The Education of Henry Adams

PRESIDENT GRANT (1869)

The first effect of this leap into the unknown was a fit of low spirits new to the young man’s education; due in part to the overpowering beauty and sweetness of the Maryland autumn, almost unendurable for its strain on one who had toned his life down to the November grays and browns of northern Europe.  Life could not go on so beautiful and so sad.  Luckily, no one else felt it or knew it.  He bore it as well as he could, and when he picked himself up, winter had come, and he was settled in bachelor’s quarters, as modest as those of a clerk in the Departments, far out on G Street, towards Georgetown, where an old Finn named Dohna, who had come out with the Russian Minister Stoeckel long before, had bought or built a new house.  Congress had met.  Two or three months remained to the old administration, but all interest centred in the new one.  The town began to swarm with office-seekers, among whom a young writer was lost.  He drifted among them, unnoticed, glad to learn his work under cover of the confusion.  He never aspired to become a regular reporter; he knew he should fail in trying a career so ambitious and energetic; but he picked up friends on the press —­ Nordhoff, Murat Halstead, Henry Watterson, Sam Bowles —­ all reformers, and all mixed and jumbled together in a tidal wave of expectation, waiting for General Grant to give orders.  No one seemed to know much about it.  Even Senators had nothing to say.  One could only make notes and study finance.

In waiting, he amused himself as he could.  In the amusements of Washington, education had no part, but the simplicity of the amusements proved the simplicity of everything else, ambitions, interests, thoughts, and knowledge.  Proverbially Washington was a poor place for education, and of course young diplomats avoided or disliked it, but, as a rule, diplomats disliked every place except Paris, and the world contained only one Paris.  They abused London more violently than Washington; they praised no post under the sun; and they were merely describing three-fourths of their stations when they complained that there were no theatres, no restaurants, no monde, no demi-monde, no drives, no splendor, and, as Mme. de Struve used to say, no grandezza.  This was all true; Washington was a mere political camp, as transient and temporary as a camp-meeting for religious revival, but the diplomats had least reason to complain, since they were more sought for there than they would ever be elsewhere.  For young men Washington was in one way paradise, since they were few, and greatly in demand.  After watching the abject unimportance of the young diplomat in London society, Adams found himself a young duke in Washington.  He had ten years of youth to make up, and a ravenous appetite.  Washington was the easiest society he had ever seen, and even the Bostonian became simple, good-natured, almost genial, in the softness of a Washington spring.  Society went on excellently well without houses, or carriages, or jewels, or toilettes, or pavements, or shops, or grandezza of any sort; and the market was excellent as well as cheap.  One could not stay there a month without loving the shabby town.  Even the Washington girl, who was neither rich nor well-dressed nor well-educated nor clever, had singular charm, and used it.  According to Mr. Adams the father, this charm dated back as far as Monroe’s administration, to his personal knowledge.

Therefore, behind all the processes of political or financial or newspaper training, the social side of Washington was to be taken for granted as three-fourths of existence.  Its details matter nothing.  Life ceased to be strenuous, and the victim thanked God for it.  Politics and reform became the detail, and waltzing the profession.  Adams was not alone.  Senator Sumner had as private secretary a young man named Moorfield Storey, who became a dangerous example of frivolity.  The new Attorney-General, E. R. Hoar, brought with him from Concord a son, Sam Hoar, whose example rivalled that of Storey.  Another impenitent was named Dewey, a young naval officer.  Adams came far down in the list.  He wished he had been higher.  He could have spared a world of superannuated history, science, or politics, to have reversed better in waltzing.

He had no adequate notion how little he knew, especially of women, and Washington offered no standard of comparison.  All were profoundly ignorant together, and as indifferent as children to education.  No one needed knowledge.  Washington was happier without style.  Certainly Adams was happier without it; happier than he had ever been before; happier than any one in the harsh world of strenuousness could dream of.  This must be taken as background for such little education as he gained; but the life belonged to the eighteenth century, and in no way concerned education for the twentieth.

