Chapter XXII. Chicago (1893)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

DRIFTING in the dead-water of the fin-de-siecle -- and during
this last decade every one talked, and seemed to feel fin-de-siecle
-- where not a breath stirred the idle air of education or fretted
the mental torpor of self-content, one lived alone. Adams had long
ceased going into society. For years he had not dined out of his own
house, and in public his face was as unknown as that of an extinct
statesman. He had often noticed that six months' oblivion amounts to
newspaper-death, and that resurrection is rare. Nothing is easier, if
a man wants it, than rest, profound as the grave.

His friends sometimes took pity on him, and came to share a meal
or pass a night on their passage south or northwards, but existence
was, on the whole, exceedingly solitary, or seemed so to him. Of the
society favorites who made the life of every dinner- table and of the
halls of Congress -- Tom Reed, Bourke Cockran, Edward Wolcott -- he
knew not one. Although Calvin Brice was his next neighbor for six
years, entertaining lavishly as no one had ever entertained before in
Washington, Adams never entered his house. W. C. Whitney rivalled
Senator Brice in hospitality, and was besides an old acquaintance of
the reforming era, but Adams saw him as little as he saw his chief,
President Cleveland, or President Harrison or Secretary Bayard or
Blaine or Olney. One has no choice but to go everywhere or nowhere.
No one may pick and choose between houses, or accept hospitality
without returning it. He loved solitude as little as others did; but
he was unfit for social work, and he sank under the surface.

Luckily for such helpless animals as solitary men, the world is
not only good-natured but even friendly and generous; it loves to
pardon if pardon is not demanded as a right. Adams's social offences
were many, and no one was more sensitive to it than himself; but a
few houses always remained which he could enter without being asked,
and quit without being noticed. One was John Hay's; another was Cabot
Lodge's; a third led to an intimacy which had the singular effect of
educating him in knowledge of the very class of American politician
who had done most to block his intended path in life. Senator Cameron
of Pennsylvania had married in 1880 a young niece of Senator John
Sherman of Ohio, thus making an alliance of dynastic importance in
politics, and in society a reign of sixteen years, during which Mrs.
Cameron and Mrs. Lodge led a career, without precedent and without
succession, as the dispensers of sunshine over Washington. Both of
them had been kind to Adams, and a dozen years of this intimacy had
made him one of their habitual household, as he was of Hay's. In a
small society, such ties between houses become political and social
force. Without intention or consciousness, they fix one's status in
the world. Whatever one's preferences in politics might be, one's
house was bound to the Republican interest when sandwiched between
Senator Cameron, John Hay, and Cabot Lodge, with Theodore Roosevelt
equally at home in them all, and Cecil Spring-Rice to unite them by
impartial variety. The relation was daily, and the alliance
undisturbed by power or patronage, since Mr. Harrison, in those
respects, showed little more taste than Mr. Cleveland for the society
and interests of this particular band of followers, whose relations
with the White House were sometimes comic, but never intimate.

In February, 1893, Senator Cameron took his family to South
Carolina, where he had bought an old plantation at Coffin's Point on
St. Helena Island, and Adams, as one of the family, was taken, with
the rest, to open the new experience. From there he went on to
Havana, and came back to Coffin's Point to linger till near April. In
May the Senator took his family to Chicago to see the Exposition, and
Adams went with them. Early in June, all sailed for England together,
and at last, in the middle of July, all found themselves in
Switzerland, at Prangins, Chamounix, and Zermatt. On July 22 they
drove across the Furka Pass and went down by rail to Lucerne.

Months of close contact teach character, if character has
interest; and to Adams the Cameron type had keen interest, ever since
it had shipwrecked his career in the person of President Grant.
Perhaps it owed life to Scotch blood; perhaps to the blood of Adam
and Eve, the primitive strain of man; perhaps only to the blood of
the cottager working against the blood of the townsman; but whatever
it was, one liked it for its simplicity. The Pennsylvania mind, as
minds go, was not complex; it reasoned little and never talked; but
in practical matters it was the steadiest of all American types;
perhaps the most efficient; certainly the safest.

