SOURCE: "The Unusable Man: An Essay on the Mind of Brooks Adams," in The New England Quarterly, Vol. XXI, No. 1, March, 1948, pp. 3-33.

[In the following excerpt, Aaron surveys Adams's work and intellectual development.]

I

Brooks Adams has been dead for more than twenty years now, but there are still many people in Boston and Cambridge who remember this eccentric and arrogant man, the last of the children of Charles Francis Adams to survive. His nephews and nieces recall his gruff manner and his penchant for saying shocking things at dinner parties, his love of argument, his endless jaunts to watering spas, his fondness for the Scottish lays he compelled his niece Abigail Adams to memorize. To some people, it seems, he was known as a crank, "that damned fool, Brooks," and Boston never quite accepted the man whom, during the fiery days of "96, it had ostracized as a dangerous incendiary. Even his brother Henry, certainly closer to Brooks than to any other member of his family, saw a mulish streak in the youngest Adams, and continually cautioned him not to kick so violently against the obnoxious aspects of American life they both loathed but to which Henry had become resigned.

Brooks never became resigned to anything, no matter how vehemently he boasted to Henry that he had. He remained the rebel, the unreconstructed individualist, knowing all the time that he was an anachronism, an "unusable man," as his niece put it, preaching to uncomprehending ears. The few times in his life when he did manage to interest a small audience always astonished him, and he would sometimes announce with a curious air of triumph to Cabot Lodge or to Henry that he was not a maniac. "I feel I am not mad," he wrote to Lodge in 1894 as if to reassure himself. "I am after all like other men. I am not the victim of an illusion. I am not a man with a maggot in my brain—and all the years when I have been wandering from New York to Jerusalem speculating on the causes which seemed to be crushing the world, I have not been morbid, crazy or ill." This is the cry of the "unusable man," the prophet in the wilderness, and it is only after we have discovered more about this misplaced American that we can understand his despair. It is agonizing to believe that one has a revelation that one's contemporaries are incapable of responding to, and Brooks Adams's eccentricity and neuroticism were aggravated if not actually produced by what he chose to regard as the blockheadedness of his fellow citizens.

Adams took some consolation in the thought that posterity might find some merit in his views and even wrote to Henry in a moment of pride, "I shouldn't wonder if I had quite a reputation after I'm dead," but his recognition has come slowly. It is ironic that Vernon Louis Parrington, whose political philosophy he would have found completely repugnant, should be one of the first to write favorably about him. Parrington's essay was genial but thoroughly misleading, and most of his successors have erred in taking literally Henry's joking reference to his brother as a "Jeffersonian Jacksonian Bryonian democrat," a judgment which clashes with almost everything Brooks Adams ever wrote. While an immense literature has grown up about Henry, Brooks (if we except the valuable introduction by Charles Beard to The Law of Civilization and Decay and R. P. Blackmur's perceptive essay which appeared some years ago in The Southern Review) has received only the most cursory treatment and that of a very inferior sort.

That Adams might be a more considerable person than the historians had supposed was made clear in Mr. Blackmur's essay and also in the few pages which Mr. Matthew Josephson devoted to Adams in his book, The President Makers (1940), where he appears for the first time as a flamboyant and somewhat sinister figure. The quotations Mr. Josephson cites from Adams's letters to Theodore Roosevelt reveal the imperialist and the Darwinian, the snob and the frustrated aristocrat. According to Mr. Josephson, Brooks Adams had become, after a brief flirtation with political reform, the historical theoretician and international strategist for the younger group of statesmen who came into power during McKinley's administration. Adams's speculations on trade routes, international exchanges, and the historical responsibilities of peoples were extremely congenial to men like Roosevelt, Lodge, and Beveridge, and although Mr. Josephson makes far too much of Adams's influence, he is correct in pointing out the similarity between the ideas of Adams and the neo-Hamiltonian expansionists who were cheered by America's reviving nationalism and who sought to substitute the martial values for the spirit-destroying materialism of plutocrat and socialist. Roosevelt and Lodge shared Adams's distaste for what T.R. called "the lawless capitalist" and "the Debsite type of anticapitalist." They too believed in the "Stewardship" principle, in the desirability of a public-spirited but aristocratic élite of skilled administrators representing the nation as a whole and jealous of its honor.

It is rather surprising that Adams's geopolitical speculations have not attracted more attention during the last decade (Harper's recent reissue of America's Economic Supremacy seems a little belated) for Adams was one of the first American strategists of Realpolitik to be taken seriously by the Germans, and his remarks upon America's place in the world and her future course with Russia make less eccentric reading to us than they did to his provincial contemporaries. It seems likely, however, that as his papers become available, he will become less important as an authority on the dynamics of international change and more interesting as a kind of American phenomenon, a complement to his brother Henry whose ideas he helped to shape and who furnished him, in turn, with his only sympathetic audience.

II

From his birth in 1847 until his death eighty years later, Adams lived a life that was not, on the surface at least, very different from the lives of his older brothers; that is, he was graduated from Harvard College, married well, travelled extensively, and wrote from time to time on public issues. But he seems to have been a chronically dissatisfied man, conducting a one-man mutiny against the world as he found it. He never attained the popular success of his brothers Charles and John Quincy, to whom apparently he never felt particularly drawn, nor could he acquire the disciplined resignation of Henry who taught himself to stare into the horrid abyss of the future without quivering.

As a young man Brooks hoped for political preferment or at least for some post of power and authority, and persisted in his ambitions for a much longer time than Henry. With the retirement of his father from politics, he lost for a time his last intimate connection with the men guiding American affairs, and it was not until Lodge and Roosevelt came into the ascendant during the nineties and Henry began to move in the Washington orbit that he once again found access to the inner circle. Out of office himself, he still had the pleasure of knowing and advising men who were in. He enjoyed playing the rôle of the amateur statesman and offered his ideas and services to properly oriented people in Washington who had the wit to appreciate his expert counsel. It is not too much to say that Adams's pessimism about the future of the country fluctuated with his friends' political successes and failures.

