John Adams: The American Presidents Series
Author: John Patrick Diggins
A revealing look at the true beginning of American politicsUntil recently rescued by David McCullough, John Adams has always been overshadowed by Washington and Jefferson. Volatile, impulsive, irritable, and self-pitying, Adams seemed temperamentally unsuited for the presidency. Yet in many ways he was the perfect successor to Washington in terms of ability, experience, and popularity. Possessed of a far-ranging intelligence, Adams took office amid the birth of the government and multiple crises. Besides maintaining neutrality and regaining peace, his administration created the Department of the Navy, put the army on a surer footing, and left a solvent treasury. One of his shrewdest acts was surely the appointment of moderate Federalist John Marshall as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.Though he was a Federalist, he sought to work outside the still-forming party system. In the end, this would be Adams’s greatest failing and most useful lesson to later leaders.
The Los Angeles Times
John Patrick Diggins, a professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has produced a little work that is more contemporary polemic than considered meditation upon the complexities of his subject, one of the most interesting, admirable and maddeningly difficult men in American history. — Anthony Day
Publishers Weekly
Diggins pays tribute to David McCullough's reestablishment of John Adams's reputation, but he has his own take in this entry in the American Presidents series, edited by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. He seeks to rebut the conventional wisdom that the country's second president was a "loser," a view based on the fact after losing the election of 1800, Adams's party, the Federalists, disappeared from the scene. The 1800 election was, in fact, a triumph for Adams and the ideas the Federalists espoused, says CUNY historian Diggins (On Hallowed Ground), as an opposition party came to power "without America shedding a single drop of blood." Furthermore, Diggins asserts, "American political history begins with the rift between Adams and Jefferson," and though Adams has been disparaged by historians, he played a central role in the development of American democracy. More than just a miniature of our second president, Diggins's slim volume offers a reconsideration of Adams, a thoughtful study of American politics of the period and Adams's legacy for today. (June 11) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A brief life of the post-revolutionary president who liked nothing better than to be left alone. And isolation, comments Diggins (History/CUNY), "while healthy for poetry or philosophy, is fatal in the sphere of politics." Laboring in the daunting shadow of David McCullough's massive, literate biography (John Adams, 2001), Diggins (On Hallowed Ground, 2000, etc.) acquits himself well in the shorter format of the American President series. Like McCullough, he spends time considering Adams in the light of political alter ego Thomas Jefferson, who lived as an aristocrat while speaking as a radical yet unfairly accused his sober-minded, eminently democratic opponent of being a Caesar in the making. Indeed, writes Diggins, when he defeated Adams in the 1800 presidential race, Jefferson even claimed that "he saved America from aristocracy and monarchy"--little realizing, the author adds, "that his utter dependence on party politics represented a defeat of his own ideals." Not that Adams's own ideals were left intact in the hubbub of sectarian fighting and character assassination that marked the earliest days of the republic. As Diggins notes, Adams's questionable record in office helps us "understand American history for what it really is: a study . . . of emerging interest-driven, factional blocs struggling for dominance within a political culture of consensus." In this struggle, the author claims Adams as the prototypical American liberal, whose championing of a strong executive branch, judiciary, and federal military force allowed the central state to take root and grow. Without that state, Diggins argues, no progressive cause since could have been realized. "Ironically," he observes on,"the egalitarian ideals Jefferson espoused would be realized in the very institutions he opposed." Readers of McCullough will find little new factual information here, but the solid interpretation of events will interest students of the presidency and the early republic.
Go to: Diet for Dancers or Best Gluten Free Family Cookbook
All the President's Men
Author: Carl Bernstein
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