The American Scene; Henry Adams

Hello, this is Howard Vincent, Illinois Tech, viewing the arts for the American scene. In the past programs, we have taken books, we took up music, in the Fine Arts Park tab, and in the future programs, we will range around, I think the primary emphasis will be upon the literary intellectual arts, but we will get the music to the drama, the theater, the opera, eventually. Today, we are going to take up a subject which isn't perhaps directly bearing on Chicago, but it has a Chicago connection as you will see. And that is Henry Adams, and I was reminded of Henry Adams by the announcement, which I think many of you must have seen, that the Howard University Press, the Bellenap Press of the Howard University Press, in cooperation with Life Magazine and Massachusetts Historical Society, which owns most of the papers, is going to publish the papers of the Adams family, the first three generations, which, you know, President John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and then Charles Francis Adams. And they're cutting off at

the time of Henry Adams, they will not publish his papers right now anyhow, but this tremendous project of, they don't know how many volumes, they imagine what they haven't stated, but all these 30, 40 volumes, is in line with what's going on in America, the publication of the Jefferson papers, which many of you know about, many volumes have come out in that, it will eventually be 50 or so volumes, Ben Franklin papers, Benjamin Franklin papers, the first volume came out last month, and there will be about 50 volumes of his papers, and so the Madison papers will be published. This recovery of our past, which is of course to all, it's a very important thing, we will not all read the papers of Benjamin Franklin or Jefferson, but we will refer to them, and we will, all of us, you and I, who are the general run of the people, will profit by the work of these scholars, these specialists in publishing them, and in writing their books from these publications. Now the Adams family is a great aristocratic family of America, there's no question about that, well two presidents, John and John Quincy, and then

of course Charles Francis Adams, who was so important in diplomatic service in the political life, much less, and to me the most important of all, because having a literary interest, historical interest, is Henry Adams himself, and now the Chicago angle, it happens that the great authority on Henry Adams is a Chicago scholar. He is professor of English at Northwest University, professor Ernest Simewells. He has published two volumes, the first volume Henry Adams, the early years, the second volume, Henry Adams, the middle years, and the third volume will be out within the next year are two, we hope. It is a magnificent study as far as it is gone. This volume, the middle years, won two prizes, it won the Francis Parkman Prize with the Society of American Historians, and it won the Bancroft Prize for American History, two tidy little prizes, not only financially, but in the honor, the great honor to win these awards,

and the book is worth these awards, it reads, it is authoritative, and we have Professor Simewells to talk today about Henry Adams and about the Adams family and the significance of these things. Ernest, what do you think about this publication, the Adams paper, besides the Adams papers, besides your delight? Well, delight is true, and having devoted myself to Henry Adams for so many years, some 19 years now, it seems simple, except as I told you, what better man to devote oneself to? It is, I think, a very great opportunity for America to get these unique papers first on microfilm. Yes, they've been very scrupulous about getting the total papers on microfilm, and now, in the fall, beginning the publication first of the great diaries. Now, about Henry Adams, why is he so important? Who was he? A lot of people may not know about him. I mean, for example, I read nothing of Henry Adams until

I was in graduate school, or even after graduate school, the education was not published, the education of Henry Adams wasn't published in a widely available form until 1931. Why is this man? Well, Henry Adams was the most intellectual of the family, and perhaps one of the most intellectual of Americans. As his education tells us, he lived under the illusion as a child that one day he, too, would be in the White House, after all, John Adams, his great -grandfather, and his grandfather, his own father was a man prominent Massachusetts politics. Why not, he, too? And as a matter of fact, a political habit. And since, in those early days, it seemed as if merit and intellect, virtue and intelligence, were recognized, there was no reason why an Adams should not carry out the family destiny. And it was a sense of destiny,

