The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

First published: 1907

Type of work: Autobiography

The Work

The Education of Henry Adams intimately traces Henry Adams’s thought processes, but it does so on an intellectual plane not generally achieved by most writers.

Adams was born in Boston in 1838 into the illustrious Brooks and Adams families. He was the grandson and great-grandson of two former US presidents. He matured in a period of mechanical and industrial invention, but he had been raised in a colonial atmosphere. He remembers that his first serious encounter with his grandfather, former president John Quincy Adams, occurred when the youngster had refused to go to school one day. His grandfather led him there by the hand. For the young Adams, the death of the former president had marked the end of his eighteenth-century, colonial environment.

The major theme of The Education of Henry Adams is the multiplication and acceleration of mechanical forces. These forces, Adams argued, led to the breakdown of moral relationships among people and to the degeneration of their pursuits into money seeking or complete lassitude. The book also deals with the way in which modern science has produced a view of the universe radically different from the view held before the end of the nineteenth century, so much so that Adams calls this new world a multiverse. The term multiverse meant, in Adams’s day, a universe in chaos, lacking any kind of ordering principle.

Adams’s father, Charles Francis Adams, was been instrumental in forming the Free-Soil Party in 1848, and he ran for vice president of the United States on the party’s ticket with Martin Van Buren. The younger Adams believed that his own education—Puritan morality, politics, and literary matters—was chiefly an inheritance from his father. In later life, looking back on his formal education, he concluded that it had been a failure. As an adult he realized that what he had needed as a student were courses in mathematics, French, German, and Spanish—not Latin and Greek.

Prompted by his teacher, James Russell Lowell, Adams spent nearly two years abroad after his graduation from Harvard. He enrolled in a program to study civil law in Germany, but he found the lecture system atrocious. He then devoted most of his stay in Europe to experiencing art, opera, and theater. When he returned to Boston in 1860, he settled down briefly to study law. In the elections that year, however, his father was chosen to be a US representative. Adams accompanied him to Washington, DC, as his secretary. There he met John Hay, who became his best friend.

In 1861, US president Abraham Lincoln had chosen Charles Adams, Henry’s father, to be minister to England. Henry once again followed his father. The Adams party had barely disembarked when they heard bad news: England had recognized the belligerency of the Confederacy. The North was now England’s undeclared enemy. The Battle of Bull Run proved so crushing a blow to American prestige that Charles believed he was in England on a day-to-day sufferance. He remained in England until 1868.

By the end of the American Civil War, the younger Adams had no means of earning a livelihood. He had earlier developed some taste as a dilettante in art, and he wrote several articles for the North American Review. On his return to the United States, Adams noted how he had been impressed by the “movements” of his fellow Americans who were now harnessing a mechanical energy that led them to “travel,” literally and figuratively, in the same direction. In contrast, the Europeans, he believed, were trying to go in several directions at one time. Still, handicapped by his limited education and by his long absence from home, he had difficulty adapting to the new industrial America. He achieved some recognition with his essays on, for example, legal tender, and with his essays in the Edinburgh Review. He had hoped that he would be offered a government position in the administration of Ulysses S. Grant. However, Grant, a man of action, was not interested in reformers or intellectuals like Adams.

Adams earned a position as an assistant professor of medieval history at Harvard, and he taught there for seven years. During this time, he tried to replace the lecture system with seminars and individual research. He found his students apt and quick to respond to this new style. He resigned his position in 1871 and traveled west to Estes Park, Colorado, with a government geological survey. There he met Clarence King, a member of the survey party, with whom he could not help contrasting himself. King had a systematic, scientific education and had his choice of scientific, political, or literary prizes, leading Adams to reflect on his own limitations.

After his flight from Harvard, Adams made his permanent home in Washington, DC, where he wrote a series of books on American history. In 1893, he visited the Chicago World’s Fair. From his observations of the steamship, the locomotive, and the newly invented dynamo, he concluded that force is the one unifying factor in American thought. Back in Washington, he saw the adoption of the gold standard and concluded that the capitalist system and American intervention in Cuba offered signs of the direction in which the country was headed. During a visit to the Great Exposition in Paris in 1900, Adams formulated an important theory. In observing the dynamo, he decided that history is not merely a series of causes and effects, of people acting upon people, but it is the record of forces acting upon people. For him, the dynamo became the symbol of force acting upon his own time, just as the Virgin was the symbol of force acting upon the twelfth century.

Adams believed that his education had been a lifelong process. He found that the tools he had been given as a youth were utterly useless, and he spent all of his days forging new ones. As he aged, he realized that the moral standards of his father’s and grandfather’s times were disintegrating; corruption and greed now existed at the highest political levels. According to his calculations, the rate of change due to mechanical force was accelerating, and the generation of 1900 could rely only on impersonal forces to teach the generation of 2000. He himself saw no end to the multiplicity of forces he believed were so rapidly dwarfing humanity into insignificance.

As a work of literature, The Education of Henry Adams may be read in at least three ways: first, as a conventional autobiography; second, as a work in the mainstream of the European bildungsroman tradition, a personal narrative of one person’s intellectual and emotional coming-of-age; and third, as a critical treatise on Western civilization and culture. Some critics have even called the book a kind of novel, especially given that Adams refers to himself not in the first person but in the third person throughout the book. That is, he presents himself as “Henry Adams,” “Adams,” and the “private secretary,” rather than as “I,” and he often changes the actual facts of his life.

In the mode of a critical treatise, Adams anticipates the twentieth century’s preoccupation with the relationship of technology and science to social and cultural assumptions. Modern science and technology, he feels, completely destroy traditional views of the relationship between the individual and society. The individual becomes a kind of cog in the wheels of society, like a part of a huge machine—a dynamo.

A key chapter in the book is “The Dynamo and the Virgin.” Here, Adams uses the two symbols to explain his analysis of the shaping forces of civilization; the chapter is a synthesis of ideas reflecting his entire education. This excursion into historiography places Adams in the front rank of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historical philosophers, for here he posits the thesis that belief had been in the past the guiding force of sociopolitical and cultural phenomena. He adds that he does not know what will be the guiding force in the future.

Just as religious beliefs—the Virgin—had created the great works of the Middle Ages, Adams writes, so also will the modern belief in science and technology—the dynamo—shape the major creations of the modern age. At last, though, he views the modern age with trepidation and anxiety, for he realizes that in most ways the humanistic education he received from his family does not suit him for the age of the dynamo. He sees that the machine is destroying moral values of great worth, values that underlie the significant achievements of his great grandfather, John Adams, second president of the United States; his grandfather, John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States; and his father, Charles Adams, a US representative and minister to England. At last, then, Henry Adams defines the major conflicts of twentieth-century American civilization, a drama whose denouement remains undecided.

Adams considers his education to have been a complete failure: “One might as well try to educate a gravel-pit,” he writes. He had one of the best educations available in his day, yet he insists that it prepared him for life not in the twentieth century but for life in the eighteenth century, a time that ended decades before he was born.

Repeatedly in his autobiography, Adams refers to the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. In so doing, he is alluding to the biblical story and his own surname, and he also is referring to the idea of the American Adam, that is, of the new person in the New World, which was an idea common in nineteenth-century American literature. Adams, however, gives this idea a new twist: He is a new man in a new multiverse consisting of radium, x-rays, dynamos, and other forms of power never before dreamed of. Unlike the American Adam in the New World, who quickly makes a home for himself modeled in many ways on Europe, Adams sees himself as a complete stranger in a new multiverse in which none of his previous ideas are of any value. This is a place in which he will never feel comfortable.

Bibliography

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