A juried poll initiated by the Modern Library (Random House) in 1999 ranked The Education of Henry Adams the best English-language nonfiction book to appear in the twentieth century. The Varieties of Religious Experience, written by Adams’s friend William James, came in second, with Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own close behind. One New York Times story surveying the list described the Education correctly enough as “weighty but evasive.” It is autobiographical in the sense that Henry contextualized certain episodes of his life into a broader narrative demonstrating the movement of the modern West away from, as he put it, “Thirteenth-Century Unity” and toward the uncertainties of “Twentieth-Century Multiplicity.” The book should thus not be approached, excepting in set and often brilliantly descriptive pieces, as an accurate memoir. Too much of Adams’s inner life is suppressed, too little of his private emotions, folded beneath blankets of beautifully arranged irony, are on display. Concerned with what he called “the strangely blighting shadow of The Education,” the biographer Ernest Samuels informed readers of his 1948 study, The Young Henry Adams, that it played only a very small role in his research. “For the most part,” he cited its propensity for distortion, “I have put [it] aside… as a primary source.”1
The Education might, for the sake of clarity, be divided into two sections; the first, briefer, and more satisfying segment details Henry’s singular adolescence. These passages include fine material on his initial encounter with Washington, D.C., his callow enthusiasm for Sumner, and his well-aimed jabs at Harvard College. Holding it all together is the irrepressible spirit of remembered youth that lights up many of the pages in a celebration of simple, impressionable pleasures. “But as far as happiness went,” he writes in one such extract, “the happiest hours of the boy’s education were passed in summer lying on a musty heap of Congressional documents in the old farm-house at Quincy, reading [the Sir Walter Scott historical novels] Quentin Durward, Ivanhoe and The Talisman, and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and pears. On the whole he learned most then.”2
The second and longer portion of the Education contains often exceptional and still quite relevant commentary on the cultural impact of industrial capitalism. At their best, such clauses combine history, art, science, economics, and literature to selectively tell the profound story of modernization. They formally introduce readers to the iconic dynamo that lessened the importance of reproduction and the family, pulled Russia away from Eastern mysticism to Western empiricism, and elevated technocrats into a kind of high priesthood. Too many of these latter chapters, however, bog down in Adams’s idiosyncratic rendering of historical “laws” that implacably prophesy social breakdown. The deterministic tone often strikes the reader as a forced if not a false strategy that detracts from the play of possibilities and personal discovery informing the earlier material. In leaving a twenty-year gap in the chronology (1871–92), moreover, Henry omits not only his marriage (and long-simmering attachment to Lizzie Cameron) but also the History, his most successful scholarly achievement. Without their inclusions, both his complicated inner life and intellectual progress remain remote, even shielded from the reader.
In full, the Education is a work of multiple attitudes and identities. Henry obsesses in the book over his “failure” to have been properly trained for the modern age, but this is a charade. He is himself an example of multiplicity taking turns as an aristocrat, a philosopher, a scientist, a patriot, a historian, a voyager in the South Seas, and so on. In pleading deficient he plays a rhetorical trick on the reader, who, impressed with the study’s casually intimidating roster of great names (Alexander I, Aquinas, Archimedes…), historical phenomena (Italian unification, the American Civil War, Darwin’s deep shadow…), and often abstruse thoughts, suspects that Adams is probably a sage repeating in his own way the Socratic paradox “I know that I know nothing.” Indeed the Education’s greatest irony is its claim to telling the story of its author’s ignorance, confusion, and misdirection, all the while assailing in vigorous prose and confident assertions the West after 1400. With an attitude of awe, Henry enumerates the technical advances made by mathematicians, physicists, and industrialists, only to reveal their complicity in fashioning a culture of anomie. Setting aside the failure motif, his more plausible role is that of the “wise fool,” the intuitive talent unburdened by the book knowledge ushered in during the Renaissance. He played neither part perfectly, and close observers could tell that he occasionally read from a script. Shortly after Henry’s death Brooks wrote, “I think in his ‘Education’ he has carried his joke, at times, perhaps a little too far.”3
