In 1825, newly elected president John Quincy Adams sat down to compose his first annual message to Congress, what we now call the State o’ the Union Address. J. Quincy hasn’t come down in history as a great president because (unfairly) the circumstances of his election seemed to suggest that the people got screwed out of their first choice, Al Gore Andrew Jackson, and also because (fairly) despite a lifetime training as a diplomat was a maladroit politician. As such his program never had a chance of getting off the ground, and his four years were kind of a loss.

And what a loss. Because although JQA (as he referred to himself in his diaries) wasn’t good at making friends and influencing pols, he was a forward-thinking man. Today, if he’s thought of at all, it is for this quality, evidenced by his post-presidential career as an opponent of slavery in the House of Representatives. However, he was ahead of his time in his conception of the federal government as well. The First Annual Message is the best guide to his thinking and a blueprint of what we lost.

The section on internal improvements begins:

The great object of the institution of civil government is the improvement of the condition of those who are parties to the social compact, and no government, in what ever form constituted, can accomplish the lawful ends of its institution but in proportion as it improves the condition of those over whom it is established. Roads and canals, by multiplying and facilitating the communications and intercourse between distant regions and multitudes of men, are among the most important means of improvement. But moral, political, intellectual improvement are duties assigned by the Author of Our Existence to social no less than to individual man.

For the fulfillment of those duties governments are invested with power, and to the attainment of the end–the progressive improvement of the condition of the governed–the exercise of delegated powers is a duty as sacred and indispensable as the usurpation of powers not granted is criminal and odious.

Wow. This little thought is buried about two-thirds of the way through the message. (Not a speech, mind you–Thomas Jefferson did away with the trips to Congress. This was read by a clerk.) Here you have the modern conception of the welfare state well over 100 years before the term had even been coined. Government’s purpose is not just to be an umpire, it’s to make things better. It would take the Great Depression to make Adams’ view one that was embraced by anything like a majority of the American people.

Adams went on to suggest a national university to go along with West Point, an idea that went back to Washington and still has some merit. He also suggested funding scientific research, another idea that was well ahead of its time, and included a request for observatories, “lighthouses of the sky,” he called them, for which he was subsequently mocked–even though he framed this request as a way to keep the U.S. on the same scientific footing with Europe. After various other reminders to Congress of things that it was supposed to do but hadn’t gotten around to, like establishing uniform weights and measures and building a monument to George Washington (which took forever and included numerous false steps), he turned to the idea that the Constitution had not explicitly authorized Congress to, y’know, build things:

The Constitution under which you are assembled is a charter of limited powers. After full and solemn deliberation upon all or any of the objects which, urged by an irresistible sense of my own duty, I have recommended to your attention should you come to the conclusion that, however desirable in themselves, the enactment of laws for effecting them would transcend the powers committed to you by that venerable instrument which we are all bound to support, let no consideration induce you to assume the exercise of powers not granted to you by the people.

That is, so far in this message I’ve asked you to do a bunch of things and am about to ask you for a lot more. If you look over the Constitution and conclude that I’ve asked you to do something against the rules, for goshsakes don’t do it. Adams then says, “But,” and throws in a long list of all of Congress’s acknowledged powers, concluding with the “necessary and proper” clause.

[I]f these powers and others enumerated in the Constitution may be effectually brought into action by laws promoting the improvement of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures, the cultivation and encouragement of the mechanic and of the elegant arts, the advancement of literature, and the progress of the sciences, ornamental and profound, to refrain from exercising them for the benefit of the people themselves would be to hide in the earth the talent committed to our charge–would be treachery to the most sacred of trusts.

Translation: C’mon, you can do it. You’ve got the power to make things better, so let’s go for the whole deal: arts, sciences, improved farming, light rail, balloon races, sushi buffets, whatever will better the citizenry. He then reminds Congress that the competition (Europe) is doing this kind of thing, and although we have the superior political system it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re number one:

While foreign nations less blessed with that freedom which is power than ourselves are advancing with gigantic strides in the career of public improvement, were we to slumber in indolence or fold up our arms and proclaim to the world that we are palsied by the will of our constituents, would it not be to cast away the bounties of Providence and doom ourselves to perpetual inferiority?

