The Education of Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams is an autobiography by (you guessed it) Henry Adams (1838-1918), who was the great grandson of President John Adams, the grandson of John Quincy Adams, and the son of Charles Francis Adams, the American Ambassador to England during the American Civil War. Because of his “blue blood” and the political connections that went with it, Adams was able to be a firsthand witness to many of the important events of the latter half of the 19th century. The book was written in 1905 when Adams was in his late 60s, a time when he admits his career as a writer, journalist, historian, and Harvard professor was pretty much over.

Unusual for an autobiography, the narrative is delivered in the third person with Adams as the show more principal protagonist. It begins with his birth at the pinnacle of Boston society. He wrote:

“Had he [Adams] been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple and circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest, under the name of Israel Cohen, he would scarcely have been more distinctly branded, and not much more heavily handicapped in the races of the coming century, in running for such stakes as the century was to offer . . .”

The quoted paragraph is typical of Adams’ writing style throughout the book: ironic, self deprecatory, often witty, but a bit pretentious and florid. In fact, his efforts to be clever sometimes begin to cloy, but more often are charming and entertaining. Nonetheless, if Earnest Hemingway expressed the very same thoughts and concepts, the 505-page book would have been only about 210 pages long.

The persistent focus throughout the book is, as the title suggests, the nature of Adams' learning experiences. He evaluates his formal education at Harvard in Latin, Greek, and the classics as virtually worthless to prepare him for the momentous events he participated in or witnessed. His judged two years of study of civil law in Germany as even less beneficial, although he valued his experiences there outside the classroom.

His "real" education began in earnest when, at age 23, he accompanied his father to England, Charles having been appointed by President Lincoln to serve as Minister and hopefully to forestall the British from recognizing and aiding the Confederate states. The younger Adams went as his father's private secretary. Henry's role, as he described it, "was to imitate his father as closely as possible and hold his tongue." This did not prevent him however from becoming a keen observer of what transpired around him. Adams noted, for example:

". . . in May, 1861 no one in England - literally no one - doubted that Jefferson Davis had made or would make a nation, and nearly all were glad of it, though not often saying so. They mostly imitated Palmerston [the UK Prime Minister until his death in October of 1865], who, according to Mr. Gladstone [Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time and Prime Minister beginning in 1868], 'desired the severance as a diminution of a dangerous power, but prudently held his tongue.' The sentiment of anti-slavery had disappeared."

Charles Adams's mission was stymied, in Henry's view, by the fact that "for some reason partly connected with American sources [such as Copperheads, or Democrats who wanted peace], British society had begun with violent social prejudice against Lincoln, Seward, and all the Republican leaders except Sumner." Newspapers published regular accounts of "the incapacity of Mr. Lincoln and the brutality of Mr. Seward, or vice versa."

But gradually Minister Adams gained allies in London, and Henry himself made friends, among them Sir Charles Trevelyan, with whom "his friendly relations never ceased for near half a century, and then only when death stopped them." [Trevelyan, it should be recalled, shut down Irish famine relief in 1846, contending that culling the numbers of the Irish was all part of Divine Providence. Such sentiments apparently had no negative effect on Henry.]

After the Civil War, Henry tried journalism as a profession. He had extraordinary advantages because of his lineage, usually having no trouble obtaining audiences with whoever happened to be US President at the time. His evaluations of several presidents were surprising in that their reputations have altered significantly since Adams’ day. He thought Andrew Johnson to be a true Southern Gentleman and had only obloquy to spare for Ulysses Grant. His appraisal of Theodore Roosevelt more closely hewed to modern assessments:

"Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts, and all Roosevelt's friends know that his restless and combative energy was more than abnormal. . . . Roosevelt enjoyed a singularly direct nature and honest intent, but he lived naturally in restless agitation that would have worn out most tempers in a month...."

He also offered perceptive remarks about other important players on the national stage. For instance, he tells us about his great personal friend, John Hay (the former secretary to and biographer of Abraham Lincoln), who became Secretary of State under Theodore Roosevelt. Hay’s final endeavors were directed to finding a peaceful settlement to the Russo-Japanese War. Ironically but probably not surprisingly, in Henry's view Hay did most of the work, but Roosevelt got the Nobel Prize.

Of Henry Cabot Lodge, the American politician, historian, lawyer, and statesman from Massachusetts, he wrote that Lodge was:

" . . . an excellent talker, a voracious reader, a ready wit, an accomplished orator, with a clear mind and a powerful memory. . .[who was] at home and happy among the vices and extravagances of Shakespeare - standing first on the social, then on the political foot . . . The usual statesmen flocked in swarms like crows, black and monotonous. Lodge's plumage was varied . . ."

