Forget the debate over embryonic-stem-cell research. Never mind the saga of Chandra Levy and her creepy paramour, Gary Condit. This summer, the most fascinating -- and revealing -- proxy for the ongoing culture war that pits liberals against conservatives, libertines against moralists, and humanists against religionists is the glowering, portly visage of John Adams.

Until recently, the second president of the United States was an all-but-forgotten figure, his remarkable bust at Faneuil Hall leaving a more lasting impression than anything he ever said or did. But all that changed -- first with the publication last fall of Joseph Ellis's Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Knopf), and then, far more spectacularly, with David McCullough's best-selling epic biography, simply titled John Adams (Simon & Schuster.)

Earlier this month, Publishers Weekly reported that more than a million copies of John Adams are now in print -- a staggering figure for a serious work of history. John Adams is number one on the New York Times bestseller list, with Founding Brothers not far behind at number four. More significant, Adams himself has emerged as something of a blunt, straight-talking hero for our times.

Attendance at the Adams National Historic Park, in Quincy, Massachusetts, has reportedly doubled. Congress appears likely to approve a monument to Adams, his wife Abigail, and their presidential son John Quincy. George W. Bush is said to be reading John Adams, presumably to learn how to avoid the mistakes that made John Quincy Adams an unpopular, one-term president. Mark Feeney, writing in the Boston Globe, compared the Adams phenomenon to the famous 1981 Rolling Stone cover line about Jim Morrison: HE'S HOT, HE'S SEXY, AND HE'S DEAD.

Yet this newfound admiration for Adams has prompted a surprisingly passionate backlash, not just against Adams himself, but against McCullough, who stands accused of producing "history lite," a 751-page book devoted more to exalting Adams's character and celebrating his and Abigail's enduring marriage than to examining Adams's sometimes loathsome policies and ideas. The most important of these critiques have come from Princeton University history professor Sean Wilentz, in a cover piece for the New Republic, who accuses McCullough of glossing over Adams's flaws in order to write "nostalgic spectacle" and "pleasant uplift" in the mode of American Heritage magazine, where McCullough once worked; and from historian Richard N. Rosenfeld, in the new issue of Harper's, who portrays Adams as a nearly demented monarchist, a bumptious, bumbling diplomat, a trampler of civil liberties, and even a bad father.

Nor has the debate over Adams been restricted to the relatively elite readership of the New Republic and Harper's. Earlier this summer, Rosenfeld's discovery that McCullough erred when he wrote that Thomas Jefferson had called Adams the "colossus of independence" was widely reported; a contrite McCullough responded that he would correct the mistake in subsequent editions. Then, Globe political columnist Thomas Oliphant came out against an Adams memorial, citing Adams's support for the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, under which (among other depredations) editors who criticized President Adams found themselves imprisoned. The Adams boom also suffered a tangential setback when the Globe's Walter Robinson reported that Joseph Ellis -- whose earlier work on Adams, The Passionate Sage, McCullough has cited as an inspiration -- had told his students at Mount Holyoke College, falsely, that he had served in the Vietnam War. (The college recently suspended Ellis for a year without pay.)

At root, though, this fight isn't just about Adams, but rather about two competing visions of America. McCullough's Adams is presented to us not just as a man worthy of admiration in his own right, but in contrast to Jefferson, his friend and rival. McCullough elevates Adams over Jefferson by dwelling almost exclusively on character rather than political philosophy (in an otherwise admiring review in Human Events, Lee Edwards writes that McCullough "is clearly less at home in the realm of ideas"), a standard of judgment that favors Adams.

In the end, though, character can take a public figure only so far. As Wilentz writes, "Plenty of great Americans, after all, have had deeply flawed characters; and if sterling character were the main guide to greatness, all America would formally commemorate the birthday of Robert E. Lee instead of the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr."

WHAT MCCULLOUGH has accomplished is a staggering reversal. Adams, the conservative, who was suspicious of democracy and who put his trust in the wisdom of property owners and aristocracy, becomes the politically correct exemplar for our times. Jefferson, the deep political thinker, the advocate of liberty, decentralized government, and the elevation of the average person, becomes the remote elitist, the hypocrite, the spendthrift who left his heirs in debt.

It's not hard to see how McCullough pulled this off. As David Greenberg observed in Slate, Adams's no-nonsense, plain-talking persona -- reminiscent of Harry Truman, an earlier McCullough subject -- resonates with the current hunger for authenticity. Adams was also an equal partner in a progressive marriage, and -- better still -- both he and Abigail loathed slavery. Jefferson, by contrast, was a dissembler who rarely summoned the courage to tell people off to their faces, who often shirked public duties, and who, of course, not only owned slaves but used them for his sexual gratification.

Yet as appealing a character as Adams clearly is, it is Jefferson's ideas that have endured. And there's no doubt that McCullough gives short shrift to the power of ideas -- a failing even his most sympathetic reviewers acknowledge. "The books that formed Adams as a politician -- Cicero and Thucydides, Locke's `Two Treatises on Government,' John Milton's `Aeropagitica' -- are dutifully itemized, as if McCullough were cruising the stacks admiring the gold-stamped morocco, rather than diving deep into their content for clues to Adams's convictions," wrote Columbia University historian Simon Schama in his New Yorker review.

Although McCullough is forceful writer, a compelling storyteller, and a gifted stylist, when it comes to explaining the importance of Adams's writing (and reading) or placing him in the ideological context of his times, he does indeed fade into the lite. There are riveting, vivid stories in John Adams; the two that stand out most in my mind are his harrowing wintertime journey to France with a young John Quincy, and a mastectomy performed on his then-46-year-old daughter, Nabby, without benefit of anesthesia (she lived several more years, a miracle given that there was no such thing as chemotherapy or radiation in those days). As for Adams's contributions to independence and the early years of the Republic, though, I can't tell you what McCullough thinks, except that his subject was always ready to serve his country despite crushing personal hardships, that he was brutally honest, and that he stood up to anyone who got in his way, whether it was Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, the French foreign minister, or the entire Dutch government.

The Wilentz essay and, now, Richard Rosenfeld's Harper's piece correct -- perhaps overcorrect -- McCullough's flaws. Wilentz's long review, in the July 2 issue of TNR (still available online at www.thenewrepublic.com/070201/
wilentz070201.html), is actually a discursive meditation on modern historiography: he sees McCullough as the personification of a backlash against an overly dry, academic, revisionist form of history-writing that rose to prominence in the 1950s, which was in itself a backlash against "New Deal-era nostalgic kitsch." Rosenfeld, best known as the author of American Aurora, the story of an anti-Federalist (and, thus, anti-Adams) newspaper, focuses much more narrowly on both John Adams and John Adams (the essay is online at www.thomas-paine.com/tpnha/adams_tyranny.html).

Both Wilentz and Rosenfeld attempt to knock down some of McCullough's most important critical judgments about Adams. McCullough says accusations that Adams was a closet monarchist were unfair and unfounded; Wilentz and Rosenfeld say Adams did indeed find much to admire about monarchy, and that though he sincerely wanted independence for the colonies, he wasn't particularly enamored of democracy or individual liberty. Wilentz and Rosenfeld also dismiss McCullough's contentions that Adams's controversial wartime diplomacy in France and the Netherlands was a success; that, while president, he saved the United States from a ruinous war with France (both accuse him of warmongering); and, most important, that the Alien and Sedition Acts, though unfortunate, were an aberration in an otherwise stellar career.

Those acts were far worse than that, say Wilentz and Rosenfeld; indeed, Rosenfeld argues that they led to a "reign of terror" against Adams's political enemies and concludes, "When Adams left the presidency he did so in disgrace. He was the founding father who had opposed popular democracy, subverted the Bill of Rights, and brought his nation to the brink of civil war." Wilentz is more measured, calling Adams a "paradox" because of his anti-democratic views, "a great American who would prove virtually irrelevant to his nation's subsequent political development." And in McCullough's Adams-versus-Jefferson debate (indeed, McCullough had originally conceived his book as a treatise on both men), Wilentz comes down firmly on Jefferson's side, writing that "Jefferson and Adams need to be judged not for who they were but for what they thought and what they did."

NONE OF this should detract from the high critical regard with which John Adams has been received in most quarters. Though McCullough is not an academic historian, he is serious, and his Adams book deserves the acclaim it has won, even from more scholarly types. In a generally favorable piece in the New York Review of Books, Brown University historian Gordon Wood offered a possible explanation for why McCullough, though a popularizer, has been treated more kindly by his peers than the late Barbara Tuchman, another non-academic. "McCullough actually attends historical conferences and sits patiently listening to long specialized papers," Wood wrote. "Anyone who does that, and doesn't have to, deserves respect."

The real value of Wilentz and Rosenfeld's comments is not that they've knocked down the edifice McCullough carefully constructed -- they haven't -- but, rather, that they've provided the necessary political and social context that McCullough, in choosing to tell a personal story, left out. Rosenfeld, in particular, is at least as guilty of excess as McCullough: he blames Adams for John Quincy's cold aloofness and for his other two sons' alcoholism without even mentioning that the Revolution kept him from home during most of his children's formative years. Read together, though, McCullough, Wilentz, and Rosenfeld paint a rounded picture of a deeply fascinating and deeply flawed man.

At some point, John Adams is likely to fade back into secondary status. Walter Isaacson, in Time, wrote that McCullough's principal achievement is to present Adams the observer, the "quirky co-star" who provides us with a fresh look at figures greater than himself, such as Jefferson and Franklin. Adams, a sharp judge of character, sees these men in all their humanness, with all their flaws. They remain, nevertheless, more important and influential figures than he.

But Adams himself, for all his appeal, is a poor proxy for progressives in the culture war. Yes, he was anti-slavery, personally honest, and a partner in an admirable marriage. But it was the hypocrite Jefferson whose writings about liberty and egalitarianism ring down through the ages. Character matters. But ideas matter more.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.

Issue Date: August 31 - September 6, 2001