The dramatic difference between their respective reputations, then, was not exclusively or even primarily a function of the different personalities. To be sure, part of Jefferson’s ability to translate across the ages was a result of his nearly infinite suppleness and pliability, the elusive and enigmatic quality that Adams had often criticized and sometimes admired. Henry Adams captured this quality more succinctly and deftly than any other commentator. “The contradictions in Jefferson’s character have always rendered it a fascinating study,” he wrote in his History. “A few broad strokes of the brush would paint the portraits of all the early Presidents with this exception…but Jefferson could be painted only touch by touch, with a fine pencil, and the perfection of the likeness depended upon the shifting and uncertain flicker of its semi-transparent shadows.” Adams, on the other hand, was neither elusive nor enigmatic. And he tended to prefer standing in the full glare of sunlight, away from those flickering shadows. If Jefferson was the Mona Lisa of American heroes, Adams was one of those faces in a portrait by John Singleton Copley, close to the canvas, drawn with linear precision, looking squarely and directly back at the viewer.32
But Adams’s lack of pliability or adaptability through the ages, while certainly a factor that helps explain his relative obscurity, cannot by itself account for his inability to translate. For, in the end, the underlying problem for the Adams legacy was not primarily the directness of his character so much as the character of his thought. In the search for a usable past, too much in Adams was simply not usable. And this brings us back to the transformation theme originally defined by Henry Adams and subsequently developed by recent scholars of early American history. Best to put the question squarely and unequivocally: what was it that grounded Adams in the eighteenth century so deeply and firmly that his reputation, unlike Jefferson’s, could not fly across the ages and find a hospitable landing spot on this side of modernity?
To pose the question in this fashion is to suggest an answer that goes beyond surface considerations of imagery and malleability. Put simply, the deepest sources of Adams’s thought and character were incompatible with the emergent values of nineteenth-century liberalism. In his political thinking, to be sure, Adams did embrace two of the central tenets of the liberal tradition: the doctrine of popular sovereignty, that is, the notion that political power ultimately derives from the people; and the principle of equality before the law, the view that justice is blind to the class, race, or gender of the accused. In these two areas, Adams was a liberal. Beyond these seminal commitments, however, he was unprepared to go. He was, in all other respects, the archetypal, unreconstructed republican, fundamentally resistant to an individualistic ethic, as well as to the belief in the benign effect of the marketplace, to the faith in the infallibility of popular majorities, to the conviction that America enjoyed providential protection from the corruptions of history, to celebrations of freedom undisciplined by government or, at the personal level, the release of passionate energies unmitigated by internal checks and balances.
The list, in fact, could go on almost endlessly, for it did not depend on books he had read or ideas he had acquired by formal education. The more encompassing meaning of “education” later used rather mischievously by Henry Adams—the entire scheme of pre-modern values and convictions in which the mind and heart of an eighteenth-century American was saturated—defined his character. Even those infamous Adams eccentricities—the perverse aversion to popularity, the punishing self-scrutiny and self-denial, the suspicion of success and corresponding comfort with hardship—were all intensified versions of mainstream republican tenets, which presupposed the easy if not inevitable corruptibility of all persons and nations, and the need to subsume selfish urges to larger public purposes. The Adams brand of republicanism was even more ascetic than the norm, born as it was out of his youthful decision to serve the public rather than God, but bringing the same moral fervor to the secular cause that he would have brought to the sacred.
And if American politics is conceived of as a religion with a set of creedal commitments, the catechism one learns early on makes Adams into a heretic. The catechism of liberal America was dominated by references to “freedom,” “equality,” “democracy,” “individualism.” The Adams catechism was dominated by references to “control,” “balance,” “aristocracy,” and “public responsibility.” Cultures and nations generally select the heroes they need. For a nation perched on the edge of an undeveloped continent, about ready to explode onto the world economically, full of energy and natural resources, as well as a youthful sense of immortality and destiny, just about the last thing needed was a voice counselling caution, social responsibility, and reconciliation to eventual decline.
The loss of that voice, however, meant the alteration of the American dialogue originally symbolized by Adams and Jefferson. The version that came to dominate public discourse in the nineteenth century, as we have seen, was initially a monologue between different sides of the Jeffersonian tradition; then, later in the century and beyond, it became a dialogue between Jefferson and Hamilton over the necessary means by which to reach agreed-upon ends, what Herbert Croly memorialized as “the promise of American life.” What was different about the Adams-Jefferson dialogue was that it was not primarily a debate over means so much as over the ends themselves, not just a disagreement over how to fulfill the promise of the American Revolution so much as a conflict over what that promise had been.
