Moderates: The Vital Center of American Politics, from the Founding to Today

Moderates

Moderates

The Vital Center of American Politics, from the Founding to Today

DAVID S. BROWN

University of North Carolina Press   Chapel Hill

© 2016 The University of North Carolina Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Brown, David S. (David Scott), 1966– author.

Title: Moderates : the vital center of American politics, from the Founding to Today / David S. Brown.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015042383 | ISBN 9781469629230 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469629247 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Moderation—Political aspects—United States—History. | Politicians—United States. | Political culture—United States. | Politics, Practical—United States. | United States—Politics and government.

Classification: LCC E183 .B89 2016 | DDC 306.20973—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015042383 ISBN 978-1-4696-2923-0 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4696-2924-7 (ebook)

For

Leslie, Sharon, and Julie,

my beautiful

sisters

I stood there holding my sturdy shield over both parties;

I would not let either side win a victory that was wrong.

—Solon

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Searching for the Center

Part I

Patriot Kings

  1  Between Aristocracy and Democracy

John Adams

  2  Up from Federalism

George Cabot

  3  Reckoning with the Original Sunbelt Right

John Quincy Adams

  4  The Jeffersonian Origins of the GOP

Abraham Lincoln

Part II

Progressives

  5  The Last Patrician

Henry Adams

   6  Between Privilege and Poverty

Theodore Roosevelt

  7  Losing the Square Deal Center

William Howard Taft

Part III

Pragmatists

  8  Me-Too Republicanism Meets the New Right

Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.

  9  West of Center

The Bushes

10  After Liberalism

Carter, Clinton, Obama

Conclusion

Holding the Center

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I am pleased to recognize those individuals and institutions that have aided and sustained the writing of this book. Helping me track down and access documents were a number of archivists and research librarians at Elizabethtown College’s High Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, the State Historical Society of Missouri, the Columbia University Center for Oral History, and the Library of Congress. A timely research stipend and much-appreciated release time were provided by Elizabethtown College; the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs and the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut furnished opportune travel grants. Beyond institutional support, several people kindly lent their expertise. With his own work percolating, Jeff Ludwig spent part of a long, snowy Rochester winter going over the manuscript—I hope he knows it’s much the better for his discerning comments. Kimberly Adams dissected an embryonic draft of an uncooperative introduction, raising the right points and coaxing a lazy author into a clearer accentuation of his ideas. I am further indebted to my friend and former colleague Paul Gottfried for countless conversations, typically with dog in tow, on the curious circus that is American politics. Much to my benefit John Milton Cooper Jr. generously read the manuscript twice and allowed me to prevail upon his patience in a marathon phone session devoted to style and expression. I’m grateful as well for the really helpful readings of the manuscript by an anonymous reviewer for the University of North Carolina Press. The reviewer’s suggestions strengthened the work both structurally and stylistically. My editor, Chuck Grench, early on saw the possibility of this project, and I am pleased that he took it on. His assistants, first Iza Wojciechowska and then Jad Adkins, kept the wheels turning and the questions coming.

Moderates

Introduction

Searching for the Center

A sane person … someone whose political beliefs seem quiet and mild, and as such always ignored by the media, which seeks out people from the screechy Left and shrill Right because they make for better sound bites.

—The web-based Urban Dictionary’s definition of Moderate, 2003

One could be excused for thinking that moderation has no place in today’s polarized political culture. It has long been fashionable for such periodicals of note as the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and the Washington Post to trumpet some variation of what one Post headline called in 2014, The End of Moderates. The presumed historical trajectory that informs these stories dates back to the 1960s when liberal Rockefeller Republicanism began to give way to what would later be called conservative Reagan Republicanism. A half-century on, we remain captive to this clean, neat narrative. For beyond the occasional header, the end of … argument has become the dominant paradigm in modern American political thought, embraced by liberals and conservatives alike. Unabashedly presentist, it suggests that moderates make up little more than a faltering wing of the contemporary GOP, as if centrism had no history outside of that party or prior to our times.

