In his late sixties, the American historian Henry Brooks Adams wrote
The Education of Henry Adams as an exploration
of the meaning of his own life. Adams was the great-grandson of one U.S. president (John Adams) and the grandson of another (John Quincy Adams). His father, Charles Francis Adams, was an important figure in antislavery politics and an early leader of the Republican Party in the years before the Civil War. As a child, Adams tells the reader, he simply assumed that one day he himself would be president of the United States. Yet the family attitudes that encouraged that belief also taught him that, as an Adams and a New England aristocrat, he had an obligation to meet the highest standards, both moral and intellectual, in private as well as public life. Almost from the beginning, Adams was troubled by a conflict between ambition and a strong sense of ethical responsibility.
Presented in chapters that are dated and arranged by strict chronology, the book divides into two main parts with a twenty-year gap between them. The first tells of Adams’ childhood, his formal
education, and the period up to the age of thirty-three, during which he was searching for a career in public
affairs. Having been graduated from Harvard University and having spent two years in Europe, Adams went to England as private secretary to his father, who held the critically important post of U.S. minister to Great Britain throughout the American Civil War. Observing the attempts of British leaders to aid the Confederacy while pretending to a strict neutrality, Henry Adams had his first disillusioning experience with the ruthlessness and duplicity of contemporary politics. Returning to the United States in 1868, Adams was dismayed by the corruption and reckless speculation that accompanied industrial growth in the years following the Civil War. The central theme of this first half of the book is Adams’ wry complaint that his background as an Adams—as well as his formal education at Harvard and in Germany—left him particularly unsuited for the rough-and-tumble world of nineteenth century public affairs.
The last two hundred pages of the book deal with the years between 1892 and 1905. Having long since abandoned any thought of participating in government, Adams devoted himself during this period to observing current public affairs and attempting to understand their relation to the broad sweep of history. Through his close friendship with John Hay, the secretary of state under President Theodore Roosevelt, he was made aware of the intimate details of American foreign policy during the period after the Spanish-American War. At the same time, convinced that the natural sciences were the most advanced areas of human thought at the time, he tried to borrow from physics the basic concepts of inertia, force, and acceleration and to apply them to interpreting human history in the long term.