Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams
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If Adams’s aristocracy was a many-faceted creature that kept changing its character in order to counter the protean illusions about democracy, the nub of his argument was more straightforward; namely, that in all societies for which there was any kind of historical record, political power and wealth tended to go hand in hand; and a few people invariably accumulated more wealth and power than the others. The central problem of American politics was to make political use of the aristocracy while still controlling its influence, to design governments and then use government’s authority to assure that the energies of the elite flowed toward public ends. One way to assure that this did not happen, indeed one way to assure domination by a plutocracy or oligarchy, was to pretend that aristocracy had become extinct in America.
Fortunately, specific manifestations of aristocracy kept popping up on the national landscape, offering Adams the opportunity to define his “aristocratic principle” in practical terms. The Essex Junto was one of his favorite examples. This was a collection of conservative leaders, the spiritual heirs to the Hamiltonian wing of the Federalist Party, which was based in Essex County, Massachusetts, and saw itself as the chief defender of New England mercantile values. During his presidency this was the powerful faction that had opposed his policies toward France and contributed to his defeat in 1800. Adams noted that these High Federalists “are possessed of so much Wealth and so great a Portion of the Talents of the Country” that they embodied “an exclusive and monopolizing Spirit.” On the other hand, many of these die-hard Federalists also possessed “so many Virtues, and good Principles, and are so nearly right…that I am convinced, without them, the People of America cannot preserve themselves from Anarchy,” a concession Adams offered despite his personal distaste for Fisher Ames, their titular leader, and his keen sense that “of all Men in the World, I have the least obligation to them.”30
But then the High Federalists were a dying breed that Adams correctly believed had committed political suicide by opposing the War of 1812 and endorsing the secession of New England from the Union at the Hartford Convention in 1815. More worrisome was the new “monied aristocracy” made possible by the proliferation of banks and paper money. “The banking infatuation pervades all America,” he wrote Rush in 1810, warning that “an Aristocracy is growing out of them that will be as fatal as the feudal barons, if unchecked in time.” For Adams, the banking industry was the northern equivalent of southern slavery; both institutions were “engines of aristocracy” that converted the labor of the many into huge profits for the few. “Every Bank in America is an enormous Tax upon the People for the Profit of Individuals,” he declared, plundering “the Madness of the Many for the Profit of a Few.” Banks, he told Rush, had replaced whiskey as the chief source of intoxication in America and were in the process of “undermining all principles, corrupting all morals….” Far from being exemplars of probity, bankers were “swindlers and thieves,” skilled at the art of “making immense fortunes…in a twinkling of an eye, by a financiering operation which substitutes a paper money whose immense depreciations go into the pockets of a few individuals….”31
In his lengthy critique of Adams’s doctrine of aristocracy, Taylor had devoted nearly a hundred pages to a like-minded argument. Taylor was also upset with what he called “finance capitalism,” meaning the emergence of banking houses, insurance companies, paper money, and rampant speculation. In Taylor’s formulation, the banking industry also “divides the nation into two groups, creditors and debtors…and fills each with malignity towards the other.” While bankers claimed to be serving the financial interest of the public, they manipulated interest rates to make “a minority of the nation rich and potent, at the expense of the majority, which it makes poor and impotent.” Adams told Jefferson that Taylor’s massive book confounded him for many reasons, but the major reason was that “the Conclusion of the whole is that an Aristocracy of Bank Paper, is as bad as the Nobility of France of England,” a point that Adams said he “most assuredly will not controvert….” In fact, neither Taylor nor any of the Virginia agrarians could outdo him in his hatred of banks. “Our whole banking system I ever abhorred,” he trumpeted, “I continue to abhor, and shall die abhorring.” Much to his chagrin, he was going to die in what he and Rush agreed had become a “bebanked, bewhiskied, and be-dollared nation.”32
There are at least two fundamental misconceptions at work here, both of which need to be corrected if Adams’s political thinking is to be assessed fully and fairly. The first is Taylor’s misconception, shared by most of the Jeffersonians, that Adams supported the banking program of Hamilton and the High Federalists. Clearly, he did not. As president he had not tried to dismantle the Hamiltonian banking scheme. For that matter, Jefferson had also renewed the Bank of the United States during his presidency. But Adams, like Jefferson and Taylor, harbored a deep-seated distrust of banks as sanctuaries for corrupt profiteers, gambling houses where the public trust was systematically put at risk and sold to the highest bidder. The second misconception, following logically from the first, is that because he shared fully in the rhetoric against these new financial institutions, because he condemned banks and bankers in language that was just as hostile and even more colorful than Taylor’s, then he must have concurred with the Jeffersonian—soon to be Jacksonian—remedy: banks were the snakes in the American Eden and must be destroyed. This was an attitude rooted in the pre-capitalistic values of traditional republicanism, so it seems plausible that Adams, the epitome of republican ideology, would find it compelling.