a sense of dedication, a historic sense of the importance of what was being done in America, the founding of a new country, and of the role of this family committed to making his success of this venture. Now, Henry's importance is perhaps that he never made the political raid. And that's his greatness. And his greatness, yes. Because he had in him, in spite of this drive toward politics, in history, he had in him the call of the artist. Yes. And to a degree, also, the philosopher. And the interest that I have found in tracking his career, plumbing his mind, going through his readings, is seeing how these first impulses of the artist, of the literary artist, of the thinker gradually flower until we get the tremendous efflorescence of his genius in the Mont Saint -Michel in Shard. There

is a very interesting edition of the French edition. I think you know something about that since you were in Paris. I believe at the time. I even helped in getting it published in a minor way, yes. And I must say that it was a very great pleasure last year when I was a Fulbright lecturer in Belgium. I made a visit to Mont Saint -Michel and in the bookstores, in that lovely and quaint town, to see this book, Mont Saint -Michel, in the French edition, as well as in English for the American Taurus. Well, Ernest, you, of course, the education is dominated, but this book was a bible of mine in college, many, many, many, many, many years ago. I was interested in the fine arts at the time, and taking Gothic architecture. And this book was, I must have worn it out under my copy of it. And when I went to France for the first time, naturally I made the pilgrimage to Shard, and it was this book in hand, and it was a tremendously exciting thing. I didn't come across the education to later.

But this man, well, what was he, let's get back, he wasn't a politician, you say he didn't, he was a historian. Well, no, he began, he began really an apprenticeship to a statesman. An Adams, it would be unfair to call the Adams, the Adams's politicians. They were statesman. No, no, no, they were statesman. And they took the highest view of that craft. And Henry Adams was a predest to his father, who, as he said, had one of the finest and best balanced minds that he knew. Of course, there was a touch of that Adams coolness, that some of the political opponents called fragility, but he was an extraordinary model. And Henry, when his father went down his congressman, just at the outbreak of the Civil War, and I must point out parenthetically, that Henry Adams always had a ringside seat at history. And his father took him down his private secretary, and here with that tremendous winter, the Great Secession Winter, and Henry sat a little bit back of the Great

Statesman of Sumner and his father in the rest, and William Henry Sward, and he saw the history being made, and the Civil War coming on. Then when Lincoln was elected, his father was chosen minister to England, and he had the choice of staying in the country, and fighting in this war that was going to last for six weeks. But he was persuaded to go with his father. That was his duty. And he went over to England, his private secretary, and served with his father without pay, of course, in those days, 1861 until 1868. And that was an extraordinary education education of the Union. Yes, because he met the diplomats, he met philosophers like John Stuart Mill, he met Browning the poet, and Browning yes, and the inner circle, he was even presented at court.

Well, with that experience, it seemed inevitable that a career in politics, high level politics was ahead of the Statesman -like politics. Well, the first thing to do was to become a journalist, his father had broken in by writing historical articles, and he became a very shrewd, perceptive, and brilliant critic of American finance, because his father had been a banker, and that was especially. In 1868, he came back to Washington, to the Washington of General Grant, already, as he said, to self himself, a little bit cynically, in the education he was for sale, but he found that the Grant administration didn't want to buy his kind of talent. Grant said, let us have peace. The Grant administration wanted to be Bob. Well, that's unfair to the general. The general, I don't mean the general, I should be in this country. No, the general, I'm sure, was pure, pure, hard. But his associates really took advantage of him, and Henry Adams was one of a group of shrewd publicists, newspaper men,

and we can thank heaven for them, who were there in Washington to watch Grant's friends, and they needed watching. Well, Adams wrote a number of brilliant studies that were published in the North American Review. He was a contributor to the nation. There was a downfall. He was writing, and he got the Cacoethys Gravendi. Well, the lust for writing, and also there was developing his powers as an observer that detached the double, and a kind of withdrawing, and it seems to me that, as he said to his brother, you like the rough and tumble of the marketplace, and his brother, by the way, served in the war, and very credibly and bravely, he said, I like refinement and delicacy in art, and we see that that was, in a way, the fatal, like heaven, the fatal obstacle to his continuing. At any rate, although his articles were quoted and so on, Grant obviously had no use for a muck raker, and although we commonly think of the muck raking beginning with McClure's magazine, it seems

