SOURCE: "Brooks Adams: Belligerent Brahmin," in Doubters and Dissenters: Cataclysmic Thought in America, 1885-1918, The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964, pp. 158-87.

[In the following excerpt, Jaher surveys Adams's career and examines claims that Adams was an anti-Semite.]

It was Brooks Adams's misfortune to be born in 1848. Had he lived a generation earlier or later he would have been a far happier man. Adams would then have escaped the frustration of estrangement from American life, the painful memory of decaying Brahmin prestige and power, and the obstacle of an unadaptable aristocratic outlook.

Patrician privilege, however, was still undisputed when the youngest son of Charles Francis Adams was born. Old families still counted, Irish immigrants had not yet overrun Boston, and Peter Charendon Brooks, the lad's merchant grandfather, was one of the richest men in the area. Massachusetts Whiggery, whether Conscience or Cotton, wielded a mighty influence, and Sumner and Webster were still names to be reckoned with. The Adamses too retained their public position. It was only a few years since old John Quincy had won fame defending liberty in the House of Representatives, and his son bid fair to take his place. Intellectually, Boston was the national hub. Transcendentalism was in its prime, and Lowell, Longfellow, and Parkman had barely embarked on their great careers. The great tragedy of this fourth Adams generation was that it was born into such a society and forced to make its way in a world where New York bankers, western writers, and urban politicians held sway.

Brooks Adams grew up unaware that he was enjoying the Indian summer of his class, with no hint of his later irascibility and despondency. Charles Francis Adams regarded his son as a "good . . . boy . . . with a very fine disposition."¹ Brooks fully reciprocated this paternal pride and affection. Even late in life he retained fond memories of his father and thought him "the most remarkable man I have ever known."

Adams's only really difficult boyhood experience was living at an English private school. Most of his classmates, sons of aristocrats, were Confederate sympathizers and did not welcome the American ambassador's son. Many years later, he remembered experiencing "their feelings in all their crudity" and hearing "the North vilified or ridiculed, . . ."² This unfortunate sojourn among the young "gentry" may have influenced his dislike for England and his contempt for European aristocracy.

In 1866, like the scions of most other prosperous and prominent Bostonians, Brooks Adams enrolled in Harvard College. He was quite similar to hundreds of other undergraduates, and certainly his college days indicated no later moroseness. Adams rowed in regattas, played in the productions of the Hasty Pudding, was admitted to the highly coveted Porcellian Club, and indulged in several collegiate pranks. As a senior, he looked back on those days and could not "help thinking how lucky I have been."

While at Harvard, Brooks developed the interests and attitudes that marked his mature years. The Adamses' testy individuality appeared early; even in college he wanted to go his own way. He complained about living with his brother Charles because "I am second fiddle and I like to play my own fiddle my own way. . . ."³ Another family trait, passion for self-improvement, developed during his undergraduate years. "I despise an idle man, or rather clubmen, more than any being I know," he wrote to his father in 1868, "and would rather be anything than that."⁴ Lasting intellectual interests, particularly in medieval history, were formed in these years. Politically, too, Brooks was absorbing ideas that would determine his future course. Taking a Brahmin's dim view of Andrew Johnson's administration, he commented sardonically that "our politics seem to me to be getting more and more muddy and beautifully worse, and hold out rich promises of, in the end, managing to bring us to the ardently desired point of having no politics at all."⁵

In 1874, after having been graduated, taking a law degree, and acting as his father's private secretary at the Alabama Claims Arbitration, Brooks Adams made his political debut. He started out as a conventional patrician reformer, becoming active in the Commonwealth Club, a Mugwump organization run by his brother Henry and made up of young bluebloods like Henry Cabot Lodge and Moorfield Storey. During the next several years, the fledgling reformer conscientiously fought the good fight and followed his elders out of the Republican Party.

Brooks was orthodox in those days. Like many other young aristocrats, he saw himself as a Brahmin St. George entering politics to slay the dragon of corruption. Certainly there was plenty of evil to combat, and who else but an Adams should lead the crusade? In July, 1874, he wrote an article for Henry's North American Review expressing the views of the conservative reformers. "Grantism" represented the ultimate corruption, the national nadir, as a witless President and a lawless Congress plundered the country. The blame, this young élitist thought, lay in "the naked rule of numbers" through which "majorities are manufactured by demagogues craftily manipulating the least intelligent portion of society." To Mugwump Brooks Adams, "a government by a corrupt civil service, with demagogues manipulating caucuses, is ruin!" In the nation's dire need, he proposed to "cut the evil at the root." These were brave words, but in reality his solution did not differ from the superficial suggestions of other genteel reformers. The "root" was a shallow, if troublesome, growth of a "feeble executive, a corrupt civil service and the caucus system." His cure, therefore, was correspondingly bland. Measures like the election of a strong president to curb Congress, the end of rotation in office, and the protection of minorities from demagogic "thralldom" were to bring America again to full bloom.⁶ During these years, Brooks was the blueblood reformer. Mugwumpery was to him, as to Henry, a vehicle for asserting aristocratic élitism by fighting the influence of business and numbers in politics.

Although his political opinions later changed, Adams formulated some permanent principles in this period. A glimpse of things to come was contained in his review of James Fitzjames Stephen's Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. In this article, he exhibited his preference for the realist—"Mr. Stephens .. . an active, ambitious lawyer, accustomed to deal with men and facts as they actually exist, [who] looks on life as a long struggle, in which the prizes are to the strong and wise,"—to "Mr. Mill, the highly trained, speculative philosopher, with a passion for doctoring society of all its ills, real and imaginary, [who] was apt in his great longing to bring all the world to something nearer his ideal to forget and ignore any practical difficulties . . . which might stand in his way." Adams fired away at the British liberal, maintaining that every "election [is] but an appeal to force." "Fraternity is simply a nauseous lie,—men are not brothers," he said, curtly dismissing the Christian ethic that he felt underlay Mill's politics. Much sounder, Brooks thought, was the doctrine "that in the end the battle must always be to the strong, and the race to the swift; and that the strong man will always rule the weak; by persuasion if possible, but if necessary by force. Nothing can alter the order of nature."⁷ Darwinian pragmatism, the foundation of Adams's emphasis on real politik and of his contempt for muddleheaded, sentimental liberals, appeared even at the heyday of his membership in a group with more than its share of the visionary and the tenderhearted.

Other blocks in the Adams edifice (perhaps sepulchre is a better word) were added during these years. In 1879, he first suggested a cyclical theory of history. This idea, later to become his explanation for the rise and fall of world empires, appeared in rudimentary form in his "plague on both your houses" attitude toward class conflict. "The rich man," he wrote Henry Cabot Lodge, "has had his fling for a thousand years and while he was the stronger he led his poorer neighbors the devil's own dance, and if they didn't like it, he struck an iron spike into them." But "he prodded once too often, and .. . the poor man got the rich man by the throat and cut his stupid head off, and served him right." Since the French Revolution, however, we had completed the circle, and now the poor man was growing as "greedy and silly as the nobles did."⁸

These somber thoughts, which he refined in the next several years, generated Adams's theory of social revolutions. His old belief about ruling groups establishing themselves by force became the basic premise of a class-conflict theory. Revolutions were caused by the "drifting of power from class to class, and the effort of the new class to assert itself."⁹ This analysis was the embryo of future works. Perhaps already lurking in Brooks's mind was the notion that the passing of his own class might lead to such an uprising.

Changes in Adams's personality occurred concomitantly with conceptual developments. A bitter, quarrelsome adult replaced the agreeable youth. Charles Francis noticed as early as 1877 that his son was "singularly brusque in his manners."¹⁰ Outsiders also saw the change. Mrs. Duncan Cryder, who had known him "as a young boy, when .. . he was friendly and pleasant," now found him "full of gloom."¹¹ Some of his acerbity was due to his hairline defeat for the state legislature in 1877. No doubt the decline of Massachusetts Mugwumps and his father's death also contributed to the transformation—and there were rumors of a broken romance. Brooks seemed aware of what was happening to him and communicated some of this negativism in a letter to Lodge. He wondered how he could ever have "enjoyed the life" of travel. Musing on his present dissatisfied state, he concluded that "after all the years make a difference in the way a man looks at the world."¹²

Disappointed in politics and dissatisfied with himself, Adams turned scholar. The first fruit of his new vocation was The Emancipation of Massachusetts, a study of the Bay Colony Puritans. His purpose in this, as in all future, works was "to set forth a scientific theory of history" by applying "certain general laws to a particular phase of development."¹³ Thus, in 1887, he began his lifelong quest for "general laws" based on historical facts. Ultimately it would lead him to view history as a cycle in which all civilizations were doomed to catastrophic ends.

The law investigated in The Emancipation was the motive power of fear. In seventeenth-century New England, a "spiritual oligarchy" buttressed its position with "superstitious terrors." When the Puritan ministry was threatened by eighteenth-century rationalism, it became bigoted and reactionary. Progressive enlightenment and reactionary prejudice then locked horns in "the fiercest battle of mankind; the heroic struggle to break down the sacerdotal barrier, to popularize knowledge and to liberate the mind." In Massachusetts, free inquiry, "that constitutional system which is the root of our national life," triumphed. So complete had been the victory that "wheresoever on this continent blood shall flow in defense of personal freedom, there must the sons of Massachusetts surely be."

Adams outraged fellow Brahmins by calling their ancestors "cruel bigots," men who shrank "from no deed of blood to guard the interests of their order."¹⁴ He claimed, contrary to everything his class had been taught, that only in spite of their Puritan forefathers had liberty found a refuge in America. Despite Brooks's rejection of the past, however, he had not yet broken with the present.

Behind his ancestral scorn lay an optimistic belief in the inseparability of progress, virtue, liberty, and truth and in the destiny of America to be their champion.

Despite its patriotic ending, The Emancipation was taken to task for bias and inaccuracy. Unfortunately, criticism drove the youngest Adams to castigation rather than to investigation. Rejected by readers and experts, he became contemptuous. Alienation expressed itself in diatribes against the opposition. "My estimation of popular intelligence has fallen," he defensively wrote to Henry. "I used to think you were wrong for the language you used to use about popular criticism and popular estimations of work but I give in, you are right."¹⁵ The critical barbs sank deeply, intensifying his isolation. Never again would Brooks write a book so hopeful about America.

The turbulent Nineties gave Brooks a public cause on which to vent his personal bitterness. Trouble was in the air in 1892, and the always apprehensive Adams quickly sniffed it. Strikes, agrarian political insurgence, and the emergence of giant corporations made him doubt the future. "Between the tariff and the trust," he wrote, "we are approaching something akin to a social revolution; for government by capital must necessarily be government by a minority and a government by a minority is a reversal of what we have had hitherto." Plutocratic government, he warned, would result in class conflict. Such a "state of affairs" could last, at best, "twenty five years," and then "we shall be in a social revolution of which no man can see the end."

Adams's rhetoric was radical, but his message was still conservative. After all, was it not natural for a Brahmin merchant's grandson to attack the high tariff, and blame industrialists and bankers for social and economic unrest? Brooks's essential moderation can be seen in his election plea for 1892. Amid "the mutterings of the storm," he called for "the defeat of Mr. Harrison." Cleveland's victory was vital because it would destroy the tariff that "holds together the great moneyed combination" and draw labor and capital "into violent collision."¹⁶ Revolutionaries do not flock to Mugwumps like Grover Cleveland, nor do they congratulate Republican friends on winning Senate seats.¹⁷

Despite Adams's faith, Cleveland did not save the nation. Within a year after his triumph, bankruptcy threatened the Adams family. Although failure was avoided, the brothers suffered considerable "care and anxiety."¹⁸ Harrowing experience now reinforced Adams's inherited dislike for bankers and businessmen. After such painful personal proof of their determination to crush him and his fellows, he became their intractable enemy.

During the misery of 1893, Brooks Adams began the Law of Civilization And Decay, the first full statement of his pessimistic philosophy. Adams sought to trace the development and decline of society with scientific principles of force and energy. According to these principles, communal growth and decay involved "oscillations between barbarism and civilization, or what amounts to the same thing . . . movements from a condition of physical dispersion to one of concentration." In the primitive state of dispersion, fear is the major manifestation of human energy. Fear, stimulating the imagination, stems from the need for self-defense. Hence, "religious, military, [and] artistic" types characterize the initial stages of society. The advance of civilization entails a "consolidation of energy" by which "fear yields to greed, and the economic organism tends to supersede the emotional and martial." The degree and rate of centralization depend upon the abundance of energy in any given society. Thus the growth and scope of civilization is proportionate to the flow of energy.

Having analyzed the principles of progress, Adams went on to describe its process. Through this discussion, he formulated his doctrine of the rise and fall of civilizations. In daily living, a richly endowed society does "not expend all its energy," but stores a "surplus . . . in the shape of wealth." Wealth, however, is accumulated by conquest, and "a race must, sooner or later, reach the limit of its martial energy." These limits are reached when "surplus energy" preponderates "over productive energy," i.e., when capitalists triumph over priests, artists, and soldiers.

When capital prevails, economic competition is substituted for war. Soldiers and farmers, creators of surplus energy, are ill adapted to the new style of life and give way to the parasitical "usurer." Since businessmen, unlike martial types, do not produce, "the effect of economic competition has been, perhaps invariably to dissipate the energy amassed by war." Consequently, the rule of bankers is as temporary as that of their predecessors. If war does not destroy the pacifistic "economic organism," it sinks more slowly "because the energy of the race has been exhausted." Thus "by war, by exhaustion or by both combined, . . . disintegration may set in, the civilization may perish, and a reversion may take place to a primitive form of organism."

Although the Adamses had a dramatic and personal vision of doom not unlike those of Donnelly and London, they also formulated a philosophical system of catastrophe. Brooks Adams's doctrine of disaster rested upon an impossible attempt to combine three contradictory ideas. He explained social growth through Darwinian concepts but attributed society's destruction to the triumph of the fittest. The organism that would finally survive the struggle for existence would doom civilization by dissipating vital energy. Disintegration, however, actually would resuscitate the race and reverse the decline. Once civilization had fallen, energy-gathering types would reappear and initiate a new society, which would itself go through the inevitable cycle of development, deterioration, and destruction. Evolution became a popular way to explain the emergence of America and to rationalize the triumph of corporation owners. Adams, as an aristocrat, resisted the social implications of Darwinism because America's growth drew the nation away from Brahmin values and because the Algeristic myth of business success underscored his own failure to achieve life goals. Thermodynamics and the cyclical theory of history provided a framework with which to use evolutionary ideas while escaping their unfavorable implications. This fusion of theories enabled Brooks to reject the captain of industry as nature's fittest organism and to deny that archaic types hindered survival. According to his application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, commercial organisms dissipated energy, and aristocratic types created it. Consequently, the victory of industrial titans involved the decline of civilization.

Adams derived only limited gratification from contradicting the theory that posited his class as atavistic. Although asserting the relevance of aristocrats to American society, he also accepted the thesis that the old must give way before the new. Brooks believed enough in evolution and the success myth to block his own wholesale rejection of these ideas. His thesis therefore, by admitting defeat, yielded only the negative satisfaction of withholding the spoils of victory. The triumph of his own class was impossible because it had not adjusted; the triumph of its displacers entailed society's disintegration. Only the theory of fatalistic cycles could resolve these clashing claims of relevance and legitimacy. Brooks Adams received some grim hope from seeing in the commercial élite's supremacy society's eventual reversion to a state of savagery where warriors and churchmen would prevail. In this way, the subjugation of the aristocrat would guarantee his return.

After conceptualizing his theory of energy cycles in general terms, Adams applied it to modern times. When Europe emerged from the Dark Ages, capitalism enabled men to accumulate surpluses and delegate their defense to others. Physical force was transmuted "into money and this process went on until individual strength or courage ceased to have importance." The mercantile triumphed over the martial way of life. The merchants, however, then gave way to modern bankers. These parasites who lived off other men's labor constricted the flow of currency so that money appreciated and "the borrowers had to part with more property to pay his debt when it fell due."

