Yankee from Quincy

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.

Coxcombs & Atheists. Though Adams himself felt that Christianity was saddled with "whole cartloads of trumpery"--and abandoned his Calvinist upbringing to become a Unitarian--he frothed with epithets when he picked up the spoor of an atheist, as he thought he did in a letter from Jean Le Rond d'Alembert to Frederick the Great.

D'Alembert: I am sometimes tempted to believe that God was at least as much in need of advice when he created the moral world as when he created the physical.

Adams: Thou Louse, Flea, Tick, Ant, Wasp, or whatever Vermin thou art, was this Stupendous Universe made and adjusted to give you Money, Sleep, or Digestion?

To Condorcet's comfortable belief "that the perfectibility of man is truly limitless," Adams retorted skeptically: "Will man ever be free from disease, vice, and death?" With Rousseau, whom he dubbed an "eloquent coxcomb," he disputed that the ignorance of primitive man is bliss; that men are equal by nature ("To be sure, if there was but one man in the world, there would be no inequality among mankind"); and that "the voice of the people is the voice of God." "If the majority is 51 and the minority 49," Adam wanted to know, "is it certainly the voice of God? If tomorrow one should change to 50 vs. 50, where is the voice of God? If two and the minority should become the majority, is the voice of God changed?"

John Adams knew he was oldfashioned. He expected to rub posterity the wrong way. But he suspected that he had raised the fundamental questions, and given them, whether posterity cared or not, the fundamental answers.

* As did his son John Quincy, who went horseback riding during Jackson's inaugural, and Andrew Johnson, who sat cleaning up his White House desk during Grant's.

/- On July 4, 1826, 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, within a few hours of the death of Jefferson at Monticello.

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