Founded in Chicago in 2006, the Sam Adams Alliance (SAM) is a non-profit, non-partisan, fiercely independent organization dedicated to inspiring and encouraging grass-roots citizen activism.
Equipping the Citizens
SAM works to equip ordinary citizens with the tools they need as they become activists in their local communities, towns, cities, regions and states. By recognizing the efforts of these citizen activists, we hope to help shine a light on the broad and deep areas of common purpose we share as Americans.
Central to SAM’s mission is its belief that too much power is now exercised by unaccountable officials—elected and unelected—in Washington, D.C. It is SAM’s belief, too, that the national political conversation is framed by a news media whose interests are all too often aligned with those of the officials who wield this power.
The surest and most responsible way to challenge that power is through citizen activism.
Among its activities has been the annual sponsorship of the Sammies, a program to honor independent voices that support transparency in government. SAM has also conducted proprietary research into emerging political trends; its 2010 study of the attitudes of Tea Party activists was covered by The New York Times, Politico and U.S. News and World Report.
SAM also sponsors “Engaging Democracy,” a podcast series in which SAM founder and political historian Eric O’Keefe applies his passion for and knowledge of American political history to contemporary public affairs.
Our Namesake – Samuel Adams
Of all the Founding Fathers, it was Samuel Adams—before Patrick Henry, before Thomas Jefferson, before Thomas Paine—who decided the American colonies could establish their own nation and who then labored with historic effectiveness to make independence a reality.
Born in 1722, Adams was also, in many ways, the most ordinary of famous patriots—a mere brewer, and a failed one at that—he also came to demonstrate astonishing force as a political organizer, publicist and critic of British imperial power. The first American of any real prominence to dispute Parliament’s right to tax the colonies at all, Adams led his native Boston through the ordeal of occupation that led, in 1770, to the Boston Massacre and, in 1773, to the Boston Tea Party.
Signing the Declaration
Taking this protest to the rest of the colonies, Adams organized the Committees of Correspondence in 1772 and the Continental Congress in 1774. In recognition of his services, the other delegates, in July 1776, asked Adams to be the first among them to sign the Declaration of Independence after the president of the Congress, John Hancock.
Most Americans, ironically enough, have come to see Adams through British eyes and regard him as the most radical of revolutionaries. He was a radical and a revolutionary in a limited sense, however. He was, in fact, a pious churchgoer who fashioned his arguments with a scrupulous devotion to legal precedent, who urged his fellow citizens to refrain from violence except in self-defense and whose aims, while ambitious, were finite.
Radical—and Conservative
Unlike the French revolutionaries, Adams was no ideologue. In the early days of the movement toward independence, his goal was simply to ensure that Massachusetts merchants could operate without interference from Parliament or the Crown and without taxes to which they had not consented. Such freedom of commerce, it turned out, required political independence, which Adams promoted with world-changing effectiveness.
Comfortable in the world of his workaday Boston, at peace with his neighbors, he sought no overthrow of established values. He was, in that sense, the most conservative of radicals but also the most radical of conservatives. He would probably find no home in today’s armed camps of Republicans vs. Democrats, right vs. left, red vs. blue.
Adams died at the age of 81 on October 2, 1803, and was buried in the Granary Burying Ground in Boston. In the words of his hometown newspaper, the Independent Chronicle, he was the “Father of the American Revolution.”
His spirit inspires our efforts.
Our Board
Eric O’Keefe – Founder, Chairman and CEO
A private investor from Wisconsin, Eric is the chairman of the Health Care Compact Alliance. He serves on the board of directors of the Institute for Humane Studies, the Center for Competitive Politics and Wisconsin Club for Growth. He is the author of Who Rules America: The People vs. the Political Class and hosts the podcast series, “Engaging Democracy.”
Leo Linbeck III
Leo Linbeck III is the CEO of Houston-based Aquinas Companies, LLC. Mr. Linbeck is also the chairman of the board of the Linbeck Group, LLC. He earned his MBA from Stanford University, graduating as the only student in the program’s history to be both Valedictorian and winner of the Arbuckle Award (the person voted by his classmates to have made the greatest contribution to the school). A father of five, he now teaches at both Stanford and Rice’s graduate business schools.
Joe Lehman
Joseph G. Lehman is president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, an independent, nonprofit research and educational institute based in Michigan. A graduate in engineering from the University of Illinois, he has been an engineer and project manager for nine years at the Dow Chemical Company. Mr. Lehman and his wife, Karen, are the founders of Midland County Habitat for Humanity. He twice received the Dow Chemical Vice President’s Award for Community Service. He is an ordained deacon in the Presbyterian Church in America.
Eric Tubbs
Eric Tubbs is the co-owner of Tubbs Brothers, Inc. a retail automobile dealership in Sandusky, Michigan, where he is an active member of the community and lives with his wife and three children. His past business experience includes sales and marketing in the automotive supply industry where he worked with all of the domestic automobile manufactures. He also directed new business development in Europe and the Far East and conducted business in Germany, France, Great Britain, Mexico, South Korea, and Japan.