By: Brooks D. Simpson | April 21, 2025
For some people, becoming president of the United States marks the apex of their ambition. However, it is not always the high point of their careers in public service. Perhaps the clearest examples of distinguished public careers taking a back seat to a mixed legacy as president are those of John and John Quincy Adams.
Although John Adams has been the subject of several recent admiring biographies, including one that was transformed into an HBO miniseries, more recently he served as nothing more than a punchline in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton: A Musical.” Even Aaron Burr and King George III fared better. Yet Adams was a revolutionary long before Hamilton arrived in Manhattan, using his own legal skills as well as his propensity for writing to advance what evolved from an assertion of colonists’ rights to a call for independence.
Without Adams, 1776 might just have been another year in America’s chronology.
As we approach the bicentennial of the elder Adams’s passing (during his son’s presidency), it is time to recognize the Adams’ achievements and service to the nation they did so much to create and establish. The Great American Heroes Act was recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives to extend the work of the John Adams Memorial Commission to establish a fitting memorial and to select a location near the White House.