Founding Healer
2019-02-07 · Guest: Harlo Unger (Historian and Author) · 52:04
Life and Legacy of Dr Benjamin Rush
Bob Zadek interviews historian Harlo Unger about the life and legacy of Dr. Benjamin Rush, the only medical doctor to sign the Declaration of Independence. They discuss Rush’s pioneering work in medicine, his humanitarian efforts for marginalized groups, and his crucial role in the political reconciliation of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
Topics: Benjamin Rush, American Revolution, History of Medicine, Psychiatry, Thomas Paine, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Humanitarianism
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Harlo Unger
Introduction to Benjamin Rush [00:18]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. Thanks so much for listening this Sunday morning. We are today and always the show of ideas, never ever the show of attitude.
My first exposure to Dr. Benjamin Rush—a name that probably most of my listeners are not familiar with, but will be before the hour is up—my first exposure was when I read, when I became interested in American history somewhere around the end of the 1980s, a book was published by Joseph Ellis called Passionate Sage, discussing the retirement years of John Adams. John Adams has since become my favorite founder. I learned in that book, as I became fascinated with the life of John Adams, that a doctor, Dr. Benjamin Rush, was instrumental in reuniting former President John Adams with former President Thomas Jefferson, who had stopped communicating with each other after Jefferson beat Adams in the presidency campaign in 1800. Dr. Benjamin Rush brought them together, started them corresponding to each other, which produced a rich history of our country in the 150-odd letters, I believe, that they wrote to each other.
I then—Dr. Benjamin Rush’s name was filed away as being an important figure in the founding generation. I never knew much about him. Now I know a lot, thanks to this morning’s guest, Harlo Unger. Harlo is a historian. He has written about 26 books. Harlo, if I have shorted you by a book or two, my apologies. He is a student of the Revolutionary era. He is a distinguished visiting fellow in American history at George Washington’s Mount Vernon. He’s a journalist, veteran journalist, broadcaster, educator, and historian. Harlo is visiting us again this morning for the third time on my show and will continue to visit each and every time he writes a book that captures my imagination. Harlo has written, just published, Dr. Benjamin Rush: The Founding Father Who Healed a Wounded Nation.
Harlo, welcome to the show this morning.
Harlo Unger: Thank you very much, Bob. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be back on your show.
Bob Zadek: And Harlo, thank you so much, of course, for being on my show, but most importantly, for all of the scholarship you have given us. You and I first spoke in 2013 when you wrote Thugs and Gangsters: The Real Story of the Boston Tea Party, and of course, you then caused Samuel Adams to fall from grace, at least in my mind. He was not the flowery figure I thought he was. Then we visited again in 2014 when you wrote a wonderful book, which I commend to our audience, How Washington Invented the Presidency.
So Harlo, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a medical doctor, the only doctor, I believe, who signed the Declaration of Independence. Tell us what brought Dr. Rush to your attention and why did you determine, and have you shown, he was worthy of an entire book explaining his life?
Harlo Unger: Well, Dr. Benjamin Rush was, as you said, the only MD. There were five others who called themselves doctor, but they had never studied medicine. They were quacks, as most people who called themselves doctor were in that era. Dr. Benjamin Rush was the only MD who signed the Declaration of Independence, and he was America’s first and only at the time, only great humanitarian.
All of the other signers, or almost all of the other signers, were wealthy merchants, bankers, and plantation owners, most of them with slaves to do their bidding and do the work and earn the money for them. Dr. Rush was a man of modest means who, as I say, was the first great humanitarian who signed the Declaration of Independence, actually believing in the words of the preamble that all men were created equal and entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He became the champion of the Americans that all of the other founding fathers forgot: women, slaves, indentured workers, laborers, prisoners, the poor, the indigent sick, the mentally ill. 90% of the population of the United States lived in that other America without money, without education, barred from voting, barred from the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by the Constitution which declared independence from Britain—I’m sorry, by the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution. Neither document ever gave women the right to vote. It didn’t free the slaves. It didn’t give rights to indentured laborers. In most states, only property owners could vote. So both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were documents written by the wealthy for the wealthy. Only Benjamin Rush signed the Declaration of Independence because he heard the cries and pleas from the rest of the Americans that other founders forgot. And he actually did sacrifice his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor to try to heal and bring justice to these other people.