Adams had printed as much as this in his books, but had never
been able to find a type to describe, the two great historical
Pennsylvanians having been, as every one had so often heard, Benjamin
Franklin of Boston and Albert Gallatin of Geneva. Of Albert Gallatin,
indeed, he had made a voluminous study and an elaborate picture, only
to show that he was, if American at all, a New Yorker, with a
Calvinistic strain -- rather Connecticut than Pennsylvanian. The true
Pennsylvanian was a narrower type; as narrow as the kirk; as shy of
other people's narrowness as a Yankee; as self-limited as a Puritan
farmer. To him, none but Pennsylvanians were white. Chinaman, negro,
Dago, Italian, Englishman, Yankee -- all was one in the depths of
Pennsylvanian consciousness. The mental machine could run only on
what it took for American lines. This was familiar, ever since one's
study of President Grant in 1869; but in 1893, as then, the type was
admirably strong and useful if one wanted only to run on the same
lines. Practically the Pennsylvanian forgot his prejudices when he
allied his interests. He then became supple in action and large in
motive, whatever he thought of his colleagues. When he happened to be
right -- which was, of course, whenever one agreed with him -- he was
the strongest American in America. As an ally he was worth all the
rest, because he understood his own class, who were always a
majority; and knew how to deal with them as no New Englander could.
If one wanted work done in Congress, one did wisely to avoid asking a
New Englander to do it. A Pennsylvanian not only could do it, but did
it willingly, practically, and intelligently.

Never in the range of human possibilities had a Cameron believed
in an Adams -- or an Adams in a Cameron -- but they had curiously
enough, almost always worked together. The Camerons had what the
Adamses thought the political vice of reaching their objects without
much regard to their methods. The loftiest virtue of the Pennsylvania
machine had never been its scrupulous purity or sparkling
professions. The machine worked by coarse means on coarse interests,
but its practical success had been the most curious subject of study
in American history. When one summed up the results of Pennsylvanian
influence, one inclined to think that Pennsylvania set up the
Government in 1789; saved it in 1861; created the American system;
developed its iron and coal power; and invented its great railways.
Following up the same line, in his studies of American character,
Adams reached the result -- to him altogether paradoxical -- that
Cameron's qualities and defects united in equal share to make him the
most useful member of the Senate.

In the interest of studying, at last, a perfect and favorable
specimen of this American type which had so persistently suppressed
his own, Adams was slow to notice that Cameron strongly influenced
him, but he could not see a trace of any influence which he exercised
on Cameron. Not an opinion or a view of his on any subject was ever
reflected back on him from Cameron's mind; not even an expression or
a fact. Yet the difference in age was trifling, and in education
slight. On the other hand, Cameron made deep impression on Adams, and
in nothing so much as on the great subject of discussion that year --
the question of silver.

Adams had taken no interest in the matter, and knew nothing
about it, except as a very tedious hobby of his friend Dana Horton;
but inevitably, from the moment he was forced to choose sides, he was
sure to choose silver. Every political idea and personal prejudice he
ever dallied with held him to the silver standard, and made a barrier
between him and gold. He knew well enough all that was to be said for
the gold standard as economy, but he had never in his life taken
politics for a pursuit of economy. One might have a political or an
economical policy; one could not have both at the same time. This was
heresy in the English school, but it had always been law in the
American. Equally he knew all that was to be said on the moral side
of the question, and he admitted that his interests were, as Boston
maintained, wholly on the side of gold; but, had they been ten times
as great as they were, he could not have helped his bankers or
croupiers to load the dice and pack the cards to make sure his
winning the stakes. At least he was bound to profess disapproval --
or thought he was. From early childhood his moral principles had
struggled blindly with his interests, but he was certain of one law
that ruled all others -- masses of men invariably follow interests in
deciding morals. Morality is a private and costly luxury. The
morality of the silver or gold standards was to be decided by popular
vote, and the popular vote would be decided by interests; but on
which side lay the larger interest? To him the interest was
political; he thought it probably his last chance of standing up for
his eighteenth-century principles, strict construction, limited
powers, George Washington, John Adams, and the rest. He had, in a
half-hearted way, struggled all his life against State Street, banks,
capitalism altogether, as he knew it in old England or new England,
and he was fated to make his last resistance behind the silver
standard.

