Henry Adams

American historian

• Born: February 16, 1838
• Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: March 27, 1918
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

A first-rate historian, Adams wrote several biographies and the monumental nine-volume History of the United States of America, covering the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. His two most famous works are interconnected and autobiographical: Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams.

Early Life

Henry Brooks Adams was the fourth of five children of Charles Francis Adams and Abigail Brown Brooks. His father was a cold and distant figure, and it was to his mother that he looked for affection. It is not surprising that Henry would always feel out of place. His elite Brahmin heritage both paved the way for his future and controlled it. A kinsman, Samuel Adams, had become involved in the American Revolution as a manipulator of mobs. His great-grandfather John Adams helped draft the Declaration of Independence and was the first vice president and the second president. Henry’s grandfather John Quincy Adams served as secretary of state and then as president. Henry’s father served as ambassador to England during the diplomatically crucial period of the Civil War and was later elected to Congress.

In addition to his distinguished heritage, Henry’s immediate family was one of the wealthiest in Boston, based on the mercantile fortune of his mother, Abigail Brooks. Adams’s full name appears to sum up his life—“Henry” betokening the scholar rather than the man of action; “Brooks” the moneyed inheritance that was his by birth; and “Adams” the line of blue-blooded forefathers who had taken such an active part in the creation of the United States. Henry’s dilemma was to live a successful life in the shadow of such eminence.

Adams attended Harvard from 1854 through 1858. In The Education of Henry Adams (1907), he later stated that he had learned nothing while there. Upon graduation, in typical patrician fashion, he set out on a tour of Europe. He studied law and learned to speak German while at the University of Berlin, from 1858 to 1860. While in Europe, he also began his efforts in journalism, which he would continue throughout his life.

In 1861, as the Civil War broke out in the United States, President Abraham Lincoln appointed Adams’s father minister to England, a critical position, because the South was attempting to gain recognition from England. At the age of twenty-three, Adams accompanied his father and acted as his private secretary. While in England, Adams continued his journalism, working anonymously for The New York Times, and he also began his historical work by writing articles for the North American Review.

Life’s Work

In 1868, Adams returned to Washington. He and his brothers decided that politics had done nothing but bring sorrow to the family. Adams’s worldview might be broken into two segments: his philosophical speculations about the world, especially the United States, and what he was going to do with the remainder of his life. As it turned out, Adams spent the remainder of his life looking for answers to both questions through an interaction of the two. In a way, Adams became one of the most versatile intellectuals the United States has ever produced.

Adams did not spend his whole life behind a desk. He enjoyed parties, people, and friendships immensely, and his family fame brought him into contact with the celebrities of the time. Although short in stature, he was handsome, and he became known as one of the three best dancers in Washington.

From 1868 until 1870, Adams was a freelance journalist, serving as a correspondent for The Nation and other leading journals as he plunged into both the social and the political worlds of Washington. His primary interest was the reconstruction of a war-shattered nation. He fought for civil service reform and the retention of the gold standard. He wrote articles exposing political corruption and warning against economic monopolies, especially within the railroads.

In 1870, Charles W. Eliot, the famous Harvard president, asked Adams to become assistant professor of medieval history. Out of tune with the world for which he was destined, Adams accepted. Despite having one of the best minds in the country, Adams was ill-trained to be a teacher. He threw himself furiously into his new task, often staying only one lecture ahead of his class. Without planning it, Adams was preparing the groundwork for what would become one of his masterpieces, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904). Adams also became the first American to employ the seminar method in his classes.

Adams’s work at Harvard became his first step toward studying the American past. In 1877, he resigned from Harvard to complete two biographies, The Life of Albert Gallatin (1879) and John Randolph (1882). This research increased his interest in the early American period, and hoping to understand the nature of an evolving American democracy, he began what was to become his nine-volume History of the United States of America (1889-1891).

In 1872, Adams married Marian “Clover” Hooper, a woman with impeccable family connections, great intelligence, and a solid income. The two took a yearlong wedding trip that included a tour of Europe and boating up the Nile. Henry and Clover made a complementary couple, and Adams would later speak of their years together as years of happiness. Their union produced no children.

Adams published two novels anonymously, Democracy: An American Novel (1880) and Esther: A Novel (1884). Neither novel was a success, because Adams did not possess the artistic talents necessary to produce fiction. Of the two, Democracy was the more popular and the superior. Democracy was a roman à clef, which accounted for its initial demand. Mrs. Lightfoot Lee is the heroine through the eyes of whom Washington is revealed. She becomes a confidant of a midwestern senator, and she is introduced to the processes of democracy. She meets the president and other high-ranking figures, only to find them all to be vacuous. She represents Adams’s alter ego; indeed, both came up with much the same summation of Washington: After an initial attraction for the cause, they both reject it in the end because of the emptiness and moral ambiguity they find there. Democracy served Adams as a trial run for The Education of Henry Adams.

Adams’s second novel, Esther, is less interesting. It is similar in that it also has a woman as its main character, this one based on Adams’s wife. As a novel of ideas, Esther investigates the relationship between religion and modern science, a theme that Adams pursued throughout his life. As the novel ends, the heroine, in her quest for meaning, stares at and listens to Niagara Falls, Adams’s overpowering symbol for the life force. The roar symbolizes a natural representation of the dynamo Adams was to make so much of and of the eternal law of history.

