Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
not lived heretofore. The America of the Gilded Age was alien to him;
its gods were not his gods, nor its ends his ends. And so began for him
a long pilgrimage of the spirit that was to carry him far and return
him at last with no solider gains than a handful of curious relics in
his pilgrim’s scrip.
The sturdy New England character, with its self-sufficing individualism
and granite integrity, never came to finer flower than in the
Braintree-Quincy house of Adams. Intellectually curious, given to
rationalism, retaining much of the eighteenth-century solidity of
intellect and honest realism, refusing to barter principle for the good
will of men, the Adams line produced no more characteristic offshoots
than came in the fourth generation. In Charles Francis Adams, Jr.,
Henry Adams, and Brooks Adams, the family virtues of independence,
intellectual integrity, and disinterested criticism, found abundant
expression. All three were children of an earlier century, endowed with
the solidest Yankee-Puritan qualities of mind and heart, unyielding
as the rock ledges of their native fields; and they found the
experience of living in the late nineteenth century, of adjusting their
eighteenth-century minds to the demands of a sordid capitalistic order,
a difficult business. Though they tried to bridge the chasm between
the two worlds, though they honestly sought some working compromise
that would suffer them to share in the work of their generation, they
met with failure. It was not possible for the House of Adams, with its
old-fashioned rectitude, to accept the ways of the Gilded Age, and in
the end they turned aside from the main-traveled road to follow their
own paths.
I • Charles Francis Adams--The Business Failure
Of the three Charles Francis Adams most nearly succeeded in his
experiment of a _rapprochement_ with capitalism, with the result that
his life came nearest to shipwreck. Perhaps there was less of the Adams
granite in his character. He refused to turn rebel but consciously
sought to win the prizes offered by his generation, training himself
to serve financial interests, making overtures to business, and
achieving a very considerable financial success. Yet nothing was more
incongruous than an Adams serving as lackey to State Street, and when
after abundant experience he came finally to realize it he turned away
to pick up the scattered threads of a life largely wasted. For years
he had suffered from a long maladjustment. When he quitted the army
at the close of the war with the brevet rank of brigadier-general, he
found himself adrift. The world of his youth was gone and the future
seemed drab and unpromising. Intellectually he was caught between
tides. The traditional idealisms had burnt out in the bitter struggle,
and in the sterile post-war years his Puritan nature found no adequate
nourishment. The crusading ardor was gone, and the new world of science
had not yet risen on the horizon of young men who had given their youth
to the army. In 1865 he came upon John Stuart Mill’s essay on Auguste
Comte, which he said revolutionized his whole mental attitude--“I
emerged from the theological stage, in which I had been nurtured, and
passed into the scientific.... From reading that compact little volume
of Mill’s ... I date a changed intellectual and moral life.” Yet from
this accidental foray into Victorian rationalism he got little more
than a sense of release from a dead Puritanism. Creative intellectual
enthusiasms were not to be his portion.
Disillusioned with the law, over which he had been pottering, and
wanting to ally himself with the dominant forces of his generation, he
“fixed on the railroad system as the most developing force and largest
field of the day.” He delved into the history of certain railways and
established a reputation as a student of transportation. For upwards of
a quarter century--from 1866 to 1890--as a member of different public
commissions and finally as president of the Union Pacific system--Jay
Gould’s road--he devoted his best energy to the work, only to be
disillusioned in the end. In 1912 he wrote this confession:
Indeed, as I approach the end, I am more than a little
puzzled to account for the instances I have seen of business
success--money-getting. It comes from a rather low instinct.
Certainly, as far as my observation goes, it is rarely met with in
combination with the finer or more interesting traits of character.
I have known, and known tolerably well, a good many “successful”
men--“big” financially--men famous during the last half-century;
and a less interesting crowd I do not care to encounter. Not one
that I have ever known would I care to meet again, either in
this world or the next; nor is one of them associated in my mind
with the idea of humor, thought, or refinement. A set of mere
money-getters and traders, they were essentially unattractive and
uninteresting.... In the course of my railroad experiences I made
no friends, apart from those in the Boston direction; nor among
those I met was there any man whose acquaintance I valued. They
were a coarse, realistic, bargaining crowd.[701]
Yet not till he had reached his late fifties did he finally cut the
ties that held him to the “bargaining crowd,” and turn to the business
of salvaging the remnant of his days. He gave himself over with zest to
the writing of Massachusetts history, but it was then too late to do
notable work. He had laid too many offerings on an altar he had come to
loathe. Not a lifelong student like Henry, he had been unable to gather
great stores of knowledge. Not a militant rebel like Brooks, he had
never been given to searching inquiries into the laws of civilization.
