Nation building

National Review, Dec 31, 2005 by Algis Valiunas

The History, unlike Beaumarchais but very like the operatic masterpiece that Mozart carved from Beaumarchais's cavalier flummery, is instinct with the sense of tragedy barely averted. Wills tries to make the case that Adams and the Tolstoy of War and Peace share a faith, inimical to the tragic sense of life, in the radiant future--a future toward which Providence is leading Tolstoy's Russia, and the innate wisdom of the people, served by its leaders, is guiding America. But in fact Adams, unlike Tolstoy, is ever aware that matters could have turned out otherwise, and he is relieved rather than crowing. The imprudence of some of the greatest men America has ever produced almost destroyed the youthful nation.

And as for the people's innate wisdom, here is what Adams says toward the end of the History, in the chapter on American character in 1817, which Wills considers the definitive testimonial to America's emerging greatness: "That the individual should rise to a higher order either of intelligence or morality than had existed in former ages was not to be expected, for the United States offered less field for the development of individuality than had been offered by older and smaller societies. The chief function of the American Union was to raise the average standard of intelligence and well-being ... but much doubt remained whether the intelligence belonged to a high order, or proved a high morality.... Time alone would decide whether it would result in a high or a low national ideal." Time has not yet decided.

Wills fails even to recognize the supreme question that Adams's history leaves portentously in the air: How great can a democratic nation be without men of great prudence to lead it? For it is not folk wisdom and popular virtue that Adams shows supreme in this world. It is chance--dumb luck--which might just as easily have run the other way, because the best men lacked the force of mind to command it.

Mr. Valiunas is a literary journalist and the author of Churchill's Military Histories.