Famous UU John Adams Handicaps the Super Bowl
Phyladelphia with all its Trade, and Wealth, and Regularity is not Boston. The Morals of our People are much better, their Manners are more polite, and agreeable -- they are purer English. Our Language is better, our Persons are handsomer, our Spirit is greater, our Laws are wiser, our Religion is superiour, our Education is better. We exceed them in every Thing, but in a Markett, and in charitable public foundations.
--diary of John Adams, October 9, 1774
Says Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy:
"Somehow we never think of Founding Father John Adams as a trash talker, but it's clear that the second president had strong feelings regarding the two regions represented in this year's Super Bowl. ... Adams sounds like a true Patriot, one who wouldn't mind having a Sam Adams with Sam Adams and taunting the Yankees from the back row of the bleachers at Fenway Park."
posted by fausto @ 2/03/2005 07:39:00 PM
8 comments
8 Comments:
My knowledge of the guy comes completely from how he was portrayed in Mr. Revere and I. BUt he sounded like this sort of guy there.
CC
Thanks much for posting that info. John Adams is buried in the basement of our church (http://www.ufpc.org) so it was particularly of interest :)
Yeah, and I get my hair cut in the barber shop next door. More often than not I park right on top of him.
As John Adams sings in the first song of the musical "1776"
"foul, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia"
Go Patriots! :-)
It's actually, "Foul, FETID, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia..."
But you have my deepest admiration for knowing the first song of "1776" at all, believe me!To this day I don't know if it's so much John Adams that I love or William Daniels, who so memorably portrayed him on both Broadway and in the film version.
Daniels was great as Adams...and Howard da Silva made the perfect Ben Franklin.
If fausto had wanted to get really obscure, he could ahve also mentioned the book "Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia" which shows how the values of the Unitarian ruling class of Boston were much better for the city than the valyes of the Quaker ruling class of Philadelphia.
Yeah, but it would have been better to bring that up on the Ben Franklin thread, not here. Digby Baltzell (author of said treatise, and college history prof of a long-ago girfriend of mine) taught in Philly, at Penn, which Franklin founded in a spare moment when he wasn't busy inventing everything else.
For Baltzell, a Philadelphian, even to write such a book is further testament (if any were needed) to Philadelphia's general inferiority complex. They haven't had a championship team in any professional sport in decades, for example. On NPR last week, prior to the Eagles' Super Bowl loss, the sports commentator called Philly "the City of Brotherly Losers".
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