Thanksgiving and John Adams’ Affinity for Athletics

Those tuning into the traditional slate of NFL games this Thanksgiving might not realize they are making the Founding Fathers proud, but sports and America have been connected since the country’s earliest days. 

As Jack Campbell notes in a recent article in the Journal of the American Revolution, John Adams, America’s first vice president and second president, had a lifelong affinity for athletics. The stout Adams is often characterized as sternly formal, so it might come as a surprise he had decades-long devotion to sports. In a letter to fellow Founder Dr. Benjamin Rush, Adams writes of how when he was younger he was avidly “making and sailing Boats, in Swimming Skaiting, flying Kites and shooting in marbles, Ninepins, Bat and Ball, Footbal &c &c.” He even admits in his autobiography “My Enthusiasm for Sports and Inattention to Books, allarmed my Father” and reminisces how in his mind’s eye he “can revive the scenes, Diversions, sports of [my] Childhood, Youth.”

While nowadays, war metaphors are often used in sports (“blitzing the quarterback,” “the tiring pitcher doesn’t have many bullets left”), Adams’ writings often went in the other direction — bringing athletic analogies into his reflections on military actions. In an Aug. 28, 1782 letter to Virginia’s Attorney General Edmund Jenings during the Revolutionary War, Adams saw fealty for the cause as a bouncing ball to be kept in play. “The Courier de L’Europe Says, an Acknowledgement of American Independance is a breach of the Neutrality,” Adams wrote. “Let Us keep up this Ball and Set all the litterary Sportsmen in Europe to play with it —  it can do no harm and may do great good.”

While on a trip to France in 1778, Adams marveled that “Sunday in this Country is devoted to Amusements and Diversions. There are more Games, Plays, and Sports of every Kind on this day, than on any other, in the Week.”

Decades later, in a June 27, 1811 letter to the “Boston Patriot” newspaper after he had left office, his analogies to athletics continued. “For my own part,” he observed, based on his experience in the White House, “I thought America had been long enough involved in the wars of Europe. She had been a foot-ball between contending nations from the beginning, and it was easy to foresee that France and England both would endeavor to involve us in their future wars. I thought it our interest and duty to avoid it as much as possible, and to be completely independent, and to have nothing to do, but in commerce, with either of them.”

When Adams’ son John Quincy Adams, who would become America’s sixth president, once left his own son (John Adams II) and his brother George Washington Adams in grandfather John’s care for the day, the eldest Adams remarked  “George … is a dutiful Son, for he is deeply engaged in Platonick Greek” while “John is at present devoted to his Sports, in shooting and Fishing he thinks he has a licence in the Vacation.” Both grandsons, he concluded, are “good Lads and will come to something, If you do not allow them two much Money.”

No wonder then that when America had declared its independence, Adams foresaw sports as being an essential element of the celebration. Gratitude for liberty, he wrote in a letter to his beloved wife Abigail, “ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”

As we turn on the latest football action this weekend, or throw together a pick-up game of our own, let’s take a moment in between huddles to express our gratitude to those like John Adams who ensured our country is so often celebrated through sports.

So as we turn on the latest football action this weekend, or throw together a pick-up game of our own, let’s take a moment in between huddles to express our gratitude to those like John Adams who ensured our country is so often celebrated through sports.

Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern is Senior Adviser to the Provost of Yeshiva University and Deputy Director of Y.U.’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. His books include “The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada,” which examines the Exodus story’s impact on the United States, “Esther in America,” “Gleanings: Reflections on Ruth” and “Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States.”