David S. Brown (1) (1966–)

This is the life of Henry Adams, scion of the great American political dynasty. Henry Adams seemed to flounder through life. No real purpose, no real occupation. He dabbled a bit here and there, but nothing was permanent, with the exception of his writing. This, though, was met with varied response. Some hailed it, some reviled it.

This book is an all-encompassing volume on Adams' life. I was fascinated with the snippets of information of his family life, especially his marriage to Clover. I wish this had been explored a bit more, though. Adams was incredibly witty and this definitely comes through in the book.

Good reading about someone I was previously unaware of.… (meer)

Henry Adams was born in 1838, the year the telegraph was first demonstrated. Native Americans were forced to relocate and the Underground Railroad was being established. Meanwhile in Britain, slavery was abolished, Victoria was newly on the throne, and Dickens published Oliver Twist. Adams died in 1918 during WWI, the year of the Spanish Influenza and the first time airplanes were used by the USPS.

Henry was the grandson of President John Quincy Adams, 'the Governor' of Henry's childhood, and the great-grandson of founding father President John Adams. His own father Charles Francis had served as ambassador to England, as had generations of Adams men.

Unlike his predecessors, Adams neither committed his life to public service. He never had children and his wife committed suicide when he was in his late 40s. He spent some time teaching at Harvard, and was popular with the students, but it did not suit him.

Henry became a historian, a world traveler, and an insider Washingtonian socialite.

"What could become of such a child of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when he should wake up to find himself required to play the games of the twentieth? " he wrote in the first chapter, continuing, "As it happened, he never got to the point of playing the game at all; he lost himself in the study of it."~ from The Education of Henry Adams

It was his book The Education of Henry Adams that introduced me to him. It is a strange book, self-published and shared with his friends. He writes about his childhood in Quincy and his later life, skipping the death of his wife and his most regarded histories. He writes about the changes in society, the rise of capitalists and industry and the power of money.

Like his predecessors, Henry was intellectual, high-minded, and could be contrary. Like his predecessors, he believed one should be called to public duty, not seek it, an 18th c concept dated by his time. Unlike his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, he was not called to serve as an ambassador, although he was his father's private secretary in London.

Instead, he wrote. He wrote an eight-volume history of Jeffersonian America, he wrote political commentary, he wrote travel pieces and about architecture and medieval history.

John Adams and John Quincy Adams were men of their time, men of action, called upon to serve their country. Henry was an observer and an outsider, out of sync, never at home.

John Adams was against slavery and John Quincy Adams fought Congress over the ban to discuss abolition. His father Charles Francis was involved with the anti-slavery Whig party. Henry was uninterested and unengaged with the problems of African Americans.

As capitalism and business men rose to power, Anti-Semitism became mainstream, and Henry was not immune. He despaired to see that the big money of the 'northern plutocracy" was the rising power in Washington. He railed against corruption and the patronage system, and despaired that too many 'good men' avoided politics as a dirty business. He railed against the rise of the Boston Irish.

He married a cerebral woman overly attached to her father, a woman liked by few. After her early death, Adams built her a enigmatic memorial, the details of which he left up to the famed sculpture Saint-Gaudens while he went on a world tour while claiming he died to the world with her.

The arc of Adam's life crossed a part of American history and politics I was not well versed on, and I found this aspect of the biography to be very interesting. The problems we see today in American politics have deep roots.

Some trivia tidbits from Adams life:
Henry James wrote in a letter to Edith Wharton that Adams read Jane Austen's Persuasion aloud in the evenings.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's character Thornton Hancock was inspired by Adams; he had met him when a boy.
Adams studied under geologist Louis Agassiz at Harvard, saying his class was "the only teaching that appealed to [my] imagination."
Adams wrote two novels, including Democracy about Gilded Age Washington DC politics; Teddy Roosevelt found it "essentially mean and base."
Adams fell in love with an unhappily married, beautiful and intelligent socialite who counted on his friendship but rejected him as a lover. She did not find him physically attractive.

I was given a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.… (meer)

What particularly informs this work is a certain sense of sly irony, in as much as while the author has no lack of respect for the life and work of Richard Hofstadter, he doesn't gloss over Hofstadter's failure to grasp how he had become quite the organization man by the time his style of politics and history came under fire in the Sixties; a period that Hofstadter was prepared to write off as the "Age of Rubbish." The question has to be whether the man could have reinvented himself for the era of the rise of the talking-head expert, or whether he would have dwindled away to being a mere curiosity had he lived longer than fifty-four years; one has to suspect the latter, as Hofstadter tended to recoil from conflict for its own sake.… (meer)