In a 1780 letter to his wife, Abigail, John Adams proposed a chronology of generational obligations for learning. It was his duty, the future president wrote during a sojourn in France, to “study politicks and war,” that the next generation “may have the liberty to study mathematicks and philosophy,” that the next should have “the right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.” Mr. Adams’s epistle ending there, modern readers cannot know whether, with more paper and time, he would have eventually previsioned the 21st-century corporate campus where word clouds are studied in both digital and material states so that the current youngest generation of workers may attain a perfect knowledge of Cinnabon brand identity.
We can only assume that when, in a separate letter written three years earlier, in the midst of the Revolutionary War, he expressed his wish that posterity would “make a good use of” the liberty he sought, he had in mind something like the 62,000-square-foot headquarters of Focus Brands, the Atlanta-based operator of 6,536 food franchise locations. Behind every snack food franchise is a story — a young mother raised in the Amish church takes over a pretzel stand in the wake of devastating personal tragedy; a flat tire on a hot day forces a Greek immigrant ice cream man to serve a rapidly softening frozen product — that is eventually obscured by the unrelenting popularity of its low-cost, high-indulgence, addictively delicious treats.
