Point of View: Adams's Insight
Presidents Day was celebrated earlier this week, and, of course, we at The Star were working rather than reflecting on how far the country has come, or regressed, since George Washington and Abraham Lincoln led it.
Washington, as I learned in Joseph J. Ellis’s new book, “American Dialogue,” had earnestly wanted to have Native Americans settled in enclaves throughout the country, and had even signed a treaty with the Creeks toward this end, but “manifest destiny,” the great westward push, put the kibosh to those plans, to which he’d devoted much of his first term, and, consequently, “slow-motion genocide” ensued.
Ellis’s book was an eye-opener for me. Jefferson stood alone, for
instance, when it came to envisioning an agrarian egalitarian paradise with incidental governing. Other founders, such as John Adams, James Madison, who drafted the Bill of Rights, and who, with Gouverneur Morris, largely provided us with our Constitution, and Alexander Hamilton were for a strong central government. Washington too, I believe.
(I had always thought of Adams in more or less pejorative terms, as an implementer of the Sedition Act, which struck home here with the libel conviction in 1799 of David Frothingham, who, in 1791, began editing Long Island’s first newspaper, The Long-Island Herald, in Sag Harbor. The alleged libel, of Hamilton, the then-Secretary of the Treasury, wasn’t published in The Herald, but in The New York Argus, in Brooklyn, in 1799, resulting in Frothingham’s arrest, trial, and conviction. Freedom of speech and of the press were to be enshrined later. Presumably to satisfy the $2,500 bond, Frothingham set to sea, never to be heard from again.)
Anyway, Ellis makes note that it was Adams who predicted our present state of vast inequality, telling Jefferson, who thought we were done with such Old World oligarchical stuff, that “as long as Property exists, it will accumulate in Individuals and Families. . . . I repeat, so long as the Idea and existence of property is admitted and established in Society, accumulations of it will be made, the Snow ball will grow as it rolls.”
Therefore, “the invisible hand of the marketplace,” according to Adams’s lights, and Ellis’s account, “required the visible hand of government to regulate its inevitable excesses,” an insight that was to become embodied in the New Deal.
Ellis says that Franklin Roosevelt, in underlining the need for New Deal legislation, argued that “only enhanced government power at the federal level could offset the economic imbalances fostered by large corporations, manage a huge industrial economy, and redistribute wealth in order to ensure that ordinary workers shared in the bounty.” As Ellis describes it, “This positive profile of government as ‘us’ rather than ‘them’ became received wisdom in mainstream American politics for the next 50 years.”
You probably know the rest, alas, so that’s all for now.