John Adams (1735-1826) was born on October30.
Around 1990, I began a three year stint working in New York's greatest bookstore, Brentano's Fifth Avenue. Assigned to the history section, I read just about every U.S. history book we sold (we were encouraged to read the books in our sections to make us more effective salespeople). I read general U.S. histories by Nevins and Commager, Samuel Elliot Morrison, Paul Johnson, Charles and Mary Beard, Richard Hofstadter, and even the loose cannon Howard Zinn. Plus several more I'm forgetting, as well as scores of books about the different phases of U.S. history, the Revolution, the Civil War, etc. I walked away from all that reading with the traditional dislike of Adams, or at least of Adams the President. While he was crucial as a leader and thinker during the Revolution, as a President Adams was said to be almost counterrevolutionary, even imperialistic. As Vice President he had suggested regal titles for the Chief Executive (e.g., "Your Majesty"). And as President he had signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, among the more unconstitutional usurpations of arbitrary power in our nation's history. The Quasi-War with Revolutionary France was also fought on his watch.
We all have David McCullough to thank for Adams' rehabilitation in the popular mind. For those who didn't read his popular 2001 book, there was the excellent 2008 HBO mini-series based upon it, starring Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney. Though McCullough never denies that Adams was unliked and perhaps unlikable (blunt, plainspoken, brusque) he identifies those facts as facets of an admirable trait: he was principled. He had character. Thus, we are able to understand why he might remain an Anglophile in an era when hatred for the English in this country was at its peak. He saw himself as an Englishman. His entire involvement in the Revolution had been based on his indignation at being deprived of the rights he felt he deserved on the basis of his English identity: the Rule of Law, the Magna Carta, Cromwellian Republicanism, the English Constitution. There is no contradiction in loving all of these quintessentially English things, while hating the Tyranny of an English King. Adams had even defended the perpetrators of the Boston Massacre when the entire city was crying for their blood. He believed in the English system of justice to that unpopular extent. But most people don't operate that way. Most are clannish and frankly fairly barbaric when it comes to such matters. It's easy to whip a mob into hatred for a certain people, or a certain class. This is especially true in times of war. Think of World War Two -- most Americans didn't just hate Fascism and imperialism; they hated the Germans and the Japanese. And a lot of slurs that American G.I.s used in Vietnam reveal an awful lot of confusion about the nature of the supposed enemy, which was supposed to have been Communism. Similarly, you have this crazy contradiction in early America. The vast majority of citizens were culturally English in every conceivable way save for their break with its monarchy. But they hated the English in an ad hominem way. Adams was wiser -- and more honest -- than that. It's a lesson for our own times.
Something else to contemplate: Adams is really our only Puritan president, or anyway our most Puritan, in the literal sense. By his time, Puritans were calling themselves Congregationalists, and he was part of a branch that had broken off to become the earliest Unitarianism. Still, given America's traditional historical narrative, the semi-mythical one that begins at Plymouth Rock in 1620, it is a little surprising that there would be only one New England man at the head of the American government during the years of its founding. Almost all the early presidents (Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe) were drawn instead from the Virginia planter aristocracy. Adams was the only one from the old Yankee culture. There were clergy in his family, and Massachusetts still retained a lot of the character of old style austerity of manner. It was one reason why he often found himself at loggerheads with the southern planters in the Continental Congress. They were raised to be artful, mannered, diplomatic. Adams called a thing by its name, and that can make you unpopular.
William Daniels foregrounded this quality of brusqueness in his portrayal of the character in the musical 1776, which I first saw on a school field trip in the run-up to America's Bicentennial. Around the same time, George Grizzard played him in The Adams Chronicles on PBS. We got a LOT of education about America's founding during those years, rough 1974 to 1976. It gave me the opportunity to assimilate the story of America's founding and the nature of our system of government before I was even a teenager, long before. It accounts for my constant, vocal shock and consternation at the realization in recent years, that a sizable minority of fully-grown Americans (those that voted for and supported the 45th President) clearly had not. There is a tendency to be angry at them for their ignorance. It would be more logical to be angry at the failure of the institutions that have made them vulnerable.
In recent years learned I something I wish I had known at the time of the Bicentennial: I am related to John Adams. (Like most WASPs with long American ancestry, I am related to ALL the Presidents. The Adamses, I believe, are the ones to whom I am most related. I am not descended from John, but from his great grandfather, the immigrant Henry Adams (1583-1646), through three different direct lines, among other connections.
One of these remains an Adams line all the way through my (3rd) great grandmother Martha Adams Turner, 1806-1884. Through Martha, I am able to calculate my relationship to our second President; he is my 3rd cousin, 7x removed.
I really love this late-in-life portrait of Adams, though I wasn't about to lead with it. It allows us to see Adams for the old Yankee cracker that he was in the end.
As for John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), the general public seems to regard him as something of an also-ran, but in reality he was one of the most gifted, able and experienced men ever to hold American office. He'd been his father's assistant when only a boy, then later was minister to the Netherlands, Russia, Prussia and Great Britain, a senator, a Secretary of State (considered one of our greatest), then President, and finally a member of the House of Representatives (the period which is depicted in the Steven Spielberg film Amistad). Despite all that, like his father, Jackson was not a creature of party politics, and it harmed him. He'd only won his presidency on a technicality (Jackson got the most votes, but without a sufficient majority so it got kicked up to Congress, who proceeded to choose Adams. Jackson got his revenge four years later).
It's probably less well known nowadays to the general public, but the Adamses remained prominent in public life for at least another century.
John Quincy's son, Charles Francis Adams (1807-1886) was a Massachusetts state senator, a U.S. Congressman, and a Free Soil Party candidate for Vice President, but remains best known as President Lincoln's ambassador to Great Britain during the Civil War. He also wrote a well regarded biography of his grandfather, and built the first presidential library (for John Quincy Adams).
Charles Francis had many distinguished children, including:
John Quincy Adams II (1833-1894), who sat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
Charles Francis Adams, Jr. (1835-1915) was a parks commissioner, a railroad commissions, a railroad president, and author of over a dozen history books and biographies
Henry Adams (1838-1918) is the best remembered of this generation on account of his posthumously published book The Education of Henry Adams. He also wrote the novels Democracy (1880), and Esther (1884) and several other books of non-fiction. A racist and an anti-Semite, one walks away from his autobiography with a strong sense of Gilded Age decadence and dissipation, of a kind of detached purposelessness far removed that of the Founding Fathers' Generation.
Brooks Adams (1848-1927) was probably the most intellectually gifted of his generation of Adamses, a historian and political scientist who was compared to Spengler and Toynbee, whose best known work was The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895)
And in the next generation Charles Francis Adams III (1866-1954) served as Secretary of the Navy under President Hoover.
And, while not a direct descendant of John, Eisenhower's controversial Chief of Staff Sherman Adams (1899-1986) did descend from that same immigrant Henry mentioned above.
Though the Adams family (see what I did there? and as it happens Charles Addams WAS related to these Adamses) has retreated from the national stage, there are numerous other American legacies that bear their name. One special one that I want to celebrate, because it's in my home state) is Fort Adams in Newport, Rhode Island. Commissioned by Adams during his Presidency, the original fort went up during the War of 1812. The present one went into service in 1841, and was used by the military until about 1950, whereupon it became a public park. Since the 1980s it has been the home of the Newport Jazz Festival and the Newport Folk Festival, two great American cultural institutions. Certainly a worthier legacy than the Alien and Sedition Acts!
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