During his early years after his father had returned from his post as Minister to England, Adams practised law, served as private secretary to his father when the latter represented the United States on the Alabama Claims Commission, and married the sister of Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge. For a short time he flirted with the Mugwump reformers, but he quickly repudiated their ideals as sentimental and unrealistic, and from the nineties on, he developed his particular brand of romantic conservatism which distinguished his writings from this time until his death.

We cannot be sure what influences or forces changed Adams from a genteel reformer to a hard-headed geopolitician, but this much seems clear. After his marriage he retired from the active practice of law and began to write history. Fortunately for him he was not obliged to earn his living, for, as he remarked to Henry, he was too original a person to survive in a world that protected a man only if he joined a guild and listened to him only if his ideas were stolen. The reception of his first book, The Emancipation of Massachusetts (1887) convinced him that the public was far stupider than he had dreamed possible, and from this time on he played the misunderstood prophet with gusto. Ostensibly the book was a ferocious attack on the Puritan founders of Massachusetts Bay whom Adams excoriated as monsters, sadists, and hypocrites. So, at least, Boston interpreted the book. But Adams, in letters to Cabot Lodge, Henry Adams, and William James protested that such was not his intention at all. "What I feel the lack of," he wrote to Lodge, "is appreciation of the unity of cause and effect in the notices I see of my book. It is really not a history of Mass. but a meta-physical and philosophical inquiry as to the actions of the human mind in the progress of civilization; illustrated by the history of a small community isolated and allowed to work itself free." He insisted that he could have done the same for any other similar community: "This is not an attempt to break down the Puritans or to abuse the clergy, but to follow out the action of the human mind as we do of the human body. I believe they and we are subject to the same laws."

Whether or not Adams was justified in censuring his audience or in confiding to Henry that no one seemed bright enough to review him, his explanations to his friends clearly show that already he was thinking along the lines he was to develop most completely in The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895). He was attempting to show, as he told William James, "that mind and matter obey the same laws and are therefore probably the same thing." In this same letter he outlined one of his cardinal theories and defended his historical approach:

My dear sir, the deepest passion of the human mind is fear. Fear of the unseen, the spiritual world, represented by the priest; fear of the tangible world, represented by the soldier. It is the conflict between these forces which has made civilization. And it is the way in which the problem has worked itself out which interests me. .. . If you mean I have given a side, it is very true; I can't conceive what is meant by impartial history, any more than impartial science. There are a set of facts; your business is to state them accurately and then criticise the evidence, and draw a conclusion; and at the same time, if you can, throw in enough interest to sugar-coat the pill. I have tried to show what I believe to be the crucial point of a certain phase of development, and then to show that what is true of this is universally true. . . . I have perhaps erred in making the story too personal, but the temptation to try to interest your audience, I admit, is too strong for me; and I can't resist the desire to make all the men and women as real to other people as they are to me.

The explanation to James is most revealing, for it helps to show what prompted Brooks Adams to apply his theory on a larger scale as well as offering a hint of what he took to be the function of the historian.

The initial result of his first political fiasco was to send him to Europe and to a set of experiences which he later cherished as the most rewarding of his life. Europe, the Near East, and afterwards India not only confirmed and expanded the ideas he first propounded in America but opened up the endless vistas of a past which even his mercenary and vulgar contemporaries, he told Henry, could not desecrate. In 1888 he began his introduction to the middle ages, his discovery of the meaning of the Gothic, and what he described to Henry as "the heart of the great imaginative past." At a cathedral in Le Mans, the meaning of the mass and the medieval spirit struck him with a strange intensity, and it was here that he received the impetus to go on to Jerusalem; to Syria, and to see "what it was that made the crusades" and "the remains of the age of faith." In Jerusalem, at Beaufort, at the Krals, and "most of all it may be," he reminisced to his brother, "in that tenderest of human buildings, the cathedral of the Templars at Tortosa, I suppose I had an intenser emotion than I could ever have again."

Out of these experiences came The Law of Civilization and Decay, perhaps his greatest book and as much a glorification of the pre-industrial age of fear and of the imagination as it was a demonstration of the inexorable movements of the trade routes and money centers. Simultaneously with this sudden and ravishing illumination came the numbing realization of what it all portended. In the past he read the degeneration of the present and glimpsed the chaos toward which he saw his own world rapidly heading. The revelation heightened his nostalgia for an age forever closed, and increased his disgust for the age in which he found himself entrapped. His subsequent writing can be understood only in the light of this dilemma.

Long before his European adventure, Adams indicated that his sympathies lay with the obsolescent standards of a defunct past rather than with the capitalistic ethic of his own America. As early as 1874, he confessed a strong distaste for Benjamin Franklin's doctrines of self interest. "No man who has elevated ideas of morality," he wrote to Lodge, "is willing to put the duty he is under to keep his word of honour to the account of profit and loss." Franklin's morality was perfectly suited to

counter jumpers but well I know that George Washington would never have indulged in any such calculation nor yet would have been proud to become the preacher of such small ware if he had. I never said Franklin wasn't useful—so is the constable and so are your account books—but you don't set the constable by the side of your God nor make a bible of your ledger—though many folks have no other.

These assumptions he developed more fully some years later in a remarkable essay on Scott and Dickens in which Adams made out his case for the pre-industrial man.

According to Adams, Scott expressed the ideals of the non-economic man while Dickens spoke for the economic man. Scott's heroes, and we may assume they are Adams's too, are extremely brave, hold honor more precious than life, display the utmost naïveté about money matters, and cling fervently to an ethic which, on the eve of the industrial period, is becoming obsolescent. The soldier-hero, the religious enthusiast, the loyal retainer (creatures of the age of fear) are ennobled by Scott, and the attributes which characterize them, he believes, derive from a decentralized, rural, policeless society. Only the courageous and the physically strong can flourish in this kind of world. But when these conditions disappear, Adams continues, with the rise of the industrial community in the eighteenth century, a new and timid social stratum comes to power (creatures of the age of greed), differing from the preceding one as the organism of the ox from the wolf. Charles Dickens is its chronicler. Where the antique world of Scott had singled out courage as the "essential quality of the ruling class," in Dickens's novels the prevailing trait is a kind of scaredness, the fear of a timid class that has applied craft and guile to the struggle for survival rather than valor. "Accordingly," Adams concludes, "when Dickens wished to personify force, he never did so through the soldier, or the swordsman but through the attorney, the detective, or the usurer."