In such an atmosphere, one made no great presence of hard work.  If the world wants hard work, the world must pay for it; and, if it will not pay, it has no fault to find with the worker.  Thus far, no one had made a suggestion of pay for any work that Adams had done or could do; if he worked at all, it was for social consideration, and social pleasure was his pay.  For this he was willing to go on working, as an artist goes on painting when no one buys his pictures.  Artists have done it from the beginning of time, and will do it after time has expired, since they cannot help themselves, and they find their return in the pride of their social superiority as they feel it.  Society commonly abets them and encourages their attitude of contempt.  The society of Washington was too simple and Southern as yet, to feel anarchistic longings, and it never read or saw what artists produced elsewhere, but it good-naturedly abetted them when it had the chance, and respected itself the more for the frailty.  Adams found even the Government at his service, and every one willing to answer his questions.  He worked, after a fashion; not very hard, but as much as the Government would have required of him for nine hundred dollars a year; and his work defied frivolity.  He got more pleasure from writing than the world ever got from reading him, for his work was not amusing, nor was he.  One must not try to amuse moneylenders or investors, and this was the class to which he began by appealing.  He gave three months to an article on the finances of the United States, just then a subject greatly needing treatment; and when he had finished it, he sent it to London to his friend Henry Reeve, the ponderous editor of the Edinburgh Review.  Reeve probably thought it good; at all events, he said so; and he printed it in April.  Of course it was reprinted in America, but in England such articles were still anonymous, and the author remained unknown.

The author was not then asking for advertisement, and made no claim for credit.  His object was literary.  He wanted to win a place on the staff of the Edinburgh Review, under the vast shadow of Lord Macaulay; and, to a young American in 1868, such rank seemed colossal —­ the highest in the literary world —­ as it had been only five-and-twenty years before.  Time and tide had flowed since then, but the position still flattered vanity, though it brought no other flattery or reward except the regular thirty pounds of pay —­ fifty dollars a month, measured in time and labor.

The Edinburgh article finished, he set himself to work on a scheme for the North American Review.  In England, Lord Robert Cecil had invented for the London Quarterly an annual review of politics which he called the “Session.”  Adams stole the idea and the name —­ he thought he had been enough in Lord Robert’s house, in days of his struggle with adversity, to excuse the theft —­ and began what he meant for a permanent series of annual political reviews which he hoped to make, in time, a political authority.  With his sources of information, and his social intimacies at Washington, he could not help saying something that would command attention.  He had the field to himself, and he meant to give himself a free hand, as he went on.  Whether the newspapers liked it or not, they would have to reckon with him; for such a power, once established, was more effective than all the speeches in Congress or reports to the President that could be crammed into the Government presses.

The first of these “Sessions” appeared in April, but it could not be condensed into a single article, and had to be supplemented in October by another which bore the title of “Civil Service Reform,” and was really a part of the same review.  A good deal of authentic history slipped into these papers.  Whether any one except his press associates ever read them, he never knew and never greatly cared.  The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.  The fateful year 1870 was near at hand, which was to mark the close of the literary epoch, when quarterlies gave way to monthlies; letter-press to illustration; volumes to pages.  The outburst was brilliant.  Bret Harte led, and Robert Louis Stevenson followed.  Guy de Maupassant and Rudyard Kipling brought up the rear, and dazzled the world.  As usual, Adams found himself fifty years behind his time, but a number of belated wanderers kept him company, and they produced on each other the effect or illusion of a public opinion.  They straggled apart, at longer and longer intervals, through the procession, but they were still within hearing distance of each other.  The drift was still superficially conservative.  Just as the Church spoke with apparent authority, of the quarterlies laid down an apparent law, and no one could surely say where the real authority, or the real law, lay.  Science lid not know.  Truths a priori held their own against truths surely relative.  According to Lowell, Right was forever on the scaffold, Wrong was forever on the Throne; and most people still thought they believed it.  Adams was not the only relic of the eighteenth century, and he could still depend on a certain number of listeners —­ mostly respectable, and some rich.

Want of audience did not trouble him; he was well enough off in that respect, and would have succeeded in all his calculations if this had been his only hazard.  Where he broke down was at a point where he always suffered wreck and where nine adventurers out of ten make their errors.  One may be more or less certain of organized forces; one can never be certain of men.  He belonged to the eighteenth century, and the eighteenth century upset all his plans.  For the moment, America was more eighteenth century than himself; it reverted to the stone age.

