James L. Nolan, Jr.: What They Saw in America: Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, G. K. Chesterton, and Sayyid Qutb. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 54, Number 2, March/April 2017. Republished with permission.

 

To achieve a degree of self-knowledge, as individuals, families, or nations, we find it helpful to ‘see ourselves as others see us.’ As a student of comparative sociology, James L. Nolan brings together a French liberal who retained a profound appreciation for Christianity and especially Catholic Christianity; a German sociologist fascinated by the interplay of Protestant Christianity and capitalism in particular, and by secularization generally; an English Catholic journalist and man of letters; and a fundamentalist Muslim now regarded as a founder of ‘Islamism,’ the form of Islam which attempts to adapt the Prophet Muhammad’s politics of tribe and empire to the modern world of nation-states. The diverse writers in question all shared the experience of having visited the United States. Although he conveys the uniqueness of each man’s insights, Nolan most wants to identify American characteristics noticed by all four writers. In part that’s the sociologist in him; in part it bespeaks his moral-political intention of improving American self-knowledge and our capacity to “more fully empathize with the values of other cultures.” Given the current tensions between the United States and certain Muslim regimes and would-be regimes, he seeks parallels between the observations of the earlier writers and Qutb, the only one who visited America after the Second World War—that is to say, after the United States became ‘first among equals’ of the powers of the earth.

Nolan approaches his writers through both their writings and their lives, following C. Wright Mills’s assertion “that the essence of the sociological imagination is recognizing the interplay between biography, history, and society.” The advantage to this approach consists of its lively sense of what’s now called ‘context’: These writers visited particular places in America at particular times, bringing their own preoccupations with them. The disadvantage is that it almost necessarily scants the nuances of the arguments presented in their books. This is especially true of a really great work, like Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which, with its two volumes of densely-packed exposition and interpretation, each the length of a good-sized book, requires close attention for a long time. Also, the moral-sociological imperative to find common grounds among such distinctive writers runs the risk of downplaying the very differences among them that might vitiate empathy. After all, if we are simply looking at four sets of values different from ours, why should we empathize? And if we are seeking to empathize, how can we overlook the sharp differences not only between each of them and us but among the writers themselves?

An example of the not-so-close reading that Nolan’s approach almost necessarily entails comes early in his discussion of Tocqueville. He remarks the interest of the young Frenchman and his friend and traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, in “America’s experiment with democracy, a political system they viewed as inevitable, in some form, to Europe’s future.” But “democracy” for Tocqueville isn’t a regime or political system, except in the small, New England townships; it is a form of society that has no aristocratic class. America’s political system is republican. Democracy or (rough) social equality can as easily support despotism, as Tocqueville’s own France had so bloodily proved. Nolan himself quite rightly mentions that Tocqueville’s journey “can be characterized as a sociological project of the most exemplary importance,” and that “the two young Frenchmen were sociologists before their day”—meaning sociology as a distinct field of study which was founded later in their century. He points to Tocqueville’s “notable sense of wonder, discovery, and adventure” in America, a quality (it might be added) shared by Weber and Chesterton but not so much by Qutb.

Tocqueville argues that the democratic character of America results in what might be described as a sort of vulgar greatness. American religiosity, American self-government, and the sheer scope of the American territory lend themselves to the greatness; commerce and what Tocqueville calls “fatuous national pride” (latterly called ‘exceptionalism’) contribute to the vulgarity. Nolan also highlights Americans’ “imperialistic inclinations,” although Tocqueville himself is more precise. He had no quarrel with imperialism as such; he defended the French empire in Algeria, while criticizing the way the French ran it. He rather criticized the pace of American expansion and its attendant “spirit of conquest, and even plunder.” He worried not so much that America was building an empire but that it was building it too rapidly to assimilate thoroughly its vast territories into what Jefferson had called an empire of liberty—an empire in which every new state was populated by genuinely self-governing citizens, men and women worthy of the equal status guaranteed under the Constitution. A good empire needs a mission civilisatrice, but Americans were becoming increasingly uncivil—animated by a sort of spirit that might lead to the supreme incivility of civil war.

This is not to say that Tocqueville viewed the Indians uncritically. Nolan correctly cites both Tocqueville’s uneasiness with the degraded condition of Indians around Buffalo, New York—they had “a penchant for alcohol abuse and had largely been reduced to begging”—and his respect for the Indians he met in Michigan, whom he and Beaumont found to be honest traders and not at all to be calumniated as ‘savages.’ But he overlooks Tocqueville’s underlying concern: Even the noble non-savages of Michigan reminded him of European aristocrats. They disdained work. They derided the white farmer for being little better than the ox behind which he plodded. But this was why aristocrats as a class were finished, whether in the salons of Paris or the woods of Saginaw. Democracy brings human nature to the surface, ruinously undermining the magnificent artifices of aristocracy. Democracy in America exhibits nature’s revenge; driven out by the aristocratic pitchfork, it has returned.

