Intellectual Legacy and Biography of Henry Adams

Biographical Overview and Key Literary Contributions. Henry Adams is best remembered as the author of The Education of Henry Adams, privately printed and circulated in 1907 and published posthumously in 1918. A book that combines autobiography with social, historical, and philosophical speculation, The Education became a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. This work, however, appears toward the end of a remarkably prolific career that generated three biographies: Life of Albert Gallatin (1879), Life of John Randolph (1881), and Life of George Cabot Lodge (1911).

His extensive literary output also encompassed two novels, Democracy (1880) and Esther (1884), along with a nine-volume grand historical narrative, The History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1889–91). Additionally, Adams authored a short genealogical history of Tahiti, Memoirs of Arii Taimai (1901), and a study of Gothic architecture and medieval culture, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1913). Beyond these published works, Adams was the author of a large body of letters, fascinating for their inside view of American politics as well as for their account of Adams's world travels.

Lineage and Early Formative Years in Boston. Henry Brooks Adams was born February 16, 1838, "under the shadow of Boston State House," as he writes in The Education's first line, and grew up a member of Boston's political and social elite. On his father's side he was the descendant of two presidents, John Adams and John Quincy Adams. During Henry's early childhood, John Quincy Adams represented his district in the U.S. House of Representatives and spearheaded a growing resistance to the Southern slave power.

Henry's father, Charles Francis Adams, also served in the House of Representatives. He ran unsuccessfully for vice president (and president) as the candidate of the Free-Soil Party; his appointment as ambassador to Great Britain from 1861 to 1868 marked the culmination of his public career. On his mother's side, Henry was the descendant of Peter Chardon Brooks, a wealthy merchant. His immediate family thus united two distinct and not always compatible strains of Boston society:

· The Adams side reflected a commitment to political ideals irrespective of private interest.

· The Brooks side reflected a willingness to do business with an unregenerate world.

The Adamses frequently clashed with the regional perspective of commercial Boston, and it is not surprising that early in life Henry determined that he would escape the provinciality of his native city.

Academic Foundations and European Travels. In the manner of elite Bostonians, Adams attended Boston Latin School and thereafter Harvard University. Upon graduation in 1858, he embarked on what for young men of his class was the customary postbaccalaureate year abroad. Settling at first in Berlin with the intention of studying civil law in Germany (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and, afterward, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller had commended the land of Goethe to English and American youth), Adams traveled widely in central and southern Europe, observing the tumult of Italy's challenge to Austrian rule, before returning to the United States in fall 1860 to a growing secessionist crisis. By May 1861 the South had seceded and Charles Francis Adams had been dispatched to England with the immediate charge to forestall British recognition of the Confederate States of America. Henry Adams's life was about to change.

Diplomatic Service in London and Civil War Era. During the next seven years, Adams resided in London, attached to his father in the unofficial capacity of private secretary. His position lacked the formality of a government appointment; still, he was responsible for a large portion of the mission's correspondence and played an important role in representing the mission to a British public. These years would prove the most formative of Adams's life. From 1861 to 1865, the young men of his generation fought and died on the battlefields of his homeland, an experience that would confer on the survivors, Union and Confederate alike, a lifelong generational identity.

Adams meanwhile worked at the American legation, attended social functions in an attempt to foster pro-Unionist sentiment in British society, and accompanied his mother and siblings on their various travels, often feeling deeply humiliated by his absence from the battlefield. On his own time he studied the great European prophet-theorists of future democratic societies: John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Auguste Comte. Unable to participate militarily in this war, which from a Northern viewpoint would purge the American nation of slave-power corruption and thus fulfill the 1776 revolution, Henry Adams endeavored to foresee the prospects of a post-Civil War United States.

His most frequently quoted observation of this period occurs in a letter to his brother, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., an officer in the Union Cavalry. Assuming the war must soon be decided and probably in the Union's favor, Henry calls for the formation of a brain trust, a set of "young men like ourselves or better," who would act as a clearinghouse of reformist ideas and set a new tone in politics and culture (Adams, Letters 1:315). At the same time that Adams performed indispensable services to a crucial overseas legation and prepared himself for a role in postwar America, he was becoming European in culture and upper-class British in manner. Beneath the ever-more polished surface, he was a fervent American, whose frame of reference had become unusually cosmopolitan. Upon returning to the United States in 1867, he had enormous adjustments to make.

Journalism, Political Reform, and Academic Career at Harvard. Adams's career as an author dates from the years in London, where he wrote articles on varied topics. His first substantial publication was an essay review of a biography of John Smith; this was soon followed by articles on currency and civil service reform and an essay review of the 10th edition of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology. The early writings evince diverse interests and an unusual capacity to participate in a range of specialized discussion. They reflect the pursuits of an intellectual for whom the life of the mind involved rigorous and ongoing self-education with a view to becoming conversant in multiple fields of inquiry.

In the years ahead Adams would pursue his multiple studies with the aspiration of formulating a predictive science of history. His immediate postwar concern, however, focused upon retrieving the American government from the choke hold of special interests, restoring the country's currency and credit, and otherwise reviving the vision of a republic in which citizens placed public good over private interest. His primary professional engagements during this period included:

·

o 1st stage: Working as a freelance political journalist (1868–69).

·

o 2nd stage: Serving as the editor of the North American Review (1870–77), striving to expose the abuses of the Ulysses S. Grant administration and facilitating efforts to pass laws in support of currency and civil service reform.