For, at its nub or core, Adams’s vision remained traditional and, as they say, pre-modern or pre-liberal. His whole way of thinking about politics and society resisted the assumption that the individual was the sovereign unit in the social equation. And, again unlike Jefferson but more typical of other members of the revolutionary generation, he did not conceive of personal or private happiness as the ultimate goal for government. His ideological orientation was inherently social and collectivistic, driven by the assumption that individual strivings—what Jefferson had immortalized in the phrase “the pursuit of happiness”—must naturally and necessarily be subordinated to public imperatives if the human potential unleashed by the American Revolution were to achieve its fullest realization. Ironically, it was precisely this kind of socialistic perspective that Herbert Croly called for at the end of his famous book; but by the time he wrote, the Adams legacy had been buried and forgotten for so long that it was beyond either memory or recovery. Indeed, given the nearly total triumph of Jeffersonian liberalism in nineteenth-century America, the traditional cast of Adams’s thinking appeared not just irrelevant but even alien. Perhaps that fact provides the final piece of our puzzled explanation for Adams’s mysterious obscurity: speaking from the far side of the Great Divide in our history, we can no longer hear his voice as recognizably American.33
And there, with one important exception, is where the matter has remained throughout the twentieth century. The exception began to become visible in the 1950s, almost certainly as a consequence of the availability of those multiple boxes of letters and diaries that Adams had once threatened to inflict on posterity. Soon after the roughly 400,000 items that comprised The Adams Papers were put on microfilm and then, even more tellingly, after a modern letterpress edition began to issue forth from the archives of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the reputation of John Adams began to ascend within the community of professional historians.34
Starting in the 1950s, then continuing throughout the next two decades, Adams became the subject of several scholarly studies that praised his performance as president, refurbished his status as political thinker, and recovered the beguilingly human dimension of his personality. In addition, the discovery by Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood, and then a host of academic disciples, that the ideology of the revolutionary generation was heavily indebted to republicanism meant that Adams—one of the most forceful and articulate proponents of republican values—began to turn up in the many monographs and textbooks that revised our understanding of the meaning of the American
Revolution. Indeed, by the time of the bicentennial of the American Revolution, Adams’s reputation within the community of professional historians had recovered the lofty position it had occupied at the time of his death. When Robert Rutland reviewed the several modern editions of the papers of the Founding Fathers, he concluded that there was a fresh scholarly consensus: “Madison was the great intellectual…Jefferson the…unquenchable idealist, and Franklin the most charming and versatile genius, but Adams is the most captivating founding father on most counts.” Rutland predicted that Adams’s stock would continue to rise; for as new volumes of The Adams Papers rolled off the press, they would come to be regarded as one of the nation’s most precious natural resources, “deserving as much public concern as the shale-oil deposits, and in the long run…more valuable.”35
Although the new surge in Adams’s reputation was almost entirely a scholarly affair, it did have some impact on the broader public appreciation of his place in American history. Certainly, the most visible manifestation of an enhanced public standing was the broadcast on public television of a thirteen-part series, The Adams Chronicles, in 1975. This massively funded and skillfully produced historical docudrama, which devoted six hour-long segments to Adams himself, exposed his accomplishments to the largest audience it had ever enjoyed. In one sense, it made Adams the supreme founding father of them all—in the literal sense of the term; that is, he became the patri arch of what was arguably the most prominent and intellectually distinguished family in American history.36
This proved both a blessing and a burden, for it revitalized his image as a major figure, but did so by conceiving his historical significance almost exclusively in terms of his biological legacy. For better and for worse, the public memory of the original Adams became inextricably imbedded in the fate of his remarkable family. This condition was surreptitiously reinforced by the intriguing fact that, of all the Founding Fathers judged worthy of a modern edition of their papers, only The Adams Papers made the entire family rather than the man himself its focus.
Despite his rising stock within the world of professional historians, and despite his enhanced visibility as the sire of a spectacular line of distinguished descendants, Adams’s political legacy remains virtually invisible and his intellectual legacy remains a shadowy subject of exclusively academic interest. Even within the scholarly world, his chief contribution to political thought has been to serve as an articulate anachronism, the staunch advocate of a dying version of republicanism, a man who stubbornly resisted the inevitable democratization of American society. And even within the regional culture of his beloved New England—the local taverns, town halls, schools, and churches—he is commonly confused with Sam Adams, who has once again become “the famous Adams” because a popular regional brand of beer has adopted his name. Over two centuries after his French hosts made the same mistake, a distressingly large portion of native New Englanders still think of him as “the other Adams.”37
Perhaps, when all is said and done, he is not the stuff out of which mythologies are made. Perhaps he is too idiosyncratic and iconoclastic ever to become a national icon, too damnably specific and disarmingly honest ever to win an election, even with posterity. Or perhaps we should not think of him as a mainstream figure at all, but should acknowledge that he belongs to that breed of American skeptics—Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, and Thorstein Veblen come to mind—who patrol the margins of our political culture and whose wisdom derives from their alienation. Even though he has come to be regarded by historians as the most engagingly human member of America’s founding generation, perhaps he was always miscast as a public figure entrusted with the exercise of political power. That, after all, was the ultimate verdict of Hamilton and the High Federalists. And it is also an explanation that makes more comprehensible the relative serenity and personal balance he was able to achieve only in his retirement years.