Nolan is very good on Tocqueville’s account of religion in America. Ministers there are entrepreneurs, like all non-slaveholding men. They are commercially-minded, restless and unrooted. He makes Tocqueville a bit one-dimensional on this, however. Tocqueville observes the tendency of Americans to explain their moral actions in terms of personal advantage, all right, but he doesn’t quite believe them, having seen Americans who mad genuine sacrifices for no personal gain at all. Some Americans are better than they say they are, and American ministers could still call their flocks to bridle their self-interest, rightly or wrongly understood. It was crucially important for Tocqueville to have seen this; otherwise, his analysis simply could not have accounted for the ‘crisis of the house divided,’ which he lived to see, if not to see its conclusion.

Although he misses the aristocratic character of the Indians, Nolan readily notices Tocqueville’s critiques of democratic America’s other two aristocracies. The older of them, the Southern plantation class, yields economic weakness, as seen in the contrast Tocqueville draws between the free state of Ohio and the slave state, Kentucky—prosperity on one side of the river, poverty and somnolence on the other. The newer aristocracy, the class of industrial oligarchs, in some respects worried Tocqueville more because they worked for a living, although not with their hands. This was the kind of aristocracy that could issue from democracy, and therefore might prove fatal to it. Another aristocracy, the administrators of the centralized state, were not in Tocqueville’s America; he would write extensively about them years later in The Old Regime and the Revolution. Tocqueville does describe the “soft despotism” of such a state, but Nolan does not make much of that dimension of his argument.

Max Weber, Nolan’s second foreign observer of America, knew all about the administrative state, sharing some of Tocqueville’s qualms about it in his anticipation of a world populated by specialists without spirit and sensualists without heart. Weber is also the one true sociologist among the four writers here, and Nolan seems intellectually very much at home with him.

Weber’s introduction to America came from Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, given him by a well-meaning uncle at the age of eleven. The book got the boy interested in American history, and his brief lecture tour in the America of 1904 brought a fascinated visitor to the now-industrialized world power. Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism “very much with America in mind,” originally publishing it as a pair of articles which appeared within a year of his return to Germany. Nolan brings out the connection Weber makes not only between Protestantism and capitalism but between both of those things and the German aristocracy. A dozen years earlier, Weber had begun a comparative study of peasants in the Rhine Valley and those living east of the Elbe River. The Catholic Rhinelanders “were thriving as independent farmers supplying goods to local urban centers.” They had no reason to move away. But in East Elbe, the “Junker lords,” under economic pressure from capitalism, had begun to organize their farms along “commercial principles.” The old estate system, which combined aristocratic authority with a degree of peasant independence and ownership, was replaced by the more impersonal principles of production and profit; now treated as wage laborers, their communal ties to the estates and the aristocracy severed, the peasants of that region were leaving for the German cities or for the New World. The Junkers hired Catholic peasants from Poland to farm the estates. Here, Protestant peasants, “with longings for more freedom and aspirations to pursue a higher cultured life therefore departed the region, while Catholic Polish peasants were content to live in small villages and farm land viewed by others as undesirable.”

Weber traced the differences between Protestant and Catholic peasants to first principles. Whereas the Puritan Richard Baxter interpreted St. Paul’s warning, “He who will not work shall not eat” as an indication that those who refuse to work lack divine grace, Thomas Aquinas understood it in a more down-to-earth sense: Those who won’t work don’t support  their community, and therefore are not entitled to the support of their community. The Puritan/Protestant association of work with grace spurred Protestants to prove that they were real Christians by working. In America, he saw, Catholic and Lutheran farmers “resisted capitalistic tendencies in agriculture,” whereas Protestants in the Calvinist line embodied such tendencies. Tocqueville would have added that democratization meant that emigrants to America didn’t need to worry about an aristocratic ruling class on the land, thus further encouraging property ownership among the predominantly Calvinist/Protestant settlers in the northern colonies. While Weber attends to the principles of production and economy (“Capitalism asks: How can I produce as many crops as possible for the markets from this given soil with as few men as possible?”), a sociologist armed with Tocqueville’s insistence on the importance of democracy would have added that capitalists also ask: How can I produce crops people actually want to buy?

Weber’s treatment of the American Indians was similarly economistic. In Oklahoma he met with Cherokee leader Robert Latham Owen, who later became a United States Senator, learning that the Indians had objected to American property law, which would replace the traditional “agrarian communism” practiced by their nations when the Indian Territory formally joined the United States a few years after Weber’s visit. Weber was reminded of the German peasants of East Elbe. Weber “thus observed the final chapter of a process that began at the time of Tocqueville’s visit,” and although he didn’t see the political-aristocratic (as distinguished from the economic-communitarian) dimension of the Indians’ way of life, he did see that “The next time I come here, the last remnant of ‘romanticism’ will be gone” from Oklahoma.

Nolan usefully relates Weber’s critique of the German ‘race theorist’ Alfred Ploetz with Tocqueville’s critique of Arthur de Gobineau’s similar notions. Weber had met W. E. B. DuBois in St. Louis, and that alone was enough to disabuse him of the supposition that persons of African heritage were innately inferior intellectually to Europeans. He concluded that “antipathy between races had nothing to do with anthropological differences, but rather were culturally and historically determined.”

