As Henry entered his sexagenarian decade, evidence of aging began to press upon him. During a visit to a Parisian antique dealer, so he told Elizabeth Cameron, “I happened to… ask a question, and, to my consternation, my French tumbled out all in a heap. The words came out without connection.” His correspondence shows that he complained of rheumatism and dyspepsia and put himself under the knife of a London surgeon to have a wen (protruding cyst) removed from a shoulder: “I feared [I] might… look like a camel if I left it alone.” Ailing teeth drove him to a Paris dentist because, he said, “Even at my age I am unwilling to have false teeth or to go toothless.” He began to take increased notice of the obituaries (and rumors of impending deaths) in the several papers he perused, observing as well the published details of probated wills. He enjoyed knowing who got what. He remained a tireless reader, a chronic gossip, and an almost desperate traveler, but the pace began to slow. “My machine,” he wrote to a niece about this time, “is quite worn.”1
But worn, torn, or otherwise, the sudden occupational ascendancy of men in Henry’s immediate orbit failed not to kindle his interest. Hay’s State Department appointment coincided with Lodge’s emergence as a force in the U.S. Senate and Roosevelt’s improbable presidency, assumed after the September 1901 assassination of William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Knowing these men—one a close friend, the other a former student, and the third an occasional dining companion—brought Adams, weaned on memories of presidential relatives, as close to actual power as he would ever come. “In a small society, such ties between houses become political and social force,” he remarked in the Education on this unusual period. “Without intention or consciousness, they fix one’s status in the world. Whatever one’s preferences in politics might be, one’s house was bound to the Republican interest when sandwiched between… John Hay and Cabot Lodge, with Theodore Roosevelt equally at home in them all.”2 Despite this image of a cozy Lafayette Square quartet, generational and temperamental differences kept Adams and Hay at a certain remove from Lodge and Roosevelt. There would be no Hearts Redux. The graying, gimlet-eyed Cabot, so Henry insisted, had grown pompous and imperious, a secure Senate seat only exacerbating his already pronounced sense of privilege. Adams’s relationship with Roosevelt, rarely warm, often idled near mutual contempt.
Twenty years Henry’s junior, TR, a caricaturist’s dream of chubby cheeks, flagrant teeth, and granny glasses, sized up the older man as a chronic cynic, too shrewd, detached, and cerebral for his own good. Adams returned this aspersion with relish, never quite shaking the suspicion that Roosevelt resembled in his dapper Rough Riders ensemble an overly excited eight-year-old. The two men invariably grated on each other; the president’s typically buoyant, often artless, and inevitably insistent nature made for a poor complement to Henry’s ironic disposition. During a casual dinner with Adams, the Cabots, and the Hays in January 1902, the new president, all of four months in office, presumed to instruct Henry before the others. “He lectures me on history as though he were a high-school pedagogue,” Henry complained to Lizzie. “Of course I fall back instantly on my protective pose of ignorance, which aggravates his assertions, and so we drift steadily apart.” Two months later he fumed to Gaskell that America was being “run by a school-boy barely out of college.”3
For both TR and Cabot, intimacy with Adams and Hay meant a certain vicarious connection to American history, both made and written. Henry’s people were enshrined in the nation’s textbooks as revolutionaries, while Hay had served as Lincoln’s assistant and private secretary. Each of the four could claim to be historians, though Adams and Hay were clearly a cut above their younger colleagues. Henry’s History and Hay and Nicolay’s Lincoln were considered masterworks, while Lodge’s filiopietistic profiles of early republic conservatives—Washington, Hamilton, and Daniel Webster—and Roosevelt’s drama-filled studies, The Naval War of 1812 and The Winning of the West, occupy distinctly lower rungs.
