The Gallatin project announced Henry’s promise as a historian, even as it underlined the genre’s inherent limitations. A document-based study, no matter how detailed, could only hint at the early republic’s “spirit,” mentality, and mood. His next book, by contrast, offered an unrestricted God’s-eye-view of its subject—with Henry playing God. That is to say, he wrote a novel. Published anonymously on April Fools’ Day 1880 while its author visited London, Democracy dissected a Washington political world that revealed itself in varying shades of ambition and vulgarity, ready for commentary and ripe for caricature. It proved to be one of Adams’s most satisfying literary efforts, not least because its sharp and unsparing comments on the U.S. system of government found a wider and more appreciative audience than his earlier salvos in the Nation and the North American Review. There is an obvious effort in this small volume to pull off a social comedy, though it perhaps reads best as an attempt to update Tocqueville, the skeptical diagnostician of New World egalitarianism. Its strengths were obvious if uneven. “It is good enough,” a half-impressed Henry James confided to a friend, “to make it a pity it isn’t better.”1
Democracy is a Washington-centered satire whose heroine, Mrs. Madeleine Lee, is a widowed New York “society girl” bored with New York society. Her old Virginia gentry husband recently buried, she comes to the capital eager to study the machinery of power; she has naïve designs on becoming a force for good government. In Washington she is promptly flattered, tempted, and proposed to by the ethically challenged Illinois senator Silas P. Ratcliffe, Henry’s scornful send-up of the scandal-dogged Maine congressman James G. Blaine. A leading presidential candidate, Blaine saw his prospects sink in 1876 when a packet of correspondence—the Mulligan letters—implicated him in the corrupt granting of railroad charters. Shortly after the accused pol defended his actions before Congress, a tart Adams wrote to Lodge, “Poor Blaine squeals louder than all the other pigs.… Disgust has now filled my mind for the whole subject.”2
The halting Ratcliffe-Lee courtship, cautious on her side, calculating on his, concludes unhappily, though Ratcliffe’s naked designs on the presidency survive this minor turbulence of the heart. Lee is more impacted by the affair. Her plans to turn Ratcliffe into an “honest politician” humiliatingly rebuffed, she recognizes the folly of her undertaking and takes wing overseas. Any similarity in her efforts as a would-be reformer and Henry’s are purely intentional.
One might profitably read Democracy as a savory parody of post–Civil War politics in all of its vote-buying, election-fixing, Gilded Age glory, though the book supports a still broader historical context. Published slightly more than a century after Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, it offers a negative progress report of sorts on the republic’s ragged development. In one scene a select group undertakes the short pilgrimage from the capital to Mount Vernon. There, a stunned Lee, charmed by the graceful simplicity of Washington’s Palladian-style home, is inspired by its pastoral surroundings to a somber recognition: “Why was it, she said bitterly to herself, that everything Washington touched, he purified, even down to the associations of his house? and why is it that everything we touch seems soiled? Why do I feel unclean when I look at Mount Vernon?” The passage clearly recalls Henry’s own impressionable visit to Washington’s house in 1850 and the sense that, though a mere boy, he “took to it instinctively.”3
Other Lee-Adams overlaps are easy to spot, though unmistakable traces of him are evident in several characters. John Carrington, for one, is a Virginia-bred lawyer living in Washington and eager to keep Lee “pure” by blocking Ratcliffe’s advances. Like Henry, he is resigned to witness the duplicity of the city’s politicians. And Nathan Gore, a Massachusetts historian futilely angling for a ministerial post in Europe (modeled mainly on the altogether more successful historian and diplomat John Lothrop Motley), longs for the courtly cosmopolitan life that enticed Adams. There is also Baron Jacobi, a sarcastic old Bulgarian envoy who, if powerless to impede Ratcliffe’s ascent, nevertheless sees through the senator’s Machiavellian schemes. Jacobi’s lyrical cynicism evokes in broad but certain terms Henry’s defiant outlook.
But for all of these ancillary males, it is Madeleine Lee who carries the cross of Henry’s concerns. Though denied the opportunity to vote or to hold office, women, as Adams knew, could attain influence as informal, unrecognized advisors. It was in this capacity, beyond the reach of elections and popularity contests, that he had once perceived a place for himself in the capital hierarchy. He thought the Adamses as politically chaste as any female in the country. Accordingly, he invests Lee with his own complicated mosaic of doubts, aspirations, and resignations. He writes of her being “tortured by ennui,” a frustrated reformer who discovered in polite philanthropy a “path [that]… seemed to lead nowhere.”4 Seeing clearly the limitations of a scholarly life spent attacking political corruption from the on-high pages of the North American Review, Henry preferred a front-row seat at the fight. His grudging understanding that he could only be a spectator in this particular blood sport is the late afternoon awareness that finally enlightens Lee.