He injected analyses of other countries into his tales of what he learned over his lifetime as well, commenting on their general intellectual, moral, and cultural climates as he understood them. His perspicacious remarks about Russia remain instructive to this day.

Although the circumstances of his birth and his formal education prepared him admirably for life in the 18th century, he struggled to cope with the radical changes occurring in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In fact, in his opening chapter, he explains that it was this juxtaposition of starting a twentieth-century career from a "troglodytic" past that caused him to speculate about how he learned to navigate the changing universe around him. His subsequent musings about his own education and adjustment are fascinating, all the more so for being so well written.

In the end, Adams bemoaned the inadequacy of classical education and the eclipse of the neoclassical truths that influenced the founding of the Republic by epochal changes in society. In their place came politics manifested as power acting upon people without their consent.

Adams strived (and failed) to develop a Hegelian-type theory of history with the descriptive and predictive power of scientific laws to explain what he saw. He viewed history as an interplay of the conflict between what he called the dynamo (roughly, modern technology) and the Virgin (roughly, traditional customs and religion). But because he could not formulate a satisfactory thesis, history became for him the movement of events without rational causes or moral purposes.

Evaluation: In spite of its shortcomings, this book is highly readible. Adams comes across as quite an appealing character, although clearly fashioned that way by the author himself. An introduction by Edmund Morris to the volume I read points out that the autobiography conceals very unpleasant aspects of Adams's personality that came out in his letters (but not his book): his "pains to elevate himself above the rest of mankind"; his contempt of other (lesser) beings; his paranoia about Jews; "and above all, [his mistrust] of himself." This last trait, according to Morris, is why Adams chose to write his autobiography in the third person:

"By forgoing any direct claim to our notice, and remaining taciturn about his worldly achievements, he achieves the miracle of making us care for him. Vain, he fights conceit; wise, he presents himself as the archetypal American naif, bent at all costs on getting an education."

But that education, as Morris avers, reveals so much of value to readers. We benefit immensely from Adams’s real time observations and analyses of the leading politicians and events of his day. He was perhaps not “in the room where it happened” per se, but close enough. He helps us understand, to paraphrase Lin-Manuel Miranda writing for the musical "Hamilton," "how the game is played, the art of the trade, how the sausage gets made . . . how the parties get to 'Yes,' the pieces that are sacrificed in every game of chess . . ."

It is a book well worth the time of aficiandos of history and of good writing generally.

(JAB) show less

This is one of the more unusual memoirs I’ve read. Rather than a self-satisfied appraisal of the author’s achievements, Adams casts himself as a failure. Of course, measured by the standards of his heritage – grandson and great-grandson of presidents – perhaps an understandable feeling, since he never held public office. In fact, the only job he held was that of assistant professor of history at Harvard for seven years, which he treats in a chapter entitled Failure. Perhaps the closest analogies among books I’m familiar with would be the confessions of Augustine and Rousseau.
The key to the work is that he titled it neither memoir nor autobiography, but “education.” So I continually asked myself what he meant by that. The show more author describes himself repeatedly as a product of the 18th century, although born in 1838. He laments that his classics-based education did nothing to prepare him for a world dominated by coal and capital. It seems then that by education he means some guidance in how to figure out what’s going on in a rapidly changing world and make his way in it. But he describes his first spring in D.C., with the beauty of Rock Creek Park, as one of the best parts of it. Contrasted with this was the 10 days he spent at the bedside of a beloved older sister, witnessing her death agony, also described as education. All the more strange, then, that he passes over the twenty years of his marriage. He never refers to his wife, their happiness, nor her suicide; there is only an enigmatic reference to the bronze figure he commissioned his friend St. Gaudens to place in Rock Creek Park. Was none of this part of his education, or was the lesson too painful to share?
On the more mundane level of education, that of curriculum, apparently he would have preferred mathematics, natural sciences and modern languages. Well, his program carried the day, the education I received was very much what he outlined. What do educators say about that today? Is it still the recipe? What should education aim to accomplish, how should it go about the task? What about the student, the subject of education? Adams seems to doubt that the cherished 18th century liberal values of extended suffrage and universal education will produce a better society. He is undeniably an elitist. Recounting his experience on the Harvard faculty, he reports that:
“The number of students whose minds were of an order above the average was, in his experience, barely one in ten; the rest could not be much stimulated by any inducements a teacher could suggest. . . Adams [the author refers to himself in the third person throughout] thought that, as no one seemed to care what he did, he would try to cultivate this tenth mind, though necessarily at the expense of the other nine.”
His aristocratic tendencies are also on display as he shudders on his journey through Pennsylvania and Ohio on his way to the St. Louis exhibition in 1904 at the hordes of Germans and Slavs who came to service the mines and furnaces. And whenever he needs a stock figure to express comic disapproval, he reaches for the Jew.
The book culminates in two chapters in which he expounds what he calls a dynamic theory of history, accompanied by a law of acceleration; it involves applying concepts borrowed from physics to questions of historical process. He had laid the groundwork for this theory in an earlier chapter, The Dynamo and the Virgin, in which he contrasts these two great forces. This contrast sheds light on his decision to write a memoir at all. His previous book, Mont St. Michel and Chartres, deals with the high middle ages, the apogee of mankind feeling itself as a unity. Subsequent development, Adams maintains, was in the direction of multiplicity, even fragmentation. He chose to chronicle his lifelong feeling of ignorance as an exemplum of this new state of affairs.
One of the rewards of reading this book was that it is liberally sprinkled with his acerbic wit. Overall, though, the tone reminded me most of Koheleth, as the unknown author of Ecclesiastes is sometimes referred to. Both look back at the end of life with the realization that the achievements of each were a striving after wind. show less

