Henry Adams (1)Besprekingen

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 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)

Less a mere work of history than it is a meditation on it, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres starts out by walking the reader through those two famous French sites before broadening out into a more general discussion of the high medieval mind and ending with extended discussions of the thought of figures such as Peter Abélard and Thomas Aquinas.

First published in 1904 as a kind of guidebook for younger family members to bring with them to Europe, this book benefits from the fact that it was written by the kind of rich, connected nineteenth-century dude (Henry Adams' paternal grandfather and great-grandfather were both U.S. presidents) who had the means and time to spend months travelling western Europe and lingering over historic sites. Adams knows a lot about not just Mont-Saint-Michel and the cathedral of Chartres, but also many other medieval ecclesiastical buildings!

Adams also clearly felt unconstrained by the kinds of qualms that later historians would feel about making sweeping statements about their subjects. He is all wild claims ("In no well-regulated community, under a proper system of police, could the Virgin feel at home, and the same thing may be said of most other saints as well as sinners") and stuff that sounds nice and poetic but doesn't really mean anything ("The man who wanders into the twelfth century is lost, unless he can grow prematurely young") and hilarious swipes at some major historical figures (Héloise of Argenteuil was "by French standards, worth at least a dozen Abélards, if only because she called Saint Bernard a false apostle"; Abélard "taught philosophy to [Héloise] not so much because he believed in philosophy or in her as because he believed in himself").

I found this all deeply entertaining. It's not good history—not only has some of what Adams got to say here been superseded by later research, but it's all built on a whole foundation of weirdo paternalistic sexism and more than a smattering of antisemitism—and I wouldn't recommend reading it as such. For a variety of reasons, historians aren't really trained to write like Adams anymore, but I do feel a little envious about the leeway Adams had to just say fuck it and write about a vibe. If he's still to be read today, it should be for that.½

Although parts are rather tedious reading it was very interesting to learn that the New England states were ready to leave the union over the trade embargo ordered to attempt to damage France and England for seizing US ships. An earlier possible split was planned by Aaron Burr, who wanted the western states to form a separate nation.

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 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.

superb book

Democracy: This novel was published anonymously in the 1880s and concerns a young wealthy widow and her young unmarried sister traveling and staying in Washington, D. C. The heroine, Madeline Lee, is intelligent, bored with New York and Europe, and wants the opportunity to learn a bit about how politics work. Through Lee's eyes, you learn how Washington works and the kind of men who live and work there. There are Senators, lawyers, and visiting dignitaries set in post-Civil War D. C. A little love story thrown in and a big ball makes the story appealing to those of us who like that thing and of course, the true lesson here about Washington is "same as it ever was."

I'd first heard of Adams in Gore Vidal's novel "Empire". That novel introduced me to people like John Hay, Secretary to Lincoln, and later Secretary of State itself. These memoirs enlightened me about the stellar politician John Hay was, thanks to the lifelong friendship between Adams and Hay.
Adams centres his memoirs on his rather barren quest to find meaning and understanding through "education". This theme tends to become tiresome.
Adams' period as Private Secretary to his father, First Minister to Great Britain during the Civil War, is especially revealing. How close the British were to declaring for the Confederacy surprised me. Similarly, how surprised were the British by the Union's successes.
He is fully admiring of John Hay, to whom he gives credit for advancing American skill and intelligence in the diplomatic manoeuvrings that produced an alliance, or at least a commonality of understanding, between Britain, France, Germany and USA at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.
I was a little confused by Adams' dynamic theory of history, but then so was he by the seismic shifts brought about by particle physics and the industrial behemoth.
Adams' life was his ever-flowering education.

Not sure i finished this book, but read on 50 page spurts over the last year or more. Don't happily read it straight through as the level of detail can be bewildering (but rewarding too). At times reporting so positively about Jefferson, but then recounting personal and professional lows as well, i have to rate this as a model of deep and fine historical analysis. Hard to keep the cast of characters straight though, as this foregoes choosing what to tell of in most stories and just tells all there is to know (or so it seems to this non-specialist). So well written though- engaging and edifying.

