John Adams by David McCullough

So much had happened in John Adams's life--he had done so much, taken such risks, given so much of himself heart and soul in the cause of his country--that he seems not to have viewed the presidency as an ultimate career objective or crowning life achievement. He was not one given to seeing life as a climb to the top of a ladder or a mountain, but more as a journey or adventure, even a "kind of romance, which a little embellished with fiction or exaggeration or only poetical ornament, would equal anything in the days of chivalry or knight errantry," as once he confided to Abigail. If anything, he was inclined to look back upon the long struggle for independence as the proud defining chapter.

OK--I guess we're doing this, huh. After reading Alexis Coe's biography of George Washington, here we are reading David McCullough's biography of John Adams. It's the second McCullough book I've read this year, after his book on the Johnstown Flood, and it shows the popular historian in full form: a big honking tome, well-written. John Adams can take credit for a renewed interest in the second president, who McCullough clearly suggests is underappreciated relative to his predecessor and successor, and resulted in the HBO miniseries starring Paul Giamatti. But McCullough's position is, I would argue, not just that Adams is underappreciated when set amidst larger personalities, but that there is a political valence to that underappreciation--that our historiography has been shaped by Jacksonian Democrats whose rhetoric of "liberty" and "states' rights" have prevented us from fully appreciating Adams as an advocate for a strong central government and opponent of slavery.

McCullough is a great writer, so in saying I was persuaded, perhaps I am saying that his style worked on me. But I do actually think McCullough's case is compelling. Firstly, he depicts Adams as the "voice" of the Declaration of Independence, advocating stormily for its passage during the Continental Congress during a time when loyalists reluctant to shake the wrath of Great Britain might still have won the day. As a diplomat, Adams secured loans and treaties from European powers in the face of powerful contempt. As president, Adams has the benefit of being a staunch opponent of slavery when every other president of his era, outside of his son John Quincy, either supported the institution's expansion or waffled on it hypocritically, as Washington and Jefferson did. (A nice detail here is that, by inviting a representative of Haiti's Toussaint to the White House, Adams was the first president to host a Black guest.)

I had a vague sense of all that before reading the book, but what I did not realize is that Adams successfully managed the "Quasi-War" with Napoleon's France and kept it from blowing up into a full-blown war of the kind that saw the White House burned just a decade later. This gained Adams no friends, because his own Federalist party (like Hamilton, who comes off here as an absolute conniving piece of shit that everyone hates) was drumming the beat for war and accused Adams of being cowardly, whereas the Jeffersonian Republicans were Francophiles who failed to see the extent of French provocations. This is sort of a key to understanding McCullough's vision of Adams, who successfully navigated both sides of the political arena, which kept the country safe and thriving but made him personally unpopular.

Adams was, it seems, kind of annoying on a personal level. His chief sin, in his own words, was "vanity," though one might add stubbornness, a short temper, and a rusticness inappropriate to the grand courts of Europe. But one person adored him--his wife Abigail, whose eloquence and intelligence set her apart among the First Ladies of the first American century, if not beyond. Adams is unique in that we have a huge trove of his writings, including the letters he and Abigail sent each other, giving us a sense of Adams' own perspectives and thought processes we don't have for other presidents. I was charmed by the thread of Abigail's love for this weird little man that most people seemed to have found unlovable, and it is one of two personal threads that undergird the book, the other being the close friendship with Jefferson that was sundered by their political differences, then stitched back together after both were out of office.

If John Adams has a flaw, it's that the book doesn't seriously deal with the Alien and Sedition Acts, an affront to the right of free speech that marked the low period of Adams's presidency. McCullough explains it away as a kind of product of the political pressures of the time, and shows that Adams later regretted it, but it's not clear exactly what those pressures were, nor why Adams, who seems to have such an iron spine when it came to doing unpopular things, embraced it. And yet, despite this, I came away with a renewed respect for the forgotten second president, "His Rotundity."

Two Books About U.S. History

Political partisanship, Washington predicted, would reduce the government to a crowd of bickering representatives who were very good at thwarting each other but got very little accomplished for their constituents. And for all his talk of unity, he had come to see people as for or against his administration and had little patience for criticism. Unbridled partisanship was his greatest fear, and his greatest failure was that he became increasingly partisan.