The Humanitarian Founder [02:30]
Bob Zadek: The phrase you just mentioned, of course, is the last phrase in the Declaration: “And to these ends, we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.” You can’t pledge very much more than that, can you, Harlo?
Harlo Unger: No. And remember Thomas Jefferson, who wrote those words, after he wrote them, he fled back to his home in Virginia at Monticello up on the mountain outside Charlottesville and never fired a shot against the British. So he didn’t risk his life at all. He certainly didn’t risk his fortune. He didn’t risk anything during the Revolutionary War.
Bob Zadek: I’m smiling, Harlo, because I know you are not a great fan of Thomas Jefferson, and I was wondering how many minutes into our discussion of Dr. Benjamin Rush would you find the opportunity to mention Jefferson, not in the most laudatory of phrases. Because I know you’re not a fan of Jefferson, and Jefferson was, of course, a complex figure, quite complex and, of course, quite hypocritical between what he wrote and how he lived. He didn’t really walk the walk, he just talked the talk. That, of course, is for another show.
Now, Dr. Benjamin Rush was perhaps—I don’t know if I can say this statistically, but he was not a political animal. Many of the founders were steeped in political study and political knowledge, of course Madison especially, the consummate politician, but that’s not to exclude Adams or Jefferson or the other founders. But Dr. Rush was, as you have said, and what makes him special, he was from the heart and from the mind a true humanitarian, not a politician. So his interest in the Revolutionary era and in independence was primarily because of the humanitarian benefits he saw in a country which was true to the principles of the Declaration. He was not a student of politics; he was a doctor first and foremost in the greatest sense of the word. Isn’t that so?
Harlo Unger: That’s correct. And there was no way for him to be a politician. He didn’t own any property. Only property owners could involve themselves in politics. After all, the plantations of the South covered most of the land. So the men who owned these plantations ruled the land and were the men who made all the political decisions for that territory. In the North, the major merchants and bankers, people like John Hancock, were those who led their communities. They alone had the power to do so. The rest of the population really, in the South, they were mostly slaves, and in the North, they were mostly working people who, many of them, indentured, which meant they were under contract to work for their employers for specific periods of time, usually six to eight years with each contract. So they had no rights. They could not vote. They couldn’t involve themselves in politics. And under British rule, they had absolute no rights. The governors of each province, as the states were called then, governors were appointed by the British government. So there was no self-rule. And after the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution, those who were named governor were usually one of the big bankers or merchants in the North, like John Hancock, or big plantation owners in the South, like Benjamin Harrison, Patrick Henry, and eventually Thomas Jefferson, although he resigned after a year because he was a terrible governor and had failed to build defenses to protect Virginia against British troops.
Medical Education and Treating the Poor [05:30]
Bob Zadek: Now, Dr. Benjamin Rush—when one reads your book, one of the real pleasures of your book and one of the real takeaways, besides that of being quite impressed with Dr. Benjamin Rush, his wisdom, his foresight, and his humanness, is the book gives us a wonderful social history of the times. Most biographies of the founders focus on the founders, and you don’t know very much, you don’t learn very much about the environment in which they lived, what life was like. You have a vague picture, but you describe it with great understanding and passion. Tell us about the world, the Revolutionary era, the country that Benjamin Rush saw and what he dedicated his life to curing. Tell us a tiny bit about what life was like and what Benjamin Rush thought ought to be different.
