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Publication
Houghton Mifflin Company (1973), Edition: Riverside, Paperback, 736 pages
Description
'Every generalisation that we settled forty years ago, is abandoned'As a journalist, historian and novelist born into a family that included two past presidents of the United States, Henry Adams was constantly focused on the American experiment. An immediate bestseller awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1919, his The Education of Henry Adams (1918) recounts his own andthe country's education from 1838, the year of his birth, to 1905, incorporating the Civil War, capitalist expansion and the growth of the United States as a world power. Exploring America as both a success and a failure, contradiction was the very impetus that compelled Adams to write theEducation, in which he was also able to voice his deep scepticism about mankind's power to control the direction of history. Written with immense wit and irony, reassembling the past while glimpsing the future, Adams's vision expresses what Henry James declared the `complex fate' to be an American,and remains one of the most compelling works of American autobiography today.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member jwhenderson
I have read several great confessional autobiographies over the centuries, Augustine and Rousseau come to mind, but my favorite is Henry Adams' narrative, The Education of Henry Adams. The Preface and four opening chapters provide a solid foundation for the entire book. They focus on his youth in
His attention points to the nature of his own education growing up in a family whose very name was synonymous with the Presidency of the United States. Born in 1838, both his Great Grandfather and Grandfather had been presidents, while his father looked forward to an Ambassadorship to England during the Civil War. Henry's education would be continued during that period as secretary to his father. But first he narrates the experience of growing up torn by family connections between the small town of Quincy and the metropolis of Boston.
The two towns provide just one of the contrasts that concern young Henry; contrasts that include town (Boston) versus country (Quincy), Winter versus Summer, and his own family ties between the Brooks of Boston on his mother's side and the Adams on his father's side. It was the interstices between these and other contrasting experiences that provided young Henry with the "seeds of moral education". Even this early in his life, as he reflects from the view of the twentieth century, he questioned what and who he was and where he was going with his life.
The community and culture that formed Henry's mind and being included family friends that would become historical figures for those of us born in the latter half of the succeeding century; figures that included, in addition to his family, Ellery Channing, Waldo Emerson, Richard Henry Dana, and above all for Henry, his hero, Charles Sumner. Henry worshiped the Senator and Orator and looked up to New England statesmen like him that expressed "the old Ciceronian idea of government by the best". People like Daniel Webster and Edward Everett who governed Massachusetts. Henry, however, was destined to move on to Washington with his father as the Adams family had for decades been a part of the national stage.
Henry did not like school and rather preferred the free play with his peers. In spite of his opinion of school it is clear that he was continuing his education at home and was soon to move back north to enter Harvard College in his sixteenth hear. His thoughts on his education at that time rang true to this reader as he described his travel to Washington, not as what happened but as what he remembered. And this was "what struck him most, to remain fresh in his mind all his life-time, . . the sudden change that came over the world on entering a slave State. He took education politically." His time in Washington ended with a remark that "he had no education", a continuing contradiction that stemmed from his own reaction to the "official" education he was undergoing in schools that contrasted (once more see above) with the true education in which his experience was creating memories.
Harvard does not suit his taste either - the curriculum had no particular quality that could impress the man that Henry was becoming; a man who was not only a reader but a writer. He was impressed by Russell Lowell who "had brought back from Germany the only new and valuable part of its Universities, the habit of allowing students to read with him privately in his study. Adams asked the privilege, and used it to read a little, and to talk a great deal." His friendship with Lowell led him to connections with the transcendentalists although he never became one. He also became friends with one Robert E. Lee at Harvard and enjoyed a coterie of Virginian friends despite their Southern ways. At the end of his formal education he was able to conclude that "As yet he knew nothing." A bit of harsh judgment for the Senior Class Orator, but great minds are sometimes hardest on themselves.
The remainder of the autobiography takes him on a journey through Darwin and Chicago and "The Dynamo and the Virgin" into the beginning of the twentieth century. His story is always interesting and his prose is some of the best I have encountered. I may comment further on it as I continue to read and reread about his thoughts on a very particular education.
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Massachusetts and time spent in Washington, D. C. and at Harvard College through his twentieth year.His attention points to the nature of his own education growing up in a family whose very name was synonymous with the Presidency of the United States. Born in 1838, both his Great Grandfather and Grandfather had been presidents, while his father looked forward to an Ambassadorship to England during the Civil War. Henry's education would be continued during that period as secretary to his father. But first he narrates the experience of growing up torn by family connections between the small town of Quincy and the metropolis of Boston.
The two towns provide just one of the contrasts that concern young Henry; contrasts that include town (Boston) versus country (Quincy), Winter versus Summer, and his own family ties between the Brooks of Boston on his mother's side and the Adams on his father's side. It was the interstices between these and other contrasting experiences that provided young Henry with the "seeds of moral education". Even this early in his life, as he reflects from the view of the twentieth century, he questioned what and who he was and where he was going with his life.
The community and culture that formed Henry's mind and being included family friends that would become historical figures for those of us born in the latter half of the succeeding century; figures that included, in addition to his family, Ellery Channing, Waldo Emerson, Richard Henry Dana, and above all for Henry, his hero, Charles Sumner. Henry worshiped the Senator and Orator and looked up to New England statesmen like him that expressed "the old Ciceronian idea of government by the best". People like Daniel Webster and Edward Everett who governed Massachusetts. Henry, however, was destined to move on to Washington with his father as the Adams family had for decades been a part of the national stage.
Henry did not like school and rather preferred the free play with his peers. In spite of his opinion of school it is clear that he was continuing his education at home and was soon to move back north to enter Harvard College in his sixteenth hear. His thoughts on his education at that time rang true to this reader as he described his travel to Washington, not as what happened but as what he remembered. And this was "what struck him most, to remain fresh in his mind all his life-time, . . the sudden change that came over the world on entering a slave State. He took education politically." His time in Washington ended with a remark that "he had no education", a continuing contradiction that stemmed from his own reaction to the "official" education he was undergoing in schools that contrasted (once more see above) with the true education in which his experience was creating memories.
Harvard does not suit his taste either - the curriculum had no particular quality that could impress the man that Henry was becoming; a man who was not only a reader but a writer. He was impressed by Russell Lowell who "had brought back from Germany the only new and valuable part of its Universities, the habit of allowing students to read with him privately in his study. Adams asked the privilege, and used it to read a little, and to talk a great deal." His friendship with Lowell led him to connections with the transcendentalists although he never became one. He also became friends with one Robert E. Lee at Harvard and enjoyed a coterie of Virginian friends despite their Southern ways. At the end of his formal education he was able to conclude that "As yet he knew nothing." A bit of harsh judgment for the Senior Class Orator, but great minds are sometimes hardest on themselves.
The remainder of the autobiography takes him on a journey through Darwin and Chicago and "The Dynamo and the Virgin" into the beginning of the twentieth century. His story is always interesting and his prose is some of the best I have encountered. I may comment further on it as I continue to read and reread about his thoughts on a very particular education.