One might expect to find richer and more reflective treatments of the country’s moderate persuasion in the scholarly literature, yet on the whole that has not been the case. Although we have several excellent studies that explore moderation in a particular era or context—John Patrick Diggins’s biography of John Adams, Daniel Walker Howe’s study of the American Whigs, and Geoffrey Kabaservice’s recent assessment of the Republican Party since Eisenhower are examples of the genre—we lack a synthetic treatment of centrism as a vital and inclusive tradition reaching back to the nation’s eighteenth-century partisan roots. As a result, much of the historiography relegates moderates to mere factions within parties and thus lacking a cohesive identity or largeness of purpose. Aside from documenting a scattering of middle-grounders and deal makers—Henry Clay, architect of three important antebellum compromises, comes perhaps most readily to mind—our conventional political narrative marches to the beat of a mechanical liberal-conservative consensus. For several decades after its postwar inception, that consensus skewed liberal as a rising cohort of scholars, themselves the children of the New Deal, praised the emerging welfare-warfare state and made something of a patron saint of FDR. At Harvard alone two historians, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Frank Freidel, labored throughout the 1950s on sympathetic multivolume treatments of Roosevelt and his era. Though challenged during the tumultuous 1960s, the case for liberalism as the normative American ideology continued to rule the interpretive roost.

This began to change in the 1980s with the onset of Reaganism. Though historian Alan Brinkley could argue as late as 1994 that twentieth century American conservatism has been something of an orphan in historical scholarship, this certainly is no longer the case. For some years now the right has received more attention than perhaps any field in American political history. Books and articles weighing conservatism’s impact on everything from Christianity to capitalism, social policy to suburbanization, have claimed the historiographical high ground. In a 2011 state of the field essay published in the Journal of American History, Kim Phillips-Fein argued that until the past two decades, it was still possible to see the story of the twentieth century in terms of the triumph and expansion of liberalism, from the New Deal through the civil rights movement, feminism, the gay rights movement and environmentalism. Today, most historians accept that significant parts of the American population always dissented from the liberalism of the mid-twentieth century.¹

What Phillips-Fein describes is a shifting focus in the scholarship rather than a fundamental reassessment or rethinking. Whether emphasizing a kind of Rooseveltian or Reaganite essentialism, the imperfect liberal-conservative idiom remains stubbornly entrenched as the operative approach to translating American politics—as so, it dominates our discussions and limits our vision. One need not dismiss its real if conditional descriptive power to notice its inherent limitations. Perhaps most problematic is the assumption that an unbridgeable ideological chasm divides liberals and conservatives—the nation read, that is, through a Fox News vs. MSNBC lens. We know, however, that historically there has been far more flexibility, play, and pragmatism in our partisanship than this rigid binary model suggests. Taking that truism as its starting point, this book examines the moderate tradition in American politics running from the Founding to Today.

Contra contemporary opinion, the delicate art of deal making was once widely respected in America. Up to the Civil War, parties, sections, and statesmen expected to compromise and burnished their reputations by doing so. As something of an object lesson, the Constitutional convention stood as the great and ever looming model of how concessions and accommodations could bring together disparate interests. More than drafting a framework of government, the Fathers established a practice of conciliation that allowed the Clays of future congresses the freedom to seek, beyond partisan or regional loyalties, common ground in times of crises. Subsequent compromises in 1820 (concerning the congressional balance of power between free and slave states), 1833 (testing the constitutionality of the federal tariff), and 1850 (regarding the status of slavery in the western territories) built upon this sturdy structure. Conversely, the reputation of moderates and mediators sunk after failing to reach yet another settlement in 1860. As historian Peter B. Knupfer has observed, the secession winter produced not only a strong reaction in both sections against any further compromise but also an outpouring of abuse against past compromises and compromisers. The old rhetoric of compromise had lost its appeal to a significant number of Americans; the tie between union and compromise had been broken.²

Since that time, political moderates have suffered the slings and arrows of both left and right. Their reputation reached a nadir of sorts when Barry Goldwater famously declared at the 1964 Republican national convention that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And … moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. Turning his back on history, Goldwater portrayed centrism as timid and indecisive, ignoring completely its constructive and time tested qualities. This study offers a much different and, I hope, more capacious reading on the subject. Though sensitive to the limitations of the moderate middle, I underscore pragmatism’s positive impact in a political culture all too eager to emphasize ideologues and idealists. To be clearer still, my conception of centrism chimes with John Milton Cooper Jr.’s description of Theodore Roosevelt’s politics, which he defined some years ago as inspired moderation.³ It is this side and this sensibility I wish to recover.

