America’s Greatest Public Servant | Interview: Bob Crawford

The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg

The Dispatch

News, Politics

4.7 • 6.6K Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2026

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

To the great dismay of fans of Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover, John Quincy Adams has been officially awarded The Remnant’s not-so-endowed chair of American public service. Joining Jonah Goldberg on the show today to make the case for Adams is Bob Crawford, historian and former bass player for The Avett Brothers. Bob and Jonah discuss Adams' brilliant career, his relationship with Andew Jackson, and his powerful rhetoric, along with the populist/elitist dynamic, the oddity of majority parties, abolitionism, the Amistad case, and Congress’s infamous gag rule. Show Notes:—America's Founding Son: John Quincy Adams, from President to Political Maverick—Jonah on Bob Crawford’s podcast The Remnant is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of Jonah’s G-File newsletters—⁠click here⁠. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠by clicking here⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:37.3	Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention?
0:42.0	Daniel Jigga!
0:48.5	Ladies and your listeners, this is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant podcast, brought to you by the Dispatch and Dispatch Media.
0:56.5	Very excited for today's guest, who I was, I had the pleasure of meeting when I was a special guest for a special edition of his excellent podcast, the Road to Now history podcast.
1:08.4	But I first was introduced to his non-historical work
1:14.0	when my daughter was a little girl and we used to bang our heads on the dashboard to kick
1:20.4	drum a heart from the Avid brothers, where Bob Crawford, I guess today, is the bassist for the
1:26.1	Grammy-nominated band.
1:28.0	Like a lot of the more famous bass players in rock and folk history, he's also a historian
1:34.9	on the sideline.
1:36.8	And Bob's new book is America's founding son, John Quincy Adams, from president to political
1:41.9	Maverick.
1:42.6	Bob, welcome to the remnant.
1:47.7	Jonah, as a regular listener to this program, it is an honor to be here. And yes, you and I and my co-host, Ben Sawyer,
1:55.9	we did a Road to Now episode live from the Tallahassee Book Festival a couple years ago, I think it was.
2:04.4	And that was a great time. Yeah. I consider myself a very amateur student of American subcultures.
2:11.2	And the Tallahassee book nerd hippie was one that I did not anticipate being there, but it was full of those
2:20.4	kinds of people, lots of tie-died book readers. Anytime you have a book festival that features
	...

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