Harlo Unger: Well, Rush, of course, grew up on a farm. He was a farmer’s son, so he was not born to wealth. When he returned—he did study medicine at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, which was the finest medical school in the world at the time. He was very fortunate to come under the patronage of Benjamin Franklin, who was kind of the equivalent of an ambassador for the provinces of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and a couple of other provinces in London. And Franklin was very, very warm in welcoming Americans who were lucky enough to come to study in England, and he patronized Benjamin Rush. Benjamin Rush stayed with him when he finished his studies. He went to London and had the good fortune of being able to study more medicine under great scientists and doctors in London, and then traveling to France where the government, still royal government, nonetheless had taken measures to provide for the poor and especially for the orphaned children, unwanted babies were left on the doorstep of the Hotel Dieu, as the hospital was called, and put up for adoption.
Rush was really overwhelmed by what he saw, and he came back to America without a penny in his pocket. He stayed with an older brother in Philadelphia and did not know how to get started in medicine. So he just took his instruments in his bag and went into the poorest sections of Philadelphia, knocking on doors saying, “Anyone need a doctor?” Well, they sure did. And they came flocking down the stairs of these tumbledown slum shacks and bringing their children who were sick or hungry, and Rush took care of them all and soon gained a reputation as a fine doctor.
The First Field Hospital [07:00]
Harlo Unger: When the second Congress came to Philadelphia to write the Declaration of Independence in reaction to what had happened in Lexington, a lot of people raced out of town to greet these people coming from all these other states. And Rush was among them, and he jumped into one of the carriages, and sitting in the carriage in that particular carriage was John Adams and his cousin Samuel Adams. And they got to talking, and finally Rush invited them to stay at the Rush home in Philadelphia. The Adamses were terribly pleased; they did not look forward to sleeping in the taverns. There were no hotels in those days; visitors slept in taverns on the second floor where there were pallets on the floor, and everybody slept together with the lice and the body odors and everything else that went with travelers.
So that’s how Rush became friends of both Adamses at the time and in turn was introduced to other members of the Second Congress. And because of his good service to local Philadelphians as a doctor, he was named to that Congress, that Second Congress which signed the Declaration of Independence. And instead of just continuing with his daily life as most signers did, including as I mentioned Jefferson went home to his plantation, didn’t want anything to do with fighting a war, Rush went up to Trenton to the west bank of the Delaware River where Washington’s troops had retreated after a disastrous battle at Brooklyn and they then lost Manhattan, they fled across New Jersey and finally settled on the opposite bank of the Delaware River opposite Trenton. It was there that they started planning the attack on Trenton on Christmas Day. Rush arrived at the same time, went with them in the aftermath of the battle and started treating wounded troops on the battlefield.
Bob Zadek: Which was never done before!
Harlo Unger: Never done before. Troops were fodder, that’s all, and they were left to die. If they couldn’t walk or crawl off the battlefield, they were left to die because they were considered useless and they weren’t—they had no rights anyway as citizens, they didn’t own any land, these were ordinary workers. So Rush started treating them, and he realized they needed shelter. And he went to Washington and demanded some help, and a big argument with Washington, and Washington just wanted Rush off his back and told one of his officers to commandeer a house on the edge of the battlefield. And Rush turned it into a field hospital, the very first field hospital in American military history. From there, he continued his efforts to treat the wounded. He went to several battles, including Brandywine, where he also treated wounded British troops and won the praise and safe passage through British lines as well as American lines. The first doctor ever to do that. Safe passage for health workers now is part of international law in wartime. So that was—he planted the seeds of what later became the Army Medical Corps.
The Primitive State of 18th Century Medicine [08:30]
Bob Zadek: One lesson that comes about from your book is when you said he studied medicine in Edinburgh and he practiced medicine. Help our audience understand how different that phrase was then as opposed to now. He really didn’t study medicine as we understand the term because there was no medicine to study really, there was no science. So just tell us a bit about what it was like to study medicine, just by way of comparison to the visual image of what people will put in their heads when you use the phrase.