______

The question of political moderation today is of special importance to the Republican Party. For despite notable success in recent wave congressional elections (2010 and 2014), it has for over a generation experienced considerably less success in national elections. Put simply, the heyday of modern conservatism has long since passed. The fiscal, evangelical, and foreign policy right met its moment in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. His promises to unleash the U.S. economy from the shackles of government regulation, stem the moral decline let loose by the divisive sixties, and roll back the Soviet empire encouraged a powerful governing consensus that extended beyond the conservative faithful. Thirty years on, however, the GOP, popularly outpolled in five of the last six general elections, is a minority party in search of a majority. Many regard it as out of touch with contemporary culture, an ideological dinosaur awaiting a demographic Armageddon. For their part, GOP hardliners seem ill disposed to make peace with their centrist colleagues and forge a more current identity. In a 2009 appearance on the Sunday news show Face the Nation, former vice president Dick Cheney denied that the moderate Colin Powell even belonged in the GOP. If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, he told host Bob Schieffer, I’d go with Rush Limbaugh. My take on it was Colin had already left the party.⁴

Limbaugh, and any number of Limbaugh-like media pundits aside, the beau idéal of the political right remains Ronald Reagan, although one might wonder why. Reagan left, after all, a far more complex and less ideologically ironclad legacy than a surface impression suggests. Domestically, he signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which effectively amnestied millions of illegal immigrants; that same year he signed the Tax Reform Act, which eliminated a number of deductions, increased corporate taxes, and broadened the tax base—congressional Democrats Richard Gephardt and Bill Bradley sponsored the bill. In foreign affairs Reagan dealt successfully with the Soviet Union through a series of give-and-take summits, even proposing to Secretary-General Mikhail Gorbachev at their 1986 Reykjavík talks that both countries destroy all of their ballistic missiles within ten years. At the time, many on the American right thought he had gone crazy. And on the issue of fiscal conservatism, Reaganomics proved a spectacular bust. Government grew notably larger during the 1980s while the country’s national debt rocketed to an unprecedented $3 trillion as the United States became the world’s largest debtor nation.

One could argue that the open secret of Reagan’s success lay in his ability to conciliate both the right and the center. By no means a liberal Republican, neither was he a particularly good Reaganite. Roll back Roe v. Wade? Resist raising taxes? Shrink the central government? None of it happened. For his first Supreme Court nominee, Reagan chose Judge Sandra Day O’Connor, a former Arizona state senator who had supported both the Equal Rights Amendment and legalized abortion. Today the right has recast Reagan as an uncompromising cold warrior who led a moral revival at home. Practicing a kind of sentimental conservatism, it has become intellectually constrained in a gilded memory cage of its own making.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush knows this. In a 2012 address before a group of editors and reporters at Bloomberg L.P. in Manhattan, he doubted whether Reagan would find much support in today’s GOP: Ronald Reagan would have, based on his record of finding accommodation, finding some degree of common ground … would [now] be criticized for doing the things that he did.⁵ A year later, Bush, speaking at the Ronald Reagan Dinner at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, more formally called for a more inclusive GOP. Way too many people believe Republicans are anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-science, anti-gay, [and] anti-worker, he warned his audience. And the list goes on and on and on. Many voters are simply unwilling to choose our candidates even though they share our core beliefs because those voters feel unloved, unwanted, and unwelcome in our party.⁶

Thinking historically, one might compare the present condition of the GOP to that of the Jeffersonians in the 1850s or to the supporters of the conservative Ohio senator Robert Taft in the 1950s. In the first instance agrarianism, states’ rights, and slavery—long the DNA of national development—neared their end. Driven out of power, the Democracy subsequently engaged in a major overhaul in concepts and convictions that prefaced its appeal to a twentieth-century urban-industrial nation: the party of Jefferson became the party of FDR. The Taft analogy speaks perhaps even more directly to the particular challenges facing today’s conservatives. For much like the current right, Taftites nurtured a vision of unreflective capitalism combined with a unilateral foreign policy that appealed to small town America. But the market crash and subsequent global war demonstrated the irrelevancy of a GOP locked in a quasi-Victorian mindset of classical liberalism and splendid isolationism. Voters informed Republicans of that in 1932, and for a long time after.

