Three Generations Theory (1780)
In a 1780 letter written by John Adams to his wife, Abigail Adams, he traced the evolution of Americans from revolutionaries to artists in three generations.
“I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.” — John Adams
Thomas Jeffersons’ Monticello displaying enlightenment ideals of symmetry and rebirth of classical tendencies in architecture.
In The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, this specific quote served as a guiding theme for David McCullough when framing the multi-generational journey of American artists and thinkers. McCullough contextualized the sacrifice of Adams as diplomat in France, being away from his family. He was securing funding and making treaties to support the war effort. McCullough wrote:
“The Revolution was another of the darkest, most uncertain of times and the longest war in American history… Adams, because of his unstinting service to his country, was separated from his family nearly all that time, much to his and their distress. In a letter from France he tried to explain to them the reason for such commitment.”
He left founders out of the broader narrative of his book, focusing on the lives of American artists in Paris. Instead, he used Adams’s prophecy as the conceptual roadmap for the book:
- Generation 1 (Politics and War): Led by Adams and the founders, who secured the nation.
- Generation 2 (Mathematics and Philosophy): The early-to-mid 19th-century innovators like Samuel Morse (who traveled to Paris as a painter but pivoted to developing the telegraph).
- Generation 3 (The Fine Arts): The late 19th-century masters like Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Mary Cassatt, and John Singer Sargent, who finally possessed the absolute freedom to study painting, sculpture, and music.
There is a beautiful arc from the idealistic founders at the end of the 18th century, through the emergence of various barbarisms and despotisms in Europe in the first two decades of the 19th century (think Napoleon and The First Empire; the Russians, Prussian, and Austrian imperialist tendencies; and the crisis in Greece between nationalists in the Greek War for Independence of 1821 against the Ottomans).
To imagine in this tumult that knowledge and ultimately artistic excellence might emerge, is one of the truly great stories in human history. What we take from this theory is even in those moments when the reality before us seems overly brutal and harsh, one may construct a reason to hope appealing to the light dwelling in the human heart and spirit.