me only fair to say that Adams and his brother were really the first muck rakers, and there are chapters in Erie. Where they showed the sort of game that Jay Gould and Jim Fisk were playing with America, those, well, are still, can be read, I think, with great profit. Kind of classic status. Then when the family saw that he was stymied in Washington, Washington wanted peace and prosperity, and let's make money, and there was no room for the critic who said why all this prosperity is resting upon a great deal of rockiness and corruption. An opportunity came. He was invited to come to Harvard as a professor of history. That's a downfall, yes. Well, he came finally to feel, and I think all of us professors sometimes have our low moments, that after six, seven years of it, he felt that teaching boys, of course, Harvard, there was a, did not have red clip

attached to it, teaching boys was essentially mean work, but I think that was one of his moments of pessimism, moments of where to grow in later life, as you know, and he became interested in the writing of history. Being a very original and vigorous mind, he tried to make reforms in education at Harvard, and I think he left his mark not only on the teaching of history, that's clear. He's a very great student of his followed, like Henry Osborne Taylor and other men, Channing, but he became interested in the writing of history, and it took a direction. Then some papers, the Gallatin papers, you know, the Secretary of the Treasury of Jefferson, became available to him, and he went down to Washington with his brilliant wife, and there they set up a salon, an intellectual and political salon, such as probably had not been seen since the days in Paris. Well, I've been running on, but you can see that a fascinating

career. The other day I was in Washington, I went across Lafayette Square and I looked over at the Adams House and thought about this. You mean where, the Adams House? Well, yes, very well, I see that. The great Richardson House. We were talking the other day in this program about Richardson here in Chicago, his architecture, but of course, his great work was Trinity Churches. You point out in your book in Boston. It was very great symbolic for Adams Churches. And this whole, the domestication of the Romanesque, that massive, and of course Richardson was one of the many important intellectuals that with whom Adams was not only friendly, but in him. Well, Adams had this curious Harvard trick of the way that Dosed Passos and Haywood Brune and Allianne and all those were together. He was in the group that were together, very distinguished. Here's Richardson at Harvard with Philips Brooks. Philips Brooks and Chauncey Wright, the design scientist, Henry James. Of course, William James.

Morafield Story, you can name a whole, John Fisk. John American Life was right there. Well, of course, as he says in his book, every door opened to an Adams, but they opened partly because he had a Harvard. Yes, because he was in Adams. And also they opened to him because he had, he was acute. He's one gets something of the quality of that, almost savage width of his, that instinct as they used to say of the Adams, the instinct for the jugular, from the education. And in conversation, well, it seems he made an art of conversation as he made an art of writing letters. And so he was always welcome. Like a phrase, didn't he? Yes. And he can strike off, as you know, you've been looking at that, one epigram after another. And all was paradox. And they also entertained magnetously. Didn't they in that house? Yes, they they they had a staff of servants and Mrs. Adams

had a very fine sense of entertaining, never more than six or eight at dinner because she was interested in conversation. And it was really an admission to, if you got in, if you got in, you were in. Yes. Then they hold in New York and Boston and Washington knew that you counted. You counted either in literature, you counted in politics, you counted in science, you counted in art. It was a more important salon in some ways and more important invitation almost in the White House. In some ways, your right was more important. And there's an interesting story about theodore Roosevelt. I don't think theodore Roosevelt really felt he had arrived until he was familiar at the Adam at the Henry Adams's breakfast. Breakfast, by the way, which always began at 12 o 'clock on that old style. Crunch. How long, when do you know that word? Well, now that's some hint, then his great career of what I've dealt with in this volume,