The truth is more intriguingly paradoxical. Adams agreed with Taylor’s criticism of banks in one important respect; namely, banks were “engines of inequality” that transferred wealth from the middling and poorer classes into the hands of the already rich. As Adams put it: “Who can compute the vast sums taken out of the pockets of the simple and hoarded into the purses of the cunning…?” Taylor, who spoke for the agrarian interests of the Jeffersonians in the South, dramatized the financial exchanges as an “ambuscade” that stole from “the family of the earth” and rewarded “the family of cunning.” Both men, along with Jefferson, also viewed the profits of bankers as inherently immoral, because they manipulated money and interest rates without doing any productive labor themselves.33
But Taylor regarded all banks as conspiratorial agencies operating in collusion with government to defy and distort the natural laws of the marketplace. He was one of the first to articulate the sectional perspective of southern farmers as victims of a northern banking conspiracy sanctioned by the federal government. Supporters of Andrew Jackson, then again, later in the century, southern Populists would seize upon this vision to stigmatize banks and bankers as symbols of an unholy alliance between capital and government. Given their assumptions about the inherently equitable distribution of goods that would occur in an unfettered marketplace, the appearance of vastly unequal pockets of wealth could only be the consequence of government-sanctioned meddling. Taylor’s solution, like Jackson’s after him, was to sever all connections between banking and the federal government.34
Adams, on the other hand, never believed in the benign operation of the marketplace. Left to its own devices, he thought that the marketplace would no more discipline itself than would Jefferson’s version of “the people.” Indeed, that was the major problem presented by what Adams called “the multitude of swindling banks”—they were essentially gambling houses that enhanced and accelerated the worst features of the marketplace. Adams did not object to banks because they were distorting the natural rhythms of a burgeoning capitalistic economy. He objected that government regulations were not in place to assure that the flow of money and property served the public interest rather than private interests. Rather than free banks altogether from federal control, he thought that all banks should be public institutions under the control of the national government: “My own opinion has invariably been, that there ought to be but one Bank in the United States,” he wrote in 1811, “an
d that a National Bank with a branch in each State…. This ought to have been a fundamental Article in the Constitution.” Banks, in short, were like all other aristocratic elements in American society—dangerous yet indispensable creatures. “An attempt to annihilate them,” he warned, “would be as romantic an adventure as any in Don Quixote.” Banks could never be eliminated, but ought never to be freed to pursue their avaricious ends; they must be regulated by law to serve national economic goals. If Taylor’s views on banks foreshadowed the Jacksonians and the Populists, Adams’s views foreshadowed the regulatory legislation of the Progressives and the New Deal.35
Of course, allusions to future political movements invariably distort the historical integrity of Adams’s political thinking, which was very much a product of late-eighteenth-century conditions that cannot be translated easily, sometimes at all, into the idioms and arguments of our modern world. It is, however, striking to realize how much the classical categories that were the primary units of his political thought literally forced him to think about American society in terms that did not fit the emerging liberal consensus of his own day but are eerily relevant to ours. His insistence on three separate orders—monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—made him unreceptive to any homogenized or undifferentiated conception of “the people.” His grounding in classical history made him wary of, then downright hostile to, the claim that America’s more egalitarian social conditions or expansive environment rendered it an exception to the lessons of history. His obsession with aristocracy and the role of elites made him contemptuous toward egalitarian expectations of several sorts, most especially the expectation that the marketplace could discipline human energies without the aid of government. Finally, his classical orientation made it impossible for him to think about government in the same negative way that most of his fellow Americans had come to understand it. For Adams, government was not, indeed could not be, a separate sphere of limited authority divorced from the dynamics of society or the marketplace. It was an organic expression of the forces that comprised American society; not, if you will, “them” but “us” not a foreign body distantly overseeing the activity of millions of private citizens, but the public will itself, and therefore an inherently collectivistic enterprise whose goals transcended any merely individualistic ethos.
