180th Birthday of Henry Adams

                 A little more than two months ago, the American writer Henry Adams would complete his 180th birthday. So, this post is a tribute to him. As a journalist he fought to expose corruption. And as a writer he brought corruption and many moral dilemmas to literature. This post is a summary of three articles. The first was published at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Adams. The second was published at  http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-education-of-henry-adams/. The third was published at  https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/on-the-horizon-henry-adams-skeptic-faith-in-democracy/

                Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918) was an American historian, writer and member of the Adams political family, being descended from two U.S. Presidents. As a young Harvard graduate, he was secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, Ambassador in London, a posting that had much influence on him, both through experience of wartime diplomacy and absorption in English culture, especially the works of John Stuart Mill. After the American Civil War, he became a noted political journalist who entertained America's foremost intellectuals in Washington and Boston. He was best known for his "History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison," a 9-volume work, praised for its literary style. His posthumously published memoirs, "The Education of Henry Adams,"  won the Pulitzer Prize and went on to be named by the renowed publisher of classics Moder LIbrary, as the top English-language nonfiction book of the 20th century. His grandfather, John Quincy Adams, and great-grandfather, John Adams, had been U.S. Presidents. In 1868, Henry Adams returned to the U.S. and settled in Washington, DC, where he began working as a journalist. Adams saw himself as a traditionalist longing for the democratic ideal of the 18th century. Accordingly, he was keen on exposing political corruption in his jounalism. In 1870, Adams was appointed professor of medieval history at Harvard, a position he held until his retirement. In 1872, Clover Hooper and he were married in Berverly, Massachusetts, and spent their honeymoon in Europe.

                The opening passages of "The Education of Henry Adams," presage the subject that would preoccupy Adams for the rest of his life: the intellectual as spectator as well as inquirer; the inadequacy of education and the passing of the Republic; the sense of life as chance, coincidence, and as indeterminate and unpredictable as the shuffle of the deck; politics as the scheme of those who would control the deck; the omnipresence of power acting upon people without their consent, history as the movement of events without rational causes or moral purposes. The title is as ironic and playful as it is bitter. Many chapters of "The Education of H.A."  deal with politics. The author transports us to the nation's capital in the pre-Civil War era, when Democrats and Whigs vied with each other over the pleasures of office, employing the rhetoric of classical republicanism not to restrain private interest for the sake of public virtue but simply to accuse the opposing party of corruption. Here anyone finds few traces of politics as the uplifting exercise in "civic humanism" and "participatory democracy" touted by many of today's scholars. In fact, Adams found democratic politics to be little more than "the systematic organization of hatreds." For Adams, power was not alien to freedom, for humankind both absorbed power and exercised it. "Man's function as a force of nature was to assimilate other forces as he assimilated food. He called it the love of power." Adams studied power because his ancestors had believed that they could tame it with the "machinery of government." Constitutions, however, deal only with power as a political phenomenon involving the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. A century later young Adams had to confront new forms of big business, and new forms of energy and armaments based on developments in science and technology. Long before Michel Foucault critized Marxist for assuming that power expresses the rule of wealth, Adams lectured his brother Brooks: "You may abolish money and all its machinery, the power will still be there." The book is troubling to many readers, despite, or perhaps because of it brilliance. Writers on the left dismiss Adams as a male elitist, and they can hardly acknowledge that the American historian who died 90 years ago had sharper insights about power than do today's Marxists. Scholars on the right may find Adams too alienated from the timeless truths that thhey feel America needs on our culture of relativism. He was, after all, trying to explain why his great-grandfather, failed as the second president. The answer was that Jefferson won the election of 1800 by attacking Adams for enlarging the power of the national government and, once in office, proceeded to do the same thing, which meant that America would not be a simple, small, virtuous republic-Jefferson's dream-but an expansive commercial empire- Hamilton's vision and Jefferson's nightmare. My favorite sections in the book concern Adams's reflections on teaching, which he took so seriously that he lamented deeply his incapacity to impart any generalizations worthy of being called lessons, much less laws. "A teacher affects eternity. He can never tell where his influence stops." 

               The novel "Democracy,"  published in 1880, was a description of a ruling class with the Adamses left out. It appeared anonymously, created something of a sensation after its publication in England.  The heroine of Democracy is an intelligent, sensitive, earnest, and sharp-witted woman who performs the same role in the novel as Adams does in the other book Education. A young, attractive, and wealthy widow, who can be moved by neither the passion of love nor the greed of money. Mrs. Madeleine Lee decides that in Washington politics she might find the meaning of contemporary life. "She wanted to see with her own eyes the action of primary forces; to touch with her own hand the massive machinery of society; to measure with her own mind the capacity of the motive power. She was bent upon getting to the heart of the great American mystery of democracy and government." She not only gts to the heart of the mystery, but she very nearly captures by it, in the person of Mr. Ratcliffe, Senator from Illinois, known to his best friends and worst enemies.The story is reminiscent of the innocent maiden rescued by the fair-haired hero from the clutches of the dastarrdly villain. Except for the faintest skeletal resemblance of plot, however, there is nothing else in the novel to suggest the melodrama. In the flesh, indeed, it is more closely akin to some of the novels of Adam's good friend Henry James, as the perpicacious Mrs. Ward suggested. It also has the Jamesian instinct for irony and ambiguity, applied, however, not so much to personal relations as to the play of mind. Above all, it has that typical characteristic of James's novel: a complicated, even tortuous moral dilemma which must somehow be resolved in terms of the clear and certain principles of morality.That Ratcliffe's political behavior, like corruption in general, is immoral there is no doubt, but of the methods, motives, and even the principles of the reformers there is cinsiderable doubt. The audacity of the man astonishes Mrs. Lee. "Was it politics, that had caused this atrophy of the moral senses by disuse?" She wonders.  The requirements of the novel form may give a deceptively optimistic color to the end of the novel. Ratcliffe is exposed as evil, and Mrs. Lee's virtur, both personal and political, is preserved. In fact, however, it is the evidence of Adam's ironic sensibility that Ratcliffe's argument is unanswered.