his most productive years. There was a novel of democracy. Oh, yes. In which 1880, you say? Yes, 1880. And it still reads, I think, wonderfully well. It's a kind of Jamesian technique applied to the novel. It's economical. It's relatively short. But a brilliant expose of politics and also of psychological problems. Yes. He was interested in the role of women. Yes. Oh, yes. And we have a first sound there. Of course, in this book, in the most famous shell, the role of women becomes central, as it's also significant here. But he wrote the biographies of Gallatin, still a standard biography, wrote a biography of John Randolph, brilliant, and still resented at the South. That probably was a Massachusetts man. And then his his great achievement of the middle years was this monumental nine volume history of the United States during the administrations of Jefferson and Madison. Oh, it's a

classic. The introductory six chapters, the concluding three or four chapters are brilliant. They appear, of course, in the anthologies. The man had a style. He was the last practitioner. It seems to me of the great style. Well, he had the facts, too. I mean, he was. Oh, yes. That was Jefferson papers across the square from him. That was a great combination. Yes. He had trained himself in the German method. Surinus, you know, history, as it actually was, and joined with that a style of McCauley and given and green. But refined there. He refined there. Didn't he start writing like them with a period? Oh, yes. Yes. The enormous period. Yes. But then he came in. And I think that if a Hemingway is going to say that the American literature began with Huck Finn, one ought also to look at some of these early writings of Henry Adams to see that he was precisely in the groove of the modern. Oh, yes. He knew how to give a sense of a whip. There's a whip lash. Oh, surely. But the trouble is he wasn't. He didn't have the immediate influence

and although his influence now is tremendous. Yes, true. I suppose almost every educated person quotes him. You pick up time and as Henry Adams said, and as you know, this whole aspect of his work of prediction, he became interested in scientific history. Well, not one thing puzzles me. You're writing three volumes on Henry Adams and yet he wrote his own biography. Your books aren't needed, quite obviously. That's it. On only they are. This is a period. Well, I think it's going to be quite true that even with the third volume, when the third volume is finished, Henry Adams will not be. He will not rest beneath that marvelous statue in Rock Creek, you know, that same board in the statue called Greep. Because his is, and this is why after so many years, I still feel a tremendous enthusiasm about him. He irritates, he charms and his mind restlessly roves over every problem in politics and in thought. He tried to

keep, as he said when he bought his first automobile, if he was going to die, he wanted to die at the head of the procession. Some men live dangerously. He thought dangerously. And that is why three volumes is not enough to exhaust these dangerous thoughts. But the fascinating thing is how you show by your book, how important was you do the book, because people have been deceived by the education Henry Adams. And he is the biggest trickster in the world. He loved paradox. He loved paradox and he felt that the one state of mind in which human beings must never be allowed to rest complacency. And so the education, for example, his student who later became the distinguished and somewhat obstructed statesman Henry Cabot Lodge brought this out. This was provided for in Adams as well. And I think it was Henry Cabot

Lodge who permitted this subtitle and autobiography. Well, it's not merely an autobiography. That's good. Because Adams was a very self -conscious writer. He had studied the very greatest of St. Augustine, Rousseau, all of them. Chilini, all of the very great ones. And this, of course, is a kind of culmination of that whole tradition. What he was very amusing that you have these two masterful biographies in America, two of the greatest in the world, Benjamin Franklin's and Henry Adams, so different. And yet, both the work of extremely complex man, the one putting on the air, great air of simplicity like Benjamin Franklin, the other, Henry Adams putting on the air of ignorance. He wasn't an educated man, but doing it this way. But isn't it you say they're so different? And yet, it's a magnificent American touch. Benjamin Franklin said that his autobiography was for practical purposes to give instruction to his children. You remember that?

And then he was induced later in the second part for people generally. Precisely the object of Henry Adams. Why was he publishing this book to give instruction to the young men in universities and elsewhere? How to ride the world that was coming? This mad, wild world that was shot full of radium and Adams. Well, there's no better book in the world in America than this one for doing it. So now notice it's very interesting that this is one of the rare books written in the third person. And that gives you, I think, the tip off. He looked at it. He took himself as a model, as he said, on which to hang his conception of the world of America and where we were heading. And he incorporates in it what is called his dynamic theory of history. That is that you kind of understand the movement of America's society only in terms of force. And so this really is a study in force. And he is the unhappy object. Why did he fail? It's something like Sartre Rissartis. The first half of the book.

