David S. Brown - The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams

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Copyright 2020 by David S. Brown

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For my teachers, gratefully

Ive outlived at least three quite distinct worlds since 1838.

Henry Adams, 1915

For some years now a remarkable interest in the John Adams family has nourished a thick forest of books and biographies, surveying the public and private lives of its resident presidents. Recognized as the nations most prominent political dynasty, the family appears over and again as emblems of a vital if irretrievable past. Theirs, however, is a cottage industry incomplete, for looking a little further down the line of descent it is evident that not one among them matched the marvelously improbable portfolio of Henry Adams. He seemed to know everybody, travel everywhere, and do everything. Historian, political reformer, journalist, novelist, world traveler, Washington wise man, and member (by investiture) of a venerable Tahitian island dynastythese are just a few of the several identities he so casually adopted. Such occupations and attitudes he used to elude a pressure-packed political family familiar with depression, alcoholism, and suicide. His uncommonly wide horizons allowed, rather, for a respectable detour from the comparatively narrow paths pioneered by grandfather (John Quincy Adams) and great-grandfather (John Adams) heads of state. One might argue that given the eclectic range of his resolutions, he led a rarer life than either.

Born in a Boston still cleaving, as he once put it, upon a nest of associations so colonial, Adams observed from various angles Americas Industrial Revolution, its Civil War, and its entry into the Great War. He met Lincoln and befriended Edith Wharton, bowed before Queen Victoria and shared a spartan meal in the unkempt Samoan home of Treasure Islands author Robert Louis Stevenson; he married into a family with strong ties to the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, visited Jeffersons Monticello with Jeffersons granddaughter Sarah Randolph, and suffered, so he said, an indifferent, very badly served White House dinner with Theodore Roosevelt; from an anxious Paris he witnessed the German invasion of 1914 and enjoyed in his final years the occasional company of a young, attractive political coupleFranklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Drawn to the unusually broad scale of Adamss relationships and experiences, I emphasize in this biography his importance as a transitional figure, one bridging the chasm between colonial and modern. To put this another way, I believe that to understand much of Americas history, and more specifically its movement in the late nineteenth century toward an imperial, industrial identity, one both increasingly beholden to technology and concerned with the fate of the white race, is to understand Henry Adams.

More than merely living a long and colorful life, Adams actively engaged and commented on his times, endeavoring to interpret their structure, pace, and meaning. In 1838, the year of Adamss birth, Sam Houston served as president of the Republic of Texas; the removal of the Cherokee Nation west of the Mississippi gave rise to the anguished expression Trail of Tears; Frederick Douglass, carrying the identification papers of a free black seaman, escaped from bondage; and a twenty-eight-year-old Abraham Lincoln spoke on the perpetuation of our political institutions before the Springfield, Illinois, Young Mens Lyceum. Many older American citizens at that time had been subjects of the British Empire; eighty years later, in 1918, the year of Adamss death, few relics of the early American republic remained. The Ford Motor Company was coming off its biggest year to date, selling an astounding 735,000 automobiles; Babe Ruth smacked eleven home runs for the Boston Red Sox in what proved to be the final season of the dead-ball era; James Joyces controversial novel Ulysses began serialization in the American modernist literary magazine Little Review; and Woodrow Wilson, attending the Versailles Peace Conference, became the first U.S. president to travel outside of the Western Hemisphere while in office. Kelloggs and Coca-Cola, Budweiser and Buick were on the rise.

Adams, the child of an impossibly distinguished New England family, assumed something of a divided perspective, for the residue of regional custom in America quite emphatically gave way, as he grew older, to stronger and more eclectic currents. The Dutch-speaking Martin Van Buren, the first New Yorker and first candidate of nonBritish Isle ancestry to become president (the year prior to Henrys birth), might conveniently be identified as a harbinger of change. He reigned, if only for a single term, over a rising republic; expansion across the frontier coupled with a lessening of suffrage restrictions for white men resulted in a dramatic increase of votersfrom roughly 400,000 in 1824 to some 2.4 million by 1840. Henry grew up with an increasingly restless, ethnically complex, and democratic nation that had moved beyond the purview of its former first families. But far from defending his own class, he wondered at the mystery of its virtual extinction in a land of plenty. How few of our college mates, with all their immense advantages, he wrote his brother Charles late in life, seem to have got or kept their proportional share in the astounding creation of power since 1850.

To leave the impression, however, that Adams languished in the past, alienated from his times, would be an error. He embraced the fruits of invention traveling in the latest Mercedes, the fastest Union Pacific luxury train cars, and the smoothest steamships (purchasing a never used ticket for the Titanics return voyage). A connoisseur of spiritual expressions, he dropped his boyhood Boston Unitarianism to sample Buddhist, Catholic, and South Seas ceremonies and aesthetics; when writing selectively of his life in his most well-known work,