For him this result was clear, and if he erred, he erred in
company with nine men out of ten in Washington, for there was little
difference on the merits. Adams was sure to learn backwards, but the
case seemed entirely different with Cameron, a typical Pennsylvanian,
a practical politician, whom all the reformers, including all the
Adamses. had abused for a lifetime for subservience to moneyed
interests and political jobbery. He was sure to go with the banks and
corporations which had made and sustained him. On the contrary, he
stood out obstinately as the leading champion of silver in the East.
The reformers, represented by the Evening Post and Godkin, whose
personal interests lay with the gold standard, at once assumed that
Senator Cameron had a personal interest in silver, and denounced his
corruption as hotly as though he had been convicted of taking a
bribe.

More than silver and gold, the moral standard interested Adams.
His own interests were with gold, but he supported silver; the
Evening Post's and Godkin's interests were with gold, and they
frankly said so, yet they avowedly pursued their interests even into
politics; Cameron's interests had always been with the corporations,
yet he supported silver. Thus morality required that Adams should be
condemned for going against his interests; that Godkin was virtuous
in following his interests; and that Cameron was a scoundrel whatever
he did.

Granting that one of the three was a moral idiot, which was it:
-- Adams or Godkin or Cameron? Until a Council or a Pope or a
Congress or the newspapers or a popular election has decided a
question of doubtful morality, individuals are apt to err, especially
when putting money into their own pockets; but in democracies, the
majority alone gives law. To any one who knew the relative popularity
of Cameron and Godkin, the idea of a popular vote between them seemed
excessively humorous; yet the popular vote in the end did decide
against Cameron, for Godkin.

The Boston moralist and reformer went on, as always, like Dr.
Johnson, impatiently stamping his foot and following his interests,
or his antipathies; but the true American, slow to grasp new and
complicated ideas, groped in the dark to discover where his greater
interest lay. As usual, the banks taught him. In the course of fifty
years the banks taught one many wise lessons for which an insect had
to be grateful whether it liked them or not; but of all the lessons
Adams learned from them, none compared in dramatic effect with that
of July 22, 1893, when, after talking silver all the morning with
Senator Cameron on the top of their travelling-carriage crossing the
Furka Pass, they reached Lucerne in the afternoon, where Adams found
letters from his brothers requesting his immediate return to Boston
because the community was bankrupt and he was probably a beggar.

If he wanted education, he knew no quicker mode of learning a
lesson than that of being struck on the head by it; and yet he was
himself surprised at his own slowness to understand what had struck
him. For several years a sufferer from insomnia, his first thought
was of beggary of nerves, and he made ready to face a sleepless
night, but although his mind tried to wrestle with the problem how
any man could be ruined who had, months before, paid off every dollar
of debt he knew himself to owe, he gave up that insoluble riddle in
order to fall back on the larger principle that beggary could be no
more for him than it was for others who were more valuable members of
society, and, with that, he went to sleep like a good citizen, and
the next day started for Quincy where he arrived August 7.

