More from Matt Franck:

Here’s a follow-up to Peter Robinson’s comment about the three royals who lived from 1738 to 2002. Not so impressive for longevity, but illustrative of how short our history is: John Quincy Adams turned nine years old the year of the Declaration of Independence. When he was very old, he met a little boy named Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, who turned seven the year Adams died. When Holmes was an aged justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, one of his clerks was named Alger Hiss. Hiss died in 1996 at the age of 92. Three long lives (1767-1848, 1841-1935, 1904-1996) spanned 220 years of our history as a nation, and each man knew the one before. Three lives that in their understanding of politics went from good to bad to worse, but that’s another subject.