The Education of Henry Adams
silver question, thorny as it was, fell into relations as simple as
words of one syllable, compared with the problems of credit and
exchange that came to complicate it; and when one sought rest at
Chicago, educational game started like rabbits from every building, and
ran out of sight among thousands of its kind before one could mark its
burrow. The Exposition itself defied philosophy. One might find fault
till the last gate closed, one could still explain nothing that needed
explanation. As a scenic display, Paris had never approached it, but
the inconceivable scenic display consisted in its being there at
all--more surprising, as it was, than anything else on the continent,
Niagara Falls, the Yellowstone Geysers, and the whole railway system
thrown in, since these were all natural products in their place; while,
since Noah's Ark, no such Babel of loose and ill joined, such vague and
ill-defined and unrelated thoughts and half-thoughts and experimental
outcries as the Exposition, had ever ruffled the surface of the Lakes.
The first astonishment became greater every day. That the
Exposition should be a natural growth and product of the Northwest
offered a step in evolution to startle Darwin; but that it should be
anything else seemed an idea more startling still; and even granting it
were not--admitting it to be a sort of industrial, speculative growth
and product of the Beaux Arts artistically induced to pass the summer
on the shore of Lake Michigan--could it be made to seem at home there?
Was the American made to seem at home in it? Honestly, he had the air
of enjoying it as though it were all his own; he felt it was good; he
was proud of it; for the most part, he acted as though he had passed
his life in landscape gardening and architectural decoration. If he had
not done it himself, he had known how to get it done to suit him, as he
knew how to get his wives and daughters dressed at Worth's or Paquin's.
Perhaps he could not do it again; the next time he would want to do it
himself and would show his own faults; but for the moment he seemed to
have leaped directly from Corinth and Syracuse and Venice, over the
heads of London and New York, to impose classical standards on plastic
Chicago. Critics had no trouble in criticising the classicism, but all
trading cities had always shown traders' taste, and, to the stern
purist of religious faith, no art was thinner than Venetian Gothic. All
trader's taste smelt of bric-a-brac; Chicago tried at least to give her
taste a look of unity.
One sat down to ponder on the steps beneath Richard Hunt's dome
almost as deeply as on the steps of Ara Coeli, and much to the same
purpose. Here was a breach of continuity--a rupture in historical
sequence! Was it real, or only apparent? One's personal universe hung
on the answer, for, if the rupture was real and the new American world
could take this sharp and conscious twist towards ideals, one's
personal friends would come in, at last, as winners in the great
American chariot-race for fame. If the people of the Northwest actually
knew what was good when they saw it, they would some day talk about
Hunt and Richardson, La Farge and St. Gaudens, Burnham and McKim, and
Stanford White when their politicians and millionaires were otherwise
forgotten. The artists and architects who had done the work offered
little encouragement to hope it; they talked freely enough, but not in
terms that one cared to quote; and to them the Northwest refused to
look artistic. They talked as though they worked only for themselves;
as though art, to the Western people, was a stage decoration; a diamond
shirt-stud; a paper collar; but possibly the architects of Paestum and
Girgenti had talked in the same way, and the Greek had said the same
thing of Semitic Carthage two thousand years ago.
Jostled by these hopes and doubts, one turned to the exhibits
for help, and found it. The industrial schools tried to teach so much
and so quickly that the instruction ran to waste. Some millions of
other people felt the same helplessness, but few of them were seeking
education, and to them helplessness seemed natural and normal, for they
had grown up in the habit of thinking a steam-engine or a dynamo as
natural as the sun, and expected to understand one as little as the
other. For the historian alone the Exposition made a serious effort.
Historical exhibits were common, but they never went far enough; none
were thoroughly worked out. One of the best was that of the Cunard
steamers, but still a student hungry for results found himself obliged
to waste a pencil and several sheets of paper trying to calculate
exactly when, according to the given increase of power, tonnage, and
speed, the growth of the ocean steamer would reach its limits. His
figures brought him, he thought, to the year 1927; another generation
to spare before force, space, and time should meet. The ocean steamer
ran the surest line of triangulation into the future, because it was
the nearest of man's products to a unity; railroads taught less because
they seemed already finished except for mere increase in number;
explosives taught most, but needed a tribe of chemists, physicists, and
mathematicians to explain; the dynamo taught least because it had
barely reached infancy, and, if its progress was to be constant at the
rate of the last ten years, it would result in infinite costless energy
within a generation. One lingered long among the dynamos, for they were
new, and they gave to history a new phase. Men of science could never
understand the ignorance and naivete; of the historian, who, when he
came suddenly on a new power, asked naturally what it was; did it pull
or did it push? Was it a screw or thrust? Did it flow or vibrate? Was
it a wire or a mathematical line? And a score of such questions to
which he expected answers and was astonished to get none.