Historical determinism entered into Weber’s thought in a manner quite un-Tocquevillian. Tocqueville understood social egalitarianism as a manifestation of human nature. Weber regarded the secularization of Christian and particularly Protestant religiosity as historically inevitable. In Weber’s opinion, Benjamin Franklin necessarily follows from Jonathan Edwards, as the Puritan understanding of work as a manifestation of grace led to a sort of asceticism of accumulation—denying oneself the material benefits of the stuff one accumulates by hard work, investing that stuff in one’s business, literally in one’s busy-ness—and gradually transferring all of one’s time and attention toward work and away from prayer. Paradoxically, this process reduced human freedom as the desire to exhibit one’s ‘gracefulness’ gave way to the “iron cage” confining workers and capitalists alike, both trapped in the ‘need’ to be busier and busier, more and more productive.

Weber saw how this played out in the life of the mind. Nolan remarks that Tocqueville “did not visit a single college” in America, but Weber did—partly because there were actual universities in America by 1904; there was more to see. American universities mostly began as colleges training young men for the pulpit and the bar, but they were now “going through a process of secularization” in parallel with the rest of American society. Weber ascribed this change not only to socio-economic processes but to the influx of German immigrants to America. Not only had German scholars accelerated the “utilitarian turn” of American intellectuals away from Christianity; they had begun to turn the universities toward “religious indifference”—an indifference seen, for example, in the historical school of Biblical exegesis that had taken root in the German universities several generations earlier. Nonetheless, American universities still resisted German models in one important respect. While German students “craved a leader who would give them a Weltanschauung, rather than a teacher who would dispassionately pass along knowledge,” American students thought of their professors as men who sell knowledge and methods “just as the greengrocer sells my mother cabbage.” Even the by-then-entrenched love of sports served “a rational purpose,” namely, the development of “physical efficiency,” even as capitalism required productive efficiency in its workers.

Nolan points to Weber’s increased disapproval of American in his last years, seen in his 1918 Heidelberg lecture with the Tocquevillian title, “Democracy and Aristocracy in American Life.” By the end of the Great War he had become more alert to the existence of a burgeoning American oligarchy. In addition to scoring the persistence of racial bias in America and its consequent serious dilution of democracy there, he also criticized the “highly peculiar combination of fundamental religious ideology with a mercantilist business economy,” a combination yielding “a new aristocracy.” (He would have been thinking of the religiously observant, philanthropic corporation men, Andrew Carnegie in the lead.) In this, he bore witness to features of American life already seen by Tocqueville. But, obviously registering antagonisms generated by the war, Weber went on to complain that the American soldier “doesn’t even know for what he is dying,” whereas the “majestic” vision of the “German warrior” partakes of the “destiny of history”—a sense of which Americans sadly lack. It is hard to resist the suspicion that Calvinist predestinarianism had found its way—in, as Weber would put it, secularized form—into German thought generally and Weber’s thought in particular. He never wrote a book titled The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Historicism.

Nolan’s third observer, G. K. Chesterton, had little use for the ponderosities of Germany theory. He made two visits to America: three months in 1921 and six months in 1930-31., writing What I Saw in America at the beginning of the Jazz Age and Sidelights on New London and Newer York in 1932. Combining a journalist’s eye, a profoundly Catholic sensibility, and a ready with expressed in writing that seems incapable of producing a dull sentence, Chesterton never attempted the systematic treatment of American themes that Tocqueville and Weber bring off but he’s a lot more fun than they are and most assuredly no less intelligent. He was also the only one of Nolan’s four visitors who was famous when he arrived, providing his readers with a few glimpses of the ‘celebrity’ obsessions that were beginning to characterize American democracy, wherein mass markets and mass publicity now intersected.

While Nolan notices Chesterton’s Catholicism (it would be hard to miss), he does not appreciate how pervasive it is in his thought, how all of his observations and animadversions relate to it. From his anti-imperialism to his agrarianism to his detestation of Prohibition, Chesterton defends the Church with unshakable fidelity and brio. “Your country began with the Declaration of Independence and ends with prohibition,” he told an interviewer with the New York Times. Unlike Tocqueville or Weber, Chesterton grounds his understanding of America squarely on the Declaration, which he approvingly describes as a creed. It is a catholic if not Catholic creed, and for Chesterton that’s close enough for government work; he vigorously points to the passages on the origin of unalienable human rights in the Creator. Prohibition of alcoholic drinks violates the natural right of liberty, and additionally reflects the creedal errors of Calvinism, a doctrine he flatly calls “a mistake.” He also regards this prohibition as an instrument of capitalism, whereby the upper classes (who cheerfully ignore the law, as did Chesterton when in their company) attempt to keep industrial workers sober enough to show up for their hours of factory labor.

Industrial capitalism warrants a much less merry scorn. Then as now, the Church rejected it, preferring the cooperation of labor and capital under the rubric of ‘corporatism.’ Chesterton himself, along with other prominent English Catholics including Hilaire Belloc, advocated “distributivism,” whereby private property would remain but would be redistributed so that no large concentrations of it would develop. The distributivists tied this proposal to agrarianism, which Chesterton in turn tied back to the yeoman farmer beloved of the author of America’s Declaration of Independence. He deplored the overpraised novels of Sinclair Lewis, particularly Main Street, for ridiculing the small-town ethos that served to counterbalance industrial urbanization. As Nolan puts it, “The small agrarian town, characterized by personal relationships of cooperation and service, fostered a sort of democratic order that Chesterton idealized.” In that America, Chesterton wrote, “it is as if people took for granted that they were really created equal”—living out Jefferson’s creed in Jefferson’s way.

