A Healthy Republic Is Built By Leaders Who Read Widely, Routinely, And Regularly

Among the most remarkable facts about the Founding Fathers, though little discussed, is how much John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and the others read. They belonged to what I call “the culture of reading,” men of books.

What did they read? The Bible, of course; Roman writers like Cicero and Livy; Greek philosopher Plutarch; Italian Renaissance poets; and then there were the writers of the Enlightenment, the writers of common knowledge. If we talk about which Enlightenment writers the Founders read, the names of John Locke, Adam Smith, and David Hume, to name a few, recur. How many of us, however, know that John Adams’s favorite story was the fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast”? Or that Jefferson read and reread Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” throughout his life, while George Washington was fond of Smollett’s “Humphry Clinker”?