Education ran riot at Chicago, at least for retarded minds
which had never faced in concrete form so many matters of which they
were ignorant. Men who knew nothing whatever--who had never run a
steam-engine, the simplest of forces--who had never put their hands on
a lever--had never touched an electric battery--never talked through a
telephone, and had not the shadow of a notion what amount of force was
meant by a watt or an ampere or an erg, or any other term of
measurement introduced within a hundred years--had no choice but to sit
down on the steps and brood as they had never brooded on the benches of
Harvard College, either as student or professor, aghast at what they
had said and done in all these years, and still more ashamed of the
childlike ignorance and babbling futility of the society that let them
say and do it. The historical mind can think only in historical
processes, and probably this was the first time since historians
existed, that any of them had sat down helpless before a mechanical
sequence. Before a metaphysical or a theological or a political
sequence, most historians had felt helpless, but the single clue to
which they had hitherto trusted was the unity of natural force.
Did he himself quite know what he meant? Certainly not! If he
had known enough to state his problem, his education would have been
complete at once. Chicago asked in 1893 for the first time the question
whether the American people knew where they were driving. Adams
answered, for one, that he did not know, but would try to find out. On
reflecting sufficiently deeply, under the shadow of Richard Hunt's
architecture, he decided that the American people probably knew no more
than he did; but that they might still be driving or drifting
unconsciously to some point in thought, as their solar system was said
to be drifting towards some point in space; and that, possibly, if
relations enough could be observed, this point might be fixed. Chicago
was the first expression of American thought as a unity; one must start
there.
Washington was the second. When he got back there, he fell
headlong into the extra session of Congress called to repeal the Silver
Act. The silver minority made an obstinate attempt to prevent it, and
most of the majority had little heart in the creation of a single gold
standard. The banks alone, and the dealers in exchange, insisted upon
it; the political parties divided according to capitalistic
geographical lines, Senator Cameron offering almost the only exception;
but they mixed with unusual good-temper, and made liberal allowance for
each others' actions and motives. The struggle was rather less
irritable than such struggles generally were, and it ended like a
comedy. On the evening of the final vote, Senator Cameron came back
from the Capitol with Senator Brice, Senator Jones, Senator Lodge, and
Moreton Frewen, all in the gayest of humors as though they were rid of
a heavy responsibility. Adams, too, in a bystander's spirit, felt light
in mind. He had stood up for his eighteenth century, his Constitution
of 1789, his George Washington, his Harvard College, his Quincy, and
his Plymouth Pilgrims, as long as any one would stand up with him. He
had said it was hopeless twenty years before, but he had kept on, in
the same old attitude, by habit and taste, until he found himself
altogether alone. He had hugged his antiquated dislike of bankers and
capitalistic society until he had become little better than a crank. He
had known for years that he must accept the regime, but he had known a
great many other disagreeable certainties--like age, senility, and
death--against which one made what little resistance one could. The
matter was settled at last by the people. 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, centralizing, and mechanical. In 1893, the issue came on
the single gold standard, and the majority at last declared itself,
once for all, in favor of the capitalistic system with all its
necessary machinery. All one's friends, all one's best citizens,
reformers, churches, colleges, educated classes, had joined the banks
to force submission to capitalism; a submission long foreseen by the
mere law of mass. Of all forms of society or government, this was the
one he liked least, but his likes or dislikes were as antiquated as the
rebel doctrine of State rights. A capitalistic system had been adopted,
and if it were to be run at all, it must be run by capital and by
capitalistic methods; for nothing could surpass the nonsensity of
trying to run so complex and so concentrated a machine by Southern and
Western farmers in grotesque alliance with city day-laborers, as had
been tried in 1800 and 1828, and had failed even under simple
conditions.
There, education in domestic politics stopped. The rest was
question of gear; of running machinery; of economy; and involved no
disputed principle. Once admitted that the machine must be efficient,
society might dispute in what social interest it should be run, but in
any case it must work concentration. Such great revolutions commonly
leave some bitterness behind, but nothing in politics ever surprised
Henry Adams more than the ease with which he and his silver friends
slipped across the chasm, and alighted on the single gold standard and
the capitalistic system with its methods; the protective tariff; the
corporations and trusts; the trades-unions and socialistic paternalism
which necessarily made their complement; the whole mechanical
consolidation of force, which ruthlessly stamped out the life of the
class into which Adams was born, but created monopolies capable of
controlling the new energies that America adored.
Society rested, after sweeping into the ash-heap these cinders