This weekend I visited Fort Necessity National Historic Site, a reproduction of the hastily-assembled for in Western Pennsylvania where a young George Washington fired the shots that started the French and Indian War. It's a strange little quirk of history that it was Washington, still a young officer and not yet the American Cincinnatus, started what some call the first true "World War." It's one of those facts that's so insane you'd think everyone would know it, except that perhaps it doesn't fit in our conception of the man who could not tell a lie and who helped forge, then lead, the American republic.

I read Alexis Coe's You Never Forget Your First in part because I wanted to read something about Washington that wasn't a colossal Ron Chernow-size tome. Incidentally, Coe describes her project in writing about Washington as being in opposite to Chernow and his peers, calling them "Thigh Guys"--because they all seem to marvel at the supposed size of the first president's hams. Coe's account is brief and breezy, punctuated by witty tables and feature boxes. I liked, for example, the way she dispatches the battles of the Revolution into a table of summaries, presuming correctly that if someone wanted that kind of thing, they might go to a thousand other books, including the Thigh Guys'. The compaction helps the reader get a stronger sense of the particular shape of Washington's life, which involve not an obvious march toward greatness but a combination of false starts, missteps, and true achievements. I enjoyed learning about Washington's actual administration as president, which always seems to be shrouded somewhat in the mists of history. While Washington's assumption and transfer of power provided the root of the American system, the administration itself seems to have been dominated by an intransigent cabinet--Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton--whose disagreements marked the birth of the partisan era and who ended up estranged from Washington personally.

I couldn't help but think that, for all its posing as an alternative to the "Thigh Guys," Coe's book has little in the way of an opposing thesis about Washington. Those he enslaved, and his moral vacillation about whether and how to emancipate them, come to play here, but that's hardly new information, and Coe seems reluctant to integrate it into a coherent understanding of Washington. He did good and bad, which I suppose is true.

Most of the people in Johnstown never saw the water coming; they only heard it; and those who lived to tell about it would for years after try to describe the sound of the thing it rushed on them.

It began as a deep, steady rumble, they would say; then it grew louder and louder until it had become an avalanche of sound, "a roar like thunder" was how they generally described it. But one man said he thought the sound was more like the rush of an oncoming train, while another said, "And the sound, I will never forget the sound of that. It sound to me just like a lot of horses grinding oats."

Not far from Fort Necessity is the Johnstown Flood National Memorial, which commemorates and interprets the 1889 flood that wiped out the city of Johnstown, PA, killing over two thousand and immiserating many, many more. David McCullough's The Johnstown Flood--the erstwhile historian's first book--tells the story of the flood in detail, beginning with the adjustments to the Lake Conemaugh dam made by a wealthy sporting club of industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and Henry C. Frick, moving on to the dam's bursting and the gruesome aftermath.

What can you say about this except: holy shit. If anything, McCullough's book convinced me that the flood was much worse than I'd even expected. The lucky, it seems, were killed outright, pummeled by the force of the wave, but for many if not most death came in a horrible and drawn-out way. People were launched down the river on the planks that had formerly been their houses, were caught in debris and crushed or drowned. The most horrifying fact is that the flood was actually stopped by a stone arch in Johnstown that did not give way, leaving people to be smashed within a plug of debris that quickly caught on fire. McCullough tells the story of the flood not just in generalities but in painful detail, describing the experiences of specific named victims and families, each of whom suffered their own ghoulish species of misery. It's a tough read, but I was really impressed by how scrupulously researched the book is. Here, as elsewhere, McCullough shows his eye for the telling detail: the sound of the horse grinding oats, or the unlucky brakeman swept away in his train, having settled down for a nap with his socks in his pockets. The fact that McCullough, writing in the sixties, was able to interview survivors is even more exceptional.