As education —­ of a certain sort —­ the story had probably a certain value, though he could never see it.  One seldom can see much education in the buck of a broncho; even less in the kick of a mule.  The lesson it teaches is only that of getting out of the animal’s way.  This was the lesson that Henry Adams had learned over and over again in politics since 1860.

At least four-fifths of the American people —­ Adams among the rest —­ had united in the election of General Grant to the Presidency, and probably had been more or less affected in their choice by the parallel they felt between Grant and Washington.  Nothing could be more obvious.  Grant represented order.  He was a great soldier, and the soldier always represented order.  He might be as partisan as he pleased, but a general who had organized and commanded half a million or a million men in the field, must know how to administer.  Even Washington, who was, in education and experience, a mere cave-dweller, had known how to organize a government, and had found Jeffersons and Hamiltons to organize his departments.  The task of bringing the Government back to regular practices, and of restoring moral and mechanical order to administration, was not very difficult; it was ready to do it itself, with a little encouragement.  No doubt the confusion, especially in the old slave States and in the currency, was considerable, but, the general disposition was good, and every one had echoed that famous phrase:  “Let us have peace.”

Adams was young and easily deceived, in spite of his diplomatic adventures, but even at twice his age he could not see that this reliance on Grant was unreasonable.  Had Grant been a Congressman one would have been on one’s guard, for one knew the type.  One never expected from a Congressman more than good intentions and public spirit.  Newspaper-men as a rule had no great respect for the lower House; Senators had less; and Cabinet officers had none at all.  Indeed, one day when Adams was pleading with a Cabinet officer for patience and tact in dealing with Representatives, the Secretary impatiently broke out:  “You can’t use tact with a Congressman!  A Congressman is a hog!  You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!” Adams knew far too little, compared with the Secretary, to contradict him, though he thought the phrase somewhat harsh even as applied to the average Congressman of 1869 —­ he saw little or nothing of later ones —­ but he knew a shorter way of silencing criticism.  He had but to ask:  “If a Congressman is a hog, what is a Senator?” This innocent question, put in a candid spirit, petrified any executive officer that ever sat a week in his office.  Even Adams admitted that Senators passed belief.  The comic side of their egotism partly disguised its extravagance, but faction had gone so far under Andrew Johnson that at times the whole Senate seemed to catch hysterics of nervous bucking without apparent reason.  Great leaders, like Sumner and Conkling, could not be burlesqued; they were more grotesque than ridicule could make them; even Grant, who rarely sparkled in epigram, became witty on their account; but their egotism and factiousness were no laughing matter.  They did permanent and terrible mischief, as Garfield and Blaine, and even McKinley and John Hay, were to feel.  The most troublesome task of a reform President was that of bringing the Senate back to decency.

Therefore no one, and Henry Adams less than most, felt hope that any President chosen from the ranks of politics or politicians would raise the character of government; and by instinct if not by reason, all the world united on Grant.  The Senate understood what the world expected, and waited in silence for a struggle with Grant more serious than that with Andrew Johnson.  Newspaper-men were alive with eagerness to support the President against the Senate.  The newspaper-man is, more than most men, a double personality; and his person feels best satisfied in its double instincts when writing in one sense and thinking in another.  All newspaper-men, whatever they wrote, felt alike about the Senate.  Adams floated with the stream.  He was eager to join in the fight which he foresaw as sooner or later inevitable.  He meant to support the Executive in attacking the Senate and taking away its two-thirds vote and power of confirmation, nor did he much care how it should be done, for he thought it safer to effect the revolution in 1870 than to wait till 1920..

With this thought in his mind, he went to the Capitol to hear the names announced which should reveal the carefully guarded secret of Grant’s Cabinet.  To the end of his life, he wondered at the suddenness of the revolution which actually, within five minutes, changed his intended future into an absurdity so laughable as to make him ashamed of it.  He was to hear a long list of Cabinet announcements not much weaker or more futile than that of Grant, and none of them made him blush, while Grant’s nominations had the singular effect of making the hearer ashamed, not so much of Grant, as of himself.  He had made another total misconception of life —­ another inconceivable false start.  Yet, unlikely as it seemed, he had missed his motive narrowly, and his intention had been more than sound, for the Senators made no secret of saying with senatorial frankness that Grant’s nominations betrayed his intent as plainly as they betrayed his incompetence.  A great soldier might be a baby politician.

