Adams’s freedom to play with identity owed something to his mea-sured removal from ancestral obligation. He had no spouse, fathered no heirs, and maintained sibling relations from a polite distance. An independent income and lack of professional portfolio accentuated his autonomy of time. Presumably he once anticipated an altogether different life, a long marriage, daughters rather than nieces, and government or diplomatic work to shape his days. None of these possibilities came to pass, of course, though precisely when the weight of unspoken expectations finally, if ever, lifted is difficult to gauge. The old family instinct for public service remained strong, and under its demands Henry donned still another mask, that of the modern intellectual. Packed with opinions and beholden to no president, plutocrat, or party boss, the ostensibly detached Adams could yet spar for his share as a cultural critic.
Accordingly, Henry copiously, perhaps even obsessively documented his exile from American politics. His novels, histories, correspondence, and Education coolly considered the practice of “clean” government impossible, a fool’s errand in a spoilsmen’s paradise. In defense of this terrible truism, Adams affected to deeply, purely, and righteously loathe the contemporary world along with its congressional movers and Wall Street shakers. He invariably identified bankers and robber barons as the enemies of tradition, attacking Jews, Germans, and English alike for turning calm into chaos and chaos into profit. Left unchallenged and thus unedited by the prerogatives of privilege, these views and antipathies, which seemed to peak in the 1890s, long remained a residual condition of his thinking. His frantic insistence to Hay that “the whole carcass” of the Anglo-Continental civilization was “rotten with worms,—socialist worms, anarchist worms, Jew worms, clerical worms,” is one that he variably repeated over the years.1
So untethered was Henry from social constraints that he seemed oblivious to the unmistakable narrowing of his perceptions and judgments. One yearns to read in his late letters the deft social criticism without the anti-Semitism, the sharp cultural commentary minus the gratuitous acid. A deficit of sympathy seems to have strongly informed his attitude, which made caricatures of the tourists and shopkeepers, the politicians and investors his correspondence singed. Oliver Wendell Holmes thought Henry lacked the graceful levity to laugh—joyfully, forgivingly—at his own shortcomings as a prelude to accepting the shortcomings of others.
Adams gave no indication, however, that he wished to alter his situation. He never showed interest in a second marriage, and his ceaseless travels were often pressed into the questionable service of supporting a bleak historical perspective. True, he could appreciate on their own sublime terms Ravenna’s brilliant mosaics, Chartres’s striking cobalt-blue windows, or a stunning display of Persian embroideries that, so he sighed, “made one’s heart bleed,” but these artifacts were also invoked to damn by comparison modern economies and sensibilities.2 “Freedom,” in other words, had paradoxically penned Adams in. Responsible only for himself, he too often tangled with abstractions, unable to take life on more immediate, multiple, and generous terms. He once presumed to compensate for his intellectual isolation by sending copies of the Education to various colleagues and acquaintances for criticism, but almost none of the manuscripts was returned. Who, after all, would dare to dispute the dismal truths arranged in this forbidding tome? And who could hope to disabuse its erudite author of the enemies he had so lovingly assembled?
According to one niece, Henry’s wavering between “great kindness [and] sudden brusqueness” got to the core of the man, touching a quality both “temperamental and involuntary.”3 Sensitive to these contrary elements in his friend’s character, an inspired John Hay commissioned Saint-Gaudens in 1904 to create a medallion of Adams in portfolio with a porcupine body and cherub wings; its inscription reads “PORCVPINVS ANGELICVS HENRICVS ADAMENSO.” The medal captures its subject’s emotional complexity with a fine satirical touch, an evocation both gentle and gruff in the fanciful semblance of a sharply quilled angel.
Any extensive biographical treatment of Henry Adams must at some point consider his conspicuous anti-Semitism. By the 1880s his letters were littered with awkward and ugly references to Jews considered rough even by the day’s standards. Such remarks do Adams no credit, though they tell us much about his relationship to his times, his conception of history, and his complicated sense of irrelevance in a republic no longer dominated by the old patrician clans. For Henry, Jew-baiting served a purpose. It gave flesh to the gold-bug and bone to the dynamo, much as his impactful travels through France’s cathedral towns had more benevolently suggested a world of medieval grace and gallantry. Certainly the urban-industrial-immigrant synthesis effected, as Adams predicted, a dramatic change in American life, though his often acrid references to the Jewish people as the indispensable instruments of modernism reveal an underlying historical confusion. He had stood on firmer ground in the long History when describing a nascent process of development in America that belonged to no “race” or group. In that study he observed an inexorable transformation beyond the dictates of mere politicians, bankers, or bureaucrats—but in later years he began pointing fingers.
