This is the final part of a four part series.
From Jewish history learned at Harvard, Adams took his belief in civic virtue and respect for religious and social differences. For Jews, Adams had admiration even though he had never met a Jew, unless perhaps in passing. Adams said:
“I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. If I were an atheist of the other sect, who believe or pretend to believe that all is ordered by chance, I should believe that chance had ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently all civilization. … How could that nation preserve its creed among the monstrous theologies of all the other nations of earth? Revelation, you will say, and especial Providence; and I will not contradict you…
In a letter written in his seventy-eighth year to Adams, his old bitter rival for the presidency in 1800, even still the most divisive election in American History, Jefferson wrote to Harvard’s first American president:
“I am sure that I really know many, many things, and none more surely than that I love you with all my heart, and pray for the continuance of your life until you shall be tired of it yourself.”
Can one imagine Mr. Trump uttering such words to his rival in either the election of 2020 or 2024?
Notwithstanding his New England reserve, Adams, within a few months of ninety, wrote to his former arch-enemy Jefferson:
“I wish your health may continue to the last much better than mine. The little strength of mind and the considerable strength of body that I once possessed appear to be all gone, but while I breathe I shall be your friend. We shall meet again, so wishes and believes your friend, but if we are disappointed we shall never know it.”
The mutual tolerance of these two very different men for each other, despite the wide differences in background but mutual devotion to freedom of thought and liberal education, models what they shared — freedom of the mind and of expression as educated at Harvard and at William and Mary. (And we recall the crowning achievement of Jefferson’s life was his establishment of the University of Virginia, for which he instructed to be remembered on his grave marker, not that he was President.) Jefferson admired the Harvard of John Adams and wanted his university to serve the same essential purposes for Virginia that Harvard had done for Massachusetts and beyond.
Martha Nussbaum, one of America’s most prominent living philosophers, writes at length about the origins in America of “Liberty of Conscience,” the title one of her books. She was also interviewed on “Bill Moyers’ Journal” on Public Television and had this to say:
“If you look into the religions [of the Founders], they have this deep idea of human dignity and the source of dignity being conscience — this capacity for searching for the meaning of life. And that leads us directly to the idea of respect. Because if conscience is this deep and valuable source of searching for meaning, then we all have it whether we’re agreeing or disagreeing. And we all ought to respect it and respect it equally in one another.”
It is of more than passing interest that Nussbaum, who was educated at Harvard and is the Ernest Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago Law School, with appointments also in the Departments of Philosophy and Divinity, was raised Episcopalian but converted to Judaism. (It is also of particular interest from another interview she has given, to the Dallas Morning News, that one of her favorite sources of solace and insight come from the symphonies of Mahler, a Jew. She also discloses her most passionate interest in writings of Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, Marcus Aurelius, James Joyce, and John Rawls — this writer’s own philosophy teacher.)
The insurrection and storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, now completely pardoned by President Trump, showed the force, but also the weakness, of a corrupted tyrannical political movement. We recognize that Mr. Trump’s Presidential Pardon of those who stormed and invaded the Capitol (with stated intent to hang Vice President Mike Pence) makes sense only if one accepts that the crimes pardoned in fact have been committed and confessed — otherwise there would be nothing to pardon, and a pardon would have no meaning. America has been experiencing the lashing out of those claiming their interpretation of religion and way of life require abandoning the freedom of religious and secular thought established by the Spirit of Seventy-Six and the Founders. One can hope that Americans will increasingly see that whatever dreams some may have had of a purely Christian America supported and protected by a conservative president and his political party are not only pure fantasy but also not in their own interest. A certain Christian faith may have inspired the fanaticism of January 6 and the Trump presidency, and the dying of the movement may include a good deal more hatred and violence as it goes down. The perverted version of Christianity married to a political movement has almost nothing to do with Jesus but everything to do with white power and privilege and white fear that “the other” will replace them. It also has nothing to do with the spirit of liberty and tolerance reflected in the legacy of Harvard.
The great Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, who taught at Harvard, said religion is the ultimate human concern because it deals with the ultimate meaning of life and death. As the marriage of Trumpian politics with evangelical Christianity moves inexorably toward divorce, one may empathize with those mostly white and formerly privileged Americans who, indeed, are losing power and prestige to immigrants, brown and black people, Asians, and to other upwardly mobile, educated elites, including Jews. The American spirit of liberty based on liberal education going back to America’s earliest moments–from the Harvard-educated John Adams, to the William and Mary-educated Thomas Jefferson, is precisely what is on the chopping block if the Trump Administration wins its war against Harvard and then against all of American higher education.
The American Spirit—both reflected in and created by Harvard — of liberty and tolerance for one another’s thoughts and beliefs is a uniquely American invention. In large part American has had this liberty because of the leadership of Harvard, which after all had a long head start over other universities and a long time to learn from its many mistakes and to model itself for imitation, such as by Jefferson in his founding his University of Virginia. This liberty and tolerance are America’s greatest contribution to the world, and no small part of this tradition is traceable to Harvard. We live in times when the consequences of intolerance, unchecked political power, and anti-democratic forces are increasingly dangerous, causing people to cower in fear and threatening our freedom and democracy, even the survival of humanity given the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. We ought to be modeling our American liberalism (including its conservative forms) locally and exporting it globally. The legacy Mr. Trump wants for himself and his presidency is dominance by political and military power, as the use of National Guard and regular military troops against civil protestors in Los Angeles now demonstrates. His early effort to dominate American education in general has started at the top — at Harvard. Yet it seems that Harvard’s legacy from 1636 to the present day is too embedded in American institutions of all kinds for one president, any president, even one as violent and determined as Mr. Trump, to subdue. History will tell, as it always does, what the outcome will be of Mr. Trump’s war on Harvard and on American education at large. Harvard has already survived nearly four centuries of countless challenges, which we have barely reviewed in this article, so one would have to accept very long odds to bet against Harvard now.
