Passionate Sage (31 page)

 

If the divergence of the reputations of Adams and Jefferson would have surprised most of their contemporaries, hindsight allows us to see that the historical forces responsible for Jefferson's ascent and Adams's relative obscurity were in place and readily discernible at the time of their mutual departure. On July 7, 1826, after the funeral ceremony for Adams at Quincy, a delegation of officials and dignitaries were invited to inspect one of the earliest railroad tracks in the new nation, which was being laid in order to transport Quincy granite a few miles away to the site of the new Bunker Hill Monument. This was exactly the kind of poignant and symbolic scene that Henry Adams, the great-grandson of the man just buried, would have found irresistibly evocative. For in the space of a few hours and within the compass of a few hundred yards, the dignitaries witnessed the death of the revolutionary generation and the birth of the major symbol of the Industrial Revolution, which was to transform the world of Adams and Jefferson more completely and more quickly than any force in modern history.
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Somehow, even the overly ripe and ever ironical intelligence of Henry Adams, the most brilliant of the Adams progeny, missed the significance of his ancestor's funeral. This was unfortunate, for the scene captured perfectly the central theme of his nine-volume
History
as well as his autobiographical masterpiece,
The Education of Henry Adams
. In both of those works, Henry Adams demonstrated a flair for marking the moment when emergent technology appeared on the American landscape and accelerated social change at dizzying rates of speed: Robert Fulton's steamboat paddling up the Hudson River, the original machine in the garden; the opening of the railroad between Boston and Albany, destined to carry commerce and people out of New England; Cunard steamers cutting through Massachusetts Bay like knives severing Boston's connection with the past. The funeral scene at Quincy was equally symbolic, showing the chasm that separated the world of the revolutionary generation from the world in which Henry Adams came of age. It evoked the sense in which anyone grounded in the eighteenth-century values of Adams and Jefferson had become irrelevant and anachronistic by the middle of the next century.
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When the eulogists of 1826 spoke of “the end of an era,” they meant that the passing of the two patriarchs had ended any direct connection with the generation that had led the movement for American independence. Henry Adams meant something more than that. He meant that the social conditions and corresponding attitudes and values of the nation underwent a
deep
change during the very years that the Sage of Quincy was living out his retirement. In his formulation, the first truly “lost generation” in American history happened to be nothing less than the Founding Fathers themselves. For they, including both Adams and Jefferson, were rooted in the “lost world” that preceded the emergence of full-blown democracy, industrial capitalism, modern technology, and liberal ideology.

What Henry Adams offered as an inspired but wholly intuitive insight, one that he used in his
Education
to dramatize his own alleged irrelevance, has become a staple of historical scholarship over the past quarter century. The central feature of American history is no longer an event—the American Revolution or the Civil War—but a process. Whether it is called “industrialization” or “modernization,” there is a scholarly consensus that this process altered the social structure and the mentality of America forever. If the Civil War has remained the Niagara Falls of American history, full of dramatic prowess and power, the first quarter of the nineteenth century has become the Grand Canyon, where a deep divide separates the way we were from the way we are, what is called “traditional” society or “classical” values from “modern” or “liberal” America.
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Merely to state the reigning scholarly interpretation in this bald and categorical fashion is to expose the verbal and conceptual limitations inherent in what might be called “the paradigmatic approach,” which imposes a set of generically labelled categories on a stream of flowing events that, by their very nature, defy being fit into geometric shapes, resist being boxed and crated and shipped to our contemporary understanding with “Traditional” or “Modern” stencilled across their surfaces. The distinguishing feature of America's evolution toward modern democratic capitalism—Adams would say its most crucial feature—was its
gradual
character. Some historians have detected the seeds of modern or liberal values planted within the first settlers of Virginia or Massachusetts; other historians have insisted that the clinching supremacy of full-blooded capitalism did not establish itself until after the Civil War. What we have, in short, is a consensus that decisive social and economic changes produced a “before” and “after” effect in American history; an apparently unavoidable problem with clumsy language; and widespread disagreement about the precise moment when this great transformation actually occurred.
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While the language problem will continue to haunt us, the timing problem can be quickly resolved. The reason historians have such a difficult time locating the moment when American social conditions and corresponding attitudes changed is that such a moment does not exist. These changes, whatever we choose to call them, were not a discrete event; they were part of a process. Both Adams and Jefferson lived through a crucial phase of this process, which had begun before they were born and continued after their death. In that sense, they both stood astride the Great Divide in American history, a rather awkward posture in theory. But because they were mercifully unburdened with the verbal and paradigmatic baggage that subsequent historians would impose, they had little sense of living schizophrenic lives or harboring irreconcilable urges in their personalities. Strictly speaking, however, which is to say from a purely historicist perspective, both Adams and Jefferson internalized a mixture of old and new, traditional and modern, classical and liberal values. But the mix was somewhat different in the two men. And this difference became the major reason for the divergence of their respective reputations. For Jefferson's legacy was able to negotiate brilliantly the social and attitudinal shift in nineteenth-century America. The Adams legacy was not; it became one of the victims of the triumph of liberalism.

