Episode 383: Quaker Founder

Historically Thinking

As today’s guest writes in the introduction of her new book Penman of the Founding: A Biography of John Dickinson, “For more than two hundred years, John Dickinson has suffered from an image problem that no one in his day would have thought possible." In Signers’ Hall at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, the statue of John Dickinson stands alone in a corner, hand pensively on chin, apart from the action of the Federal Convention…Alternatively, they might imagine him in the manner of the musical 1776, strutting across a stage, ever to the right, never to the left, with ruffles aflutter, singing jubilantly about his conservatism. There he at least possesses the virtue of energy. Or they could imagine him as HBO’s pale, sweaty, scowling disbeliever in the American cause, opposite a stalwart John Adams. But none of these images of him is accurate.” That is if we have any images of him in our heads at all–which, to be honest, is highly unlikely. This conversation aims to change that. Jane E. Calvert is Founding Director and Chief Editor of the John Dickinson Writings Project, which under her guidance has produced three of a projected 13 volumes of Dickinson’s prolific output. She is the authority on Quaker political thought, which she has delineated in Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson. Penman of the Founding is now the definitive biography of John Dickinson, and hopefully the basis for much more scholarly work.