Long before the Civil War, the idea of elite-born rule had ceased to stir American politics. Weaned on a diet of Vox Populi, Vox Dei (“The voice of the people is the voice of God”), several millions came by the 1820s to embrace the idea of common man democracy. In company with a host of Reconstruction-era Brahmin reformers, Henry hoped to arrest this egalitarian trend. The recent war exposed, so he believed, the inherent perils of popular partisanship as two “extremist” groups—the southern plantocracy and northern abolitionism—came to dominate the political landscape with devastating results. In coming to Washington, Adams determined to make the case for the country’s haute bourgeoisie as a hedge against the next gathering storm of special interests. Its patriotic pedigree, educational advantages, and cultivated sense of civic responsibility promised to transcend narrow regional, economic, and ideological concerns encased in one-sided party planks. He knew, however, that the patricians faced an uphill and perhaps insurmountable struggle. America’s growing suffrage prompted a type of professional electioneering and vote begging that easily eclipsed the comparatively minor-key canvassing of Jackson’s day. Public policy, rather, now moved to the beat of the urban bosses and their patronage-as-usual politics.1
In several of the nation’s larger metropolitan areas, including Boston and Chicago, Cleveland and Kansas City, the great machines dominated daily affairs. New York’s Tammany Hall, once governed by the notorious William “Boss” Tweed, controlled immense assets in money and jobs, housing and administration; the investigative journalist Lincoln Steffens, author of The Shame of the Cities, a 1904 exposé of municipal government malfeasance, famously called Philadelphia’s Republican faction “the most corrupt and the most contented” in the country.2 While it is true, as Adams duly noted, that these organizations engaged in graft as well as more inventive forms of criminality, they also (in exchange for loyalty at the polls) supported immigrants, helped cut through ribbons of bureaucratic red tape, and aided often poorly structured city governments. They were shady but efficient, autocratic but responsive.
Henry, of course, hoped to see them doomed, anticipating in their demise the rise of a partisan-free civil service corps and an independent president. For a brief period in the winter of 1868–69 he thought the great patriot king of the past, George Washington, might be approximated in the whiskered visage of Ulysses S. Grant, the latest in a not so small line—five at the time, including Jackson, Harrison, and Taylor—of American army generals to occupy the White House. Smitten by Grant’s successful turn defeating the secessionists and eager to believe that a military man might share the patricians’ contempt for political parties, Henry thought the republic soon to be in capable hands. Arriving in Washington just weeks before Grant captured the presidency, he indulged in a romantic sense of shared destiny. Years later he wrote of his—and what he somewhat dubiously described as the nation’s—hope for a golden Grant era:
At least four-fifths of the American people,—Adams among the rest,—had united in the election of General Grant to the Presidency, and probably had been more or less affected in their choice by the parallel they felt between Grant and Washington. Nothing could be more obvious. Grant represented order. He was a great soldier, and the soldier always represented order. He might be as partisan as he pleased, but a General who had organised and commanded half a million or a million men in the field, must know how to administer.
With characteristic morbidity, Henry concluded this retrospective account of his initial dip into presidential politics with the double-damning line, puncturing both himself and Grant, “Adams was young and easily deceived.”3
The general proved human after all, presiding, despite his own personal integrity, over a scandal-ridden administration that mirrored the new era’s growing reputation for plunder, spoils, and shakedowns. Its more conspicuous examples include the Whiskey Ring (a conspiracy of distillers to bribe government officials and to defraud the government of excise taxes on alcohol), the Crédit Mobilier scandal (government officials accepted payoffs from a construction company building part of the first transcontinental railroad), and the Belknap bribery (Secretary of War William Belknap collected kickbacks for licenses to sell supplies on Indian lands). Other instances of corruption occurred in various federal departments, resulting in a broad if somewhat amorphous cry for reform.
