John Adams was born in a place with a funny name: Braintree, Massachusetts, which fact was bound to give rise to jokes having “Braintree” in them. And indeed, because of his affected pompous manners and natural corpulence, he was jokingly nicknamed His Lordship Duke of Braintree, particularly after making the rather ridiculous suggestion that the President of the United States ought to be afforded a much loftier form of address than just “Mr. President.” As the first ever vice president and second president of the country, he was entitled to his opinion, but in this particular case the American nation has well chosen to stick to the contrary opinion, keeping the simple, but immensely dignified form of address “Mr. President” from the very beginning all the way to our time.
Despite being habitually caricatured, oftentimes mean-spiritedly, Adams was a good president, contributing, on the balance to his nation’s historical greatness. I have always felt that he was somehow underappreciated, and for this reason had developed a special affection for him, long before he was affectionately portrayed as “a man of honesty and wisdom” by the historian David McCullough in his 2001 monograph John Adams.
President Number Two John Adams can be well introduced by the witty remark about him made by Thomas Jefferson in a 1787 Letter to James Madison: “He is vain, irritable, and a bad calculator of the force and probable effect of the motives that govern men. This is all the ill which can possibly be said of him. He is as disinterested as the Being who made him.” If indeed all the vices John Adams possessed are the ones enumerated here, as Jefferson suggests, he must have been as close to a saint as one could possibly get, and, at least, ought to have been made into an impressive legend, which, alas, was never to happen, I don’t know why… or, perhaps, I do: He did not have the right vices to make himself colorful enough, while the hagiographers did not care much for the niche he occupied between America’s two early saints: Washington and Jefferson. Ironically, it was this fairly recent biography of his, by McCullough, which may have stirred the stale waters of indifference regarding his person, toward some measure of interest and sympathy.
John Adams played a huge role in the American Revolution. As a lawyer, he defended the colonial claims against the Crown, supported the colonies’ push for independence, and, when it was achieved, he promoted the idea of checks and balances inspired by the writings of Montesquieu. In 1775 he nominated Washington to be commander in chief of the virtually nonexistent army. Next year he formally defended the Declaration of Independence on the Congressional floor. Then in 1787 he published his Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, a very important paper in support of the separation of powers, even if criticized for its aristocratic tone, which was, apparently, too much for some egalitarian members of Congress.
Adams, perhaps more than anybody else, was the epitome of the non-political politician, who saw himself in the role of the President, like Washington, as the leader of the whole nation, and was thus unconcerned with the relevance of political parties, and with the very concept of partisan opposition. As a result, he was badly misunderstood on at least two historical counts.
To start with, he was inaccurately viewed as a staunch Federalist and a loyal member of the Hamilton Party, which was in opposition to the Jeffersonian idea of more personal liberty and less Federal government. But in reality, he was the most liberal member within the Federalist Party, and never supported Hamilton’s wish to go to war with France. In fact, refusing to do so in 1799, and thus frustrating the ongoing preparations for such a war, conducted by the Hamilton hawks, he was from then on viewed by Federalist extremists as their worst enemy, as a result of which he would become the only one-term president among the first five.
Note: Do also bear in mind that the Federalism of his time greatly differed from the “Federalism” of today. At the dawn of America’s history as a nation, Federalism was primarily motivated by the desire to create e pluribus something unum. Incidentally, none other than the great President Lincoln, nearly a century later, ironically represents perhaps the most extreme example of “federalism” in American history, even if the Fort Sumter incident that started the Civil War made it virtually impossible for him to avoid it. The same cannot be said of today’s “federalist” proclivities (not to be confused with President Reagan’s New Federalism, which was centrifugal, rather than centripetal, and which had become one of the casualties of 9/11), infringing upon the rights of individual states in every way, in an apparent drive toward a greater authoritarian control of the federal government. (A good example of this was the selective commandeering [formally, individual activations] of state national guards [and even of the state troopers!] for federal military service in Iraq, during the George W. Bush Administration, leaving the states woefully shorthanded in responding to state emergencies. According to the existing laws, however, the federal government can legally mobilize the National Guard only collectively in wars and national emergencies and serving as the first line of defense in cases of immediate grave danger to the United States.) End of note.
Now, as for the rather infamous case of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, enacted against France, the fact is that they never originated with Adams personally, although he did sign them, and his subsequent decision not to go to war against their intended target might well remove at least some sting from his later detractors’ condemnation of him as the one responsible for them, and, therefore, as an enemy of civil freedoms.
