Brooks Adams
Brooks Adams was an American writer and historian born in June 1848 into a prominent family in Quincy, Massachusetts, known for his father, Charles Francis Adams, Sr., an influential diplomat, and his grandfather, President John Quincy Adams. He received a rigorous education, attending Harvard and briefly studying law, where he passed the bar exam. Adams traveled extensively across Europe, the Middle East, and India, and published numerous articles on public policy and history. His notable works include "The Emancipation of Massachusetts," which faced criticism for its revisionist perspective on early colonial leadership, and "The Law of Civilization and Decay," where he examined patterns of societal growth and decline. Despite his efforts, Adams struggled to achieve a lasting reputation as a serious historian, with his ideas often viewed as disorganized and lacking coherence. Later in life, his demeanor became increasingly bitter, and he spent his final years in his family's Quincy home. His work reflects an intersection of personal experience and broader social theories, making him a complex figure in American intellectual history.
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Brooks Adams
Historian
- Born: June 24, 1848
- Birthplace: Quincy, Massachusetts
- Died: February 13, 1927
- Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts
Biography
Brooks Adams was born in the Adams family summer home in Quincy, Massachusetts, in June, 1848. His father was Charles Francis Adams, Sr., an important American diplomat and Free- Soiler vice-presidential candidate. His grandfather was President John Q. Adams. His was a strict upbringing, and he was afforded the finest in primary and secondary education in Boston and England, where his father was posted during the Civil War. He attended Harvard, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1870, and spent only one year studying law. Nonetheless, he passed the Massachusetts bar exam and briefly practiced. He returned to Europe with his father, and spent many of the following years traveling on his own in Europe, the Middle East, and India. He married Evelyn Davis in 1889, but the couple produced no descendants.
Meanwhile he produced nearly two dozen articles on contemporary events and public policy, and was asked in 1886 to write on Massachusetts history. His book The Emancipation of Massachusetts (1887) was a revisionist history that attacked the theocratic leadership of the early colony. The reaction of his editor and scholars was sharp and generally negative, and he was accused of being “irreligious.” His defensive response proved to be characteristic: people misunderstood his work and intent. Rather than history, he was establishing a theory of history, and his choice of time and place were merely arbitrary.
Though he lectured at the Boston University Law School from 1904 to 1911, Adams was never an academic historian. He continued to write on historical matters, however, and his articles and Emancipation earned him the label historian. In the shadow of the Panic of 1893, Adams wrote The Law of Civilization and Decay, in which he presented a number of observations on the growth and decline of civilizations that derived from positivist and organic models of social behavior, and a bit of Marxist analysis of capitalism. He considered these observations to be ’laws’ that could explain and predict the fates of nations and peoples. Competition uses up a people’s energy, which leads to exhaustion, which leads to fear and centralization of power, and eventual collapse. Perhaps because he avoided discussing America directly, the public accepted this work much more readily. His general approach and level of scholarship, however, undermine his reputation as a both theorist and historian.
The books that followed—including America’s Economic Superiority (1900), The New Empire (1902), and The Theory of Social Revolutions (1913)—championed the populists’ distrust of economic and political concentration and sought to correct the dubious direction in which he rather pessimistically saw America heading. They could not, however, rescue Adams’s reputation as a serious dilettante whose ideas never gelled into a coherent, systematic, and acceptable framework. As he grew older, his personality grew more bitter and curmudgeonly; he lived out his last years in the family’s house in Quincy.