In 1885, Adams was stunned when his wife of thirteen years took potassium cyanide and killed herself. There was no discernible motive for her suicide except that she feared madness, which existed in her family. Strangely, Adams had a sculpture of a mysterious, cloaked woman placed on her grave. At the time of her death, Adams had been working on his History of the United States of America. He set the manuscript aside and began a period of restless traveling that included Japan.

As time passed, Adams narrowed his travel to winters in Washington and summers in Paris. He eventually returned to his History of the United States of America and completed it in September, 1888. The work was published in nine volumes between 1889 and 1891. Initially, it was met by apathy, but eventually it would be considered of the highest order, second only to the work of Francis Parkman.

Adams’s best-known works, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams, were privately printed and distributed to friends and only later were published for general use. The two works are interconnected and are based on thoughts that Adams spent a lifetime trying to untangle.

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres is a work of history, aesthetics, philosophy, and theology. The book is like a Symbolist poem, with one event flowing into another and all rules of chronology and reason being defied.

Adams’s starting point for Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres can be found in his travels to France and his visits to the thirteenth century cathedrals. Adams was in search of a fixed point from which to measure motion down to his own time, and that point became the medieval worldview as expressed especially in the cathedrals. Adams believed that their monumental structures expressed the deepest emotions that humans ever felt. For Adams, an entire age could be said to have unity, purpose, mission, and fullness of experience toward an ideological unity represented by the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The Education of Henry Adams was not finished until Adams was sixty-eight years old. It remains his best-known work and one of the most distinguished autobiographies of all time, compared by some to Saint Augustine’s Confessions (c. 1397). Whereas the Virgin had been the center for Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, the symbol for the twentieth century became the dynamo, one of which Adams had seen at the Chicago World’s Fair. Adams found the twentieth century to be incomprehensible. Under the impact of the alarming growth of science and technology, historical forces had accelerated, leading to what Adams called the “multiverse” of the modern world.

Adams died on March 27, 1918, in Washington, D.C., the city from which he could not separate himself. World War I was still raging, and the breakup of the modern, civilized world, which Adams had predicted, had become reality. Adams was buried next to his wife in the Rock Creek Cemetery. At his direction, the grave was unmarked.

Significance

Henry Adams’s life situation allowed him the freedom to be rebellious. He scornfully accepted the mantle of responsibility that destiny had given him. He became the first modern historian in the United States. He briefly shared his enormous intellect with students and then resigned permanently from teaching, undertaking full time the completion of his research and compiling his magnum opus, the nine-volume History of the United States of America.

Adams also made his mark on the historical and literary world with his Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and his The Education of Henry Adams. These two works, especially The Education of Henry Adams, are still widely read by students and the general public. One central connection between the two is the juxtaposition Adams proposed between the Virgin of the thirteenth century and the dynamo of the twentieth. Adams was interested in power—religious power, political power, and scientific power.

Adams was almost as good a prophet as he was a historian. He believed that the twentieth century was heading toward chaos; humankind was being swept away by seemingly uncontrollable technology, represented by the dynamo. Ahead of his time and unable to comprehend modern man, Adams foresaw the ultimate possibility of humanity’s self-destruction.

Bibliography

Adams, Henry Brooks. The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography. Introduction by Donald Hall. Washington, D.C.: Privately printed, 1907. Reprint. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. The best starting point for a study of Adams would be his three works listed in this bibliography, especially The Education of Henry Adams, one of the most distinguished autobiographies of the twentieth century.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Letters of Henry Adams. 3 vols. Edited by J. C. Levenson et al. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982. Adams’s letters are valuable because they reveal his thoughts and reflect the times in which he lived.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. Washington, D.C.: Privately printed, 1904. Reprint. New York: New American Library, 1961. Adams’s thoughts on the medieval world, Gothic cathedrals, and thirteenth century Unity.

Byrnes, Joseph F. The Virgin of Chartres: An Intellectual and Psychological History of the Work of Henry Adams. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981. Discusses Adams’s relationships with women. Concentrates mainly on Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and Adams’s thoughts concerning the Virgin Mary.

Chalfant, Edward. Both Sides of the Ocean: A Biography of Henry Adams, His First Life, 1838-1862. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1982.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Better in Darkness: A Biography of Henry Adams, His Second Life, 1862-1891. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1994.

‗‗‗‗‗‗. Improvement of the World: A Biography of Henry Adams, His Last Life, 1891-1918. North Haven, Conn.: Archon Books, 2001. Chalfant has compiled an exhaustively detailed three-volume scholarly study of Adams’s life based on archival and private material previously unavailable to biographers.

Harbert, Earl N., ed. Critical Essays on Henry Adams. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. The editor has compiled essays on Adams by R. P. Blackmur, H. S. Commager, Ernest Samuels, Charles Anderson, Howard Mumford, J. C. Levenson, and others. The essays cover various matters, including Adams’s fiction and his two autobiographical works.

Levenson, J. C. The Mind and Art of Henry Adams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957. This critical work concentrates on Adams’s life and on his enormous distinction as a writer and interpretive scholar. Major concepts associated with Adams, such as modern humankind existing within a “multiverse” and Adams’s thesis concerning the Unity found in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, are developed and discussed in detail.

Samuels, Ernest. The Young Henry Adams. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1948.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Henry Adams: The Middle Years. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Henry Adams: The Major Phase. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964. These three books constitute a comprehensive and distinguished biography of Henry Adams. Samuels examines the pattern of failure and futility that Adams experienced during his attempts at education, his observations of others’ efforts, and his perplexities with language itself.