Passionate Sage

by Joseph J. Ellis

  Of course, when it came to democracy, Jefferson was the hands-down champion. And so it would have been eminently plausible for Douglas to cite Jefferson as the founder who expressed the deepest faith in the capacity of ordinary citizens to decide their own fate; this would have then set up a mid-nineteenth-century version of the Adams-Jefferson dialogue, with Douglas wrapping his argument in the Jeffersonian rhetoric of majority rule and Lincoln countering with the Adams conviction that majorities have no magic pipeline to the truth, that crucial matters of principle—and slavery was certainly one such matter—were too important to be resolved at the ballot box.

  Douglas, in fact, defended his case for popular sovereignty along just such Jeffersonian lines, claiming that the practicality of the solution was less compelling to him than its hallowed association with the Sage of Monticello. But Lincoln, instead of citing Adams, contested Douglas’s appropriation of Jefferson. The key Jeffersonian document, as Lincoln saw it, was the Declaration of Independence, and he based his attack against Douglas on the immorality of slavery when judged by the Jeffersonian assertion of human equality in the Declaration. The Lincoln-Douglas debates, in short, drew on the wisdom of the founders all right, but both sides in the debate claimed to be speaking for Jefferson; or, to put it differently, the argument over the place of slavery in the republic became a dialogue between different sides of Jefferson’s thought. Jefferson, it seemed, was everywhere; Adams was unmentioned, unnoticed, invisible.21

  He was also conspicuously—and even more inexplicably—absent from the most influential critique of the Jeffersonian tradition ever written. The book was The Promise of American Life (1909), and the author was Herbert David Croly, a grotesque-looking wisp of a man, whose frail appearance belied his powerful ideas, ideas that shaped the terms of the national political debate from the Progressive era to the New Deal. Croly actually succeeded brilliantly in doing what so many journalists and aspiring intellectuals before and since have frustrated themselves in trying to do; namely, write a book steeped in scholarship and grounded in an understanding of American history that alters forever the way political leaders of the day think about government. Much of what Croly had to say about what was right and wrong with American politics was eerily reminiscent of Adams. But in what was a long and intricate book, Adams’s name never appeared at all, either in the text or in the index. And to make matters worse, he had somehow been replaced in Croly’s version of the great dialogue of American politics by the one person in the world Adams genuinely and thoroughly despised.22

  Looking back from the vantagepoint of the early twentieth century, Croly discerned a dual tradition in the public discourse; as he put it, any thoughtful observer could detect “the existence from the very beginning of our national career of two different and, in some respects, antagonistic groups of political ideas….” Clearly, one of the voices in the dialogue belonged to Jefferson, whose most effective and disarming quality was “a sincere, indiscriminate, and unlimited faith in the American people.” No one was Jefferson’s equal in articulating the democratic ideal, in dreaming the American dream, if you will, which envisioned a nation populated by free and enterprising individuals unburdened by government restrictions, and—thanks to the open-ended continent made available by God and then secured by the American Revolution for posterity—free to pursue the promise of American life with degrees of success and levels of serenity previously unknown in human history.23

  If this sounded too good to be true, Croly observed in his dispassionately abstract prose, it was because Jeffersonian ideals were not true, except as seductive visions parcelled out to a gullible democratic audience that obviously appreciated being told that its judgment was infallible. The Jeffersonian sermon always took “the people” as its text and always closed with the comforting conclusion that, as Croly put it, “individual members needed merely to be protected against privileges and to be let alone, whereafter the native goodness of human nature would accomplish the perfect consummation.”24

  Croly had warned his readers early on that his analysis was not designed to be popular, that it would “meet with a far larger portion of instinctive opposition and distrust than it will of acquiescence.” For over four hundred pages the hammer blows fell relentlessly and resoundingly on the unquestioned articles of faith underlying the Jeffersonian creed. Jefferson had misguidedly sought to achieve “an essentially equalitarian and even socialistic result by means of an essentially individualistic machinery.” He had incorrectly presumed “a complete harmony both in logic and in effect between the idea of liberty and the idea of equality; and just in so far as there is any antagonism between those ideas, his whole political system becomes unsound and impracticable.”