Comfortable with Americans’ generosity, courage, hospitality, and friendliness, Chesterton did set his teeth at their “hustle and uplift”; Nolan perceptively associates this with Tocqueville’s earlier observation of American “restlessness.” This “passionate worship of energy for its own sake” seemed to Chesterton the “chief fault of the American people.” Self-promotion, advertising: Chesterton quipped when viewing the lights of Broadway at night that all this would seem a perfect wonder to someone who could not read. “The clamor of the multitude,” the unfettered reign of popular opinion also remarked by Tocqueville contrasted unpleasantly with the meditative calm esteemed by a spirit formed in the Church. Like Weber, Chesterton blamed capitalism not democracy for this, and in his analysis Tocqueville strikes me (but not Nolan) as the more thoughtful of the three men, democracy having preceded industrial capitalism in America.

Chesterton’s ardent anti-imperialism (he sided with the Irish, the Boers, the Indians, and after-the-fact with the Americans against the English) and also his anti-internationalism dovetailed perfectly with his Catholicism. He regarded H. G. Well’s notion of a “United States of the World” as a monstrous conception—an “aristocracy of globetrotters,” a ‘Davoisie’ avant la lettre. Both imperialism and internationalism inclined to wipe out nations, but genuine democracy requires popular government, and that can only be “founded on local knowledge.” It has been the genius of Catholic Christianity to frame an international organization that adapts itself to local customs, while avoiding tyranny by respecting the doctrine of powers spiritual held distinct from powers temporal. The modern state, especially the imperial modern state, arose against the Church, and not seldom as a carapace protecting such things as Lutheranism and Calvinism. An international super-state would prove even more malignant. Both aim as fusing spirituality of a sort (calling itself ‘pragmatic,’ ‘scientific’) with temporal power. What Chesterton wanted was a world of nations with small, limited governments. Nolan quotes a representative passage: “So far as… democracy becomes or remains Catholic and Christian, that democracy will remain democratic. In so far as it does not, it will become wildly and wickedly undemocratic”—prey for tyrants as unrestrained by the fear of God as their hapless subjects will need to become in order to submit to them. Chesterton sees and applauds the end of the old aristocracies—no partisan of the ‘Old Regime,’ he—perhaps because he sees that the aristocracy too often inclined to infidelism, in contrast to the steadfast peasantry.

The last of Nolan’s travelers, Sayyid Qutb, equally preferred religiosity to modern statism and secularism. He stayed in America the longest, disliked it the most, and although officially here as an employee of the Egyptian Ministry of Education, came to it with the least curiosity, finding little of value in the country or its people except technical-scientific virtuosity and a magnificent natural beauty (he spent much of his time in Colorado) unappreciated by Americans themselves, preoccupied as they were alternatively by commerce and debauchery.

Although Qutb had begun his career as a secularized literary scholar and poet, he had long resented European imperialism in the Middle East. The Truman Administration’s recognition of Israel after the Second World War turned him against America, too, and he had already begun to move back to the Islamic convictions of his home village. The Egyptian regime of King Farouk (no stranger to debauchery, himself) had sent Qutb to America “with the hope that time in the United States would moderate his hostile attitude toward the West. It did just the opposite.” Nolan does not appreciate the vehemence of Qutb’s hatred of Jews, giving the impression that he was merely an anti-Zionist. But given the character of international politics in the 1940s, separating anti-Zionism from anti-Judaism would have been difficult to do, especially since a substantial number of Muslims in the Middle East rather sympathized with Hitler’s attack on, first, liberal democracies, second, Jews, and third, the British and French empires which ruled much of the region under the League of Nations mandate system. And Qutb did write a virulently anti-Jewish tract, “Our Struggle with the Jews,” published in the 1950s, which does not appear in Nolan’s bibliography. Nolan does observe that Qutb wrote his first Islamist book in 1948, before he left for the United States.

Nolan identifies two main Islamist concepts Qutb enunciated at this time: jahiliyya or ignorance and jihad or struggle. The Koranic term jahiliyya initially “referred to the barbaric condition of Arabs in the early seventh century prior to the mission of the Prophet Muhammad.” Qutb charged the modern West and also apostate, secularized Muslims with such ignorant barbarism. Among apostate Muslims such ignorance led to servility, an aping of Western secularist vulgarity that left them passive slaves of Western imperialism. Jihad consists of true belief (jihad of the heart), correct doctrine and teaching (jihad of the tongue), social service (jihad of the hand), and finally “militant combat” (jihad of the sword). Jihad of the sword did not include attacks on civilians, terrorism, but did include insurgency and of course war against Israel.

Like Tocqueville and Chesterton before him, Qutb found American and particularly New York restlessness rather jarring. More, “the agitated, confused herd… knew no purpose except for money and pleasure,” and gave itself no time for “spiritual longings” or “poetic feelings.” Unlike Tocqueville or Chesterton, Qutb never betrayed the slightest hint of a sense of humor at any of this, railing that “America is the biggest lie known to the world.” “All moral values are subject of ridicule for Americans,” he averred. Eventually, the country would succumb to communism, he prophesied.