As a starting-point for a new education at fifty-five years old,
the shock of finding one's self suspended, for several months, over
the edge of bankruptcy, without knowing how one got there, or how to
get away, is to be strongly recommended. By slow degrees the
situation dawned on him that the banks had lent him, among others,
some money -- thousands of millions were -- as bankruptcy -- the same
-- for which he, among others, was responsible and of which he knew
no more than they. The humor of this situation seemed to him so much
more pointed than the terror, as to make him laugh at himself with a
sincerity he had been long strange to. As far as he could comprehend,
he had nothing to lose that he cared about, but the banks stood to
lose their existence. Money mattered as little to him as to anybody,
but money was their life. For the first time he had the banks in his
power; he could afford to laugh; and the whole community was in the
same position, though few laughed. All sat down on the banks and
asked what the banks were going to do about it. To Adams the
situation seemed farcical, but the more he saw of it, the less he
understood it. He was quite sure that nobody understood it much
better. Blindly some very powerful energy was at work, doing
something that nobody wanted done. When Adams went to his bank to
draw a hundred dollars of his own money on deposit, the cashier
refused to let him have more than fifty, and Adams accepted the fifty
without complaint because he was himself refusing to let the banks
have some hundreds or thousands that belonged to them. Each wanted to
help the other, yet both refused to pay their debts, and he could
find no answer to the question which was responsible for getting the
other into the situation, since lenders and borrowers were the same
interest and socially the same person. Evidently the force was one;
its operation was mechanical; its effect must be proportional to its
power; but no one knew what it meant, and most people dismissed it as
an emotion -- a panic -- that meant nothing.

Men died like flies under the strain, and Boston grew suddenly
old, haggard, and thin. Adams alone waxed fat and was happy, for at
last he had got hold of his world and could finish his education,
interrupted for twenty years. He cared not whether it were worth
finishing, if only it amused; but he seemed, for the first time since
1870, to feel that something new and curious was about to happen to
the world. Great changes had taken place since 1870 in the forces at
work; the old machine ran far behind its duty; somewhere -- somehow
-- it was bound to break down, and if it happened to break precisely
over one's head, it gave the better chance for study.

For the first time in several years he saw much of his brother
Brooks in Quincy, and was surprised to find him absorbed in the same
perplexities. Brooks was then a man of forty-five years old; a strong
writer and a vigorous thinker who irritated too many Boston
conventions ever to suit the atmosphere; but the two brothers could
talk to each other without atmosphere and were used to audiences of
one. Brooks had discovered or developed a law of history that
civilization followed the exchanges, and having worked it out for the
Mediterranean was working it out for the Atlantic. Everything
American, as well as most things European and Asiatic, became
unstable by this law, seeking new equilibrium and compelled to find
it. Loving paradox, Brooks, with the advantages of ten years' study,
had swept away much rubbish in the effort to build up a new line of
thought for himself, but he found that no paradox compared with that
of daily events. The facts were constantly outrunning his thoughts.
The instability was greater than he calculated; the speed of
acceleration passed bounds. Among other general rules he laid down
the paradox that, in the social disequilibrium between capital and
labor, the logical outcome was not collectivism, but anarchism; and
Henry made note of it for study.

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 moment 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's
personal 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 costless 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; of the 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 line? And a score of such questions to which he
expected answers and was astonished to get none.

Education ran riot at Chicago, at least for retarded minds which
had never faced in concrete form so many matters of which they were
ignorant. Men who knew nothing whatever -- who had never run a
steam-engine, the simplest of forces -- who had never put their hands
on a lever -- had never touched an electric battery -- never talked
through a telephone, and had not the shadow of a notion what amount
of force was meant by a watt or an ampere or an erg, or any other
term of measurement introduced within a hundred years -- had no
choice but to sit down on the steps and brood as they had never
brooded on the benches of Harvard College, either as student or
professor, aghast at what they had said and done in all these years,
and still more ashamed of the childlike ignorance and babbling
futility of the society that let them say and do it. The historical
mind can think only in historical processes, and probably this was
the first time since historians existed, that any of them had sat
down helpless before a mechanical sequence. Before a metaphysical or
a theological or a political sequence, most historians had felt
helpless, but the single clue to which they had hitherto trusted was
the unity of natural force.