In his final, important works, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and the Education, Henry successively adopted the attitudes of a Norman Goth and an old republican, each identity soundly, defiantly out of step with the industrializing trend of the modern West. His anti-Semitism found room for expression in each of these voices, constituting a private reply to tumultuous times. Late nineteenth-century America witnessed a slew of mass strikes, the arrival of millions of southern and eastern European immigrants, and a severe depression that sparked unprecedented economic hardships. A number of otherwise disparate constituencies responded to this predicament with various degrees of race hostility. As the historian John Higham wrote some years ago:
Three groups in late nineteenth-century America harbored anti-Jewish feelings that went beyond mere social discrimination: some of the agrarian radicals caught up in the Populist movement; certain patrician intellectuals in the East, such as Henry and Brooks Adams and Henry Cabot Lodge; and many of the poorest classes in urban centers. Different as they were, each of these groups found itself at a special disadvantage in the turmoil of an industrial age—the poor because it exploited them, the patricians because it displaced them.4
One can observe the patrician reaction in its tenacious efforts to remain a people apart. The nation’s old cultural elite began in the 1880s to establish country clubs and create patriotic societies with membership dependent on pedigrees reaching deep into the American past. Groton (1884) and a number of other private schools—including Westminster (1888), Woodberry Forest (1889), Choate (1890), Taft (1890), and Hotchkiss (1891)—were founded in part to provide a class-based education. As Leonard Dinnerstein has noted, “the appearance of the first Social Register” in 1887 furnished “people who counted in society [with] a book to inform them of who belonged to their most exclusive circles.”5 More aggressive efforts on behalf of race snobbery followed, such as the founding of the Immigration Restriction League (1884), whose membership included the influential historian John Fiske, future Harvard University president A. Lawrence Lowell, and Senator Lodge. The growth of the League outside of its New England stronghold—into New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco, among other cities—gives some indication of its appeal beyond the Brahmins. At the progressive University of Wisconsin, a number of talented social scientists, including the economist Richard Ely, labor historian John R. Commons, and sociologist Edward A. Ross, were sympathetic to the League’s concerns with the “coarsening” of the American population via the rapid introduction of Mediterraneans, Slavs, and Jews. Ross, particularly alarmed by the prospect of “race suicide,” became an advocate of eugenics. Lending his scholarly reputation to a number of organizations seeking to “enhance” genetic quality in America, he provided testimony to the Wisconsin legislature when it considered a law to authorize sterilization. He called critics of the bill “essentially sentimental.”6
In Great Britain and its dominions during this period, support also built for limiting immigration. The Aliens Act of 1905 slashed the number of Jewish arrivals in the United Kingdom dramatically, while Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all moved, through literacy tests and other means, to promote a form of white nativism. Concerned with the declining British birth rate, the socialist Sidney Webb feared for a “national deterioration” as the country “gradually [succumbed] to the Irish and the Jews.”7 It is within this heightened racial context, one informed by widespread movements of peoples and cultures, that Adams’s views should be assessed and understood.