Beginning with The Law of Civilization and Decay and continuing in books, articles, and letters, Adams ranged the idealized types from the age of faith against the mercenary and unheroic figures of his own day. He deplored this world of Dickens, a world devoid of statesmanship, of art, of manners, of adventure, even while he traced its inevitability. Hence his attacks against plutocrats, bankers, Jews—collectively subsumed in the word "goldbug," the quintessence of everything vile and rotten in his generation.

The "gold-bug" for both Brooks and Henry was an epithet and conveyed no exact designation. The gold-bug or Jew or banker (he used the words interchangeably) embodied the spirit of the modern, the genii of money. Essentially they were poetic conceptions personifying the forces of commerce. In his more rational moments, he recognized that "to hate the gold-bug is not the attitude of the historian. The gold-bug sucks because he is a goldbug, and nature causes him to suck." He also knew perfectly well, as Henry did, that the family income depended on the sovereignty and well-being of the moneychangers. But history had also persuaded him that the money power had poisoned his world. "I never should have hated Wall Street as I do," he wrote to Henry in 1896, "if I had not just dug the facts out of history, and convinced myself that it is the final result of the corruptest society which ever trod the earth. I tell you Rome was a blessed garden of paradise beside the rotten, unsexed, swindling, lying Jews, represented by J. P. Morgan and the gang who have been manipulating our country for the last four years." This is a romantic statement and typical of the naïve over-simplifications to which so-called "realists" are often susceptible. That a money power existed, that it exerted an influence dangerous to a democratic people was certainly true, and many thousands of Adams's contemporaries agreed with this view, but Brooks, and Henry too, attributed to international finance an almost occult energy and pervasiveness which hardly differed from the fantasies of the primitive populists they ridiculed.

Brooks Adams's mightiest effort to overcome the legions of gold came in 1896, when he lent some tangible and much moral support to the Democrats. He had spent the last year in India studying reverently, almost ecstatically, the vestiges of a warlike, poetic, and imaginative culture. Modern India, with its crumbling shrines, its commercialized temples, its vulgar, arrogant officialdom epitomized for him the deteriorating effects of the money economy on human institutions, and he returned to Quincy full of resolves to strike at gold if the opportunity arose.

The campaign of 1896 seemed to offer that opportunity. In a long and interesting series of letters, Brooks recounted to Henry what he later referred to as the last great servile insurrection. It was characteristic of Adams that he should quixotically associate himself with the Nebraska farmers (a group as obsolete, he believed, as the Templars and the English monks) while at the same time having no respect for the populists or their candidate Bryan, "one of the very most empty, foolish, and vain youths, ever put in a great crisis by an unkind nature." He informed his brother that the election of Bryan would mean revolution, for the bankers would never let him assume office even granting the remote possibility that he could win the election. Bryan was only a clever agitator, he reported to Henry, with no understanding of economics, and he early came to the conclusion "that the Republicans had better win" over the "honest incompetents" of the silver movement. Adams had everything to lose by a Bryan victory. The Adams's estate had gone on the rocks in "93, and a democratic administration, as he told Henry, "would disarrange many things which have taken me three long, harassing years to get in order." Adams had backed the conservative movement within the Democratic camp, but he was not prepared to support actively "a raving Populist stump speaker" and his bob-tail following.

Believing as he did that the country and the family fortunes would remain safer with McKinley as president, Adams could still enjoy the spectacle of the struggle ("it is like a cold bath, it is like looking into a heavy surf where you know you must plunge") and take the most exquisite pleasure in the consternation of the gold-bugs. The Republicans, moving "in their course like a squad of police against a mob" had everything on their side. Mark Hanna, Adams mentioned to his brother, took two millions out of one Boston office building alone during the first week of August 1896. And yet the Democrats, lacking "ability, or judgment, or capacity of any kind" and led by an "empty vessel" still managed to keep the election in doubt and terrify business. The violence of the agrarian storm astonished him:

I have never seen so impressive a sight as the election. A rising of miserable bankrupt farmers, and day labourers led by a newspaper reporter, have made the greatest fight against the organised capital of the world that has ever been made this century—or perhaps ever. . . . No money, no press, no leaders, no organization. Amidst abuse, ridicule, intimidation, bribery—against forces so powerful and so subtle that they reach the bravest and most honest men in the country.

Brooks, as a gesture, sent money to Chicago and induced Henry to do the same, but he reluctantly reached the conclusion that the gold-bug must retain control until the inevitable rot should set in. "Henceforth," he wrote to Henry, "the old travesty of popular government must be abandoned and the plutocracy must govern under its true colors." Nature had so constituted the gold-bug mentality that it alone could survive; the rest were mere anachronisms, the rejected, animals "who might have done well in the glacial or the torrid or some other age, but who can't live now." And the worst of the defeat, Adams lamented, was the absolute impossibility of a renaissance:

Out of it all observe, that for the first time in human history there is not one ennobling instinct. There is not a barbarian anywhere sighing a chant of war and faith, there is not a soldier to sacrifice himself for an ideal. How can we hope to see a new world, a new civilization, or a new life. To my mind we are at the end; and the one thing I thank God for is that we have no children.

III

During the exciting days of "96, Adams had been reflecting on other subjects besides silver and gold, and in the closing years of the century, he continued his European travels, watched carefully what he believed to be the signs of decay in the British empire, studied the campaigns of Napoleon, for whom he developed an intense admiration, and scrutinized the great Russian state sprawling to the eastward. It was at this time that he thought through the ideas embodied in his next books, America's Economic Supremacy (1900) and The New Empire (1902). These ideas can be reduced to the following axioms: (1) that "man is an automatic animal moving along the paths of least resistance" without will and dominated by forces over which he has no control, and that what is true of men is true of nations; (2) that "by nature, man is lazy, working only under compulsion," and that "when he is strong he will always live, as far as he can, upon the labour or the property of the weak"; (3) that the history of nations is simply the success or failure of adaptation (the flexible live; the rigid die) and that "intellectual variations are the effect of an attempt at adaptation to changing external conditions of life"; (4) that since the life of nations centers around the fiercest competition (with war as the extreme form) and since nations "must float with the tide," it is foolish for men to talk of "keeping free from intanglements. Nature is omnipotent." Nations either respond to challenges or decline. There is no standing still.