Adams left the Capitol, much in the same misty mental condition that he recalled as marking his railway journey to London on May 13, 1861; he felt in himself what Gladstone bewailed so sadly, “the incapacity of viewing things all round.”  He knew, without absolutely saying it, that Grant had cut short the life which Adams had laid out for himself in the future.  After such a miscarriage, no thought of effectual reform could revive for at least one generation, and he had no fancy for ineffectual politics.  What course could he sail next?  He had tried so many, and society had barred them all!  For the moment, he saw no hope but in following the stream on which he had launched himself.  The new Cabinet, as individuals, were not hostile.  Subsequently Grant made changes in the list which were mostly welcome to a Bostonian —­ or should have been —­ although fatal to Adams.  The name of Hamilton Fish, as Secretary of State, suggested extreme conservatism and probable deference to Sumner.  The name of George S. Boutwell, as Secretary of the Treasury, suggested only a somewhat lugubrious joke; Mr. Boutwell could be described only as the opposite of Mr. McCulloch, and meant inertia; or, in plain words, total extinction for any one resembling Henry Adams.  On the other hand, the name of Jacob D. Cox, as Secretary of the Interior, suggested help and comfort; while that of Judge Hoar, as Attorney-General, promised friendship.  On the whole, the personal outlook, merely for literary purposes, seemed fairly cheerful, and the political outlook, though hazy, still depended on Grant himself.  No one doubted that Grant’s intention had been one of reform; that his aim had been to place his administration above politics; and until he should actually drive his supporters away, one might hope to support him.  One’s little lantern must therefore be turned on Grant.  One seemed to know him so well, and really knew so little.

By chance it happened that Adam Badeau took the lower suite of rooms at Dohna’s, and, as it was convenient to have one table, the two men dined together and became intimate.  Badeau was exceedingly social, though not in appearance imposing.  He was stout; his face was red, and his habits were regularly irregular; but he was very intelligent, a good newspaper-man, and an excellent military historian.  His life of Grant was no ordinary book.  Unlike most newspaper-men, he was a friendly critic of Grant, as suited an officer who had been on the General’s staff.  As a rule, the newspaper correspondents in Washington were unfriendly, and the lobby sceptical.  From that side one heard tales that made one’s hair stand on end, and the old West Point army officers were no more flattering.  All described him as vicious, narrow, dull, and vindictive.  Badeau, who had come to Washington for a consulate which was slow to reach him, resorted more or less to whiskey for encouragement, and became irritable, besides being loquacious.  He talked much about Grant, and showed a certain artistic feeling for analysis of character, as a true literary critic would naturally do.  Loyal to Grant, and still more so to Mrs. Grant, who acted as his patroness, he said nothing, even when far gone, that was offensive about either, but he held that no one except himself and Rawlins understood the General.  To him, Grant appeared as an intermittent energy, immensely powerful when awake, but passive and plastic in repose.  He said that neither he nor the rest of the staff knew why Grant succeeded; they believed in him because of his success.  For stretches of time, his mind seemed torpid.  Rawlins and the others would systematically talk their ideas into it, for weeks, not directly, but by discussion among themselves, in his presence.  In the end, he would announce the idea as his own, without seeming conscious of the discussion; and would give the orders to carry it out with all the energy that belonged to his nature.  They could never measure his character or be sure when he would act.  They could never follow a mental process in his thought.  They were not sure that he did think.

In all this, Adams took deep interest, for although he was not, like Badeau, waiting for Mrs. Grant’s power of suggestion to act on the General’s mind in order to germinate in a consulate or a legation, his portrait gallery of great men was becoming large, and it amused him to add an authentic likeness of the greatest general the world had seen since Napoleon.  Badeau’s analysis was rather delicate; infinitely superior to that of Sam Ward or Charles Nordhoff.

Badeau took Adams to the White House one evening and introduced him to the President and Mrs. Grant.  First and last, he saw a dozen Presidents at the White House, and the most famous were by no means the most agreeable, but he found Grant the most curious object of study among them all.  About no one did opinions differ so widely.  Adams had no opinion, or occasion to make one.  A single word with Grant satisfied him that, for his own good, the fewer words he risked, the better.  Thus far in life he had met with but one man of the same intellectual or unintellectual type —­ Garibaldi.  Of the two, Garibaldi seemed to him a trifle the more intellectual, but, in both, the intellect counted for nothing; only the energy counted.  The type was pre-intellectual, archaic, and would have seemed so even to the cave-dwellers.  Adam, according to legend, was such a man.