Harlo Unger: Yeah, medicine was in the most primitive era. Not much had changed from ancient Greece when Galen decided that all diseases are due to something in the blood. So the best way to clean out the diseases and illnesses is to bleed patients. And bleeding was still the common form of treatment for disease when Rush studied medicine. By then, they were now studying anatomy, but it was against the law in all countries to use cadavers for that purpose. Nonetheless, they did that. And so they knew all body parts, but they really had no conception of disease as we know it today. They had no instruments. The stethoscope had been invented, but they didn’t know—they really didn’t know how to use it properly. I’m sorry, the stethoscope had not been invented. The microscope had been invented, but not the stethoscope. The stethoscope wouldn’t be invented until around 1850. So they had no tools. They had no scalpels. They had a thing called a lancet, which was a knife, and they would cut into the arm, pull out the vein, and bleed the patient until usually they’d take a pint of blood a day during the illness. Fortunately for them and for the patients, the human body replaces most of the blood within 24 hours. So a pint of blood did not kill them. But in many cases, they bled so much that the patients would die of shock. After a certain amount of time, no more blood flows out, the body goes into shock, and that’s how George Washington died. He did not die of his illness. He had basically laryngitis, and he died of it because he and the doctors kept insisting as each day passed that he wasn’t any better, “Let’s take more blood,” and finally they took so much that he died of shock.
So that was the state of medicine. There really was no medicine. There were quacks all around the colonies who would come into town on wagons and sell patent medicines and call themselves doctor this and doctor that. But patent medicines were nothing more than fruit syrups loaded with rum or some sort of alcohol, white lightning, some sort of alcoholic beverage. So people who drank these medicines would go into a drunken stupor and think they were better, but the patent medicines never healed anybody. Doctors were no more competent to treat illness and wounds than a layperson. They may have had some sense of cleanliness, and we’ll get into that after the break, but in terms of day and night difference in competence, a doctor was not necessarily any more competent. They just thought they were, and they were practicing what medicine was at the time, but by objective standards, they really weren’t any more competent than a non-doctor. Isn’t that fair to say?
Harlo Unger: They were a little bit more competent because they cared more. Laypeople, especially on farms, “Get up and go to work,” the farmer would tell his kid, “Nothing like work to get rid of your illness.” The job came first. So they did not exhibit the compassion that doctors did. And remember, there were very, very few doctors. There were none in the rural communities. The only doctors as such with MDs, the equivalent of what Rush had received, the only doctors were in major cities. And cities, by major cities, you have to remember, these were very, very small towns in today’s terms. Philadelphia, which was the largest, most populated, and richest in terms of gross product in America at that time, Philadelphia only measured about two miles by three miles. So you can easily walk across the whole city anytime you felt like it. This is how Rush was able to treat so many patients. He’d go into the slum areas, which were relatively small compared to today’s city, and treat the poor. So he could be back in his neighborhood, in the better neighborhoods, within a half hour at most.
Intuition and Hygiene [11:30]
Bob Zadek: And despite the limitations of formal medical education because of the state of science, Dr. Benjamin Rush, as we will learn, made enormous, meaningful, significant contributions that stretch for perhaps a hundred years beyond his death as the first great American humanitarian. Harlo, give us some idea of the causes that Dr. Benjamin Rush devoted his attention to, and also you explain in your book his skill as of all things a lobbyist. No, he wasn’t clad in Gucci shoes, he didn’t have an office on K Street, there was no K Street of course, but he was a skilled lobbyist. And you have hinted at that, Harlo, when you talked about how he persuaded General Washington, who perhaps initially wasn’t all that sympathetic, to build the first field army hospital. And he did so just by becoming a pain in the neck to Washington, but he got the job done. And I think that is a subtext in Dr. Rush’s life, how skillful he was at persuading his friends and using his relationships with the rich and famous, if you will, to accomplish significant social goals. So tell us some of the issues that Dr. Rush sometimes singly, all by himself, adopted and how his skill as a lobbyist and using his friendships accomplished meaningful changes in the life of colonial America.
Harlo Unger: He basically appealed to the selfish interests of the rich and famous. After all, with Washington to start at the beginning, the more troops that Rush saved who could fight again, the fewer troops Washington had to recruit, and it was a big problem recruiting enough troops. Rush managed to heal enough soldiers that they could go back and fight again. Similarly in Philadelphia, the more he cured diseases and illness in the poor sections, the more workers the rich merchants had to work for them.
