The Education of Henry Adams

CHICAGO (1893)

DRIFTING in the dead-water of the fin-de-siecle —­ and during this last decade every one talked, and seemed to feel fin-de-siecle —­ where not a breath stirred the idle air of education or fretted the mental torpor of self-content, one lived alone.  Adams had long ceased going into society.  For years he had not dined out of his own house, and in public his face was as unknown as that of an extinct statesman.  He had often noticed that six months’ oblivion amounts to newspaper-death, and that resurrection is rare.  Nothing is easier, if a man wants it, than rest, profound as the grave.

His friends sometimes took pity on him, and came to share a meal or pass a night on their passage south or northwards, but existence was, on the whole, exceedingly solitary, or seemed so to him.  Of the society favorites who made the life of every dinner- table and of the halls of Congress —­ Tom Reed, Bourke Cockran, Edward Wolcott —­ he knew not one.  Although Calvin Brice was his next neighbor for six years, entertaining lavishly as no one had ever entertained before in Washington, Adams never entered his house.  W. C. Whitney rivalled Senator Brice in hospitality, and was besides an old acquaintance of the reforming era, but Adams saw him as little as he saw his chief, President Cleveland, or President Harrison or Secretary Bayard or Blaine or Olney.  One has no choice but to go everywhere or nowhere.  No one may pick and choose between houses, or accept hospitality without returning it.  He loved solitude as little as others did; but he was unfit for social work, and he sank under the surface.

Luckily for such helpless animals as solitary men, the world is not only good-natured but even friendly and generous; it loves to pardon if pardon is not demanded as a right.  Adams’s social offences were many, and no one was more sensitive to it than himself; but a few houses always remained which he could enter without being asked, and quit without being noticed.  One was John Hay’s; another was Cabot Lodge’s; a third led to an intimacy which had the singular effect of educating him in knowledge of the very class of American politician who had done most to block his intended path in life.  Senator Cameron of Pennsylvania had married in 1880 a young niece of Senator John Sherman of Ohio, thus making an alliance of dynastic importance in politics, and in society a reign of sixteen years, during which Mrs. Cameron and Mrs. Lodge led a career, without precedent and without succession, as the dispensers of sunshine over Washington.  Both of them had been kind to Adams, and a dozen years of this intimacy had made him one of their habitual household, as he was of Hay’s.  In a small society, such ties between houses become political and social force.  Without intention or consciousness, they fix one’s status in the world.  Whatever one’s preferences in politics might be, one’s house was bound to the Republican interest when sandwiched between Senator Cameron, John Hay, and Cabot Lodge, with Theodore Roosevelt equally at home in them all, and Cecil Spring-Rice to unite them by impartial variety.  The relation was daily, and the alliance undisturbed by power or patronage, since Mr. Harrison, in those respects, showed little more taste than Mr. Cleveland for the society and interests of this particular band of followers, whose relations with the White House were sometimes comic, but never intimate.

In February, 1893, Senator Cameron took his family to South Carolina, where he had bought an old plantation at Coffin’s Point on St. Helena Island, and Adams, as one of the family, was taken, with the rest, to open the new experience.  From there he went on to Havana, and came back to Coffin’s Point to linger till near April.  In May the Senator took his family to Chicago to see the Exposition, and Adams went with them.  Early in June, all sailed for England together, and at last, in the middle of July, all found themselves in Switzerland, at Prangins, Chamounix, and Zermatt.  On July 22 they drove across the Furka Pass and went down by rail to Lucerne.

Months of close contact teach character, if character has interest; and to Adams the Cameron type had keen interest, ever since it had shipwrecked his career in the person of President Grant.  Perhaps it owed life to Scotch blood; perhaps to the blood of Adam and Eve, the primitive strain of man; perhaps only to the blood of the cottager working against the blood of the townsman; but whatever it was, one liked it for its simplicity.  The Pennsylvania mind, as minds go, was not complex; it reasoned little and never talked; but in practical matters it was the steadiest of all American types; perhaps the most efficient; certainly the safest.

