The Education of John Adams by R. B. Bernstein

The Education of John Adams
By R. B. Bernstein
Oxford University Press, 2020

A thin biography of an American Founding Father feels almost suspect these days, particularly if the biography is published within hailing distance of Independence Day. The Education of John Adams, the new book by R. B. Bernstein, Lecturer in Law and Politics at the City College of New York, was published on the 1st of July and clocks in at 344 pages, and that page-count makes it something of an anomaly. Aside from entries in a series like “Lives of the American Presidents” (where brevity is a built-in feature), this is virtually unheard-of in a John Adams biography. Page Smith needed two volumes to do the job, each longer than this single one. John Ferling’s one-volume life was well over 500 pages. Even a book as squarely aimed at a broad popular audience as David McCullough’s 2001 bestselling Adams book was 750 pages. Publishing a relatively short biography of the country’s shortest President starts to look like an affront. 

This sense of affront is slightly strengthened by Bernstein’s opening attempt to dismiss what he refers to as all “previous studies” of his subject, claiming they’ve all presented slanted views of Adams by over-concentrating on some aspects of his admittedly multifaceted character while under-concentrating on others. Bernstein rejects this course and strives in these pages for a more balanced look:

Deciding between character without ideas (reducing Adams to an idiosyncratic volcano but ignoring his intellectual depth and ideas without character (seeing Adams as a learned intellectual but shortchanging his humanity) is a false choice. Juxtaposing his ideas with his character, this book sets him within intersecting contexts - personal, regional, lawerly, political, and intellectual - that shaped his vision of the world and his place in it.

It need hardly be said that virtually every one of those “previous studies” likewise rejected the temptation to present a caricature instead of a portrait. All biographers of famous people need to bark a little about the unique nature of their approach (and maybe growl a little about the deficiencies of their predecessors), but this is a snuff box too far. Virtually every one of those previous studies not only described but celebrated the many aspects of the Adams nature; indeed, it’s the main motivation to write an Adams biography.

But Bernstein’s book is nevertheless distinctive. In fact, in its emphasis on personality over period trivia, it most resembles the best likewise-short earlier book on the subject, Honest John Adams, written by Gilbert Chinard almost a century ago. In Bernstein’s pages, John Adams lives and breathes in all his contradictions, glories, and misdemeanors, and the focus helps him to do all that. At every point where another biographer might have been tempted to indulge in a 30-page digression on the Tripoli pirates or the economics of New England small-hold farms, Bernstein stays his course, keeping his eye tightly trained on his hero. It can make for headlong reading.

Of course, occasionally it can also make for frustrating reading, since context is inevitably the victim of such an approach. Bernstein might invoke Machiavelli in his Preface - twice - but he doesn’t get around to discussing, say, Samuel Adams until Page 44. “John found Samuel’s preference for radical, bottom-up activism disturbing,” he writes. “He also was wary of Samuel’s leanings toward American independence, a step that he deemed unwarranted.” Readers wondering if perhaps John’s older cousin had broader or deeper influences on his younger cousin’s maturation as a politician will have to look elsewhere. The spotlight here is resolutely on the one Adams.

The story of John Adams always takes on a poignant, almost wistful tone once that spotlight becomes softer. Adams grew into wisdom, and he slowly ripened into being comfortable simply being John Adams. Bernstein handles this twilight period - when most of the man’s friends were long dead, and when the country he’d risked everything to create was now standing on its own feet without him - with a skill that will make some readers wish he’d linger:

In this last period of his life, Adams read, wrote letters, conversed with visitors, enjoyed his family, and faced the growing burdens and lessons of old age. Just as, generations later, Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, “I have traveled a good deal in Concord,” Adams traveled a good deal in Quincy.

But there’s no lingering in The Education of John Adams, and since that’s the book’s defining characteristic, we’re lucky it’s also the book’s main strength.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.