In a courageous attempt at empathy, Nolan quickly swoops in to remind his readers that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn also delivered himself of some sharp criticisms of “the decadence and materialism of the West” in his 1978 Harvard University commencement speech. Nolan does allow that the Catholic Christian Chesterton and the Orthodox Christian Solzhenitsyn “no doubt would not agree with Qutb that Islam was the proper remedy,” a judgment with which all his readers and theirs will likely concur. Like all Nolan’s travelers, Qutb deplored the racism he saw in America, finding it un-Islamic. But he also described jazz as “the music the negroes invented to satisfy their primitive inclinations, as well as their desire to be noisy on the one hand and to excite bestial tendencies on the other”—a sentiment not entirely free of racial bias, Nolan observes.

Qutb blamed Western ignorance and barbarism on the Western Christian ‘privatization’ of religion. As a Muslim accustomed to a religion that is also a comprehensive legal code, he found in the distinction between temporal and eternal, especially in its modern ‘liberal’ variant, the separation of Church and State, a dehumanizing schizophrenia that must be halted and reversed. It would be, he wrote, “a disaster for humanity if the world became America.”

Nolan concludes with a summary, listing seven criticisms of America shared by his four visitors. They found America to be violent, racist, materialistic, exploitive of its land, individualistic yet conformist, secularist, and imperialist. Except for Qutb, they praised Americans’ habit of voluntary civic association; Qutb noticed this habit but condemned its manifestation in the form of such sexualized affronts to decent sensibilities as school dances and church socials. Nolan offers, “The fact that his analysis of America lines up in certain respects with assessments made by other Westerners, including those considered in this study, suggests that perhaps he is pointing to certain truths—however entangled with exaggeration and vitriol they may be—that, in Tocqueville’s words, only a foreigner can make reach the ears of Americans.”

I think rather the opposite. Each one of these travelers wrote primarily for his fellow countrymen and also (in the cases of Chesterton and Qutb) for his fellow religionists. Tocqueville and Chesterton sought, first of all, to teach the French and the English about Americans and also themselves. Tocqueville’s book focuses primarily not on America at all, but on democracy, the social form of which America happened to be the purest example. Weber in his later years and Qutb from the beginning reinforced unfavorable judgments many among their peoples had already made. As for Americans, their own writers have served up ample supplies of ‘critique’ very much along the lines we see here. I guess that Americans, like all peoples, are more likely to sit still for criticisms that come from ‘their own’ than those that come from foreigners. (That ‘entrepeneurial’ preacher, Billy Graham, probably pulled more Americans away from their vices than all foreign critics combined.)

What remains interesting about these four travelers, Tocqueville more than any, is their description and analysis of democratic modernity in America. But pointing us to their writings, Nolan provides an excellent encouragement to join them in that study.

 

 

 

 

James Traub: John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit. New York: Basic Books, 2016.

Originally published in Law and Liberty, July 11, 2016. Republished with permission.

 

Founders of moral codes and their consequent political regimes say what they want citizens (or subjects) to do. By making certain actions habitual in us, they seek to nurture a certain kind of human being, a model or type embodying the code and the regime founded. This model of what a human being in this regime ought to be must then be imitated, inasmuch as the model will likely be perfect and therefore impossible to embody fully. A Christian will want to know Jesus, but also Paul, precisely because Paul is not the perfect man but the good citizen of the regime of the perfect man. Less-than-holy regimes follow the same logic. In 1946 two Soviet writers on pedagogy published a book translated into English under the title “I Want to Be Like Stalin.” One wants to know “Soviet Man,” the one embodied by the Man of Steel, but one also wants to know Soviet men and women of a lesser order, the successors, the ones who do indeed become like Stalin. What does it mean to perpetuate a given regime, to uphold the model and inducing the next generations to imitate that model?

In the United States, George Washington served as the model citizen of the republic founded upon the defense of natural rights. (One might add that Benjamin Franklin served as the model citizen-intellectual, which isn’t quite the same thing.) John and Abigail Adams (themselves no mean models) educated their son, John Quincy, to become the worthy successor of the founding generation of the new regime. What does a man formed to defend natural rights look like? James Traub gives us a carefully-drawn portrait of a man “who did not aim to please, and… largely succeeded”—both in not-pleasing and in defending natural rights.

The Adamses began by refusing to treat their child as childish. Jack and Jill may have gone up the hill to fetch a pail of water, but Mrs. Adams judged the tale devoid of moral content and consequently unworthy of her child’s attention. She kept little Johnny out of public school altogether, where such pointless rhymes were taught, preferring to educate him at home with such helps as Charles Rollin’s Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonians and Grecians. When their beloved family physician died at the hands of the troops of “Pharaoh” at Bunker Hill, mother and son wept together, before turning to the task of melting down the family pewter for bullets.

