• Dynasty, Declension, and the Endurance of the House of Adams
• William Merrill Decker (bio)

Sons and daughters of high-performing parents are commonly held to impossible standards of success. Seldom, however, are they required to replicate the careers of their elders, much less sustain a surname's prestige. The odds are long that an American of any era will descend from a family preeminent for two or more generations. To be an Adams, a Roosevelt, a Kennedy, or a Bush is to bear an onerous burden: anything less than stunning achievement counts as a kind of failure. Pity the heir who must emerge from the forebears' shadows. A prominent family's fabled decline is the inevitable predicate of its rise.

The narrative of the decline of the House of Adams commences, as Douglas Egerton demonstrates in his engaging and insightful generational group portrait, with a diary notation Charles Francis Adams set down on February 24, 1848, just after learning that his father, John Quincy Adams, died the evening before: "I no longer have a Father. The glory of the family is departed and I, a solitary and unworthy scion, remain overwhelmed with a sense of my responsibilities."¹ Well might Charles Francis, forty years old with no extraordinary success to claim or brilliant prospect before him, feel the weight of the family legacy and suspect that he trod a downward path as the sole surviving male heir. To the degree that his line had dreamt of dynastic succession, glory had begun to depart with the death—by probable suicide—of his eldest brother George Washington Adams in April 1829, a month after J. Q. Adams's single quadrennial ended in electoral bitterness. It would depart even further with the death from alcoholism of John Adams II in 1834. Chastened, moreover, by the brevity of the presidential administrations of John and J. Q. Adams, who incurred humiliation as the first and second one-term White House occupants, the third-generation scion had every reason to temper his expectations. That Charles Francis defied what Egerton profiles as family dysfunction and predisposition to melancholy (what we might today call clinical depression) to become his father's successor as the Massachusetts third-district U.S. House [End Page 250] Representative, a founder and vice presidential candidate of the Free Soil Party, and U.S. Minister to Great Britain during the Civil War and its aftermath, constitutes success by all but the loftiest of family benchmarks.

It is therefore curious that Charles Francis Adams's rehabilitation should fall outside this book's official program. Opening the narrative with a profile of J. Q. Adams as a late-life champion of racial justice, Egerton's agenda is to track the third and fourth generations' descent first into disappointment and then into petty bigotry. But in its sensitive portrayal of the unlikely, overshadowed, yet quietly courageous career of Charles Francis, Heirs of an Honored Name makes its most valuable contribution to the already voluminous chronicle of this singular American family. It does so by elevating the lonely third-generation survivor to a nearly equal footing with his presidential ancestors even as it enforces a view of him as cold, introverted, and pessimistic, or in other words cast in the mold of the crippling family psychology.

Emerging as a statesman on par with his predecessors, Charles Francis, in this depiction, eludes the thesis, telegraphed in the book's subtitle, by which Egerton insistently frames the family saga. Upon the family's own measure of decline—chronic inoccupancy of the White House—Heirs of an Honored Name imposes another: that the third and particularly the fourth generation failed to acknowledge much less embrace a "modern America" in which privileged first-family Anglo-Americans steadily lose dominance among an onslaught of competing stakeholders. Egerton assesses the cumulative honorability of the House of Adams by its incapacity to preserve its conservatism without smothering the progressivism evinced by the first, second, and third generations. Achieving dishonor in...

• 王朝、衰落和亚当斯家族的持久性
• 威廉·梅里尔·德克尔（生物）

表现出色的父母的儿子和女儿通常被要求达到不可能的成功标准。然而，他们很少需要复制长辈的事业，更不用说维持一个姓氏的威望了。任何时代的美国人都有可能出自一个两代或更多代的杰出家族。成为亚当斯、罗斯福、肯尼迪或布什是要承受沉重的负担：任何不令人惊叹的成就都被视为一种失败。可怜必须从先人的阴影中走出来的继承人。一个显赫家族的衰落是其崛起的必然前提。

正如道格拉斯·埃格顿 (Douglas Egerton) 在他引人入胜且富有洞察力的世代集体肖像中所展示的那样，亚当斯家族衰落的叙述开始了，查尔斯·弗朗西斯·亚当斯 (Charles Francis Adams) 于 1848 年 2 月 24 日在得知他的父亲约翰·昆西·亚当斯 (John Quincy Adams) ，在前一天晚上去世：“我不再有父亲。家庭的荣耀已经离去，而我，一个孤独而卑微的后裔，仍然被我的责任感压得喘不过气来。” ¹查尔斯·弗朗西斯 (Charles Francis) 可能已经 40 岁了，在他面前没有任何非凡的成就或辉煌的前景，他可能会感受到家族遗产的重量，并怀疑他作为唯一幸存的男性继承人走上了下坡路。1829 年 4 月，也就是 JQ 亚当斯的四年一度的选举因选举痛苦而结束一个月后，他的家族梦想着王朝继承，荣耀开始随着他的大哥乔治·华盛顿·亚当斯于 1829 年 4 月去世——可能是自杀。随着 1834 年约翰·亚当斯二世因酗酒而去世，这种情况甚至会更进一步。此外，由于约翰和 JQ 亚当斯的总统任期短暂，他们作为第一任和第二任白宫居住者遭受了羞辱，因此受到了惩罚，第三代子孙完全有理由降低他的期望。[结束第 250 页]众议员、自由土地党的创始人和副总统候选人以及内战及其后果期间的美国驻英国大臣，除了最高的家庭基准外，其他人都取得了成功。

因此，查尔斯·弗朗西斯·亚当斯 (Charles Francis Adams) 的康复不属于本书的官方计划，这很奇怪。以 JQ 亚当斯作为种族正义的晚年拥护者的形象开始叙述，埃格顿的议程是追踪第三代和第四代的下降，首先是失望，然后是小偏见。但在其对查尔斯·弗朗西斯 (Charles Francis, Heirs of an Honored Name)不太可能、黯然失色但默默勇敢的职业生涯的敏感描绘中为这个庞大的美国家庭编年史做出了最有价值的贡献。它通过将孤独的第三代幸存者提升到与他的总统祖先几乎平等的地位来做到这一点，即使它迫使人们认为他是冷漠、内向和悲观的，或者换句话说，是在残缺不全的家庭心理的模式中铸就的。

查尔斯·弗朗西斯 (Charles Francis) 作为与他的前任不相上下的政治家而崭露头角，在这本书的副标题中，查尔斯·弗朗西斯 (Charles Francis) 回避了论文，埃格顿坚持用它来描绘家庭传奇。根据家族自身的衰落——白宫的长期闲置——名誉继承人强加了另一个：第三代，尤其是第四代未能承认更不用说拥抱一个“现代美国”，在这个“现代美国”中，享有特权的第一家族英国人在相互竞争的利益相关者的冲击中，美国人逐渐失去主导地位。埃格顿通过无法在不扼杀第一代、第二代和第三代所表现出的进步主义的情况下保持其保守主义来评估亚当斯家族的累积荣誉。在……中获得耻辱