If the building blocks out of which Adams shaped his thinking about politics came from the classics, his deepest insights into the human motives that inhabited and eventually animated the classical categories came from introspection. If Adams’s temperament was inherently oppositional or dialectical, revealing itself most fully in dialogue or debate, the ultimate dialogue was with himself. In his early and middle years that dialogue went on in his diary, but he stopped making entries during his presidency and never resumed them again after his retirement. In one section of his Discourses on Davila, however, he had recorded his most candid opinions on the emotional source of all political behavior, especially the underlying motives for aspiring political leaders and erstwhile aristocrats. Originally published in serial form in 1790, soon after his return to America from England, Davila was republished as a book in 1813, but attracted little notice. Although no John Taylor made it the focus of extended study, Adams himself returned to it regularly. “Americans paid no attention or regard to this,” he noted in the margins in 1813, “and a blind mad rivalry between the north and south is destroying all morality and sound policy as a result.” It is doubtful that Davila by itself could have prevented the Civil War, but there is no doubt that it contained the most personal and penetrating comments on the psychological roots of his political “system” that Adams ever wrote.36
The main theme of Davila was introduced through a story that Adams told of a starving pauper and his dog. Friends eventually advised the pauper to avoid death by eating the dog’s food. But the pauper refused, asking rhetorically, “who will love me then?” Adams claimed that the pauper’s reaction cut to the core of human motivation. “In this ‘who will love me then?’ there is a key to the human heart,” Adams observed, “to the history of human life and manners; and to the rise and fall of empires.” For it was in the heart, not the head, that Adams found the most powerful forces shaping individual and group behavior, the primary elements in his political chemistry. Nor was Adams content to locate the emotional wellspring, then follow the analysis of classical or modern theorists. “I have been somewhat a student of Machiavel,” he wrote Vanderkemp, “but he has always been disagreeable to me because I never could know whether he was in jest or earnest.” Davila did feature a long quotation from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, which Adams was clearly reading at the time of composition, but he cited Smith for the same reason he loaded down all his published writings with acknowledged and unacknowledged quotations—the book was at hand—and in his frenzied fashion of composition, he seized whatever sources were around him to document his point.37
In Davila, however, the point about the inner workings of the heart clearly came not from a book but from the heart Adams knew best, his own. There were many human emotions, he observed, but none was “more essential or remarkable, than the passion for distinction,” that is, the craving “to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved and admired by his fellows….” This need to be noticed could express itself in several forms. When it took the form of “a desire to excell another, by fair industry, and the practice of virtue [it] is properly called Emulation.” When it changed course and “aims at power, it is Ambition.” It could also express itself in a variety of guises that received separate names, including “jealousy,” “envy,” and “vanity.” But the separate names only referred to the different targets of what was a single human passion. “It is a principal end of government to regulate this passion,” he argued, “which in turn becomes a principal means of government.” And this bedrock human passion, he was at pains to emphasize, was not a desire for wealth or power. The quest for material distinction was merely a secondary passion that served as a means to the ultimate end, which was the need for attention and affection.38
Merchants, bankers, and other members of “the moneyed aristocracy” were actually driven by emotional forces that wealth itself, no matter how huge the supply, could never satisfy: “Why do men affront heaven and earth to accumulate wealth, which will forever be useless to them?” The answer was psychological, not material or economic. It was “because riches attract the attention, consideration, and congratulations of mankind.” Avaricious businessmen who pursued more and more sums of money were rather pathetic creatures, for they were trying to purchase affection with a currency that would never fetch much in the only emotional exchange that mattered: “Riches force the opinion on man that he is the object of the congratulations of others,” Adams wrote. “His imagination expands, and his heart dilates at these charming illusions. His attachment to his possessions increases as fast as his desire to accumulate more; not for the purposes of…utility, but from the desire of illustration.” Over a century later Thorstein Veblen would develop a similar theory of economic behavior and give it the memorable label “conspicuous consumption.” Adams had early on encountered the same psychological dynamic inside his own soul, where the lingering vestiges of New England Puritanism also made him familiar with the futility of amassing wealth as a way of persuading oneself, and others, that salvation was assured.39
Adams was less interested in the theoretical or theological origins of the insight than its political applications. He claimed that “the science of government, may be reduced to the same simple principle,” namely, the act of “conducting, controlling, and regulating the emulation and ambition of the citizens.” There was no way, he was at pains to insist, that the drive for “the attention, consideration, and congratulations of our fellow men” could ever be eradicated. “Nature has taken effectual care of her own work,” he declared; it has “wrought the passions into the texture and essence of the soul, and has not left it in the power of art to destroy them.”
It was not only folly to oppose the elemental urges of mankind, it was also counterproductive. The passion for distinction had been woven into the fabric of human nature for a purpose. “Nature has ordained it, as a constant incentive to activity and industry,” Adams proclaimed, “that…men might be urged to constant exertions of beneficence.” Because of the irresistible impulse to win the approval of others, “men of all sorts, even those who have the least of reason, virtue or benevolence, are chained down to an incessant servitude to their fellow creatures; laboring without intermission…slaves to mankind.” The social consequences of this powerful drive would, he predicted, become most visible in America, because “the lowest can aspire as freely as the highest….” Adams was careful not to claim that the relatively open and uncrowded conditions in America would allow for the emergence of social equality. In fact, he thought that greater freedom in this richer environment would produce greater inequality. But he did think that the combustible combination of the drive for distinction with the more wide open American environment would generate unprecedented levels of productivity.41