The Johnstown Flood would be a seminal moment in American history if only for the number of people it killed--I think the worst disaster pre-9/11?--but it stands out especially because of what it illuminates about Gilded Age America. Public anger turned toward the wealthy of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club, who had turned a derelict reservoir into a ticking time bomb. I appreciated McCullough's sober evaluation of culpability; it's entirely possible, McCullough notes, that the exceptional rainstorm that filled Lake Conemaugh might have broken the dam even without the adjustments, and besides, no one living had been responsible for them. But, McCullough concludes, the neglect in replacing the original valves meant that no matter what, there had been no way to adjust the water level of the dam--a sin which falls directly at the feet of those who ought to have known better. It's not really fair to compare them, because their scopes and purposes are so different, but reading them back to back I did feel like McCullough succeeded with a strong perspective in a way that Coe struggled to achieve in her book about Washington. In both cases, however, they illuminated a very interesting trip to a part of the United States with deep layers of history.

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

It had taken four years. They had endured violent storms, accidents, one disappointment after another, public indifference or ridicule, and clouds of demon mosquitoes. To get to and from their remote sand dune testing ground they had made five round-trips from Dayton (counting Orville's return home to see about stronger propeller shafts), a total of seven thousand miles by train, all to fly little more than half a mile. No matter. They had done it.

Last year, on our way home from our annual trip to the Outer Banks, we stopped at the Wright Brothers National Memorial, where you can see a replica of the Flyer that made the first ever powered flight on December 3rd, 1902--and walk along the paths of its first flights. I really enjoyed the museum there, which made the achievement seem somehow even more impressive: did you know, for instance, that after arriving at Kitty Hawk, Orville and Wilbur discovered that all the data they were using, which had been collected by German aeronautist Otto Lilienthal, was basically garbage, and they had to start from scratch all on their own, using wind tunnels of their own design? So when we went back down this year, I took along historian David McCullough's The Wright Brothers, a biography of the two men and their achievement.

What I enjoyed most about The Wright Brothers is probably the historical sense it gives of Kitty Hawk in the early 1900's. The Outer Banks were barely inhabited at the time, save for "life-saving stations" that were stationed every six miles to save stranded or sinking boats. People lived with their families in the meagerest conditions, growing what they could in small garden plots of mostly sand. Wilbur and Orville stayed with a time with Kitty Hawk's postmaster, and the local life-saving crew provided critical support for the brothers during their stay on the remote beach, and were among the first people outside of the brothers themselves to witness human flight. Kitty Hawk today is all yogurt shops and escape rooms, but you really get a sense of that remoteness passing over some of the bridges further to the south; though many flight enthusiasts of the time were thought of as obsessives or cranks, you have to marvel at the commitment the brothers had toward the goal of flight. On his very first trip over, McCullough describes rough waters that nearly drowned poor Wilbur, who even had to reverse course and camp out for the night in a sheltered part of the sound.

Part of me wanted my experience reading The Wright Brothers to be more like my experience in the museum: to explain (or remind) the various technical achievements that made the Wrights the first to achieve human flight, while so many were making the same attempt. What was so genius about the wing-warping system the Wrights used? How did they perfect the propeller? But McCullough is a historian, not an engineer, and the book is written with an eye toward the human rather than the scientific.

What I really didn't know was what happened after the successful trials at Kitty Hawk. First, no one seems to have believed they'd done it. The first eyewitness account was written in a magazine called Gleanings in Bee Culture. The Wrights attempted over and over again to contact the U.S. government to sell them the Flyer, but the U.S gave them the cold shoulder every time, even after the Wrights had returned to Dayton and begun making regular flights at Huffman Prairie. But not every country was so dismissive--it was actually the French government that first expressed interest in the Wright's invention. France, as I did not know, seems to have been the real epicenter of research into human flight. It wasn't until Wilbur demonstrated the Flyer at Le Mans in 1908--five years after Kitty Hawk--that the momentousness of the achievement had really become clear. And it was the beginning of a period in which the brothers became European celebrities, which seems to have been bemusing and a bit troubling to them both, being rather American in the simplicity of their tastes and habits.

Though I liked the first part of the book best--the wind-swept dunes, the tireless tinkerers, all that stuff of legend was what I wanted to hear about again--but it was this second part, which told the part of the story I'd never heard, that was probably the most valuable.