Left Flank

If only for its visceral qualities—tar and feathering, inoculations, the truth beneath those wigs—HBO's John Adams is an unexpected television treasure. If only Benjamin Franklin had farted on film! How many times have I wanted some producer to dramatize this book or that! I never expected the next one to be David McCullough's John Adams.

I still don't admire John Adams as much as other figures of the age, such as John Marshall or James Madison.

An obvious reason is the question of dynasty. America is currently contemplating replacing one political dynasty, the Bushes, with another, the Clintons. This might seem odd for a country that was born in a revolt against hereditary privilege. But Adams's career suggests that it might not be so odd after all. Adams's eldest son, John Quincy, became America's sixth president despite losing the popular vote to a man from Tennessee. Fully 45% of the members of the first Congress in 1789 were related to each other. (Today 10% of members of Congress have relatives who also served in Congress.)

That none of the other early presidents produced a dynasty may owe more to accidents of biology—none of them produced a son—than to a deep-seated aversion to family privilege. Adams also has a quality that endears him to modern audiences: a cussed authenticity. Washington comes across as too good to be true. Jefferson owned 200 slaves at the time when he held «these truths to be self-evident».

Adams, the advocate of the hereditary principle, was the only one of the first three presidents to have pulled himself up by his bootstraps (his father was a farmer and a cobbler and his mother was probably illiterate) and the Adamses, father and son, were unique among the first dozen presidents in not owning slaves. He could also be irreverent about his fellow revolutionaries. He said that Washington's main qualification for leadership was that he was always the tallest man in the room, and he complained that Jefferson hogged all the glory for writing the Declaration of Independence.

Adams was also fortunate in his wife. Abigail was arguably America's most impressive first lady, a first-rate intellect who devoted her life to tending Adams's farm and raising a family of scholar-statesmen. Abigail was not the sort of woman to boast that she had solved this or that diplomatic problem because she had had a few people to tea. But she had strong views on racial and sexual equality, fulminating against «the sin of slavery» and advocating women's rights.

Adams's record may also strike a chord with a country that has grown weary of George Bush's mission to democratise the world. Adams believed that democracy needed to be restrained by checks and balances, by the good sense of the educated elite, and by the rule of law. (The HBO series rightly starts with an account of Adams's decision to brave the American mob and defend a group of British soldiers who were accused of massacring innocent Americans.) He also believed that a constitutional system could thrive only in the right soil. America is in the mood for Adams's dyspeptic common sense.

Let's not forget the Alien and Sedition Acts!

But, thanks to him, there's this generation's interpretation of the Founding experience, and one of the rare dramatizations of the 18th Century that doesn't just look silly or distant.