A larger-than-life portrait of Adams

John Adams

The American Presidents Series

John Patrick Diggins

Times Books: 202 pp., $20

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“John Adams” is one in the estimable series of short biographies of American presidents published by Times Books under the general editorship of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. “It is the aim of the American Presidents Series,” writes Schlesinger, “to present the grand panorama of our chief executives in volumes compact enough for the busy reader, lucid enough for the student, authoritative enough for the scholar.”

Some books in the series have delivered on that promise -- Louis Auchincloss’ “Theodore Roosevelt,” for example. “John Adams” is an irritating exception.

John Patrick Diggins, a professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has produced a little work that is more contemporary polemic than considered meditation upon the complexities of his subject, one of the most interesting, admirable and maddeningly difficult men in American history.

Diggins uses Adams as a stick to beat left-wing college professors, the 1960s, contemporary American society and the excesses of politics and democracy. He presents Adams, in fact, as the only virtuous American president after Washington. The 1800 election, which Thomas Jefferson won to succeed Adams, Diggins writes, “freed the political mind of conscience and made America safe for sin.”

“Henceforth,” Diggins says, “there would be little relationship between theory and practice in electoral politics, little possibility that what a politician said while running for office had any bearing on what he did once in office. With the increasing democratization of American political life, government left truth and morality behind to follow the path of power and expediency, rushing after public opinion and bowing to it, succumbing to what [de] Tocqueville called parties of ‘consequence’ rather than of principle and Emerson called a civic culture of ‘cunning,’ a politics of deception and clever image management.... “

“But during Adams’ four years in office,” Diggins concludes, “the buck did stop, and for one, brief episode in American history the thought of truth shamed the tumult of politics.”

Poor Adams. For 200 years too little has been thought of him, and now, in this book, too much. Diggins seems to have adopted Adams’ grumpy great-grandson Henry Adams, the historian, as his model for temperament, if not for range and intellectual power.

Diggins’ indispensable antagonist to Adams is, of course, Jefferson. Diggins can scarcely be too dismissive of Jefferson: “An indulgent consumer who came to be dependent upon his creditors, a plantation owner who depended on the labor of his slaves, Jefferson also became a politician dependent on a political party to serve his political purposes.” Adams, though, was concerned with “civic virtue and the public good.”

Diggins brushes aside as inconsequential for national security Adams’ signing of the federalist Alien and Sedition Acts -- those early and gross assaults on Americans’ civil liberties -- yet goes out of his way to declare Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase unconstitutional.

In looking at the America of Adams and Jefferson, Diggins most definitely prefers New England to Virginia. Though Diggins acknowledges that Adams found the ideas of “frigid John Calvin” a bar to his joining the ministry, he regrets that America has lost a sense of guilt.

Stern Puritan New England, with the thunder of the Hebrew prophets in the background, is the landscape he likes. He compares Adams’ ideas on governments and men favorably to Bismarck’s; of the confrontation between Adams and Talleyrand, he remarks that it “could well suggest the difference between a slouching Catholic and a strait Puritan.”

Acknowledging that Adams had some shortcomings, Diggins writes: “The two worst things that can be said about President Adams are that he behaved neither as a politician nor as a salesman, neither as one who would please his party by thinking only about the next election nor one who would stoop to peddling himself and his policies to the public.” That sums up the stiff-necked Adams pretty nicely. The trouble is, to think about the next election, a necessity for a politician, is not necessarily to think only about it, and to take one’s case to the people is not necessarily to stoop to peddling.

Adams failed where the men who came before and after him succeeded. Washington and Jefferson inspired the people. Adams did not. He did not meet that requirement for a president; he was certain very often that he was right, and sometimes he was -- but he was not a leader.