Adams had printed as much as this in his books, but had never been able to find a type to describe, the two great historical Pennsylvanians having been, as every one had so often heard, Benjamin Franklin of Boston and Albert Gallatin of Geneva.  Of Albert Gallatin, indeed, he had made a voluminous study and an elaborate picture, only to show that he was, if American at all, a New Yorker, with a Calvinistic strain —­ rather Connecticut than Pennsylvanian.  The true Pennsylvanian was a narrower type; as narrow as the kirk; as shy of other people’s narrowness as a Yankee; as self-limited as a Puritan farmer.  To him, none but Pennsylvanians were white.  Chinaman, negro, Dago, Italian, Englishman, Yankee —­ all was one in the depths of Pennsylvanian consciousness.  The mental machine could run only on what it took for American lines.  This was familiar, ever since one’s study of President Grant in 1869; but in 1893, as then, the type was admirably strong and useful if one wanted only to run on the same lines.  Practically the Pennsylvanian forgot his prejudices when he allied his interests.  He then became supple in action and large in motive, whatever he thought of his colleagues.  When he happened to be right —­ which was, of course, whenever one agreed with him —­ he was the strongest American in America.  As an ally he was worth all the rest, because he understood his own class, who were always a majority; and knew how to deal with them as no New Englander could.  If one wanted work done in Congress, one did wisely to avoid asking a New Englander to do it.  A Pennsylvanian not only could do it, but did it willingly, practically, and intelligently.

Never in the range of human possibilities had a Cameron believed in an Adams —­ or an Adams in a Cameron —­ but they had curiously enough, almost always worked together.  The Camerons had what the Adamses thought the political vice of reaching their objects without much regard to their methods.  The loftiest virtue of the Pennsylvania machine had never been its scrupulous purity or sparkling professions.  The machine worked by coarse means on coarse interests, but its practical success had been the most curious subject of study in American history.  When one summed up the results of Pennsylvanian influence, one inclined to think that Pennsylvania set up the Government in 1789; saved it in 1861; created the American system; developed its iron and coal power; and invented its great railways.  Following up the same line, in his studies of American character, Adams reached the result —­ to him altogether paradoxical —­ that Cameron’s qualities and defects united in equal share to make him the most useful member of the Senate.

In the interest of studying, at last, a perfect and favorable specimen of this American type which had so persistently suppressed his own, Adams was slow to notice that Cameron strongly influenced him, but he could not see a trace of any influence which he exercised on Cameron.  Not an opinion or a view of his on any subject was ever reflected back on him from Cameron’s mind; not even an expression or a fact.  Yet the difference in age was trifling, and in education slight.  On the other hand, Cameron made deep impression on Adams, and in nothing so much as on the great subject of discussion that year —­ the question of silver.

Adams had taken no interest in the matter, and knew nothing about it, except as a very tedious hobby of his friend Dana Horton; but inevitably, from the moment he was forced to choose sides, he was sure to choose silver.  Every political idea and personal prejudice he ever dallied with held him to the silver standard, and made a barrier between him and gold.  He knew well enough all that was to be said for the gold standard as economy, but he had never in his life taken politics for a pursuit of economy.  One might have a political or an economical policy; one could not have both at the same time.  This was heresy in the English school, but it had always been law in the American.  Equally he knew all that was to be said on the moral side of the question, and he admitted that his interests were, as Boston maintained, wholly on the side of gold; but, had they been ten times as great as they were, he could not have helped his bankers or croupiers to load the dice and pack the cards to make sure his winning the stakes.  At least he was bound to profess disapproval —­ or thought he was.  From early childhood his moral principles had struggled blindly with his interests, but he was certain of one law that ruled all others —­ masses of men invariably follow interests in deciding morals.  Morality is a private and costly luxury.  The morality of the silver or gold standards was to be decided by popular vote, and the popular vote would be decided by interests; but on which side lay the larger interest?  To him the interest was political; he thought it probably his last chance of standing up for his eighteenth-century principles, strict construction, limited powers, George Washington, John Adams, and the rest.  He had, in a half-hearted way, struggled all his life against State Street, banks, capitalism altogether, as he knew it in old England or new England, and he was fated to make his last resistance behind the silver standard.