Adams was born in 1838 into a family that had made American history, but his role was to be that of an observer, from the Civil War up to 1905. Perhaps the most interesting section comes early on, when Henry was serving as secretary to his father, who was US minister to Britain during the Civil War. Adams' discussion of Britain's role in that conflict broke new ground for me: I knew much of the British establishment supported the South, but I didn't know how close the Liberal Government came to recognizing the South as a country. Henry was in Washington during the Grant Administration, and his view of Grant is highly negative. He was also an intimate observer in the 1890's. Sometimes Adams' negativity (about himself more than anything else) becomes burdensome, and one misses the personal element. Still, this is key reading for those interested in the period.

A wealthy widow, tired of New York society visits Washington. She becomes interested in politics and follows the career of an ambitious Illinois senator. She almost marries him but is warned away by another man who knows of crooked dealings.

Henry Adams, the grandson of JQ Adams, records the story of his life from the perspective of his search for a proper education. His is a life of privilege, allowing him the time to ponder the world and his role in it without the encumbrance of traditional employment. He questions formal education, like his time at Harvard, and feels most of what is taught is useless at best. Adams, because of his lineage, has a front-row seat to observe the events of the nineteenth century, and at times foresees problems on the world stage. Although he has no need for an income, he does earn money by writing his observations.

I'm glad I read the book. It represents a unique perspective. I didn't think it was particularly well written, but I do acknowledge that he never meant it to be published for a wide distribution. That could explain its rough edges. I found that I needed assistance to get through it, so I approached each chapter by reading a Cliff Notes summary first, just to get my head around where he was heading, then I opened up the LibriVox recording and listened while I was reading. That helped immensely. Recently I read an article that encouraged a reader to stretch themselves every once in a while. This book was once of those times for me.

long autobio put in terms of education rather than deeds

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 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.

I took a break from reading novels of Henry James to take respite with a novel by another Henry (or perhaps by his wife Clover). The plot lighter, the sentences still recognizably 19th century, but more straightforward than those of James. In places, especially toward the beginning, it’s witty, even hilarious, but then it turns serious, even a bit melodramatic. Reading it just a few weeks before the election, the book struck me as a House of Cards set 140 years earlier, and the unfolding plot of this year’s election something like the fulfilment of what Adams prophesied — the corruption of his time becoming only more encompassing. Perhaps not a masterpiece, but a very good read.
So, who was the author? Speaking for Clover: similarities in the prose style to the voice she adopts in her surviving letters. In addition, the book was first published anonymously, while this is not decisive, it might suggest a female authorship. Speaking for Henry: the presence of many of his pet peeves (senators and protectionism, to name just two). So either Clover adopted Henry’s themes, or Henry adopted Clover’s voice. The latter seems to me more probable, especially since the protagonist is an independent-minded woman.

Adams casts this book as a vade mecum addressed to a “niece” (one of the charming young ladies in his social circle) about to make her first visit to these two monuments of medieval construction. Adams is a sensitive responder to architecture; he “reads” Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres with a perceptive eye. His intelligence probes deeper, though: these are not merely skillful arrangements of piles of stone; the great cathedrals and abbeys are the input of wealth, the result is an expression of energy. Why did eleventh-century Normans and twelfth-century French rulers make this investment?
What I admire about Adams, aside from the elegance and intimacy of his prose, is this grasp of the grand arc of history. When, after two centuries, the donors realized little return on their outlay—prayers accompanied by donations didn’t seem more efficacious than those without—the funds dried up. Indeed, Adams even sees the French Revolution a half-millennium later as taking back the wealth that went into the cult.
Adams also points out the significance that the coastal abbey is dedicated to the warrior-archangel Michael, and connects this to the Normans, who built it, as the dominant power of the eleventh century. They sat on the throne of Sicily, and while the abbey was a-building, William realized his ambition of conquering England.
Chartres, on the other hand, represents the apogee, in the twelfth and thirteenth century, of devotion to the Virgin, which Adams terms the “least reasonable” of “the unexpected revelations of human nature.” This seems to be a dismissal, but the way he describes this “almost fanatical frenzy” reveals that it resonated deeply in him, though he is the spawn of Puritans. The essence of the book, to me, was Chapter 13, “Les Miracles de Notre Dame.” This culminates what he has said in the previous chapters describing the cathedral. Throughout, he speaks of Mary not only as an object of devotion, but as a queen who loves, who knows, and who can have her will carried out. She is the pattern for the great queens of the time.
While there were exceptional men then—Abélard, Richard the Lion Heart, for example—Adams is fascinated by the strong women and their imposition of courtesy, the manners of the court. Foremost, Eleanor of Aquitaine, whom he refers to as Eleanor of Guienne, but also Blanche of Castille and Héloïse.
At the time Adams wrote this, his fellow historians saw history as the chronicle of great men. In the century since, this has often been balanced or replaced by attention to the role of economic forces and social movements. Adams predates this in his Autobiography with his ruminations on the role the dynamo played in his time. He sees the cult of Mary in similar terms of wealth and energy, but by relating it to the power of remarkable women, he is unique. I’m not aware of another historian of his time depicting an era as a chronicle of great women.
Adams charms the reader throughout with feigned ignorance in many fields, such as architecture, about which he clearly knows more than he lets on. But the limit of his understanding does show when he tackles theology. He claims to see no difference between Gregory the Great’s classic formulation of God’s omnipresence and garden-variety pantheism. And when Saint Bernard has Abélard condemned without a hearing, Adams seems to accept Bernard’s grounds: any effort to reach God by reason was “futile and likely mischievous,” as Adams puts it. Adams elides the crucial difference between attempting to prove God’s existence through reason and attempts to use it to understand God. Perhaps it is because he possessed a probing intellect that he is sensitive to its limits, and writes sympathetically of mystics — not so much Bernard, but Francis, whom he calls “the nearest approach the Western world ever made to an Oriental incarnation of the divine essence.”
The final chapter, devoted to Thomas Aquinas, closes the book by portraying his vast output as the intellectual equivalent of the soaring spires and broken arches of the gothic cathedral. In Thomas, the aspirations of medieval times rose as far as they could. Adams’s response to the Summa is similar to his response to Chartres: he is a tourist, overwhelmed by the beauty, moved to feel yet not to understand.
I enjoyed this book greatly, regretting only that Adams mars his account, so sensitive and penetrating in every other way, with gratuitous grumblings about Jews. It’s a shame that someone who could think so creatively was, on this point, captive to the prejudice of his time.

