Two American Presidents Faced ‘The Problem of Democracy’

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John Adams and John Quincy Adams have long been eclipsed in the minds of historians and the public by their more charismatic rivals, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Recent years have witnessed a reinterpretation of facts that were always in plain sight. Jefferson was a man who couldn’t bring himself to act on the values he proclaimed; Jackson had few values beyond his lust for glory.

The “presidents Adams,” as authors Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein call them, operated from entirely different habits of mind. Isenberg and Burstein’s biography of the father-son statesmen, The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality (Viking), succeeds at dusting off the reputations of its subjects as fussbudget naysayers. The authors argue that the Adams family warned against the situation where we find ourselves today—a political system bought and paid for by the rich and run by charismatic but dangerous and deceptive leaders. Isenberg and Burstein praise their subjects for “their stubborn insights into human psychology” and “how emotionally induced thought often undermined social and political justice.”

The trickiest chapter in the career of the father, John Adams, the second president of the United States, concerns immigration and free speech. Here, the authors’ defense falls short. Xenophobia accurately describes their attitude toward the (primarily Irish) immigrants pressing at the gates, albeit their dislike of non-Anglo-Saxons was widespread in the America of their day. However, in our internet age, the debate over where to draw the line between free speech and the willful circulation of dangerous slander remains relevant and unresolved.