A Monument to the Adams Family

No sooner did we read Dean Karayanis’s column on the current campaign to honor the Adams family with their own monument in Washington than we put in a call to James Grant. The famed editor of the Interest Rate Observer wrote a choice biography of John Adams, called “Party of One.” We were working on, we told him, a short editorial in praise of the Adams family. “Why short?” Mr. Grant exclaimed, typically to the point.It turns out that for a newspaper that views the world through the prism of the Sun, honoring the Adams family is a great opportunity. Particularly in respect of the Constitution and money. At one point the Second President found himself in a position in which he needed to borrow money just to cover our deficit. Adams was horrified that the rate would be 8 percent, which proved the highest rate America would pay for the next 170 years.For Adams, Mr. Grant’s biography notes, was a gold-and-silver man “even when the fast-depreciating Continental was widely regarded as a necessary wartime expedient. Adams would have none of it. ‘The success of our Cause appears to me to depend entirely (under God,) on our support or the Credit of our Currency,’” he proposed in 1777. He reckoned that America “must import if possible a Fund of Gold and Silver to redeem the Bills as they become payable.”A few months later, Adams put the hay down where us mules can get to it: “There is so much Injustice in carrying on a War with a depreciating Currency that We can hardly pray, with Confidence for success.” Like Thomas Jefferson, and in anticipation of the likes of Thomas Hart Benton, a.k.a. “Old Bullion,” Adams distrusted banks, and he advocated a 100 percent gold and silver reserve behind every note that a commercial bank issued.The prospect of borrowing at 8 percent came during the Quasi-War with France. Adams was confronted by his Treasury secretary with the need to pay 8 percent to borrow $5 million to plug a budget deficit. Adams was staggered: “I said that fifteen years before, I had borrowed a larger sum in Holland for 4 ½%, 5 ½% and never more than 6%, upon the naked pledge of the faith of the United States. …” In the event, the Treasury did wind up paying 8 percent.Could President Trump relate? Adams hated the deficit as he hated paper money and as he hated inflation, and he feared the worst for the government’s solvency: “At the rate of our expenses for the support of the government, the navy, and that army, I was sure that national bankruptcy must occur in one year; and what resource had we? Paper money!” He worried needlessly, some will airily conclude. He worried prophetically, others might observe.We’d like to think that greatness of the Adams family down through the years stems, at least in part, from John Adams’ faithfulness to the principles outlined above. A bipartisan group in Congress writes in the Hill that the memorial would “be different from the monuments Washington already knows so well. It would not commemorate only a president, general, or individual achievement.”The proposal for the monument, its backers write, “would tell the story of an American family — men and women, parents and children — bound together across generations by a commitment to public service.” It couldn’t be more timely, coming as the government scrambles to borrow fiat paper money to fund a new war. We’d like to think of visitors to Washington pausing at the monument and asking, “What would John Adams do?”

A Monument to the Adams Family

A Monument to the Adams Family

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