Introduction
Even before the United States had a written constitution (1787), the struggling nation could already boast a richly talented body of political writers and critics. Most influential of this group was the shrewd Englishman Thomas Paine, who eventually spent his life tracing the rich vein of Western democratic thought as it found expression in first the American and then the French revolutions. Everywhere, Paine was the man on the spot, and a man never slow to tell the truth as he saw it being made.
In America, for example, Paine was the first to argue the case for independence in the plain language of his popular pamphlet Common Sense (1775). Written to be discussed in homes and taverns, by farmers and artisans who often lacked the real skills of literacy, this pamphlet addressed social and political questions with blunt directness and a sense of urgency: “Society, in every state, is a blessing. Government, even in its best sense, is a necessary evil.” From its beginnings, American political commentary would favor definitions of both forces and influences that pointed to stark differences and sharp contrasts. Whether the contest existed between our nation and the King of England or between geographic sectors of the emerging United States, the continuing political drama assumed the importance of combat, sometimes between men or women, political parties, armies in the field, but always treated in the same idiom favored by Paine—as the extremes of good and evil.
To George Washington, John Adams, and the other Founders, Thomas Paine and Common Sense played a welcome part—but only a part—in establishing the new nation. The Adams family itself was instrumental in charting the course of the new nation. After Washington’s terms as president, John Adams was next to serve, followed in the family by his eldest son, John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States. Two generations later, another Adams family heir, Henry Brooks Adams, took the familiar path from Boston and Quincy to Harvard College, and then to politics as practiced in Washington, D.C. For four generations, the Adamses retained their important place in national politics. But for Henry, his appropriate role had become that of observer and critic, rather than actor, in the political drama.
By the time Henry sat down to write Democracy, the Civil War was long over and the nation had experienced its colorful postwar festival called “The Gilded Age.” Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner used that phrase for the title of their humorous novel (subtitle: “A Tale of To-day”), which appeared in 1873. Adams knew that volume but felt that it left behind plenty of scandal about the Grant administration that demanded trenchant criticism. He had established residence in Washington, directly across Lafayette Park from the White House, the symbolic home of his grandfather and great-grandfather. He knew what went on there, as did his wife, Marian. Henry was engaged in writing his monumental History of the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison (1889- 1891), but he believed he could also find time to compose a short novel, as a diversion for himself and his wife, who would contribute details of dress, manners, etc., as well as timely gossip about Washington society. Both Adamses found their collaboration congenial, but neither wanted to be known as “author” of the novel, which was published anonymously in 1880. Its secret authorship would not be formally revealed to the general public until the book was reprinted in 1925, seven years after Henry’s death.
Adams’s secret authorship pleased him not only because it served to protect his reputation as a serious historian but also because it kept him free of the political notoriety surrounding Democracy in England and America. The novel’s authorship became for Adams and his friends something of a private joke, played upon in letters to John Hay, who shared the secret. But another part of Adams sought tangible results from the book: he hoped for a wide readership that could effect political reform. In 1885 an impatient author declared, “My experiment has failed.” Yet by 1905, he had found cause to brag about the only work of his to achieve widespread popularity. (The Education of Henry Adams, a best seller in 1919, was not yet published.) Until the time of his death, Adams insisted that each of his books, including Democracy, had been written as an experimental test of his readers.
The reading public certainly had mattered to the author when Democracy first appeared, offering a fictional treatment of recent post-Civil War politics in Washington. The book analyzed the American political situation of Adams’s own day almost schematically, for the benefit of both his heroine and the reader, who shares in her political education throughout. The story combines Madeleine Lee’s search to find the real meaning of democracy with a conventional tale of romance—a contest for Madeleine’s hand waged between two political men of sharply contrasting types: Ratcliffe, the modern politician who wields the power to make government work; and Carrington, the old-fashioned Southern statesman, now left without political position or power—a political idealist rather than a pragmatist. Madeleine arrives in Washington having already rejected the sterile intellectual atmosphere of Boston and the crass business life of New York. She has also suffered the death of her husband and of their only child; now at the age of thirty she feels herself to be as hard and as unyielding as “pure steel.” She is ready to undertake a new and far more ambitious role at the center of American politics: “What she wanted was POWER.”