______

More than a rumination on the contemporary GOP’s identity crisis, this book assays a series of moderate coalitions touching several centuries. The first, the Adams-Federalists, fell ideologically between the poles of Jeffersonianism (the advocates of states’ rights) and Hamiltonianism (the supporters of a strong activist state). Both John Adams and Alexander Hamilton were Federalists, though the latter’s efforts to create a fiscal-military elite propelled by a powerful national bank and an expanding army aroused the former’s concern. Alarmed by the French Revolution’s presumably radical impact in America, High Federalists, favoring aristocratic Britain and following Hamilton’s lead, voted into law the Sedition Act, which in practice restricted the freedom of speech of Federalism’s domestic critics, the Jeffersonians. To justify this assault on the Constitution and maintain their hold on power, the Hamiltonians needed a crisis and better yet a war and this Adams, elected in 1796 as George Washington’s presidential successor, refused to give them. Largely as a result, Federalism fractured internally in 1800, was routed in that year’s elections, and never regained its old relevancy. Despite himself being swept away in the Jeffersonian deluge, Adams always considered his opposition to ultra Federalism a kind of national service. Although he maintained a spirited correspondence with Jefferson in their final years, he never ceased to condemn what he called Hamilton’s villainy.

The nation’s second moderate coalition, the Clinton-Democratic Republicans (1812), brought together the New York–New England wing of the Jeffersonian Party along with some Federalist support. Having grown resentful of slaveholder political dominance, it sought to defeat the planters at the polls. Its chief grievance was with Jefferson’s unpopular embargo (1807–9), which, in the name of protecting American neutrality in the ongoing wars of the French Revolution, forbade U.S. export trade with any nation. To his mainly northern opposition, Jefferson, the southern agrarian, seemed intent on wrecking the North’s free-labor economy. As if to pour salt in its wounds, Jefferson subsequently signed the supplementary acts to enforce the embargo, and these empowered federal agents to confiscate shipments without a warrant merely on the suspicion that a transporter had considered evading the restriction. Frustrated with the Lake Champlain region’s continued illicit trade with Canada, Jefferson declared it to be in a state of insurrection and sent regular army units to deter exchanges. Looking to stop this executive overreach, critics within the Jeffersonian camp would within a few years ally with the remnants of Federalism to run the New Yorker DeWitt Clinton against James Madison—Jefferson’s handpicked heir—in the 1812 presidential election. In a tight race, Madison won by claiming Pennsylvania, without which he would have been bested. In both 1812 and 1800, in other words, largely internal oppositions had challenged the ruling parties over their claims to unconstitutional power.

The country’s third moderate coalition, made up of a number of antislavery groups that began to congeal under the Republican Party banner in 1854, shared a common aversion to the expansion of the peculiar institution into the western territories. For a generation these future Republicans had watched as southern irreconcilables sought to bend the Constitution to fend off their greatest fears—democracy and free labor. In all, their attack on popular government was remarkable. The 1836 Gag Rule prevented abolitionist petitions from being read or discussed in the House; the protracted struggle over the fate of Kansas (1850s) included outright voter fraud that resulted in the sitting of pro-slavery legislatures in a territory with a clear anti-slavery majority; and the notorious Dred Scott decision (1857) held that African-Americans, free or otherwise, could not be U.S. citizens. In the face of such extremism many critics of the Slave Power sought in 1860 a moderate solution, the recognition of slavery where it currently resided, but no future extension into the nation’s territories.

