Last month, just a few weeks after the most divided presidential election of our lifetime, millions of Americans sat down with their families for Thanksgiving dinner.
Now, Christmastime is here with countless parties and even more opportunities for political tensions to erupt; that is, if your family members, friends or co-workers differ with your political views.
And with President Trump’s inauguration next month, despite the fact “the people have spoken,” there are pretty good chances future holidays (and other annual family get-togethers) over the next four years could remain a political powder keg.
“The degree of political polarization is really astronomical right now,” said Dr. Laurie Kramer, a professor of applied psychology at Northeastern University. “It’s just different than previous elections that we’ve had.”
So much so, that a staggering 25% of Americans are simply skipping holiday celebrations to avoid more potential political conflict.
I’ve been alive for roughly eight decades now, and, while I hate even saying or admitting it, I’ve never seen America more divided.
Today, we split hairs over everything, not just presidential preferences.
Any small laundry list will do: the economy, the border, law and order, religion and spirituality, vaccines, race, climate change, gender issues, marriage, international war and myriad other issues. Differences are then exacerbated in our polarized world of broadcast media, partisan media, social media, and every form of punditry and commentary.
There’s no more compromising. No more negotiations. No more respect for another man’s varying opinion, but only judgment. Just “my way or the highway,” and never the twain shall meet.
I know social psychologists offer countless ways to unite political and other divides among differing friends and family, but, for me, I believe Americans need more. They need to be reminded of our common uniting vision.
Over the past few weeks, I wondered (again) if a way forward might be found in America’s past (that was the premise and basis of my New York Times bestseller, “Black Belt Patriotism: How to Reawaken the American Dream“). And that’s when I found it!
I was reading a past edition of the Wall Street Journal when I stumbled upon the opinion piece by Peggy Noonan, “How Two Great Friends Overcame Politics.” It was subtitled, “Adams and Jefferson met in 1775 and came apart in 1789. A forgotten man brought them together.”
Citing the historian Gordon Wood’s “superb” work, “Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson” (2017), Noonan explained America’s two differing founders this way:
They met in Philadelphia in the Continental Congress in 1775 and invented a nation together in 1776. What allies they were, how brilliantly they worked, in spite of differences in temperament, personality, cast of mind and background. Adams of Massachusetts was hearty, frank, abrupt. He was ardent, a brilliant, highly educated man who found it difficult to conceal his true thoughts. His background was plain New England. He made his own way in the world. … Adams tended to erupt. But once past his awkwardness and shyness, he was jovial and warm.
Jefferson of course was an aristocrat, a member of Virginia’s landed gentry. He let the game come to him. Mr. Wood quotes a eulogist, who said Jefferson “kept at all times such a command over his temper that no one could discover the workings of his soul.” He was serene. … Jefferson, in Mr. Wood’s words, “used his affability to keep people at a distance.”
In short, they “were the odd couple of the American Revolution: Adams, the short, stout, candid-to-a-fault New Englander; Jefferson, the tall, slender, elegantly elusive Virginian,” wrote historian Joseph J. Ellis.
By 1789, right after the U.S. Constitution was ratified, Adams and Jefferson’s relationship was quickly unraveling.
Much can be said and has been written about the dissolution of their friendship. But the divide of politics and personality was just too vast between the Federalist Adams and the Democratic-Republican Jefferson. And it only grew during the 1790s.
Their bitter rivalry was embedded in stone in 1800, when they engaged in what others call “the nastiest presidential election in American history.” Their feud was so intense that it spread among each of their camps like gangrene. So great was the viciousness that it threatened the very survival of our newly founded nation.
The Lehrman Instituted explained their – and their camps’ – hostility toward each other: “The period leading up to the election of 1800 became a witches’ brew of personalities, innuendo, ideology, and rumor. … The charges and counter-charges addressed the candidates’ courage, patriotism, religion, race, morality, mental health, as well as their political viewpoints. Foreign developments fueled domestic fears which fueled political unrest. Historian Joanne B. Freeman wrote: ‘The fuel for these fears was the seemingly implacable opposition of Federalists and Republicans, largely a battle between northerners and southerners. With partisan animosity at an all-time high and no end in sight, many assumed that they were engaged in a fight to the death that would destroy the Union. Of course each side assumed that it alone represented the American people, its opponents a mere faction promoting self-interested desires.'”
What compounded and even fueled the Adams-Jefferson feud was the fact the election results came under fire and controversy, as the Library of Congress explained: “Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson defeated Federalist John Adams by a margin of 73 to 65 electoral votes in the presidential election of 1800. When presidential electors cast their votes, however, they failed to distinguish between the office of president and vice president on their ballots. Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, each received seventy-three votes. With the votes tied, the election was thrown to the House of Representatives as required by Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution. There, each state voted as a unit to decide the election.”