  But by the early twentieth century, one did not need to be a brilliant logician or profound historian to recognize that Jeffersonian political beliefs had led directly, if inadvertently, to unprecedented levels of social and economic inequality, the enshrinement of private greed as a natural right by the American plutocracy—the so-called captains of industry—and the doctrinaire rejection of government’s authority to do anything about it. Jefferson, in short, was an “amiable enthusiast” who had known how to turn phrases that appealed to popular illusions, but he and his followers had “perverted the American democratic idea” with a lullaby disguised as a set of political principles. Under any kind of honest scrutiny, the Jeffersonian side of the political dialogue must be judged, so said Croly, a baleful blend of “intellectual superficiality and insincerity.”25

  Croly’s indictment of the Jeffersonian legacy was couched in a labyrinthian, intensely moralistic style—“Crolier than thou,” as one angry critic put it—but stripped to its essentials, it recapitulated most of the criticisms that Adams had delivered in his personal correspondence with Jefferson and Jefferson’s disciple, John Taylor. To be sure, Croly enjoyed the splendid advantage of hindsight, so his treatment of Jefferson’s bucolic vision was informed by the experience of the Industrial Revolution, urban poverty, and the rationalizing nostrums of Social Darwinism, none of which either Adams or Jefferson could have been expected to foresee clearly, if at all. On the other hand, even without the benefit of hindsight, Adams had warned Jefferson that individual freedom and social equality were incompatible ideas, that ignoring their conflict only assured the triumph of the privileged, as in fact happened. More tellingly, Adams had accused Jefferson of making a religion of “the people” that was just as fanciful as the old religion of “the king.” And, again like Croly, Adams had insisted that government needed to play an active role in managing national priorities; that it was not, as Jefferson seemed to believe, only and always a source of oppression.

  There were other similarities, but most of them only came clear in the context of the other side of Croly’s argument, which must have sent the ghost of Adams into an apoplectic fit; for Croly claimed that Hamilton, not Adams, was the realistic counter to Jefferson’s beguiling dreams, the sober and more far-sighted side of the American political dialogue. Croly’s Hamilton was “the sound thinker, the constructive statesman, the candid and honorable, if erring, gentleman” he was also admirable—Adams must have been flailing his arms at this—for his willingness to court unpopularity. Hamilton had his faults, Croly acknowledged, the chief one being that he “perverted the American nationalist idea almost as much as Jefferson perverted the American democratic idea.” This was an indirect way of suggesting that Hamilton’s commitment to a powerful executive and an energetic national government sometimes lurched over into a fondness for absolute monarchy or dictatorship and a total disregard for individual rights. Such autocratic dalliances did not overly disturb Croly, however, since he himself was prepared to admit that “the time may come when the fulfillment of a justifiable democratic purpose may demand the limitation of certain rights, to which the Constitution affords such absolute guarantees.” It was Hamilton’s unbridled nationalism that Croly most admired and that he saw as the historical precedent for a vigoro
us federal government and a proto-socialistic American state in the twentieth century.26

  Croly’s enshrinement of Hamilton would have seemed bizarre to most members of the revolutionary generation, who acknowledged him as a political genius of massive daring and vision, but too eccentric and dangerous to fit easily within the American ideological spectrum. If Adams and Jefferson were planets orbiting around the sun that was Washington, Hamilton was a comet that streaked through the late-eighteenth-century sky, blazing trails of glory, then disappeared. Until the Civil War, his name and reputation were largely ignored by historians and biographers as too exotic or Napoleonic to permit emulation. When he did appear, it was usually in the speeches of Jacksonian Democrats, who used his name as a combination curse and epithet, the symbol of the banking conspiracy and moneyed aristocracy.