Prior to the 1880s Henry had exhibited no particular grievances toward Jews; indeed he counted among his kin a Jewish brother-in-law, Charles Kuhn, married to his beloved sister Louisa. A few years after Loo and Charles’s 1854 marriage Henry, then studying law in Germany, witnessed perhaps his first overt episode of anti-Semitism. Bertha and Fanny Gans, American friends of his older brothers, were snubbed at a Court Ball in Dresden and then became the subjects of town gossip. The experience disgusted Henry, who wrote to Brooks of the attacks on the Misses Gans, “The Germans are still a semi-barbarous people and the ideas of the middle-ages are alive and kicking in the nineteenth century.” Years later, Henry and Clover enjoyed cordial acquaintances in London with the Goldsmids and the Montefiores, “Jews,” one Adams scholar tells us, “of their own class and complexion.”8
Interestingly, considering his views, Adams took some mixed pride in pointing out that a certain “Hebraic” tradition linked the “chosen people” of Israel to the Puritan plantationeers occupying their own hallowed “city upon a hill.” He played upon this idea on the opening page of the Education when comparing his “branded” birth into a founding family of the American nation to that of a Jewish babe belonging to a “holy nation.” Perhaps he was also making a comment on the dangers of insularity. “Had he been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple,” he wrote of himself, “and circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest, under the name of Israel Cohen, he would scarcely have been more distinctly branded, and not much more heavily handicapped in the races of the coming century, in running for such stakes as the century was to offer.” This putative connection of Brahmins and Jews may sound self-serving in Henry’s hands, though it is one that Thomas Jefferson had made many years earlier while attacking the Federalist Party. In a 1798 letter to a Virginia politician, Jefferson had insisted, “Our New England associates… are marked, like the Jews, with such perversity of character, as to constitute, from that circumstance, the natural division of our parties.” Adams quoted this line in the History, poking fun at the intolerance to which Jefferson, a champion of Enlightenment liberalism, so innocently advertised. The quip, he assured readers, was humorous largely “because no humor was intended.”9
It is further worth remembering that Henry drew a respectful portrait of a Jewish character in the novel Democracy. His description of the old diplomat Baron Jacobi, a “witty” and “cynical” Washington transplant who rues America’s cultural backwardness and “seemed to have met every noted or notorious personage of the century,” sounds almost like an authorial self-description. Jacobi saw through the thin tissue of corrupt capital politics but chose to be an amiable guest who “accepted the prejudices of Anglo-Saxon society, and was too clever to obtrude his opinions upon others.” He would not, however, accept humiliation. We last see the resourceful baron getting much the better in a physical altercation with an offensive senator who, on a public sidewalk, attempts to block his path; the proud diplomat staggers the dull pol with the full force of his walking cane. Jacobi, Henry approvingly wrote, lacked not for “high temper and personal courage.”10
Some years after Democracy appeared, Adams became acquainted (through La Farge) with the young American art historian Bernard Berenson. Despite their differences in age and ethnicity, the two struck up a sociable correspondence. Adams could never forget, however, Berenson’s Jewish Lithuanian roots. In the winter of 1904 Berenson and his wife joined a small breakfast party at Adams’s house. Their host, admitting to being in a “dark purple gloom,” proceeded, so he relayed to one correspondent, to make the Berensons uncomfortable:
[A]t last—Barenson and his wife! Well, you know, you see, you know I can’t beat it. There is, in the Jew deprecation, something that no weary sinner ought to stand. I rarely murder. By nature I am humane. Life, to such people, is perhaps dear, or at least worth living, and I hate to take it. Yet I did murder Barenson. I cut his throat first, and chopped him into small bits afterwards and rolled the fragments into the fire. In my own house I ought not to have done so. I tried to do it gently, without apparent temper or violence of manner. Alas! murder will out.
In her diary afterward, Mary Berenson described Adams as “pretty rude.”11
This insolence arose principally from Henry’s association of Jews with the historical process of liberal capitalist development. It is a race prejudice he held in common with some of America’s most significant writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Edith Wharton’s social-climbing Simon Rosedale plays to type in The House of Mirth; Theodore Dreiser once called New York “a Kyke’s dream of a Ghetto”; and the journalist and satirist H. L. Mencken described “the Jews… as the most unpleasant race ever heard of.” Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, the latter calling it “undesirable” to live amid “any large number of free-thinking Jews,” have elicited in scholarly circles cottage industries on this theme. And yet other notable Progressive-era personalities, such as William Dean Howells, William James, and the essayist Randolph Bourne, were unsparing critics of American parochialism; Oliver Wendell Holmes, himself among the highest of Brahmins, maintained strong friendships over many years with Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, and Harold Laski. In Adams’s case a number of circumstances converged to stiffen his anti-Semitism: disappointment at the development of Victorian civilization, a congenital mental rigidity (liberally evident as one peeked up the family tree), and the quiet complicity of friends. Hay, Gaskell, and Lizzie Cameron at the very least tolerated his remarks. Adams felt comfortable enough with Gaskell to write of his 1895 return to London, “I plunge into a horde of Jews, the most terrible since the middle-ages. They are secret and banded together; they lie; they cheat the Christian; they are gutter-Jews at that, the new lot; and they own us all.”12 He is obviously speaking for effect, but there is more than a soupçon of real scorn in such ugly words.