Viewed more positively, the “joke” that Adams tells is painfully on target and thus goes some way in explaining why he resorted to satire. The Education, after all, is an exercise in counterintuitiveness that questions the liberal nineteenth century’s hasty endorsement of science, order, progress, property rights, rationality, and self-improvement. All, he suspected, were superlatives, rationalizations for the violent overturning of an older economy of scale for something ultimately unsettling. The cultural historian Clive Bush finds Henry’s skepticism completely appropriate:
In terms of liberal economics the age of the entrepreneurial individual was, for the mass of the population, over. America itself changed startlingly, from a largely self-employed and family-business economy in 1870 to one where in 1900 12 per cent of the population owned 99 per cent of the wealth. The sciences passed out of range of common-sense knowledge, or, perhaps more accurately, the early, long and expensive training needed to grasp the fundamentals of science placed them out of range of the mass of the people. It is little wonder that the “Henry Adams” of Adams’s Education of Henry Adams wondered who, where, and what he was.4
Other commentators would come along in the 1920s who too puzzled over their identities in a radically reconfigured world. Adams’s memorable division of chronology, contrasting thirteenth-century consensus in tension with twentieth-century clash, is echoed in Hermann Hesse’s popular 1927 novel Steppenwolf: “Now there are times when a whole generation is caught… between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence.”5 A generation before Hesse—and James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway, among other modernists—so unequivocally questioned the Victorian legacy, Adams had already, and without the prod of a global conflict, laid such a foundation.
But if Henry anticipated an emerging school of writers critical of contemporary life, he also retained a place in the older practice of literary Bostonians whose influence he could never completely escape. Like the Puritan jeremiads, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s deliberations on ancestral guilt, and well-bred Beacon Hill’s condemnations of a sinful slave republic, his Education came freighted with predictions of gloom and doom for a country all too corruptible. There is in the book a fairly strong connection to New England’s lapsarian tradition that makes it perhaps less sui generis than one might suspect. As a child, Henry learned early of Boston’s annoying superiority and Quincy became for him a kind of paradise lost. It is a parable that formed the core of his mature thinking and one he often revisited.
Committed to the Quincy perspective, he attacked those organizing principles (Darwinism, imperialism) and rising classes (manufacturers, financiers) that he associated with the dynamo. Its unpredictable energy belied restraint, he asserted, and gave humanity a false sense of its power. He wrote in the Education that those technocrats and their patrons who pursued “force” were only hunting down their own deaths: “Every day nature violently revolted, causing so-called accidents with enormous destruction of property and life, while plainly laughing at man, who helplessly groaned and shrieked and shuddered, but never for a single instant could stop. The railways alone approached the carnage of war; automobiles and fire-arms ravaged society, until an earthquake became almost a nervous relaxation.”6 One is reminded in this striking passage of the twentieth—and twenty-first—century’s problematic relationships with chemical gases, environmental destruction, and, of late, mass shootings. Adams’s concerned references to “nervous relaxation” and the universal man who “shrieked” in futility might be paired with the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch’s contemporaneous Scream (1893), whose sudden inspiration, the artist recalled, came on a walk with two friends as the setting sun turned the sky a vivid red: “I stopped—leaned against the fence—deathly tired.… I heard a huge extraordinary scream pass through nature.”7
The unease that Adams captures in the Education is partly a result of his own shifting identity. The Irish gardener’s quip at the Old House questioning a young Henry’s right to be president—a gibe recorded in the memoir—accentuates the confident assumptions of the antebellum ruling class. But between that moment and Henry’s putting it down on paper, the white liberal New England nation, despite its momentary Civil War–era recovery, lost its vitality as a sovereign people. No more would an Emerson—or an Adams—be seen as a representative man of the republic.