  After the Civil War, however, again like the proverbial comet, he reappeared, the beneficiary of several converging trends: the Union victory in the war generated a need for nationalistic heroes; American historians who studied in Germany or were influenced by the new German scholarship suddenly found charismatic leaders with despotic tendencies more necessary and alluring; Wall Street capitalists, who had always harbored a private affection for the one founder who appreciated the power of money, used the newfound status they enjoyed as cultural leaders in the Gilded Age to publicize a champion of wealth. By the time Croly sat down to write The Promise of American Life, then, Hamilton’s reputation had surged nearly to the front rank; several of the standard histories had linked him symbolically with Jefferson as the opposing presence, more relevant than Jefferson for a burgeoning nation-state that was exploding onto the world stage as a commercial and imperial power.27

  Croly’s elevation of Hamilton clinched and effectively sealed his reputation for the twentieth century. The Promise of American Life proved to be one of the most influential books in modern American history, not just because it redefined the political agenda of the liberal tradition, which it unquestionably did, but also because it recast, in a way that proved both credible and accessible, the political legacy of the founding generation. Croly redefined the American dialogue so that it fit more neatly the competing imperatives of the conservative and liberal mainstream of the twentieth century, which usually translated into the competing platforms of the Republican and Democratic parties. It was the few against the many, limited government against big government, capitalism against democracy, freedom against equality. Croly’s major theoretical contribution, of course, was to declare the need for governmental power to offset and regulate corporate power; the use of Hamiltonian means, as he put it, to achieve Jeffersonian ends. But his major historical contribution, if one can call it that, was to adapt the legacy of the revolutionary generation to the political needs of the twentieth century. And this necessarily entailed the suppression of the classical or republican mentality that Adams epitomized.

  Of course, all attempts at making the past relevant to the present inevitably require some measure of distortion. In Croly’s case, however, the distortion, though it proved functional and efficacious, achieved relevance at the expense of ignoring an entire way of thinking about politics that predated the issues his version of Hamilton and Jefferson symbolized. In Croly’s formulation, the American dialogue represented a disagreement over the proper means to achieve agreed-upon ends, which ultimately boiled down to a disagreement over the power and role of the federal government. By eliminating Adams from the dialogue, in short, more fundamental questions about just what the promise of American life was or ought to be became mute. For Jefferson, it was a birthright of personal contentment unencumbered by government. For Adams, it was a legacy of public obligation rendered possible by government. More on this major theme shortly. For now, it is sufficient to establish, not just another non-sighting of Adams in a place where we might reasonably have expected to encounter him, but also what proved to be the decisive episode in his permanent deletion from the national discourse on the remembered meaning of the American political tradition.

  If the divergence of the reputations of Adams and Jefferson would have surprised most of their contemporaries, hindsight allows us to see that the historical forces responsible for Jefferson’s ascent and Adams’s relative obscurity were in place and readily discernible at the time of their mutual departure. On July 7, 1826, after the funeral ceremony for Adams at Quincy, a delegation of officials and dignitaries were invited to inspect one of the earliest railroad tracks in the new nation, which was being laid in order to transport Quincy granite a few miles away to the site of the new Bunker Hill Monument. This was exactly the kind of poignant and symbolic scene that Henry Adams, the great-grandson of the man just buried, would have found irresistibly evocative. For in the space of a few hours and within the compass of a few hundred yards, the dignitaries witnessed the death of the revolutionary generation and the birth of the major symbol of the Industrial Revolution, which was to transform the world of Adams and Jefferson more completely and more quickly than any force in modern history.28

