Blowing the dust off another Founding Father

Americans are eager to read about the original “greatest generation,” Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington and John Adams, as well as some of the lesser lights in the constellation who won the Revolution, drafted the Constitution and inaugurated a government that has endured for more than 200 years. Popular interest in the founding era is certainly greater today than at the time of the noisy observances of the 1776 bicentennial nearly three decades ago.

The revival seems to have started in the 1990s, some time after the collapse of the Soviet Union raised the United States to undisputed global preeminence. Subsequent events have only strengthened the impression that, for better or worse, this nation stands alone, a singular power in the world. It is tempting to look for a link between recent history and the current preoccupation with national origins. Are we looking for guidance from the 18th century? For evidence that imperial reach was part of the plan from the start? Do readers simply want to glory in a glorious past, or is there an uneasy suspicion that, in getting to the top, we have somehow lost our way?

The most commercially successful books have been character-driven biographies, more celebratory than interpretative in approach, that tend to skirt the ideological complexities of the American Revolution in favor of vivid storytelling. The latest example is from James Grant, a financial analyst and the author of four books on financial history. One might have expected him to pick Hamilton, the first U.S. Treasury secretary, but instead he’s produced the lively and reasonably compact biography “John Adams.” One has to admire the pluck of any writer, even one as skillful as Grant, who offers a new Adams biography. Any Adams book is in danger of being overshadowed by David McCullough’s mammoth “John Adams,” which has sold something like 2 million copies in hardcover and was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for biography. But this new look at the second president succeeds on its own terms. Grant is a fine prose stylist who has borrowed heavily from another talented writer -- Adams. The result is a highly readable treatment of the Massachusetts patriot that examines his early life as well as his public career.

From his remarkable writings -- his diaries, letters and unfinished autobiography -- John Adams speaks with a sparkling, almost modern sensibility. The only other member of the club that can talk to us so directly is Franklin, the current biographers’ favorite. Adams’ humanity stands out in the founding era’s gallery of stiff, bewigged patriarchs. He feels like a Founding Father you can cuddle up to -- a wise, self-deprecating and endearingly cranky American original. He’s also an appealing biographical subject because it’s easy to judge him as underrated. (Adams himself certainly thought so. “Mausoleums, statues, monuments will never be erected to me,” he predicted with some accuracy.) Yet perhaps only Washington did more than Adams to secure American independence.

Adams first emerged as a leader of the patriotic resistance to British imperial policies in his native Massachusetts, the most defiant of the 13 restive colonies. Massachusetts sent him to the Continental Congress. His combative energy harnessed to a deep intelligence soon made him the most influential delegate, extolled by Jefferson as “our Colossus on the floor.” He was a thoroughgoing radical and the early, uncompromising advocate of a complete break with Britain. “The Atlas of American Independence” was how another delegate described him. Eventually the congress sent Adams to Europe as a member of the commission appointed to negotiate a peace with war-weary Britain. After the 1783 treaty confirmed American independence, Adams became the first U.S. emissary to the mother country. He returned home, served two terms as Washington’s vice president, then was elected president. Adams was the first one-term president, defeated by his own vice president, Jefferson, in the tumultuous election of 1800.

Grant recounts all of this with verve, wit and some eloquence. The author’s day job is putting out an interest-rate newsletter, so it’s not surprising that he goes into the intricacies of Adams’ eventual success in securing vital loans from Dutch bankers for what Grant calls the “worse-than-broke” United States. The Americans were “in the clinical sense, uncreditworthy,” Grant writes. Against his frugal inclinations, Adams was forced to offer speculative yields of more than double the going rate to attract investors, making him, Grant suggests, the first American “junk-bond promoter.” He also devotes considerable attention to Adams’ religious life, tracing his progress from a conventional New England Congregationalist to a soon-to-be-conventional New England Unitarian. By the end of his life, Adams “rejected the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and the infallibility of Scripture.” He clung stubbornly to the necessity of belief in an afterlife, claiming, “I am certain, there is nothing in this world worth living for but hope, and every hope will fail us, if the last hope, that of a future state, is extinguished.” Grant seems to be saying that John Adams’ service entitles him to a more conspicuous place in the American pantheon. But, like others before him, the biographer has been sufficiently dazzled by Adams’ charms to fail to appreciate just how perverse, retrograde and finally irrelevant this particular founder could be. As essential as he was to the winning of independence, Adams got himself on the wrong side of history in the business of setting the new nation on the course it was to follow. Adams believed in republican government, but his brand of classical republicanism, distrustful of the people, committed to the rule of elite, was at odds with the boisterous popular democracy Americans were embracing. Not for nothing was the election that made Jefferson president -- and ended Adams’ political career -- called the “Revolution of 1800.” It was seen as a second American Revolution, a reaffirmation of the egalitarian spirit of 1776. Grant’s affectionate portrait does not acknowledge that Adams’ historical reputation succumbed to self-inflicted wounds. *