George Washington good, John Adams bad.

Or--wait--is it the other way round?

Here’s Johnny—again.

TEMPORARILY UNLOCKED

I heard a historian on the radio the other day talking about his new book, and it caught my attention because he was saying that some U.S. presidents—even before Trump!—have threatened certain fundamentals of our system of government, and I of course agree. I agree to the point where the proposition comes off to me as a bit of a “duh,” yet I was interested in the fact that a well-credentialed scholar is promoting it.

The author is Corey Brettschneider, professor of constitutional law and politics at Brown. His book is The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It. I haven’t read it, so this isn’t a discussion of the book but of what Professor Brettschneider said in the interview. (As I pointed out in a talk the other night, once the author’s told you everything that’s in a book, why would you need to read it?)

Brettschneider was contrasting what he presented as President Washington’s commitment to American democratic institutions—as seen in Washington’s stepping down after two terms and in various statements he made—with the efforts made by the administration of President John Adams, Washington’s immediate successor, to crack down, in a blatantly authoritarian way, on press criticism of the administration.

And it’s true that the Adams administration and the Federalist majority in Congress made a concerted attack on freedom of speech and of the press. The Federalists didn’t just condemn the press as an enemy of the people, a la Trump. They went on a rampage of convicting and jailing newspaper editors under the Sedition Act, passed by Congress in 1798, which made it illegal to criticize the president.

Yes.

Illegal to criticize the president.

It was a horrible time. Adams’s Secretary of State, Timothy Pickering, scanned the papers daily with relish, marking down editors for arrest. More than twenty were imprisoned during this brief reign not of outright murderous terror, like that in revolutionary France, but of outright, anti-constitutional injustice triggered by the opposition party’s admiration for revolutionary France and the Federalists’ responding, ironically, by imitating—if comparatively weakly, happily—the French terror’s “enemy of the state” mode.

It ended only when most of the acts expired.

Most, not all. A related piece of the 1798 legislation is still on the books: the Alien Enemies Act. Trump has threatened to use it to carry out mass deportations. Such are among the gifts received from those happy, bygone days when the republic was fresh and new and innocent and free. Thanks, President Adams!

Anyway, I am not a fan, as you can tell, of the Alien and Sedition Acts, as they were known, and of course I agree with Professor Brettschneider that Adams, in signing them, violated the individual liberties that the constitutional amendments had been designed to prevent the federal government from violating.

Adams wasn’t, it’s interesting to note, by any means aligned with Secretary Pickering on a number of matters. The whole cabinet, which the president had more or less inherited from Washington—a second-string bunch of hacks, in my estimation, influenced to some degree by the out-of-office Alexander Hamilton—was largely at odds with Adams himself, who hated Hamilton, and the feeling was mutual. The Federalist Party was overreaching wildly while falling apart over these internecine hatreds. Adams is undoubtedly guilty of unconstitutional violations of liberties he supposedly held sacred. But the whole situation was a shitshow.

And that’s the context in which I have to question what Brettschneider was presenting, in his radio interview, as a stark contrast between Adams and Washington when it comes to respect for democratic institutions. For as anyone knows—anyone who has studied both the primary and the secondary record, as the professor and I have—Washington fully approved of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

No. Correction. He believed they didn’t go far enough.

So when it comes to the issue of authoritarian crackdown, Brettschneider’s supposed contrast between the first two presidents doesn’t exist. If making Adams an exceptionally villainous destroyer of American democratic institutions requires making Washington an exceptionally virtuous defender of such institutions, all reality regarding the actors and the period gets washed away in a tide of unknowing, and I don’t think that’s something a well-credentialed scholar should be trying to do.

If you’ve read my stuff about all this, you already know that Washington not only thought the 1798 crackdown legislation should have gone farther but had, two years before he stepped down, carried out a military suppression of the entire citizenry of western Pennsylvania, during which he violated multiple constitutional protections of individual rights. You also know that he viewed any organized opposition to his Federalist majority as an approach to treason. While the people do have a right to protest an individual law, he said, the right stops there. There’s no right of association. Organizations opposed to the majority should be shut down in the interest of preserving order. In the High Federalist view, any concerted dissent from the High Federalist view was insincere on its face, just a ploy for sowing disorder, the purpose to bring down the government.

That’s also what Washington meant when warning, famously, in his tiresomely over-quoted goodbye speech, against “the spirit of party.” He was referring to an organized opposition to his own party, which he managed to not see as a party.

Adams, if we really want a contrast, wasn’t so high a Federalist as Washington. He had his own views, which at times made him a party of one. His signing the Alien and Sedition Acts is rightly condemned, but the idea that Washington, of all people, offers a shining example of an alternative to such government overreach is really pretty bizarre, and this is what comes, I think, of looking for good guys and bad guys: founders to love, founders to hate.