The corollary economic laws worked out by Adams made national survival depend upon energy and mass, or, to put it in another way, upon concentration and the cheap and efficient administration of large units. "From the retail store to the empire," he wrote, "success in modern life lies in concentration. The active and economical organisms survive: the slow and costly perish." Throughout the history of man, Adams decided, civilizations have expanded or receded according to their control of trade routes and their access to mineral deposits; but military and commercial successes frequently destroyed national traits responsible for engendering these successes, and newer and more virile nations rose upon the ruins of the old. As society comes to be organized into "denser masses," he reasoned, the "more vigorous and economical" unit "destroys the less active and more wasteful." Hence the modern state, if it is to survive, must move in the direction of collectivism, whether private or state. Political principles for the realist become less important than success in underselling one's rival. Victory in the war of trade depends, in turn, upon ready access to raw materials and a cheap efficient administration.

Political principles are but a conventional dial on whose face the hands revolve which mark the movement of the mechanism within. Most governments and many codes have been adored as emanating from the deity. All were ephemeral, and all which survived their purpose became a jest or a curse to the children of the worshippers; things to be cast aside like worn-out garments.

Adams's attitude toward governments rested finally upon the degree to which they could exploit material and human resources and survive in the continuous struggle between nations. To see him solely as an anti-plutocrat and a radical, as some have done, is to over-simplify as well as to misconstrue his true position. The clue to his character and the explanation for his various stands are suggested by his dual rôle of romantic and conservative. In the first, he glorified the pre-industrial man, lashed out against the money-power, and identified himself with the obsolete organisms who retained the vestigial attributes of the age of faith. In the second, he played the ambitious opportunist, the lover of power, the geopolitical schemer mapping the course of his country's destiny and bolstering the status quo. These two seemingly antithetic guises were actually complementary.

As a historian and a realist, Adams knew that to protest against the change in the character of society was foolish, and that the sensible man adjusted himself even in a world for which he felt himself unsuited. He saw no reason why he should make himself a martyr to gold. "Only those who have a faith to die for want to suffer," he wrote to Henry who needed no convincing. "I see no future to this thing but a long, sordid, slow, grind lasting, may be, indefinitely, with no hope of anything better, and no prospect of what you call anarchy, even supposing anarchy an agreeable condition." The wise strategy for the philosopher in a dying world was to survive as comfortably as he could. "If I believed in a god, or a future, in a cause, in human virtue right or wrong, it would be another thing; but I have not enough lust for martyrdom to want to devote myself to misery simply for the sake of suffering." One did not have to make one's peace with the gold-bug to endure in his society.

Given the stupidity of the average man, certainly one of Adams's primary postulates, and the iron laws of history, the sheer task of staying alive was difficult enough to preoccupy any man. He knew for certain that the world was disintegrating, and he had no faith, as we have seen, in man's ability even to comprehend the complexities of modern living. Man moved instinctively toward selfgratification by the shortest possible route, the "human mind so constituted that whatever benefits an individual seems to that individual to benefit the race." What his grandfather had discovered about the people who spurned his services, Adams professed to have discovered about his own generation: that the American people rejected the great dream of his idol, George Washington, of a "constructive civilization," that science and education only aggravated the problem since man was not, as John Quincy Adams at first hopefully surmised, an intelligent rational animal. Science only permitted man to "control without understanding." It hastened the process of disintegration since "an education of conservation was contrary to the instinct of greed which dominated the democratic mind, and compelled it to insist on the pillage of the public by the private man." With such human stuff to work with, no government could evolve "capable of conducting a complex organism on scientific principles." Democracy was by its very nature disintegrative, "an infinite mass of conflicting minds and of conflicting interests, which, by the persistent action of such a solvent as the modern or competitive industrial system, becomes resolved into what is, in substance, a vapor which loses its collective intellectual energy in proportion to the perfection of its expansion."

These conclusions (which illustrate again the Adams brothers' fondness for applying the second law of thermodynamics to human institutions) spelled ultimate disaster for the race; but Brooks nevertheless felt that a strategy might be worked out whereby America's prosperity and potential supremacy could be at least temporarily sustained and which could once more revive the old heroic virtues. As a property holder and a gentleman he opposed the thrusts of populism, socialism, and trades unionism. As a statesman and an economist, on the other hand, he saw the policies of the plutocracy, with their unintelligent domination of the banks and the courts, as suicidally stupid and leading straight to revolution. His criticism of the rich, therefore, must in no sense be interpreted as adventures in muckraking, but as warnings to a class in danger of being overthrown by forces within and without. Most of his writings after 1896 should be seen as lectures to the members of his own class on the tactics of survival. Governments, he says, are not accidents but growths "which may be consciously fostered and stimulated, or smothered, according as more or less intelligence is generated in the collective brain." In modern society their duration depends upon the successful application of Adams's talismans: consolidation, conservation, administration.

Adams's domestic ideas were radical enough to anger most of the conservatives, but as he turned more and more to the international scene around the turn of the century, an apparent inconsistency began to appear in his writings which disturbed even Henry, always in close rapport with his brother. Adams had started as a young man in the Mugwump camp and had worked with the New England reformers of the "Goo Goo" variety. He had refused to support James G. Blaine, "the continental liar from state of Maine," and for some time had plumped for Cleveland, a conservative Democrat who wanted, as Adams saw it, to scale down a revolution-provoking tariff and maintain sound money. He came out flatly at this time against the McKinley tariff as a device by capitalists to destroy capitalism; for it was the oppressive protective duties, he felt, that indirectly lured the ignorant into supporting confiscatory and socialistic financial schemes like the unlimited coinage of silver. Harrison in 1892 he labeled a gold-bug. Cleveland steered a path between socialism and plutocracy, and Adams supported him for that reason. And then, rather dramatically, Brooks Adams, the anti-gold bug, the secret sympathizer of the populists, the man who wanted to see McKinley hanged in front of the White House, became one of the Republican administration's strong supporters.