As for father John, he interspersed his activities at the Continental Congress with reading recommendations for his son, Thucydides being just the thing for his ten-year-old. Traub rightly observes, “‘The classics’ was not a subject, like geography or history, but rather a lens through which to examine and understand the life around you.” A year later, Johnny accompanied Father on a diplomatic mission to Europe; after getting chased by a British ship and nearly capsized in a storm on the way over, he received one of Mother’s characteristically bracing monitions: “Dear as you are to me, I had much rather you should have found your Grave in the ocean you have crossed, or any untimely death crop you in your infant years, rather than see you an immoral profligate or a Graceless child.” No such misfortune ensued. Upon his return to Massachusetts at age 18, his aunt Mary reported to Abigail, “He is formed for a Statesman.”

Smartened up and toughened up, Adams proved ready to think about and act in the crises that arose in the aftermath of the American founding—quite literally until his death on the floor of the House of Representatives in February 1848. Traub helps his reader identify five such crises, all interrelated: The French Revolution; the Napoleonic Wars; conflicts leading up to and including the War of 1812 with the British Empire; the rise of New-World republicanism in the face of Old-World monarchism; and the consequences of sectional slavery under conditions of rapid continental expansion.

Adams’s first important intervention in public debate was the “Publicola” letters, a reply to Thomas Paine’s defense of the French Revolution. In 1791—that is, two years before the Jacobins took control of the French Republic and heads began to roll—Adams argued that the American Revolution was indeed justified on the basis of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, but that the same conditions did not prevail in France. Against Paine, he argued that the mere existence of aristocracy or monarchy did not justify revolution but only a long train of abuses and usurpations committed by such regimes, as suffered by the American colonists in the 1760s and 1770s. Further, no people unused to local self-government should undertake a republican revolution because they will likely commit excesses worse than the oppressions they suffer.

By the time the Jacobins did take over, President Washington had appointed the now 27-year-old Adams ambassador to the Low Countries; he arrived just as French troops rolled in. The Dutch had hoped for help from Great Britain and the Hapsburgs, in vain; this conquest demonstrated the necessity for military self-defense rather than dependence upon great-power protectors. It also demonstrated the poisonousness of the factionalism that follows such dependence upon foreigners, who play divide-and-rule politics in the countries they ostensibly protect. Traub suggests that Adams’s dispatches on these themes contributed to the thinking of Washington and Hamilton as they prepared his Farewell Address, the two themes of which are America’s need for political union and for well-defended neutrality.

Generally, the French Revolution reinforced in Adams what he had learned from his beloved classics and also from such experiences as the Shays Rebellion of 1786-87: democratization or equalization as a social phenomenon was a fact in non-slaveholding American states and a strong trend in aristocratic Europe, but in both cases it needed careful management. In the years following, the British aristocracy would prove better at governing this transition than the Continental aristocracies. In his preference for gradualism over violent revolution, and above all in his insistence that people think about democratization, he anticipated Tocqueville, whom he met a generation later, during Tocqueville’s journey through America.

The Napoleonic Wars that followed from the French Revolution saw Adams as our ambassador to Prussia under the administration of his father. The younger Adams saw what Tocqueville would see, later on: that social democratization could lead to despotism as easily as republicanism. He “viewed France as a revolutionary power bent on dominating the world” with a regime that combined atheism, social egalitarianism, and tyranny. First under the three-man Directory regime, which attempted not merely to master Europe but to gain a foothold in North America by trying to purchase the vast Louisiana territory from Spain, and then under the Napoleonic regime, which succeeded in making the purchase, Adams rightly supposed that France planned to establish a military garrison at the strategic chokepoint of New Orleans, thereby controlling the Gulf of Mexico and extending French control up the Mississippi River. This would have enabled France to set the rules for American commerce out of the rich farmlands of the Midwest and conceivably to contain American behind the Alleghenies. The plan died with the slave revolt in France’s colony on Santo Domingo, and although Adams called Thomas Jefferson’s eventual purchase of Louisiana from France a “direct violation of the Constitution (as Jefferson himself admitted, to a Senate ally), he agreed that the safety of the public is the supreme law. Constitutions exist to secure natural rights, not the other way around.

The second diplomatic assignment Adams secured from his father, at the Russian court of Alexander at Saint Petersburg, coincided with another crucial moment in European affairs. Adams and the Czar each saw the other country as a counterweight to Napoleonic France, and in the end Alexander broke with Napoleon’s “Continental System,” provoking the war that led to France’s defeat. Adams did everything he could to encourage Alexander’s inclination to independence, and although the Czar made his own calculations, Adams was able to gain Russian help with U. S. commercial shipping on the Continent—that is, with the one kind of foreign relations Washington and Adams had endorsed with respect to America’s dealings with the European powers, and the one most at issue throughout the Napoleonic Wars.

As a consequence of those wars, British policy aimed at impressing American sailors to service in the Royal Navy and at interference with American shipping to British enemies. Unable to match the Brits on the open seas, the Jefferson and Madison administrations adopted an embargo on British goods, which provoked New Englanders to talk of nullifying federal law and even seceding from the Union. Secession would have served British and general European interests by making North America more like Europe itself, and more like North America when the Indians ruled it: a congeries of dividable states vulnerable to rule from overseas. Fortunately, “the embargo gave way before the Union did,” as Southern senators saw that it wasn’t working.

