4/14/2025

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal begins with a review by Michael Lucchese at Law & Liberty of a new Library of America edition of John Quincy Adams’s writings. Edited by David Waldstreicher, this collection features some of Adams’s most “important addresses to an American people he loved but perhaps never fully understood.” Spanning from his days as an undergraduate to his time in the House of Representatives after his presidency, Lucchese writes that “these documents reveal John Quincy Adams was a man of immense moral clarity and penetrating intellectual powers.” His commitment to America as a classical republic undergirded by an appeal to natural rights should be praised. But the documents also show that Adams “was only half-suited to the tacking and trimming necessary to democratic statesmanship,” because, like his father, he disliked party politics and had a strong independent streak. “In the end, though, anyone who spends time reading Adams’s writings must conclude that he is in the first rank of American statesmen,” Lucchese notes. “Whatever his shortcomings as a practical politician, he achieved great things on behalf of his country—and, perhaps more importantly, he gave voice to her most fundamental principles.”

At RealClearHistory, J. Michael Hoffpauir, Assistant Professor of Political Theory at the University of Austin and a Jack Miller Center fellow, focuses on Benjamin Franklin’s seemingly scandalous praise of vanity. He gives a full-orbed understanding of vanity, which “is not merely one’s desire to stand above others – it is also one’s resentment of those who think they ought to be placed higher.” Hoffpauir then notes that “Franklin’s democratic character…is evident in his realism regarding human beings’ vanity and readiness to give it fair quarter wherever he meets it.” And this is also pivotal for civics education. Without a sense of the higher and the lower, Hoffpauir concludes that “one cannot rightly judge which man is worthy of imitation and honor and which is worthy of condemnation and infamy.”