SOURCE: "Brooks Adams, Caustic Cassandra," in The American Scholar, Vol. 9, No. 2, Spring, 1940, pp. 214-27,

[In the following excerpt, Madison offers a survey of Adams's major works and political concerns.]

Brooks Adams is, a dozen years after his death, a truly forgotten man. A test poll of twenty-five college graduates of various ages and interests elicited the fact that less than a third were able to identify him and that only one, a writer on legal history, was familiar with some of his writings. Nor is this surprising. His radical social and economic views had early antagonized the class to which he belonged, and throughout his mature years he was scorned (by those who knew what he stood for) as the last and least worthy of the captious Adams tribe. His books, readily appreciated in England and translated into French, German and Russian were ignored by most of the important American periodicals and disregarded by the leaders of public opinion. Consequently they had few readers. When he died in 1927 his passing received scant public notice. The incisive obituary paragraph in the New York Nation and the commendable brief memoir by his friend Worthington Chauncey Ford were the only items to mark the event. The living generation of Americans, on the verge of the economic catastrophe which he more than anyone had clearly foreseen and had tried so valiantly to forestall, knew not the name of Brooks Adams.

Yet this youngest son of Charles Francis Adams was in some essential respects the most original and profound member of our most distinguished family. His contribution to the culture of his time appears the more significant if viewed from the vantage point of his background and personality. With a grandfather and great-grandfather past Presidents of the United States, with his father the extraordinarily capable ambassador to Great Britain during the crucial Civil War period, with the leading men of England and America frequenting his home on an intimate basis, Brooks could not but grow up intensely proud of being an Adams. Nor was this empty conceit. He and his brothers more than justified their acute sense of selfimportance. In the words of the late Professor Vernon Parrington, "Intellectually curious, given to rationalism, retaining much of the eighteenth-century solidity of intellect and honest realism, refusing to barter principle for the good will of men, the Adams line produced no more characteristic offshoots than came in the fourth generation." But if the reverse of the picture is less attractive it is no less authentic. According to James Russell Lowell "the Adamses have a genius for saying even a gracious thing in an ungracious way." From John down they have indulged in self-dramatization, have placed themselves in leading positions, exaggerated the animus of their opponents and accepted misunderstanding and disapproval with injured hauteur. None of the exceptionally able sons of Charles Francis Adams would stoop to fit himself to the political hurly-burly of the post-Civil War period; dignified, disdainful, dissentient, each sooner or later sought upon Clio's deep bosom the solace needed by their aggrieved vanity.

Brooks was a thoroughbred Adams. Proud of his obviously distinguished lineage although he sometimes derided it, certain of his high intellectual capacities, possessed of an acute social conscience, he was at the same time extremely shy, as much the prig as his brother Henry (both of them, according to the latter, "were used to audiences of one") and readily suspicious of the motives of others. Brought up by a father whose puritanic severity had made the childhood of his sons monotonous and dreary, Brooks remained to the end overserious and zealous for the sanctity of truth and justice. As his brother Henry wrote him in 1910, "I have known you for sixtyodd years, and since you were a baby, I've never known you when you weren't making yourself miserable over the failings of the universe. It has been your amusement, and a very good one."

Like the other Adamses ever since John, Brooks studied at Harvard and became a lawyer. Jealous of his considerably older brothers and wishing to make his way unaided, he opened an office for himself and for eight years he waited for a practice which failed to materialize. It was not that he was deficient in his equipment as a lawyer; his knowledge of the law in time became immense and incisive. Nor was it a lack of the will to succeed; the idea of failure was obnoxious to his inflated vanity. He soon perceived, however, that even less than his brothers could he adjust himself to the grasping and unscrupulous ways of his contemporaries. "Brooks," wrote his brother Henry, "irritated too many Boston conventions ever to suit the atmosphere." Before long State Street became to Brooks, even more than to the other Adamses, the symbol of all that was crass and iniquitous. Since he had early inherited from his maternal grandfather enough money to keep him in comfort for the rest of his days he decided in 1881 to close his law offices and to turn his mind, even as his brothers had done, to the study of history.

In 1886, after years of intensive reading and hard thinking, Adams completed his first historical work, The Emancipation of Massachusetts. The book aroused considerable controversy and was damned and praised with equal promptitude. It was in truth an iconoclastic examination of our colonial past—the first work in that field to treat persons and events with the factual objectivity of the seasoned scholar rather than with the smug self-satisfaction of the sentimental chronicler. As such it struck a body blow against the carefully-nourished prejudices that pervaded the historical writing of the period. "From that day," Mr. Ford testified, "the filiopietistic school of history was laughed out of court."

