Macbeth Policy

A signature framework drawn from John Quincy Adams: the principle that a candidate who solicits support has already corrupted himself. Adams would “stand for” office but not “run for” it. The name comes from a literary exchange — Joseph Hopkinson accused Adams of adopting “the policy of the wavering Macbeth,” who muses “If chance will have me king, why chance will crown me / Without my stir.” Adams embraced the charge in a letter he titled “The Macbeth Policy,” noting that had Macbeth actually adhered to such a policy, there would have been “no tragedy.”

Adams’s underlying logic, as the book renders it: “He who asks or accepts the offer of friendly service contracts the obligation of meeting it with a suitable return… If he asks or accepts the aid of one, he must ask or accept the multitude. The only choice is to ask or accept nothing.” Soliciting support was “vitally and essentially corrupt”; accepting nothing was “the only principle to which no exception can be taken.” The book treats this as a principle admirably suited to the Washington era but increasingly anachronistic by 1824 — and it notes the tragic coda: Adams ultimately became president by “finally throwing off the Macbeth policy,” relaxing his iron principles in a compromise that “would come to haunt him.”

Where this appears

• John Quincy Adams — Adams’s refusal to campaign for office as a republican principle, and the compromise of it that secured (and shadowed) his presidency.