Henry’s mature observations of Grant contain all the scorn of a betrayed lover embarrassed by his former infatuation. He designated the general in the Education as “pre-intellectual, archaic,” and more primitive than “the cave-dwellers.” Sporting with Darwin, and his own callow conflation of war heroes, Henry insisted that the sharply descending line linking the great Washington to the assuredly less than great Grant made ridiculous any suggestion of executive evolution. And for several decades scholars more or less agreed, ranking the general in one presidential poll after another near the bottom of the bottom. The making of Lost Cause mythology (celebrating the Confederacy’s cause as heroic), the deification of Gen. Robert E. Lee, and the Redemption of the white South from northern occupation armies contributed to a long-standing tendency to downgrade the eighteenth president. The historiography of our own day, however, influenced by the long civil rights movement, has offered a far more positive interpretation of Grant, emphasizing his efforts to defend black rights in the South.4 But this is a contemporary consensus. Deferring to his cultural education and constitutional scruples, Henry, as noted, could muster only indifference to the situation of the newly freed peoples, and this negatively impacted his view of Grant, whose efforts to enforce the Reconstruction revolution in southern states he sometimes criticized.
It was Grant’s willingness to play the partisan game, however, to defer to the interests and the bosses, that really broke Henry’s heart. Adams had looked to the general to tame the Senate (having dangerously overreached, he claimed, in its efforts to remove Johnson from office), rein in the emerging postwar money power (southern agrarianism no longer in vogue), and more generally model for the country a spirit of public service and high-mindedness. None of this happened. Adhering to the realities of American electoral politics, Grant’s cabinet predictably included its share of political appointees. “It is the old régime,” Henry fumed to Charles shortly after the new administration took power in March. The following month he unleashed his disappointment in “The Session,” a stinging but very able essay that appeared in the North American Review. It detailed the previous December’s assembly of the Fortieth U.S. Congress, while more widely expressing its author’s doubts about the government’s failure to move the nation forward. Inspired by Lord Robert Cecil’s “review of politics” articles in the London Quarterly, Henry sought to elevate the quality of American political discourse, primarily by exposing its present deficiencies. He argued that several key issues, including Reconstruction, revenue and monetary reform, and the restoration of presidential power, demanded address, only to receive, as he put it, “superficial attention.” In a provocative censure of democratic politics he observed, without a trace of irony, “The system itself is at fault.”5
Most emphatically, the evident need for financial reform captured Adams’s attention. As the growing nation’s money supply remained constrained in the postwar period, major creditors did well, for this increased the value of their every precious dollar. Debtors, by contrast, were obviously injured by the lack of cash. In the not too distant future the Greenback (1874–89) and Populist parties (1891–1908), two debtor-oriented coalitions, would put the currency question near the forefront of American elections. Henry identified the northern plutocracy—the creditor class—as the new driving force behind national policy, in effect replacing the old southern gentry. Thus, his observation to the Boston economist Edward Atkinson that “the whole root of the evil is in political corruption” stressed big money’s power to purchase public policy. This he thought it did altogether effectively, and he held out little hope that the patricians might manage Wall Street’s rising titans. “Our coming struggle is going to be harder than the anti-slavery fight,” he predicted. “I fear we shall be beaten on the wider field.”6
The solution to the currency question, and so many other challenges, seemed obvious to Henry: the country must learn to elevate the “right” men to office. Condemning mere politicians, he argued that an attentive electorate could always replace spoilsmen with men of high character and expertise. His appeal clearly bristled with self-interest: “To conduct the Government without the aid of trained statesmen is as dangerous as to conduct a war without the aid of trained generals.” Presumably Harvard ’58 and the like were waiting in the wings. But just how such competent men were to overcome the marching orders of national parties he left an open and perhaps unanswerable question. A host of interests or “rings,” he conceded, dominated Congress and were alert to the wishes and winks of various railroad, whiskey, and iron barons. All depended on reducing the power of the parties, for that would reduce the power of their paymasters. And yet most Americans, as Henry knew, identified closely with the country’s partisan culture; turnout in presidential elections averaged nearly 80 percent during this period. Raised on Quincy’s Old House homilies, he seemed unable to appreciate why this was so—why, say, former slaves and Union Army veterans so uncritically embraced the Republican Party and urban-based immigrants so often supported Democrats. Thus, when he wrote, “The system of protecting special interests should be reformed,” he failed to reckon that many Americans were willing to accept a certain surplus of commonplace corruption as long as their own concerns were among the protected. They, of course, had precious little privilege to fall back upon.7 He seemed further to have never entertained the idea that the Brahmins themselves constituted a kind of special interest.