But there is also a distinct possibility that the problem is not primarily personal or psychological, but ideological. Which is to say that perhaps it is not so much that Adams’s character steadfastly resists mythmaking, but rather that he represents a cluster of political principles that do not fit comfortably within the framework of our national political mythology. Memorials will only be erected to him, according to this train of thought, when the rhetoric of Jeffersonian liberalism ceases to dominate mainstream American culture; when the exaltation of “the people” is replaced by a quasi-sacred devotion to “the public” when the cult of the liberated individual is superseded by the celebration of self-denial; when national development must vie for seductiveness with conservation; when the deepest sense of personal satisfaction comes not from consumption but production; when the acceptance of national and personal limitations seems less like defeatism than a symptom of maturity. In this sense, the time of John Adams has passed and not yet come again.
Prophecies: An Epilogue
Where can we look but into the heart of man and the history of his heart? In the heart were found those appetities, passions, prejudices and selfish interests, which ought always to be controlled by reason, conscience and social affections; but which are never so perfectly controlled, even by any individual, still less by nations and large bodies of men. And less and less, as communities grow larger and larger, more populous, more commercial, more wealthy, and more luxurious.
—Adams to John Taylor, April 1814
From the year 1761, now more than Fifty years, I have constantly lived in an enemies Country. And that without having one Personal enemy in the World, that I know of.
—Adams to Benjamin Rush, January 8, 1812
WE ARE WHOLLY DESTITUTE of any direct evidence about the state of Adams’s mind on the last morning of his life, as he sat alone in the upstairs study of the Adams homestead. It seems safe to presume that at least a portion of his mind was occupied with thoughts of Independence Day. Fifty years earlier, in what proved to be a prophetic letter to Abigail, he had predicted that the great day would be celebrated “by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival,” and would be “solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”1
Characteristically, his prophetic powers had gotten the story correct with almost eerie accuracy, right down to the fireworks, but still managed to put him out of step with his fellow Americans. For he had identified the date of Independence Day as “The Second Day of July 1776,” which was the day he believed the clinching debate had occurred in the Continental Congress. His last words of tribute to Jefferson, muttered later that afternoon in 1826, suggest that he had finally reconciled himself to the Virginian’s enshrinement as the author of independence. It is tempting to speculate that the last and most symbolic act of his life, which was to expire on July 4, represented an ultimate effort to bring his feisty and idiosyncratic personality into alignment with the official patriotic calendar, to reconcile the death if not the life of John Adams with the customs of his countrymen.
He had proven himself capable of similar gestures of accommodation with the emerging national ethos on several occasions during his quarter century of retirement. When aging Federalists bemoaned the decline of standards and the passing of the revolutionary generation, he loved to lecture them on the superiority of the rising generation of American statesmen. Pessimists who presumed that the Master of Montezillo would concur with their gruesome forecasts of an inevitable clash between erstwhile American aristocrats and democrats were surprised to hear him turn their fatalism into a joke: “That the first want of man is his dinner, and the second his girl,” he observed, were truths “held in common by every democrat and aristocrat,” and these primal urges would bind Americans together despite the apocalyptic predictions of factionalism by the faint of heart. “Our Country is or at least ought to be happy,” he proclaimed to a downcast governor of New Hampshire, despite “gloomy forebodings into Futurity” by ignorant foreca
sters, who, he warned, tended to confuse their own personal despair with national decline. “If ever there existed upon this Globe a Nation of People who had so many causes and motives for Thanksgiving as our American Nation,” he proclaimed, “it has never fallen under my observation or within my reading.” In 1822 he reassured John Jay that, despite the Adams reputation for pessimism, in his old age he had “always endeavored to contemplate objects on the bright side.” As proof of his sanguine temperament he apprised Jay that he was telling all visitors that “Our prospects at present are beyond example and beyond all comprehension.” The only caveat he felt obliged to add—it was a paradox, Adams insisted, but not a contradiction—was that “this globe, and as far as we can see this Universe, is a theatre of vicissitudes.”2
The caveat, of course, was the abiding Adams message. And the enduring Adams legacy, if such a thing can be said to exist at all, tends to take the form of a sober and realistic caveat to America’s buoyant optimism and nationalistic pretensions. Adams was a pessimist by conviction and an optimist only when he felt the need to play contrarian. He rarely indulged in optimistic predictions except when presented with visitors or correspondents who, thinking he would agree, offered pessimistic estimates of the fate of the American republic. Then he would, as he put it, “jump upon the great See-Saw” and balance the political equation with reassuring observations that “the Federal Union…will last longer than we shall live,” or that neither monarchy nor dictatorship will ever take root in America “unless Napoleon should make Aaron Burr a King…which I do not believe he is either willing or able to attempt.” His optimistic forecasts, in short, were almost always expressions of his oppositional disposition, his instinct to serve as an alter ego to the dominant political wisdom of the moment, to make himself into the great American caveat.3
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