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LibraryThing member whitewavedarling
I'm inclined to consider this book more of a text on history than a standard autobiography, and I have rather mixed feelings about it as a whole. As an experimental autobiography, it's a fascinating study, but it's also a slow and long read. I'm not opposed to long books, but this was a rough read,
Still, in the end, it was worthwhile--something I didn't expect to be saying when I was about halfway through the work. The beginning was interesting, though, as was the last 150 pages or so where Adams dealt more with his ideas on progress, history, and social inertia, all of which were interesting and readable.
In the end, I recommend this to any student of history or anyone interested in the ways that American and European cultures were changing and reacting to one another in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. It is not, by any means, a fast or overtly entertaining read, but I would say it's worthwhile, perhaps as a side project to read a chapter from per day (chapter lengths are manageable). I wouldn't suggest reading it as I did, all five hundred pages over three days for a class---this, indeed, was rough.
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I have to admit. The middle in particular lagged for me, primarily because of a constant discussion of historical and political personalities that I was unfamiliar with. While I have a fair enough familiarity with American history, I'm not particularly familiar with any of the leading personalities of the nineteenth century (except for those who were literary or those who anyone would know, like the Presidents, etc.), and Adams often treats them as if the names are household familiarities, which I don't doubt they were to his contemporary audience. As a result, though, I was sometimes fairly lost, and considerably bored.Still, in the end, it was worthwhile--something I didn't expect to be saying when I was about halfway through the work. The beginning was interesting, though, as was the last 150 pages or so where Adams dealt more with his ideas on progress, history, and social inertia, all of which were interesting and readable.
In the end, I recommend this to any student of history or anyone interested in the ways that American and European cultures were changing and reacting to one another in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. It is not, by any means, a fast or overtly entertaining read, but I would say it's worthwhile, perhaps as a side project to read a chapter from per day (chapter lengths are manageable). I wouldn't suggest reading it as I did, all five hundred pages over three days for a class---this, indeed, was rough.
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LibraryThing member bokai
I was not prepared for this book at all. My background in early American history is limited at best, and Adams writes in such a vague and uninstructive manner that I think I spent the majority of the book confused and lost. Like a previous reviewer mentioned before me, Adams' apparent determination
The style of the text can also be intensely frustrating. It's practically ethereal at times, so that I would wonder if in the mess of words I had just read anything had actually been said. I struggled throughout the entirety of the book, confused and feeling woefully under-informed. Even the introduction describes the contents of Adams' Education to be "elusive" and "obscure".
So why is The Education of Henry Adams considered an important book in American History? The same introduction that admits the Education to be "elusive" and "obscure" provides the clue. It is stated there, "The 'Education', we must remember, was not destined for general publication but for a small group of Bostonians who would know, without having it stressed, when Henry Adams was being wholly serious, when he was playing with paradox, when he simply wanted to epater les bourgeois. The first readers knew, too, that much was deliberately left out, as irrelevant... or omitted for reasons of decorum..."
The introduction goes on to mention that Adams had been married, and that his wife had committed suicide. Not a word of this is mentioned in the body of the text itself, and if one were to skip the introductory text one would assume Adams had been an eternal bachelor.
The Education of Henry Adams is not a history book, and it is not a biography. It's a book of reaction, tailored to a small number that might be interested in the reaction of Henry Adams to the events of his life. Read in that context one can understand why the text is as difficult as it is, and it helps one realign the angle of their approach to The Education properly.
The first thing one must do is accept that one will learn very little history from The Education. This book is certainly a springboard for further research into Adams' time, if one is so inclined (and maybe has a grant or two) but by itself it teaches very little on this subject.
For someone like me, who is by no means a scholar of American History (yet) and is removed from Adams by an entire century, the most accelerated in known human history, no less, the value of The Education was the role it played in bridging that century and connecting two people, one a spiritual child of the 18th century who found himself living in the 19th, and the other a child of the 19th who finds themselves living in the 21st. The Education is, ultimately, a deeply personal book that expresses a sense that no period fiction or removed history can really capture. Once I had let go of my expectations of a more conventional education through this book, I was able to appreciate this and the service The Education provides in capturing the mindset of an American ancestor for future generations to connect to.
And the connection turned out to be stronger than I expected. The first anniversary of my undergraduate education has just passed me by, and I've spent a good part of the last year pondering the value of my own education in the sense that Adams' does so. That Henry Adams spent his whole life in a sort of frustrated search for the confidence of understanding is both a comfort and a terror to me. Will I too in my twilight years be struggling to stand upon the rumbling tectonics of a world where the age of certainty is long dead, and "Education" in the sense of grasping hold of fundamental truth is gone? I guess I'll know in 60 years or so, and when my own journey of education is over I am looking forward to meeting Mr. Adams and comparing notes. Perhaps he's more candid in person.
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to withhold any concrete explanations of the history he comments on is intensely frustrating. The line where he refers to a major event in Civil War diplomacy as history and not education had me seeing red for a moment there. For good portions of the text I wanted to reach into the author's grave and shake him, shouting, "Just spit it out!"The style of the text can also be intensely frustrating. It's practically ethereal at times, so that I would wonder if in the mess of words I had just read anything had actually been said. I struggled throughout the entirety of the book, confused and feeling woefully under-informed. Even the introduction describes the contents of Adams' Education to be "elusive" and "obscure".
So why is The Education of Henry Adams considered an important book in American History? The same introduction that admits the Education to be "elusive" and "obscure" provides the clue. It is stated there, "The 'Education', we must remember, was not destined for general publication but for a small group of Bostonians who would know, without having it stressed, when Henry Adams was being wholly serious, when he was playing with paradox, when he simply wanted to epater les bourgeois. The first readers knew, too, that much was deliberately left out, as irrelevant... or omitted for reasons of decorum..."
The introduction goes on to mention that Adams had been married, and that his wife had committed suicide. Not a word of this is mentioned in the body of the text itself, and if one were to skip the introductory text one would assume Adams had been an eternal bachelor.
The Education of Henry Adams is not a history book, and it is not a biography. It's a book of reaction, tailored to a small number that might be interested in the reaction of Henry Adams to the events of his life. Read in that context one can understand why the text is as difficult as it is, and it helps one realign the angle of their approach to The Education properly.
The first thing one must do is accept that one will learn very little history from The Education. This book is certainly a springboard for further research into Adams' time, if one is so inclined (and maybe has a grant or two) but by itself it teaches very little on this subject.
For someone like me, who is by no means a scholar of American History (yet) and is removed from Adams by an entire century, the most accelerated in known human history, no less, the value of The Education was the role it played in bridging that century and connecting two people, one a spiritual child of the 18th century who found himself living in the 19th, and the other a child of the 19th who finds themselves living in the 21st. The Education is, ultimately, a deeply personal book that expresses a sense that no period fiction or removed history can really capture. Once I had let go of my expectations of a more conventional education through this book, I was able to appreciate this and the service The Education provides in capturing the mindset of an American ancestor for future generations to connect to.