If documentary evidence forms the basis of the book, its spirit throbs with a passion for the freedom of the mind. With the unmitigated severity of the crusading prosecutor Adams, who was shocked to find the early history of his native state compounded of intolerance and cruelty, unfolded the horrible record of persecution and repression, of flogging and burning, of greed and cupidity. He had nothing but scorn for a clergy who had perverted the Puritan Commonwealth—child of the Reformation and predicated on the assertion of the freedom of the mind—into a "cesspool of iniquity" more intolerable than the one from which they had fled. Nor had he anything to retract when he issued a new edition some thirty years later. He regretted somewhat only the "acrimonious tone" of certain passages. For what he found in early Massachusetts was a duplication of previous periods in history during which the clergy exercised temporal power.

The power of the priesthood lies in submission to a creed. . . . The horrors of the Inquisition, (he Massacre of St. Bartholomew, the atrocities of Laud, the abominations of the Scotch Kirk, the persecution of the Quakers had one object—the enslavement of the mind.

In chapter after chapter Adams relates in factual detail how, in the fanatic pursuit of conformity, the Puritan clergy and elders, basing their criminal code on Pentateuch law, cruelly persecuted Anabaptists, Quakers, witches and religious liberals and turned their parishioners into neurotic censors and vindictive zealots. The leaders are etched in acid. Governor Winthrop, John Cotton, the Mathers—these and numerous others are quoted to their own condemnation as cruel and conceited bigots. Increase Mather is pictured as having "an inordinate love of money and flattery," a preacher who "delighted to blazon himself as Christ's foremost champion in the land." And of Cotton Mather's pious attempts to justify the burning of witches Adams remarks, "It is not credible that an educated and a sane man could ever have honestly believed in the absurd stuff which he produced as evidence of the supernatural." Father and son are quoted at length on their opposition to Leverett's appointment to the presidency of Harvard, and only after reading their epistles to Governor Dudley and their diary notations can one appreciate Adams' pleasure in their discomfiture—"But these venomous priests had tried their fangs upon a resolute and able man. Dudley shook them off like vermin."

Having noted that the dominance and decline of the Puritan priesthood followed a fairly common trend in the history of social development, Adams devoted the next decade of his life to the evidence that enabled him to write his most original contribution, The Law of Civilization and Decay. In 1893, four years before the volume was actually published, his brother Henry, then his intimate companion, commented in a letter, "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 overrunning his thoughts." And having read the final version of the manuscript, Henry wrote to his brother, "You have struck out of it pretty much all that was personally offensive, and left only generalities which no one need resent .. . all I can say is that, if I wanted to write any book, it would be the one you have written." This last remark, incidentally, should set at rest the common assumption that Henry and not Brooks was the first American to develop as a law of history the theory that "civilization followed the exchanges."

This law is largely based on an intensive study of trade routes and the shifting centers of civilization. It assumes that civilization is the product of social concentration, constantly seeking a new equilibrium and compelled to find it; that it moves always from decentralization to centralization and back again to decentralization. A corollary of the law pertains to the conspicuous roles played by man's two basic drives, fear and greed, during the different periods of civilization.

In the earlier stages of concentration, fear appears to be the channel through which energy finds the readiest outlet; accordingly, in primitive and scattered communities, the imagination is vivid, and the mental types are religious, military, artistic. As consolidation advances, fear yields to greed, and the economic organism tends to supersede the emotional and the martial.

While fear holds sway the sacred caste is the characteristic ruling class; when greed motivates social behavior, supremacy passes to a moneyed oligarchy.

To prove the validity of this law Adams traces in vivid detail the development of European civilization from the earliest times to the present—and in passing offers pointed illustrations and shrewd observations which even more than the law itself illumine the dark recesses of human nature. He examines the rise and decline of the various centers of population and demonstrates the similarity in each instance in the elements of growth and decay. In our own era, with which the book is most concerned, the fall of Rome initiated a period of decentralization which lasted a thousand years—a millennium during which men were motivated by the fear of the invisible and consequently were dominated by the organized clergy. With the development of trade and science, however, fear gave way to greed and in time resulted in the Reformation, the separation of church and state, and the supremacy of the moneyed classes. England, having gone farthest along the path of concentration, best illustrates this constant flux:

Gradually energy vented itself more and more freely through these merchants, until they became the ruling power in England, their government lasting from 1688 to 1815. At length they fell through the very brilliancy of their genius. The wealth they amassed so rapidly, accumulated, until it prevailed over all other forms of force, and by so doing raised another variety of man to power. These last were the modern bankers. With the advent of the bankers a profound change came over civilization, for contraction began. Self-interest had from the outset taught the producer that, to prosper, he should deal in wares which tended rather to rise than to fall in value, relatively to corn. The opposite instinct possessed the usurer; he found that he grew rich when money appreciated, or when the borrower had to part with more property to pay his debt when it fell due, than the cash lent him would have brought on the day the obligation was contracted.