And so when he found himself free at last, he set himself to the
business of local chronicles. That was better than nothing; it was the
one thing in his life he took solid pride in; the work was honestly and
capably done; but it was small savings from a lifetime of conscientious
work. His venture into the realm of business had been a disaster.
II • Henry Adams--Intellectual
From a similar disaster Henry Adams was saved by an early
disillusionment. His efforts at _rapprochement_ were little more than a
gesture. While casting about after the war for a promising opening for
a career he hit upon finance as a likely field and published a number
of essays that drew attention to him. But it was quite impossible
for him to go forward along such lines. He was too completely the
intellectual, too aloof from his generation in spirit and will, to ally
himself with the economic masters of the Gilded Age. Sooner or later
he would go his own way, and luckily good fortune took the matter in
hand promptly. No suitable opportunity offering, he was dragooned by
family and friends into an assistant-professorship at Harvard, where
he spent seven years trying to explain to himself and his students
the meaning of the Middle Ages. Those years were his introduction to
history. The passion of the student was in his blood, and he turned
with zest to brood over the scanty records of past generations, seeking
a clue to the meaning of man’s pilgrimage on earth, trying to arrange
the meaningless fragments in some sort of rational pattern, in the hope
of discovering an underlying unity in what seemed on the face only a
meaningless welter of complexity and irrationality. A rationalist, he
followed his intellect in an eager quest for the law of historical
evolution, and he ended fifty years later in mysticism. It was a
natural outcome for a lifetime of rationalizing--a compensation for the
mordant dissatisfactions that issued from the restless play of mind.
Dissatisfied with his labors he quitted the Harvard post in 1879 and
thereafter made his home at Washington in the atmosphere of politics.
From the Middle Ages he turned to the American past and set out to
explore the period during which the first Adams had played his part.
He could not deal with narrow parochial themes; he would not fall
into the “sink of history--antiquarianism,” that satisfied Charles
Francis Adams. From the beginnings of his intellectual life he had
been concerned with the ideas and ideals that presumably lie behind
periods and civilizations; so he went back to what he regarded as the
great age of American political history, to inquire into the meaning
of the struggle between Federalism and Jeffersonianism for control of
the venture in republicanism. But finding little satisfaction there, as
he had earlier found none in Victorian England, where he had studied
closely contemporary English statesmen--Palmerston and Lord Russell and
Gladstone--only to convince himself that they were bankrupt of ideas
and morality, and had nothing to teach concerning the good life, he
abandoned the field, threw over his familiar studies, and set about the
great business of reëducating himself.
From his long studies in the American past one significant thing
had emerged--he had come to understand the source of certain of his
dissatisfactions with current American ideals that set him apart
from his fellows. He had gone back to his own origins and had traced
the rise of the defiant Adams prejudices that were as strong in the
fourth generation as they had been in the first. The Adams family was
eighteenth-century--Henry Adams had come to understand--and he himself
in mind and education and prejudices, was of that earlier time. He
was a child of Quincy rather than Boston--a simple world with simple
virtues that capitalism and industrialism were destroying in the name
of progress. From such village loyalties he could not rid himself.
Perhaps in reason he should not have preferred that earlier homespun
world; but affection does not heed logic, and as Henry Adams traced the
decline of Quincy to Hamilton’s financial policy that started the new
capitalism on its triumphant career, he was filled with bitterness.
It was a vulgar order that was rising and an evil day. Since 1865 the
bankers had ruled America, and they were coming finally to cajole
the American people into accepting their vulgar ideals and putting
their trust in a bankers’ paradise. As he watched the temples of the
new society rising everywhere in the land, his gorge rose at the
prospect. He had no wish to dwell in a bankers’ paradise. Dislike of
a capitalistic society was in his blood. From father to son all the
Adamses had distrusted capitalism and hated State Street. The “only
distinctive mark of all the Adamses,” he said late in life, “since old
Sam Adams’s father a hundred and fifty years before, had been their
inherited quarrel with State Street, which had again and again broken
out into riot, bloodshed, personal feuds, foreign and civil war,
wholesale banishments and confiscations, until the history of Florence
was hardly more turbulent than that of Boston.”[702]
And so when at the climax of the capitalistic revolution he watched
the change going on noisily all about him, when the transition to
the bankers’ paradise was called progress and capitalistic feudalism
was hailed as the advent of Utopia, he seemed to himself a somewhat
pathetic anachronism. Shades of the prison house were falling about
him. “He had hugged his antiquated dislike of bankers and capitalistic
society,” he said bitterly, “until he had become little better than a
crank.”
He had known for years that he must accept the régime, but he
had known a great many other disagreeable certainties--like age,
senility, and death--against which one made what little resistance
one could.... For a hundred years, between 1793 and 1893, the
American people had hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and back,
between two forces, one simply industrial, the other capitalistic,