Reading Henry Adams a Century Later...

I can think of no better way to pass the time as we await the arrival of a new century than to read these letters of Henry Adams, who watched with great interest and trepidation the passing of the 19th Century and the arrival of the 20th. The grandson of one president, great-grandson of another, living across Lafayette Square from the White House but constantly traveling the world, an observer and occasional behind-the-scenes influence but never an active participant in government affairs, Adams had a unique view of the events of his time. His “Education of Henry Adams” is perhaps the most brilliant intellectual autobiography in American literature.

These letters to women friends, to nieces and brothers, to artists, scientists and statesmen and to many other friends and relatives, provide an insight into Adams’ thoughts as his “Education” and its companion volume “Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres” began to take shape. They reveal his passionate curiosity about unfolding events, his never-ending desire to find meaning in history and his sometimes astonishing power of prophecy.

The first three volumes (published in 1982) of this six-volume set cover the years 1858-1891. The newly published, latter three volumes begin in 1892 and end a few days before his death at age 80, in March, 1918. More accessible than some of Adams’ published writings, they provide perceptive commentary on all the momentous events of the period: the Panic of 1893, the Spanish-American and Boer wars, William Jennings Bryan and the silver question, the Administrations of Cleveland, McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, the sinking of the Lusitania and the beginnings of World War I.

By far the greatest number of letters are to Elizabeth Cameron, the beautiful woman nearly 20 years his junior to whom he grew increasingly attached after his wife’s suicide in 1885. According to Adams’ biographer, Ernest Samuels, their relationship was apparently quite proper, in spite of gossip. She was the wife of Pennsylvania Sen. J. Donald Cameron and the niece of Sen. John Sherman (of the Sherman Antitrust Act) and Gen. William T. Sherman. Adams was usually quite restrained in indicating his feelings for her, but because of her intelligence and awareness of social and political power plays, he seems to have found her an ideal confidant.

Adams’ letters to Mrs. Cameron from Washington are, as the editors say, “the best court gossip an American has ever recorded.” He wrote about the small dinners he attended at the Roosevelt White House and of what he had learned about the latest in national and international affairs when he entertained his friends the John Hays, the Henry Cabot Lodges, foreign diplomats and others in places of power. When he was away from Washington, she was his best informant. “Madame de Pompadour,” he called her. “You are the only person who sees people and the world. You alone have the instinct, and take the trouble, and do the work.” The same could be said of Adams himself.

Adams’ admiration for women, but regret at their wasted energies, is one of the themes in his letters that foreshadow passages in the “Education.” In the chapter titled “Vis Inertiae (1903),” for example, he called contemporary American women a “failure.” They had been set free, thanks to the greatly increased expenditure of artificial energy on their households, but their own potential energy was being wasted. As he wrote to a woman friend in 1905 while the “Education” was in progress, the American woman “has held nothing together, neither State nor Church, nor Society nor Family.” To young George Cabot Lodge, however, he predicted that woman “is only beginning her career. . . . What will please her a century hence is a fascinating subject of reflection. . . . A branch of the sex is sure to break off as an emancipated social class. If I were beginning again as a writer, I think I should drop the man, except as an accessory, and study the woman of the future.”

Energies and forces, whether social, political or physical, are a major theme in Adams’ letters, as in his published work. “Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres” explores the unity of religious belief during the Middle Ages as the force behind the building of the great Gothic cathedrals, while the “Education” is concerned with the multiplicity of energies that fragment the modern world. The contrast between the two periods especially impressed him, as he told various correspondents, when he went from Paris to Washington. Summers in Paris he was “living in the 12th Century,” making daily excursions into the countryside to attend services at Chartres and “collect” spires and stained-glass windows. In the winter he returned to Washington and the 20th Century, amazed at finding himself in a “hundred-mile-an-hour country” whose rising power in the world astounded him.

To his brother, Brooks, whose “Law of Civilization and Decay” (published in 1895) was an important influence on his own work, he wrote about his interest in physics, which had been stimulated by studying the dynamos at the Paris Exposition of 1900, and of his efforts to calculate accelerating rates of energy consumption. Henry was convinced that at the rate the world was developing its power resources, it would “break its neck” in 30 years or so. “My belief is that science is to wreck us, and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell; we don’t in the least know or care where our practically infinite energies come from or will bring us to.”

By 1909, Adams had begun to study the writings of William Thompson, Lord Kelvin, on whose Second Law of Thermodynamics Adams hoped to build a scientific theory of history. His 1910 “Letter to American Teachers of History,” intended to shake up members of the profession whom he believed were “dead as dormice,” was a classic statement of fin-de-siecle pessimism. In it Adams proposed that thought, like other forms of energy, would gradually become dissipated. Civilization was declining, not progressing upward as the social Darwinists had been claiming. “Kelvin was a great man,” he wrote to a friend in 1909, “and I am sorry I did not know enough mathematics to follow him instead of Darwin who led us all wrong.”

Reading the letters makes one feel a part of the time; it is a painless way to read history. The editors have supplied excellent introductions, which give the reader an overview of Adams’ activities. The notes are always helpful, although those that first identify a correspondent may be in an earlier volume and are sometimes hard to find. Identifying notes from volumes one to three are not repeated in these later volumes. There are good indexes in volumes three and six, covering the contents of the first and second series of letters, respectively.

The letters will be especially useful to scholars, but they can be read with great enjoyment by anyone who makes a little effort to learn the cast of characters. Adams is never dull. His witty, ironic style often amuses, even when he is discussing apocalyptic events. His perceptive observations on the beginnings of the 20th Century give us, looking back on it, a new understanding of what we have been through.