Actually the shift was not so bewildering as an innocent populist who had read The Law of Civilization and Decay as an anti-gold bug tract might have supposed, and Henry, out of sympathy with Brooks's new jingoistic phase, need not have been surprised. This book, as Adams pointed out to Lodge in 1894, did trace "the origin, rise, and despotism of the gold bug," but he advocated no heretical monetary theories and had seen silver as a feasible solution only in so far as it might be controlled by conservative business men in the Democratic party. Adams feared revolution in 1896 and thought that an intelligently controlled silver policy might reduce its threat by relieving the impoverished farmers. His pamphlet on the gold standard published in that year (described by Samuel Bowles of the influential Springfield Republican as "perhaps the most insidious and powerful argument ever made in demonstration of the ruinous consequences of silver demonitization") provided useful ammunition for the anti-gold bugs. But he found no difficulty in coming to terms with the other side a few years later, because his own friends, the imperialists, were moving into positions of power. The war with Spain had alleviated the pressure at home by opening up new markets. Surplus production could now be handled without tampering with the monetary system. Adams announced his change of views at a press interview in 1898:

The party (he was quoted as saying) which takes advantage of the opportunity afforded now for the nation to advance and takes its place as a power in the world, is bound to be victorious, no matter what its name, and the men and parties who are content to stand still, and who cannot see that the country has outgrown the system of government which did very well a century ago, will be swept aside. I believe in the war . . . and in the policy of expansion which it forced the nation. I am an expansionist, an "imperialist," if you please, and I presume I may be willing to go farther in this line than anybody else in Massachusetts, with, perhaps, a few exceptions.

Certain world patterns were beginning to take shape that called for a different strategy. From 1898 to 1912 Adams was eager to provide it.

IV

From his studies and travels, Adams became convinced by the early nineties that the old European balance of power was beginning to shift. Watching the money centers moving further westward from Lombard Street to Wall Street, always a sign of impending convulsion and revolution in Adams's prognosis, he calculated that the United States stood at last upon the threshold of a new era. By 1897 (a crucial date in the Adams's chronology when Pittsburgh steel began to undersell European steel) America was on its way to becoming the greatest creditor nation in the world. The rapid liquidation of British assets abroad—the dissolution of the British empire was a favorite theme of both Brooks and Henry—had placed tremendous demands upon the supply of American specie. But owing to the superb and remarkably efficient reorganization of American industry through the great trusts, we met our obligations and then proceeded to undersell Europe. In addition to our clearly superior manufacturing facilities and our rich endowments of natural resources, especially the all-important minerals, our prohibitive tariff, formerly assailed by Adams, permitted us to pay for the losses suffered temporarily in the trade invasion abroad. We were carrying on the war of commerce with commendable energy, impoverishing European farmers, reducing the profits of Europe's industry, excluding large potentially productive areas from European penetration, and, in general, making our position economically unassailable.

For the moment Adams could support the party of the plutocrats and the trusts. "The trust must be accepted," he said in 1901, "as the corner stone of modern civilization, and the movement toward the trust must gather momentum until the limit of possible economies has been reached." Not only did he feel that the trust produced more cheaply and efficiently than small concerns, reducing waste and providing low prices for the consumer, but he saw the trust also as a form of western collectivism which would meet the challenge of the collectivist peoples of the East. He summarized his ideas when he wrote to Lodge:

I must honestly and seriously believe that we are now on the great struggle for our national supremacy, which means our existence. I believe, from years I have given to the study of these matters in many countries, that we must be masters or we must break down. We must become so organized that we can handle great concerns and vast forces cheaper and better than others. It is fate. It is destiny. I believe that, unsatisfactory in many ways as our present system is, the overthrow of McKinley, or even the failure to strengthen his administration, would be a blow to our national life.

After his conversion to McKinleyism in 1900, he saw no reason why McKinley's administration should not go down "as the turning point in our history. As the moment when we won the great prize. I do believe," he assured his friend Lodge, "that we may dominate the world, as no nation has dominated it in recent time." In this happy and aggressive frame of mind, the country's prospects looked particularly good. To Henry he wrote:

I look forward to the next ten years as probably the culminating period of America. The period which will hereafter be looked back upon as the grand time. We shall likely enough, be greater later, but it is the dawn which is always golden. The first taste of power is always the sweetest.

His temporary good spirits did not delude him into the belief that America's ultimate future was any brighter, "but the bloom," he concluded, "will last our time. We have vitality enough for one generation at least—perhaps more. And we shant last that long." A trip to Spokane in the spring of 1901 provided more evidence of America's incredible energy:

The journey was tiresome (he wrote to Henry) but very interesting. I came home straight, and sat most of the time in an observation car. It is no use for the world to kick, the stream is too strong, nothing can resist it. Beginning on the crest of the rockies the tide flows down into the Mississippi valley, and then across to the eastern mountains in an ever increasing flood, with an ever heightening velocity. At last you come to the lakes and Buffalo. There, I take it, modern civilization reaches its focus. No movement can keep pace with the demand; no power can be found vast enough. . . . No one who has watched that torrent from its source on the Divide to its discharge in New York Bay can, I think, help feeling the hour of the old world has struck.

Confident in America's destiny, close to his friends Lodge and Roosevelt, and eager to receive information or offer what he considered to be sound advice, his utterances took on a magniloquence, a bellicosity, and a fervor which he showed neither before nor after.

Both Roosevelt and Lodge understood geographical necessities; they shared Adams's distaste for plutocrats and socialists and appreciated the soldierly virtues. But it was Roosevelt who seemed particularly attuned to Adams's aggressive message and who most clearly reflected the influence of his scholarly friend. From the time of Roosevelt's sympathetic review of The Law of Civilization and Decay until the days of the Bull Moose party, Adams closely followed T.R.'s career. He had sympathized with Roosevelt's ambitions in 1896, for Roosevelt too felt the pain and frustration in a gold-bug age, and he had advised his friend to sell himself. "It is of course a poetical conception to fight and die for what is right, what is pure and true and noble, but after all is it not the dream of a poet, or at least a poetic age? Is not to live the first, the most pressing demand of nature; and to live must we not bend to nature? Can anything be wrong for us to do which is imperiously demanded by the instinct of self-preservation?" After Roosevelt had temporized with Wall Street and found himself by accident in the White House, Adams congratulated his protégé as the new Caesar:

"Thou hast it now: king, Cawdor, Glamis, all—" The world can give no more. You hold a place greater than Trajan's, for you are the embodiment of a power not only vaster than the power of the Empire, but vaster than men have ever known.