Another corollary of the law is the relative character of law itself. "Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation." At each stage of civilization the class in power has always sought to perpetuate itself by means of legislation. When the imagination is vivid and fear holds sway over the minds of men, ecclesiastical law prevails. As trade develops and competition sharpens, civil codes are drawn up

for the enforcement of contracts and the protection of the creditor class. The more society consolidates, the more legislation is controlled by the wealthy, and at length the representatives of the monied class acquire that absolute power once wielded by the Roman pro-consul and now exercised by the modern magistrate.

When The law of Civilization and Decay was published in 1897 the author's views on the then-embittered silver question obscured the great merits of the book. Because Adams advocated bimetallism his work was attacked and deprecated when it was not deliberately ignored. The one important exception was Theodore Roosevelt's extended review in The Forum. Although Roosevelt was expected by his friends to demolish the book, and he certainly disapproved strongly of Adams' political and economic radicalism, he was urbane enough to find the volume "a marvel of compressed statement" and a distinguished contribution to the philosophy of history. Although he objected, more or less justifiably, to a number of statements made by the author he readily admitted his scholarly approach and deep sympathy:

Through the cold impartiality with which he strives to work merely as a recorder of facts, there break through now and then flashes of pent-up wrath and vehement scorn for all that is mean and petty in a purely materialistic, purely capitalistic, civilization.

In America's Economic Supremacy and The New Empire, collections of essays published in 1900 and 1902 respectively, Brooks Adams pursues his study of the flux of civilization, but with special reference to modern economic concentration and to the sudden emergence of the United States as a world power. Main trade routes are again examined in great detail and their obvious effect upon the flow of social activity is indicated. Adams is here acutely interested in the problem of the transmission of energy from one center of concentration to another. He demonstrates effectively, decades before the appearance of Spengler's work on the decline of Western civilization, the constant movement of power and empire from east to west, from south to north, until they have gone half around the earth and have at the turn of the 20th century established themselves in the United States. After considering all the available facts he points out that the centers of concentration have developed in places containing an abundance of food and useful metals and that when these means of wealth are depleted the seat of power migrates to a more suitable location. In this respect he was also among the first to develop the effect of geography on politics. "I am convinced that neither history nor economics can be intelligently studied without a constant reference to the geographical surroundings which have affected different nations."

Having traced the past movement of empire from one center of concentration to another Adams proceeded to analyze economic conditions in Europe during the final quarter of the last century. France he found definitely in eclipse after the war with Prussia, and Germany in his view lacked the resources required for world dominance. Of Russia he was less certain. A vast country, potentially capable of great economic development, it could be impelled in that direction only by the cataclysm of social revolution. In the light of what has actually happened his perspicacity is of special interest—"What a social revolution in Russia would portend transcends human foresight but probably its effect would be felt throughout the world." England, having maintained the seat of wealth and power for more than a century, he believed definitely on the decline. In his opinion Englishmen were exerting less initiative, less energy; were depending too much on the income from their colonies; were indulging themselves to the point of mental inertia. In the United States, on the contrary, the ascending curve of power was clearly evident. In every field of major economic endeavor American enterprise and American wealth dwarfed the efforts of competing countries.

What impressed Adams most about this transfer of "the seat of energy" was the extraordinary velocity of its migration. "A change of equilibrium," he pointed out, "has heretofore occupied at least the span of a human lifetime, so that a new generation has gradually become habituated to the novel environment. In this instance the revolution came so suddenly that few realized its presence before it ended." For this reason he regarded the rapid rise of his native land to industrial and business supremacy with grave apprehension. He knew the type of men who headed the gigantic corporations and huge banking establishments and he did not trust them. Aware also that "prosperity had always borne within itself the seeds of its own decay" he could not help fearing that the cupidity of our business leaders would either bring on a social revolution or hasten the migration of economic power from our shores to the next "seat of energy" across the Pacific. "Supremacy," he reflected, "has always entailed its sacrifices as well as its triumphs, and fortune has seldom smiled on those who beside being energetic and industrious, have not been armed, organized, and bold."