But what Adams looked upon as the chief menaces of postwar public life—the political party with its well-oiled machine and the giant corporation with legislators on secret payroll—proved to be formidable opponents for a man of gentlemanly ambition whose attraction to the world of politics was countered by a temperamental aversion to the brutal ways of public life. From 1870 to 1877, Adams was an assistant professor of history at Harvard University, where he taught medieval and American history. During these years, he also edited the North American Review. While he continued to participate in debates over public policy, he turned his attention to the European past; in researching arcane topics such as Anglo-Saxon law, Adams sought clues to the long-term development of democratic institutions. By the end of this period, he was ready to begin theorizing the emergence of an American nation and the formation of a national character.

Life in Washington, D.C. and the "Five of Hearts" Circle. In 1877 the heirs of Albert Gallatin, Thomas Jefferson's treasury secretary, invited Adams to organize Gallatin's papers. With the idea of writing a biography of Gallatin that would serve as a prelude to a larger study of the administrations of Jefferson and James Madison, Adams resigned from Harvard and moved to Washington, D.C., accompanied by his wife, Marian Hooper (Clover) Adams. Arriving in Washington as a financially independent gentleman scholar, Adams cultivated important friendships with a variety of intellectuals, artists, statesmen, and diplomats. He and Clover established a residence in the neighborhood directly across from the White House, and their house became a powerful Washington salon.

With his friends Clarence King and John and Clara Hay, Henry and Clover formed a clique that became known as the "Five of Hearts"; Elizabeth Sherman Cameron, the second wife of Senator J. Donald Cameron, soon became part of this tight-knit set. In 1879 Adams published The Life of Albert Gallatin, and the following year Democracy: An American Novel appeared anonymously. By the early 1880s Adams was already at work on a history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations. In 1884, under the pseudonym Frances Snow Compton, Adams published Esther, a novel that reflects much of the ongoing discussion of Adams's inner circle on subjects ranging from the validity of religious and scientific truth to what it means to be an American man or woman.

Personal Tragedy, Global Travels, and Philosophical Synthesis. In 1885, after suffering a long depression following the death of her father, Clover took her own life. Adams would spend the next 33 years in a state of mourning, yet these were years of great productivity, travel, and friendship. Avoiding European sojourns that would stir memories of his life with his wife, he toured Japan in 1886 in the company of the artist John La Farge and, in 1890, after completing his history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations, embarked on a year-long journey to Hawaii, Samoa, and Tahiti, again taking La Farge as a companion. Bereavement only intensified Adams's restlessness.

Upon returning from the South Seas, he established a pattern of wintering in Washington and spending summer and autumn in Paris. Before the turn of the century he would travel in the American West, Mexico, Cuba, the Caribbean, Egypt, Syria, the Balkans, Russia, and Scandinavia. Adams bore witness throughout his travels to destabilizing geopolitical conditions:

· Great concentrations of wealth and armaments.

· Rising nationalist and colonial ambitions.

· Tyranny of states and large corporations.

With inveterate suspicion of banking interests, he exhibited an almost populist attitude toward the financier; an anti-Semitism that ascribed global economic volatility to the Rothschilds and other Jewish bankers disfigures his writings of this period. Beneath a veneer of cynicism he remained highly idealistic about republican institutions and thus looked with alarm upon his nation's acquisition of overseas colonies in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. As the intimate of John Hay, ambassador to Great Britain and afterward secretary of state under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, Adams was privy to the turbulent events of the 19th century's closing years.

Adams would remain an eager student of social and scientific thought. He recognized that Karl Marx offered a powerful response to concentrations of wealth, and he saw that the discovery of radium spelled the end of the old Newtonian universe. Sociopolitical and epistemological crises were menacing enough, but Adams became increasingly alarmed by the rapid development of technologies that placed unprecedented power in human hands at a time when greed and national belligerence had never run so high. The philosophical and spiritual fragmentation of the world provided the theme of the two masterworks of his later years, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1913) and The Education of Henry Adams (1907, 1918).

Final Years, Death, and Historical Assessment. Adams remained productive well into his seventies, but in April 1912 he suffered a stroke that effectively ended his scholarly output. The stroke occurred a few days after the sinking of the Titanic, the ship on which Adams had booked passage for what had become his yearly retreat to Europe. His recovery was a slow process, through the course of which he was aided by his live-in assistant, Aileen Tone, with whom he studied medieval madrigals and chansons de geste. With the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, his trips to Europe were forever curtailed, and he nervously observed from afar the events of that catastrophic conflict, which appeared to justify his dire predictions about the course of human history.

Adams died in his sleep in the early morning hours of March 27, 1918. After a simple ceremony in his home the next day, he was laid to rest beside his wife in Rock Creek Cemetery beneath the magnificent bronze statue he had commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to design after Clover's death.

As the member of a highly educated and materially privileged elite, Adams represents a narrow range of American social experience. He had no understanding of the urban poor and little sympathy for the laboring classes; he formed virtually no conception of the lives led by African Americans and other minorities. It is possible nevertheless to speak of Adams as a major oppositional voice. Throughout his long career he preserves an 18th-century idea of republican citizenship zealously opposed to concentrated power, and his late works recognize that power, in the modern era, is militant, imperial, and resolved to operate in open violation of the letter and spirit of Western constitutional democracy. Adams affords great insight into the twin phenomena of state tyranny and terror insurgency. Inasmuch as his writings mirror the anxiety of late modern global culture, his readership accordingly extends well beyond the confines of a materially privileged class.