Drawn like Henry Adams himself to Washington, the seat of power, Madeleine discovers that her best opportunity to exercise real political power is represented by the prospect of a marriage to Senator Silas P. Ratcliffe, who in the course of the book becomes secretary of the treasury and who leaves no doubt about his ambition to be president. Intelligent, wealthy, and attractive, Madeleine soon finds herself sinking deeper and deeper into politics; she begins as an observer and quickly becomes a participant, a key figure in the developing political drama. What at first seems a dispassionate study of power, carried out in a detached spirit of intellectual curiosity, soon threatens to destroy her emotional and intellectual stability, and even her basic moral nature. For Madeleine, the price of political education is high, perhaps too high.
The moral and political hero of Democracy is John Carrington, an impoverished Southerner who first appears defeated and politically powerless in post-Civil War Washington, but who, despite temptations, remains throughout a man of principle. He is simply not for sale in a world where other men are readily bought and delivered. Carrington is a loyal Virginian but never a secessionist; he is a former Confederate soldier who fought bravely for his region and political beliefs but never for the cause of slavery. Carrington is, in short, a noble representative of the Old South—the South of George Washington and Mount Vernon. Because of his rigid adherence to the old code of personal principles, he now seems to be politically impotent. Yet even when he appears to be beaten by Ratcliffe’s skillful maneuvering, Carrington retains power enough to move Madeleine Lee. His letter revealing that Ratcliffe has accepted a political bribe forces Madeleine to comprehend the true nature of her suitor: Ratcliffe’s lack of all moral principles—personal and political—determines her rejection of power. A clear-sighted realism has defeated romance.
Throughout the book, Adams insists that the older American values—such as personal principles—should not be forgotten in the post-Civil War frenzy. Writing as a historian turned novelist, Adams shows that the fullest possible understanding of the past, including the human origins of character and action, still provides the most useful key to the present and the future. Here, political drama is acted out by characters who help us to measure how much American society has changed. Ratcliffe, Carrington’s rival, represents not New England, where he was born, but his present home on the western frontier, where new political power is emerging. This “Prairie Giant of Peonia” now stands ready to dominate the whole of the Republic. Again, a contrast in moral character between the Southern idealist and Western pragmatist works (together with a somewhat mechanical manipulation of setting) to establish Adams’s point: the South that only recently had presented itself as an enemy to the Union now seems to offer the best hope for a much-needed renaissance in American political life.
The contest for the hand of the heroine thus becomes a struggle to determine the future of the American nation. Madeleine Lee’s problem—to perceive and understand the moral and psychological makeup of her two suitors—defines an attempt by the novelist to evaluate the historical significance of the societies that Carrington and Ratcliffe represent.
Adams shows how Madeleine cannot simply be told the truth; she must be made to see for herself. Only gradually can she gain personal understanding and arrive finally at a correct estimate of Ratcliffe:
The audacity of the man would have seemed sublime if she had felt sure that he knew the difference between good and evil, between a lie and the truth; but the more she saw of him, the surer she was that his courage was mere moral paralysis, and that he talked about virtue and vice as a man who is color-blind talks about red and green; he did not see them as she saw them; if left to choose for himself he would have nothing to guide him. Was it politics that had caused this atrophy of the moral senses by disuse?
At this point in the novel, for the reader as much as for Madeleine, the ironic characterization of “The Prairie Giant of Peonia” has done its work. Ratcliffe provides Henry Adams the affirmative answer to the questions that Madeleine asks.