With Brooks, Henry found a willing ally in his indictment against the Jewish people. The Law of Civilization and Decay offered statistical “proof” for the claims made earlier by the European clerical press that international (that is, Jewish) bankers advantageously manipulated global finance. In the storm of trade wars and expanding economic empires, older spiritual expressions, along with regional markets and low-intensity capitalism, presumably succumbed to a parasitic finance capitalism bereft of honor, paternalism, and social responsibility. Brooks describes this process in his book, indicating the recent and to him regrettable decline of Anglo-Saxon leadership before a new moneyed aristocracy:
The ideal statesman had been one who, like Cromwell, Frederic the Great, Henry IV., William III., and Washington, could lead his followers in battle.… In France and Germany the old tradition lasted to within a generation. Only after 1871 came the new era, an era marked by many social changes. For the first time in their history the ruler of the French people passed admittedly from the martial to the monied type, and everywhere the same phenomenon appeared; the whole administration of society fell into the hands of the economic man.
And the embodiment of the economic man, Brooks warned readers, was “the Jew in London.”13
Henry’s spiteful references to Jews have generally overshadowed his equally crude, if not equally abundant, Irish-taunting. Both ethnic groups were in a sense inheritors of traditional Anglo power and thus ripe for Adams’s derision. He crassly wrote to Elizabeth Cameron in 1910 of Boston’s new mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald (grandfather of John F. Kennedy), “Poor Boston has fairly run up against it in the form of its particular Irish maggot, rather lower than the Jew, but more or less the same in appetite for cheese.”14 Together the Irish and Jewish peoples in America challenged the already fading genteel tradition. More, they contributed to the indispensable labor power that made the United States an industrial giant. Their energy, outlook, and ambition matched the dynamic needs of the nation, and Adams, who thought of himself as “eighteenth century” in outlook, was not wrong in claiming that he felt a stranger in his own land.
Filled with a sense of displacement, he drifted around the globe in search of an antidote to Anglo-Saxon materialism. As noted, France attracted him greatly and he began to spend summers there. “On the whole France impressed me favorably,” he wrote to Brooks in 1895. “The signs of decay are less conspicuous than in any other country I have visited. Capitalistic processes are less evident. The small man has a better chance. The people understand the age better, and still make a fight. Of course the Jew is great, but he is not yet absolute, as he is [in England].” Perhaps not surprisingly Henry read with interest the French anti-Semite Édouard Drumont and the former Boulangiste Henri Rochefort. Both men were sharp critics of bourgeois civilization and zealous anti-Dreyfusards.15
The Dreyfus Affair—Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French artillery officer, was wrongly convicted in 1895 on charges of treason—rocked France for several years. Touching upon questions of justice, citizenship, and anti-Semitism, it exposed a deep and searing rift between traditionalists (the church and army) and modernists (republican and anticlerical sentiment) over the nation’s future. Henry unhesitatingly favored the former. The difficulty hovering over the affair, he believed, concerned Western civilization’s tenuous commitment to its conservative military and religious traditions. He insisted to Hay that the Dreyfus case constituted nothing less than “a moral collapse that involves soldiers and civilians alike, and the capacity of the French to maintain a character of any sort in a world like Europe.”16
Yet as early as 1898, a year before Dreyfus was pardoned, Adams recognized the injustice of the situation. “I grant the innocence of Drei-fus,” he wrote. The artillery officer’s fate interested him less, however, than the fate of France. “What I am curious about is the thing that comes next,” he wrote to Elizabeth Cameron. “Dreifuss is to be set free—that has been foreseen… but what is to become of France? They can’t acquit Dreifuss without condemning France.” Henry took the position that come what may, the integrity of the French Army must at all costs be preserved. As late as 1899, several years into the affair and after it was known that high-ranking military officials had suppressed evidence