The Education of Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams

An Autobiography

By Henry Adams

About The Education of Henry Adams

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time

‘I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams,’ said Gore Vidal. ‘He was remarkably prescient about the coming horrors.’

His political ideals shaped by two presidential ancestors—great-grandfather John Adams and grandfather John Quincy Adams—Henry Adams was one of the most powerful and original minds to confront the American scene from the Civil War to the First World War.

Printed privately in 1907 and published to wide acclaim shortly after the author&’s death in 1918, The Education of Henry Adams is a brilliant, idiosyncratic blend of autobiography and history that charts the great transformation in American life during the so-called Gilded Age.

With an introduction by renowned historian Edmund Morris.

Ch. 22: “Chicago” (excerpt)

By the time he got back to Washington on September 19, the storm
having partly blown over, life had taken on a new face, and one so
interesting that he set off to Chicago to study the Exposition again, and
stayed there a fortnight absorbed in it. He found matter of study to fill
a hundred years, and his education spread over chaos. Indeed, it
seemed to him as though, this year, education went mad. The silver
question, thorny as it was, fell into relations as simple as words of one
syllable, compared with the problems of credit and exchange that
came to complicate it; and when one sought rest at Chicago,
educational game started like rabbits from every building, and ran out of sight

among thousands of its kind before one could mark its burrow. The Exposition itself defied philosophy. one might find fault till the last gate closed, one could still explain nothing that needed explanation. As a scenic display, Paris had never approached it, but the inconceivable scenic display consisted in its being there at all- more surprising, as it was, than anything else on the continent, Niagara Falls, the Yellowstone Geysers, and the whole railway system thrown in, since these were all natural products in their place; while, since Noah’s Ark, no such Babel of loose and ill-joined, such vague and ill-defined and unrelated thoughts and half-thoughts and experimental outcries as the Exposition, had ever ruffled the surface of the Lakes.
The first astonishment became greater every day. That the Exposition should be a natural growth and product of the Northwest offered a step in evolution to startle Darwin; but that it should be anything else seemed an idea more startling still; and even granting it were not- admitting it to be a sort of industrial, speculative growth and product
of the Beaux Arts artistically induced to pass the summer on the shore of Lake Michigan- could it be made to seem at home there? Was the American made to seem at home in it? Honestly, he had the air of enjoying it as though it were all his own; he felt it was good; he was proud of it; for the most part, he acted as though he had passed his life in landscape gardening and architectural decoration. If he had not done it himself, he had known how to get it done to suit him, as he knew how to get his wives and daughters dressed at Worth’s or Paquin’s. Perhaps he could not do it again; the next time he would want to do it himself and would show his own faults; but for the mome-nt he seemed to have leaped directly from Corinth and Syracuse and Venice, over the heads of London and New York, to impose classical standards on plastic Chicago.
Critics had no trouble in criticising the classicism, but all trading cities had always shown traders’ taste, and, to the stern purist of religious faith, no art was thinner than Venetian Gothic. All trader’s taste smelt of bric-a-brac; Chicago tried at least to give her taste a look of unity.
One sat down to ponder on the steps beneath Richard Hunt’s dome almost as deeply as on the steps of Ara Coeli, and much to the same purpose. Here was a breach of continuity- a rupture in historical sequence! Was it real, or only apparent? one’s personal universe hung on the answer, for, if the rupture was real and the new American
world could take this sharp and conscious twist towards ideals, one’spersonal friends would come in, at last, as winners in the great American chariot-race for fame. If the people of the Northwest actually knew what was good when they saw it, they would some day talk about Hunt and Richardson, La Farge and St. Gaudens, Burnham and McKim, and Stanford White when their politicians and millionaires were otherwise forgotten. The artists and architects who had done the work offered little encouragement to hope it; they talked freely enough, but not in terms that one cared to quote; and to them the northwest refused to look artistic. They talked as though they worked only for themselves; as though art, to the Western people, was a stage decoration; a diamond shirt-stud; a paper collar; but possibly the architects of Paestum and Girgenti had talked in the same way, and the Greek had said the same thing of Semitic Carthage two thousand years ago.Jostled by these hopes and doubts, one turned to the exhibits for help, and found it. The industrial schools tried to teach so much and so quickly that the instruction ran to waste. Some millions of other people felt the same helplessness, but few of them were seeking education, and to them helplessness seemed natural and normal, for they had grown up in the habit of thinking a steam-engine or a dynamo as natural as the sun, and expected to understand one as little as the other.For the historian alone the Exposition made a serious effort. Historical exhibits were common, but they never went far enough; none were thoroughly worked out. one of the best was that of the Cunard steamers, but still a student hungry for results found himself obliged to waste a pencil and several sheets of paper trying to calculate exactly when, according to the given increase of power, tonnage, and speed, the growth of the ocean steamer would reach its limits. His figures brought him, he thought, to the year 1927; another generation to spare before force, space, and time should meet. The ocean steamer ran the surest line of triangulation into the future, because it was the nearest of man’s products to a unity; railroads taught less because they seemed already finished except for mere increase in number; explosives taught most, but needed a tribe of chemists, physicists, and mathematicians to explain; the dynamo taught least because it had barely reached infancy, and, if its progress was to be constant at the rate of the last ten years, it would result in infinite costly energy within a generation. one lingered long among the dynamos, for they were new, and they gave to history a new phase.Men of science could never understand the ignorance and naivete ofthe historian, who, when he came suddenly on a new power, asked naturally what it was; did it pull or did it push? Was it a screw or thrust? Did it flow or vibrate? Was it a wire or a mathematical fine? And a score of such questions to which he expected answers and wasastonished to get none.