Though abolitionists denounced this course, its ultimate goal was in fact the end of black bondage. The historian Richard Sewall has justly observed that more moderate Republicans—men like William Pitt Fessenden, Samuel Bowles, Edwin D. Morgan, John Sherman, Caleb Smith, and Abraham Lincoln—exhibited greater patience, greater reverence for the Union and the Republican party as ends in themselves, and less crusading zeal than did their radical colleagues. Yet on the whole they shared the radicals’ hatred of slavery as well as the Slave Power and viewed the destruction of both as the prime task of their party. In the end, Lincoln’s practical leadership proved decisive. By spurning ideological labels and candidly facing the political realities of his time, Lincoln belonged to what historian David Herbert Donald called the American Pragmatic Tradition.⁷

The nation’s fourth moderate coalition spanned several decades (1870s–1910s) and consisted of no fewer than three distinct parties or movements (Liberal Republicans, Mugwumps, and the Progressive Party). What links them together is a patrician-led rejection of the political corruption that had become so prominent in Gilded Age America. The most notable of their number, Theodore Roosevelt, inherited as president a nation struggling under the multiple pressures of industrialization, urbanization, and large-scale immigration. Concerned that anti-progressive Old Guard Republicans had given too many advantages to big business, he advanced a series of reforms known collectively as the Square Deal. It broke up bad trusts, condemned predatory wealth, and more generally recognized the growing influence of an increasingly consumer-oriented middle class. Broadly interpreted, the Square Deal sought to create a fairer balance of power in America and gave the GOP its first major reform agenda since Reconstruction. After Roosevelt left office, however, Old Guardism returned in force and rejected the regulatory state idea, which would not be seen again until New Deal Democrats employed it to both reshape and dominate the electoral landscape.

It is easy to forget today that from 1936 to 1976, moderate Republicans controlled the GOP, and thus constituted the country’s fifth moderate coalition. They engineered the presidential candidacies of the one-time Democrat Wendell Willkie (1940), the pro–New Deal governor of New York, Thomas Dewey (1944 and 1948), and Dwight Eisenhower (1952 and 1956), the symbol-in-chief of, as Ike put it, Modern Republicanism. Reasserting themselves after Barry Goldwater’s ultra conservative 1964 campaign, moderates capped an era of relative dominance within the party by supporting Gerald Ford’s 1976 nomination over Ronald Reagan.

Conservative Republicans have since argued that because the GOP won few national elections during this period—four to be precise—it should have broken with the social welfare model and given voters a real choice between right and left. It is implied in this analysis that if offered such an option, most would have gone right. But that seems, particularly in light of the Goldwater debacle and the genuine if transitory appeal of postwar liberalism, a rather dubious premise. In fact, by maneuvering their party to the middle, moderate Republicans helped to sustain its relevancy, perhaps even its existence. The GOP, after all, was a fast failing concern in the 1930s and we sometimes forget that not all major parties, one thinks of the Federalists, Whigs, and Populists, live to fight another day.⁸ Certainly some conservative reaction to the social welfare model was bound to set in. Untethered to GOP moderates, however, it might well have alienated those many undecided voters eager to prune back but by no means uproot the New Deal State.

The nation’s sixth and, at this writing, latest moderate coalition is the contemporary (post 1990) Democratic Party. It arose only after an extended internal struggle between party progressives (supporters of 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern) and party pragmatists (supporters of Bill Clinton). Unable any longer to win national elections as tax-and-spend liberals and effectively smeared by their opponents as the party of amnesty, abortion, and acid, a string of Democratic candidates—Humphrey, McGovern, Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis—dropped five of six presidential campaigns between 1968 and 1988.

Clinton, the first Baby Boomer elected to the White House, made common cause in the late eighties with an emerging group of New Democrats to redefine their party by making it more responsive to the suburbs, the middle-class, and critics of the entitlement state. Successful in the 1990s, the Democrats’ march to the middle had in fact begun a generation earlier during the Carter presidency. A moderate in a party still very much tied to its Rooseveltian roots, Jimmy Carter struggled to master a fracturing New Deal coalition. Many of his in-house critics believed him a typical southern conservative and, in the 1980 Democratic primaries, rallied around the typical northeastern liberal Ted Kennedy in protest. Their support gave Kennedy an impressive 37 percent of the vote in what was something of an opening phase in a hard fought contest for the party’s future. By the early 1990s, after liberal Democratic candidates suffered consecutive lopsided losses in the 1984 and 1988 presidential elections, the New Democrats broke through. Trending toward the center on such hot button issues as tax cuts, welfare reform, and the trimming of federal entitlements, they have captured more popular votes than their GOP opponents in every national election save one since 1988.⁹

