John Adams and the Pursuit of Greatness

John Adams and the Pursuit of Greatness


I've been reading and watching a lot of stuff about John Adams, our second president. It was a John Adams Christmas at our house, and I received the old PBS documentary from 1976, The Adams Chronicles, as well as the new HBO miniseries starring Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney. I also got several books, including 1776 by David McCullough, and America's First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735-1918, by Richard Brookhiser.

I first fell in love with John Adams in high school, when a friend introduced me to the Broadway musical, 1776 (the director's cut DVD was one of my Christmas presents this year). It starred William Daniels as Adams, in the role he originated on Broadway. From the first time I heard that soundtrack, I took one of Adams' principles as a guiding force for my life: Yet through all the gloom, I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory.

It helped me to understand, young as I was, that pain is temporary and sacrifice in the service of something higher is worth it. Here's the full quotation, which John wrote to his beloved wife Abigail, on July 3, 1776, the day after the Declaration of Independence was signed:

You will think me transported with enthusiasm, but I am not. I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the gloom I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see that the end is worth more than all the means; that posterity will triumph in that day's transaction, even though we may regret it, which I trust in God we shall not.

In my renewed, adult study of John Adams, I have come to love him even more. As a youth, I saw him as a hero and a romantic, the ultimate patriot and husband. As an adult, I see more of his faults. He was a devoted but absent husband and father, adoring his wife from afar, and often feeling forced to choose between his duty to his country (even before it was a country) and his love for his family. He felt he should use his gifts for Justice and Liberty, but what he wanted most was to let other people deal with it while he stayed home and enjoyed the comforts of home, hearth, and family. He knew he fell short of his ideals in the private arena due to his pursuit of his ideals in the public arena.

He was so very human. He was cranky, resentful, petulant, and insecure. But he had a strong sense of duty, an ideal ingrained in him from birth and before, that those who have been privileged with a good family, decent means of support, and a good education had a reponsibility to achieve greatness. According to Brookhiser, "The Adams family wished to be judged, and constantly judged themselves, by the standard of greatness...Great men have large and positive effects on their times and on the future, either through their actions or their thoughts." (p 9)

All of John's hard choices were based on this ideal. He was in a position to have a large and positive effect on his fellow man and on the future of the whole nation; for John it would have been the worst sin to turn down greatness for his own preference or comfort.

I think we've lost this ideal of greatness in our time. In Adams's era, people were encouraged to make their marks by improving the lives of others to the greatest extent their gifts and influence allowed. Ambition was encouraged and engrained in young people, because the more you develop your gifts, and the higher you rise personally, the more good you can do for others—even if you have to sacrifice to achieve that level of success.

I don't think our culture teaches this ideal any longer. If someone declared that they had ambitions to be "great," we would only hear, "greater than you." I see everywhere the opposite ideal, that people are entitled to be considered just as good as anyone else simply because they exist. But that isn't right...not everyone's as good as everyone else. Everyone is equal before the law, but if anyone wants to be as good or great as someone else, they have to work for it. It won't just come because they were born.

In other words, the world doesn't owe you anything. A great person, such as John Adams, understands that he, in fact, owes the world, and spends his life trying not only to repay that debt, to give back all he's gotten from society, but to give society even more than he received. For Adams, birth, social status, inherent gifts and talents, and education, made him a person with a huge debt to pay, and he would only achieve the greatness he desired when he had gone far past simply repaying it.

Those were the values our country was founded on. Every one of our heroic founders felt it was his duty to work for personal greatness, so that the whole society would be better when he left it than it was when he came. We've come so far since those days...and that's not a great thing.