Thomas Boylston Adams (1910 - abt. 1996)

Ancestors

Died about 1996 at about age 86 in Lincoln, MA

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Biography

Thomas was born in 1910. He is the son of John Adams and Marian Morse. Thomas Boylston Adams, a descendant of Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams who was a corporate executive, a writer and administrator in the field of history and an opponent of the Vietnam War, died on Wednesday at his home in Lincoln, Mass. He was 86

Mr. Adams was a great-great-great-grandson of John Adams, the second President, and a great-great-grandson of John Quincy Adams, the sixth. He once told an interviewer, My branch of the family is the poor Adamses -- completely broke.

He was a vice president of the Sheraton Corporation of America from 1954 to 1963 and president of Adams Securities from 1964 to 1968 and held other executive posts.

Mr. Adams also became a trustee of the Adams papers, a private collection of the papers of four generations of the family -- 300,000 manuscript pages of diaries, letters and other writings -- that had been placed in a trust in the early 1900's. He played an important role in the 1950's in making them available for editing and publication. They'd been put in trust for 50 years; then they were to be disposed of, he said in a 1970 interview. Good Lord, no, I haven't read all of them, he went on, speaking at an exhibition of portraits of John Quincy Adams at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. Why, they filled a room the size of two of these galleries. Fortunately, when the trust ran out in 1954, the country had begun to be interested in history so we were able to get financing to have them edited and published.

Mr. Adams was president of the Massachusetts Historical Society from 1957 to 1975 and treasurer of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 1955 to 1990. From 1974 to 1991, he wrote columns, under the title History Looks Ahead, for The Boston Globe. He also contributed to other publications and wrote a book, A New Nation (1982).

In 1966 he campaigned unsuccessfully in Massachusetts as a peace candidate opposing the Vietnam War, for the Democratic nomination for the Senate. My family came to this country 300 years ago to escape the divine right of kings, he declared at the time. They helped set up the system of checks and balances. I can't sit silent while it is destroyed. He only won about 50,000 of 635,000 votes in a three-way race that was won by Endicott Peabody, a former Governor.

Mr. Adams was born in Kansas City, Mo., graduated from Groton School in Groton, Mass., attended Harvard College from 1929 to 1932 and was a watch company executive before World War II, in which he became a gunnery officer -- a captain -- in the Army Air Forces.

He is survived by his wife of 57 years, the former Ramelle Frost Cochrane; four sons, John, Peter Boylston and Francis Douglas, all of Lincoln, and Henry Bigelow of Kansas City, Mo.; a daughter, Ramelle Frost Adams of Lincoln; a brother, John Quincy Adams of Boothbay, Me.; a sister, Abigail Adams King of Los Angeles, and nine grandchildren.

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Acknowledgments

Thank you to Al Adams for creating Adams-14146 on 3 Nov 13. Click the Changes tab for the details on contributions by Al and others.