For him this result was clear, and if he erred, he erred in company with nine men out of ten in Washington, for there was little difference on the merits.  Adams was sure to learn backwards, but the case seemed entirely different with Cameron, a typical Pennsylvanian, a practical politician, whom all the reformers, including all the Adamses. had abused for a lifetime for subservience to moneyed interests and political jobbery.  He was sure to go with the banks and corporations which had made and sustained him.  On the contrary, he stood out obstinately as the leading champion of silver in the East.  The reformers, represented by the Evening Post and Godkin, whose personal interests lay with the gold standard, at once assumed that Senator Cameron had a personal interest in silver, and denounced his corruption as hotly as though he had been convicted of taking a bribe.

More than silver and gold, the moral standard interested Adams.  His own interests were with gold, but he supported silver; the Evening Post’s and Godkin’s interests were with gold, and they frankly said so, yet they avowedly pursued their interests even into politics; Cameron’s interests had always been with the corporations, yet he supported silver.  Thus morality required that Adams should be condemned for going against his interests; that Godkin was virtuous in following his interests; and that Cameron was a scoundrel whatever he did.

Granting that one of the three was a moral idiot, which was it:  —­ Adams or Godkin or Cameron?  Until a Council or a Pope or a Congress or the newspapers or a popular election has decided a question of doubtful morality, individuals are apt to err, especially when putting money into their own pockets; but in democracies, the majority alone gives law.  To any one who knew the relative popularity of Cameron and Godkin, the idea of a popular vote between them seemed excessively humorous; yet the popular vote in the end did decide against Cameron, for Godkin.

The Boston moralist and reformer went on, as always, like Dr. Johnson, impatiently stamping his foot and following his interests, or his antipathies; but the true American, slow to grasp new and complicated ideas, groped in the dark to discover where his greater interest lay.  As usual, the banks taught him.  In the course of fifty years the banks taught one many wise lessons for which an insect had to be grateful whether it liked them or not; but of all the lessons Adams learned from them, none compared in dramatic effect with that of July 22, 1893, when, after talking silver all the morning with Senator Cameron on the top of their travelling-carriage crossing the Furka Pass, they reached Lucerne in the afternoon, where Adams found letters from his brothers requesting his immediate return to Boston because the community was bankrupt and he was probably a beggar.

If he wanted education, he knew no quicker mode of learning a lesson than that of being struck on the head by it; and yet he was himself surprised at his own slowness to understand what had struck him.  For several years a sufferer from insomnia, his first thought was of beggary of nerves, and he made ready to face a sleepless night, but although his mind tried to wrestle with the problem how any man could be ruined who had, months before, paid off every dollar of debt he knew himself to owe, he gave up that insoluble riddle in order to fall back on the larger principle that beggary could be no more for him than it was for others who were more valuable members of society, and, with that, he went to sleep like a good citizen, and the next day started for Quincy where he arrived August 7.

As a starting-point for a new education at fifty-five years old, the shock of finding one’s self suspended, for several months, over the edge of bankruptcy, without knowing how one got there, or how to get away, is to be strongly recommended.  By slow degrees the situation dawned on him that the banks had lent him, among others, some money —­ thousands of millions were —­ as bankruptcy —­ the same —­ for which he, among others, was responsible and of which he knew no more than they.  The humor of this situation seemed to him so much more pointed than the terror, as to make him laugh at himself with a sincerity he had been long strange to.  As far as he could comprehend, he had nothing to lose that he cared about, but the banks stood to lose their existence.  Money mattered as little to him as to anybody, but money was their life.  For the first time he had the banks in his power; he could afford to laugh; and the whole community was in the same position, though few laughed.  All sat down on the banks and asked what the banks were going to do about it.  To Adams the situation seemed farcical, but the more he saw of it, the less he understood it.  He was quite sure that nobody understood it much better.  Blindly some very powerful energy was at work, doing something that nobody wanted done.  When Adams went to his bank to draw a hundred dollars of his own money on deposit, the cashier refused to let him have more than fifty, and Adams accepted the fifty without complaint because he was himself refusing to let the banks have some hundreds or thousands that belonged to them.  Each wanted to help the other, yet both refused to pay their debts, and he could find no answer to the question which was responsible for getting the other into the situation, since lenders and borrowers were the same interest and socially the same person.  Evidently the force was one; its operation was mechanical; its effect must be proportional to its power; but no one knew what it meant, and most people dismissed it as an emotion —­ a panic —­ that meant nothing.

