During my lunch break today, I wandered into the downtown branch of the public library, where a display about John Adams' book collection was housed.

Hang with me, this is light on numismatism and heavier on why Dead White Men are on our coins.

For our everyday money, mythologies abound. Let's ask our MOTS ("man on the street") who fails the Find-Your-Hometown-on-a-Map Test about the following people:

ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1c, $5): Civil War, freed the slaves

THOMAS JEFFERSON (5c, $2): ... uh, Founding Father? states rights? Louisiana Purchase?

F.D.R. (10c): New Deal, World War II

GEORGE WASHINGTON (25c, $1): won the Revolution, 1st president, crossed the Delaware, chopped down a cherry tree

J.F.K. (50c): Cuban missile crisis

ALEXANDER HAMILTON ($10): uh, Founding Father? founded the Treasury?

ANDREW JACKSON ($20): some president before the Civil War? fought Indians or Mexico or something?

...

OK, that exercise is over. Now, every single president (SOME of them sucked and don't deserve to be on a coin, right?) on a dollar coin (NEVER spent, only collected, so why not waste these useless presidents on useless coins and look good doing it [pat on back, Congress!!]) ... hmm ...

I grew up in Massachusetts, where we studied the American Revolution like it was Charles de Gaulle in modern French lycees. And the BOSTON MASSACRE was something like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand - something you memorized as a cause of a war.

What I don't remember learning was WHO DEFENDED the British soldiers at their trial. Care to guess?

JOHN ADAMS! That's right, one of those Dead White Men ... our second president.

What's great about history is how it repeats itself. Compare the quartering of British troops in Boston in 1770 with the quartering of American troops in Baghdad in 2005, and things sound eerily similar. From a UMKC faculty project (http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/bostonmassacre/keyfigures.html) (skip to ALL CAPS if you want to spare yourself the historical quote) -

More detailed records exist for the Soldiers' trial, which commenced on December 3. Adams presented evidence that blame for the tragedy lay both with the "mob" that gathered that March night and with England's highly unpopular policy of quartering troops in a city. Adams told the jury: "Soldiers quartered in a populous town will always occasion two mobs where they prevent one." He argued that the soldier who fired first acted only as one might expect anyone to act in such confused and potentially life-threatening conditions. "Do you expect that he should act like a stoic philosopher, lost in apathy?", Adams asked the jury. "Facts are stubborn things," he concluded, "and whatever may be our inclinations, or the dictums of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

SO I HAVE A NEWFOUND APPRECIATION FOR COLLECTING these over-produced and under-circulated dollar coins. John Adams knew that taking on this case would RUIN HIS LAW PRACTICE and possibly ENDANGER HIS FAMILY'S LIVES, but he was a man of principle who believed in a fair search for the murky truth - AND NOT for the black-and-white fables spread by the flames of public passions.

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