If you know a lot about the history of the second half of the 19th century, you will probably enjoy this book much more than the casual and the curious, as Adams does a lot of name-dropping without any kind of footnotes or contextual explanation. I was especially interested in Adams' description of his time as private secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, Lincoln's ambassador in England during the Civil War, and the diplomatic and political machinations that ocurred while trying to secure Britain's official neutrality.

There are some slow parts of the book, and his attempt to conclude with an overarching theory of history, detailed in scientific language, is unsuccessful in hindsight. Adams' ideas about the accelerating show more progress of technology and thought is really the culmination of Englightenment thinking, which would be disavowed by the modernists ten years after his death. Perhaps Adams would have revised his thinking if he had lived to see the cataclysm of 1914, and it is ironic how in the last lines of the book he wistfully hopes for a centenial reunion with his best friends King and Hay, to observe the progress and peace that humanity had created. The year: 1938. show less

I was not prepared for this book at all. My background in early American history is limited at best, and Adams writes in such a vague and uninstructive manner that I think I spent the majority of the book confused and lost. Like a previous reviewer mentioned before me, Adams' apparent determination to withhold any concrete explanations of the history he comments on is intensely frustrating. The line where he refers to a major event in Civil War diplomacy as history and not education had me seeing red for a moment there. For good portions of the text I wanted to reach into the author's grave and shake him, shouting, "Just spit it out!"

The style of the text can also be intensely frustrating. It's practically ethereal at times, so that I show more would wonder if in the mess of words I had just read anything had actually been said. I struggled throughout the entirety of the book, confused and feeling woefully under-informed. Even the introduction describes the contents of Adams' Education to be "elusive" and "obscure".

So why is The Education of Henry Adams considered an important book in American History? The same introduction that admits the Education to be "elusive" and "obscure" provides the clue. It is stated there, "The 'Education', we must remember, was not destined for general publication but for a small group of Bostonians who would know, without having it stressed, when Henry Adams was being wholly serious, when he was playing with paradox, when he simply wanted to epater les bourgeois. The first readers knew, too, that much was deliberately left out, as irrelevant... or omitted for reasons of decorum..."

The introduction goes on to mention that Adams had been married, and that his wife had committed suicide. Not a word of this is mentioned in the body of the text itself, and if one were to skip the introductory text one would assume Adams had been an eternal bachelor.

The Education of Henry Adams is not a history book, and it is not a biography. It's a book of reaction, tailored to a small number that might be interested in the reaction of Henry Adams to the events of his life. Read in that context one can understand why the text is as difficult as it is, and it helps one realign the angle of their approach to The Education properly.

The first thing one must do is accept that one will learn very little history from The Education. This book is certainly a springboard for further research into Adams' time, if one is so inclined (and maybe has a grant or two) but by itself it teaches very little on this subject.

For someone like me, who is by no means a scholar of American History (yet) and is removed from Adams by an entire century, the most accelerated in known human history, no less, the value of The Education was the role it played in bridging that century and connecting two people, one a spiritual child of the 18th century who found himself living in the 19th, and the other a child of the 19th who finds themselves living in the 21st. The Education is, ultimately, a deeply personal book that expresses a sense that no period fiction or removed history can really capture. Once I had let go of my expectations of a more conventional education through this book, I was able to appreciate this and the service The Education provides in capturing the mindset of an American ancestor for future generations to connect to.

