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Henry Adams
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Henry Adams
American historian
in full Henry Brooks Adams
born Feb. 16, 1838, Boston
died March 27, 1918, Washington, D.C.
Main
historian, man of letters, and author of one of the outstanding
autobiographies of Western literature, The Education of Henry Adams.
Adams was the product of Boston’s Brahmin class, a cultured elite
that traced its lineage to Puritan New England. He was the
great-grandson of John Adams and the grandson of John Quincy Adams, both
presidents of the United States. The Adams family tradition of
leadership was carried on by his father, Charles Francis Adams
(1807–86), a diplomat, historian, and congressman. His younger brother,
Brooks (1848–1927), was also a historian; his older brother, Charles
Francis, Jr. (1835–1915), was an author and railroad executive. Through
his mother, Abigail Brown Brooks, Adams was related to one of the most
distinguished and wealthiest families in Boston. Tradition ingrained a
deep sense of morality in Adams. He never escaped his heritage and often
spoke of himself as a child of the 17th and 18th centuries who was
forced to come to terms with the new world of the 20th century.
Adams was graduated from Harvard in 1858 and, in typical patrician
fashion, embarked upon a grand tour of Europe in search of amusement and
a vocation. Anticipating a career as an attorney, he spent the winter of
1859 attending lectures in civil law at the University of Berlin. With
the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War in 1861, Pres. Abraham Lincoln
appointed Adams’ father minister to England. Henry, age 23, accompanied
him to London, acting as his private secretary until 1868.
Returning to the United States, Adams travelled to Washington, D.C.,
as a newspaper correspondent for The Nation and other leading journals.
He plunged into the capital’s social and political life, anxious to
begin the reconstruction of a nation shattered by war. He called for
civil service reform and retention of the silver standard. Adams wrote
numerous essays exposing political corruption and warning against the
growing power of economic monopolies, particularly railroads. These
articles were published in Chapters of Erie and Other Essays (1871). The
mediocrity of the nation’s “statesmen” constantly irritated him. Adams
liked to repeat Pres. Ulysses S. Grant’s remark that Venice would be a
fine city if it were drained.
Adams continued his reformist activities as editor of the North
American Review (1870–76). Moreover, he participated in the Liberal
Republican movement. This group of insurgents, repelled by partisanship
and the scandals of the Grant administration, bolted the Republican
Party in 1872 and nominated the Democrat Horace Greeley for president.
Their crusade soon foundered. Adams grew disillusioned with a world he
characterized as devoid of principle. He was disgusted with demagogic
politicians and a society in which all became “servant[s] of the
powerhouse.” Americans, he wrote, “had no time for thought; they saw,
and could see, nothing beyond their day’s work; their attitude to the
universe outside them was that of the deep-sea fish.” His anonymously
published novel Democracy, an American Novel (1880) reflected his loss
of faith. The heroine, Madeleine Lee, like Adams himself, becomes an
intimate of Washington’s political circles. As confidante of a
Midwestern senator, Madeleine is introduced to the democratic process.
She meets the President and other figures who are equally vacuous. After
her contact with the power brokers, Madeleine concluded: “Democracy has
shaken my nerves to pieces.”
In 1870 Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard College, appointed
Adams professor of medieval history. He was the first American to employ
the seminar method in teaching history. In 1877 he resigned to edit the
papers of Thomas Jefferson’s treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin.
Pursuing his interest in U.S. history, Adams completed two biographies,
The Life of Albert Gallatin (1879) and John Randolph (1882). He
continued to delve into the nation’s early national period, hoping to
understand the nature of an evolving American democracy. This study
culminated in his nine-volume History of the United States of America
during the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, a scholarly work
that received immediate acclaim after its publication (1889–91). In this
work he explored the dilemma of governing an egalitarian society in a
political world in which the predominant tendency was to aggrandize
power. In 1884 Adams wrote another novel, Esther. Published under a
pseudonym, Esther dealt with the relationship between religion and
modern science, a theme that engaged Adams throughout his life.
Adams was stunned when, in 1885, his wife of 13 years, Marian Hooper,
committed suicide. Distraught, he arranged for the sculpture of a
mysterious, cloaked woman to be placed upon her grave. The union had
produced no children, and Adams never remarried. After his wife’s death,
Adams began a period of restless wandering. He travelled the globe from
the South Sea islands to the Middle East. Gradually the circuit narrowed
to winters in Washington and summers in Paris.
Though Adams referred to his existence during this period as that of
a “cave-dweller,” his life was quite the opposite. From the 1870s until
his last years, intellectuals gravitated to his home to discuss art,
science, politics, and literature. Among them were the British diplomat
Sir Cecil Arthur Spring-Rice, the architect Henry Hobson Richardson, and
Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge. His closest friends were the geologist Clarence
King and the diplomat John Hay. Adams and King were inseparable. Their
letters remain a rich source of information on everything from gossip to
the most current trends of thought.
