Samuel Adams

Samuel Adams failed at almost everything before he found his vocation. He inherited his father's malting business and ran it into the ground. He worked as a tax collector and was so chronically lenient that by 1765 his account was more than £8,000 in arrears and the town meeting was nearly bankrupt. He was not a great orator. He was not a military commander. He was not a diplomat.

He was, however, an organizer, and in that role, he was transformatively effective.

Adams built the Committees of Correspondence, a communication network that connected colonial political leaders and created the organizational infrastructure for collective action before such action was widely considered possible. He cultivated the Sons of Liberty. He ran the Green Dragon Tavern as something between a community center and a revolutionary headquarters.

The Boston Tea Party was not a spontaneous outbreak of colonial frustration. It was a planned operation, executed by people Adams had organized and coordinated over years.

His animating conviction: political power belongs to the people who are governed, not to the class of people who happen to hold power at any given moment. He was, in other words, the Founder who would be most recognizable to anyone who has ever organized a union, knocked on doors for a candidate, or tried to build a coalition from the grassroots up.

The Green Dragon ran on ale. We've updated the beverage. The arguments are the same.