And the connection turned out to be stronger than I expected. The first anniversary of my undergraduate education has just passed me by, and I've spent a good part of the last year pondering the value of my own education in the sense that Adams' does so. That Henry Adams spent his whole life in a sort of frustrated search for the confidence of understanding is both a comfort and a terror to me. Will I too in my twilight years be struggling to stand upon the rumbling tectonics of a world where the age of certainty is long dead, and "Education" in the sense of grasping hold of fundamental truth is gone? I guess I'll know in 60 years or so, and when my own journey of education is over I am looking forward to meeting Mr. Adams and comparing notes. Perhaps he's more candid in person.
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LibraryThing member jddunn
I'll agree with the ratings of this among the best nonfiction of the 20th century. It is another of my favorite genre, the "books about everything." It covers roughly the period from 1850 to 1905, and hits on almost every major historical and intellectual development of the time, but from a unique
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personal and anecdotal perspective. Adams was a man of great gifts and cultivation, but with a unique, eccentric, mugwumpishly conservative temperament that makes his collision and confrontation with the early modernist era he lived through especially instructive and relevant to our own time. The filters of what his worldview did and didn't take for granted reveal fresh insights about our country's rapid and jarring growth from an agrarian experimental republic into a modern industrial superpower. Show Less
LibraryThing member wildbill
When the author completed this book he had 100 copies printed and he sent them to his friends. It is a very personal autobiography, there are several mentions of Rousseau's Confessions. It was only after his death that it was published for retail sale, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1918.
Adams' life
There is a level I would call patter. A description of where he went, who he saw and what they said. This is always interesting because he had a very interesting life. He traveled a lot and spent time with some very interesting people. He goes progressively deeper into the world around him until he is talking about a dynamic theory of history.
Adams is very intelligent and very observant. He tells an excellent story. He wrote this at the end of his life and he definitely has some words of wisdom to pass along. He also has a sense of humor which flashes out occasionally.
Adams does not portray himself in a very positive light. He doesn't talk about his accomplishments very much. I felt sometimes that Adams as the grandson and great-grandson of Presidents didn't feel that he had accomplished much in life.
The book is very good literature. The writing is noticeably from a different era. I enjoyed the book. While I recommend it, it may not be for everyone, I don't think the book was written to entertain others.
This makes me want to read Mont Saint Michel which is supposed to be one of his best.
Adams' life
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was full of interesting people and events many of which are talked about in this book. As a Civil War buff I enjoyed the five years Adams spent as the private secretary for his father, the American Ambassador to England, 1860-1865. There is a chronological format but Adams does not tell the story of his life. He does not include the death of his wife or any of his writing as topics in the book. Adams did have some irritating traits. He was a snob. I am sure it was how he was raised. His attitude was tinged with cynicism that was at times unpleasant. He did not try to sugar coat what he had to say and he had a lot to say on several levels. There were parts of the book I'm not sure I understood and that was frustrating.There is a level I would call patter. A description of where he went, who he saw and what they said. This is always interesting because he had a very interesting life. He traveled a lot and spent time with some very interesting people. He goes progressively deeper into the world around him until he is talking about a dynamic theory of history.
Adams is very intelligent and very observant. He tells an excellent story. He wrote this at the end of his life and he definitely has some words of wisdom to pass along. He also has a sense of humor which flashes out occasionally.
Adams does not portray himself in a very positive light. He doesn't talk about his accomplishments very much. I felt sometimes that Adams as the grandson and great-grandson of Presidents didn't feel that he had accomplished much in life.
The book is very good literature. The writing is noticeably from a different era. I enjoyed the book. While I recommend it, it may not be for everyone, I don't think the book was written to entertain others.
This makes me want to read Mont Saint Michel which is supposed to be one of his best.
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LibraryThing member theageofsilt
This is a book much better suited to a person with a good background in American history. Adams writes about pivotal events for an audience that does not need the background information. If you don't already know the story of the "Alabama", you won't understand it any better for reading Adams'
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account of his time in England when this was a crisis. However, I thought his observations about the New England character, London society, the rise of technology and many other topics quite interesting. He was born into a household of great privilege and has the modesty to acknowledge it. Writing of the infant with two presidents in his lineage "Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he." It is also Adams' burden that he feels he must live up to a family tradition in a world that changes rapidly during his long life. Show Less
LibraryThing member Muscogulus
This peculiar book was on my wishlist for years, ever since I first red a description of it. Henry Adams, a grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of John Adams, made his name as an essayist and historian, but he is best remembered today for this autobiography. As a creature of
The book enjoyed its greatest popularity in the 1920s, in part because the name-dropping that Adams does throughout the book was about people who were then still widely known. (Modern editions include a name glossary.) Adams’s comfortable pessimism also must have appealed to the generation that endured the catastrophe of World War I and formed the materialist culture of the ’20s. The book’s star fell during the Great Depression, but the Education has always had its devotees. (One of them is Edmund Morris, who wrote the introduction to my edition.)
My progress through the book was gradual. I spent about three evenings a week with it, and occasionally I wasted some daylight on it. While I never stopped finding Adams interesting, I did begin to feel that marching through the book was a duty more than a plesure. I'm usually happy to indulge writers who digress frequently and who come at their subject indirectly, by tortuous paths, or as if by accident. I even try to win skeptics over to the delights of that pioneering novel about nothing, Tristram Shandy. But the Education was a harder slog than I expected. The conceits that had delighted readers in the 1910s and ’20s soon wore a bit thin for me, sometimes lapsing into predictability. Everything, I soon realized, would turn out in the end not to be education. I found myself wishing Adams would describe, however tentatively and circuitously, what ”education” ment to him. But I feel sure that this silence was intentional.
Another famous silence is his omission of any mention of his wife, Marian “Clover” H. Adams, a fascinating woman to whom he was intensely devoted, and who killed herself during a struggle with depression in 1885. She was one of America’s first portrait photographers, and she poisoned herself with some of the potassium cyanide she used to develop photographs. This giant lacuna in The Education of Henry Adams is only indicated by a chapter title: “Twelve Years Later.”
Adams was a very young man during the Civil War, serving his father in the American embassy to Britain. So slavery and the southern “Slave Power” are lively presences in the Education. Black people, however, are invisible; one would probably search the whole text in vain for the contemporary word ”Negro.” Instead, Adams’s meditations on race — an important topic to him — are consistently directed beyond American shores. It is interesting to watch him struggle with the idea of race, convinced that it exists, aware that it is the foundation upon which the edifice of world history was being raised, but troubled by the elusiveness, the insubstantiality of it.