Men died like flies under the strain, and Boston grew suddenly old, haggard, and thin.  Adams alone waxed fat and was happy, for at last he had got hold of his world and could finish his education, interrupted for twenty years.  He cared not whether it were worth finishing, if only it amused; but he seemed, for the first time since 1870, to feel that something new and curious was about to happen to the world.  Great changes had taken place since 1870 in the forces at work; the old machine ran far behind its duty; somewhere —­ somehow —­ it was bound to break down, and if it happened to break precisely over one’s head, it gave the better chance for study.

For the first time in several years he saw much of his brother Brooks in Quincy, and was surprised to find him absorbed in the same perplexities.  Brooks was then a man of forty-five years old; a strong writer and a vigorous thinker who irritated too many Boston conventions ever to suit the atmosphere; but the two brothers could talk to each other without atmosphere and were used to audiences of one.  Brooks had discovered or developed a law of history that civilization followed the exchanges, and having worked it out for the Mediterranean was working it out for the Atlantic.  Everything American, as well as most things European and Asiatic, became unstable by this law, seeking new equilibrium and compelled to find it.  Loving paradox, Brooks, with the advantages of ten years’ study, had swept away much rubbish in the effort to build up a new line of thought for himself, but he found that no paradox compared with that of daily events.  The facts were constantly outrunning his thoughts.  The instability was greater than he calculated; the speed of acceleration passed bounds.  Among other general rules he laid down the paradox that, in the social disequilibrium between capital and labor, the logical outcome was not collectivism, but anarchism; and Henry made note of it for study.

By the time he got back to Washington on September 19, the storm having partly blown over, life had taken on a new face, and one so interesting that he set off to Chicago to study the Exposition again, and stayed there a fortnight absorbed in it.  He found matter of study to fill a hundred years, and his education spread over chaos.  Indeed, it seemed to him as though, this year, education went mad.  The silver question, thorny as it was, fell into relations as simple as words of one syllable, compared with the problems of credit and exchange that came to complicate it; and when one sought rest at Chicago, educational game started like rabbits from every building, and ran out of sight among thousands of its kind before one could mark its burrow.  The Exposition itself defied philosophy.  One might find fault till the last gate closed, one could still explain nothing that needed explanation.  As a scenic display, Paris had never approached it, but the inconceivable scenic display consisted in its being there at all —­ more surprising, as it was, than anything else on the continent, Niagara Falls, the Yellowstone Geysers, and the whole railway system thrown in, since these were all natural products in their place; while, since Noah’s Ark, no such Babel of loose and ill joined, such vague and ill-defined and unrelated thoughts and half-thoughts and experimental outcries as the Exposition, had ever ruffled the surface of the Lakes.