And the connection turned out to be stronger than I expected. The first anniversary of my undergraduate education has just passed me by, and I've spent a good part of the last year pondering the value of my own education in the sense that Adams' does so. That Henry Adams spent his whole life in a sort of frustrated search for the confidence of understanding is both a comfort and a terror to me. Will I too in my twilight years be struggling to stand upon the rumbling tectonics of a world where the age of certainty is long dead, and "Education" in the sense of grasping hold of fundamental truth is gone? I guess I'll know in 60 years or so, and when my own journey of education is over I am looking forward to meeting Mr. Adams and comparing notes. Perhaps he's more candid in person. show less

Henry Adams’ memoir is a mixed bag. It’s interesting because Adams was the grandson and great-grandson of two early presidents. Adams dabbled in politics in his early career but, unless I missed something, he never held elected office. He spent time in the bureaucratic ranks and voiced political commentary.

Adams refers to himself in the third person throughout his memoir. This struck me as false humility. He bemoaned the years he sought but did not find education to prepare him for the future. Again, this struck me as false humility and arrogance. Isn’t he really saying that he wasn’t teachable?

Framing his memoir in terms of education conveniently allowed Adams to omit any mention of his wife and their troubled marriage, while show more talking at length about other women who contributed to his education. Adams kept his cards close to his chest, revealing only those that supported the public image he wanted to maintain. show less

The Education of Henry Adams is a terrible book. Like Walden and Emerson’s Essays, it reveals a peculiarly American complacency in its subject, but without the redeeming writing skill of Thoreau and Emerson. Adams is vague and general when he should be detailed and specific, and that’s pretty much all the time. He writes as if his readers had just put down a newspaper covering the events of the period he’s writing about, so that all he need do is allude to people and places.
The choice of narrating his life in the third person is never justified or explained. Perhaps Adams thought it suited his habit of self-deprecation. Unfortunately, the self-deprecation, like most of Adams’s attempts to be humorous, comes across as mere show more sarcasm, which is the weakest of humor’s rhetorical tools. The book’s conceit, that Adams never gets the education he needs to face the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, is undercut by Adams’s condescension about almost everyone else’s mental powers, including Lincoln, Grant, Cleveland, Roosevelt, and other American presidents he meets.
Adams, a self-confessed dilettante when it comes to art (though even here he boasts of confounding the experts), is in fact a dilettante in all he tries. He plays at learning law in America and abroad, makes fun of his secretarial duties in the service of his father Charles Francis Adams when the latter is ambassador to England, and when he returns to the States after the Civil War to no prospect of high diplomatic appointment under Johnson, he gives up the idea of diplomacy altogether and becomes a part-time journalist and an unwilling history professor. Meanwhile, he has briefly taken up Darwin without understanding him; he has the mistaken popular, teleological notion that evolution aims at perfection.
In the chapters on Adams’s years in London during the Civil War, the young diplomat bewails his failure to understand what the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Minister Lord Russell, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gladstone are up to. Henry thinks their behavior reflects a wish to see U.S. power divided, since she is a rival nation (and an old enemy). In fact, if their memoirs and biographies written years later are to be believed, they were just reacting to day-to-day changes in the American situation while trying to protect England’s cotton trade with the South.
After the war Adams remains in England at loose ends, taking up Darwinism and becoming a dilettante and an art collector in a small way. When he returns to the country he can expect nothing from the Johnson administration—the southerner Johnson was anathema to the old Free Soilers (Sumner, Charles Adams, and the other men who formed Adams’s political consciousness). He had been publishing, sometimes with his identity concealed, in various stateside papers since his work for his father in the Congress, so he ended up going to Washington to try to break into a journalism job, ultimately in New York.
He supported Grant but soon discovered what a mistake that was. The Jay Gould scandal came less than a year into Grant’s presidency. Adams first turns down and then accepts a job to teach at Harvard and edit the North American Review.
After the death of his sister in the early 1870s there is a hiatus in Adams’s account: He tells us nothing about his marriage or his wife’s depression and suicide, and he leaves out any account of the years from 1872 to 1892, when he retires and begins a period of travel with various friends. Altogether I find the book unsatisfactory as autobiography or as a picture of the times Adams lives through. show less

This peculiar book was on my wishlist for years, ever since I first red a description of it. Henry Adams, a grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of John Adams, made his name as an essayist and historian, but he is best remembered today for this autobiography. As a creature of one of the most elite American families, Adams could hardly avoid living an extraordinary life in regular contact with rich and influential people. He also had an imposing family legacy that was perhaps impossible for anyone to live up to. In this book, looking back over his life from the perspective of old age, Adams resorts to laconic detachment, writing of himself in the third person (”Adams”).

