Randall Woods is the author of the biography John Quincy Adams: A Man for the Whole People. Woods's other books include LBJ: Architect of American Ambition. He is a Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas.
Q: What inspired you to write a biography of John Quincy Adams?
A: This was a departure for me. Most of my work is on the 20th century. But I’m a diplomatic historian, and Quincy Adams was held up as the quintessential secretary of state, kind of an iconic figure, and I needed a change of era and topic. I thought he would benefit from fresh eyes.
Q: What stood out to you about him?
A: I knew he was an intellectual, that he had a massive IQ. His diaries are one of the greatest in the American language, along with Samuel Pepys. I was afraid to go back in time because of a lack of sources, but the Adamses never had an emotion that they didn’t write down.
The book is one-third travelogue—Quincy Adams was the best-traveled American of his generation by the time he was 18—one-third family history, and one-third political and diplomatic history.
I’m not writing for other historians, I’m trying to write for educated laypeople. This country is losing its sense of identity. We don’t know where we’re going.
He was one of the great orators in a period of great orations. He was called upon to give speeches for Lafayette, for Madison. He knew Europe better than any other American—it was a culture he admired, but a politics he didn’t. They had a sense of who they were, and this country didn’t. His effort was to create an American identity—I found that rather interesting.
Q: What would he think of today’s politics, and of the idea of American identity today?
A: He is haunting me: “What is going on with my country?” He thought Andrew Jackson was a nihilist, and that support of slavery was antithetical to the Declaration of Independence. Quincy Adams’s bible was not the Constitution but the Declaration of Independence.
The key here is education, a lack of education, the attack on public education that began in the Reagan administration. It goes back to a sense of identity, people voting in their own self-interest. I grew up in a town of 11,000 people in central Texas. To graduate, you needed a foreign language [and more]. Only 20 percent went to college, but people graduating from high school knew about the separation of powers and the Constitution. People don’t have that anymore.
Quincy Adams and John Adams said that in a virtuous republic, members will sacrifice for the general good, that they have to be educated. That’s what he would say. Trump, the judiciary, the politicization—education is the problem here.
And bad religion, false religion. The Adamses had long conversations about religion, the relationship between Christianity and a virtuous republic. They were committed to church-state separation. They were New Englanders. When John Adams went to Harvard, the whole board of Harvard was required to be Congregational ministers.
My idea is to explore this landscape, people’s lives, and bring it to life. I started this book a long time ago, when there were no contemporary biographies of Quincy Adams. Now there are two, published in 2015 and 2016. I had to convince my publisher!
Q: How many years did you work on the book?
A: Eight or nine years. I do research. That’s one thing about historians. They read my work, and they can smell phony at 100 feet. They can tell if someone has immersed themselves in the literature or they haven’t. I do background reading, and then turn to primary sources.
Q: How would you describe the relationship between John Quincy and his father?
A: He respected his mother [Abigail Adams]. She was a hard woman, a brilliant rustic. She was self-educated, she had a circle of friends, she ran the farm. Like most women in the 18th and 19th centuries, she tended to live through her children. He was her avatar. She expected much from him--she expected him to sacrifice for the American experiment. She ruined two of his romances.
He was emotionally close to his father. He took him to Europe when John Quincy was 11. They nurtured each other. You could write a volume on the correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and on John Adams and John Quincy Adams. They covered everything—religion, politics, history.
They trusted each other implicitly. Unlike Abigail and John Quincy, they were emotionally intimate. They were intellectually compatible. There was no other father-son relationship like that in American history.
Q: So was he seen as preordained to do great things?
A: I don’t think he was a projection of parental expectations. He would have been who he was even without that. With his own children, his expectations destroyed them. Only Charles Francis was able to withstand his brutal expectations.
John Adams was a moderately successful lawyer and farmer, and when he went to the Constitutional Convention he was kind of a poor man. What he had in common [with the others] was their education.
Q: What do you see as John Quincy Adams’s legacy today?
A: The notion of a virtuous republic, and unity. Long before the Civil War…Quincy Adams fought against any form of secession. He told his father once that unity to me is what balance is to you. He was obsessed with it.
He was a New Englander, but was a chief advocate for Western expansion, which was anathema to New England because it diluted their power. He was a nationalist in the best sense of the word. He would be the anti-Trump.
He acknowledged as they grew that there were differences in the regions, in interests, religious orientations. He wanted to create a national economy so each region was dependent on another.
In speeches, he wanted to create an image of America as unique—a republic in a sea of monarchy, a nation of immigrants, based on the common ideals in the Declaration of Independence. Other countries have constitutions, but we are unique—an experiment worth fighting and dying for.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m thinking of a biography of Averell Harriman. I’m going back to the Cold War, to World War II. He didn’t have much of a personality—he was smart, he led a colorful life, but he was very private. It would be a different kind of biography.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Quincy Adams did more for marginalized Americans than any other figure before the Civil War. He spent his career after the presidency fighting slavery.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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