It took me literally a year to read James Traub's "John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit" (commission earned), but I have finally come to the end. Speaking of the end, JQA's famous last words were "This is the end of earth."
JQA:MS is not the only book I read in the past year, but it is the one I spaced out the most.
Anyway, here are 2 passages each with a surprising word that I will render in boldface:
From page 490:
By the time Polk took over, Tyler had already annexed Texas, and the Senate had given its approval. By this time General Santa Ana had been overthrown in yet another coup, plunging Mexico into anarchy. Opponents like Adams could no longer argue that annexation would threaten Mexico’s stability. That is one of the reasons why the vote for war in May 1846 was so one-sided. Adams continued to view the war policy in apocalyptic terms. In a burst of temper, Adams wrote in his journal, “The Constitution is a menstruous rag, and the Union is sinking into a military monarchy, to be rent asunder like the empire of Alexander or the kingdom of Ephraim and Judah.”
Page 514:
The Adams name rolled on in gently ebbing waves of distinction. Charles Francis Adams III, who married the granddaughter of the secretary of the navy under President John Quincy Adams, served as Herbert Hoover’s navy secretary. (He had prepared for the role by successfully defending the America’s Cup.) His son, Charles Francis Adams IV, served as president of the aerospace firm Raytheon. The Roman numerals have marched all the way down to our own day in the form of John Quincy Adams VII, surely one of the very few “VII”s in a nation that has forsworn a hereditary aristocracy. This John Quincy Adams has a blog.
I couldn't find the blog. I tried! As for "The Constitution is a menstruous rag," I can't believe that never came up in law school. It's something I never even considered exclaiming in all my years of teaching law school, and I have never heard of any law professor or other legal character crying out "The Constitution is a menstruous rag!" no matter how much the Constitution was bothering them. I didn't even know there was such a word as "menstruous." I looked it up in the OED and saw that the word appears in the King James version of the Bible: "thou shalt cast them away as a menstruous cloth; thou shalt say unto it, Get thee hence." I suppose it is one of those words that have seen better days. Like blog.
You can read the "menstruous rag" diary entry, from February 19, 1845, here, and from there, you can get to the entire 15,000+ pages that Adams wrote in the diary that he kept from 1779 to 1848.
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36 comments:
Well, that tears the rag off of the bush.
Laughter without mirth
This is the death of earth
JQA started the unreliable narrator trend
Hyperbole is not a new thing.
Multi-generational violators of the "Sr/Jr/numbers are for living men" rule. CC, JSM
henry adams the grandson, had a real fin de siecle obsession,
It appears three times in the King James bible.
Maybe it was the start of feminism, bringing new insights to - 'The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants....." If that isn't a description of PMS, I don't know what is.
I searched (for longer than I care to admit) for the "blog" of J Q Adams VII, and I too failed to find even a trace of one. Still, I don't think Traub was lying. I think he must have been using the word "blog" more loosely than you or I would. For instance, he might have considered regular posts to Facebook or LinkedIn a "blog."
probably a general or diary, traub is one of the less reliable chimps that the Times employs, so caveat emptor
It could be a private blog just for the family
interestingly another future descendant, sam adams was an intel officer during the Vietnam war, where he properly assessed the troop strength of the vietcong on the eve of the Tet offensive, this formed the basis of the Westmoreland lawsuit,
He died in 1848, so he did not live to see how close the "military monarchy" came to being "rent asunder". Julius Caesar might have been a more appropriate parallel to Lincoln than Alexander. Though Johnson was no Augustus.
It is true, that the lieutenants who fought together to conquer Mexico, became the generals who fought over the spoils.
Menstruous rag must be a typo, but I can’t decide in which word. But it can’t remain unseen. Every time I see the old parchment depicted I will remember.
"menstruous" would appear to be used to mean "unclean", rather than any more specific connotation. Perhaps "readily discarded"?
“He died in 1848, so he did not live to see how close the "military monarchy" came to being "rent asunder"
In 1861 Minnesota fought AGAINST tyranny.
Oh, it's no typo. He wasn't typing.
“ Oh, it's no typo. He wasn't typing.”
That is irrefutable Jupiter.
Unfortunately there is no good word for an error in handwriting other than "error." Could be called a "manuo," but no one uses that term.
As I get older and get closer to death, I find myself reading more religious books. I have read the entire Old Testament (the Tanakh) several times, and just finished reading "Everyman's Talmud", the major teachings of the the Rabbinic Sages, by Abraham Cohen. Some of this can be a bit tedious with all of the rules and regulations, but as a retired lawyer I was most impressed by Chapter X, Jurisprudence. It is amazingly relevant to today's legal debates. I am now in the middle of reading John Calvin's "Institutes of the Christian Religion." This is heavy reading, but both books have really opened my mind to some major revelations. It's not like reading Facebook posts, TikTok videos, or Althouse comments, but I think it is well worth your effort.
Remember that under the Israelite ritual law as spelled out in Leviticus 15 (later taken up into rabbinic Judaism), a "menstrous rag" has the power to make he or she who comes in contact with it ritually unclean. I wonder if JQA is imputing such a corrupting power to the Constitution. If so, a pretty heavy duty charge by an ex-president and son of one of the Founders.