The problem of America's destiny perturbed Brooks Adams so acutely that he could not refrain from pondering it for years on end. In an article published in 1910 he writes:

Within the last decade, step by step and very reluctantly, I have been led to suspect that not only the tranquility of life, but the coherence of society itself, may hinge upon our ability to modify, more or less radically, our method of thinking, and, as I tend toward this conclusion, I look at these questions more seriously. . . . We are abundantly inventive and can create wealth, but we cannot control the energy which we liberate. Why we fail is the problem which perplexes me.

Continuing his study of the greatly-increased velocity of our economic concentration, and being only too familiar with the type of mind of our leading "malefactors of wealth," he was led gradually and unwillingly to the conclusion that, unless we exercised our best intelligence, "the expansion of the social core within would induce an explosion which we call a revolution."

In 1913 he published the result of this cogitation and research in a volume entitled The Theory of Social Revolutions. Applying his law of civilization and decay to contemporary conditions he argues cogently that our present rulers, the capitalists, are incapable of coping with the complex problem of democratic government and must be deprived of their dominant position. His analysis of our modern economic system, to which he devotes a good part of the book, is detailed and incisive, if somewhat oversimplified—as when he insists that our economy is under the complete control of a small group of men concentrated near the tip of Manhattan:

Since 1871, while the area within which competition is possible has been kept constant by the tariff, capital has accumulated and has been concentrated and volatilized until, within the republic, substantially all prices are fixed by a vast moneyed class. This class, obeying what amounts to being a single volition, has its heart in Wall Street, and pervades every corner of the Union.

Not that Adams condemned this development of monopolies; on the contrary, as an economic scientist he regarded it as a "vital principle of our civilization" which could not be eliminated without undermining our economic system. But he could not abide the predatory capitalists who were exploiting the various monopolies for their own selfish ends.

The modern capitalist not only thinks in terms of money, but he thinks in terms of money more exclusively than the French aristocrat or lawyer ever thought in terms of caste. .. . He may sell his services to whom he pleases and at what price may suit him, and if by so doing he ruins men and cities, it is nothing to him. He is not responsible, for he is not a trustee for the public.

Brooks Adams' indictment of the capitalist class is thorough and devastating—he sees it as a crass, greedy, unprincipled and unsocial body of men, without vision or the capacity for leadership, clinging desperately and defiantly to the economic power thrust upon them by the sudden and fortuitous change in "the seat of energy." As an example of the capitalist's blindness Adams points to his stupid scorn for the very laws enacted for his safeguard. "In spite of his vulnerability, he is of all citizens the most lawless. He appears to assume that the law will always be enforced, when he has need of it, by some special personnel whose duty lies that way, while he may evade the law, when convenient, or bring it into contempt, with impunity." But Adams finds the capitalist's failure to emerge out of his narrow role as the exploiter of money and men, to become a power for good over the nation as a whole, an even more glaring deficiency:

From the days of William the Conqueror to our own, the great soldier has been, very commonly, a famous statesman also, but I do not now remember, in English or American history, a single capitalist who has earned eminence for comprehensive statesmanship. . . . Certainly, so far as I am aware, no capitalist has ever acquired such influence over his contemporaries, as has been attained with apparent ease by men like Cromwell, Washington, or even Jackson.

Step by step the argument leads to the inevitable conclusion that the capitalist class had, like all the ruling groups in the past, served its social purpose while advancing along the path to power and that, like the earlier ruling groups, it had been "stricken with fatuity" once it reached the crest. Adams avers:

Privileged classes have seldom the intelligence to protect themselves by adaptation when nature turns against them, and, up to the present moment, the old privileged class in the United States has shown little promise of being an exception to the rule. .. . It is hard to resist the persuasion that unless capital can, in the immediate future, generate an intellectual energy, beyond the sphere of its specialized calling, very much in excess of any intellectual energy of which it has hitherto given promise, and unless it can besides rise to an appre-ciation of diverse social conditions, as well as to a level of political sagacity, far higher than it has attained within recent years, its relative power in the community must decline.

He has not the slightest doubt, of course, that the capitalist class would neither discover within itself the intelligence and the ability with which to perpetuate its power nor submit peacefully to the group destined to supplant it. He feared therefore that the resulting struggle for power would be as radical and calamitous as all previous similar contests, since "the rise of a new governing class is always synonymous with a social revolution and a redistribution of property."

