John Adams: Book Review of the McCullough Biography

This is an old book review I’ve written up: and I’m posting on the blog because, well, its better than letting it molder on my desktop.

The Original: paunchy, stolid . . . & heroic?

John Adams Review

McCullough’s John Adams is a worthy read. McCullough has the art of storytelling; he knows how to make his subject powerful, compelling and relatable. By the end, the reader sees John Adams as larger than life, but  relatable, as well. The balance between Hero and Everyman is well done; you can admire him for the sheer scale of his project and empathize with him in the thick of his struggles, personal mortifications, familial trials, and political rivalries.

What made Adams a Hero: his cause (the idea of political liberty) and his absolute (heroic) dedication to it. What made him an Everyman: McCullough’s attention to the dense web of relationships—wife, family, friends, mentors, colleagues, and rivals—that he negotiates in the course of life and work. The ending was superb . . . transforming a quote from one of the letters written by Adams on personal aggravation, disappointment, and the grand delight of life, into the man’s own epitaph. John Adams says the final word for himself, and what words. They sum up both his reflectiveness, his perspective, his humaneness in the complex emotions, and his sense of humor

The Man
It’s worth saying a few words on Adams himself. Character study is a pretty fascinating business: to chart out someone’s personal qualities, and sometimes use it as a mirror to further our own goals of personal excellence. I’m awed by Adams’  devotion to reading: it’s part of the 18th century culture of letters I guess, to see reading as a disciplined pursuit, rather than a hobby or distraction. I guess it considerably helped Adams that Youtube wasn’t around at that time.

“Drawing up reading lists and embarking on a course of study is what any man or woman of excellence must do. One must master absolutely some areas of knowledge and thought (in his case, the classics and law) not neglecting to revisit and re-inform himself of them throughout life, while all the while reading and having correspondence with individuals from diverse fields of work so that one is a truly well rounded individual.”

His correspondence with Benjamin Rush, the physician and founder of modern psychiatry, is a great example of this ethic. Also, we can learn from Adams the discipline to keep a diary and record impressions and lessons of life that might otherwise be lost like “leaves on a stormy wind.” According to McCullough, Adams was faithful diary writer, never swerving even if it were to jot down a line through the turbulent times of his life.

Paul Giamatti looks a lot better . . . he's got the resolute look down cold.

Personally, what I admire most intensely is Adams’ dedication and loyalty to relationships, no matter what the personal cost. His dedication in personally answering the thousands of letters that came during his presidential tenure is a case in point. His long friendship with Jefferson is a good illustration. The regard and attachment he cemented with Jefferson, during their tenures in the congressional committee of the Declaration of Independence, ambassadorship in France and England, and other posts, was plenty tested during the later years of presidential rivalry. In his writings and business dealings, Jefferson comes across as rather cold (hello, some of the man’s slaves were his own kids . . . whom he freed only on his deathbed). The mechanistic, Newtonian view of the universe he subscribed to as a man of the Enlightenment, in which the most powerful law was perhaps self-interest, is reflected in the way he approached human connections as well.

But even when Adams learned of Jefferson’s treachery in hiring muckrackers in a smear campaign during their presidential battles, even while he came to revise his understanding of the Jefferson behind the courtliness and gentlemanly reserve, he still maintained connections that somewhat flickered back into life during their post-retirement correspondence. He never slammed the door shut on a relationship he valued.

We can also find plenty to admire in his relationship with his wife, Abigail . . . the letters are amazing, sketching a meeting of minds and personality. Clearly, the two loved each other as husband and wife, friends, companions, helpmates: a supportive, multi-textured marriage. She was his equal in every way, and one of his most trusted advisers in the presidency; he respected her above the mutual bonds of dependence. A man’s capacity to see his wife as an equal is nothing to sneeze at, certainly not in the 18th century (nor today, despite the lipservice that’s paid to it . . . we are living in an age when the ideal woman is to be a Kim Kardashian, I suppose).

The Workers for Political Liberty
The ideas were already there. Jefferson and Adams didn’t come up with anything; we can ignore the somewhat grandiose claims of US mythmakers on the Founding Fathers inventing modern democracy. They wrote, spoke, and implemented ideas that had already been developed by Locke, Montesqieu, Hume, Hobbes, and other philosophes (who themselves took plenty of leaves out of scholarship from Africa, the Islamic world, etc . . . but that is a subject for another day).

But in Adams and Jefferson, we can also see a tremendous contradiction in these philosophies of social/political independence. First, European universalism-exceptionalism: their belief in man’s inalienable rights conflicted with Euro-tribal/national racism. It’s quite a convenient way to limit the “inalienable” clause by qualifying whose a man and who isn’t; and obviously, the peoples of Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East as man, weren’t men. Second, suffrage and political representation granted to citizens  vs with class elitism, where the “natural aristocracy” as Adams puts it, was supposed temper the impulses of the “mob” (Hobbes’s distrust of human nature, conflicting with political rights).

In fact, Adams horrified reaction to France’s revolutionary government instituting a unicameral legislature is a good example of this interesting schizophrenia. The brutal crackdowns in Shays’ Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion (essentially led by dispossessed farmers, who saw no benefits from the Revolution and did end up losing the land and moving west) is another. Jefferson’s stirring eloquence against the evils of Negro Slavery, contrasted by his refusal to free his own slaves so that they could labor for his debt on grounds of “self preservation” (but which really meant preservation of his princely lifestyle).

The later political careers of men like Adams and Jefferson are quite interesting; they show how the liberals of the Revolution became the conservatives of the new American government. The Revolution ended up replacing one elite gobbling power and resources, with another. At the end of the day, the rebellion was about the fact that the British were cutting into too great a share of the American planter/mercantile class’ profits. The revolutionary experiment was about shattering a political glass ceiling, only to swiftly replace it with an economic one. These are my critiques of McCullough’s portrait work: it’s too glowing, too caught in the golden haze of post-national romanticism. The good old days . . . the larger than life Founding Fathers . . . well, perhaps the US hasn’t corrupted the political program they set down, perhaps the later generations followed the blue print only too well.