This was one of the things you asked how he developed as a doctor because medicine was so primitive. He intuited a lot of the so-called cures that he developed. People didn’t bathe in that time. Most people thought bathing was dangerous, that you could get sick by taking a bath or washing yourself. He intuited the opposite. The first thing he did was to clean the wounds that the poor people he treated contracted. And those wounds would heal by washing them with whatever soap they were—very strong soaps in those days, mostly lye—but they would get better. So he intuited a lot of the medical miracles that he performed in those days. Naturally, for serious diseases he relied on bleeding, which did not work, but the interesting thing about bleeding is that those that did get better from the disease—there was a huge yellow fever epidemic—those that did get better from it, those who contracted it and got better from bleeding would have gotten better anyway. And a little bleeding can make a person feel a little woozy and euphoric, and in the presence of the great Dr. Rush, they would always feel a little bit better after bleeding. If they died, well, they would have died anyway. Those that didn’t die would have lived anyway. So no one really realized that bleeding was not effective.
But other things that he did were. He, in the hospitals that he worked at, he got the directors to clean up the hospitals. He got town fathers to clean the streets. They didn’t clean the streets in those days, and in the poor sections, the sewers ran out into the street. So when you walked down a street in Philadelphia or any other major town, you’d be walking through sewage. He convinced the town that it would be healthier and wealthier if they cleaned up the streets, and they did. And it got rid of the mass odors that filled the streets, it diminished the incidence of diseases, and he did the same thing in the hospitals where he got them to clean up the hospitals, to limit patients to one in each bed so they wouldn’t get each other’s diseases. With the army, he talked Washington into getting the soldiers to cut their hair very, very closely along the sides to get rid of body lice and to get rid of the diseases that lice carried. The soldiers were taught to bathe or wash themselves three times a week minimum and cut their hair so that they were cleaner and were less subject to illnesses in the field.
The Father of American Psychiatry [13:00]
Harlo Unger: In the hospital that he worked at, he found a group of patients naked in the basement, chained to the walls. And these were the insane, the mentally ill. They were starving to death, whipped mercilessly by sadistic guards for demanding food or anything else. Rush went tearing up to the boardroom and got the board of directors of the hospital together. He had seen better treatment in France, and so he demanded that each of these mentally ill patients be transferred to a special wing in the hospital where they each had clean beds and were treated as patients, not as the victims of satanization. They thought that mental illness was the work of the devil. So he got religion out of the hospital and got the mentally ill treated as patients. And he found that many of them responded to all sorts of different treatments. One was what we now call physical therapy or exercise; it made them healthier and so they felt better about themselves and their mental illness declined a bit. He found that others had talents, and he had those talents trained; it’s what we now call occupational therapy.
And the biggest discovery, a century before Freud, the biggest discovery was what he called talk therapy. He would take each patient aside and just listen and talk with him or her. And lo and behold, many of them got much, much better, some better enough to go home and lead productive lives. A century later, the American Psychiatric Association recognized him as the father of American psychiatry, and his image is on the official seal of the American Psychiatric Association. He was a pioneer in modern medicine and really is the father of modern medicine in many, many ways. Basic hygiene that is now practiced in medicine is a result of Rush’s efforts. Rush designed the first code of ethics that made fee splitting unethical among decent men and women in the medical profession. Until Rush and really long after Rush, doctors referring a patient to another doctor would split the fees. So obviously they were often sent to doctors who were not very good; it was simply a partnership that had nothing to do with healing the patients. So he developed the first code of ethics for modern medicine. There were in so many areas he was revered. He was a great teacher. He wrote the first great medical textbook. He was the first professor to teach chemistry in America, and then he wrote a four-volume work on medicine and medical care that became the Bible for medical care for at least a couple of decades after he lived. And his work on mental health was the basic text in psychiatry for more than a century until the end of the 1900s. Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind was the basic psychiatric text in America until the end of the 19th century. So his influence on American medicine is infinitesimal. And indeed in Chicago, of course, there’s a huge Rush University complex with a medical school, nursing school, and it’s enormous and very central to medical life in Chicago.
Social Activism and Women’s Education [14:30]
Bob Zadek: Harlo, you mentioned Benjamin Franklin, with whom Benjamin Rush had a very close personal relationship. And also you point out, we may have time to discuss it, his relationship perhaps with Thomas Paine. And if we take those three founding-era men—Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine—there’s one thread that may be coincidental and maybe not. Dr. Benjamin Rush was not in it for the money, was never rich, although he married a wealthy woman and that was the source of some financial security, but he was not in any of this for the money. He served the poor for free. He wasn’t in it for the money. Benjamin Franklin, because he felt—he had lots of inventions, but his inventions like the stove and other inventions, he refused to patent them and he gave them to the public domain because he felt he didn’t want the money, but he wanted to encourage the development of mechanical science and of other science. Thomas Paine similarly wrote the bestseller in the founding era in Common Sense, but he would not take any royalties. He wanted the book to get out. So those three men, all of whom are in the same arc as Benjamin Rush, all—although Franklin became very wealthy—all of them would subordinate their desire for money in favor of the public good. I found that to be an interesting connection between three, the two other men in Benjamin Rush’s life and Benjamin Rush. That may be coincidental, it may be there are others, but I thought I would mention that.
Now, Benjamin Rush also—his interest was, we use the phrase humanitarian, his interest was beyond pure medical science, although science is in quotation marks. He was passionate about women’s rights, child labor, and of course slavery. Tell us, if you will, how important these issues and others were to Benjamin Rush and how much of a visionary he was in seeing issues that we are still talking about today this morning in the news.
Harlo Unger: Well, I’m glad you mentioned these other social issues because he was passionate about women’s rights. And again, he talked the legislature into allowing girls to go to school by telling them that, “Do you want your boys to grow up as ignoramuses? Who are the first teachers of your boys? They are your wives. And your wives should have as good an education as you if they are going to take the responsibility of raising your boys.” So that’s how he coaxed the Pennsylvania legislature.
Bob Zadek: He was a lobbyist! He was a skillful lobbyist!
Harlo Unger: And he showed everyone how it was in their better interest to improve the lives of everyone. He was a great humanitarian and wanted everyone to have a decent life. As for slavery, he went into the black neighborhoods, helped talk them into and help them raise the funds to build the first African American church in America in Philadelphia. He actually went to the slave market, bought a slave himself so that he could—he was a teenager—so he could raise the boy, educate him, and then free him as soon as he was educated enough to get a job. And the boy got a job on a ship as a free man, and whenever the ship came to town, he went to stay with Rush and his wife; that was now his home. So he made the Rush house his home.
Thomas Paine and Common Sense [16:00]
Harlo Unger: Rush, as I said, was deeply involved in the fight for emancipation. I’m glad you mentioned his run-in with Thomas Paine, whom he met in a bookstore. Thomas Paine had come over and was an enemy of royalty and was eager to help Americans gain independence. And he was writing an essay—he got a job as an editor of a magazine, he was a great writer, his words just leaped off the page and gripped readers—and he was working on a document, a pamphlet he was writing on liberty and independence, American liberty and the horrors of the whole concept of divine right of kings. He said, “Why should some baby born of some woman have the right to rule the world?” And so he wrote this pamphlet, he showed it to Rush, Rush edited it, and Rush came up with the title Common Sense, which Paine then delivered to Washington on the banks of the Delaware opposite Trenton. Washington ordered Common Sense—which you may remember began, “These are the times that try men’s souls”—he had that read aloud to all the troops on the night before they went across the Delaware and fought the Battle of Trenton. And it was considered—it was credited with having revived the spirits of the dispirited troops, Washington’s dispirited troops after their horrible defeat in Brooklyn.
Bob Zadek: I think that book was—wasn’t that book Crisis that Thomas Paine wrote?
Harlo Unger: It was not a book. It was the first of a series of pamphlets called American Crisis. It was American Crisis I. And each of them came out at different times during the Revolutionary War, and indeed the last one after victory at Yorktown, he said that “the times that try men’s souls are over.” So they were all related, but they weren’t in a book; they were later published in the 20th century in book form.
Reconciling Adams and Jefferson [17:30]
Bob Zadek: You mentioned his long friendship, his being Dr. Rush’s long friendship, deep friendship with John Adams and his relationship with Thomas Jefferson. We have just enough time, I think, to tell the story, if you would, the story that brought him first to my attention, which was Adams and Jefferson after the election of 1800 never spoke again for 12 years. They were—and how did Benjamin Rush, why and how did he cause them to reconnect? And the resulting letters are so important in the history of our country.
Harlo Unger: Well, it was a bitter election in 1800, and Jefferson didn’t actually win it, although he defeated Adams. The Electoral College was a tie vote, and under the Constitution, it was thrown into the House of Representatives, which went for more than 30 ballots—37 ballots—before one representative switched his vote from Aaron Burr to Thomas Jefferson. So it was a bitterly fought election, and the divide between the two sort of political parties, political feelings were between the Federalists and the anti-Federalists or Democrat-Republicans, as the Jeffersonians called themselves. The Federalists were very, very strict constitutionalists and believed in a very strong central government, really ruled by, governed by the power of Congress. The Jeffersonians wanted more states’ rights; they leaned more towards the ideas of Patrick Henry of Virginia.
So the bitterness of that election, Adams felt that the Jeffersonians had stolen it from him, and he went home to Massachusetts and stayed there, gradually growing more and more bitter. So that later on after Rush had become friends with Jefferson—Jefferson didn’t believe in doctors and he was quite sick and finally he broke down and wrote Rush a letter saying, “Can you help me? I probably won’t do what you tell me, but I’ll listen.” And so Rush gave him directions on how to care for himself: stay in bed, take hot drinks, and all the other things we do for colds or the flu. At that time, he realized that the difference between the Federalists and the anti-Federalists were so important in the formation of our country, a debate that is going on to this day in the 21st century, that it would be important to the history of our nation for the two men, Adams and Jefferson, to record their thoughts or to write down their thoughts. And the best way he felt was for them to resume correspondence. They had been close friends earlier in life when Adams was ambassador to France and Jefferson came over and really became part of the Adams family. So they were very, very close at one point. And little by little with calming, soothing letters, coaxing letters, Rush talked them into at least wishing them a Merry Christmas, wishing each other a Merry Christmas. So it started with very, very small steps, and they developed this correspondence in which they described all of the motives behind the formation of these two political points of view.
Bob Zadek: And Harlo, I just want to mention because we’re going to run out of time, that collection of letters between Jefferson and Adams is a wonderful read. There’s about 154 letters, and all of that we would not have, this wonderful first-person history, without Dr. Rush using his psychiatric knowledge to manipulate Jefferson and Adams to start writing again.
Harlo, thank you so much for the hour of your time. I wish we had a couple of days, not only an hour. Those of you who wish to read the book, it’s a must-read: Dr. Benjamin Rush: The Founding Father Who Healed a Wounded Nation. And Harlo, how do our friends out there follow your writing and tell us in the brief few seconds we have, what are the next four or five books you are working on?
Harlo Unger: Well, the next book is Thomas Paine, coming out on September 10th. So I hope you’ll all get it. It’s a great read.
Bob Zadek: A fascinating figure in American history.
Harlo Unger: Exciting figure and who sparked and helped win the American Revolution, sparked the French Revolution. He was really a great man. And you can get all my books on my website, harlounger.com.
Bob Zadek: Harlo, thank you so much for the hour of your time. We had a wonderful morning together, and good luck on your new book. Thanks so much. This is Bob Zadek. So long to my friends out there. I’ll be back again next Sunday. Speak to you then.