While in France, Adams pushed further into the recesses of history in
search of “a fixed point . . . from which he might measure motion down
to his own time.” That point became medieval Christendom in the 13th
century. In Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (printed privately, 1904;
published, 1913) he described the medieval world view as reflected in
its cathedrals. These buildings, he believed, expressed “an emotion, the
deepest man ever felt—the struggle of his own littleness to grasp the
infinite.” Adams’ attraction to the Middle Ages lay in the era’s
ideological unity; a coherence expressed in Catholicism and symbolized
by the Virgin Mary.
The Education of Henry Adams (printed privately, 1906; published
1918) was a companion volume to Chartres. The Education remains Adams’
best known work and one of the most distinguished of all
autobiographies. In contrast to Chartres, the Education centred upon the
20th-century universe of multiplicity, particularly the exploding world
of science and technology. In opposition to the medieval Virgin, Adams
saw a new godhead—the dynamo—symbol of modern history’s anarchic
energies. The Education recorded his failure to understand the
centrifugal forces of contemporary life. The book traced Adams’
confrontations with reality as he moved from the custom-bound world of
his birth into the modern, existential universe in which certainties had
vanished.
Neither history nor education provided an answer for Henry Adams.
Individuals, he believed, could not face reality; to endure, one adopts
illusions. His attempt to draw lines of continuity from the 13th to the
20th century ended in futility. Adams concluded that all he could prove
was change.
In 1908 Adams edited the letters and diary of his friend John Hay,
secretary of state from 1898 to 1905. His last book, The Life of George
Cabot Lodge, was published in 1911. In two speculative essays, “Rule of
Phase Applied to History” (1909) and Letter to American Teachers of
History (1910), Adams calculated the demise of the world. Basing his
theory on a scientific law, the dissipation of energy, he described
civilization as having retrogressed through four stages: the religious,
mechanical, electrical, and ethereal. The cataclysm, he prophesied,
would occur in 1921. How literally Adams intended his prediction remains
a point of dispute.
In 1912, at the age of 74, Adams suffered a stroke. His haunting fear
of senility became real for a short time. For three months he lay
partially paralyzed, his mind hovering between reason and delirium. He
recovered sufficiently, however, to travel to Europe once again. When he
died, in his sleep in his Washington home, he was, according to his
wish, buried next to his wife in an unmarked grave. In 1919 he was
posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the Education.
Adams is noted for an ironic literary style coupled with a detached,
often bitter, tone. These characteristics have led some critics to view
him as an irascible misfit. They contend that his fascination with the
Middle Ages and his continuous emphasis upon failure were masks behind
which he hid a misanthropic alienation from the world. More sympathetic
commentators see Adams as a romantic figure who sought meaning in the
chaos and violence of the 20th century. As Adams described it, he was in
pursuit of “. . . a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard
without a shudder.”
Christine McHugh
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THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
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Тyре of work:
Novelized autobiography
Author: Henry Adams (1838-1918)
Type of plot: Intellectual and social history
Time of plot: 1838-1905
Locale: America, England, France
First published: 1907
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The theme of this autobiography is the process of technological
growth and the multiplication of mechanical forces which led, during the
author's own lifetime, to a degeneration of moral relationships between
men and to the lapsing of their pursuits into money seeking or complete
lassitude. The book is a masterpiece of intellectual writing, tracing
intimately the author's thought processes and his moral and emotional
maturation.
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The Story
Henry Brooks Adams was born of the union of two illustrious
Massachusetts families, the Brookses and the Adamses, and he was, in
addition, the grandson and the great-grandson of presidents. His wealth
and social position should have put him among the leaders of his
generation.
Although the period of mechanical invention had begun by 1838, Henry
Adams was raised in a colonial atmosphere. He remembered that his first
serious encounter with his grandfather, John Quincy Adams, occurred when
he refused to go to school, and that gentleman led him there by the
hand. For Henry Adams, the death of the former president marked the end
of his eighteenth century environment.
Charles Francis Adams, Henry's father, was instrumental in forming the
Free-Soil party in 1848, and he ran on its ticket with Martin Van Buren.
Henry considered that his own education was chiefly a heritage from his
father, an inheritance of Puritan morality and interest in politics and
literary matters. In later life, looking back on his formal education,
he concluded that it had been a failure. Mathematics, French, German,
and Spanish were needed in the world in which he found himself an adult,
not Latin and Greek.
He had opportunity to observe the use of force in the violence with
which the people of Boston treated the anti-slavery Wendell Phillips,
and he had seen black slaves restored to the South.