On the flipside, I coincidentally saw a video discussion between Thomas Nichols—a retired professor at the U.S. Naval War College and a specialist on international affairs—and Lindsay Chervinsky—a presidential historian and the Executive Director of the George Washington Presidential Library—regarding Dr. Chervinsky’s new book, Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic. (In this case, too, I haven’t read the book; I’m just considering what was said in the video.) Unlike Brettschneider, who in telling his story of dangerous and salutary presidents, more or less defines Adams by the Alien and Sedition Acts, Chervinsky is out to gain Adams his due as a creator of the office he held, and if you find that kind of thing interesting, she makes a good case that precedents set by the second president were as important as those set by the first.

Unlike Brettschneider on Washington, Chervinsky and Nichols don’t try to make their man Adams a force for unalloyed good. Because they have to deal with the Alien and Sedition Acts.

And “have to,” I thought while watching, seems to be pretty much how they view that job. After a good bit of kvelling about Adams’s importance, they walked up to acknowledging his role in 1798 with a sense of grim duty, almost sadness, as if in signing the acts, Adams had strayed, in a way upsetting to his promoters, from the commitments that had marked his thinking up to that date. As if he’d made an error. Had been flawed. Had succumbed to irrational pressures of his own emotions, so that Nichols and Chervinsky feel sorrow and pain about an aberrant moment in a great career, a moment that they must in good faith responsibly acknowledge, before returning to a celebration of Adams’s importance.

Here again, in a more nuanced way, we have the good-guy/bad-guy problem. The degree of nuance makes this version of the problem more like “important-guy/bad-guy”: bad-guy Adams must be allowed to step out of concealment for a moment before important-guy Adams gets to take over again.

I don’t get why the important guy and the bad guy aren’t in fact fully integrated—but then I don’t view Adams’s anti-democratic attitude in 1798 as any aberration at all from his thinking throughout his career. And I still like Adams! This is the stuff that makes him interesting!

In the video, after the sad part, Nichols and Chervinsky go pure good-guy regarding Abigail Adams. That might seem a pretty safe choice, if looking for good guys is important to you; to me it’s not, obviously. Chervinsky points out, rightly, of course, that Abigail was a brilliant political thinker at both the macro and the tactical levels. But when she added that Abigail could size people up quickly—could see right away who they really were—that made me sad, on behalf of Albert Gallatin, one of my key characters in THE HAMILTON SCHEME, an opponent of the Federalists and therefore hated, naturally enough, by both Adamses.

Abigail, viewing Gallatin, fantastically unfairly, not just as a dedicated opponent but also as a slimy, lying, cold-blooded, French-allied, treacherous foreigner, characterized him with the worst epithet her kneejeek anti-Catholic Yankee soul could come up with: “The Jesuit.” Gallatin was in fact a Calvinist, from Geneva. For whatever that’s worth. In the video, Chervinsky said that Abigail had a way with an insult that could cut people down to size. That description reflexively takes Abigail’s view of those she insulted. Really, she and John were just both really good at insults involving fabrication—lying—and I think that just makes them all the more fun, interesting, and real.

Finally, at the end of the video, Nichols asked Chervinsky why John Adams has been so overshadowed.

And here I had to pause the video and say “What?!”

Nichols does note that there was an HBO show based on Adams’s life, but he also notes the absence of a monument to Adams in D.C. and Adams’s absence from our currency and I mean, come on. Here was a one-term, very problematic presidency, and nevertheless literally everybody who cares about the period knows a lot about Adams and thinks of him as critically important.

It’s not just the HBO show. That show—which wasn’t, by the way, just any show but a high-budget production starring maybe two of the most acclaimed actors of their generation—was made only because a mere blink of an eye ago, everybody loved John Adams to pieces, thanks in large part to the hugely bestselling David McCullough biography. Richard Brookhiser, in his biography of Hamilton, said, “It is impossible not to love John Adams,” and while not everybody would have agreed, there was nothing outlandish about that remark at the time.

Pitching a founder book almost always involves claiming the founder’s been overlooked. But this one’s quite a stretch.

Chervinsky also says that Adams hasn’t gotten his due in part because historians have taken at face value every scurrilous thing Hamilton and Jefferson said about him. That’s funny because I’ve been complaining for years that historians over-rely on irresponsible statements by John Adams (there are about a zillion of them), an idea I got in the early ’00’s from a book published by the historian Garry Wills in the late 1970’s. So round and round we go.

I’m in a different line of work from Brettschneider and Chervinsky, certified professional historians who, for all their differences, are hooked on the promotion, and in the former case, on the detraction of long-dead historical figures whom I find interesting and exciting not because they had what are often called flaws, or lacked them, or sometimes lapsed from the good, or didn’t, but because they were maniacally intense, for both good and ill, when doing their most important work. I’ll never get why we keep being asked to take sides among fascinatingly kooky characters who lived a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

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Further Reading

Chervinsky and Nichols on Adams.

Brettschneider on dangerous and salutary presidents.

Paywalled, sorry: Marshall Smelser on Washington and the Alien and Sedition Acts.