The most recent winner of those elections, Barack Obama, has proven an adept New Democrat. As former Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein argued in 2011, If you put aside the emergency measures required by the 2007–9 global financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal health care; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans have staked out before.¹⁰ Klein’s article may have turned a few heads (Obama a moderate?!), but not Obama’s. In a 2012 interview with a Miami-based television station, the president responded to critics who called him a socialist by saying, the truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican. Public intellectual Noam Chomsky (ruefully) agreed, observing recently that the president is kind of a mainstream centrist with some concerns for liberal ideas and conceptions, but not much in the way of principle or commitment. With the moderate GOP more or less disappeared, he continued, today’s Democratic Party has become the moderate party.¹¹

Chomsky’s epitaph for GOP centrism, like that of the major media outlets, may be a bit premature. In fact the right believes just the opposite, arguing that an unwillingness to nominate true conservatives dooms its candidates in general elections. As Texas senator Ted Cruz caustically put the matter before a 2015 Tea Party gathering, you know what ‘electability’ is? Nominate the candidate who is closest to the Democrats.¹² Far from reaching the kind of consensus assumed by Chomsky, the GOP is engaged, rather, in a prolonged internal battle to define itself before the electorate—the same kind of ideological skirmishing its opponents went through in the 1970s and 1980s. The question of whether it will be as successful as the New Democrats is at this point unclear. What we know is that its hard right wing is incapable of making a majority within the party, let alone around the country. Whether the GOP can find enough common ground to advance compelling ideas and candidates in coast-to-coast campaigns remains to be seen and is, in any case, beyond the scope of this study. My interest, rather, is in recovering the history of a moderate persuasion that has on occasion proven to be a saving grace of sorts in American politics. Older than the liberal-conservative consensus, the nation’s centrist tradition has influenced every important public debate from early republic concerns over executive overreach to more contemporary questions regarding organized conservatism’s future. Put another way, by reviewing the role of the middle we may come to recognize the important and still vital pragmatic lines of leadership that connect the partisan past with the partisan present.

  Part I    Patriot Kings

The greatest dangers to American democracy once came from within. Before the Civil War, the country’s early radical right—New England’s ultra-Federalist elite and the secession-making southern plantocracy—questioned the constitutional arrangement negotiated in 1787. Each sought solace in the past. Wedded to traditional hierarchical worldviews, they hoped to stem the quickening pace of popular government. This proved impossible. Under the pressure of westward expansion, the first stirrings of industrial development, and the decline of an older deferential political culture, the character of the United States changed dramatically from the Age of Washington to the Age of Lincoln. The pivot of history had turned. A quasi-colonialism gave way to social mobility, gentry rule fell before a broadening electorate, and states’ rights gave way to the notion of a perpetual and powerful Union.

1    Between Aristocracy and Democracy

John Adams

Aristocracy will continue to envy all above it, and despise and oppress all below it; Democracy will envy all, contend with all, endeavor to pull down all.

—John Adams, 1814

The moderate persuasion in American politics begins with John Adams. A man of the liberal right, he viewed with suspicion the nation’s emerging rule of the strong right, the dominant wing of the Federalist Party loyal to Alexander Hamilton. He condemned its vision of a small civil service elite holding both private wealth and state power as contrary to the self-governing spirit of the Revolution. Neither, however, could he follow the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, the other dominant ideologue of the day. The Virginian’s buoyant brand of Enlightenment egalitarianism struck Adams as too populistic, too reliant upon the good will of the people to be practical. In an era of iconic personalities touched by the volatility of the French Revolution and prone to factionalism at home, Adams’s search for the center found few allies. Indeed, then and for several generations thereafter, Americans seemed at a loss to reconcile with the nation’s second president, the only one of the country’s first five chief executives not to be reelected. Hamilton and Jefferson, by contrast, conveniently ascended from men to myths. They came quickly to personify the poles of American politics, symbols of aristocracy and democracy clashing in a timeless struggle over the centuries.