demonstrating Dreyfus’s innocence, he swore to being “rather impressed by the good appearance of the army.” In a strained analogy, he claimed that the American Civil War had taught him “to back the Army and Navy against everything everywhere on every occasion,” and he now presumed to support the French military to the same degree, even if it resided, as he put it, on the side of “injustice.” No doubt he saw in the coming victory of the Dreyfusards the imminent collapse of the comparatively pre-industrial culture that drew him to Paris each year. For an old Norman, this depressing eventuality provoked an outpouring of unseemly sentiments. In one letter acknowledging his belief in Dreyfus’s innocence, he could not contain himself from adding, “Drei-fus himself is a howling Jew.”17
It is easy to regard Henry’s Judeophobia as remote and private, a personality tic largely confined to his correspondence. The historian Albert S. Lindemann has noted that Adams “did not try to bring his anti-Semitic ideas into the political arena or to transform them into action; his was not the crusading or populist anti-Semitism.” And yet the wide and influential circle of his friends and acquaintances was such that his race snobbery became a point of open conversation. Some of those near to him remembered well his fierce language and corrosive tone. After listening to Henry once too often despair of the Dreyfus “convulsion,” Hay drolly declared to Elizabeth Cameron that Adams “now believes the earthquake at Krakatoa was the work of [the pro-Dreyfusard novelist Émile] Zola and when he saw Vesuvius reddening the midnight air he searched the horizon to find a Jew stoking the fire.”18 Hay no doubt knew just how far to take his old friend’s views, though the writer Owen Wister suggested that Adams’s sardonic tongue perhaps negatively influenced the younger and less intellectually secure who shared his society:
His talk was informed and pointed, he knew an extraordinary number of things very well—better than almost anybody you were likely to see in America—to be with him, dine with him, was a luxury and an excitement. He fascinated not only beautiful and particular ladies, but clever and aspiring young men as well. For some of these his influence was not quite wholesome; not only your patriotism, but your faith in life, had to be pretty well grown up to withstand the doses of distilled and vitriolic mockery which Henry Adams could administer.19
Not long after his death, Adams began to appear in many of his acquaintances’ memoirs. These accounts tended to ignore his inelegant remarks on Jewry, a topic in any event not typically discussed in polite circles. As Professor J. C. Levenson has noted, “The question of Adams’s anti-Semitism really was not raised until the post-Auschwitz era, and when it finally did come up beginning in the 1950s, it was brought into discussion principally by Jewish scholars.”20 Two of these men, Richard Hofstadter (actually half-Jewish) and Alfred Kazin, were good friends who, in their respective fields, sought to recast, in light of the Great Depression and Second World War, the political and literary history of America. Both formed early, lasting, and conflicting opinions of Adams. While preparing a study on social Darwinism in the United States, a twenty-something Hofstadter wrote Kazin, “Been skimming through Henry Adams’ letters for my book. I never realized before what a… real pig of a genteel Anglo-Saxon Jews-are-commercial-and-have-no-manners anti-Semite… he was.” Kazin, as Hofstadter knew, admired Adams and “liked,” so Kazin noted, “to mock my fascination… by quoting Adams’s insane hatred of Jews, especially immigrant Jews.” They agreed, however, that American industrial power was a uniquely unsettling force. “We were both,” Kazin later reflected, “in the spell of what had caught and frightened Adams.”21 In these two prominent public intellectuals of the twentieth century do we see on a slight scale the broader struggle among critics and readers alike to make sense of Adams’s anti-Semitism. No doubt it accompanied certain class chauvinisms shared by many Brahmins, but even some of these highly educated Bostonians casually wondered at Henry’s intolerance. He seemed since youth a crusader in search of a distant cause. And what offended him—Grantism, gold-bugs, dynamos—he interpreted as the instruments of a coming apocalypse. This contemplative Buddha, presumably surviving quietly on the “edges of life,” sheltered a scattering of spoken and silent resentments, a few of which proved in their glistening appeal too rooted and too strong to overcome.