That didn’t prevent the War of 1812, spurred by mutual U. S.-British underestimation. Adams participated in the negotiating team that eventually produced the Treaty of Ghent, ending the war, although not because the American negotiators proved especially persuasive. As usual, not diplomacy but the military facts on the ground settled matters; British defeat at Baltimore chastened British overconfidence, as did continued political unrest in France, where the reinstated Bourbons proved unpopular. This Second War of Independence, as many Americans called it, confirmed Adams’s conviction of the indispensability of constitutional union to the defense of natural rights, a conviction strengthened as Adams took charge of the State Department under President James Monroe, just as his friend Czar Alexander (unamused by France’s geopolitical proclivities) organized the Holy Alliance against godless republicanism. Spain was part of that alliance, and the Spanish Empire was by far the largest in the New World.

That empire and the regimes of the Americas were changing, and Adams’s conception of American geopolitical strategy changed accordingly. In the 1820s, Latin American nations began to throw off Spanish rule and to found republican regimes rather optimistically modeled on the United States. Adams responded with caution, preferring to delay formal recognition of the new republics so as not to provoke European and especially Holy-Alliance intervention in the hemisphere. This was the circumstance behind his famous declamation that the United States did not go abroad to seek monsters to destroy, but, while applauding republicanism in the defense of natural rights wherever it arose, vindicated only its own regime and the rights of its own people. He spoke against the policy of Senator Henry Clay, who advocated what amounted to a reverse Holy Alliance of New World republics to guard against the Holy Alliance. Adams questioned not whether Latin Americans were endowed with natural rights but rather whether they had yet developed the habits of mind and heart to sustain their newly-designed republican institutions. After all, Americans had governed themselves locally for a long time, and yet had found themselves riven by factionalism to the point of disunion. Latin Americans had enjoyed no such long experience in self-government.

Adams instead formulated what since became known as the Monroe Doctrine. Based on an understanding of the stark regime differences between the Old and the New Worlds, the Holy Alliance and the young republics, the Monroe Doctrine said in effect that we won’t set out to destroy what we take to be foreign monsters if you Europeans don’t set out to destroy what you take to be foreign monsters in the Americas. Traub perceptively remarks that this “marked an end to the fundamental defensiveness of Washington’s message,” inasmuch as it implied a spheres-of-influence division between the two hemispheres. Neither ‘idealistic’ in the Wilsonian sense nor a specimen of amoral Realpolitik, the Adams/Monroe policy guided the United States for the remainder of the century.

Adams attempted to extend his policy during his own administration, which followed Monroe’s two terms. Simon Bolívar proposed a Pan-American Congress for discussing trade and other hemispheric issues, and Adams advocated that we accept the invitation because Washington’s policy—like all policies, as distinct from moral principles—addressed the circumstances of its time and place. Those circumstances had changed with the regime changes in Latin America. The United States was no longer an isolated republic surrounded by territories ruled by imperial monarchies. But this position proved too much to sustain, given Adams’s rather weak political position in the U. S. (Traub calls it “Adams’s Waterloo”). In addition to continued strong reverence among all Americans for all things George Washington had propounded, Southern Congressmen objected that Haiti might attend, and of course discourse with former slave rebels was for them a possibility to dangerous to countenance. Adams’s advocacy of U. S. participation in the Pan-American Congress gave that great political operative, Martin Van Buren, an opportunity to form an alliance with General Andrew Jackson and Senator John C. Calhoun against Adams, making him a one-term president and establishing a new Democratic Party coalition that would dominate American politics for a generation.

This, in turn, precipitated the final crisis of Adams’s career, his finest hour as a natural-rights republican. Jefferson had understood American expansion across the continent as a new kind of imperialism: the “empire of liberty.” Unlike colonial empires, which subordinated the colonies to a distant, central government or ‘metropole,’ the American empire would consist of territories intended for organization as equal states within the American federal republic—all of them guaranteed a republican regime under Article IV, section 4 of the Constitution. Adams had supported U. S. territorial expansion to the Pacific as early as 1818, aiming to rid much of North America of Spanish and British imperial rule. However, from that time and for the next thirty years he would oppose the annexation of Texas because it could not enter the Union as fully republican but as a slave state—that is, a state (or worse, several states) dominated by plantation oligarchs. Although he sided with General Jackson in his drive to wrest Florida from Spain, which he regarded as too weak to control cross-border raids by the Seminole Indians, and he insisted on a clause in the eventual treaty with Spain in which the Empire would cede U. S. claims in the far West, Texas was another matter.

More subtly, in discussing the matter with Senator Calhoun, he learned that Calhoun imagined the principle of human equality enunciated in the Declaration of Independence applied only to “white men.” Knowing first-hand that the Founders meant no such thing, Adams concluded that the institution of slavery had clouded the minds of slave owners. Just as no one expected a man like George III to hold the truths of the Declaration to be self-evident, it now transpired that the new generation of slave owners (unlike the men Adams had known as a young man) no longer found those truths self-evident, either. This made Adams begin to think that the Constitution and the Union it codified contained a fatal flaw: the three-fifths compromise, whereby slave states gained extra representation in Congress based not on the population of citizens but of a proportion of slaves as well. This had seemed a reasonable compromise in 1787, for the sake of Union—that is, for the sake of defending natural-rights republicanism against the divide-and-rule strategies of its powerful enemies. But by the time of the 1820 Missouri Compromise, Adams judged that the terms of the constitutional union had reinforced anti-republican, oligarchic ideas and sentiments in the South, which then used its disproportionate influence in Congress to extend slavery to the territories—as it had not even wanted to do in the Northwest Ordinance territories back in 1787.

