HPC Portrayals

HENRY ADAMS (1838-1918)

by George Frein

Visionaries of the second rank see into the future. Visionaries of the first rank see into the past, the present, and the future. Henry Adams was a visionary of the first rank.

Adams was a historian who knew the past better than any of his countrymen. Of course he had an advantage. He was born into an historic family that had two presidents. His great grandfather, John Adams, was the second president and his grandfather, John Quincy Adams, was the sixth president. Henry grew up expecting to be president himself someday.

But instead of becoming president, Henry took on a more difficult form of public service than politics: he became a historian. What he saw in the past he gave to his countrymen in a nine-volume History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Nobody read it, he said. But that is not true. It is read even today because it is so perceptive and because Adams wrote better than any other American historian.

But Adams saw deeper into the past than just the past of America. His book on the Middle Ages, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, has been called “the most penetrating book on the medieval spirit ever produced by an American.” It is a carefully researched book on Gothic architecture and a scholarly celebration of the influence of the Virgin Mary on the medieval mind.

Adams was not just a good historian; he was also a good student of his own life and times. He looked into the present and saw life imperiled by uncritical optimism and a mistaken belief in American exceptionalism. His analysis grew out of his ability to compare and contrast his day and time with the culture of the Middle Ages, so beautifully expressed in the cathedrals. His study of the present was set forth chiefly in his autobiographical masterpiece: The Education of Henry Adams: A Study of Twentieth-century Multiplicity. Its sub-title shows that Adams intended the present day to be compared unfavorably with the past. Mont Saint Michel andChartres had been subtitled A Study of Thirteenth Century Unity.

“My business is to look ahead,” Adams once said. When he looked into the future he saw only an acceleration of 19th century coal and steam power. He wrote, “Power leaps from every atom and enough of it to supply the stellar universe and the human race may well commit suicide by blowing up the world.” He knew of radium and wrote those visionary words 30 years before the first atomic bomb. The only thing that could save the race, he said, was education: mind power strong enough to wrap itself around physical power and control it.

In the end, Adams felt unprepared to face the future, but said “Perhaps some day . . . my friends and I might be allowed to return for a holiday to see the mistakes of their own lives made clear in the light of the mistakes of their successors.” If Henry Adams were to return, say in 2011 during Chautauqua week, he would surely look as closely at us as we look at him and his vision of the past, the present, and the future.

GEORGE FREIN

George Frein has been a Chautauqua scholar/performer since 1986. Since then he has portrayed a Jesuit missionary, Father De Smet; the historian Henry Adams; the author Herman Melville; two presidents, John Adams and Abraham Lincoln; one governor, John Winthrop; two artists, John James Audubon and Charles Wilson Peale; and one murderer, Dr. Seuss, the man who killed Dick and Jane. Keeping all these dead people alive and on friendly terms in his mind makes George a bit crazy, and so for his mental health he does one more character: Mark Twain who said, “Ah, well, I am a great and sublime fool. But then I am God's fool, and all His work must be contemplated with respect.”

HENRY ADAMS

an Adams family failure.
a “conservative Christian anarchist.”
a pessimist.
a stable companion to statesmen.

QUOTES

“I always expect the worst and it’s always worse than I expect.”

“The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.”

“My countrymen all seemed to me ignorant that there is a thing called ignorance.”

“No man however strong can serve 10 years as schoolmaster, priest, or senator and remain fit for anything else.”

“History is instructive for the historian and it is so chiefly for teaching him his ignorance of women. Nowhere in his pages will you read about them. He knows nothing about them.”

“All the coal and steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.”

TIMELINE
1844 or 45	Much against his will, Henry, 6 or 7, is taken to his first day at school by the firm hand of President John Quincy Adams.
1858	“Having learned little but with an open mind,” Adams graduates from Harvard.
1861	After three years travel in Europe, Adams fails to learn much more, he says.
1861-67	Henry is private secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, Lincoln’s minister to Great Britain during the Civil War.
1870-77	Adams is professor of medieval history at Harvard.
1877	With his wife, Marion, Adams moves to Washington, D.C. She becomes the most distinguished hostess in the capitol; he writes history, biography, and fiction.
1895	Adams travels to France for the first time to study medieval cathedrals. He begins to spend half of the year in Washington and the other half in France.
1904	Adams privately publishes his book about the cathedrals, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres.
1907	A private edition of his masterpiece, The Education of Henry Adams is issued.
1918	After his death, a trade edition of The Education is published and the next year he is awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

RECOMMENDED READING

Adams, Henry. Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education. The Library of America, 1983. This inexpensive volume includes Adams’ novels, Democracy and Ester as well as his two major works. The single most representative chapter in all Adams’ books is chapter 25 of The Education, “The Dynamo and the Virgin” (1900). This is the one thing by Adams to read if you read nothing else. It will make you smarter than your boss and every history buff in Northern Colorado.
O’Toole, Patricia. The Five Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends 1880 – 1918. Clarkson Potter Publishers, 1990. Adams was intensely social and that is why he could not stand the Harvard faculty and why he moved to Washington where his social circle included John and Clara Hay, Clarence King, and other notables in the arts and politics.
Samuels, Ernest. Henry Adams. Harvard University Press, 1989. This is a one-volume biography by the distinguished Adams scholar who also wrote the definitive Adams biography in three volumes and likewise edited Adams’ letters in eight volumes, all published by Harvard University Press.
Wills, Gary. Henry Adams and the Making of America. Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Wills captures the heart and soul of Adams’ nine-volume history of the U.S. by showing just how Adams reveals the paradox of American history with telling irony.