You have too the last and rarest prize, for you have an opportunity. You will always stand as the President who began the contest for supremacy of America against the eastern continent.

Roosevelt, in short, was to carry out the policies of McKinley whose death Adams deeply regretted, and whom he now described as the best president since Lincoln. McKinley had kept pace with the times, changing his cabinet after the war, reorganizing the army, checking Russia and Germany in the east without causing a panic, and revising America's trade policy. Roosevelt must continue and implement these achievements or we were doomed. This was to be the theme on which he continually harped to the new president and which lay behind all of his subsequent counsel, both on foreign and domestic relations.

Dreams of peace, Adams had long argued, were the will o' the wisps luring nations to destruction. Human destiny called for war. Nations destroyed or were in turn destroyed. Our trade methods actually despoiled the world, whether or not they were intentionally devised to do so, and if we meant to retain our commercial hegemony, we had to face the facts. If we played the braggart, "rich, aggressive, and unarmed," we would most certainly be stripped by our adversaries; nor could we cautiously withdraw. "If we retreat from our positions," he wrote Henry in 1901, "we might keep the peace, but I fancy our retreat would mark our culmination. It would mark the point you are always speculating about when America would be overweighted by the combination of all Asia from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It would be all Asia then, Europe would be absorbed." For the certain success of the new American push, Adams added one more proviso. Our political administration would have to be as flexible, up-to-date, and energetic as our economic; our political machinery would have to be recast into a cheaper, more elastic, and simpler form. Finally, we would have to develop a new kind of administrator, well-trained, audacious, and disinterested.

Now by their very natures, the rulers of American society were specialists whose skill in aggrandizing themselves and whose heroic devotion to their own interests incapacitated them for public service. The ideal administrator represented no special interest but all the interests, and his mind was not bounded by the narrow concerns which made the capitalist unfit to rule a vast, complex, and centralized economy. Unfortunately, America, said Adams, had no administrators, and in 1903 his letters to Henry are filled with apprehensive references to this dearth of trained personnel:

We need a new deal of men and we need it very bad, and everyone agrees with it. Only we can't raise the men. . . . As I see it, everything is ripening for a plunge. We must have a new deal, we must have new methods, we must suppress the states, and have a centralized administration, or we shall wobble over. The most conservative as well as the most radical seem to agree to this.

Adams used the analogy of the "new high steel building" to suggest the powerful, compact, administrative system he had in mind. "Our whole civilization," he warned, "must consolidate to match the high building."

In daily life we have outgrown the specialist, and for that reason the specialist fails and is a positive danger. We are now attempting to produce the generalizing mind. We are attacking administration scientifically. If we succeed in training the next generation right, and their nervous systems do not give way under the strain, we shall, likely enough, pull through and land a big fish .. . the change is represented by the steel cage of thirty or forty stories. Everything has to pass onto the basis of steel from a basis of brick and stone. It means a social revolution going down to the family and up to the government.

An intelligent administration subordinated the indispensable monopolies to the service of the state, obviating the necessity of a biased judiciary (which hastened the movement toward revolution), and taught the people how to obey and take responsibility. Adams's dream envisioned a kind of modified state socialism, run along the lines of a big modern corporation, with a trained and conservative élite solidly in control, a powerful but amenable industrial aristocracy, and an orderly responsible electorate. "The older I grow," he wrote to Henry, "the more I am convinced that the administrative mind is the highest vehicle of energy, and that is what makes the power of the soldier, for the soldier must also be an administrator." The time was rapidly approaching, he hazarded with more prophetic insight than he usually showed, "when we shall be reorganized by soldiers." From 1900 his cry was for discipline—a disciplined Business, a disciplined Nation, a disciplined Home. "Life is tolerable," he concluded, "under any form of orderly government."

Adams placed his hope in Roosevelt as the man who might bring about the necessary administrative reforms. He welcomed his incumbency and remained in close touch with him until T.R.'s death. Roosevelt, he thought, at least approximated the ideal type of administrator, despite his occasional aberrations, his volatility, and his penchant for addressing hard-bitten party men as if they were Groton boys. He too shared Adams's disgust for "moral platitudinizing" about war ("hogwash without admixture," Adams called it) and feared the loss of national virility if the feminists had their way. Adams backed Roosevelt, admitting all of the latter's limitations, not only because of his sincerity and honesty, but because Roosevelt represented the kind of intelligent conservatism which, through limited concessions to reform, would preserve their class and protect the country. Writing to the President in 1903 about the railroad problem, he remarked:

I think all conservative men owe you and the Attorney-General a great debt—for it is your policy or State ownership. There is no middle course. In a word, to live, this country must keep open the big highways leading west, at equitable rates, and must command the terminus in Asia—if we fail in this we shall break down.

Throughout Roosevelt's administration, Adams constantly advised him on the railroad issue. His own affairs happened to be involved here, but he saw the arrogant and irresponsible practices of the roads, supported by what he regarded as a stupid and reactionary judiciary, as an invitation to social convulsion as well as an injurious blow to our foreign interests. "I apprehend that we are entering on a social revolution," he wrote Roosevelt in 1906, "which must either wreck or reorganize our society. The community, or the monopoly must control prices, and therefor all wealth." Under Taft, Adams was now certain, the gold-bugs had regained lost ground; it was for this reason that, in 1912, he urged his friend to seek a third term and save the country. "This two term business," he agreed with his grandfather, was "vicious and preposterous Jeffersonian rot," and as Roosevelt seemed to respond to Adams's ideas, he grew more excited about his campaign for re-election. He warned Roosevelt that he was attempting to defeat the strongest and best defended entrenchment in the world and that the gold-bugs would treat him no better than an anarchist. But then, he concluded, "it has always been so":

I think I know this thing to the bottom. What I want, and have always wanted, is order and authority, and we can have neither unless the law is equally enforced. Capitalism, as always, seeks unequal enforcement of the law—or privilege. Just now, to get privilege, they use the courts, as they are using the Commerce Court to upset the Interstate Commerce Commission. To attain this immediate end they expose the courts to popular attack, as the vested slave interest did the Dred Scott Case. Capital always will. But in so doing it undermines the foundation of order. It works chaos. And chaos is straight before us.