But her discovery does little to still an inborn appetite for rallying around a perfectly lost cause. In a telling passage relating Lee’s “eminently respectable” genealogy, Henry writes, “Was she not herself devoured by ambition, and was she not now eating her heart out because she could find no one object worth a sacrifice?… What did she want?” Like Henry, the already privileged Lee coveted neither wealth nor social status. She wished, rather, to observe “the action of primary forces” in Washington, to decipher the “massive machinery” of a politically corrupt society, and to measure “the capacity of the motive power” to shape an entire civilization.5 Adams would later apply nearly identical terms in the Education when writing of the awesome dynamos.
And perhaps it is this evident concern with “machinery” and “primary forces” that hampered Henry’s efforts in Democracy to convincingly portray human drama. Its characters are stiff and drawn too closely to type; the book is overly intellectualized, with a crush of speeches, conversations, letters, and inner dialogues passing as action; and everything that transpires in the novel moves mechanically toward a predictable end: the disillusioning of Madeleine Lee. But just why readers should care about her is unclear, and thus the story’s central theme, the quest for power, never cuts very deep. Lee piously wants to reform politics, while Ratcliffe unapologetically prefers politics as usual. There is little discussion of their motivations, and this is a crucial blemish, particularly in regard to Ratcliffe, whose moral poverty cries out for context. As he is a symbol of robber baron rule, readers want to understand his reasons, psychology, and justifications.
One further wonders if Henry realized that Ratcliffe could easily be read as the story’s spry knight. No one else in the novel is as energetic, disciplined, charismatic, or capable. Yes, the senator facilitated voter fraud in the 1864 presidential election, but he did so in order to ensure Lincoln’s Union-saving reelection. Carrington, by contrast, is an ineffectual southerner ineffectually courting Lee, and Lee, despite a host of Nation-approved arguments on the baleful effects of political corruption, is unable to refute Ratcliffe in their private parleys. One is inclined to see a bit of Henry in Ratcliffe, as when the latter counters Lee’s lame case-making for reform with a wizened insistence that “no representative government can long be much better or much worse than the society it represents.” There is also evidence in the novel that for all his Lee-like campaigning against corruption, Henry saw and perhaps even respected the efficacy of men such as Ratcliffe. In a tricornered conversation with Lee and Carrington, Gore is asked his opinion of the senator and whether the senator should not be expected to stump for clean government. “Mr. Ratcliffe has a practical piece of work to do,” Gore evenly replies, “his business is to make laws and advise the President; he does it extremely well. We have no other equally good practical politician; it is unfair to require him to be a crusader besides.”6 Perhaps Henry is striking an ironic note here, but the reader’s trust in Gore and doubts about Lee and Carrington carry the argument in Ratcliffe’s favor. This impression is only reinforced when Lee and Carrington, their delicate sensibilities wounded, abandon America for travel and work abroad. It is Ratcliffe, now heading the Treasury Department, who remains in the country, doing its business and making not so distant plans to claim the presidency.
For contemporary readers, Carrington is of interest only to the extent that he tells us something about Henry’s—and by extension, a number of patricians’—views of the Civil War. Carrington is the idealized southerner, a reluctant secessionist raised in “the old Washington school” and mourning the passing of his section’s quasi-aristocratic traditions. On the issue of slavery, the cause of the secession movement that Carrington’s Confederacy fought for, Adams is deafeningly silent. This is a highly selective history of the war and Reconstruction, essentially deferring to the white South’s perspective. It is Carrington, the pardoned rebel, “whom life had treated hardly,” and it is the “poor Lees” who were “driven away” from their Arlington home.7
In such blinkered scenes is Democracy’s grandee pedigree on display; its author commiserates with his “kind,” and anyone hailing from, say, west of the Appalachians is in for rough treatment. The president is dismissed as “a small Indiana farmer” pushed forward by an aggressively unsophisticated wife and a brutish crew of “tobacco-chewing, newspaper-reading satellites”; Ratcliffe may run Washington, but this “Prairie Giant’s” plebeian roots, summoned in the sterile atmosphere of “a horse-hair sofa before an air-tight iron stove in a small room with high, bare white walls,” also invite satire.8 The unrelenting narrowness of these caricatures dilutes the novel’s aspiration to be, as its subtitle insists, “an American tale.” The many sins Henry exposes are no doubt worthy of reflection, though on balance the overall portrait is skewed. One finds in its pages nothing to suggest democracy’s vitality and inspirational power, let alone why so many “prairie” Americans had just a generation earlier sacrificed their lives for the furtherance of popular government.
