Before he was inviting comparisons with Hitler and Mussolini, America’s 45th and now 47th president favored himself like another, decidedly more American demagogue. Andrew Jackson. In his first term, Donald Trump hung Jackson’s portrait in his Oval Office, praised Jackson’s populism, and declared his own victory over Hillary Clinton to be “greater than the election of Andrew Jackson.”
And so for this reason, among many others, I want to turn for inspiration ahead of the election to the man and former president forever linked to Jackson in the American historical imagination: John Quincy Adams.
John Quincy was both a man of immense intelligence and accomplishment and, in many ways, one of early America’s perennial losers. His solitary term as president saw much of his agenda stymied by the emergent partisanship of the Jacksonian era and his own inability to garner support for his expansive vision of internal improvements. Jackson, in many ways John Quincy’s opposite, would sweep to power in 1828. And the former president’s subsequent time in the House of Representatives would see him stand valiantly but futilely against the institution of slavery and the coming violent division of the Union.
He was, undoubtedly, his father’s son. Both Presidents Adams, as Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein note, “voiced what few politicians ever speak aloud: a conviction that the people are not always right, can be misled, and will arrive at conclusions with insufficient information.” The authors add that “While humans remained subject to their passions, it was empirically that the favored theory of Western democracy did not ensure positive outcomes. The Adamses sensed this and did not shy away from saying so.”
John Quincy was morally fixed, but intellectually wide-ranging. He frequently spurned party loyalty and was fundamentally quarrelsome. As biographer Harlow Giles Unger describes the later Adams, “he was argumentative and politically unpredictable, but consistent in his fierce and constant defense of justice, human rights, and the individual liberties that his father and other Founding Fathers had fought for in the American Revolution.”