Nancy Isenberg - The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality

They were the only two chief executives in the American republics first half century to be turned out of office after a single term. There is no giant marble memorial to either of them in Washington, D.C. Alive or dead, they do not embody the beau ideal of the democratic spirit. Who would claim that John and John Quincy Adams speak credibly, meaningfully, to the modern age? We would.

It is precisely because they are not obvious symbols of democracy that we find the two Adamses compelling subjects as we search for a better way to understand how the United States could have proceeded from its ecstatic opening pledgethe magnanimous spirit of 1776to where it is today as a distressed political system. No historical investigator until now has committed to telling in any depth the story of the first father-and-son presidents. In these pages, we retie the broken threads of our nearly 250-year-old political inheritance. We see the Adamses experiences and their unpopular (but not necessarily wrong) positions as an opportunity to present to the politically engaged of our own time an accurate picture of a political heritage too many Americans are loath to address. It includes, but is not limited to, the unfortunate tribalism of the two-party system.

With a fixation on influence-buying, poll-shifting dollars, we live at a moment in history when confusion reigns as to the dependability of all high-sounding founding-era rhetoric. If you were to ask an average citizen what America stands for, he or she would most likely repeat something from grade school about freedom and democracy. The simplistic response is not to be mocked, but it does betray whats wrong: lack of definition. The framers of the Constitution did not erect a democracy. It was not their intent to do so. We must not assume that the United States is a democracy today either. That is why we have written this book. The presidents Adams are our vehicle in an effort to provide a germane, perhaps even urgent, interpretation of the nature of American politics. Persistent myths can no longer suffice.

How, then, do we extend the discussion from what we think we know about the two Adamses to what we should know about them? John Adams, the second president, assumed a lead role in the looming Revolution, vocally defending the Declaration of Independence when it came before the Continental Congress. But that is not what we consider most memorable about him. John Quincy Adams, the sixth president, was the first president not to have been old enough to take part in the Revolution; he stood before the Supreme Court in 1841 and argued valorously in order to win freedom for the kidnapped Africans who had dispatched their captors on board the Amistad. But that is not what we consider most memorable about him. The best reasons we find for remembering the Adamses are those that concern their stubborn insights into human psychology. They understood the tricky relationship between human nature and political democracy, and how emotionally induced thought often undermined social and political justice.