Race ruled the conditions; conditions hardly affected race; and yet no one could tell the patient tourist what race was, or how it should be known. History offered a feeble and delusive smile at the sound of the word; evolutionists and ethnologists disputed its very existence; no one knew what to make of it; yet, without the clue, history was a nursery tale. (pp. 411-412)
The passage I just quoted is from Adams’s trip to Hammerfest, Norway where, in the footsteps of Thomas Carlyle’s protagonist Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, he seeks the edge of the polar ice cap, and marvels to find it not only easy to reach but illuminated with electric light. He then meditates on ”the Norse” (his quaint term for Scandinavians) as embodying “unity” (his unexplained synonym for modernity) and contrasts them with Russia, where he had just visited. Russia, for him, exemplifies a universal “inertia” that would surely resist incorporation into ”unity“ — or change of any kind, for that matter — for generations to come. The ikon-kissing peasant exemplified all Russians for Adams. How surprised he must have been to hear of the Russian Revolution, less than five months before his deth in March 1918.
While contemplating the Hammerfest glacier he also glances at the indigenous people, whom he calls, reflexively and with an unconscious pun, the last Laps. One wonders how surprised he might be at the survival of the Lapps — now known by their own name of Sámi — and at their limited autonomy within Norway and Finland, and their protected rights to their language, culture, and self-determination. All these developments would be the opposite of Adams’s idea of progress and “unity.”
The world we live in is unlike the abstract future that Henry Adams fabricated, piece by piece, during his unevenly documented life of contemplation. I couldn’t help wondering, after I finished the book, whether Henry Adams himself had taken it seriously. Was it all just a performance to amuse his many friends? Or was it a task to keep the author distracted from the great loss at the center of his life? In parts of the book — such as the sermonette about unity and inertia, or the chapter "The Dynamo and the Virgin" about another pair of opposed archetypes — his words glow with a steady zeal, like the orange fire in a vacuum tube. None the less, whatever else all this may have ment to Henry Adams, we can safely assume that there was no education in it.
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one of the most elite American families, Adams could hardly avoid living an extraordinary life in regular contact with rich and influential people. He also had an imposing family legacy that was perhaps impossible for anyone to live up to. In this book, looking back over his life from the perspective of old age, Adams resorts to laconic detachment, writing of himself in the third person (”Adams”). The book enjoyed its greatest popularity in the 1920s, in part because the name-dropping that Adams does throughout the book was about people who were then still widely known. (Modern editions include a name glossary.) Adams’s comfortable pessimism also must have appealed to the generation that endured the catastrophe of World War I and formed the materialist culture of the ’20s. The book’s star fell during the Great Depression, but the Education has always had its devotees. (One of them is Edmund Morris, who wrote the introduction to my edition.)
My progress through the book was gradual. I spent about three evenings a week with it, and occasionally I wasted some daylight on it. While I never stopped finding Adams interesting, I did begin to feel that marching through the book was a duty more than a plesure. I'm usually happy to indulge writers who digress frequently and who come at their subject indirectly, by tortuous paths, or as if by accident. I even try to win skeptics over to the delights of that pioneering novel about nothing, Tristram Shandy. But the Education was a harder slog than I expected. The conceits that had delighted readers in the 1910s and ’20s soon wore a bit thin for me, sometimes lapsing into predictability. Everything, I soon realized, would turn out in the end not to be education. I found myself wishing Adams would describe, however tentatively and circuitously, what ”education” ment to him. But I feel sure that this silence was intentional.
Another famous silence is his omission of any mention of his wife, Marian “Clover” H. Adams, a fascinating woman to whom he was intensely devoted, and who killed herself during a struggle with depression in 1885. She was one of America’s first portrait photographers, and she poisoned herself with some of the potassium cyanide she used to develop photographs. This giant lacuna in The Education of Henry Adams is only indicated by a chapter title: “Twelve Years Later.”
Adams was a very young man during the Civil War, serving his father in the American embassy to Britain. So slavery and the southern “Slave Power” are lively presences in the Education. Black people, however, are invisible; one would probably search the whole text in vain for the contemporary word ”Negro.” Instead, Adams’s meditations on race — an important topic to him — are consistently directed beyond American shores. It is interesting to watch him struggle with the idea of race, convinced that it exists, aware that it is the foundation upon which the edifice of world history was being raised, but troubled by the elusiveness, the insubstantiality of it.
Race ruled the conditions; conditions hardly affected race; and yet no one could tell the patient tourist what race was, or how it should be known. History offered a feeble and delusive smile at the sound of the word; evolutionists and ethnologists disputed its very existence; no one knew what to make of it; yet, without the clue, history was a nursery tale. (pp. 411-412)
The passage I just quoted is from Adams’s trip to Hammerfest, Norway where, in the footsteps of Thomas Carlyle’s protagonist Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, he seeks the edge of the polar ice cap, and marvels to find it not only easy to reach but illuminated with electric light. He then meditates on ”the Norse” (his quaint term for Scandinavians) as embodying “unity” (his unexplained synonym for modernity) and contrasts them with Russia, where he had just visited. Russia, for him, exemplifies a universal “inertia” that would surely resist incorporation into ”unity“ — or change of any kind, for that matter — for generations to come. The ikon-kissing peasant exemplified all Russians for Adams. How surprised he must have been to hear of the Russian Revolution, less than five months before his deth in March 1918.
While contemplating the Hammerfest glacier he also glances at the indigenous people, whom he calls, reflexively and with an unconscious pun, the last Laps. One wonders how surprised he might be at the survival of the Lapps — now known by their own name of Sámi — and at their limited autonomy within Norway and Finland, and their protected rights to their language, culture, and self-determination. All these developments would be the opposite of Adams’s idea of progress and “unity.”
The world we live in is unlike the abstract future that Henry Adams fabricated, piece by piece, during his unevenly documented life of contemplation. I couldn’t help wondering, after I finished the book, whether Henry Adams himself had taken it seriously. Was it all just a performance to amuse his many friends? Or was it a task to keep the author distracted from the great loss at the center of his life? In parts of the book — such as the sermonette about unity and inertia, or the chapter "The Dynamo and the Virgin" about another pair of opposed archetypes — his words glow with a steady zeal, like the orange fire in a vacuum tube. None the less, whatever else all this may have ment to Henry Adams, we can safely assume that there was no education in it.
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LibraryThing member ed.matlack
This book almost defies categorization. It is less an autobiography, and more an accounting of America's transition into modernity as seen through the eyes of an extraordinary man. Adams is unique amongst American intellectuals because of his access to power through his lineage, but what separates
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him from most historians is his style of prose; he is an exceptional narrator. I enjoyed this book greatly, although it was not the easiest read at times, particularly when Adams' more cynical side shown through. Regardless, this is a classic of American literature and a must read for those interested in understanding the evolution of American thought. Show Less
LibraryThing member stillatim
One of the oddest books I've ever read, and am ever likely to read: an autobiography written in the third person, which tells us almost nothing at all about the author/central character, this seems more like a pre-modernist bildungsroman than anything else. The weirdness doesn't end there- Henry
As if that's not hard enough to deal with, Mr Adams' assumes that you've already heard of him and all his friends, and that you know what they were about. Sometimes this works okay (for instance, I know a bit about Swinburne and the presidents he encounters); often it doesn't (Henry, Mr King and Mr Hay were clearly very close friends, but what exactly the latter two did, what they believed, and what impact their actions had on the greater world remains a mystery to me). If you're deeply versed in 19th century American politics, you'll probably find his comments on those men and dozens of others amusing and interesting. I am not so versed.