Brooks Adams was equally outspoken in his censure of the politico-economic nature of our court system. Long before J. Allen Smith and Charles A. Beard he described the class bias of our Constitution and the special interpretation given it by lawyers elevated by the group in power. In this book he offers a wealth of irrefutable evidence to the effect not only that our federal courts function politically but that their political character had been given them deliberately at the beginning of our national existence. At the time the Constitution was under discussion, he explains, this compromise had seemed the only feasible solution of the impasse between the frail federal republic and the jealous and obstinate states. As a consequence of this adjustment the courts have arrogated to themselves the right to control the political branches of the government. He contends:

Under the American system the Constitution, or fundamental law, is expounded by judges, and this function which, in essence, is political, has brought precisely that duality of pressure on the bench which it has been the labor of a hundred generations of our ancestors to remove. On the whole the result has been not to elevate politics, but to lower the courts to the political level.

He cites numerous instances, from the case of Marbury vs. Madison down, to indicate how often the judiciary has interfered with the will of Congress in favor of a special class; and maintains that a society organized under the modern scientific conditions which have created trusts and monopolies out of the essentials of life cannot indefinitely be "administered under an effete code of law."

Law is the frame which contains society, as its banks contain a river; and if the flow of a river be increased a thousandfold, the banks must be altered to correspond, or there will be flood overwhelming in proportion to the uncontrollable energy generated. . . . Courts, I need hardly say, cannot control nature, though by trying to do so they may, like the Parliament of Paris, create a friction which shall induce an appalling catastrophe.

Eager to circumvent the danger threatening the country, Adams became wrathful at the thought that those best able to save it were instead selfishly bent on maintaining the status quo. Himself a member of a family of lawyers and a profound student of the law, he excoriated the limited and rigid mentality of the legal practitioners who were more interested in benefiting their clients than in upholding the law, and who employed their ingenuity and cunning in behalf of the capitalists bent on aggrandizement. It is this type of lawyer, he argued, who has deliberately turned the Constitution into a fetish (as if it had "some inherent and marvellous virtue by which it can arrest the march of omnipotent Nature") in order to make it a bulwark against the attempts of the people to adapt their economy to changing conditions.

Brooks Adams was preoccupied throughout his mature years with the basic problem of our industrial civilization: how to adjust modern society to the ever-increasing velocity of economic concentration. The more he dug into the origins of our economy, the more he observed its effect upon the mass of mankind, the more he was persuaded that capitalism must be superseded by a system of government more in keeping with our scientific centralization if we are to avoid an internal explosion and maintain our world supremacy. Knowing that every ruling class is struck blind once it has passed the crest of its upward curve, he was full of foreboding. "I am full of gloomy fears," he wrote to Mr. Ford in 1897, the year in which his book The Law of Civilization and Decay was published, "I do not know where we are going, nor do I see any light ahead. There seems to me to be no headway on the ship, and that we are going on the rocks. I hope I may be wrong." Further research in the fields of economics and politics only intensified his premonitions, and in The Theory of Social Revolutions he exerted his brilliant powers of analysis and generalization, as well as his natural capacity for invective, to make clear to his countrymen the inherent faults of our system of government and their urgent need of a remedy.

It is easy to dismiss his admonitions as the alarms of a disgruntled pessimist, as some have done, or to decry his indictment of capitalism as an arraignment from a pseudosocialist. Brooks Adams was neither. He had an extraordinary familiarity with the law and a thorough and profound knowledge of the history of civilization. In addition he was moved in all things by a passion for social justice, by an intense devotion to truth. Motivated in all his writings by an acute puritanic conscience, he propounded his views of civilization, and of own economy, with the force of utter conviction. If, in his eagerness to generalize and to express himself emphatically, his conclusions were at times too sweeping, his basic assumptions are as valid today as when they were first made. Indeed his original and acute intellect perceived trends and relationships long before they became obvious to his contemporaries. Again, although he was certainly familiar with the works of the leading socialistic writers and although the Marxian theory of history was really, according to his brother Henry, the foundation for Brooks' later historical views, the similarity was only coincidental. He had too keen and unequivocal a mind to absorb the ideas of another uncritically. Politically he was, if anything, "a Jeffersonian Jacksonian Bryonian democrat" (to quote the words of his favorite brother) and a passionate admirer of Washington, "the whole man—in brief, he was a true descendant of the Adamses who had helped build our nation and who had had the courage to prefer truth and honesty to the good will of men. And if his animadversions upon our state of society offended those in power—men who were getting what they could for themselves and let "the public be damned"—with the result that his books went quickly out of print and are today practically unobtainable and unknown, the loss is all the more our own.