This book was interesting but moved slowly. Adams didn't have many friends, was a misanthrope, and didn't fit anywhere except as mediocre student in the school of life.

One of the books where I was glad there was no traditional happy ending.

The Education of Henry Adams is rich in personal observations, filled with nineteenth-century US history. Even his mile walk to school at age 6 has historical interest, because the 77-year-old man who held his hand and walked with him was the sixth US president, John Quincy Adams, Henry’s grandfather.

For the record, Henry’s great-grandfather was the second US president, John Adams (signatory of the Declaration of Independence), then his grandfather John Quincy Adams the sixth president, and his father the US ambassador to England during the Civil War. His maternal grandfather Peter Chardon Brooks was one of the 100 wealthiest Americans, a merchant millionaire, which was rare in the 1700s and early 1800s.

Adams was alive twenty-two years before the Civil War, and from his earliest years was appalled at slavery and the retrograde violation of human dignity in the southern defense of slavery (100). He met presidents from, of course, his grandfather John Quincy, through Zachary Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and many more, through twentieth-century presidents McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt. He died in 1918, the same year that World War I ended. It was a long way from the early American pioneer days of 1838 when he was born. When Adams was born, transportation and communication had not changed in 10,000 years. When he died he had seen the introduction of new transportation and communication that the twentieth century took for granted.

Henry served as assistant to the ambassador to England for eight years when he was fresh out of Harvard University. Returning to the US around 1869 he started a career he loved as a journalist. But his family, friends, and professors he respected, persuaded him to take the position of history professor at Harvard. He did it for seven years. One of his students was Henry Cabot Lodge.

Other than the friends he made during this period, he hated teaching and considered it a waste of seven years. He had little faith in standard teaching methods and outcomes. He valued the active mind and to “know how to learn” rather than the stuff that people spend most of their time studying (314). He believed in slower-paced learning to more fully and deeply absorb subjects as opposed to fast-paced surface learning.

On the other hand, he felt a little guilty after Harvard had greeted him as an adult with open arms: “Yet nothing in the vanity of life struck him as more humiliating than that Harvard College, which he had persistently criticized, abused, abandoned, and neglected, should alone have offered him a dollar, an office, an encouragement, or a kindness” (305).

He returned to his writing career, which over his lifetime included novels, the eight-volume History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, historical and legal essays, the two books I’ve reviewed, and many others. He was one of America’s most esteemed historians though he spent his life with a sense of personal failure and a low estimation of his own education.