Despite which, this is an amazing, brilliant book, well worth the considerable effort needed to read it, because Mr Adams and Henry Adams are pretty obviously men you would like to spend time with in heaven. One of them, or maybe both, would amuse you with lines such as:
"Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power-houses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces."
and
"Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds."
I don't know, though, if I'd like to spend much time chatting with Adams himself.
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Adams spends much of his time philosophizing about history while the narrator (call him Mr Adams) spends most of his time explaining that Henry Adams is a fool who has no idea what he's talking about; Henry Adams involves himself in politics, the academy, and Grand Tourism but Mr Adams rants about the uselessness of politics and the academy, and rolls his eyes at Henry's failure to understand or properly enjoy any of the things he sees while Grand Touring. As if that's not hard enough to deal with, Mr Adams' assumes that you've already heard of him and all his friends, and that you know what they were about. Sometimes this works okay (for instance, I know a bit about Swinburne and the presidents he encounters); often it doesn't (Henry, Mr King and Mr Hay were clearly very close friends, but what exactly the latter two did, what they believed, and what impact their actions had on the greater world remains a mystery to me). If you're deeply versed in 19th century American politics, you'll probably find his comments on those men and dozens of others amusing and interesting. I am not so versed.
Despite which, this is an amazing, brilliant book, well worth the considerable effort needed to read it, because Mr Adams and Henry Adams are pretty obviously men you would like to spend time with in heaven. One of them, or maybe both, would amuse you with lines such as:
"Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power-houses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces."
and
"Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds."
I don't know, though, if I'd like to spend much time chatting with Adams himself.
Show Less
LibraryThing member michaelm42071
The Education of Henry Adams is a terrible book. Like Walden and Emerson’s Essays, it reveals a peculiarly American complacency in its subject, but without the redeeming writing skill of Thoreau and Emerson. Adams is vague and general when he should be detailed and specific, and that’s pretty
The choice of narrating his life in the third person is never justified or explained. Perhaps Adams thought it suited his habit of self-deprecation. Unfortunately, the self-deprecation, like most of Adams’s attempts to be humorous, comes across as mere sarcasm, which is the weakest of humor’s rhetorical tools. The book’s conceit, that Adams never gets the education he needs to face the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, is undercut by Adams’s condescension about almost everyone else’s mental powers, including Lincoln, Grant, Cleveland, Roosevelt, and other American presidents he meets.
Adams, a self-confessed dilettante when it comes to art (though even here he boasts of confounding the experts), is in fact a dilettante in all he tries. He plays at learning law in America and abroad, makes fun of his secretarial duties in the service of his father Charles Francis Adams when the latter is ambassador to England, and when he returns to the States after the Civil War to no prospect of high diplomatic appointment under Johnson, he gives up the idea of diplomacy altogether and becomes a part-time journalist and an unwilling history professor. Meanwhile, he has briefly taken up Darwin without understanding him; he has the mistaken popular, teleological notion that evolution aims at perfection.
In the chapters on Adams’s years in London during the Civil War, the young diplomat bewails his failure to understand what the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Minister Lord Russell, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gladstone are up to. Henry thinks their behavior reflects a wish to see U.S. power divided, since she is a rival nation (and an old enemy). In fact, if their memoirs and biographies written years later are to be believed, they were just reacting to day-to-day changes in the American situation while trying to protect England’s cotton trade with the South.
After the war Adams remains in England at loose ends, taking up Darwinism and becoming a dilettante and an art collector in a small way. When he returns to the country he can expect nothing from the Johnson administration—the southerner Johnson was anathema to the old Free Soilers (Sumner, Charles Adams, and the other men who formed Adams’s political consciousness). He had been publishing, sometimes with his identity concealed, in various stateside papers since his work for his father in the Congress, so he ended up going to Washington to try to break into a journalism job, ultimately in New York.
He supported Grant but soon discovered what a mistake that was. The Jay Gould scandal came less than a year into Grant’s presidency. Adams first turns down and then accepts a job to teach at Harvard and edit the North American Review.
After the death of his sister in the early 1870s there is a hiatus in Adams’s account: He tells us nothing about his marriage or his wife’s depression and suicide, and he leaves out any account of the years from 1872 to 1892, when he retires and begins a period of travel with various friends. Altogether I find the book unsatisfactory as autobiography or as a picture of the times Adams lives through.
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much all the time. He writes as if his readers had just put down a newspaper covering the events of the period he’s writing about, so that all he need do is allude to people and places. The choice of narrating his life in the third person is never justified or explained. Perhaps Adams thought it suited his habit of self-deprecation. Unfortunately, the self-deprecation, like most of Adams’s attempts to be humorous, comes across as mere sarcasm, which is the weakest of humor’s rhetorical tools. The book’s conceit, that Adams never gets the education he needs to face the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, is undercut by Adams’s condescension about almost everyone else’s mental powers, including Lincoln, Grant, Cleveland, Roosevelt, and other American presidents he meets.
Adams, a self-confessed dilettante when it comes to art (though even here he boasts of confounding the experts), is in fact a dilettante in all he tries. He plays at learning law in America and abroad, makes fun of his secretarial duties in the service of his father Charles Francis Adams when the latter is ambassador to England, and when he returns to the States after the Civil War to no prospect of high diplomatic appointment under Johnson, he gives up the idea of diplomacy altogether and becomes a part-time journalist and an unwilling history professor. Meanwhile, he has briefly taken up Darwin without understanding him; he has the mistaken popular, teleological notion that evolution aims at perfection.
In the chapters on Adams’s years in London during the Civil War, the young diplomat bewails his failure to understand what the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Minister Lord Russell, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gladstone are up to. Henry thinks their behavior reflects a wish to see U.S. power divided, since she is a rival nation (and an old enemy). In fact, if their memoirs and biographies written years later are to be believed, they were just reacting to day-to-day changes in the American situation while trying to protect England’s cotton trade with the South.
After the war Adams remains in England at loose ends, taking up Darwinism and becoming a dilettante and an art collector in a small way. When he returns to the country he can expect nothing from the Johnson administration—the southerner Johnson was anathema to the old Free Soilers (Sumner, Charles Adams, and the other men who formed Adams’s political consciousness). He had been publishing, sometimes with his identity concealed, in various stateside papers since his work for his father in the Congress, so he ended up going to Washington to try to break into a journalism job, ultimately in New York.
He supported Grant but soon discovered what a mistake that was. The Jay Gould scandal came less than a year into Grant’s presidency. Adams first turns down and then accepts a job to teach at Harvard and edit the North American Review.
