Founding Fighters

By James Poniewozik

America's first president, George Washington, is on Mount Rushmore. So is the third, Thomas Jefferson. But there is only the merest crevice between them where the second, John Adams, might have been. Nor has Adams ever been on the face of a regular piece of U.S. currency. William McKinley got the $500 bill, for God's sake!

The misfortune of John Adams the man, however, is the good fortune of HBO's John Adams the miniseries. Because viewers have little preconception of the man, the miniseries is free to do what history should, which is not just reproduce the past but reflect on the present. Add a little diversity and subtract a few powdered wigs, John Adams says, and we're having essentially the same arguments we had more than 200 years ago.

Adams (Paul Giamatti) didn't catch many breaks. He wasn't tall and commanding like Washington, wildly gifted like Ben Franklin or silver-tongued like Jefferson--and, he notes, he doesn't have an inheritance, so he must work for a living as an attorney. This colors his personality; Giamatti plays him as a trudging bulldog, noble but vain, intellectual but provincial, idealistic but cautious. And it colors his politics, giving him a darker view of life than those of his colleagues with cleaner fingernails.

The most thought-provoking differences are between Adams and Jefferson (Stephen Dillane). Jefferson is a classic Enlightenment optimist, who believes in philosophy and science and the improvability of mankind. Adams believes that you can change people's condition--make them freer, more prosperous, more fairly represented--but you can't better their souls.

Their differences spill over into politics after the Revolution. Jefferson is leery of creating a strong Constitution that will effectively force the choices and values of his generation on Americans to come. Adams favors it--for exactly that reason. To him, it's human nature to revert to mob rule and injustice; if his generation is lucky enough to get the rules right for once, they should damn well be cemented so that later generations can't screw them up. "You have a disconcerting lack of faith in your fellow man," Jefferson chides. "And you," Adams retorts, "display a disturbing excess of faith in your fellow man."

It's an eternal, multifaceted, unresolved argument. Put one way, it's the debate between hope and pragmatism. Put another, it's the argument between liberalism and conservatism. In Episode 4, the two men watch a demonstration in France of a manned hot-air balloon. It's a small, perfect illustration of the ferment and unease of the Enlightenment. Jefferson is rapturous about the flight and all it symbolizes about human progress; man's bond to Earth is literally being severed for the first time. Adams is convinced the thing won't get off the ground. When the balloon takes off, Jefferson gloats, "Mankind floats upon a limitless plain of air." Adams deadpans, "Hot air."

Hot air! Just pretty words! It's tempting to map John Adams on today's political campaign, with Jefferson as hope-mongering orator Barack Obama and Adams as pragmatic workhorse Hillary Clinton. But the analogy is not perfect. The complex Adams parallels a range of his successors. Like the current President Bush, he's leery of foreign counsel, especially from the French, whom he sees as corrupt, face-painting dandies. Like the previous President Bush, he established a dynasty, through his son John Quincy. And he carries in him pieces of many Americans who've had to rely more on hard work than on gifts and charm: a little Nixon, a little Truman, a little Bob Dole.

You'd think that Hollywood, like the chiselers of mountains, would side with the charismatic dreamers. But John Adams shows that Adams' unflashy tenacity--"Thanks be to God, He gave me stubbornness"--is an asset and his skepticism a form of idealism. To put it in today's terms, Adams is not the Founding Father you'd want to have a beer with. That might be Jefferson or witty, bawdy Franklin. But Adams beat Jefferson in the first contested U.S. election, in 1796, before losing to him in 1800. Who was right? Who ultimately won? Unlike the reply on Mount Rushmore, that answer has not been set in stone.