The Adamses sealed their identity as an American royal family of sorts when son John Quincy Adams was elected the sixth president in 1824. But long before John Quincy rose to the top, the Adams brand already had a monarchist tinge. John Adams in fact vehemently opposed hereditary monarchy and ti
Were Adams to be elected, warned the Boston Chronicle, the principle of hereditary succession would be imposed on America, to make way for John Quincy, Mr. McCullough writes in his book John Adams. With Thomas Jefferson, Adamss opponent in the election of 1796, the Boston paper said that no one
But four years later, the populist Jefferson deprived Adams of a second term. In 1824, John Quincy Adams ran for president, and the monarchist charge returned. The father whom he so much admired was to a considerable extent a liability, says Fred Kaplan, author of John Quincy Adams: American V
John Quincy won barely. As in the election of 2000, when another son of a one-term president ran for the job himself, the election of 1824 produced an inconclusive result (which was decided by the House of Representatives). But unlike George W. Bush, who won a second term, John Quincy Adams lost r
The John Quincy story matters, not only because it shows how fears of hereditary succession lingered in the US decades after its founding, but also for its relevance to the Bush family. The second President Bush felt a kinship to John Quincy, and kept a portrait of the sixth president in the private
Still, the comparison between Q and W is easily overdrawn. In a way, John Quincy was more like the first President Bush than the second. John Quincy and George H.W. each brought a long, distinguished rsum of federal government service to the presidency. Indeed, in George W.s first presidential ra