After the death of his sister in the early 1870s there is a hiatus in Adams’s account: He tells us nothing about his marriage or his wife’s depression and suicide, and he leaves out any account of the years from 1872 to 1892, when he retires and begins a period of travel with various friends. Altogether I find the book unsatisfactory as autobiography or as a picture of the times Adams lives through.
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LibraryThing member FKarr
read this when traveling from Paris to Moscow back in April 1996 maybe
LibraryThing member pickwick817
It was interesting to me to read about the viewpiont of the Civil War as seen from London. After recently reading Carl Sandburg's biography of Lincoln, another take on the war made for good comparison. Adam's assessment of his own formal education was surprisingly poor. Adam's commentary on some of
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the contemporary events prompted me to dig into some history references. Minor events from the present day, were sometimes seen as big events back then. I also enjoyed Adam's discussion on the progress of technology through the 1800's, and his own version of Moore's Law, except regarding the use of coal as an energy source. Some seemingly gross assumptions about "future" years like 1960 and 2000, were not far off the mark. Show Less
LibraryThing member wcpweaver
The Education of Henry Adams is one long meditation on the value of a man's life in the bewildering fast-paced and very corrupt 19th century. If only Henry could see us now! All of the problems he delineates with modern society only much more, and a whole lot faster.
Otherwise I found Adams's style
I may read it again when I'm in a better mood.
Otherwise I found Adams's style
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and manner to be aggravating and disingenuous to the max. It might be the mood I'm in, but the narrator presumes we're well versed in the politics of his day when in actuality even the worst scandals are forgotten events. To be led to the climax of his father's outmaneuvering the British Prime Minister during the Civil War and then be told, "But that's history and has nothing to do with education," when a single paragraph could have explained everthing is what my grandpa would call "a pisser." In fairness he probably didn't expect it to be read a hundred years later by the general public, having only printed a few copies for friends. I did think his insights to be remarkable and he clearly foresaw the conflicts building that would define the 20th century, but his narcissism—even if ironic—annoyed me from the beginning.I may read it again when I'm in a better mood.
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LibraryThing member mrminjares
A tiresome catalogue of nineteenth century american domestic and foreign policy through the eyes of one of America's most distinguished gentlemen. He complains a bit too much about not having enough education - and then he offers an abstract theory of history as a solution to his problems. An
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interesting, but not very enlightening story of a man on a journey through America. Show Less
LibraryThing member enoerew
It is easy to be overwhelmed with characters and events of history that you are not familiar with, but if you are patient, you will see this book as an interesting inside look at an important period of change in the United States and the world as a whole.
LibraryThing member EricKibler
This is my second least favorite book thus far from the Lifetime Reading Plan. My least favorite being the Q'uran.
Henry Adams was the grandson and great grandson of Presidents. Although a Bostonian, he inherited an eccentric outsider-dom from his famous forebears, and remained to the end of his
As a part of the family of Founding Fathers, he stands between two centuries, the eighteenth and the twentieth. He wrote this book in 1904, and at age 66 he is still forward-looking, wondering what the twentieth century has in store. He was fly on the wall for the nineteeth.
After concentrating the narrative on his education, which includes Harvard, he concludes that the education one picks up accidentally is more valuable then what one received intentionally at even the most respected institutions. After that, the bulk of the heart of the book is spent on Charles Francis Adams' (Henry's dad's)tenure as American Minister in London during Civil War years, and Henry's tenure as his personal secretary (Nepotism? Naaaahh!)At first, the American minister is shunned by members of Parliament, as the predominant opinion was that the Union would not survive the Civil War. But C. F. Adams is persistent, circumstances improve, and the Minister attains victory in the Laird ironclad affair. Adams has little good to say about the character of English politicians in general, but ends up making a few very close friends.
When he reaches 1870, he suddenly skips twenty years. It just so happens that during this period was when he met and married his wife, who with Henry, and others, comprised the predominant intellectual salon in the U.S. This was also the period where Adams had his salad days as author and Harvard history professor. Seems to me this would have been prime material to include, but as he felt he wasn't being "educated" during that period, he skips it.
Unfortunately, the post 1890 years are anticlimactic. At the end of the book, he tries (IMO unsuccessfully) to articulate his "dynamic theory of history". In reading about this, I couldn't help but think of the closing chapters of Tolstoy's "War and Peace", where the great Count makes a more lucid case for a scientific approach to history. Like Tolstoy, Adams seems to imagine a future figure not unlike Isaac Asimov's Hari Selden, a "psychohistorian" who can use the science of history to predict future events.
Also unfortunately, Adams was a clear product of the Victorian Age. Those guys never told the real dirt on themselves. This would have been a good book in which to do so, as one is educated by his youthful maistakes and indiscretions. It's a shame, but one thing you never think when reading this book: "Oh Henry Adams! What kind of crazy shit are you gonna do next?"
The style of the book is mannered, curlicued, and sometimes opaque. For those who wonder why, this book is exactly why the world needed a Hemingway.
Henry Adams was the grandson and great grandson of Presidents. Although a Bostonian, he inherited an eccentric outsider-dom from his famous forebears, and remained to the end of his
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life apart from the business community of that city. Adams has the disconcerting habit of speaking of himself in the third person like Jimmy from Seinfeld. "Henry Adams doesn't like this steak! Henry Adams wants you to send it back!"As a part of the family of Founding Fathers, he stands between two centuries, the eighteenth and the twentieth. He wrote this book in 1904, and at age 66 he is still forward-looking, wondering what the twentieth century has in store. He was fly on the wall for the nineteeth.
After concentrating the narrative on his education, which includes Harvard, he concludes that the education one picks up accidentally is more valuable then what one received intentionally at even the most respected institutions. After that, the bulk of the heart of the book is spent on Charles Francis Adams' (Henry's dad's)tenure as American Minister in London during Civil War years, and Henry's tenure as his personal secretary (Nepotism? Naaaahh!)At first, the American minister is shunned by members of Parliament, as the predominant opinion was that the Union would not survive the Civil War. But C. F. Adams is persistent, circumstances improve, and the Minister attains victory in the Laird ironclad affair. Adams has little good to say about the character of English politicians in general, but ends up making a few very close friends.
When he reaches 1870, he suddenly skips twenty years. It just so happens that during this period was when he met and married his wife, who with Henry, and others, comprised the predominant intellectual salon in the U.S. This was also the period where Adams had his salad days as author and Harvard history professor. Seems to me this would have been prime material to include, but as he felt he wasn't being "educated" during that period, he skips it.
Unfortunately, the post 1890 years are anticlimactic. At the end of the book, he tries (IMO unsuccessfully) to articulate his "dynamic theory of history". In reading about this, I couldn't help but think of the closing chapters of Tolstoy's "War and Peace", where the great Count makes a more lucid case for a scientific approach to history. Like Tolstoy, Adams seems to imagine a future figure not unlike Isaac Asimov's Hari Selden, a "psychohistorian" who can use the science of history to predict future events.