I have always liked John Adams, and I still like him. But despite the flurry of public interest, elicited by the above-mentioned McCullough biography of his, I much doubt that the attention span of the American public which, as we know, is not too great, and needs incessant rekindling of the most exploitative kind, will keep, in our twenty-first century, preoccupied with other things, either the short-lived celebrity status of Adams or even his name in American history books, in sufficient focus for the public to still remember his name after these long ten years that have passed since McCullough book’s publication, which, nine-eleven and all, now seems like ages ago.
Despite being habitually caricatured, oftentimes mean-spiritedly, Adams was a good president, contributing, on the balance to his nation’s historical greatness. I have always felt that he was somehow underappreciated, and for this reason had developed a special affection for him, long before he was affectionately portrayed as “a man of honesty and wisdom” by the historian David McCullough in his 2001 monograph John Adams.
President Number Two John Adams can be well introduced by the witty remark about him made by Thomas Jefferson in a 1787 Letter to James Madison: “He is vain, irritable, and a bad calculator of the force and probable effect of the motives that govern men. This is all the ill which can possibly be said of him. He is as disinterested as the Being who made him.” If indeed all the vices John Adams possessed are the ones enumerated here, as Jefferson suggests, he must have been as close to a saint as one could possibly get, and, at least, ought to have been made into an impressive legend, which, alas, was never to happen, I don’t know why… or, perhaps, I do: He did not have the right vices to make himself colorful enough, while the hagiographers did not care much for the niche he occupied between America’s two early saints: Washington and Jefferson. Ironically, it was this fairly recent biography of his, by McCullough, which may have stirred the stale waters of indifference regarding his person, toward some measure of interest and sympathy.
John Adams played a huge role in the American Revolution. As a lawyer, he defended the colonial claims against the Crown, supported the colonies’ push for independence, and, when it was achieved, he promoted the idea of checks and balances inspired by the writings of Montesquieu. In 1775 he nominated Washington to be commander in chief of the virtually nonexistent army. Next year he formally defended the Declaration of Independence on the Congressional floor. Then in 1787 he published his Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, a very important paper in support of the separation of powers, even if criticized for its aristocratic tone, which was, apparently, too much for some egalitarian members of Congress.
Adams, perhaps more than anybody else, was the epitome of the non-political politician, who saw himself in the role of the President, like Washington, as the leader of the whole nation, and was thus unconcerned with the relevance of political parties, and with the very concept of partisan opposition. As a result, he was badly misunderstood on at least two historical counts.
To start with, he was inaccurately viewed as a staunch Federalist and a loyal member of the Hamilton Party, which was in opposition to the Jeffersonian idea of more personal liberty and less Federal government. But in reality, he was the most liberal member within the Federalist Party, and never supported Hamilton’s wish to go to war with France. In fact, refusing to do so in 1799, and thus frustrating the ongoing preparations for such a war, conducted by the Hamilton hawks, he was from then on viewed by Federalist extremists as their worst enemy, as a result of which he would become the only one-term president among the first five.
Note: Do also bear in mind that the Federalism of his time greatly differed from the “Federalism” of today. At the dawn of America’s history as a nation, Federalism was primarily motivated by the desire to create e pluribus something unum. Incidentally, none other than the great President Lincoln, nearly a century later, ironically represents perhaps the most extreme example of “federalism” in American history, even if the Fort Sumter incident that started the Civil War made it virtually impossible for him to avoid it. The same cannot be said of today’s “federalist” proclivities (not to be confused with President Reagan’s New Federalism, which was centrifugal, rather than centripetal, and which had become one of the casualties of 9/11), infringing upon the rights of individual states in every way, in an apparent drive toward a greater authoritarian control of the federal government. (A good example of this was the selective commandeering [formally, individual activations] of state national guards [and even of the state troopers!] for federal military service in Iraq, during the George W. Bush Administration, leaving the states woefully shorthanded in responding to state emergencies. According to the existing laws, however, the federal government can legally mobilize the National Guard only collectively in wars and national emergencies and serving as the first line of defense in cases of immediate grave danger to the United States.) End of note.
Now, as for the rather infamous case of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, enacted against France, the fact is that they never originated with Adams personally, although he did sign them, and his subsequent decision not to go to war against their intended target might well remove at least some sting from his later detractors’ condemnation of him as the one responsible for them, and, therefore, as an enemy of civil freedoms.
I have always liked John Adams, and I still like him. But despite the flurry of public interest, elicited by the above-mentioned McCullough biography of his, I much doubt that the attention span of the American public which, as we know, is not too great, and needs incessant rekindling of the most exploitative kind, will keep, in our twenty-first century, preoccupied with other things, either the short-lived celebrity status of Adams or even his name in American history books, in sufficient focus for the public to still remember his name after these long ten years that have passed since McCullough book’s publication, which, nine-eleven and all, now seems like ages ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment