America's First Dynasty : The Adamses, 1735-1918 [Paperback]

Richard Brookhiser (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 4, 2003

They were America's longest lasting dynasty, the closest thing to a royal family our nation has ever known. The Adamses played a leading role in America's affairs for nearly two centuries -- from John, the self-taught lawyer who rose to the highest office in the government he helped to create; to John Quincy, the child prodigy who followed his father to the White House and fought slavery in Congress; to Charles Francis, the Civil War diplomat; to Henry, the brilliant scholar and journalist. Indeed, the history of the Adams family can be read as the history of America itself. For when the Adamses "looked at their past, they saw the nation's," writes author Richard Brookhiser. "When they looked at the nation's past, they saw themselves."

"America's First Dynasty" charts the family's travels through American history along with an impressive cast of characters, among them George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Theodore Roosevelt. Brookhiser also details the darker side of the Adams experience, from the specters of alcoholism and suicide to the crushing burden of performance passed on from father to son. Yet by putting a human face on this legendary family, Brookhiser succeeds in creating an impassioned, heroic family portrait that the American public is not likely to forget.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In the spirit of his earlier books, Alexander Hamilton: American and Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington, Richard Brookhiser produces an elegant, concise volume drawing on previous scholarship but offering a fresh perspective on four prickly generations of Adamses. Until David McCullough's John Adams became a surprise bestseller, the United States' second president and his descendants seldom had good press. Acknowledging John's essential role in the American Revolution and his son John Quincy's principled fight against slavery, contemporaries and historians nonetheless judged both men poor presidents, characterized by haughty pride and stiff-necked dislike of compromise. Charles Francis Adams, John Quincy's son, lost an almost certain chance to run for president as a Republican in 1872 by disdainfully announcing "that he would reject any nomination that had to be negotiated for;" the most famous book by Charles's son, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), implicitly blames Henry's failure to achieve the prominence of his forefathers on the loss of meaning and coherence in the modern, fragmented world. Tracing the lives and careers of these four men, Brookhiser strikes a balance between their struggles with a daunting heritage and battles with the often unappreciative outer world, identifying "the constant companion of the Adamses" as "the idea of greatness. Am I as great as my ancestors? As great as my contemporaries? Why doesn't the world recognize my greatness?" This proves a sensible organizing principle for his graceful reappraisal of a well-known but not often well-understood family. --Wendy Smith --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

"The Adams family saga satisfies our curiosity about famous figures, which is part gossip a venerable genre, from Suetonius to People part identification," writes Brookhiser in his introduction to this quartet of lively profiles of four generations of Adamses: John, the second president; his son, John Quincy, the sixth president; the latter's son, Charles Francis, diplomat and antislavery advocate; and Charles's son, historian and memoirist Henry. Brookhiser, senior editor at the National Review, deviates from the tone of his recent hagiographic works on Washington and Hamilton and presents us with quirky, often unflattering miniatures. Piecing together bits from a wide variety of letters, histories, autobiographies, speeches and legal documents, Brookhiser creates vivid, often disconcerting portraits. Reaaders see Abigail chiding husband John to "remember the ladies," but also his arguing in favor of an "aristocracy of birth"; John Quincy's powerful arguments in the Amistad case turn out to be superfluous to his winning the case. Brookhiser appears to have a love/hate relationship with his subjects. While the first three men are implicitly criticized for seeking power, Henry Adams's later prose style is described as having "the arsenic whiff of unrelieved irony, the by-product of forswearing power." There are wonderful details here John and son John Quincy reading Plutarch to each other over the breakfast table but curious lapses such as a lack of interest in the suicide of Henry's wife, Clover. All too often, however, Brookhiser's conservative politics (so evident in his 1991 The Way of the WASP) color the text: James Buchanan is described as a "gracious, gutless homosexual whose lame-duck cabinet was filled with traitors," and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's complicated race politics are ridiculed. While entertaining, Brookhiser's book feels a little thin, more of a footnote to David McCullough's richly admired biography of John Adams than an important work on its own.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (February 4, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684868644
• ISBN-13: 978-0684868646
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 6.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,556,192 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dynasty and Melancholy, March 3, 2002

By 

Kerry Walters (Lewisburg, PA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: America's First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735-1918 (Hardcover)

An interesting and nicely readable survey of four generations of one of America's founding families. Brookhiser's book doesn't have the detail of McCollough's recent biography on Adams (this isn't a complaint, by the way!). Instead, it traces family traits and dispositions through their historical and psychological course over a period of 150 years or so.

Each one of the mini-biographies of the four Adamses Brookhiser discusses--John, John Quincy, Charles, and Henry--are fascinating in themselves. But what I think is especially valuable is the thread of melancholy that seems to run through the Adams lineage, a thread Brookhiser paints with innuendo rather than bold stroke. John's ambition and frustrated pride, John Quincy's self-punishing advocacy of unpopular causes, Charles' heart-breaking need to establish a postmortem relationship with his father by editing John Quincy's multi-volumed diary, Henry's world-weariness that expresses itself in his cleverly cynical autobiography or his romantic nostalgia for a medieval period that really never was: each of the Adamses suffers from and copes with a dark side in his own way. The darkness is what makes them all so incredibly intriguing and, combined with a New England work ethic, creates a restlessness in them that probably fuels their success.

Two bonuses in the book: first, provocative insights one picks up about the Adamses (for example, Charles's aristocratic, stiff-upper-lip handling of his own increasing dotage in his last years--how Adams-like; or Henry's refusal to mourn the beloved wife who killed herself--again, only an Adams could put on such a public front); second, the book's topic invites us to ask ourselves why it is that we Americans, who supposedly deplore aristocracy out of a loyalty to our democratic traditions, so enjoy and protect our homegrown dynasties. The Adamses, the Roosevelts, the Rockefellers, the Kennedys, the Bushes--we either love 'em or love to hate 'em. A good question to ask ourselves is "why?".

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A family contract, May 21, 2002

By 

Andrew S. Rogers (Stamford, Connecticut) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: America's First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735-1918 (Hardcover)

Richard Brookhiser doesn't write 'biographies' in the conventional sense -- and certainly not in the modern sense, in which writers seem determined to prove that once-admired historical figures are just as messed up as the rest of us, and probably even worse. No, what Brookhiser attempts to do (as I believe he noted in 'Founding Father,' his book about George Washington) is reclaim the ancient idea of biography as a means of understanding and exploring ideas about civic virtue, citizenship, and (dare we say?) morals.

This isn't to say that Brookhiser whitewashes his subjects. Far from it: his subjects come through in this book both as sharply defined individuals and as members of a family with a very clear sense of itself and its place in history. That he chooses not to bog himself down in domestic minutia doesn't detract from the quality of the biography, and enhances the points he's trying to make.

If this book were a novel, cover blurbs would breathlessly proclaim it 'the sweeping saga of an American family across four tempestuous generations.' And the description wouldn't be far wrong. From the time of the Founding until the First World War, the Adams family was (to varying degrees at various times, but always to some extent) among the most prominent, influential, respected, and reviled families in America. Brookhiser does a fine job showing how four individual members of this family bore that inheritance, and shaped, and were shaped by, what it meant to be an Adams. If 'the contract of the [American] founding ... was a contract with their family' (p. 199), the family had contractual obligations in return. Many Adamses chose not to fulfill those 'obligations.' But the four who most notably did, did so with one eye on their times and the other on their patrimony.

The four biographies are fascinating in their own rights. But the section of the book I most enjoyed was the final four chapters, in which Brookhiser weighs one Adams against another and against some of the perennial questions of American civic life -- most notably the question of Republic versus Empire. It's here, especially, that Brookhiser shows how the lessons of the Adams dynasty apply to our own times as well as theirs.

The most obvious appeal of 'America's First Dynasty' is to students of political history. But it also bears reading for the light it shines on current political, constitutional, and cultural questions, and for the recurring dilemma of the family in American political life. For if the supermarket tabloids still label a certain other political/media clan as 'America's royal family,' it's worth remembering that they're not the first nor, by any stretch, the most important. This book is definitely worth a read.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Foundered!, March 24, 2002

By 

John B. Maggiore (Buffalo, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: America's First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735-1918 (Hardcover)

After Richard Brookshiser's excellent - even inspirational - short biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, I eagerly purchased AMERICA'S FIRST DYNASTY with great expectations. Sadly, the book doesn't live up to my hopes, and does not do its subjects justice.

The book contains four mini-biographies (even briefer than Brookshiser's norm) of the four "great" Adamses - John, John Quincy, Charles Francis, and Henry. Their four lives spanned from 1735 through 1918 and tell the tale of America during that time. Which is part of the problem with the book - the scope is way too big for a work slightly longer than 200 pages.

While Brookshiser seemed to capture the essence of Washington and Hamilton, his scant treatment of each Adams only scratches the surface of each life. At the same time the book is more four strung-together stories, rather than an ongoing story (for instance, in chapters about one Adams, Brookshiser rarely writes about the others despite their overlapping lives). At the end of the book, perhaps in an attempt to identify trends to tie these stories together, or perhaps only to push up the page length, Brookshiser writes concluding chapters on "themes."

The book fails for another reason, having to do with the concept of "greatness." If there is such a thing as a "great man," John Adams is a legitimate candidate for the title. Brookshiser tries to make the case that the other three hold such a claim, too, but he (or rather they) fall short. John Quincy, whose story Brookshiser tells best, was an accomplished politician, but he would almost certainly be forgotten if not for his famous name, his failed presidency, and Steven Spielberg's film, AMISTAD. The case for Charles Francis' greatness is tougher still, and Brookshiser sort of admits as much ("John Adams said, foolishly, that he had never been a great man. Charles Francis Adams might have said it, with more truth." P. 211-212). Brookshiser's case for Charles Francis is that his understated style as Lincoln's ambassador to England helped keep the British from siding with the Confederacy. This is a bit of a stretch, but beyond that, the rest of Charles Francis' life is not especially spectacular.

Henry Adams, the "last generation" (Brookshiser does not indicate if John Adams has any direct descendents still alive) never served as a public official as his famous forefathers had. While Henry was well-known, Brookshiser struggles for an explanation for how he represents the continuation of a "dynasty." Henry was a writer, and while it is certainly true that the others also wrote, Brookshiser does not present the Adamses as a dynasty of writers. Instead, they are a dynasty of "great men." Henry enters the pantheon for his book, MONT SAINT MICHEL AND CHARTES (interestingly, not the better known, EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS). Henry's great book apparently has virtually nothing to do with politics or public affairs, so accepting that this is truly a "great book," it is an achievement far removed from those of his family.

So, AMERICA'S FIRST DYNASTY is oddly incoherent. The idea for the book was good, and Brookshiser probably couldn't get away with simply writing a biography of John Adams in the wake of David McCullough's book, but in the future he should stick to biographies of single individuals. This book certainly isn't so bad as to turn me away from future books by Brookshiser, and specifically I'm hoping her turns his attention to Ben Franklin, who is prominent in all three of his period books. But if this marks he third installment in a series on our nation's founders, it will not stand up as the best.