Maybe he was just on the rag that day.
Jupiter: "Though Johnson was no Augustus."
In an odd coincidence, I call my johnson Augustus. CC, JSM
I did find references to his blog and the website he used. It is no longer active and Wayback Machine apparently used to archive part of it. However using google AI I found the name of the blog and some of the topics he covered. The "VII" Suffix - jqavii.com was one of the topics he covered. The AI gave a short summary of what he talked about in that subject. Other topics the AI was able to summarize would be “What’s in a Name?”, “Living History”, “Family Lore vs History”, and “Modern Ancestry”. These all are subjects that cover living with such a famous name and some of the complications that go along with it.
I was going to mention CFA VI the last time the topic was JQA. Thomas Boylston Adams, a cousin of his, was a columnist for the Boston Globe. The Adamses were the real-life Kennedys. Like the Kennedys, they had their share of tragedies. JA and JQA weren't the most tolerant fathers. Failure to measure up to expectations was fatal.
C. Bradley Thompson has a book on Adams https://share.google/fzOtJSEiUaaJqdeGG
Fyi professora
@Jupiter
No. The first 3 meanings are all about menstruation. There’s a 4th definition, but it’s “Monthly; (also) lasting only a month. Obsolete. rare.”
@ColoradoJim I tried AI as well (it was Gemini), and it told me pretty much what you said, including the domain jqavii.com and the claim that archive.org had captured such thoughtful essays. But all of that was false, an AI hallucination. You can see for yourself the the Wayback machine never saw anything at that domain
I agree that a "menstruous rag" is one that has been used to collect menstrual blood. But I don't see how he could be likening the Constitution to such a rag in any very specific fashion. I think he is using it like you might use "filthy". Not actually implying accumulated filth, but simply disgust.
"This is the end of earth."
As last words go, these pale in comparison to many. From what little I know of the man, John Quincy Adams tended to be apocalyptic about any situation that did not unfold precisely as he would have dictated -- not unlike his father, unsurprisingly.
Among dying words, I'm most impressed by those of England's most ruthless king and a Confederate general officer. The sources vouchsafe Henry VIII's last intelligible utterance was, "Monks, monks, monks..." There were no monks in attendance that day in the Palace of Whitehall, nor any day since the king promulgated the Act of Supremacy, so what was he thinking? Was it regret for breaking with the Catholic Church over Anne Boleyn, the queen whom Henry came to hate because she failed to give him a son?
The other last words I admire were those of Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. On 2 May 1863, Jackson was wounded by North Carolina troops during one of his nighttime reconnaissance rides between the lines. Surgeons amputated his left arm, but Jackson developed pneumonia and died of it eight days later.
"Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees." Left-wing academics, ever diligent in their efforts to expunge and corrupt American history, attribute those words to a narcotic dream created by the laudanum given to Jackson for his pain, ignoring the almost complete absence of that drug in the Confederacy, thanks to the Union naval blockade, and the testimony of the several witnesses present. Jackson was intensely religious and often spoke in words and cadences of the King James Bible. Such a beatific tone at the end of his life was most in character.
Too bad about last words in the 21st century, we have so few of them these days worth recording. People tend to die under sedation in hospital beds with beeping and blooping instruments and mechanisms, making last words inaudible if uttered at all. Others die Caesarean deaths -- sudden, unexpected, and not at all conducive to well-chosen last words.
Biblical allusions are sometimes opaque to our Hostess and her tribe.
"Biblical allusions are sometimes opaque to our Hostess and her tribe."
But this is not among those times. The Biblical use is in the original post, replete with citation and quote. And of course I know that there are rules in the Old Testament about menstruation.
I was using the OED, and I mentioned 4 definitions in my 7:40 comment. You might be interested to know that this is the third definition:
1560–1685
† Defiled with, or as with, menstrual blood (in the Old Testament regarded as a type of pollution). Hence (esp. in the 17th cent.): designating something regarded as corrupt, polluted, or unclean. Obsolete.
Obviously JQA didn't believe there was literally menstrual blood on the Constitution. It's a figurative usage and it refers to a special objection to menstrual blood and to menstruating women.
I am modest. I don't use my number except on formal occasions.
There's a family joke about the lack of imagination in naming the male line. "How can you say that, just because there are so many Fred John Drinkwaters? Why, just a hundred years ago, there was a John Fred Drinkwater in the mix!"
A poet, by the way, among other minor sins.
Still opaque, unfortunately. The most obvious meaning and reference by JQA is from the writings of the apostle Paul, in which for modesty sake the English translates "dung" or "trash", thereby evading the reference meaning entirely in the sources you are quoting.
The New Testament is replete with hundreds of references to Old Testament concepts, always using a sort of shorthand , consisting of quotes of words and phrases directly from the Septuagint. Much like, say a Constitutional Law Professor might reference Miranda, or Obergefell, without quoting hundreds of pages of opinions. The founders of this nation knew their bible, often in the original language, and often employed this reference method.
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