Ratcliffe’s greatest political power derives from a confident analysis of other men, his understanding of their motives, and from a pragmatic skill in managing their actions to suit his interests. Within the limits of politics, he is successful, even in manipulating a president. Yet, because he is morally “color-blind,” he badly misjudges both Carrington and Sybil (Madeleine’s sister) and underestimates their power to protect Madeleine precisely because their motives are not political. In a climactic scene, Ratcliffe encounters Madeleine alone, and, exerting all his charm and magnetic fascination, he offers her the highest prize of which he can conceive, the greatest within his own system of purely political values: to become the wife of a future president and the most powerful woman in the country. But Madeleine is not tempted. Her determined rejection shows the reader a different set of values—one totally alien to Ratcliffe’s life and thought: “Mr. Ratcliffe, I am not to be bought.”
Madeleine has renounced her ambition for power. She joins with Carrington and Sybil in actively affirming traditional moral principles. Defeated by this alliance of past and present, Ratcliffe suddenly loses his famous self-control. As he confronts a failure caused by his own misjudgment of human nature, Ratcliffe cannot maintain his personal balance, and he creates a scandalous public scene, destined to end his career, by scuffling with a foreign diplomat on a public street. Like his hopes for marriage to Mrs. Lee, his chances for the presidency are dashed. Again, the derangement of Ratcliffe’s faculties shows itself in a crucial interview with Madeleine: he twice calls the heroine a “heartless coquette,” and in that epithet Adams’s sense of irony finds its strongest voice. Ratcliffe’s evaluation provides a final proof of his moral color blindness—his inability to interpret human actions apart from political motives—and no label could be less appropriate to the sympathetic character of Madeleine Lee that the novelist has so carefully developed. Already Madeleine has demonstrated “heart” by sacrificing her romantic interest in Carrington to Sybil; now her denial of the opportunity to wield future power constitutes a conclusive rejection of Ratcliffe on the very grounds of her heart—a heart that must be reckoned much larger than his.
Finally, the best chance for Madeleine Lee’s future represents Adams’s hope for his public as well. Readers who share her point of view are the voters who should ponder Adams’s message: like Madeleine, this public must first learn to judge political men (and women) as they really are, not as they claim to be. Here, the readers are moved toward a rejection of merely pragmatic political values by the author’s inclusion in the novel of figures who do represent higher personal standards—for example, such characters as Nathan Gore and Carrington himself, both of whom embody older principles of personal honor and high moral conduct.
Using the contrast between Ratcliffe and Carrington, the novelist manages to build a strong case against the corrupting forces of change that, by 1880, had perverted an older American politics of principle. “The Prairie Giant of Peonia” is destroyed by his own overweening ambition; his object never grows beyond the selfish desire to exercise a crude domination over the country and over Mrs. Lee as well. Unlike the admirable Carrington, Ratcliffe is the mere creature of a political party, lacking every vestige of independence. When Madeleine inquires of him, “Have you never refused to go with your party?” “Never!” is Ratcliffe’s firm reply. This corrupting obeisance to party provides Ratcliffe with a convenient excuse for immoral actions. Attempting to explain away his part in a bribe, for example, he tells Madeleine that he has acted not upon his own judgment but out of a disciplined fealty to party leaders: “Their declaration, as the responsible heads of the organization, that certain action on my part was essential to the interests of the party, satisfied me.”
Yet such pragmatic opportunism could not satisfy Henry Adams. He underscores his objections to Ratcliffe’s stand by setting this display of modern corruption against an older ideal of duty, showing that Ratcliffe lacks not only all knowledge of the true “springs of action” in men unlike himself, but the willingness to search out his own motives as well. The modern politician has lost all sense of personal accountability for his actions: “Like most men in the same place, he did not stop to cast up both columns of his account with the party, nor to ask himself the questions that lay at the heart of his grievance: How far had he served his party and how far himself?” To an Adams, self-restraint and self-control were as important in personal behavior as any political balance of powers was in national government.
