Over three crowded weeks in August and September 1901, Henry journeyed with the Lodges to Russia, eager to survey the Romanovs’ “century behind” civilization.1 The trip afforded Adams the opportunity to reflect on the accuracy of Brooks’s Law of Civilization and Decay, which questioned the lazy assumption among the Anglo-American elite that liberal democracies were soon to encircle the globe. Like his brother, Henry rejected what he considered to be a glib ideological argument for one frankly materialistic. He deemed population, industrial capacity, and land resources as far more telling triggers of power than polling booths. Two countries in particular impressed Adams as having the inside track in the race to build, exploit, and extract. The United States’ bourgeoning size and strength left him little doubt of its sunny place in the Darwinian order, presumably putting Europe in shadow. But Russia intrigued Henry; if currently running behind America, its undeniable potential to win the evolutionary sweepstakes and dictate terms in both Asia and the Continent could not be ignored. As the new international structure began to take shape in the wake of German unification, Britain’s gradual decline, and Spain’s expulsion from the Western Hemisphere, America and Russia—one a democracy, the other an autocracy—struck him as the likely beneficiaries.
Henry’s Russian sojourn followed a desultory German holiday in late July. He traveled with the Lodges to Rothenburg ob der Tauber, a town in the Franconia region of Bavaria famed for its medieval architecture. Following a rainy day (a perfect excuse to luxuriate over “good fourteenth century glass”) the party continued east to Bayreuth for the city’s annual music festival performing the operas of Richard Wagner. The scores were enormous and presented just as written, with no intermission, no concessions made for the patience or comfort of the audience. After sitting through hours of Das Rheingold, a less than impressed Henry wrote to Lizzie, “I was nearly asphyxiated, and thought the performance rather mediocre.… I am quite clear that for a delicate digestion like mine, with a tendency to insomnia, the Wagnerian beer-and-sausage should be taken in short gulps, and at concerts.”2
Presumably to cleanse their Wagner-sodden palates, Adams and the Lodges went next to Salzburg, where they attended a Mozart festival. But the city, Henry discovered to his disappointment, was “a fashionable summer haunt… filled with Americans.” The ubiquity of U.S. En-glish grated on his ears, and a tourist collective—“Everybody looks like everybody else”—applauded the “very pretty, and easy, and familiar” music meant to content them.3 A little bored, he noted that a certain royal personage in one performance hall resembled a prominent New York banker. As the festival wound down, Lodge unexpectedly, and perhaps citing his seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as a pretext, expressed an interest in observing conditions in Russia firsthand. Enjoying as always “Sister Anne’s” company, Henry decided to go along, and in a succession of dreary night trains they headed east to Moscow.
Adams had thought often of Russia that year. In February he had written to Brooks that America (in which he included Central and South America) should turn isolationist and “stand on our internal resources alone.” He believed it likely that with the United States tending to more local concerns and the older western European powers in eclipse, “Germany and Russia [would] try to run the machine.” Should that be the case, he assured Brooks, “they cannot be shut out.” He then wrote Cecil Spring Rice that Russia presented to the thoughtful observer a true enigma. Espying a largely peasant-ridden country through maps, atlases, and statistical tables, Adams nurtured the suspicion that it lurched into the new century a “colossal dwarf,” equipped with tremendous potential for growth. The course of Eastern development confused him, for it represented such a strong rebuke to the liberal lines of social and economic progress embraced by the West. “Behind that oriental curtain of Russo-Germanism,” he confessed to Lizzie six months before setting foot in Russia, “I can divine nothing.”4 Raising his gaze beyond the familiar London-Paris–New York axis, he hoped now to appraise the dynamo’s prospects in the land of the czars.
