Adams and Obama

As I suggested in yesterday's post, I would submit reviews for books that President Obama has read recently. Today's installment is for David McCullough's biography of John Adams. I originally read the book while traveling in Boston and Philadelphia in March 2008, and wrote the review in June 2008.

John Adams’ mind was a product of the European Enlightenment. Yet this, according to David McCullough in his Pulitzer Prize winning biography entitled John Adams, was only the beginning of the Adams legacy. The list of contributions made by Adams to the establishment of American society and government is long and weighty. He argued – verbally and in written form -- for independence from Britain at a time when many colonies were clinging to notions of peace with the mother country. He nominated George Washington to be the first commander of the Continental Army. Adams was largely responsible for the rules and by-laws of the emerging republic’s first navy, and he was instrumental in the creation of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also served as the second president of the fledgling United States and as a diplomat in The Netherlands and France. Quite possibly though, the most significant aspects of John Adams’ life involved the creation of structures and underlying principles of United States government.


In a 1776 pamphlet entitled Thoughts on Government, Adams produced a work of genius. In it, he laid out the twin themes of independence. “The happiness of the people was the purpose of government . . . [and] that form of government was best which produced the greatest amount of happiness for the largest number” (102). In an era of Enlightenment, Adams was creating a government that “raised fundamental questions about the realities of human nature, political power, and the good society” (101). Largely based on the values of 17th century English political philosopher John Locke, virtue had a prominent role in this “good society.” Moreover, the primary mechanism for achieving virtue in society was through education. Thus the creation and perpetuation of a virtuous government was dependent upon a “government of laws, and not of men” (222) but also on government’s ability to “spread . . . wisdom, knowledge, and virtue among all the people” through the creation of “private societies and public institutions . . . for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country” (223). Of course, Adams was not alone in promoting education in the late colonial and early republican periods. Ben Franklin also contributed to a pursuit of knowledge in 18th century society. For example, Franklin’s hand is behind the establishment of the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731 (essentially the first library in North America), the American Philosophical Society in 1745, and the University of Pennsylvania in 1749. Thus when Adams presented the idea of a Boston counterpart to Philadelphia’s Philosophical Society it was, in McCullough’s words “enthusiastically taken up” (223) to become the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1780.

As important as this reader considers education in a civil society, Adams’ greatest contribution to government can be seen best in the “principle of the separation and balance of powers” (222) which Adams first wrote for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1779, only to later argue for it during the drafting of the Constitution in 1787. In January 1787, Adams had produced a pamphlet entitled A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America. Although hastily written, it is considered to be “an expanded, more erudite rendition of the case for checks and balances in government that he had championed in his Thoughts on Government, and later put into operation in his draft of the Massachusetts constitution” (374). In it, Adams identified the salient features of a government free of monarchy and hereditary aristocracies. “There must be three parts to government – executive, legislative, and judicial – and to achieve balance it was essential that it be a strong executive, a bicameral legislature, and an independent judiciary” (375). Once again the power of Enlightenment principles and concepts is apparent in the structure of government which Adams conceived. In this case, Enlightenment notions of balance and symmetry in the framing of power are paramount. This structure has come to be known as the first, second and third articles of the Constitution which were signed into law in Philadelphia in September 1787, and it is sure evidence of Adams’ tremendous contribution to the narrative of the American story.

Indeed, within the past week an example of Adams’ independent judiciary can be found in BOUMEDIENE ET AL. v. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, ET AL. decided 12 June 2008. This decision, although disliked by the President of the United States, ruled against the President and his denial of habeas corpus (Latin for “present the body”). Had Adams not had the foresight to envision the need for a court system which could, if necessary, rule against the executive power without fear of reprisal, the American people – and arguably the world – would not have had habeas corpus restored.

Late in his life, Adams read (or likely re-read) some of the writings of Rousseau, one of the seminal figures of the European Enlightenment. To Rousseau’s line declaring “There is no doubt that people are in the long run what the government make out of them . . .” Adams responded in the margin with “The government ought to be what the people make it” (619). Clearly even in 1815, some thirty years after Adams’ own seminal works were produced, he believed in the power of the people to know what was best for themselves, and to act on that power with rationality and reason. In short, John Adams was a product of the Enlightenment.