In contrasting Carrington to Ratcliffe, the novelist makes good use of his opportunity to demonstrate the vitality of Adams family ideas. Although the Southerner’s lack of financial independence limits his freedom, because he cannot flee from Washington and politics altogether, he never becomes a mere slave to party, nor is he willing (any more than the wealthier Madeleine, once she sees the light) to be bribed by Ratcliffe. Geographically, Carrington’s ideals and principles are lost in Washington life but effectively recovered in the scenes set at Mount Vernon and Arlington; they are the principles of George Washington and the Constitution, of Lee and the Southerners who fought in the Civil War out of duty to their states but not in defense of slavery. As Adams portrays him, Carrington represents the frail surviving hope for a renaissance of idealism in American politics, and for a better national future. His suit for Madeleine never appears to be strong alongside Ratcliffe’s, but his single attempt at action proves decisive enough to educate—if not to captivate—the elusive heroine. Still, at the end of the story Ratcliffe remains in power in Washington, and Adams’s pessimistic judgment on democracy has not been overturned.
More than any other single character, the heroine expresses the conviction of Henry Adams. “ ‘I want to go to Egypt,’ said Madeleine, still smiling faintly. ‘Democracy has shaken my nerves to pieces. Oh, what rest it would be to live in the Great Pyramid and look out for ever at the polar star!’” Mingled suggestions of disappointment and hope in this concluding speech show us something of the complexity of the author’s judgment. Because Madeleine Lee, unlike Ratcliffe, remains introspective, she cannot escape from complications. Unlike sister Sybil,
She had not known the recesses of her own heart. She had honestly supposed that Sybil’s interests and Sybil’s happiness were forcing her to an act of self-sacrifice; and now she saw that in the depths of her soul very different motives had been at work: ambition, thirst for power, restless eagerness to meddle in what did not concern her, blind longing to escape from the torture of watching other women with full lives and satisfied instincts, while her own life was hungry and sad.
For Madeleine, no end to such complication seems clear. Instead her introspective habit has brought a bitter reward: “. . . the worst was not in that disappointment [of ambitions], but in the discovery of her own weakness and self-deception.”
Just as she becomes aware of her own complex nature, so Madeleine Lee also finds that the outside world no longer seems so simple nor the guides to personal action well marked. For Mrs. Lee, political questions have been complicated by both the romantic attraction she feels toward Ratcliffe and her own ambition for power. For politics or society, simple reform seems all but impossible. Human nature dictates against it.
In 1880 Henry Adams echoed the truths of Thomas Paine and Common Sense: “Government, even at its best state, is a necessary evil.” After one hundred years of frenzied work, American politicians had little more to show and less to brag about in regard to social improvement. In truth, man (and woman) remained stubbornly unimprovable, despite often expressed admirable intentions to seek remedies. If the democratic truth could not be told in the language and technique of a novel, as Adams claimed, the final effect of Democracy proved less experimental or innovative than repetitive in the larger message it conveyed to readers. True to the fate of its heroine, the book insisted on an inconclusive escape as the proper moral of political involvement. Of course, like Madeleine Lee, Henry Adams had fled from the active political life that had engaged both his great-grandfather John Adams and his grandfather John Quincy Adams. So the story was his own.
After Democracy was published (to become a surprise best seller in both England and America), Henry Adams turned to a more private literature of the personal letter, as he sent advice to his ex-Harvard student Henry Cabot Lodge, who in 1881 was considering a career in politics:
I suppose every man who had looked on at the game has been struck by the remarkable way in which politics deteriorate the moral tone of everyone who mixes in them. . . . Politicians as a class must be mean as card-sharpers, turfmen, or Wall Street curbstone operators. There is no respectable industry in existence which will not average a higher morality.
Here, Adams’s mordant disapproval of political man could hardly be mistaken—even by an ex-student. Yet, as the author of Democracy might have expected, his letter provided another unteachable lesson lost: For Henry Cabot Lodge ignored the wry wisdom of his favorite Harvard mentor and entered upon a lengthy political career in the United States Senate. No irony of life was lost on Henry Adams.
EARL N. HARBERT