Passing through Warsaw (“a big, bustling city”), Adams took notice of its large Jewish population, which he called “a startling revelation.” He looked upon British and American Jews as the couriers of modernism and found this formerly unrealized “backwards vs. forwards” distinction among Semitic peoples fascinating. Simultaneously repelled by the archaic material culture of this Polish population yet attracted to its “edge” rather than “center” existence, he warmed to it, as he had earlier embraced aspects of Polynesian and Latin American “primitivism.” Undoubtedly he saw a bit of himself in the occupants of this rustic city. Here lay another kind of Quincy, an eighteenth- or even sixteenth-century holdout to the mass of organizing energy then rippling through western Europe. “The Jews and I are the only curious antiquities in it,” he wrote to Lizzie. “My only merit as a curio is antiquity, but the Jew is also a curiosity.”5
Entering into the Russian heartland aboard a bobbing Moscow-bound train, Henry meditated in the thick August heat on the living peasant past. The vast landscape, filled with drifting peoples in seemingly random passage, fully occupied his imagination. Years later he wrote sublimely of this thirty-hour journey, “From the car-window one seemed to float past undulations of nomad life,—herders deserted by their leaders and herds,—wandering waves stopped in their wanderings,—waiting for their winds or warriors to return and lead them westward; tribes that had camped, like Khirgis, for the season, and had lost the means of motion without acquiring the habit of permanence. They waited and suffered.” During the trip Adams experienced the vicarious sensation of entering a younger America. The size of the country overpowered him and he wondered at its latent capacity for economic development. “Small things do not seem at home in it,” he assured Lizzie. The route to Moscow confirmed his notion that Russia lay at least three generations behind the United States. Massive forests dotted with log cabins dominated the landscape, and widely dispersed industryless cities offered the only signs of modern amenities. “Her scale is greater, but her energy less” than Europe’s, Adams informed Hay. “She is still metaphysical, religious, military, Byzantine; a sort of Mongol tribe, almost absolutely unable to think in western lines.”6
In Poland and Russia, Adams happily reported, the alliance of religion and government, economy and thought remained firmly tied to older conditions and traditions. “From the first glimpse… of the Polish Jew at the accidental railway-station,” he later observed, “to the last vision of the Russian peasant, lighting his candle and kissing his Ikon before the railway Virgin in the station at St. Petersburg, all was logical, conservative, christian and anarchic.” Not even the rhapsodized virtues of medieval Normandy could match the Virgin’s vital, living presence in Moscow. Attending high mass at the immense Cathedral of the Redeemer (destroyed by Stalin in 1931 and rebuilt and reconsecrated in 2000), he felt a spiritual connection that had long eluded him in the secular West. “At Chartres I have only the empty shell, and have to imagine the life,” he explained the difference to a niece. “Here I find the life absolutely unchanged; just what it was all over Europe in 1100.”7
From Moscow, Henry and the Lodges traveled to St. Petersburg, which, Henry reported, felt “cold like October.” There, Lodge had a number of conversations with government officials, including Sergei Witte, the influential policymaker and champion of Russian industrialization. With the aid of Anna Cabot Lodge’s first cousin, Herbert Peirce, third assistant secretary of state, Adams enjoyed a private evening tour of the Hermitage. Nearly a century earlier his grandparents John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Adams had lived for several years in St. Petersburg as the American minister to Russia and his wife. On occasion they attended plays and operas at the handsome Hermitage Theater. Henry now roamed this same complex of connected buildings with real interest. And despite the prevalence of Dutch paintings—a matter of personal distaste—he delighted in the vast gallery, visiting it twice during his short stay. “The Hermitage pictures are next to the Madrid for condition,” he wrote Lizzie. “I am not disappointed.”8
In early September Adams and the Lodges split up, the latter deciding to return to western Europe by way of Berlin. Having no interest in revisiting the city whose language and lecture system had long ago defeated him—“forty years of varied emotions had not deadened [my] memories of Berlin”—Henry went alone to Stockholm and then Trondheim, Norway, the old Viking capital, and still farther north to Hammerfest.9 There, in the land of the Lapps and the reindeer, near the silent Arctic Circle, he witnessed the brilliant Northern Lights, whose dominant visual presence and striking colors eclipsed Trondheim’s functional urban electric illumination that never varied, never broke, and never provoked among the sleepy Trondheimians a sense of wonder, awe, or adoration.
Adams’s opinion of Slavic supremacy in the East varied over the years, particularly following the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5). He thereafter worried about the health of the czar’s empire, seeing in its potential collapse a fracturing of states and peoples from Europe to the Pacific. In Russia he thus observed a possible template for the process of civilizational entropy that he fully expected to one day break down the modern industrial, imperial order. Peasants and gold-bugs alike, he surmised, were equally compromised in the cold science of decline.