Did he himself quite know what he meant? Certainly not! If he
had known enough to state his problem, his education would have been
complete at once. Chicago asked in 1893 for the first time the
question whether the American people knew where they were driving.
Adams answered, for one, that he did not know, but would try to find
out. On reflecting sufficiently deeply, under the shadow of Richard
Hunt's architecture, he decided that the American people probably
knew no more than he did; but that they might still be driving or
drifting unconsciously to some point in thought, as their solar
system was said to be drifting towards some point in space; and that,
possibly, if relations enough could be observed, this point might be
fixed. Chicago was the first expression of American thought as a
unity; one must start there.

Washington was the second. When he got back there, he fell
headlong into the extra session of Congress called to repeal the
Silver Act. The silver minority made an obstinate attempt to prevent
it, and most of the majority had little heart in the creation of a
single gold standard. The banks alone, and the dealers in exchange,
insisted upon it; the political parties divided according to
capitalistic geographical lines, Senator Cameron offering almost the
only exception; but they mixed with unusual good-temper, and made
liberal allowance for each others' actions and motives. The struggle
was rather less irritable than such struggles generally were, and it
ended like a comedy. On the evening of the final vote, Senator
Cameron came back from the Capitol with Senator Brice, Senator Jones,
Senator Lodge, and Moreton Frewen, all in the gayest of humors as
though they were rid of a heavy responsibility. Adams, too, in a
bystander's spirit, felt light in mind. He had stood up for his
eighteenth century, his Constitution of 1789, his George Washington,
his Harvard College, his Quincy, and his Plymouth Pilgrims, as long
as any one would stand up with him. He had said it was hopeless
twenty years before, but he had kept on, in the same old attitude, by
habit and taste, until he found himself altogether alone. He had
hugged his antiquated dislike of bankers and capitalistic society
until he had become little better than a crank. He had known for
years that he must accept the regime, but he had known a great many
other disagreeable certainties -- like age, senility, and death --
against which one made what little resistance one could. The matter
was settled at last by the people. For a hundred years, between 1793
and 1893, the American people had hesitated, vacillated, swayed
forward and back, between two forces, one simply industrial, the
other capitalistic, centralizing, and mechanical. In 1893, the issue
came on the single gold standard, and the majority at last declared
itself, once for all, in favor of the capitalistic system with all
its necessary machinery. All one's friends, all one's best citizens,
reformers, churches, colleges, educated classes, had joined the banks
to force submission to capitalism; a submission long foreseen by the
mere law of mass. Of all forms of society or government, this was the
one he liked least, but his likes or dislikes were as antiquated as
the rebel doctrine of State rights. A capitalistic system had been
adopted, and if it were to be run at all, it must be run by capital
and by capitalistic methods; for nothing could surpass the nonsensity
of trying to run so complex and so concentrated a machine by Southern
and Western farmers in grotesque alliance with city day-laborers, as
had been tried in 1800 and 1828, and had failed even under simple
conditions.

There, education in domestic politics stopped. The rest was
question of gear; of running machinery; of economy; and involved no
disputed principle. Once admitted that the machine must be efficient,
society might dispute in what social interest it should be run, but
in any case it must work concentration. Such great revolutions
commonly leave some bitterness behind, but nothing in politics ever
surprised Henry Adams more than the ease with which he and his silver
friends slipped across the chasm, and alighted on the single gold
standard and the capitalistic system with its methods; the protective
tariff; the corporations and trusts; the trades-unions and
socialistic paternalism which necessarily made their complement; the
whole mechanical consolidation of force, which ruthlessly stamped out
the life of the class into which Adams was born, but created
monopolies capable of controlling the new energies that America
adored.

Society rested, after sweeping into the ash-heap these cinders
of a misdirected education. After this vigorous impulse, nothing
remained for a historian but to ask -- how long and how far!