That is, Europe and Asia have bullet trains and we don’t, and at some point that’s going to catch up to us. And–and this was the sentence that helped kill the whole deal, just to cut to the end–don’t listen to those who want the federal government to be this little, out of the way thing. Unfortunately, “Palsied by the will of our constituents” didn’t jibe with the democratic spirit. At this time, and for years and years and years after, and for some groups still today, any expansion of government activity was viewed as a power grab. That’s how this address would be portrayed, and the bad choice of words here didn’t help. This address was later referred to by a historian as “suicide by manifesto.” The public just wasn’t able to think along these lines.

And yet, JQA got it. He got the idea of public works. In his wrap-up, he reminds Congress that some states have built universities and canals, and isn’t that stuff cool? Well, imagine if we used the power of the government to do some of the same things!

If undertakings like these have been accomplished in the compass of a few years by the authority of single members of our Confederation, can we, the representative authorities of the whole Union, fall behind our fellow servants in the exercise of the trust committed to us for the benefit of our common sovereign by the accomplishment of works important to the whole and to which neither the authority nor the resources of any one State can be adequate?

There was no interest in finding out. Adams’ cabinet begged him not to include the internal improvements section, but he felt that this was his one shot to set his political philosophy before the nation. Everyone from Andrew Jackson to Thomas Jefferson blasted Adams as a wannabe tyrant. “When I view the splendor and magnificence of the government embraced in the recommendation of the ,” Jackson wrote, “together with the declaration that it would be criminal for the agents of our government to be palsied by the will of their constituents, I shudder for the consequence–if not checked… it must end in consolidation, and then in despotism.”

Jefferson also decried “consolidation.” “Under the authority to establish post roads, they claim that of cutting down mountains for the construction of roads, of digging canals, and aided by a little sophistry on the words ‘general welfare,’ a right to do, not only the acts to effect that, which are specifically enumerated and permitted, but whatsoever they shall think, or pretend will be for the general welfare. And what is our resource for the preservation of the constitution? Reason and argument? You might as well reason and argue with the marble columns encircling them.”

So much for states rights, Jefferson thought, when what Adams was trying to do was to give money to the states, and make the government more responsive to the people, not less. Jefferson failed to truly understand these words from the message to Congress:

The spirit of improvement is abroad upon the earth. It stimulates the hearts and sharpens the faculties not of our fellow citizens alone, but of the nations of Europe and of their rulers. While dwelling with pleasing satisfaction upon the superior excellence of our political institutions, let us not be unmindful that liberty is power; that the nation blessed with the largest portion of liberty must in proportion to its numbers be the most powerful nation upon earth, and that the tenure of power by man is, in the moral purposes of his Creator, upon condition that it shall be exercised to ends of beneficence, to improve the condition of himself and his fellow men.

God gives governments power, Adams said, because he wants them to use it to positive ends. The end of the government can’t just be about conducting foreign relations, minding the borders, and leaving things in the same crappy condition in which you found them. Or, as Adams himself put it in a letter around this time, that the framers of the Constitution would not have been “so ineffably stupid as to deny themselves the means of bettering their own condition.”

Yet, this was not the prevailing view. As we shall see in future installments of this Internal Improvements miniseries (if anyone is still with me after the many delays of the last couple of weeks), the failure to embrace Adams’ program and others like it helped determine both the economic future of the United States, as well as the relationship between Americans and their government, where the latter was viewed as a necessary evil instead of a force for good.

Sources for the preceding include “John Quincy Adams,” by Robert V. Remini; “Internal Improvements,” by John Lauritz Larson (one of the very few books, if not the only book devoted to this early debate); and “Jefferson: Writings,” Library of America edition.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 11:40 pm and is filed under The Political Mindscape. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.