At age 20, Henry Adams (1838-1918) aspired to become president of the United States. His hopes were not realized. He planned to study law, but that didn’t work out either. He was a middling student at Harvard University, often bored with his courses. Yet because of his writing ability, he was asked to give the prestigious Class Day Oration.
It was a sunny, blisteringly hot day in June of 1858 when Adams, robed in a black gown, stepped up to the podium to give his oration. Instead of delivering bromides, he denounced Boston’s commercial and materialistic bent. “Man,” Adams railed, “has reduced the universe to a machine.” And Harvard “had done its best to dilute all wonder, mystery, and experimentation from the human experience.”
In the audience, his father, Charles Francis Adams Sr. (1807-1886), a congressman, made notes praising his son’s speech. Charles, similar to his father, John Quincy Adams, and his grandfather, John Adams, had raised his children to be proficient writers. “The governor,” as he was called, believed that “there is no species of exercise, in early life, more productive of results useful to the mind than that of writing letters.” For Charles, the best result would have been for one of his sons, possibly Henry, to be elected to the presidency.
Henry’s mother, Abigail Brown Brooks, came from one of the U.S.’s richest families and had little experience raising children. Mothering seven children overwhelmed her. They were boisterous and outspoken. Henry, though, was shy and loved to read. The Adams’s home in Quincy, Massachusetts, had a library of 18,000 books, including his father’s 10-volume history of the works of his great-grandfather, John Adams.
Henry was a man of contradictions. He attacked materialism but collected watercolors by J.M.W. Turner. He lived lavishly, took numerous tours of Europe, and traveled to the Far East and the South Seas. He later owned a Mercedes automobile.
He believed in democracy but considered the best government to be one overseen by a small elite. He condemned Wall Street but invested in the stock market. He considered slavery to be wrong, but he disapproved of the Emancipation Proclamation, believing that the U.S. should have gradually sapped the strength of the slaveholders by establishing free colonies in the South. Working for his father in the British Embassy during the Civil War, Adams wrote numerous articles hoping to keep England from siding with the Confederacy.
Adams supported President Ulysses S. Grant but later called him “more primitive than the cave-dwellers.” He denounced Jay Gould and his partners, who cornered the gold market during Grant’s presidency, in an article titled “The New York Gold Conspiracy.”
His elite friends included Secretary of State John Hay, geologist Clarence King, novelists Henry James and Edith Wharton, philosopher William James, and artist Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the creator of Grief, the shrouded, mysterious figure that marks Adams’s wife’s grave in Washington’s Rock Creek Cemetery. Adams called the statue the “peace of God,” suggesting his spiritual sensitivity.
Adams was a historian, a political journalist, and a prolific author. He wrote several biographies, two novels, a nine-volume history of the U.S. from 1801 to 1817, a history of Tahiti, and a book about medieval spirituality, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, that is still prized today. That’s to say nothing of his extensive correspondence, of which more than 2,000 pages have been published. Adams hoped that in a hundred years or so, when “everything about us is forgotten,” his letters “might still be read and quoted.” Then, of course, there is his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, The Education of Henry Adams, which is widely considered one of the best nonfiction books of the 20th century despite leaving out some personal details, such as its author’s pain over the death of his wife, Marian Hooper, who committed suicide in 1885 after 13 years of marriage.
An orthodox Protestant, Adams was captivated by the spirituality of Gothic architecture and music as well as the power of the Virgin Mary to inspire such magnificence. Adams’s visit to the Chartres Cathedral in the 1890s inspired his love for medieval poetry and his sense of the sacred. He was so moved that he called the Virgin Mary “the greatest and most mysterious of all energies,” one capable of challenging mankind’s materialism. Although he didn’t convert to Catholicism, he became friends with the Rev. Sigourney Fay, a Catholic priest, and began to study the works of St. Thomas Aquinas. Soon, he lost his interest in politics. When the young historian Samuel Eliot Morison visited Adams hoping to engage him in a political discussion on U.S. federalism, he found the septuagenarian Adams bored by American history but passionately focused on medieval songs.
In his new biography of Adams, The Last American Aristocrat, David Brown tries to uncover the man behind the memoir. Leaning on Adams’s memoir and letters, as well as Ernest Samuels’s three-volume biography of Adams, which won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize, Brown focuses on Adams as the political and social critic. He surveys Adams’s life chronologically, which works, but the book lacks a clear narrative drive and tends to bog down in detail.
Adams was, above all, a critic of the materialism of the late 19th century and the early 20th century. He believed that the U.S. was “marked by a steady decline of literary and artistic intensity, and especially for the feeling for poetry.” The country had entered, he believed, into a Faustian bargain with technology.
But even as Adams criticized the spiritual breakdown afflicting the U.S., he still called the country “the grandest theater in the world for the exercise of that refinement of mind and those high principles, which it is a disgrace to us if we have not acquired.”
Diane Scharper is the author of seven books, including Reading Lips and Other Ways to Overcome a Disability. She teaches memoir for the Johns Hopkins University Osher Program.