Also unfortunately, Adams was a clear product of the Victorian Age. Those guys never told the real dirt on themselves. This would have been a good book in which to do so, as one is educated by his youthful maistakes and indiscretions. It's a shame, but one thing you never think when reading this book: "Oh Henry Adams! What kind of crazy shit are you gonna do next?"
The style of the book is mannered, curlicued, and sometimes opaque. For those who wonder why, this book is exactly why the world needed a Hemingway.
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LibraryThing member ivanfranko
I'd first heard of Adams in Gore Vidal's novel "Empire". That novel introduced me to people like John Hay, Secretary to Lincoln, and later Secretary of State itself. These memoirs enlightened me about the stellar politician John Hay was, thanks to the lifelong friendship between Adams and Hay.
Adams
Adams' period as Private Secretary to his father, First Minister to Great Britain during the Civil War, is especially revealing. How close the British were to declaring for the Confederacy surprised me. Similarly, how surprised were the British by the Union's successes.
He is fully admiring of John Hay, to whom he gives credit for advancing American skill and intelligence in the diplomatic manoeuvrings that produced an alliance, or at least a commonality of understanding, between Britain, France, Germany and USA at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.
I was a little confused by Adams' dynamic theory of history, but then so was he by the seismic shifts brought about by particle physics and the industrial behemoth.
Adams' life was his ever-flowering education.
Adams
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centres his memoirs on his rather barren quest to find meaning and understanding through "education". This theme tends to become tiresome. Adams' period as Private Secretary to his father, First Minister to Great Britain during the Civil War, is especially revealing. How close the British were to declaring for the Confederacy surprised me. Similarly, how surprised were the British by the Union's successes.
He is fully admiring of John Hay, to whom he gives credit for advancing American skill and intelligence in the diplomatic manoeuvrings that produced an alliance, or at least a commonality of understanding, between Britain, France, Germany and USA at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.
I was a little confused by Adams' dynamic theory of history, but then so was he by the seismic shifts brought about by particle physics and the industrial behemoth.
Adams' life was his ever-flowering education.
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LibraryThing member JBarringer
As memoirs go, this one is pretty boring, possibly interesting reading for people studying the psychology of Henry Adams, but not all that useful for much else, and really tedious.
LibraryThing member ksmyth
I read the Education twice in college, so it's been about thirty years. I remember being impressed with Henry Adams' reasoning, and the metaphor of the Virgin and the Dynamo. A great look inside a superior mind.
LibraryThing member Coutre
The Education of Henry Adams is rich in personal observations, filled with nineteenth-century US history. Even his mile walk to school at age 6 has historical interest, because the 77-year-old man who held his hand and walked with him was the sixth US president, John Quincy Adams, Henry’s
For the record, Henry’s great-grandfather was the second US president, John Adams (signatory of the Declaration of Independence), then his grandfather John Quincy Adams the sixth president, and his father the US ambassador to England during the Civil War. His maternal grandfather Peter Chardon Brooks was one of the 100 wealthiest Americans, a merchant millionaire, which was rare in the 1700s and early 1800s.
Adams was alive twenty-two years before the Civil War, and from his earliest years was appalled at slavery and the retrograde violation of human dignity in the southern defense of slavery (100). He met presidents from, of course, his grandfather John Quincy, through Zachary Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and many more, through twentieth-century presidents McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt. He died in 1918, the same year that World War I ended. It was a long way from the early American pioneer days of 1838 when he was born. When Adams was born, transportation and communication had not changed in 10,000 years. When he died he had seen the introduction of new transportation and communication that the twentieth century took for granted.
Henry served as assistant to the ambassador to England for eight years when he was fresh out of Harvard University. Returning to the US around 1869 he started a career he loved as a journalist. But his family, friends, and professors he respected, persuaded him to take the position of history professor at Harvard. He did it for seven years. One of his students was Henry Cabot Lodge.
Other than the friends he made during this period, he hated teaching and considered it a waste of seven years. He had little faith in standard teaching methods and outcomes. He valued the active mind and to “know how to learn” rather than the stuff that people spend most of their time studying (314). He believed in slower-paced learning to more fully and deeply absorb subjects as opposed to fast-paced surface learning.
On the other hand, he felt a little guilty after Harvard had greeted him as an adult with open arms: “Yet nothing in the vanity of life struck him as more humiliating than that Harvard College, which he had persistently criticized, abused, abandoned, and neglected, should alone have offered him a dollar, an office, an encouragement, or a kindness” (305).
He returned to his writing career, which over his lifetime included novels, the eight-volume History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, historical and legal essays, the two books I’ve reviewed, and many others. He was one of America’s most esteemed historians though he spent his life with a sense of personal failure and a low estimation of his own education.
His lifelong pursuit was to extrapolate and understand the trajectory of human evolution, socially, politically, industrially, scientifically, theologically, and technologically. One of his comments on human evolutionary development sounds very modern. As history students know, Ulysses S. Grant had been a great general, but was corrupt as president. Speaking of Grant, Adams cuts to the chase: “He had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages. … That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be called…the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. … Darwinists ought to conclude that America was reverting to the stone age” (266).
The Education is rife with insightful commentary on the world spinning around him, sometimes moving too fast to comprehend, sometimes moving incomprehensively backwards. He saw paradigm-shift inventions from telegraph and trains, to telephone and automobiles (he even bought a car in his later years), steam then electricity, inventions like photography, then film and the early Hollywood silent films, finally airplanes and the discovery of radium and radiation.
Adams traveled more than most Americans in the nineteenth century. He spent many years throughout Europe, Russia, Asia, Africa, the Pacific islands and the Caribbean. He was an early observer of the merging of Western Cultures, noting “Hamburg was almost as American as St. Louis” (414).
The Education has hidden treasures, offhand observations that end up being the most memorable. For example, he notes the affectation of eccentric behaviors in people considered highly eccentric. Eccentricity itself becomes a convention. He observes that “a mind really eccentric never betrayed it. True eccentricity was a tone—a shade—a nuance—and the finer the tone, the truer the eccentricity” (370).
Adams’ final thoughts show his disappointment: “He saw his education complete, and was sorry he ever began it” (458). He abhorred the ever-worsening “persistently fiendish treatment of man by man;…the perpetual symbolism of a higher law, and the perpetual relapse to a lower one” and principals of freedom deteriorating into principals of power and the “despotism of artificial order” (458), referring to the rise of corporate dominance over society. He particularly disliked the growing influence of corporate power: “The Trusts and Corporations stood for the larger part of the new power that had been created since 1840, and were obnoxious because of their vigorous and unscrupulous energy…They tore society to pieces and trampled it under foot” (500).
Adams had good friends who met tragic fates, his wife committed suicide at a young age, and as he grew older, found himself “A solitary man of sixty-five years or more, alone in a Gothic cathedral or a Paris apartment…” (460). So this is The Education of Henry Adams. You may wonder why I liked it so much, and recommend it. The book is a retrospective provided by one of our most observant students of life, with access to the most interesting places and people in their most interesting times. The book itself is a fascinating education for anyone who reads it.