Sound or feel familiar?
A few years ago, Fred Smith, founder of the excellent online think tank, “The Gathering,” wrote another amazing piece, “Forgetting the Little that Divides,” in which he explained the agent or agents that brought the Jefferson-Adams feud to an end.
In 1809, at the end of Jefferson’s two terms as president, a mutual friend and fellow signer of the Declaration of Independence, Dr. Benjamin Rush, had a dream about the two former presidents.
Rush not only wrote it down but also sent it to both men.
In the dream, Rush saw the alienated statesmen renew their friendship and begin corresponding with each other.
In the dream, Adams wrote a short letter to Jefferson, and Jefferson responded.
Rush wrote that these two brief letters were “followed by a correspondence of several years in which they mutually reviewed the scenes of business in which they had been engaged, and candidly acknowledged to each other all the errors of opinion and conduct into which they had fallen during the time they filled the same station in the service of their country.”
Both Jefferson and Adams respectfully acknowledged Rush’s dream, but then seemed to brush it aside. It appeared the letter fell on deaf ears, but time marinated the relational vision.
Three years later, at Rush’s appeal, Jefferson sent a very cautious letter to John Adams who responded with a guarded reply.
That correspondence led to other letters until John Adams wrote to Jefferson on July 15, 1813: “Never mind it, my dear Sir, if I write four letters to your one; your one is worth more than my four. … You and I ought not to die, before we have explained ourselves to each other.”
The outcome? These bitter enemies, prodded by a friend’s dream, were brought back together for the last decade of their lives, until they both died on the very same day and only three hours apart: July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
(To read Benjamin Rush’s actual letter and explanation about his dream, and far more specifics about the reconciliation of Adams and Jefferson, go to historian David Barton’s Wallbuilders.com website, a treasure trove of our founders’ documents and commentary.)
Jefferson and Adams started off as America’s quintessential odd couple. They respected their differences in the beginning. They found common ground and goals, and sought to use one another’s strengths to meet and complete them.
Over time, combined with their political wounds, as is often with us today, they ended up focusing and feeding on their differences and disagreements instead of what brought them together in the founding of our republic.
But the truth and fact remained: More united them than divided them.
But could they see it? Can we?
There’s nothing new under the sun.
Maybe we can learn from the Jefferson-Adams divide and their relational mistakes before we die, too.
I haven’t had a dream about you, America. But let’s consider this column as my “Dr. Benjamin Rush letter” that we all can do better.
In reality, Rush’s dream and subsequent letter were not just about Jefferson and Adams, but all of us. They epitomized what our nation and we as its citizens should be all about: E Pluribus Unum and the American dream.
What is America if not a union or unity of diversity, E Pluribus Unum, “out of the many one”?
Or do we think it is only coincidence or cliché that the 13 letters of E Pluribus Unum symbolize the 13 original states like the 13 stripes on the U.S. flag?
Wouldn’t a single ruling party or way of believing make us no difference than Communist China or the regime of Iran?
What is America if we’ve lost common decency and respect for others to have their own opinions and beliefs, even in light of vehement disagreement?
The fact is: we, as family and friends, will not agree on everything, including our politics.
We may not hang out every weekend or even month. But maybe hanging out on select occasions (like holidays, birthdays, annual celebrations, etc.) are, in fact, the perfect periodic occasions for extending a handshake or hug and proving that we can love each other and agree to disagree agreeably. If not then, when?
My wife’s advice to hurting marriages is her universal relational creed: Go back to the beginning. Go back to the beginning, when you used to be friends, opened the doors for each other, wrote loving notes, gave gifts and expressed appreciation in a long list of ways, despite your differences.
Maybe we need to do the same in our country for both friend … and foe.
Maybe instead of focusing on “our divorce,” we can return to what brought us together as “newlyweds,” even radically different ones.
Maybe we can relearn to fight fair and for other’s rights as much as our own.
Maybe we can rediscover how to agree to disagree agreeably, without losing or discarding our passions or First Amendment rights to speak freely even in opposition.
Maybe now, more than years past, we can focus more on what unites us rather than what divides us, and keep the real UNITED States of America alive for our posterity.
Remember, we are human and American before we are our political and life’s preferences. Think about it. Test yourself first before others.
Could the God-given rights and path to respect and reconciliation get any clearer than through the words in the Declaration of Independence for you as well as your American “adversaries”?
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