There were, to be sure, dissenters from this tidied-up political drama. In the late 1920s the distinguished Progressive literary historian Vernon Parrington drew a suggestive portrait of early republic politics that strayed beyond the traditional Jeffersonian-Hamiltonian dualism. Though recognizing the liberal and conservative strains in American life, he veered off the prescribed path, perceptively writing that midway between these two points stands John Adams. Independent of mind, intellectually aggressive, and blessed with astonishing energy that often exceeded the patience of his peers, Adams appeared always to be in a state of doing, acting, making, and moving, much to the bounce of his own drummer’s beat. Striking the proper chord, Parrington notes that he was an uncompromising realist and refused to be duped by [either the] fine dreams of humanitarian panaceas that so delighted Jefferson or the push for centralized power that drove Hamilton.¹ He feared, rather, top and bottom alike. As his colleagues quickly grouped into rival factions, Adams resisted their lead as a false choice between democracy and aristocracy. A stubborn republican, he found himself ideologically alienated from the sharp partisanship that dominated post-Revolutionary politics.

An avid observer of human limitations, Adams wore an impulsive skepticism like a second skin. Unlike Jefferson, he approached the Enlightenment’s promise of perfectibility as an intelligent carnivore might accost a porcupine—curious and with a certain instinctive hunger, but exceedingly wary. This guarded cast of mind colored Adams’s opinions on both representative rule (There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide, he once avowed) and the heaven-on-earth hopes inspired by the French Revolution. Accordingly, he foreswore the colossal optimism that underlined the Jeffersonian faith in virtue as the blessed product of vice. It is impossible to imagine Adams ever repeating anything remotely close to Jefferson’s remarkable claim that the liberty of the whole earth was depending on the [French Revolution], and … rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated.²

True, Hamilton too questioned America’s French connection and, more broadly, the philosophical underpinnings that shaped the Age of Reason. Yet he presumed that an abiding social stability might be cobbled by combining the stock jockeying of nascent capitalists with the martial prowess of a standing army. As the country’s first treasury secretary, Hamilton sought to centralize financial power in such a way as to strike at states’ rights and turn local loyalties to national allegiances. His controversial proposal for the creation of the First Bank of the United States (chartered by Congress in 1791) provided a uniform currency and monetary engine for elites to acquire loans. It also spurred a speculative boom that threatened to launch a money monopoly among the very rich. This ersatz aristocracy offended Adams, who broke early from Hamiltonianism, concerned that it promised the rise of a new tyranny.

More broadly, Federalism and Republicanism emphasized conflicting visions of development. The great question facing Americans from the 1787 drafting of the Constitution to the 1861 dissolution of the Union involved the tense relationship between localism and nationalism. In various permutations, the confusion of critical issues challenging the new nation during these decades—slavery, internal improvements, and expansion across the frontier—intersected with this fundamental problem. By their very natures, localism and nationalism were incompatible. One would have to give way, peacefully or otherwise. In ruminating on the ideological world formed by the Jeffersonian-Hamiltonian contest, Adams insisted that the nation suffered for its association with extremism. He believed this to be the natural if injurious outcome of political parties that held contrasting views on where power resided. Most Americans at this time abhorred the concept of party spirit, but in the end most drifted into the party system. Adams never did. This independence proved to be the ultimate source both of his proud self-sovereignty and of his inevitable failure as president to offer a viable third way of governing.

