The Inheritance

The Inheritance

In politics, they call it “The Blame Game.” Each party blames the other for all of the woes which beset America. Who is responsible for getting us involved in the wars in Asia? Who caused the stock market to rise or crash? Who ruined our schools, debased our traditions, and cost America its vision of being “a city on a hill” unblemished, virtuous, and the leader of the free world? We ultimately lay the blame at the feet at whichever president we oppose.

Nowhere is this truer than in the political legacy of John Adams. Joseph Ellis, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, describes the political travails of Adams, America’s second president, as “the classic example of the historical truism that inherited circumstances define the parameters within which the presidential leadership takes place, that history shapes presidents, rather than vice versa.” 

To put it simply, Adams was “probably doomed to failure” because his presidency followed that of the “demigod” George Washington.

Any move Adams made was compared to Washington’s. Washington’s style of governing was majestic. Adams style, as Ellis describes it, was that of “enlightened perversity.” In short, he loved to argue. 

As a lawyer, he defended the British soldiers accused of firing on the crowd in what we call “The Boston Massacre” -- a choice which could have destroyed his law practice. As delegate to the Continental Congress, he proposed independence from England a full year before it was generally considered and argued tirelessly until it was adopted. But his revolutionary credentials did not rescue him from uncomplimentary comparisons to Washington.  His presidency was largely considered a failure. 

Adams inherited a struggling nation, still recovering from the Revolution, an undeclared war with French privateers in the Atlantic and Caribbean and a Congress at war with itself. Many presidents have inherited troubled times. Franklin Roosevelt inherited the Great Depression. Harry Truman inherited the atomic bomb. Andrew Johnson inherited Reconstruction after the Civil War and Lyndon Johnson inherited the war in Vietnam. Barack Obama inherited two wars in Asia and an age of terrorism.  

Logically, we should not judge our presidents on the events which were thrust upon them but on how each dealt with them. Our judgement is also tinged by our own political beliefs and visions. Some people feel that Roosevelt’s policies lifted the nation from depression, while others feel that he left behind a welfare nation. Johnson was both praised for proposing ground-breaking legislation on civil rights and blamed for sending thousands of young men to unnecessary deaths in an unwinnable war. 

John Adams believed that history was messy. As Ellis explains it, Adams felt that there is “a distinction between history as experienced and history as remembered.” Events experienced are more “tangled and incoherent” than can be related to and judged by those viewing them from a distance. In other words, unless you are in the middle of the fray, unless you are the president dealing with both inherited and current circumstances, you cannot accurately judge his actions.

More than two hundred years later, historians generally agree that many of Adams’s positions were correct. He was, in his own words, obnoxious and disliked, but his arguments concerning American independence and governance were visionary. Sitting in judgement is an amusing parlor game, but running the country is a deadly serious business. 

Let us pray that the actions of our current and future presidents fulfill the hope of John Adams after he moved into the newly-built White House that “None but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.” His wife Abigail surely added, "Or women." 

(All quotations from Joseph Ellis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Founding Brothers.)