CHICAGO (1893)
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!