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grandfather.For the record, Henry’s great-grandfather was the second US president, John Adams (signatory of the Declaration of Independence), then his grandfather John Quincy Adams the sixth president, and his father the US ambassador to England during the Civil War. His maternal grandfather Peter Chardon Brooks was one of the 100 wealthiest Americans, a merchant millionaire, which was rare in the 1700s and early 1800s.
Adams was alive twenty-two years before the Civil War, and from his earliest years was appalled at slavery and the retrograde violation of human dignity in the southern defense of slavery (100). He met presidents from, of course, his grandfather John Quincy, through Zachary Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and many more, through twentieth-century presidents McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt. He died in 1918, the same year that World War I ended. It was a long way from the early American pioneer days of 1838 when he was born. When Adams was born, transportation and communication had not changed in 10,000 years. When he died he had seen the introduction of new transportation and communication that the twentieth century took for granted.
Henry served as assistant to the ambassador to England for eight years when he was fresh out of Harvard University. Returning to the US around 1869 he started a career he loved as a journalist. But his family, friends, and professors he respected, persuaded him to take the position of history professor at Harvard. He did it for seven years. One of his students was Henry Cabot Lodge.
Other than the friends he made during this period, he hated teaching and considered it a waste of seven years. He had little faith in standard teaching methods and outcomes. He valued the active mind and to “know how to learn” rather than the stuff that people spend most of their time studying (314). He believed in slower-paced learning to more fully and deeply absorb subjects as opposed to fast-paced surface learning.
On the other hand, he felt a little guilty after Harvard had greeted him as an adult with open arms: “Yet nothing in the vanity of life struck him as more humiliating than that Harvard College, which he had persistently criticized, abused, abandoned, and neglected, should alone have offered him a dollar, an office, an encouragement, or a kindness” (305).
He returned to his writing career, which over his lifetime included novels, the eight-volume History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, historical and legal essays, the two books I’ve reviewed, and many others. He was one of America’s most esteemed historians though he spent his life with a sense of personal failure and a low estimation of his own education.
His lifelong pursuit was to extrapolate and understand the trajectory of human evolution, socially, politically, industrially, scientifically, theologically, and technologically. One of his comments on human evolutionary development sounds very modern. As history students know, Ulysses S. Grant had been a great general, but was corrupt as president. Speaking of Grant, Adams cuts to the chase: “He had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages. … That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be called…the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. … Darwinists ought to conclude that America was reverting to the stone age” (266).
The Education is rife with insightful commentary on the world spinning around him, sometimes moving too fast to comprehend, sometimes moving incomprehensively backwards. He saw paradigm-shift inventions from telegraph and trains, to telephone and automobiles (he even bought a car in his later years), steam then electricity, inventions like photography, then film and the early Hollywood silent films, finally airplanes and the discovery of radium and radiation.
Adams traveled more than most Americans in the nineteenth century. He spent many years throughout Europe, Russia, Asia, Africa, the Pacific islands and the Caribbean. He was an early observer of the merging of Western Cultures, noting “Hamburg was almost as American as St. Louis” (414).
The Education has hidden treasures, offhand observations that end up being the most memorable. For example, he notes the affectation of eccentric behaviors in people considered highly eccentric. Eccentricity itself becomes a convention. He observes that “a mind really eccentric never betrayed it. True eccentricity was a tone—a shade—a nuance—and the finer the tone, the truer the eccentricity” (370).
Adams’ final thoughts show his disappointment: “He saw his education complete, and was sorry he ever began it” (458). He abhorred the ever-worsening “persistently fiendish treatment of man by man;…the perpetual symbolism of a higher law, and the perpetual relapse to a lower one” and principals of freedom deteriorating into principals of power and the “despotism of artificial order” (458), referring to the rise of corporate dominance over society. He particularly disliked the growing influence of corporate power: “The Trusts and Corporations stood for the larger part of the new power that had been created since 1840, and were obnoxious because of their vigorous and unscrupulous energy…They tore society to pieces and trampled it under foot” (500).
Adams had good friends who met tragic fates, his wife committed suicide at a young age, and as he grew older, found himself “A solitary man of sixty-five years or more, alone in a Gothic cathedral or a Paris apartment…” (460). So this is The Education of Henry Adams. You may wonder why I liked it so much, and recommend it. The book is a retrospective provided by one of our most observant students of life, with access to the most interesting places and people in their most interesting times. The book itself is a fascinating education for anyone who reads it.
Show Less
LibraryThing member annbury
Adams was born in 1838 into a family that had made American history, but his role was to be that of an observer, from the Civil War up to 1905. Perhaps the most interesting section comes early on, when Henry was serving as secretary to his father, who was US minister to Britain during the Civil
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War. Adams' discussion of Britain's role in that conflict broke new ground for me: I knew much of the British establishment supported the South, but I didn't know how close the Liberal Government came to recognizing the South as a country. Henry was in Washington during the Grant Administration, and his view of Grant is highly negative. He was also an intimate observer in the 1890's. Sometimes Adams' negativity (about himself more than anything else) becomes burdensome, and one misses the personal element. Still, this is key reading for those interested in the period. Show Less
LibraryThing member ddonahue
superb book
LibraryThing member margaretfield
brilliant writing.
LibraryThing member jonbrammer
If you know a lot about the history of the second half of the 19th century, you will probably enjoy this book much more than the casual and the curious, as Adams does a lot of name-dropping without any kind of footnotes or contextual explanation. I was especially interested in Adams' description of
There are some slow parts of the book, and his attempt to conclude with an overarching theory of history, detailed in scientific language, is unsuccessful in hindsight. Adams' ideas about the accelerating progress of technology and thought is really the culmination of Englightenment thinking, which would be disavowed by the modernists ten years after his death. Perhaps Adams would have revised his thinking if he had lived to see the cataclysm of 1914, and it is ironic how in the last lines of the book he wistfully hopes for a centenial reunion with his best friends King and Hay, to observe the progress and peace that humanity had created. The year: 1938.
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his time as private secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, Lincoln's ambassador in England during the Civil War, and the diplomatic and political machinations that ocurred while trying to secure Britain's official neutrality. There are some slow parts of the book, and his attempt to conclude with an overarching theory of history, detailed in scientific language, is unsuccessful in hindsight. Adams' ideas about the accelerating progress of technology and thought is really the culmination of Englightenment thinking, which would be disavowed by the modernists ten years after his death. Perhaps Adams would have revised his thinking if he had lived to see the cataclysm of 1914, and it is ironic how in the last lines of the book he wistfully hopes for a centenial reunion with his best friends King and Hay, to observe the progress and peace that humanity had created. The year: 1938.
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Awards
Pulitzer Prize (Winner — 1919)
Language
Original publication date
1918 (commercial publication)
1907 (private limited edition)
Physical description
736 p.; 8.1 inches
ISBN
0395166209 / 9780395166208
Local notes
Riverside Editions
Other editions
The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography by Henry Adams (Paperback)