America’s First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735-1918
by Richard Brookhiser
Free Press. 256 pp. $25.00
As Americans nowadays know, democracies have their own form of royalty. George W. Bush is the son of another President Bush, who in his turn was the son of a Senator. The Bush now in the White House recently dedicated the headquarters of the Justice Department to Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the murdered President and son of ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, in the presence of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who in his first run for that office defeated George Lodge, son of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, himself the son of a Senator who had been Theodore Roosevelt’s friend. And it was Theodore’s cousin Franklin, of course, who would become the first President to be elected four times.
The distinction of creating America’s first royal line belongs to none of these famous families, however, but rather to John Adams, the founding father who injected the dynamic of succession into our republican structures of power. For Richard Brookhiser, whose most recent books have been celebratory portraits of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, the fate of Adams and his best-known descendants reveals a darker side of our national story: the arc of a dynastic family, from the raw, energetic founder to the final exhausted and desiccated heir.
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John Adams (1735-1826) was a familiar type in American politics—the self-made man, a lawyer by training, who propels himself upward by sheer force of ambition and will. His first, best career was as a rebel and a rouser; an early advocate of American independence, he pleaded the necessity of revolution, nominated George Washington as commander of the Continental Army, and promoted the American cause abroad as ambassador to France, Britain, and Holland.
Far less successful was his performance in the offices that he occupied after the U.S. became a nation. As the first Vice President, he was overshadowed in Washington’s cabinet by its dueling superstars, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. As President, he foundered, lacking the political talent to lead. Overwhelmed by fierce partisan battles and unable to muster support, he was easily beaten by his ex-friend, Jefferson, and returned home embittered after a single term—to live out his last years through his eldest son and namesake, John Quincy.
This Adams (1767-1848) was pressed relentlessly on the predestined path. His childhood was a long lesson in purpose and greatness. “John tutored his son [John Quincy] in Europe,” Brookhiser tells us. “They read Plutarch aloud. . . . In Paris, he hobnobbed with Franklin, Lafayette, and ‘Mr. Jefferson.’ . . . In London, he heard Pitt and Fox debate.” At fourteen, John Quincy went to London as the ambassador’s translator. He was “so far beyond his years,” his proud father said, that many “take him for my younger brother.”
And on he dutifully went, through various embassies, to the cabinet of President Monroe, and to his own run for President. “The vote,” Brookhiser writes, “would be a judgment on a public life and career that had begun . . . before he was born.”
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John Quincy could match his father in becoming President, but he could not surpass him by becoming a good one, and he too served only one term, losing to Andrew Jackson in 1828.
But rather than learn from his own family experience—or that of his two younger brothers, who responded to the stress by turning disastrously to alcohol—John Quincy chose to repeat it, raising three sons under the stern lash of duty. His two eldest burned out early, both of them becoming drunks like their uncles. Charles Francis (1807-86), the third son, who in reaction became dull, sober, and extremely responsible, felt the family trust as a terrible burden.
This son and grandson of Presidents “did not like politics,” Brookhiser informs us. Charles Francis hated conflict, and “when his father was losing . . . hoped that the family would finally stop being ‘eternal subjects of contention and abuse.’ ” Yet he had arrived at a point in American history when a viable Adams was automatically considered a political candidate. Quiet, withdrawn, but harnessed to a sharply felt legacy, he served in the Massachusetts legislature, allowed himself to be nominated for Vice President in 1848 on the anti-slavery Free Soil ticket, and, ten years later, went to Congress as a Republican.
Following in the steps of his father and grandfather, Charles Francis accepted appointment as ambassador to the Court of St. James in 1861, charged with keeping Britain neutral in the Civil War. This task accomplished, and his debt finally paid to country and family, he retired to edit his ancestors’ papers, choosing to preserve the past rather than to invent the future.
The first Adams in a century who did not himself want to be President, Charles Francis was also the first not to bring ruin to his sons. They were brought up without the relentless prodding and lectures, and so none became a disgrace: John Quincy II held minor offices to no special purpose; Charles Francis II became president—of the Union Pacific Railroad; Brooks became a social historian. But it was the most talented of them, Henry (1838-1918), the critic and historian, who most carried forward the family name—and symbolized its fin-de-siècle decline.
With Henry, the house of Adams reached the point at which the family’s past no longer inspired, but rather tended to intimidate. To him, all effort seemed futile, all characters minor, all idols false. In his works of history, Brookhiser tells us, no figure “knows what he is doing, every judgment is wrong . . . every leader betrays his principles.” All of the Adamses who had not drunk themselves silly had seemed precocious and aged as young people, borne down by the weight of family history. Henry, in his fifties, already thought himself a decrepit old man.
In time, he withdrew into the study of the Middle Ages, a field into which his forebears had never ventured and thus had laid down no record of achievement. “The burden that had driven his forefathers to greatness and bitterness and their brothers to drink was lifted,” Brookhiser writes. There no longer being a point to being an Adams, “the family business could, with good conscience, be wound up.”
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But what was this business, and what was the point of it? As Brookhiser emphasizes, the Adamses wished to be judged by the standard of greatness, but somehow fell short. They were important but not indispensable, clever but never creative, high-minded but often mean-spirited. They were sore losers, and when they lost, which was often, they blamed everyone but themselves. They founded no parties, furthered no theories, and developed no great schools of thought.
The principal reason we remember the Adamses, as Brookhiser knows, is that they were a dynasty, and one that lasted for more than a century. As such, they became the gold standard for those who came after. Joseph P. Kennedy announced his intention to better John Adams. When George W. Bush became President, his father took to calling him “Quincy.” But if the Adamses serve as a goal, they are also a warning. Indeed, the resemblance between the problems of the Adamses in 1800 and those of the Kennedys almost two centuries later reminds us that pressure and privilege, unwisely administered, can distort and destroy human lives.
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