The book enjoyed its greatest popularity show more in the 1920s, in part because the name-dropping that Adams does throughout the book was about people who were then still widely known. (Modern editions include a name glossary.) Adams’s comfortable pessimism also must have appealed to the generation that endured the catastrophe of World War I and formed the materialist culture of the ’20s. The book’s star fell during the Great Depression, but the Education has always had its devotees. (One of them is Edmund Morris, who wrote the introduction to my edition.)

My progress through the book was gradual. I spent about three evenings a week with it, and occasionally I wasted some daylight on it. While I never stopped finding Adams interesting, I did begin to feel that marching through the book was a duty more than a plesure. I'm usually happy to indulge writers who digress frequently and who come at their subject indirectly, by tortuous paths, or as if by accident. I even try to win skeptics over to the delights of that pioneering novel about nothing, Tristram Shandy. But the Education was a harder slog than I expected. The conceits that had delighted readers in the 1910s and ’20s soon wore a bit thin for me, sometimes lapsing into predictability. Everything, I soon realized, would turn out in the end not to be education. I found myself wishing Adams would describe, however tentatively and circuitously, what ”education” ment to him. But I feel sure that this silence was intentional.

Another famous silence is his omission of any mention of his wife, Marian “Clover” H. Adams, a fascinating woman to whom he was intensely devoted, and who killed herself during a struggle with depression in 1885. She was one of America’s first portrait photographers, and she poisoned herself with some of the potassium cyanide she used to develop photographs. This giant lacuna in The Education of Henry Adams is only indicated by a chapter title: “Twelve Years Later.”

Adams was a very young man during the Civil War, serving his father in the American embassy to Britain. So slavery and the southern “Slave Power” are lively presences in the Education. Black people, however, are invisible; one would probably search the whole text in vain for the contemporary word ”Negro.” Instead, Adams’s meditations on race — an important topic to him — are consistently directed beyond American shores. It is interesting to watch him struggle with the idea of race, convinced that it exists, aware that it is the foundation upon which the edifice of world history was being raised, but troubled by the elusiveness, the insubstantiality of it.

Race ruled the conditions; conditions hardly affected race; and yet no one could tell the patient tourist what race was, or how it should be known. History offered a feeble and delusive smile at the sound of the word; evolutionists and ethnologists disputed its very existence; no one knew what to make of it; yet, without the clue, history was a nursery tale. (pp. 411-412)

The passage I just quoted is from Adams’s trip to Hammerfest, Norway where, in the footsteps of Thomas Carlyle’s protagonist Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, he seeks the edge of the polar ice cap, and marvels to find it not only easy to reach but illuminated with electric light. He then meditates on ”the Norse” (his quaint term for Scandinavians) as embodying “unity” (his unexplained synonym for modernity) and contrasts them with Russia, where he had just visited. Russia, for him, exemplifies a universal “inertia” that would surely resist incorporation into ”unity“ — or change of any kind, for that matter — for generations to come. The ikon-kissing peasant exemplified all Russians for Adams. How surprised he must have been to hear of the Russian Revolution, less than five months before his deth in March 1918.

While contemplating the Hammerfest glacier he also glances at the indigenous people, whom he calls, reflexively and with an unconscious pun, the last Laps. One wonders how surprised he might be at the survival of the Lapps — now known by their own name of Sámi — and at their limited autonomy within Norway and Finland, and their protected rights to their language, culture, and self-determination. All these developments would be the opposite of Adams’s idea of progress and “unity.”

The world we live in is unlike the abstract future that Henry Adams fabricated, piece by piece, during his unevenly documented life of contemplation. I couldn’t help wondering, after I finished the book, whether Henry Adams himself had taken it seriously. Was it all just a performance to amuse his many friends? Or was it a task to keep the author distracted from the great loss at the center of his life? In parts of the book — such as the sermonette about unity and inertia, or the chapter "The Dynamo and the Virgin" about another pair of opposed archetypes — his words glow with a steady zeal, like the orange fire in a vacuum tube. None the less, whatever else all this may have ment to Henry Adams, we can safely assume that there was no education in it. show less