33. Croly, Promise of American Life, 399–454, for Croly’s preferred, semi-socialistic vision.
34. For the publication history of The Adams Papers, see Lyman H. Butterfield, “The Papers of the Adams Family: Some Account of Their History,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, 71 (1953–57), 328–56.
35. Robert Rutland, “Recycling Early National History Through the Papers of the Founding Fathers,” American Quarterly, XXVIII (1976), 250–62. The references to scholarly reappraisals of Adams in the decades after publication of his papers in a modern edition are cited in the acknowledgments section above and are sprinkled throughout the notes to chapter 1. It also bears mentioning that the two leading historians of early America, Edmund Morgan and Bernard Bailyn, were commissioned to write review essays on the first volumes of the Butterfield edition as they emerged in the early 1960s: see Morgan, “John Adams and the Puritan Tradition,” New England Quarterly, XXXIV (1961), 518–29, and Bailyn, “Butterfield’s Adams: Notes for a Sketch,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, XIX (1962), 140–61. Virtually every major newspaper and magazine in the nation also ran advertisements and reviews; the Massachusetts Historical Society staged the largest reception in its history to mark the publication; and the American Historical Review published a review by an amateur historian named John F. Kennedy.
36. The interpretation of Adams offered in the PBS series was sophisticated and historically accurate. In fact, much of the dialogue was taken directly from his letters and diaries. The text accompanying the series was by Jack Shepherd, The Adams Chronicles: Four Generations of Greatness (Boston, 1975).
37. One of the ironies of the scholarly literature on Adams is that no one has done more to recover both our appreciation and dismissal of Adams as the prototypical republican than Gordon Wood. See above, chapter 4, note 34, for Wood’s treatment of Adams as a political thinker. On the other hand, Wood’s respect for Adams’s abiding political realism is also coupled with a sad but strong verdict on his “irrelevance.” In his most recent book, which appeared as this account was going to press, the underlying reasons for Wood’s verdict are made clearer, for he describes republicanism as a transitional ideology that helped to stabilize post-revolutionary American politics, but then was swept away and superseded by democratic values that were latent in the movement for American independence. See Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992). The other seminal account by a modern scholar of Adams’s intellectual legacy is by John Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics, 69–99, which recognizes Adams as a critic of the emerging liberal ideology in a way that acknowledges his political relevance for our own time. My own view is that Wood provides the best analysis of Adams’s republican values, while Diggins provides the best analysis of Adams’s prominent role as a political thinker who still has something to say to post-liberal America. The persistent popular confusion of John with Sam Adams—largely a consequence of a regional New England beer that trades on Sam’s name—was the object of an utterly unscientific study by yours truly in several local bars and watering holes in western Massachusetts.
Prophecies: An Epilogue
1. Adams to Abigail Adams, July 3, 1776, Family Correspondence, II, 30.
2. Works, VI, 516; Adams to John Langdon, December 12, 1810, Reel 118; Adams to John Jay, March 10, 1822, Reel 124.
3. Adams to Thomas Foxcroft, February 13, 1807, Reel 118.
4. Adams to Benjamin Rush, June 20, 1808, Spur of Fame, 110; Adams to Benjamin Rush, May 14, 1812, Reel 118; Adams to Francis Vanderkemp, February 5, 1805, Works, IX, 589–90.
5. Henry Adams, History, I, 636; Adams to Benjamin Rush, May 14, 1812, Reel 118; Adams to Theodore Foster, October 6, 1811, ibid.
6. See Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History (Boston, 1986), 22–48, for a modern review of the cyclical approach; and Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York, 1987), for the most influential argument on behalf of the cyclical pattern as an explanation for the fate of nation-states over the past five centuries.
7. Much of the vast secondary literature on republican ideology makes at least glancing reference to the habit of mind discussed here. It is the central focus of Drew R. McCoy’s The Elusive Republic and of McCoy’s more recent book, The Last of the Fathers, 39–84, 171–216. For the most recent and comprehensive claim that the “declension model” was losing its hold on most Americans even before the Revolution, see Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, 1988). I tend to agree with McCoy, whose version of Madison is quite similar to my version of Adams. The liberal mentality that Greene discovers emerging in the mid-eighteenth century only becomes dominant, so I would argue, about the time Adams and Jefferson died.
8. Adams to Benjamin Rush, June 20, 1818, Reel 118; Works, VI, 484.
9. Works, VI, 484, 487–88.
10. Adams to Thomas Jefferson, July 15, 1817, Adams-Jefferson Correspondence, II, 519.
11. Adams tended to avoid specific forecasts, preferring to focus on the psychological forces that needed managing rather than chronology. In his low moods he sometimes declared that decline had already begun and in more buoyant moods he referred to postponing America’s judgment day for several centuries. The quoted phrases cited here are both from the same letter to Thomas Foxcroft, February 13, 1807, Reel 118. For the pessimistic predictions of Henry Adams, see his “The Rule of Phase Applied to History,” in The Tendency of History (New York, 1919).
12. Three recent books which focus attention on the intellectual tradition that Adams represents in ways that celebrate rather than denigrate its significance are: Diggins, Lost Soul of American Politics; Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); and Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York, 1990).
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