John Adams: Realist of the revolution

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2002 by Allen, Brooke

It is now two centuries since John Adams lost the presidency to his longtime friend and political foe Thomas Jefferson and retired from public life. He had been one of the most brilliant and energetic of the Founding Fathers, the first great nationalist, possibly the most influential architect of the new nation's government and identity. He also possessed an extraordinary level of personal probity that few, if any, American public figures have equaled. In 1801 he left the presidency, he said, with a conscience "clear as a crystal glass," and an examination of his record in office shows him, astoundingly, to be nearly justified in making this claim. As Joseph Ellis, so far his canniest and most insightful biographer, put it, "Adams stands out as a statesman of unquestioned character who truly did prefer being right to being president."

Yet so far Adams has never achieved the mythical status of his great contemporaries, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Jefferson. Even during his lifetime it was becoming evident that he would never share in the adulation accorded these chosen few. This was partly, he believed, because he had not courted the public or succeeded in fashioning a charismatic image. "Popularity was never my mistress, nor was I ever, or shall I ever be a popular man. But one thing I know, a man must be sensible of the errors of the people, and on his guard against them, and must run the risk of their displeasure sometimes, or he will never do them any good in the long run." True enough, but the statement would seem wildly idealistic to most of today's politicians, with their reckless addiction to opinion polls.

Another factor in Adams' image problem might lie, simply and unfairly, with his physical stature and his demeanor. Of medium height and distinctly portly, Adams presented a faintly comic appearance that his unbridled tongue and temper did nothing to improve. He did not have Washington's fine Roman mien, or Jefferson's devastatingly attractive fatal flaws; his virtues were of the bourgeois variety, not very sexy. Nor did he, like Franklin, turn his unprepossessing physique to his own advantage, creating a homespun, backwoods, authentically "American" persona. He was constitutionally averse to posing and posturing. He could be brilliantly eloquent-in his two-hour speech urging the ratification of the Declaration of Independence, he spoke "with a power of thought and expression that moved us from our seats," according to Jefferson-but he was fatally deficient in the all-- important quality of politic reticence, of which both Washington and Jefferson were past masters. Adams understood this, but what he called "the gift of silence" seemed beyond him. "Eloquence in public Assemblies is not the surest road to Fame and Preferment," he admitted, "at least unless it be used with great caution, very rarely, and with great Reserve."

There were other, more substantial reasons why it was Jefferson and not Adams who emerged as the new Republic's poster boy. Jefferson was a dreamer and a visionary with a uniquely felicitous gift for giving verbal expression to everything America wanted to believe about itself, while Adams was a realist-not a cynic, but a simple realist-who recognized the fatal limitations that human nature must necessarily place on human potential. Adams looked to the bad old world, Jefferson to the glorious future, and it goes without saying that the Jeffersonian message was vastly more attractive.

Their attitudes to the French Revolution were a case in point. Adams, like his contemporary Edmund Burke, correctly predicted bloodshed and eventual tyranny even in the Revolution's early days. "Everything will be pulled down. So much seems certain. But what will be built up? Are there any principles of political architecture?" He was deeply skeptical, too, about the ideology (a neologism he approved, amused by its likeness to "idiocy") in which it was fomented: he was scornful of the French philosophes with their naive faith in Reason, remarking that "it would seem that human Reason and human Conscience, though I believe there are such things, are not a Match, for human Passions, human Imagination, and human Enthusiasm." In old age he commented on the Revolution with a brutal realism guaranteed to distress political radicals from that day to this:

I acknowledge that the most unaccountable phenomenon I ever beheld, in the seventy-seven, almost, years that I lived, was to see men of the most extensive knowledge and deepest reflection entertain for a moment an opinion that a democratic republic could be erected in a nation of five-and-twenty millions people, four-and-twenty millions and five hundred thousand of whom could neither read nor write.

Jefferson, on the other hand, took a stubbornly optimistic view of the Revolution's eventual outcome, serene in the belief that violence acted as a necessary and even desirable cleansing agent. "My own affections," he wrote, "have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than it is now." This strikes a chilling note, and reminds us that Jefferson was the progenitor of a strain of doctrinaire American radicalism that would one day tolerate and even condone the genocidal purges of Mao and Stalin.