  Somehow, even the overly ripe and ever ironical intelligence of Henry Adams, the most brilliant of the Adams progeny, missed the significance of his ancestor’s funeral. This was unfortunate, for the scene captured perfectly the central theme of his nine-volume History as well as his autobiographical masterpiece, The Education of Henry Adams. In both of those works, Henry Adams demonstrated a flair for marking the moment when emergent technology appeared on the American landscape and accelerated social change at dizzying rates of speed: Robert Fulton’s steamboat paddling up the Hudson River, the original machine in the garden; the opening of the railroad between Boston and Albany, destined to carry commerce and people out of New England; Cunard steamers cutting through Massachusetts Bay like knives severing Boston’s connection with the past. The funeral scene at Quincy was equally symbolic, showing the chasm that separated the world of the revolutionary generation from the world in which Henry Adams came of age. It evoked the sense in which anyone grounded in the eighteenth-century values of Adams and Jefferson had become irrelevant and anachronistic by the middle of the next century.29

  When the eulogists of 1826 spoke of “the end of an era,” they meant that the passing of the two patriarchs had ended any direct connection with the generation that had led the movement for American independence. Henry Adams meant something more than that. He meant that the social conditions and corresponding attitudes and values of the nation underwent a deep change during the very years that the Sage of Quincy was living out his retirement. In his formulation, the first truly “lost generation” in American history happened to be nothing less than the Founding Fathers themselves. For they, including both Adams and Jefferson, were rooted in the “lost world” that preceded the emergence of full-blown democracy, industrial capitalism, modern technology, and liberal ideology.

  What Henry Adams offered as an inspired but wholly intuitive insight, one that he used in his Education to dramatize his own alleged irrelevance, has become a staple of historical scholarship over the past quarter century. The central feature of American history is no longer an event—the American Revolution or the Civil War—but a process. Whether it is called “industrialization” or “modernization,” there is a scholarly consensus that this process altered the social structure and the mentality of America forever. If the Civil War has remained the Niagara Falls of American history, full of dramatic prowess and power, the first quarter of the nineteenth century has become the Grand Canyon, where a deep divide separates the way we were from the way we are, what is called “traditional” society or “classical” values from “modern” or “liberal” America.30

  Merely to state the reigning scholarly interpretation in this bald and categorical fashion is to expose the verbal and conceptual limitations inherent in what might be called “the paradigmatic approach,” which imposes a set of generically labelled categories on a stream of flowing events that, by their very nature, defy being fit into geometric shapes,
resist being boxed and crated and shipped to our contemporary understanding with “Traditional” or “Modern” stencilled across their surfaces. The distinguishing feature of America’s evolution toward modern democratic capitalism—Adams would say its most crucial feature—was its gradual character. Some historians have detected the seeds of modern or liberal values planted within the first settlers of Virginia or Massachusetts; other historians have insisted that the clinching supremacy of full-blooded capitalism did not establish itself until after the Civil War. What we have, in short, is a consensus that decisive social and economic changes produced a “before” and “after” effect in American history; an apparently unavoidable problem with clumsy language; and widespread disagreement about the precise moment when this great transformation actually occurred.31

  While the language problem will continue to haunt us, the timing problem can be quickly resolved. The reason historians have such a difficult time locating the moment when American social conditions and corresponding attitudes changed is that such a moment does not exist. These changes, whatever we choose to call them, were not a discrete event; they were part of a process. Both Adams and Jefferson lived through a crucial phase of this process, which had begun before they were born and continued after their death. In that sense, they both stood astride the Great Divide in American history, a rather awkward posture in theory. But because they were mercifully unburdened with the verbal and paradigmatic baggage that subsequent historians would impose, they had little sense of living schizophrenic lives or harboring irreconcilable urges in their personalities. Strictly speaking, however, which is to say from a purely historicist perspective, both Adams and Jefferson internalized a mixture of old and new, traditional and modern, classical and liberal values. But the mix was somewhat different in the two men. And this difference became the major reason for the divergence of their respective reputations. For Jefferson’s legacy was able to negotiate brilliantly the social and attitudinal shift in nineteenth-century America. The Adams legacy was not; it became one of the victims of the triumph of liberalism.