As a story of political intrigue, however, Democracy proved a surprising success. It sold well on both sides of the English-speaking Atlantic and received a French translation within a few months of publication. Nearly three years after its appearance Henry James, ignorant of its author’s identity but interested in the novel’s surprising reach, wrote Clover, “[It] forms the favorite reading of [British Prime Minister] Mr. [William] Gladstone. Mrs. [Mary] Sands [an American expatriate] told me last summer that she had sat next to him at dinner, one day when he talked of it for an hour. ‘He said it was written in such a handy style, you know!’ ”9 Had James been intimate with the Adamses’ Washington arrangement, he may have been able to guess Democracy’s author. Madeleine Lee furnished her Lafayette Square home with the variety of “Persian and Syrian rugs and embroideries, Japanese bronzes and porcelain” prized by Henry and Clover; Carrington enjoyed horseback riding in Rock Creek, a favorite Adams haunt; and the novel ends with Lee planning an Egyptian retreat, this a defeat of sorts evoking for Henry, perhaps, the difficult period he and Clover experienced on the Nile.
Adams’s authorship of Democracy remained more or less a secret for many years. This gave rise to a spirited guessing game among gossiping pols and literati to identify the writer. Blaine thought King the probable culprit but later came to suspect Clover; hedging his bets he cut both socially. Other likely candidates included Hay, the crusading Godkin, the journalist Manton Marble, and the lawyer and writer Arthur George Sedgwick. The Adamses enjoyed their mystery and actively protected it by deflection. Clover was much amused by her father’s conjecture that she wrote Democracy and accompanied her letter of denial with an index of other candidates, which included two of her fellow Hearts but not her husband. Henry’s English friend Sir Robert Cunliffe asked point blank if Adams knew who wrote the novel, prompting Adams to reply less than candidly, “I cannot enlighten you about the authorship of ‘Democracy,’ ” before he too offered a “black list” of the usual suspects.10
Invariably some of the guesses hit the mark. The British novelist Mary Augusta Ward detected an overlap in spleen venting between Democracy and an article Henry had published in the North American Review. Cecil Spring Rice, a young British diplomat who frequented the Adamses’ Lafayette Square residence, had it half right when he wrote his brother in 1887, “Adams, son of the Minister and joint author of Democracy, is rather an interesting sort of cynic, and I had a real jolly evening with him last night talking over England and America. The feeling about politicians is very bitter, certainly.” In the 1909 study A Manual of American Literature, Cornell scholar Clark Sutherland Northup wrote that Democracy’s “authorship… ha[d] hitherto baffled the critics,” and then announced “definitely” that the work belonged to “the historian Henry Adams.” Northup praised the novel as “keen and incisive” yet “all too pessimistic.” Finally, in 1923, five years after Henry’s death, Henry Holt, Democracy’s publisher, confirmed Adams’s authorship.11
Upon reflection it is clear that the novel served a number of purposes for Adams. Most obviously it proved an ideal vehicle for dramatizing the catalog of complaints that he had piled piecemeal over the years in any number of small circulation journals. Democracy further afforded Henry a welcome change of creative technique from his dense study of the Jefferson and Madison administrations, now well under way. And in terms of sharpening his instruments, he learned much from experimenting with fiction, thus enlarging his writer’s repertoire. Certain stretches of the History—including the wonderfully written Burr affair, in which his antihero contemplates severing a piece of the republic for himself—contain pace, atmosphere, and irony the envy of any historian.
Finally, Democracy tells us something important about Adams’s dimming view of America’s prospects. The republic’s assumed exceptionalism is treated in the novel as merely platitudinous. As Madeleine Lee discovers, getting “to the bottom of this business of democratic government” meant realizing “that it was nothing more than government of any other kind.” This is the type of double-edged observation that can appear either solemnly wise or superficially clever. It pokes nicely at American arrogance while managing to underestimate the real power of its idealism. Theodore Roosevelt, no admirer of clever men, had little use for the book. “The other day,” he wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge in 1905, “I was reading Democracy, that novel which made a great furor among the educated incompetents and the pessimists generally about twenty-five years ago. It was written by Godkin, perhaps with assistance from Mrs. Henry Adams. It had a superficial and rotten cleverness, but it was essentially mean and base, and it is amusing to read it now and see how completely events have given it the lie.”12 Roosevelt’s dismissal of Democracy should come as no surprise. If Madeleine Lee retreated from the trials of her time, TR embraced those of his, eager to advance what he famously called “the strenuous life.” Under the auspices of the Square Deal, Roosevelt piloted a series of regulatory reforms that furthered the cause of popular government and established something of a template for future progressive platforms. But did such initiatives really give Democracy “the lie”? Who would deny that when approached as a meditation on power, greed, and partisanship, Henry’s “mean and base” send-up of Washington retains, nearly a century and a half on, every bit of its wit, bite, and relevance?