His lifelong pursuit was to extrapolate and understand the trajectory of human evolution, socially, politically, industrially, scientifically, theologically, and technologically. One of his comments on human evolutionary development sounds very modern. As history students know, Ulysses S. Grant had been a great general, but was corrupt as president. Speaking of Grant, Adams cuts to the chase: “He had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages. … That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be called…the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. … Darwinists ought to conclude that America was reverting to the stone age” (266).

The Education is rife with insightful commentary on the world spinning around him, sometimes moving too fast to comprehend, sometimes moving incomprehensively backwards. He saw paradigm-shift inventions from telegraph and trains, to telephone and automobiles (he even bought a car in his later years), steam then electricity, inventions like photography, then film and the early Hollywood silent films, finally airplanes and the discovery of radium and radiation.

Adams traveled more than most Americans in the nineteenth century. He spent many years throughout Europe, Russia, Asia, Africa, the Pacific islands and the Caribbean. He was an early observer of the merging of Western Cultures, noting “Hamburg was almost as American as St. Louis” (414).

The Education has hidden treasures, offhand observations that end up being the most memorable. For example, he notes the affectation of eccentric behaviors in people considered highly eccentric. Eccentricity itself becomes a convention. He observes that “a mind really eccentric never betrayed it. True eccentricity was a tone—a shade—a nuance—and the finer the tone, the truer the eccentricity” (370).

Adams’ final thoughts show his disappointment: “He saw his education complete, and was sorry he ever began it” (458). He abhorred the ever-worsening “persistently fiendish treatment of man by man;…the perpetual symbolism of a higher law, and the perpetual relapse to a lower one” and principals of freedom deteriorating into principals of power and the “despotism of artificial order” (458), referring to the rise of corporate dominance over society. He particularly disliked the growing influence of corporate power: “The Trusts and Corporations stood for the larger part of the new power that had been created since 1840, and were obnoxious because of their vigorous and unscrupulous energy…They tore society to pieces and trampled it under foot” (500).

Adams had good friends who met tragic fates, his wife committed suicide at a young age, and as he grew older, found himself “A solitary man of sixty-five years or more, alone in a Gothic cathedral or a Paris apartment…” (460). So this is The Education of Henry Adams. You may wonder why I liked it so much, and recommend it. The book is a retrospective provided by one of our most observant students of life, with access to the most interesting places and people in their most interesting times. The book itself is a fascinating education for anyone who reads it.

Henry Adams toured French mediæval gothic architecture, and apparently took a lot of notes, focusing on the Grande Cathedrals of Mont-Saint-Michel (built in the 1100s) and Chartres (built in the late 1100s to 1200s). The notes became the book. If that were the extent of the book, however, it could be summed with a few nice photos and captions. But there’s also 360 pages of mystery and fascination surrounding the architecture. Most of the book is Adams’ observations on the culture surrounding the buildings, moreso than on the buildings themselves. Adams takes us on a gothic travelogue through the intrigues of mediæval royal families of France, clashes in the cloisters of church hierarchy, power struggles in church and court, dark-age philosophers and poets telling stories captured in sparkling gothic stained-glass perfection.

Reminiscent of Melville’s long chapters on the anatomy of the whale, there are long detailed descriptions of the elements of the cathedral. Wading through that pays off. The stories told literally and figuratively in the massive stained glass paintings, in themselves and in their relation to other architectural features, represent the heart and soul of people’s faith, fears, allegiances, loves, hates, and pivotal events of the time.

So many fascinating stories and events converge in the 1100s and 1200s: the Golden Legend; the founding of Orders; the Chanson de Roland as metaphor for Mont-Saint-Michel, or vice versa; the intellectual romance of Abélard and Héloïse, Christian of Troyes retelling the age-old story of Tristan and Iseult (originating from a pre-Islamic Persian story); the famous invention and flowering of “Courteous Love” and how it is epitomized in the chantefable Aucassins et Nicolette; the real-life romances of Thibaut and Blanche of Castille; the backdrop of the Crusades; the touching familial closeness of Richard Cœur de Lion and Mary of Champagne; the Magna Charta and the Zodiac Window; the scholastic vs. mystic battles of theology between Abélard and Bernard of Clairvaux; inquiries into universals of geometry and syllogisms, and unity versus multiplicity; the controversy of the two Popes and its effects on people’s careers. The book closes out the 1200s with Thomas Aquinas’ rise from “dumb ox” to Summa Theologica—building his Church Intellectual to complement the Church Architectural—a “gothic Cathedral to the Trinity” (329). As Adams puts it, “His sense of scale and proportion was that of the great architects of his age” (354, 355). For culture, science, and art, the equilibrium of the universe rested on the delicate balance of the flying buttresses.