The dramatic difference between their respective reputations, then, was not exclusively or even primarily a function of the different personalities. To be sure, part of Jefferson's ability to translate across the ages was a result of his nearly infinite suppleness and pliability, the elusive and enigmatic quality that Adams had often criticized and sometimes admired. Henry Adams captured this quality more succinctly and deftly than any other commentator. “The contradictions in Jefferson's character have always rendered it a fascinating study,” he wrote in his
History
. “A few broad strokes of the brush would paint the portraits of all the early Presidents with this exception…but Jefferson could be painted only touch by touch, with a fine pencil, and the perfection of the likeness depended upon the shifting and uncertain flicker of its semi-transparent shadows.” Adams, on the other hand, was neither elusive nor enigmatic. And he tended to prefer standing in the full glare of sunlight, away from those flickering shadows. If Jefferson was the Mona Lisa of American heroes, Adams was one of those faces in a portrait by John Singleton Copley, close to the canvas, drawn with linear precision, looking squarely and directly back at the viewer.
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But Adams's lack of pliability or adaptability through the ages, while certainly a factor that helps explain his relative obscurity, cannot by itself account for his inability to translate. For, in the end, the underlying problem for the Adams legacy was
not
primarily the directness of his character so much as the character of his thought. In the search for a usable past, too much in Adams was simply not usable. And this brings us back to the transformation theme originally defined by Henry Adams and subsequently developed by recent scholars of early American history. Best to put the question squarely and unequivocally: what was it that grounded Adams in the eighteenth century so deeply and firmly that his reputation, unlike Jefferson's, could not fly across the ages and find a hospitable landing spot on this side of modernity?

To pose the question in this fashion is to suggest an answer that goes beyond surface considerations of imagery and malleability. Put simply, the deepest sources of Adams's thought and character were incompatible with the emergent values of nineteenth-century liberalism. In his political thinking, to be sure, Adams did embrace two of the central tenets of the liberal tradition: the doctrine of popular sovereignty, that is, the notion that political power ultimately derives from the people; and the principle of equality before the law, the view that justice is blind to the class, race, or gender of the accused. In these two areas, Adams was a liberal. Beyond these seminal commitments, however, he was unprepared to go. He was, in all other respects, the archetypal, unreconstructed republican, fundamentally resistant to an individualistic ethic, as well as to the belief in the benign effect of the marketplace, to the faith in the infallibility of popular majorities, to the conviction that America enjoyed providential protection from the corruptions of history, to celebrations of freedom undisciplined by government or, at the personal level, the release of passionate energies unmitigated by internal checks and balances.

The list, in fact, could go on almost endlessly, for it did not depend on books he had read or ideas he had acquired by formal education. The more encompassing meaning of “education” later used rather mischievously by Henry Adams—the entire scheme of pre-modern values and convictions in which the mind and heart of an eighteenth-century American was saturated—defined his character. Even those infamous Adams eccentricities—the perverse aversion to popularity, the punishing self-scrutiny and self-denial, the suspicion of success and corresponding comfort with hardship—were all intensified versions of mainstream republican tenets, which presupposed the easy if not inevitable corruptibility of all persons and nations, and the need to subsume selfish urges to larger public purposes. The Adams brand of republicanism was even more ascetic than the norm, born as it was out of his youthful decision to serve the public rather than God, but bringing the same moral fervor to the secular cause that he would have brought to the sacred.

And if American politics is conceived of as a religion with a set of creedal commitments, the catechism one learns early on makes Adams into a heretic. The catechism of liberal America was dominated by references to “freedom,” “equality,” “democracy,” “individualism.” The Adams catechism was dominated by references to “control,” “balance,” “aristocracy,” and “public responsibility.” Cultures and nations generally select the heroes they need. For a nation perched on the edge of an undeveloped continent, about ready to explode onto the world economically, full of energy and natural resources, as well as a youthful sense of immortality and destiny, just about the last thing needed was a voice counselling caution, social responsibility, and reconciliation to eventual decline.

The loss of that voice, however, meant the alteration of the American dialogue originally symbolized by Adams and Jefferson. The version that came to dominate public discourse in the nineteenth century, as we have seen, was initially a monologue between different sides of the Jeffersonian tradition; then, later in the century and beyond, it became a dialogue between Jefferson and Hamilton over the necessary means by which to reach agreed-upon ends, what Herbert Croly memorialized as “the promise of American life.” What was different about the Adams-Jefferson dialogue was that it was not primarily a debate over means so much as over the ends themselves, not just a disagreement over how to fulfill the promise of the American Revolution so much as a conflict over what that promise had been.

For, at its nub or core, Adams's vision remained traditional and, as they say, pre-modern or pre-liberal. His whole way of thinking about politics and society resisted the assumption that the individual was the sovereign unit in the social equation. And, again unlike Jefferson but more typical of other members of the revolutionary generation, he did not conceive of personal or private happiness as the ultimate goal for government. His ideological orientation was inherently social and collectivistic, driven by the assumption that individual strivings—what Jefferson had immortalized in the phrase “the pursuit of happiness”—must naturally and necessarily be subordinated to public imperatives if the human potential unleashed by the American Revolution were to achieve its fullest realization. Ironically, it was precisely this kind of socialistic perspective that Herbert Croly called for at the end of his famous book; but by the time he wrote, the Adams legacy had been buried and forgotten for so long that it was beyond either memory or recovery. Indeed, given the nearly total triumph of Jeffersonian liberalism in nineteenth-century America, the traditional cast of Adams's thinking appeared not just irrelevant but even alien. Perhaps that fact provides the final piece of our puzzled explanation for Adams's mysterious obscurity: speaking from the far side of the Great Divide in our history, we can no longer hear his voice as recognizably American.
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And there, with one important exception, is where the matter has remained throughout the twentieth century. The exception began to become visible in the 1950s, almost certainly as a consequence of the availability of those multiple boxes of letters and diaries that Adams had once threatened to inflict on posterity. Soon after the roughly 400,000 items that comprised
The Adams Papers
were put on microfilm and then, even more tellingly, after a modern letterpress edition began to issue forth from the archives of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the reputation of John Adams began to ascend within the community of professional historians.
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