Word: adamses
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The most thought-provoking differences are between Adams and Jefferson (Stephen Dillane). Jefferson is a classic Enlightenment optimist, who believes in philosophy and science and the improvability of mankind. Adams believes that you can change people's condition--make them freer, more prosperous, more fairly represented--but you can't...
Their differences spill over into politics after the Revolution. Jefferson is leery of creating a strong Constitution that will effectively force the choices and values of his generation on Americans to come. Adams favors it--for exactly that reason. To him, it's human nature to revert to mob rule...
It's an eternal, multifaceted, unresolved argument. Put one way, it's the debate between hope and pragmatism. Put another, it's the argument between liberalism and conservatism. In Episode 4, the two men watch a demonstration in France of a manned hot-air balloon. It's a small, perfect...
Hot air! Just pretty words! It's tempting to map John Adams on today's political campaign, with Jefferson as hope-mongering orator Barack Obama and Adams as pragmatic workhorse Hillary Clinton. But the analogy is not perfect. The complex Adams parallels a range of his successors. Like the current...
You'd think that Hollywood, like the chiselers of mountains, would side with the charismatic dreamers. But John Adams shows that Adams' unflashy tenacity--"Thanks be to God, He gave me stubbornness"--is an asset and his skepticism a form of idealism. To put it in today's terms, Adams...