The first astonishment became greater every day.  That the Exposition should be a natural growth and product of the Northwest offered a step in evolution to startle Darwin; but that it should be anything else seemed an idea more startling still; and even granting it were not —­ admitting it to be a sort of industrial, speculative growth and product of the Beaux Arts artistically induced to pass the summer on the shore of Lake Michigan —­ could it be made to seem at home there?  Was the American made to seem at home in it?  Honestly, he had the air of enjoying it as though it were all his own; he felt it was good; he was proud of it; for the most part, he acted as though he had passed his life in landscape gardening and architectural decoration.  If he had not done it himself, he had known how to get it done to suit him, as he knew how to get his wives and daughters dressed at Worth’s or Paquin’s.  Perhaps he could not do it again; the next time he would want to do it himself and would show his own faults; but for the moment he seemed to have leaped directly from Corinth and Syracuse and Venice, over the heads of London and New York, to impose classical standards on plastic Chicago.  Critics had no trouble in criticising the classicism, but all trading cities had always shown traders’ taste, and, to the stern purist of religious faith, no art was thinner than Venetian Gothic.  All trader’s taste smelt of bric-a-brac; Chicago tried at least to give her taste a look of unity.

One sat down to ponder on the steps beneath Richard Hunt’s dome almost as deeply as on the steps of Ara Coeli, and much to the same purpose.  Here was a breach of continuity —­ a rupture in historical sequence!  Was it real, or only apparent?  One’s personal universe hung on the answer, for, if the rupture was real and the new American world could take this sharp and conscious twist towards ideals, one’s personal friends would come in, at last, as winners in the great American chariot-race for fame.  If the people of the Northwest actually knew what was good when they saw it, they would some day talk about Hunt and Richardson, La Farge and St. Gaudens, Burnham and McKim, and Stanford White when their politicians and millionaires were otherwise forgotten.  The artists and architects who had done the work offered little encouragement to hope it; they talked freely enough, but not in terms that one cared to quote; and to them the Northwest refused to look artistic.  They talked as though they worked only for themselves; as though art, to the Western people, was a stage decoration; a diamond shirt-stud; a paper collar; but possibly the architects of Paestum and Girgenti had talked in the same way, and the Greek had said the same thing of Semitic Carthage two thousand years ago.

Jostled by these hopes and doubts, one turned to the exhibits for help, and found it.  The industrial schools tried to teach so much and so quickly that the instruction ran to waste.  Some millions of other people felt the same helplessness, but few of them were seeking education, and to them helplessness seemed natural and normal, for they had grown up in the habit of thinking a steam-engine or a dynamo as natural as the sun, and expected to understand one as little as the other.  For the historian alone the Exposition made a serious effort.  Historical exhibits were common, but they never went far enough; none were thoroughly worked out.  One of the best was that of the Cunard steamers, but still a student hungry for results found himself obliged to waste a pencil and several sheets of paper trying to calculate exactly when, according to the given increase of power, tonnage, and speed, the growth of the ocean steamer would reach its limits.  His figures brought him, he thought, to the year 1927; another generation to spare before force, space, and time should meet.  The ocean steamer ran the surest line of triangulation into the future, because it was the nearest of man’s products to a unity; railroads taught less because they seemed already finished except for mere increase in number; explosives taught most, but needed a tribe of chemists, physicists, and mathematicians to explain; the dynamo taught least because it had barely reached infancy, and, if its progress was to be constant at the rate of the last ten years, it would result in infinite costless energy within a generation.  One lingered long among the dynamos, for they were new, and they gave to history a new phase.  Men of science could never understand the ignorance and naivete; of the historian, who, when he came suddenly on a new power, asked naturally what it was; did it pull or did it push?  Was it a screw or thrust?  Did it flow or vibrate?  Was it a wire or a mathematical line?  And a score of such questions to which he expected answers and was astonished to get none.

Education ran riot at Chicago, at least for retarded minds which had never faced in concrete form so many matters of which they were ignorant.  Men who knew nothing whatever —­ who had never run a steam-engine, the simplest of forces —­ who had never put their hands on a lever —­ had never touched an electric battery —­ never talked through a telephone, and had not the shadow of a notion what amount of force was meant by a watt or an ampere or an erg, or any other term of measurement introduced within a hundred years —­ had no choice but to sit down on the steps and brood as they had never brooded on the benches of Harvard College, either as student or professor, aghast at what they had said and done in all these years, and still more ashamed of the childlike ignorance and babbling futility of the society that let them say and do it.  The historical mind can think only in historical processes, and probably this was the first time since historians existed, that any of them had sat down helpless before a mechanical sequence.  Before a metaphysical or a theological or a political sequence, most historians had felt helpless, but the single clue to which they had hitherto trusted was the unity of natural force.