These ideas he presented in greater detail in his Theory of Social Revolutions (1913) which reflected the 1912 campaign as The Law of Civilization and Decay embodied the issues of "96. As Adams saw it, Roosevelt's job, if elected, was to rebuild a broken-down administrative system, unable to cope with modern complexities, in a scientific way. He could not succeed by making emotional speeches against the bosses. Bryan and his followers had failed in a similar contest because they relied too much on emotion, and Roosevelt's task was immeasurably more difficult than Bryan's.

The question (he told Roosevelt) is whether we can construct a central administration strong enough to coerce those special interests, or whether they can prevent such a consolidation. Call it what you will: empire, dictatorship, republic, or anything else, we have the same problem which Caesar had in Rome when he suppressed the plundering gang of senators led by Brutus, who murdered him for it. We must have a power strong enough to make all the interests equal before the law, or we must dissolve into chaos. All of these special interests are now banded against you in Chicago and they are capable of anything, including murder.

After Roosevelt failed to win the Republican nomination at Chicago, Adams advised him not to run independently and to bide his time, but to Henry he confided his disappointment. Roosevelt had tried hard, but his mind was not elastic and he never fully understood the issues; with a tenth of Caesar's ability he faced problems ten times as difficult. Adams found the emotion of the Bull Moose crusade extremely distasteful, and the antics of Roosevelt and his followers reminded him of "these volatilized women who run about in motors and can't keep still." Henry was sure by this time that Roosevelt's mind had "disintegrated like the mind of the country," but Brooks still believed that some use remained in his erratic friend even though Teddy made "plenty of mistakes" and was "as headstrong as a mule."

Adams had never really approved Roosevelt's brief alliance with the progressives ("They do not know what they want and, if they were told what must be done, they would run like rabbits"), but as Roosevelt moved back again to reality and began his crusade against Wilson and unpreparedness, Adams warmed up considerably. The war he had predicted in 1903 had already embroiled Europe and threatened to drag in the United States. American participation at this time would be disastrous, he told Roosevelt in 1914, because only by remaining neutral could we reconstruct our obsolete political system and defend ourselves. A German victory he thought preferable to an English, "for Germany will not dare attack us with the English fleet on her flank, whereas England, I suspect, if she has the better, must control our competition on the sea if she is to carry her debt and feed her people." The Germans, at least, might teach our plutocrats and our mercenary proletariat that "we men owe a paramount duty to our country." Our salvation lay in substituting for the money standard of Wall Street the military standards of West Point.

By 1916 Roosevelt's chances for the presidency were slim, but Adams thought he might carry enough influence to have himself appointed Secretary of War or see to it that a man like Leonard Wood got the job. He wanted to see a series of military schools on the order of West Point set up all over the country in which "obedience, duty, and self-sacrifice" would be taught "on a great scale." If Roosevelt succeeded in this all-important assignment, which was nothing less than changing the moral values of people raised for two generations on the gospel that money is the chief end in life, he would have made his greatest contribution to the nation. "Our troubles," according to Adams, "now arise from the false standards of our people. Is it not logical for men to reason that if money is the only end in life, then peace at any price is a sound policy?"

Roosevelt, however, could not prevent the re-election of Wilson, the president who had become for Adams a "flagrant ass" and the symbol of our national disunity. He detected the hand of his old enemies, the Bankers, behind the League of Nations and suspected that Mr. Schiff was "somewhere near the focus of the hell-broth." Adams should have realized by this time that his recommendations had little chance of being taken seriously, but he could not resist the temptation to preach in spite of Henry's pointed remarks that he avoid didacticism; he still felt obliged to warn his uncomprehending and bemused contemporaries. In the debates of the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention in 1917 and 1918, he unfolded all of his favorite arguments and admonitions: the necessity of national supremacy and the subordination of all special interests to the collective will; the dangers which would follow from our failure to collectivize in the face of European tendencies; the tyranny of the courts as brakes on progress; the importance of a flexible bureaucracy which could administer without obstruction ("All modern government means administration, and that is all it does mean"); the certainty that "everything is to be cured by the concentration of power in some one who really will protect the whole community, the interest of all of us"; the natural inequality of men and the inevitable concomitant, competition; the necessity of recasting our society and girding ourselves for the future struggle which is most certain to occur.

These ideas, amusingly and sometimes brilliantly elaborated in the Massachusetts debates, drew polite applause but no one pretended to know what he was talking about. Only one person really understood Adams's remarks, the person who had provided his first and most sympathetic audience—his brother Henry.

V

Henry had been following Brooks's strenuous theorizings from the beginning and had found little to disagree with. Always more reserved and skeptical, if no less pessimistic than Brooks, he still found his brother's economic analyses stimulating and instructive; indeed, his own thinking was frequently so similar that it is sometimes hard to discover what brother anticipated the other. Although Henry refused to take credit for the ideas in The Law of Civilization and Decay, he exhibits many of Brooks's pet preconceptions, not only his loathing for the gold-bugs, Jews, and socialists, but his views on the inevitability of some kind of state socialism. Both brothers predicted the bankruptcy of England, Henry with more regret, for he did not share Brooks's inveterate hatred of England or accept his vision of an American empire. America, he felt, could not manage its own concerns, much less the world's (a view which Brooks returned to), and Henry preferred to see Germany and Russia direct the machine after Britain went under. But Henry's geopolitical speculations resemble Brooks's in large part (he too believed "that superiority depends... on geography, geology and race energy"), and he accepted unchanged Brooks's hypothesis of civilization:

All Civilization is Centralisation. All Centralization is Economy Therefore all Civilization is the survival of the most economical (cheapest)

Henry's heavy correspondence with Brooks, earnest for the most part and without the veneer of flippancy that characterized most of his other correspondence, is merely one indication of their close intellectual relationship. "We are too much alike, and agree too well in our ideas," Henry remarked to a friend. "We have nothing to give each other." Both used different methods to approach identical ends and acted upon each other as counter irritants or whetstones. Each submitted favorite hypotheses to the other and criticized each other's ideas with brotherly candor.