Adams made a startling, one might almost say prophetic, argument, which Traub wisely quotes in full, lest those unfamiliar with the record not believe it. In November 1820, this staunchest friend of the Union confided to his diary that the Union would and should one day dissolve. It should dissolve because the dissolution would prompt a slave rebellion in the South and a civil war between the Northern and Southern regimes. The republican, Northern states would win the war and then abolish slavery. This was the only way slavery would ever be abolished in the United States, given the entrenchment of oligarchy in the South.

When Adams recovered from his 1828 presidential defeat by Jackson and (so far uniquely among ex-presidents) returned to Washington as a Congressman in 1831,he dedicated the remainder of his life to attacking the plantation oligarchy—he called it the “slaveocracy”—of the South. By then, Southerners had begun to claim the right to nullify federal tariff laws, following the bad example of New England Federalists a generation earlier. On this, Adams supported President Jackson, who let it be known (quite believably, given his temperament) that he would deal harshly with any nullifiers who put their constitutional theory into practice. The eventual compromise on the tariff sacrificed Henry Clay’s “American System” of protective tariffs on manufactures, internal improvements, and the national bank, a price Adams judged too high.

But Adams saw another opportunity for much bigger moral and political stakes than the American System. Precisely because he could not envision disunion as a prelude to slavery abolition followed by reunion, he could reach out to the new Abolitionist movement which began in the early 1830s. Without going to the extremes of William Lloyd Garrison, he could side with the Abolitionists on many of the major issues relevant to abolition: Texas annexation; the right to petition Congress on the slavery issue; the gag rule, which forbade discussion of slavery on the floor of the House; and the celebrated Amistad case, in which Adams represented slaves who had liberated themselves while on board a ship transporting them from Africa by killing the captain.

Not only did Texas annexation invite the extension of slavery, it did so under unusual conditions. Most American territorial gains had come at the expense of Indian nations and tribes, many of which themselves owned slaves. But although Mexico had a corrupt and none-too-republican regime, it had abolished slavery in 1829; it was the ‘Texians,’ as they were called—the American settlers who had moved into the area and declared independence from Mexico in 1836—who had reintroduced slavery, which annexation by the United States would now perpetuate within the Union.

Adams enjoyed better luck in his other anti-slavery campaigns. Traub gives a fine and sometimes funny account of the old man’s ironclad stubbornness, as he bedeviled his slave-state colleagues with every procedural trick in and out of the book to bring the slavery debate to the House floor. And of course in the Amistad case he successfully argued the natural-rights foundation of the Constitution in front of a Supreme Court dominated by Southern justices, including Roger Taney, who would later write the infamous majority opinion in the Dred Scott case. Throughout, he publicly defended the Union while anticipating its eventual temporary and salutary demise.

By 1844, however, he decided to lay it on the line. At a meeting of black citizens in Pittsburgh, he said, “the day of your redemption… may come in peace or it may come in blood; but whether in peace or blood, LET IT COME.”

It was one thing for someone like Garrison to say that. For a former president and sitting Congressman to say it was quite another. Challenged to confirm or deny his statement by a Southern Congressman, Adams didn’t even bother to stand up from his seat: “I say now, let it come. Though it cost the blood of millions of white men, let it come! Let justice be done though the heavens fall.” Perhaps for the first time, the slaveholders began to see what they might be up against.

A few months later, back in his native state, Adams addressed a group of young Whigs: “Young men of Boston: burnish your armor, prepare for the conflict, and I say to you, in the language of Galgacus to the ancient Britons, Think of your forefathers! Think of your posterity.” As many schoolboys then learned, the Scottish chieftain Galgacus rallied the Caledonians to fight Rome in A. D. 83, saying of his fellow Scots, “To all of us slavery is a thing unknown,” and of the Romans, “To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the name empire. They make a desert and they call it peace.” Not only was John Quincy Adams’s father a man worthy of thought, but his son, Charles Francis, headed the Young Men’s Whig Club of Boston, and would later serve as the U. S. ambassador to Great Britain during the Civil War. Thinking of his father and his son, asking his fellow citizens to think of theirs, Adams reminded Massachusetts men that they had fought one empire and might soon fight another—not the republican empire of liberty founded by their forefathers but an oligarchic, slave-based empire now extending into the deserts of the Southwest.

After Adams died in 1848, during the Mexican War he had argued against, one of the pallbearers at his state funeral, John C. Calhoun, could have no idea that the spirit of Adams would rise and the regime of the South would suffer the lasting burial, less than twenty years later. A member of the Committee of Arrangements charged with preparing the funeral was an obscure Illinois Congressman, Abraham Lincoln.