Did he himself quite know what he meant?  Certainly not!  If he had known enough to state his problem, his education would have been complete at once.  Chicago asked in 1893 for the first time the question whether the American people knew where they were driving.  Adams answered, for one, that he did not know, but would try to find out.  On reflecting sufficiently deeply, under the shadow of Richard Hunt’s architecture, he decided that the American people probably knew no more than he did; but that they might still be driving or drifting unconsciously to some point in thought, as their solar system was said to be drifting towards some point in space; and that, possibly, if relations enough could be observed, this point might be fixed.  Chicago was the first expression of American thought as a unity; one must start there.

Washington was the second.  When he got back there, he fell headlong into the extra session of Congress called to repeal the Silver Act.  The silver minority made an obstinate attempt to prevent it, and most of the majority had little heart in the creation of a single gold standard.  The banks alone, and the dealers in exchange, insisted upon it; the political parties divided according to capitalistic geographical lines, Senator Cameron offering almost the only exception; but they mixed with unusual good-temper, and made liberal allowance for each others’ actions and motives.  The struggle was rather less irritable than such struggles generally were, and it ended like a comedy.  On the evening of the final vote, Senator Cameron came back from the Capitol with Senator Brice, Senator Jones, Senator Lodge, and Moreton Frewen, all in the gayest of humors as though they were rid of a heavy responsibility.  Adams, too, in a bystander’s spirit, felt light in mind.  He had stood up for his eighteenth century, his Constitution of 1789, his George Washington, his Harvard College, his Quincy, and his Plymouth Pilgrims, as long as any one would stand up with him.  He had said it was hopeless twenty years before, but he had kept on, in the same old attitude, by habit and taste, until he found himself altogether alone.  He had hugged his antiquated dislike of bankers and capitalistic society until he had become little better than a crank.  He had known for years that he must accept the regime, but he had known a great many other disagreeable certainties —­ like age, senility, and death —­ against which one made what little resistance one could.  The matter was settled at last by the people.  For a hundred years, between 1793 and 1893, the American people had hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and back, between two forces, one simply industrial, the other capitalistic, centralizing, and mechanical.  In 1893, the issue came on the single gold standard, and the majority at last declared itself, once for all, in favor of the capitalistic system with all its necessary machinery.  All one’s friends, all one’s best citizens, reformers, churches, colleges, educated classes, had joined the banks to force submission to capitalism; a submission long foreseen by the mere law of mass.  Of all forms of society or government, this was the one he liked least, but his likes or dislikes were as antiquated as the rebel doctrine of State rights.  A capitalistic system had been adopted, and if it were to be run at all, it must be run by capital and by capitalistic methods; for nothing could surpass the nonsensity of trying to run so complex and so concentrated a machine by Southern and Western farmers in grotesque alliance with city day-laborers, as had been tried in 1800 and 1828, and had failed even under simple conditions.

There, education in domestic politics stopped.  The rest was question of gear; of running machinery; of economy; and involved no disputed principle.  Once admitted that the machine must be efficient, society might dispute in what social interest it should be run, but in any case it must work concentration.  Such great revolutions commonly leave some bitterness behind, but nothing in politics ever surprised Henry Adams more than the ease with which he and his silver friends slipped across the chasm, and alighted on the single gold standard and the capitalistic system with its methods; the protective tariff; the corporations and trusts; the trades-unions and socialistic paternalism which necessarily made their complement; the whole mechanical consolidation of force, which ruthlessly stamped out the life of the class into which Adams was born, but created monopolies capable of controlling the new energies that America adored.

Society rested, after sweeping into the ash-heap these cinders of a misdirected education.  After this vigorous impulse, nothing remained for a historian but to ask —­ how long and how far!