In February 1907 Henry sent copies of the Education to friends and family under the pretext that they strike out objectionable material, correct inaccuracies, and rework imprecise language. He asked that after making such emendations, the individual return the volume. Many of these chosen first readers were mentioned in the book, and Adams may have wished for a rigorous editing process by those in the best position to comment. But one wonders if he really intended to be inundated with several dozen marked-up manuscripts calling for revision. He must have known that the likelihood of any being returned were slim. Who would venture to correct the history of one of America’s most respected historians? Who would know what to make of his curious detour into the hard sciences (evident in such befogged passages as “At the calculated acceleration, the head of the meteor-stream must very soon pass perihelion”), and how many would dare him to introduce the details of that two-decade open sore that he so loudly refused to discuss?8 Perhaps in asking for corrections Henry stayed true to the spirit of the work. He adopted yet another identity, that of the humble searcher who had only questions but no answers.
By May he had dropped the pretense of expecting his readers to polish the Education. “You need not bother yourself about returning the volume,” he wrote to Gaskell. “I had meant to call them all back, expecting large changes or omissions; but thus far, no changes of any consequence have been asked, and no omissions.” He could not hide from Gaskell his pride in the work’s popularity. “The President [Roosevelt] tells me that he means to keep the volume, whatever I say; and the various ladies not only refuse to return it, but clamor for more copies.” He later reported that only Charles Eliot, the man who recruited him to teach medieval history at Harvard nearly forty years earlier, had actually relinquished his manuscript. Several readers wrote to Adams, however, and their responses varied widely. Clara Hay frankly counseled Henry to drop the dynamo and return to Jesus: “But it seemed to me that you have studied too much to find that ‘Force’ you are still seeking. Why, instead of all those other books, you have gone to, to find it—did you not go back to your Bible?… I have wanted, for so long to tell you this, but have not had the courage.” Williams James, being William James, utterly rejected the deterministic universe constructed in the Education, telling Adams, “I don’t follow or share your way of conceiving the historical problem.… Unless the future contains genuine novelties, unless the present is really creative of them, I don’t see the use of time at all.” And a few years after Henry’s death, the British statesman John Morely read the Education and sniggered to a colleague, “If A. had ever looked at himself naked in a glass he would have rated other men a little more gently.”9
With Henry’s privately printed copies of the Education circulating over the years, interest built in seeing the manuscript more widely distributed. In January 1916 Ferris Greenslet, literary editor at Houghton Mifflin, under whose colophon the Chartres appeared, asked about publishing the Education. Replying the following month, Adams said “no”—and “yes.” “Please bear in mind that, for reasons personal to myself, I do not want publication. I prefer the situation as it stands. Under no circumstances will I bind myself to publish or to help publication. If you drop the matter altogether I shall be best satisfied.” But in the same note Adams, then two days beyond his seventy-eighth birthday, all but drew a path to the Education’s publication: “After my death I should leave my corrected copy to the Massachusetts Historical Society to do what they pleased with. You could make what arrangements you liked with them.”10 Adams died in 1918, in which year the book appeared; it captured the 1919 Pulitzer Prize for biography.
The First World War undoubtedly played an important role in making the Education appear a prescient, even a prophetic text. The conflict produced a vast civilizational shock, resulting in a bifurcation of historical time already, in some sense, outlined by Adams. Just as he had lingered doubtfully over the prospects of the postwar West, very many Americans in the 1920s, feeling taken in by President Woodrow Wilson’s naïve appeal to make the world “safe for democracy” and uninspired by the decade’s withdrawal into Wall Street exuberance, were equally skeptical. The market crash of 1929, the resulting Depression, and the great ideological struggle between fascism, capitalism, and communism that followed further initiated a strong mood of disillusionment. Readers of that period discovered in the Education an expression of mounting anxiety that had rolled through Adams’s life and, surprisingly, into theirs—its dry, mordant wit made to capture the tone of difficult times. Succeeding generations have ever since returned to this unusual book for its oracular chapters. To engage deeply with the Education is to look beyond both its memoirish surface and its pseudo-scientific sheen and to accept it as something of a disquieting statement on humanity’s imperilment in a civilization it has created but cannot control. Contentiously organized around the theme of failure, it has managed since its issuance to interest readers skeptical of the materialism, militarism, and technological progress that has so definitively come to define both the promise and the sorrow of the American Century.