______

A fourth-generation New Englander, John Adams never strayed far from the Puritan persuasion that had brought his great-great grandfather, Henry Adams, to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. From this auspicious landfall succeeding Adamses settled in Braintree, a small village some dozen miles south of Boston. Here they made their living, heir after heir, chiefly off the land. John Adams’s father, also named John, ventured a bit beyond a plow-and-cow existence. Settled near North Precinct Church, he served both community and congregation as tax collector, militia officer, deacon, and selectman. In this last office, the elder Adams ensured that the district’s indigent received adequate care, typically a meal and a bed. When no placement proved possible he welcomed the poor into his own home, apparently absorbing the cost out of pocket. Known for his generosity, intelligence, and good character, the deacon was once warmly recalled by a proud John as the honestest Man I ever knew. In Wisdom, Piety, Benevolence and Charity In proportion to his Education and Sphere of Life, I have never seen his Superior.³

The easy sociability of the senior Adams, a popular figure at the meetinghouse, does little to suggest let alone explain the temperamental volatility that shook his son. Gripped by strong passions, the younger John gave every indication of living his life more slave than master to the potent combination of engagement, ambition, and insecurity that pressed his political career forward. Reared in a Puritan tradition that questioned cravings for personal distinction, he twitched constantly between pride and a punishing self-denigration, oppressively, confessionally aware of both his real and imagined shortcomings. In need of the occasional brimstone, Adams found that a chilly deism offered him nothing. Reflecting in late age upon the special and wholly unanticipated success enjoyed by his simple kin, he concluded that a humble faith had spared more than their souls. What has preserved this race of Adamses in all their ramifications, in such numbers, health, peace, comfort and mediocrity? I believe it is religion, without which they would have been rakes, fops, sots, gamblers, starved with hunger, frozen with cold, scalped by Indians, &c., &c., &c., been melted away and disappeared.⁴

If the religion observed by Adams resembled in faint outline the once exacting Calvinism of the Bay Colony’s earliest elect, it also contained more liberal qualities. Adams believed, as he once put it, in a Being existing from Eternity with supreme power over His creation, and while he considered it an absolute certainty that in this world of wonder there … never was but one being who can Understand the Universe, he reasoned by analogies from nature and society that his Maker refrained, as he explained to Jefferson, from condemning innumerable millions to … miser[y], forever. To the partisans of predestination, Adams cribbed a stark reply: I believe no such Things. His faith found strength, rather, in the following simple, affirming metaphysics: The Love of God and his Creation; delight, Joy, Tryumph, Exultation in my own existence … are my religion.⁵ Devoted to a personal and sympathetic divinity, Adams was no more abstract spiritualist than condemning Calvinist. He appears to have occupied an ecclesiastical middle ground that we might designate as harmonious, just, and Whiggish—God loved His cosmos and offered His children a rewarding life if they lived in a condition of moral accord. This search for a meaningful saintly center proved also to be the temperamental path on which Adams pursued his public career. Though teased by strong emotions, he considered extremes, whether in worship or in politics, to be symptomatic of indiscreet impulses.

Of course the question of what constituted a state of moral accord proved, in the vicissitudes of daily life, elusive and complex. Seeking structure, Adams circled back on the path that led to the old Puritanism. Shaped by Calvinism’s penchant for introspection and haunted by the blurred line separating sin and salvation, he disclosed in his letters and diaries a practiced attachment to self-analysis. Collapsing society with self, he sought to subject his country to the same kind of restless internal dialogue in a language more Jeremiad than Enlightenment. Certainly he never lingered so long or so lovingly on the latent possibilities of the republic as did Jefferson in his eloquent Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), a document tying the presumed environmental superiority of the New World to its rising political prospects.

In this study, Jefferson read Virginia’s agrarian vision across the continent as a case of a wishful Edenic innocence sustained in a republic mercifully absent, as he put it, the mobs of great cities. Nor could Adams embrace the penny saved is a penny earned homilies that underlie Benjamin Franklin’s famous Autobiography, which has long served as shorthand for the nation’s worship of self-help strategies and self-made men. The memoir opens with a boastful oration touting its author’s worldly success: Having emerg’d from the Poverty and Obscurity in which I was born and bred, to a State of Affluence and some Degree of Reputation in the World, and having gone so far thro’ life with a considerable Share of Felicity … my Posterity [may find my situation] fit to be imitated.⁶ Adams too could assume a pedantic attitude, though his sermons typically arrived in the clipped cadence of the cold scold. For an earthy art of living, the fruits, that is, of Parisian cuisine, London theater, and Philadelphia’s secular-minded modernity, interested him far less than Franklin. He felt compelled, rather, to apprise his countrymen of their assorted shortcomings, this but a preface to a