In time one came to recognize the type in other men, with differences and variations, as normal; men whose energies were the greater, the less they wasted on thought; men who sprang from the soil to power; apt to be distrustful of themselves and of others; shy; jealous; sometimes vindictive; more or less dull in outward appearance; always needing stimulants, but for whom action was the highest stimulant —­ the instinct of fight.  Such men were forces of nature, energies of the prime, like the Pteraspis , but they made short work of scholars.  They had commanded thousands of such and saw no more in them than in others.  The fact was certain; it crushed argument and intellect at once.

Adams did not feel Grant as a hostile force; like Badeau he saw only an uncertain one.  When in action he was superb and safe to follow; only when torpid he was dangerous.  To deal with him one must stand near, like Rawlins, and practice more or less sympathetic habits.  Simple-minded beyond the experience of Wall Street or State Street, he resorted, like most men of the same intellectual calibre, to commonplaces when at a loss for expression:  “Let us have peace!” or, “The best way to treat a bad law is to execute it”; or a score of such reversible sentences generally to be gauged by their sententiousness; but sometimes he made one doubt his good faith; as when he seriously remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained.  In Mark Twain, this suggestion would have taken rank among his best witticisms; in Grant it was a measure of simplicity not singular.  Robert E. Lee betrayed the same intellectual commonplace, in a Virginian form, not to the same degree, but quite distinctly enough for one who knew the American.  What worried Adams was not the commonplace; it was, as usual, his own education.  Grant fretted and irritated him, like the Terebratula, as a defiance of first principles.  He had no right to exist.  He should have been extinct for ages.  The idea that, as society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset evolution, and made of education a fraud.  That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be called —­ and should actually and truly be —­ the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous.  One must be as commonplace as Grant’s own commonplaces to maintain such an absurdity.  The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.

Education became more perplexing at every phase.  No theory was worth the pen that wrote it.  America had no use for Adams because he was eighteenth-century, and yet it worshipped Grant because he was archaic and should have lived in a cave and worn skins.  Darwinists ought to conclude that America was reverting to the stone age, but the theory of reversion was more absurd than that of evolution.  Grant’s administration reverted to nothing.  One could not catch a trait of the past, still less of the future.  It was not even sensibly American.  Not an official in it, except perhaps Rawlins whom Adams never met, and who died in September, suggested an American idea.

Yet this administration, which upset Adams’s whole life, was not unfriendly; it was made up largely of friends.  Secretary Fish was almost kind; he kept the tradition of New York social values; he was human and took no pleasure in giving pain.  Adams felt no prejudice whatever in his favor, and he had nothing in mind or person to attract regard; his social gifts were not remarkable; he was not in the least magnetic; he was far from young; but he won confidence from the start and remained a friend to the finish.  As far as concerned Mr. Fish, one felt rather happily suited, and one was still better off in the Interior Department with J. D. Cox.  Indeed, if Cox had been in the Treasury and Boutwell in the Interior, one would have been quite satisfied as far as personal relations went, while, in the Attorney-General’s Office, Judge Hoar seemed to fill every possible ideal, both personal and political.

The difficulty was not the want of friends, and had the whole government been filled with them, it would have helped little without the President and the Treasury.  Grant avowed from the start a policy of drift; and a policy of drift attaches only barnacles.  At thirty, one has no interest in becoming a barnacle, but even in that character Henry Adams would have been ill-seen.  His friends were reformers, critics, doubtful in party allegiance, and he was himself an object of suspicion.  Grant had no objects, wanted no help, wished for no champions.  The Executive asked only to be let alone.  This was his meaning when he said:  “Let us have peace! “

No one wanted to go into opposition.  As for Adams, all his hopes of success in life turned on his finding an administration to support.  He knew well enough the rules of self-interest.  He was for sale.  He wanted to be bought.  His price was excessively cheap, for he did not even ask an office, and had his eye, not on the Government, but on New York.  All he wanted was something to support; something that would let itself be supported.  Luck went dead against him.  For once, he was fifty years in advance of his time.