NEWS & PUBLICATIONS

The Power of Place "The whole world of what has preceded us is available not just through books, but through places."

NPS

   The report on Adams National Historical Park is the first of what is expected to be a series that will provide a critical survey of the condition of a number of the 385 units within the National Park System.

   The Adams assessment gave the park a good grade, but found that if current funding and staffing levels remain the same over the next ten years, the park's collections and archives are likely to deteriorate. More than 22,000 archival items, mostly family papers, have not been classified or catalogued and remain in storage. The park lacks sufficient staff to manage and preserve the collection, safeguard the park, and guide visitors through the park, which includes nine historic buildings on three separate properties. For more information on the program and this report, go to www.npca.org.

What follows are excerpts from the speech given by McCullough.    It was suggested years ago that to make people feel better about paying their income tax you should be able to designate which department of government you would like your money to go to. Everybody thought that was a wonderful idea, until somebody pointed out that it would never work, because everyone would want their money to go to national parks.

NPS

   My connection with the national parks started with my first book, The Johnstown Flood. It took vision, confidence, and a sense of the importance of the site to create a park there. It's a place where people can come and feel history.

   Future scholars who have to do their work from microfilm, microfiche, or some other device are going to miss that tactile connection with those vanished people from those distant times that cannot really be expressed in words, but comes from holding the real document, the real book in your hand.

   The feeling one gets from working with the real documents is very close to the feeling we get coming into a historic place. We feel something we cannot get from reading books or seeing a film. You tread the floors that they actually tread, with the light coming through the same windows in the same way. We can almost transport ourselves to that other time. It is in our nature to want to go back, to want to know what happened. Everything that can be done to make that voyage possible is a worthy endeavor.

   Why do we care, why do we bother with these places? Because they mean so much. We need the past for our sense of who we are. We need the past for a sense of our civic responsibility, how all these benefits and freedoms came to us, and what it is our duty to protect. But we also need the past because it is an extension of the experience of being alive. Just as music and painting and the theater and poetry are extensions of the experience of life. Why should we limit ourselves to this little bit of time that is allowed to us by our biological clocks when the whole world of what has preceded us is available? Not just through books, but through places.

   The Adams National Historical Park is a magnificent site. It is not just a home of a great American. It's the home of great Americans. Two presidents, a premier historian, and one of the greatest and most important diplomats in our history, Charles Francis Adams, Lincoln's ambassador to Great Britain during the Civil War. It's the home of great women. Abigail Adams ranks as one of the great figures of that founding time, as does her daughter-in-law, Louisa Catherine Adams. And it's old by our American standards. The house is older than Mount Vernon, older than Monticello, older than the country. The two houses, the birthplaces, are older still.

   And what is so eloquent about those birthplaces is how small they are and how well made. How symbolically appropriate that they are so solid, so New England. You really can't understand America if you don't understand New England. This is where the whole concept of civic responsibility, civic good, community public service began.

   John Adams was born 266 years ago on October 30 in this golden time in the calendar of New England. He was the son of a man who was a selectman, a deacon in the church, a member of the militia, who served year after year, never went anywhere else, never accomplished much in a worldly way. Never traveled abroad, never went out of New England, probably never left Massachusetts. His wife, who was a Boylston, probably was illiterate. But they were people who cared about their community, who cared about the responsibility of public service. And John Adams, the president, never failed to answer the call to serve his country. Irrespective of inconvenience, detriment to his livelihood, risk of death, and in a time such as we are in now, his example is one, if taken to heart, serves us all very well.

   He was a man of moral courage; he did not give up. When I finished writing about his presidency in my biography and embarked on his final years, it was a somewhat daunting thought that here was this marvelous subject, this active, passionate, imperfect, warm-hearted protagonist, who had traveled farther than any other figure of his time in the service of his country, and yet when he came home, he never went anywhere ever again for the next 25 years. How was I going to sustain that as a biography? In fact, in many ways for me it is the most interesting part of his entire life. Because it was then that the inward journey begins.

   And to think that some of those superb things that he wrote, such as the letters to Jefferson, some of the finest letters ever written in the English language, let alone in American history, were written during that time. That beautiful passage that he wrote in one letter to a dear friend describing an ice storm outside his window when his beloved trees had been destroyed, and yet all he can see is the glory, the glitter, the spectacle of God's Earth. Here was a man who had seen death and suffering in his family, who hadn't a tooth left in his head, who had no hair on his head, who had every reason to be down, yet he is exalting over this spectacle of what really was the destruction of another beloved side of his life. "I have vowed," he said, "in the spirit of St. Paul to rejoice ever more," and then he adds that wonderful, "if I can."

   So when you go into the house, you will see the desk at which he wrote the letters. There are eyeglasses that are his, and possibly they are even the same eyeglasses that he wore as he wrote the letters. You can look out the same window, you can turn to the corner and the very armchair where he delivered his last wonderful statements to his fellow townsmen who came to ask what he might say that they could repeat at the 50th anniversary celebration of the Fourth of July. He said "I give you independence forever." And one of the men said, "wouldn't you like to add a little bit more to that Mr. President?" He said: "Not one word."

   This place isn't just furnished with pieces of rare quality that maybe are like what he might have had. Everything is the real thing. And it isn't just one man's life, or one husband's or wife's lives; it's succeeding generations of family and American history. It provides a geological crosscut. You can see the layers of civilization and personal history as you can at no other historic site.

   This is the first president who came from New England, first who went to college, first president who started his career as a schoolteacher. He is the president who signed into law the Library of Congress. The president who kept us out of the war with France that was so very close to breaking out full scale.

   He is also the president who as much as any I know represents the miraculous transformation that comes with education. There is a misconception that John Adams was a rich, Boston blueblood. When you come here, you know he was not a Bostonian; he came from Quincy. He was not rich; he was a farmer's son. And he wasn't a blueblood. But because he got a scholarship to Harvard, he discovered books and hence he read, as he said, "I read forever more." He became the most deeply, broadly read American of his very bookish time. He believed in education. If you read the letters that he wrote to his children, that he wrote to his grandchildren, you know that he understood the power of education.

   We have a clause in the Massachusetts constitution, written by John Adams at the desk in the library, that says it shall be the duty of the government to educate everybody. Then he names the institutions involved, not just colleges and schools. Had he known there would be a National Park Service, he would have included that, too. And believe me, the Park Service is very much in the business of education: higher education.