Brooks had a younger brother's respect for Henry's genius and the highest admiration for his literary talents. Mont St. Michel and Chartres he called "the best literary production of America, if not Europe, at least upwards for two generations," and he took a family pride in this "gem of thought, of taste, of execution" which redeemed his generation. "I perhaps alone of living men can appreciate fully all that you have there," he wrote to Henry, "for I have lived with the crusaders and the schoolmen." Of the Education he was less certain although he allowed that it was perhaps "the broadest and, in many ways, the best thing you have ever done." His criticisms or recommendations seem a little cryptic to the outsider, but apparently he felt that Henry had not written the last half on the scale of the first and had "tried to relieve the shadow." Brooks may have meant by this last remark that the "failure" of Henry's life was not seen clearly enough as an individual reflection of a general predicament: man's tragic inability to adapt himself in a changing universe. Such a meaning is certainly suggested in Brooks's reply to Henry after receiving his essay on "Phase." Here he recommended that the Education be rewritten on the basis of this radical theorem:

You have at last overcome your obstacle. Here is unity whereby to measure your diversity. The theorem which should precede the experiment. Your education has been the search for the "new mind." The contrast you wish to draw is the absolute gap between the thing nature demands and the human effort. If you can strip from your book all semblance of personal irritation against individuals, eliminate the apparent effort to write fragments of biography, and raise the story of your life to the level in dignity of the vast conception against which you are to measure the result, you will have created one of the master-pieces of literature, psychology and history. But I can only say again to you what I have said before . .. that this is a huge and awful tragedy.

Henry had begun to complain to Brooks in 1908 about failing powers of mind, and his brother's praise and encouragement must have been especially welcome. Brooks assured him that his work had steadily improved and that his best work, like his grandfather's, had been done after sixty. "The only trouble with you," he wrote, "is the trouble he felt and we all feel, that is an increase of mental power as the bodily power declines. I suffer from that myself."

As for himself, Adams noted that he was losing his "faculty of expression" and that he could not rid himself "of that rigid, didactic and school-mam manner, which drives me to frenzy but which holds me like a vice." Certainly Henry wrote far better than Brooks. He was more successful in presenting systematically and meticulously his well-considered ideas, sustained, as Mr. R. P. Blackmur says, by an all-pervasive imagination. But it should be added that Brooks knew perfectly well the strength and limitation of his method. Always deferring to Henry and regarding him as one of the greatest minds of his age, he nevertheless stoutly defended his own kind of writing against his brother's criticisms. He never thought of his books as being history or literature in the strict sense. They were written for an "occasion," for crises, and the times were too crucial to allow him the luxury of being a mere chronicler. History for him had no particular interest unless a practical lesson could be extracted from it:

I try to present a method, not an historical study. I use history as little as possible, and only as illustration. Anyone can gather facts if they only have a plan upon which to arrange them. Hence I have a perfectly plain task, very narrowly limited. I have to state a theory or a method. I have to illustrate it enough to be understood. .. . I have to take a definite starting point, and I have to deduce a practical conclusion bearing on our daily life. I have last of all to be ready at the precise moment when the catastrophe is impending evidently—or I shant be read.

Henry and Brooks clearly differed in method—Brooks choosing to be didactic and active, Henry non-committal and passive, but they saw eye to eye on laws of social change and the probable future of the world.

After Henry's stroke and gradual debilitation, Brooks foresaw his brother's death and recoiled from the prospect of being left alone, the last of his generation. Writing to Henry in the spring of 1915, he reminisced:

And as I look back through the long series of years to the days when I was a schoolboy and you used to take me to walk in England, more than fifty years ago, I wonder more day by day what it has all been about and why I am here at all. You have been closer to me than any other man, I suppose, and I cannot with equanimity contemplate parting with you. At this moment my whole life rises before me. I am a coward. I do not want to stay till the last. You must wait and keep me company.

A few months later he wrote almost shyly:

You have helped both of us over many a wet place in our path. .. . It is my birthday—so I may be forgiven an emotion. You always were the best of us four brothers—you are so still now that we are reduced to two. I wish I could have done more to justify my life—but I think I have done nearly my best—good or bad, the best part has been yours ever since I was a boy. And now, as an old man, I look at your worth and thank God that you have redeemed our generation.

Brooks's last tribute to Henry was his long introduction to the latter's Degradation of the Democratic Dogma in which he reiterated his and Henry's theory of exhaustion of resources by waste and its human equivalent. The introduction was mainly an account of John Quincy Adams and, by indirection, of Brooks himself, for he had come gradually to identify his own career with that of his grandfather. In 1909, while he was preparing a biography of John Quincy Adams that he never published, he wrote to Henry that Washington and their grandfather were

the only two men who ever conceived of America as a unity and tried practically to realise their idea. They failed and with them our civilization has failed. Adams stood alone because no one else saw the sequence of relations. He felt this and the sense of failure made him bitter and morbid.

Brooks and Henry, facing the same problem, had failed too. No one ever understood their grandfather, Brooks concluded, and "no one will ever understand us—but he was right: and we are right."

Brooks Adams died in 1927, the same arrogant, blunt, audacious man that he always was, with a few years to spare before the crackup he anticipated and had hoped to escape. With him died his prejudices that were later to crop up in uglier forms and his yet unfulfilled predictions. He had wanted to serve his countrymen, for he never seemed quite able to resign himself to the pessimistic implications of his own message, but they neither responded to his promise of national glory nor to his threats of disaster. He had much to suggest which was pertinent and valuable, but he always stood aloof from the democracy he wanted to save and believed that men were "doomed eternally and hopelessly to contend" against a blind and purposeless universe. And yet he did not gloat over the world's destruction as Henry Adams liked to do. He made a great show of being fatalistic and of enjoying the twilight before the Gotterdammerung, but behind the façade of scientific detachment can be discerned a prevailing sympathy for man in his uneven contest with nature.