Before the Chapter House at Wenlock. The second figure from the right may be Marian (Clover) Adams; the others are Lady Pollington, Lady Eleanor Leigh Cunliffe, Charles Milnes Gaskell, Henry Adams, Sir Robert Alfred Cunliffe, and Lord Pollington.
Charles Francis Adams and Abigail Brooks Adams at Peacefield in Quincy, Massachusetts, circa 1883 Photograph taken by their daughter-in-law, Clover Adams
("Democracy: An American Novel" is the quintessential Amer...)
"Democracy: An American Novel" is the quintessential American political novel. At its heart is Madeleine Lee, a young widow who comes to Washington, D.C., to understand the workings of power. Pursued by Silas Ratcliffe, the most influential member of the Senate, Madeleine soon sees enough of power and its corrupting influence to last her a lifetime.
History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson
(Henry Adams’ History of the United States During the Admi...)
Henry Adams’ History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson is a complete and detailed account of political life in the U.S. from 1801 to 1809.
(Mont Saint Michel and Chartres is a record not of a liter...)
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres is a record not of a literal jouney but of a meditative journey across time and space into the medieval imagination. Using the architecture, sculpture, and stained glass of the two locales as a starting point, Adams breathes life into what others might see merely as monuments of a past civilization.
(As the Grandson of President John Quincy Adams and the Gr...)
As the Grandson of President John Quincy Adams and the Great Grandson of President John Adams, Henry Brooks Adams saw himself as a failure by comparison to the lofty accomplishments of his ancestors. This inferiority complex is quite visible in "The Education of Henry Adams", the autobiography of the author and an important document of 19th century American history and political life. Adams, a historian, journalist, and novelist shows in this great work of literature his accomplishments as a writer, proving that he was anything but a failure.
(This selection, the first based on the authoritative 6-vo...)
This selection, the first based on the authoritative 6-volume Letters, represents every major private and public event in Adams’s life from 1858 to 1918 and confirms his reputation as one of the greatest letter writers of his time.
Henry Brooks Adams was an American historian and author, best known for his History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. He also authored two works of fiction Democracy: An American Novel and Esther and, most famously, the autobiographical The Education of Henry Adams. Throughout his career he was a frequent contributor to American newspapers.
Background
Henry Brooks Adams was born on February 16, 1838 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States; the son of Charles Francis Adams Sr., an American diplomat and scholar, and Abigail Brooks. His grandfather was the 6th United States President John Quincy Adams, and his great-grandfather was the 2nd United States President John Adams.
Education
Adams entered Harvard University in 1854. There he wrote for the Harvard Magazine, acted for the Hasty Pudding Club, and at his graduation in 1858 was chosen Class Day Orator. Later he attended lectures at the University of Berlin in Germany.
In 1860 Henry’s father, then a member of the United States Congress, asked him to be his private secretary. On March 19, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln appointed Charles Francis Adams, Sr. United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom, and Henry Adams accompanied him in his private secretary role. During this period Henry Adams published three long and promising articles in the influential North American Review.
In 1868, Henry Adams returned to the United States and settled in Washington, D.C., where he worked as a journalist exposing political corruption. These articles were published in Chapters of Erie and Other Essays (1871). In the autumn of 1870 he reluctantly quit Washington for Boston to become editor of the North American Review.
The same year Adams began serving as a Professor of Medieval History at Harvard, then returned to Washington to continue work as a historian. By 1876 he was ready to offer his Harvard students a course on the history of the United States from 1789 to 1840. From that course he developed materials for the books upon which his reputation as a historian rests: Documents Relating to New England Federalism, 1800-1815 (1877); The Writing and The Life of Albert Gallatin (1879), a classic political portrait; John Randolph (1882); and the monumental History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison (9 vols., 1889-1891).
Adams resigned as editor of the North American Review in 1876. The following year he left Harvard and settled with his wife in Washington, where he could more easily pursue his historical research. In 1879 they returned to Europe, spending much of the winter in London.
