WASHINGTON BEACON- Two hundred years ago, John Quincy Adams gave one of the most famous and most misunderstood speeches in American history. Speaking in the Capitol building to the citizens of Washington, D.C., the secretary of state commemorated the Declaration of Independence and attacked the legitimacy of autocracy and colonialism. Understandably, his contemporaries were struck by its belligerence. But so misunderstood is the speech that isolationists to this day use it to advocate against the kind of foreign policy Adams himself practiced.
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