Thomas Boylston Adams (academic)

Thomas Boylston Adams (July 25, 1910, Kansas City, Missouri – June 4, 1997, Lincoln, Massachusetts) was a 20th-century American business executive, writer, academician, and political candidate.

Adams was a member of the venerable Adams family of Massachusetts and a descendant of American presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams. His grandfather was Charles Francis Adams, Jr. and his parents were John Adams and Marian Morse Adams.

Adams was graduated from the Groton School then attended Harvard College. He was a captain in the Army Air Force during World War II, a vice president of the Sheraton Corporation of America from 1954 to 1963, and president of Adams Securities from 1964 to 1968.

Adams was president of the Massachusetts Historical Society (1957–1975) and treasurer of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1955–1990). He was a trustee of the Adams papers (a collection of 300,000 pages of diaries, letters and other writings papers from four generations of his family) and helped organize them for public use. He was a columnist for the Boston Globe from 1974 to 1991.

In 1966 Adams, an early and vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, ran a quixotic campaign as a peace candidate for the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate, against two far better-known candidates: former governor Endicott Peabody and Boston mayor John F. Collins. Adams got about 8% of the vote as Peabody won the nomination (and was easily defeated in turn by Republican Edward Brooke). He ran for Congress in 1968 and was a delegate to the 1972 Democratic Convention.

Adams was married for 57 years to the former Ramelle Frost Cochrane; the couple had six children.

Books

• Adams, Thomas Boylston (1981). A New Nation. Globe Pequot Press. ISBN 978-0871069597.