These, I had the maximum opportunities. I had a ringside of history and yet I guess wrong. I judge wrong. That is to be a great influence in American life. Well, is he aware at the time of his death that he hadn't failed that he had the most magnificent success? I don't think he could have been quite aware of it because he hoped he had the dream, but as a matter of fact, in late in life, he realized that his role was a teacher of teachers. And one of the reasons why he printed privately, he was not interested in a wide popular success. No, no. As he told, I think, Lodge, if you can influence the top one tenth of one percent. There's a great book, so the great influential books have always hit a few and they trickle down. That's right. That's right. And I think he succeeded. Yes. Oh, he succeeded. My lives and every intelligent man in the university reads his book and I had a curious experience in trying to teach his to French students and I have had this with other books in the American literature. You have always gotten to play this. It's so hard to understand this. And yet, you think that he being so

French in his culture, I mean, annoying French, they would be very sympathetic to him. They are, in a way. Well, I think one of their difficulties, one of the main difficulties, and the same thing with our students, it's so elusive. Here we have the intellectual history from 1838, practically, to 1905. Yes. Yes. Everything significant that happened and all the important people, all the main turns and the development, as he was saying, of these forces of capitalism, energy, the dynamo. And well, now, of course, what are demands of them? They have to know something about American history, American intellectual history, and that they have not wanted to do. Now, they have to, because of our place in the world, and they are becoming interested in having to confront this. Yes. I think it's a marvelous development. Yes, it is. And they certainly are eager and avid to read. In the very fact, they're printing it now, so widely. Yes, I was astonished to discover how many Europeans had read the education. There is an excellent French edition of it.

Well, the one thing I wanted to point, I wish we could talk about a minute, and that is the literary quality of this. This is a beautiful piece of work. In France, it's his trick here. Had he known it better, he would only have thought it was, phrases like that, or the habit of reticence of talking without meaning is never effaced. Well, that's what I mean by, in a way, the grand style, and yet, in the modern manner. Modern manner, yes. In the modern manner. There is something. Give her a little flick. You can do that. Give him a solid massively. It sees me as an almost a French taste for epigrams. Yes. As you turn the pages, one epigram, one after another, and all is paradoxical. For example, Pope said the proper study of mankind is man. What does Adam say the proper study of mankind is woman. And he goes out the pulpit, and that was, of course, his great discovery of women and the importance of sex. That, by the way, one of the misconceptions I think of this whole idea of the two

centers of portion or the virgin and the dynamal, one doesn't realize, or many people don't realize, that the symbol of the virgin is a symbol of woman kind. And he did not stop, of course, with the Christian tradition. No. He went right back to ISIS and to Astarty and the great mother goddesses so that he was ahead of his time. The kind of magnificent metaphor. This is dangerous. I know for the what the Freud was trying to get at too. I think so. Forrest the power, the devil's drives men. Not in that cheap way that it's so often in the parallel. No, there's no Bulgarian. I was saying. Very profound philosophical. Ludwig Lewis enrolled that that was Adam's great discovery, discovery of sex and sin. When this appeared in, well, the most I'm a shell in 1904, 1905, where he says to understand, properly understand the virgin, you have to go back to be, to Eve. And then finally says to the bee, the queen bee. You got in contrast to the dynamal, coming out here to Chicago and studying the exposition and the machine out here, fascinating isn't it? One could write

a very interesting chapter on the influence of Chicago. Well, here you are. You had this very quick fast introduction to this magnificent man, Adam, this magnificent family. And I hope you'll all read, not only the education of Henry Adams, but Ernest Samuel's volume on Henry Adams in middle years. You will enjoy it. I'm sure. Thank you.