John Adams’s Prayer: May none but Honest and Wise Men ever rule under this Roof

anthony @ 21:05 BST

This inscription, on the fireplace of the State Dining Room in the White House, was composed by John Adams, first Vice-President of the United States and its second President.

It reads:

“I pray Heaven to Bestow the Best of Blessings on THIS HOUSE and on All that shall hereafter Inhabit it. May none but Honest and Wise Men ever rule under this Roof.”

During the French Revolution, when men of property were cacking themselves over fear of Jacobins Under the Bed (much as we were doing over the Reds during the McCarthyite era and today over the “terrorists”), Adams foolishly signed into law the tyrannous Alien and Sedition Acts, precursors of today’s so-called Patriot Act.

For all his faults, he did at least have the wisdom to keep America out of war with Great Britain, despite a powerful anti-British war-party amongst the anti-Federalists (forbears of today’s Democrats), during Washington’s second administration, and, during his own Presidency, with France, despite hotheads like Alexander Hamilton (First Secretary of the Treasury, Agent number 7 of the British government, and wannabe Napoleon), in his own Federalist Party (forbears of today’s Republicans), who were clamouring for war with Revolutionary France.

Commenting on Cheney’s influence on the present incumbent, Geezer writes:

Well, the US president of every administration has been a figurehead, the problem with Duhbya is that he doesn’t have the ability to figure…

Quite so, Geezer, quite so.

John Adams was indeed a figurehead, both in the sense that he spent much of his time away from Washington at home in his beloved Quincey, leaving others to mind the shop (I mean, store), as Eisenhower did when Tricky Dickie was VP, and as Reagan did when Bush père was VP, and in the sense that, as Gore Vidal says, he was “not without intellectual interest”.

George Bush fils, too, is certainly a figurehead in the first of the two terms outlined above, leaving it to his VP to run the show, but, alas, is somewat less of a figurehead in the second of the two terms, not having the ability to figure, and being somewhat more of a, yes, you’ve guessed it…