Despite its author’s caste-bound shortcomings, however, “The Session” offered an intelligent if unsparing critique of contemporary political life. It not unfairly admonished the “curiously ill-informed” public, the shrewd capitalists who pocketed politicians, and, of course, the quite-willing-to-be-bought politicians themselves. In demanding good government, Henry might be said to have anticipated the Progressive reformers of a later generation (1890–1920), including the socialist Eugene Debs and the social worker Jane Addams, who were also disturbed by the power of money in politics. But this putative connection, if suggestive, is also imperfect. The eclectic Progressives—muckrakers and modernizers, social scientists and suffragists—tended to believe that more democracy meant better governance and worked for the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments which, by allowing for the taxation of the highest incomes, the popular election of U.S. senators, and “votes for women,” provided the framework for a more egalitarian century.
Henry, as noted, thought the republic safest when governed by fewer hands—those presumably belonging to the men thumbing through his essay. “For once,” he wrote to Gaskell shortly after “The Session” appeared, “I have smashed things generally and really exercised a distinct influence on public opinion by acting on the limited number of cultivated minds.”8 And to be sure, some among the would-be meritocracy took notice. The Nation called “The Session” “statesmanlike,” while Samuel Bowles, an old ally of the Governor’s and editor of the Springfield Republican, predicted a bright future for its young author:
Among the officers of the new “Reform League” at Boston may be found the names of three Adamses—all sons of the late Minister to England, and great-grandsons of the second president of the United States. Two of these names are well known to the people of the country, both in the present and the past generations,—John Quincy Adams and Charles Francis Adams. But the third—Henry Brooks Adams—designates a young gentleman who has quite as good a chance of becoming prominent in the future politics of the country as either of his brothers, although he is yet but little known.… The fruit of his winter’s studies in Washington now appears in the April North American—a long and brilliant paper on “The Session,” in which, with some conceit and some pedantry, but with more ability than either, he reviews the doings and omissions of the last session of the Fortieth Congress.9
Bowles’s generous editorial made for Henry a pleasant period of possibilities. Just removed to Washington and already the talk of the town, he might have fairly considered himself a coming man among the men who mattered. Anticipating another “Session” and perhaps still another, he sought to make the format a formula for authority. In fact, just what little clout he actually carried soon became apparent.
With the onset of “Grantism”—an acidic shorthand coined by Sumner in 1872 and broadly appropriated to construe the era’s cronyism and political corruption—Henry saw the extent of his illusions. Though greatly disappointed by the new administration, the arch-contrarian in him rather enjoyed being on the outside looking in. It felt like home. Thus, when he wrote to a friend, “My family is buried politically beyond recovery for years. I am becoming more and more isolated,” he predictably finished the thought on a defiant note: “But I rather like all this, for no one can touch me and I have asked nothing of any living person.”10
Rather than a private cri de coeur, however, Henry’s conspicuous independence and wishful plans for a rule-by-the-better-sort republic telescoped the aspirations of an entire class of liberal Victorian reformers. Its members—including the author George William Curtis, the poet James Russell Lowell, and the art historian Charles Eliot Norton—were raised in the Unitarian persuasion, spoke New-Englandese, and sought to upend the boss-and-party system. Together they occupied a shrinking stage. From the vantage of the 1890s, E. L. Godkin, editor in chief of the New York Evening Post, a reform mouthpiece that Henry once contributed to financially, looked back upon Grantism’s victory with a cutting candor. “When I think of what I hoped from America forty years ago, and see what is coming,” he wrote Norton, “I see that we all expected far too much of the human race. What stuff we used to talk!”11
Henry too liked to talk, and though long attracted to the idea of civil service reform, he never committed himself to the practical business of trying to bring it about. Belonging even to a minority faction aroused in him a palpable unease. His family’s prized political autonomy merged with an innate distrust that expected the rough game of modern partisanship to be carried by influence peddlers and crowd pleasers. To fail in such a rigged arena, in other words, held certain charms. It confirmed for Henry the problematic nature of unwieldy democracies, excused the House of Adams’s ebbing influence, and suggested the neglect of those talented but superfluous and no longer quite so young men idling about in the better Washington, London, and Paris hotels. Understanding well his own discounted value in the land of Grant, he seemed almost eager to mock the shambling political system and to heap scorn upon those who made it pay. In a gesture to be repeated many times over the years, Henry reached confidently for the martyr’s cross. “But my opinions and dislike for things in general will probably make my career a failure so far as any public distinction goes,” he wrote to Gaskell in the summer of 1869, “and I am contented to have it so.”12