Before their return to America in the fall of 1880, an anonymous novel treating the political and social life of Washington appeared under the title Democracy; Adams's authorship was to remain a well-kept secret until 1909. In 1884 his second novel, Esther, was published. The novel dealt with the relationship between religion and modern science, a theme that engaged Adams throughout his life.
In 1885, the year of his wife’s death, Adams and the artist John La Farge set out for Japan. Adams returned in time to stand by his father's deathbed in November 1886. He went to Washington next and completed the History. More travels followed, notably a trip to Polynesia, again with La Farge, in 1890. One of the native women Adams admired provided materials for Memoirs of Marau Taaroa, Last Queen of Tahiti (1893). From the South Seas the writer-traveler journeyed to France.
In 1904 Adams privately printed Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, a classic study of the architecture, thought, and spirit of the Middle Ages. For his next major work he also found a dominant symbol in France: the dynamo he observed at the Paris Exposition of 1900 somehow expressed for him the "multiplicity" of the 20th century. This was the subject of the book for which he is best remembered, The Education of Henry Adams.
Adams spent his last years in Washington and died quietly in his home on March 26, 1918. He was buried in Rock Creek Cemetery beside the grave of his wife.
Toward the end of his life he said that "Unitarian mystic" best described his religious views.
Politics
As a newspaper correspondent for The Nation and other leading Washington journals, Adams 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.
Adams continued his reformist activities as editor of the North American Review. 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." His anonymously published novel Democracy, an American Novel (1880) reflected his loss of faith.
Views
Henry Brooks Adams lived in an era of remarkable change and recorded the implications of the period with great perception. Adams hoped to understand the nature of an evolving American democracy, that is thoroughly described in his History of the United States of America. His other works, such as Education 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.
Considered a prominent Anglo-Saxonist of particularly the nineteenth-century, Adams was nevertheless highly critical of the English. Besides, he was described as being "paranoid about Jews." Some of Adams’s letters have overtly anti-Jewish observations and descriptions.
Quotations:
"Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education."
"Americans 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."
"I detest [the Jews], and everything connected with them, and I live only and solely with the hope of seeing their demise, with all their accursed Judaism. I want to see all the lenders at interest taken out and executed."
"We are in the hands of the Jews. They can do what they please with our values."
"Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit."
"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."
"Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man."
"No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous."
"Friends are born, not made."
"A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."
"Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see."
"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts."
Membership
Adams was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1884. In 1894, Adams was elected president of the American Historical Association.
Personality
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.
Adams was a member of an exclusive circle, a group of friends called the "Five of Hearts" that consisted of Henry, his wife Clover, geologist and mountaineer Clarence King, John Hay (assistant to Lincoln and later Secretary of State), and Hay's wife Clara. One of Adams's frequent travel companions was the artist John La Farge, with whom he journeyed to Japan and the South Seas. A long-time, intimate correspondent of Adams's was Elizabeth Cameron, wife of Senator J. Donald Cameron.
Quotes from others about the person
"He used to say, half in jest, that his great ambition was to complete St. Augustine's Confessions, but that St. Augustine, like a great artist, had worked from multiplicity to unity, while he, like a small one, had to reverse the method and work back from unity to multiplicity." - Adams about himself writing under the name of his friend Henry Cabot Lodge
Connections
Adams had met his future wife Marian Hooper in 1866 when she was traveling in England. Henry and Marian were married on June 27, 1872 at the Hooper home in Beverly, Massachusetts by Rev. Charles Edward Grinnell. In 1885 Marian Adams's father died; she sank rapidly into a manic-depressive condition and on December, 7 committed suicide.
Henry Adams and the Making of America
An eye-opening profile of the greatest historian of the nineteenth century assesses the seminal role and influence of Henry Adams on the study of history, discussing his use of archival sources, firsthand reportage, eyewitness accounts, and other techniques that transformed historical study and created a paradoxical view of American history that still informs modern-day policy.
2005
Henry Adams: The Historian as Political Theorist
James P. Young, author of the highly regarded Reconsidering American Liberalism, seeks to revive interest in the thought of Adams by extracting core ideas from his writings concerning both American political development and the course of world history and then showing their relevance to the contemporary longing for a democratic revival.