For a number of reasons these men never engaged in outright competition. Adams and Hay refused to vie for elective office and enjoyed reputations as cultured gentlemen who traveled, collected art, and, in Hay’s case, wrote poetry. They appreciated satire, could be sharp-tonged, and savored Washington society; they were in love with the same inaccessible woman. And having served the Union during the Civil War (if not in the field), they could be said to have had little to prove. Lodge, by contrast, was eager to make his mark on American diplomacy. An unapologetic imperialist, he thought McKinley and Hay had lingered indecisively on the question of annexing the Philippines. Resentful of such criticism, Hay once complained to Adams that Lodge caused him more difficulty “than all the governments of Europe, Asia and the Sulu Islands, and all the Senators from the wild West and the Congressmen from the rebel confederacy.”4
As virtual H Street housemates, Adams and Hay fell into a pattern of daily late afternoon walks, on which the secretary unburdened himself of various State Department pressures. In a note to Lizzie Cameron, Henry briefly discussed the nature of these excursions:
Of course my chief visitor is John Hay who comes to take me to walk at four o’clock, and… occasionally dines here. John… is singularly detached. His attitude towards Theodore is that of a benevolent and amused uncle. He has usually some story to tell, or some outburst to repeat, partly with fun and occasionally with surprise or even astonishment, but never as though he felt any responsibility.5
In his own letters to Lizzie, Hay portrayed Adams as a welcome fund of comic relief from the rigors of office: “I go to the Department at nine and work till five and then carry home a little portfolio of annoyances.… If it were not for the blessed Dor [a nickname for Adams] my lot would be most pitiable. He takes me for a walk in the gloaming and predicts catastrophes and ruin till my own cares fade away in the light of the coming cataclysm.”6
As a loyal companion, Adams nodded sympathetically at Hay’s concerns, knew his place, and generally agreed with his friend’s judgments. In February 1904, the month the Russo-Japanese War began, he wrote to Lizzie, “Hay came at four to walk, and talked an hour straight, about Russia and the situation. We fought over the whole field, as you may imagine, and differed only as to the measurements of our own dangers.”7 Hay’s first biographer, William Roscoe Thayer, came to the conclusion that Adams exerted an “indirect, almost subconscious influence” on the secretary. His Life and Letters of John Hay appeared in 1915, a decade after his subject’s death, though Thayer had access to Cameron’s and Adams’s impressions. In a 1916 letter to Cameron, Thayer maintained that he could see no explicit connection between Adams and State Department decisions:
As to Henry Adams: I undertook the work without any preconceived notions; but many persons told me, as you intimate, that Mr. Adams really guided Hay’s policy as Secretary of State. There is nothing to indicate this in the record. The great pilot after 1901 was Roosevelt, who put through several of the chief measures which were commonly attributed to Hay.… Mr. Adams himself assures me that Hay rarely consulted him, or any other friend, on State Department matters.8
It is unlikely, of course, that had Henry strongly impacted Hay’s thinking, he would have told Thayer. Among closer companions, however, he occasionally suggested a kind of informal working relationship with the president and his leading men. He wrote Gaskell late in the fall of 1901, “I am afraid to go home and get kicked by my triumvirate friends—Roosevelt, Hay and Lodge—who are now running our foreign affairs and have a way of running them in my house at the cost of my comfort.” This wry report proved prophetic. In early 1905 Adams, at the instigation of the White House, welcomed to his home the British diplomat Cecil Spring Rice, on leave from St. Petersburg, where he served as chargé d’affaires. While parking his toothbrush on H Street, Spring Rice carried on private discussions with Roosevelt regarding the Russo-Japanese War. The conflict interested Henry, for it seemed to confirm Brooks’s geopolitical outline of rising (Japan) and declining (Russia) powers while lending itself to the kind of statistical sampling of raw materials and energy then much on Adams’s mind. He believed, so he told Spring Rice, that Russia’s defeat in the war prefaced America’s own eventual downturn. “We can not run our machine another thirty years,” he remembered the dynamos of Chicago and Paris, “without some similar convulsion.”9
Whether or not Henry actually believed a looming crack-up threatened the United States (his “thirty years” guess works out to 1935—the depths of the Great Depression), he certainly worried over America’s strategic role in the world. In 1901 he condemned several examples of what he considered Western overreach, panning British efforts to subdue the Dutch Boers in South Africa, questioning a mainly European alliance’s response to the anticolonial Boxer Rebellion in China (1899–1901), and scolding America’s brutal ongoing war (1899–1902) against the Philippine Republic. He saw in these counterrevolutionary efforts on the part of the major powers a self-defeating strategy. “I hold our Philippine excursion to be a false start in a wrong direction,” he wrote Brooks, “and one that is more likely to blunt our energies than to guide them. It is a mere repetition of the errors of Spain and England.” Having little faith in the efficacy of old empires, he proposed a new structure of statecraft, later, under Woodrow Wilson, to take the name “liberal internationalism.” Reflecting on the futures of various emancipated or soon to be emancipated peoples, Adams believed that only the United States could lead the world forward. European colonialism, he contended, “creates, nourishes and preserves more dangers than it eliminates.” He suggested to Brooks that the New World’s defining historical moment was now at hand: “We all agree that the old, uneconomical races, Boers, Chinese, Irish, Russians, Turks, and negroes, must somehow be brought to work into our system. The whole question is how to do it. Europe has always said: Buy or Fight! So the Irish, the Boers and the Chinese are likely to remain unassimilated. We Americans ought to invent a new method.”10
But even when calling for Washington to take the reins, Henry still demurred, still sometimes posed as a Populist or a Silverite on the sinking side of history’s beautiful losers. He occasionally mocked Hay’s pretentions to American hegemony in Asia—“Your open door is already off its hinges,” he wrote his fellow Heart during the Boxer Rebellion—and claimed to be making his stand with modernity’s malcontents. As if it were not enough to be a twelfth-century Norman or brother to a Tahitian prince, he took on still more identities in his quest to resist the colonizers: “I who am a worm—and trodden upon, at that—am quite Chinese, Asiatic, Boer, and anarchist.”11
Parsing Adams’s views on the emergent American Empire can be an exercise in ambiguity. He seemed to grudgingly accept the necessity of U.S. global leadership while at the same time supposing that this path led straight to the kind of consolidated capitalist West that he so loathed. This conundrum nettled Henry, who, as usual, sought insight through travel. Certain of Britain’s eclipse and doubtful of Germany’s global reach, he identified Russia, with its sprawling population, immense territory, and vast resources, as America’s likely future adversary. As the old imperialism wound down, he was determined to see for himself what fresh menace might follow in its place.