JOHN ADAMS AND THE PROPHETS OF PROGRESS (362 pp.]—Zoltan Haraszti—Harvard University Press ($5).
Few U.S. Presidents have left office in such a huff as to miss the inaugurations of their successors. Crusty John Adams did it* when Thomas Jefferson defeated him for re-election in 1800. He left the capital at dawn of Inauguration Day, and by March 17, 1801, after a 14-day journey, he was back on his Quincy, Mass. farm. He even congratulated himself, Yankee-fashion, on a shrewd swap, having made, he felt, "a good exchange ... of honors and virtues for manure."
Like any active man shunted into sudden retirement, Adams, then 65, dreaded having time on his hands. "Ennui, when it rains on a man in large drops," he wrote, "is worse than one of our northeast storms; but the labors of agriculture and amusement of letters will shelter me." Adams gradually slacked off on farm chores, but nothing ever slaked his thirst for letters. He lived to boast of reading 43 books in his 82nd year, and it was in his study, at the hoary age of 90, that he died.†
A spry, scholarly picture of John Adams in his study is offered by Zoltan Haraszti, curator of the Boston Public Library's rare books section, in John Adams and the Prophets of Progress. Author Haraszti manages to write well up to the expert's mark without writing above the interested layman's head. As it happens, John Adams does most of his writing for him.
Revolutionary Conservative. Adams had one of the best private libraries of any American of his day, and he was no passive reader. He never curled up peaceably with a book; he lunged for the jugular of its meaning. The struggle took place in the margins of his books, where he scribbled thousands of comments—talking back to the great minds of all time and especially those of the 18th century.
Author Haraszti has culled Adams' choicest comments and neatly arranged them in the form of dialogues. In this play of intellects, Adams clashed most frequently with the French philosophers, e.g., Rousseau, Voltaire, D'Alembert, Condorcet and their disciples. Adams reveals himself as one of the greatest conservatives who ever helped to make a revolution. Sample dialogue between Adams and Mary Wollstonecraft, mother-in-law of Percy Bysshe Shelley, an ardent feminist, and author of an urgent work entitled Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution:
Mary Wollstonecraft: The cruelties of the half-civilized Romans prove that the progress of the sciences alone can make men wiser and happier.
Adams: Witness Marat, Robespierre . . . etc.
M.W.: A human being is not now allowed vainly to call for death, whilst the flesh is pinched off his quivering limbs.
Adams: No. The guillotine is more expeditious . . .
M.W.: In the Middle Ages . . . the people were, strictly speaking, slaves; bound by feudal tenures, and still more oppressive ecclesiastical restraints.
Adams: Now they are to be bound by no tenures and under no restraints. But taxes are almost as bad as tenures, and atheism is worse than . . . Catholicism, if we judge by its effects.