To most people, the above references have little meaning, if any. But if you read this book, they will have a lot of meaning and enrich your experience. The broad brushstrokes across history, occasionally filled in with colorful detail, renewed my interest in the period. So after finishing the book, I searched on key people and events and found additional fascinating bits of historical intrigue. The book covers so much of the culture, arts, science, philosophy, politics, and social aspects of the period, it’s a great reference point for further investigation.

A Book About the Gilded Age*

Democracy is a cynical book about politics, primarily that of Senators, in the late 1800s, written by a man descended from two Presidents. It tells the story of a rich New York widow, Madeline Lee, who moves to Washington DC to learn about how the government works, and who is disgusted in what she finds. Her main foil is a senator from Illinois, Silas Ratcliffe, who she will discover is corrupt and power-hungry.

Set in the years after the Civil War, Democracy is full of interesting pictures of life in the capitol before the modern era, where people rode horses for transportation and where the society scene is reminiscent of the Old South. But it also shows the dark side of politics in a way that makes you think not much has changed since. I didn't particularly enjoy this book for its plot, and Adams at times seems contradictory in his opinions of politics, condemning the corruption but not the corrupted (perhaps a "hate the sin, love the sinner" approach).

Not a difficult read, although it has many literary and historical references that most people (myself included) will need google to understand.

* - I've had to set my themed reading list aside for now, as I'm taking a couple literature classes this summer through a state program that provides free tuition for Texas residents over 55. This novel is assigned for my 19th Century American Literature class focused on the Gilded Age.

Ultimately this is an old man grousing about how the country has gone to hell in a hand basket. Plus he was no doubt bothered that he had sat out the Civil War as an aide to his father the ambassador to Great Britain. Unlike today that disqualified him from holding elected, and especially high, office as his grandfather and great grandfather had.

For the first several chapters it reminded me very much of how I felt about my own experiences in school.

I am delighted with how nicely the third person narrative fits this autobiography. He is a very skilled writer.

He was a deep thinker and there is much that I don’t understand. Part of my inability to understand is I only have vague familiarity with many of his intimate acquaintances and this historical events he was in the middle of.

I grew curious as to whether he ever married since he was writing at length about various powers, including the power of the feminine. From Wikipedia I found that he had married, she committed suicide, and he was totally silent about her in his autobiography. (Chapter 30)

It would take a much more careful reading to understand the depth in this book.

It's a good book, and I'm glad I read it, but it's not a conventional biography. At least as they're being written these days.

What we have is a bunch of letters, interspersed with explanatory exposition. The letters are both to and from the book's subject. A significant number of them are in French--though these are mostly in the first chapter, when the subject was growing up in Geneva and/or settling in America.

The book's a decent history of Gallatin's ideas, of his congressional term, and of his long stint as US Treasury Secretary. His time as a diplomat isn't really covered well, and his post-public life is only somewhat sketched, though it's clearly worth a better telling.

Despite the many letters, only occasionally does the man come to life in these pages--and that mostly when he's talking politics with someone. I'm sure some other biography handles this better.

And there's this "foreigner" thing. Despite his long service to our country, people forever called him a foreigner. There even seems to have been a couple attempts to amend the US Constitution explicitly intended to handicap him. Sets me to wondering if there's a master's thesis out there which explored the topic.

Finally: The author's description of Gallatin's relationship with John Quincy Adams, is interesting. Gallatin and JQ Adams seem to have been both friends and rivals. That relationship's told well.

Have read Mt. St. Michel but not The Education or the novels yet.

A fine and entertaining book that shows that political corruption and incompetence are nothing new at all. At the time I finished the book about 373 other LibraryThing readers had read the book, but I'm the only one who read this dilapidated old paperback edition from 1961--don't use my entry as an indication of popularity. As I understand it, this book was tremendously popular in its day--1880 publication. The cover on my book says that "Gladstone, the English Prime Minister, advised everyone one to read it." The cover also reports, ""The public, with appetite whetted by the secrecy surrounding its authorship and the highly inflammable nature of its subject matter clamored so vividly for copies that countless unauthorized editions were published on both sides of the Atlantic. This wholesale piracy, Adams declared, was the single real triumph of his life."