Prompted by his teacher, James Russell Lowell, he spent nearly two years
abroad after his graduation from college. He enrolled to study civil law
in Germany, but finding the lecture system atrocious, he devoted most of
his stay to enjoying the paintings, the opera, the theater in Dresden.
When he returned to Boston in 1860, Henry Adams settled down briefly to
read Blackstone. In the elections that year, however, his father became
a Congressman, and Henry accompanied him to the capital as his
secretary. There he met John Hay, who was to become his best friend.
In 1861 President Lincoln named Charles Francis Adams minister to
England. Henry went with his father to Europe. The Adams party had
barely disembarked when they were met by bad news. England had
recognized the belligerency of the Confederacy. The North was her
undeclared enemy. The battle of Bull Run proved so crushing a blow to
American prestige that Charles Francis Adams felt he was in England on a
day-to-day sufferance. The Trent Affair and the second battle of Bull
Run were equally disastrous abroad. Finally, in 1863, the tide began to
turn. Secretary Seward sent Thurlow Weed and William Evarts to woo the
English, and they were followed by announcements of victories at
Vicksburg and Gettysburg. Charles Francis Adams remained in England
until 1868, for Andrew Johnson had too many troubles at home to make
many diplomatic changes abroad.
At the end of the war Henry Adams had no means of earning a livelihood.
He had, however, developed some taste as a dilettante in art, and
several of his articles had been published in the North American Review.
On his return to America, Henry Adams was impressed by the fact that his
fellow-countrymen, because of the mechanical energy they had harnessed,
were all traveling in the same direction. Europeans, he had felt, were
trying to go in several directions at one time. Handicapped by his
education and by his long absence from home, he had difficulty in
adapting himself to the new industrial America. He achieved some
recognition with his articles on legal tender and his essays in the
Edinburgh Review, and he hoped that he might be offered a government
position if Ulysses S. Grant were elected president. But Grant, a man of
action, was not interested in reformers or intellectuals like Henry
Adams.
In 1869 Adams went back to Quincy to begin his investigation of the
scandals of the Grant administration, among them Jay Gould's attempts to
obtain a corner on gold,
Senator Charles Sumner's efforts to provoke war with England by
compelling her cession of Canada to the United States, and the rivalries
of Congressmen and Cabinet members.
He decided it would be best to have his article on Gould published in
England, to avoid censorship by the powerful financier. Gould's
influence was not confined to the United States, however, and Adams was
refused by two publications. His essay on Gould was finally published by
the Westminster Review.
Adams became assistant professor of medieval history at Harvard and
taught in Cambridge for seven years. During that time he tried to
abandon the lecture system by replacing it with individual research. He
found his students apt and quick to respond, but he felt that he needed
a stone against which to sharpen his wits. He gave up his position in
1871 and went west to Estes Park with a Government Geological Survey.
There he met Clarence King, a member of the party with whom he could not
help contrasting himself. King had a systematic, scientific education
and could have his choice of scientific, political, or literary prizes.
Adams felt his own limitations.
After his flight from Harvard, he made his permanent home in Washington,
where he wrote a series of books on American history. In 1893 he visited
the Chicago Exhibition. From his observations of the steamship, the
locomotive, and the newly invented dynamo, he concluded that force was
the one unifying factor in American thought. Back in Washington, he saw
the gold standard adopted, and concluded that the capitalistic system
and American intervention in Cuba offered some signs of the direction in
which the country was heading. During another visit to the Exhibition in
1900 Adams formulated an important theory. In observing the dynamo, he
decided that history is not merely a series of causes and effects, of
men acting upon men, but the record of forces acting upon men. For him,
the dynamo became the symbol of force acting upon his own time, as the
Virgin had been the symbol of force in the twelfth century.
During the next five years Henry Adams saw his friends drop away.
Clarence King was the first to go. He lost his fortune in the panic of
1893 and died of tuberculosis in 1901. John Hay, under William McKinley,
became American minister to England, and then Secretary of State. He was
not well when he accepted the President's appointments, and the enormous
task of bringing England, France, and Germany into accord with the
United States and of attempting to keep peace, unsuccessfully, between
Russia and Japan caused his death in 1905.
Adams considered that his education was continuous during his lifetime.
He had found the tools which he had been given as a youth utterly
useless, and he had to spend all of his days forging new ones. As he
grew older, he found the moral standards of his father's and
grandfather's times disintegrating, so that corruption and greed existed
on the highest political levels. According to his calculations, the rate
of change, due to mechanical force, was accelerating, and the generation
of 1900 could rely only on impersonal forces to teach the generation of
2000. He himself could see no end to the multiplicity of forces which
were so rapidly dwarfing mankind into insignificance.
