living contradiction as both slaveholder and author of the Declaration of Independence.¹³ Whatever their flaws, I find it impossible to read their letters without finding great virtue in both men. The genius of our American democracy is that it embraces, indeed requires for its success, the perspectives of both: the visionary idealist with faith in the people’s will and the skeptical pragmatist, seeking the good but ever mindful of dangers on all sides. We need both—vision and pragmatism—to propel our democracy. At Yale you will have a chance to discover which of these qualities best suits you, or perhaps you will find yourself, like Lincoln, attracted to the golden mean—holding a clear and steady vision while acting on a keen sense of the possible.

Three hundred years after the first student took up study with Reverend Pierson, Rector of the new Collegiate School in Connecticut, you launch your own Argosy here in New Haven. May your journey inspire you with a passion for learning, shape in you the capacity to think independently, and bring you friendships to last a lifetime.

Welcome, visionaries and pragmatists, to Yale College.  

Footnotes

1: David McCullough, John Adams. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001.

2: Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1959. (Cited hereafter as Letters).

3: Adams met Jefferson when both came to Philadelphia as delegates to the Continental Congress in the summer of 1775. They worked as allies in the struggle to convince their fellow delegates to break from Great Britain. With powerful logic and rhetoric, Adams dominated the congressional debate, and he assigned to Jefferson, the master of English prose, the task of putting the actions and aspirations of the colonial rebels into words. Early in 1778, Adams went to Paris to seek support from the French, and he remained in Europe on a succession of diplomatic assignments for most of the ensuing decade. Jefferson joined Adams in Paris in 1784 and remained in Europe until 1789. It was during this period, especially between August 1784 and May 1785 when both men were in Paris, that Jefferson dined frequently with John and Abigail Adams and became an intimate friend of both.

4: Jefferson to Adams, July 5, 1814, Letters, p. 432.

5: Adams to Jefferson, July 16, 1814, Letters, p. 437.

6: Adams to Jefferson, July 9, 1813, Letters, p. 350.

7: Adams to Jefferson, July 15, 1813, Letters. p. 358.

8:Jefferson to Adams, October 28, 1813, Letters, p. 391.

9: Jefferson to Adams, July 5, 1814, Letters, p. 434.

10: Adams to Jefferson, May 19, 1821, Letters, pp. 572–73.

11: Jefferson to Adams, September 12, 1821, Letters, p. 575.

12: Jefferson to Adams, March 25, 1826, Letters, p. 614.

13: See especially the two most recent books of Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, New York: Random House, 1996, and Founding Brothers, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001, pp. 162–248.

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