Book Review: Nation Builder
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“While dwelling with pleasing satisfaction upon the superior excellence of our political institutions, let us not be unmindful that liberty is power; that the nation blessed with the largest portion of liberty must be in proportion to its numbers be the most powerful nation upon earth, and that the tenure of power by man is, in the moral purposes of his Creator, upon condition that it shall be exercised to ends of beneficence, to improve the condition of himself and his fellow men.”
The quintessentially Adamsian assertion that “liberty is power” acquires all its dangers by virtue of the fact that John Quincy Adams, like John Adams before him, considered it reversible as well – and this neatly foreshadows both the achievements and the problematic complications of the entire lifetime JQA spent in politics. That political lifetime is the subject of Charles Edel's comprehensive if slightly dry new book, Nation Builder: John Quincy Adams and the Grand Strategy of the Republic.That “grand strategy,” the rudiments of which Adams absorbed as a very young man from James Madison and especially Alexander Hamilton, is something JQA pondered and sharpened through extensive reading and writing. Adams favored a strong federal government exercising complete authority over a collection of states that possess no separate sovereignty of their own, and he envisioned an America infinitely strengthened by, as it were, an executive brain. This only increased the irony of how sour an experience he found the brainhood itself, his stint as president; “I can scarcely conceive a more harassing, wearying, teasing condition of existence,” he confided in his immense diary. “The weight grows heavier from day to day.”As Edel points out, “Before becoming president, Adams had mused that 'the more of pure moral principle is carried into the policy and conduct of a Government, the wiser and more profound will that policy be,'” and having read widely in his primary sources, Edel shrewdly sees the limitations of his subject:
While he served as secretary of state and president, Adams's different strategies had been stymied by personal and political shortcomings. His disposition was poorly suited for compromises that democratic politics demanded, and he had little ability to steer public opinion. But what had been liabilities now became assets.
These pleasingly sharp assessments of JQA in specific are counter-weighted frequently in Nation Builder by equally-good panoramic shots, especially of the new nation:
In the early republic, American political theory and domestic politics stressed the division of power through checks and balances. But when it came to foreign policy, there was an inconsistency. At least in the Western Hemisphere, America believed in no checks, no balances, and often no restraint. Instead, America pursued, in a vision laid out by the Constitution's framers and executed by John Quincy Adams, a preponderance of power. The reasons for this were clear enough. If America did not, so the framers argued, North America would end up looking like Europe, which would mean no liberty.
2014 has been a surprisingly fruitful year for studies of John Quincy Adams, and Edel's book is in many ways the most intelligent of the bunch. The Adams who emerges from his pages is a fittingly complex figure, as often at war with his own nature as he was with the petty partisanship or Southern slaveholding of his day. Edel's readers will take away from his book a new appreciation of how much the United States they know owes to this early President they've scarcely heard of.