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Critical Evaluation
"Education" is both the theme and the metaphor of The Education of Henry
Adams. In the preface, Adams notes that the object of his "study is the
garment, not the figure," and he goes on to say that his specific object
"is to fit young men, in universities or elsewhere, to be men of the
world, equipped for any emergency: and the garment offered to them is
meant to show the faults of the patchwork fitted on their fathers."
Thus, by recounting the way in which he educated himself, he intends to
educate others—a typical goal of autobiographers such as Benjamin
Franklin, St. Augustine, and Jean Jacques Rousseau, all of whom are
cited by Adams in his book.
Adopting the voice of a third-person narrator and following a strict
chronological order in telling the story, including using parenthetical
dates for each chapter title, suggests that the educated man is indeed
sharing his knowledge with the uneducated and is doing this with
complete- objectivity. This apparent objectivity is misleading, however.
Not only is the book more theory than it is narrative; it also does not
recount Adams' life with the objectivity one might expect from the tone
and chronological approach. For example, complete silence surrounds all
that happened to Adams from 1872 to 1891. He concludes one chapter,
titled "Failure (1871)," and begins the next chapter, titled "Twenty
Years After (1892)," with no explanation of what occurred during that
hiatus. Critics have speculated about this silence, suggesting that
perhaps Adams simply did not want to write about his marriage and his
wife Marian's suicide, or perhaps Adams wanted to emphasize the contrast
between what he had been at the age of thirty-three and what he had
become by the age of fifty-three. Whatever the reason for the gap, Adams
apparently felt that his readers did not need the details to complete
their education.
What Adams did give his audience was an autobiography that moves from
the self into abstraction, that theorizes about four areas that were
critical to his becoming educated: politics, science, nature, and
psychology. Each influence helped Adams become a skeptical, observing
individual who attempted to educate others.
In addition to showing his family's role in helping him see the role of
politics in his life, Adams devotes an important section of his
autobiography to examining President Ulysses S. Grant and the lessons
Adams learned from that politician. Adams had hoped for some kind of
political office from Grant, but not realizing that goal, he speculates
on why that loss was probably his gain and a step toward his being
educated. Adams explains how he came to see Grant as a
"pre-intellectual, archaic" type, who "would have seemed so even to the
cave-dwellers." Though Adams felt that he himself did not suit the
twentieth century, he came to understand that he possessed what Grant
lacked—namely, the ability to think. That quality was one aspect of the
educated man.
Another quality was the ability to live without absolute certainty, the
ability to use the scientific method to understand the incompleteness of
truth. Describing himself as a Darwinian, he explains that he "was the
first in an infinite series to discover and admit to himself that he
really did not care whether truth was, or was not, true." In other
words, in his educational process, he learned that the process of
examination, the inclination to be skeptical about absolutes, was
essential.
Equally critical, and related to his understanding of science, was
Adams' recognition of what governed nature: chaos. Whereas order was the
dream of man, chaos, according to Adams, was the order of nature. Thus
Adams came to learn that his simplistic notion of an orderly nature
needed to be replaced with a more sophisticated sense of the lack of
unity and uniformity in nature.
The final influence upon Adams was what he called "the new psychology,"
which, like Adams' understanding of science and nature, pointed to
complexity and a lack of unity. Thus, he pointed to the new psychology
as being "convinced that it had actually split personality not only into
dualism, but also into complex groups, like telephonic centres and
systems, that might be isolated and called up at will." Added to the
three other influences, this new way of viewing psychological realities
shaped Adams' education, so that he came to realize that his earlier
beliefs in unity were being replaced by an awareness of multiplicity.
In coming to this understanding, Adams makes dramatic use of dialectic,
emphasizing the tension between opposites. His chapter titles
demonstrate this when, for example, he juxtaposes "Quincy" to "Boston,"
"Political Mortality" to "The Battle of the Rams," and "The Height of
Knowledge" to "The Abyss of Ignorance." The most famous of his
oppositions occurs in one chapter, "The Dynamo and the Virgin," in which
Adams explores the dynamo as the symbol of the twentieth century,
contrasted with the Virgin, the symbol of force acting upon medieval
times. The chapter in which he explores this particular opposition is
actually a condensed version of two books written by Adams in which he
carefully explores first unity and then multiplicity. The first book,
Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, is also one of the finest introductions
to the Middle Ages, and the second, The Education of Henry Adams,
continues to be one of the best analyses of twentieth century
intellectual history.
In his autobiographical study of opposites and the way in which they
contribute to a person's education, Adams determined that the aim of
education was the ability to cope, and the aim of education in the
twentieth century was the ability to cope with a particularly important
phenomenon: multiplicity. As he put it, "The child born in 1900 would,
then, be born into a new world which would not be a unity but a
multiple." The Education of Henry Adams chronicles one man's coming to
this realization and his effort to help others become educated as well.
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