To Brooks Adams, Mayer Rothschild, the Jewish banker, epitomized the new group. According to Brooks, Rothschild's last words, uttered to his son as he lay dying, were: "You will soon be rich among the richest, and the world will belong to you." Nathan, who succeeded Mayer to the Rothschild empire, was sketched with the acid of an aristocrat's pen. He "had no tastes, either literary, social or artistic; in his manner and address he seemed to delight in displaying his thorough disregard of all the courtesies and amenities of civilized life; . . . Extremely ostentatious, though without delicacy or appreciation." Adams was trying to even the score of 1893 by attacking with rapier finesse the business blunderbuss that had almost annihilated him.

With the bankers' victory, gold had become supreme. As a result, credit was "manipulated by a handful of men" who had financially enslaved the debtor. Even the triumphant capitalist system, however, "bears within it the seeds of its own decay." In their unquenchable desire for markets and cheap labor, the magnates had opened up the East. Easterners, once mechanized, could undersell western businessmen. Greed, which impelled capitalism's triumph, would destroy it.

Apart from economic strangulation, modern civilization was threatened with biological extinction. In a centralized capitalistic society, the family was losing its economic and social significance, marriage was no longer sacred, and children had become a burden. Consequently, reproduction was declining, and, since modern society had no revitalizing "supply of barbaric life," race suicide was a likely prospect." For Brooks, the decline of that basic aristocratic institution, the patriarchal family unit, meant society's disintegration.

Adams turned history into a treadmill. There were stages but no progress, Darwinian conflict but no evolution to higher types. He acknowledged the financiers' success in the struggle for existence, but evolution did not seem to him a progressive process. Compared to previous aristocracies, the banker was dull, cowardly, and uncultured. Even though he disagreed with its positive conclusions, Brooks borrowed much from Darwinism. The human situation was conceived in terms of constant change, adaptation through necessity, and conflict for survival. Substituted for the tenet of growth to higher levels, however, was an endless repetition of triumph alternating with defeat. There was a ceiling to any society's development, and, when it was reached, the pendulum would always swing the other way. Decline, ending in disaster, would occur, and another civilization would rise to go through the inevitable cycle.

Doubtless Adams's portrayal of the financier was colored by a combination of his experience in 1893, a Brahmin bias against the bourgeoisie, and the traditional Adams animus for State Street. Like Henry, Brooks chronicled the emergence of the class that had displaced his own and took grim satisfaction in discovering the sources of its eventual disintegration. He, too, linked capitalistic deterioration with its divergence from the patrician style of life. Both brothers saw in the gross manners, pervasive materialism, and artistic inarticulateness of the businessman his ultimate destruction. To these aristocrats, taste meant energy, and sensibility meant survival.

There was another theme in Brooks's treatise, a theme far different in context, though not in content, from that of the alienated aristocrat. It was a long way from Boston to Nininger City, and an Adams could never be confused with a Donnelly, but nevertheless they shared a common grievance against commercial interests. Brahmin Brooks Adams agreed with the Populists in attributing to the financiers a tight money policy deliberately aimed at crushing producers. He joined the farmers in condemning "usurers" whose only activity in the economy was to destroy. it by their own greed. The aristocrat and the agrarians held a common opinion of the materialism and cowardice of the dominant class. As members of disaffected groups, even their cataclysmic outlook was similar. They both predicted that the élite, through its insatiable greed, would doom itself and all civilization.

Adams did not restrict himself to deploring capitalistic depredations, however. He attempted by political agitation to redress the balance between Wall Street and Beacon Street and sought revenge against the bankers who had made him so miserable in 1893. In 1894, he fought business with bimetallism as earlier he had opposed it through the tariff. With Francis A. Walker, Brahmin economist and President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Benjamin Andrew, President of Brown University, he formed the International Bimetallists, an organization that advocated the use of both silver and gold for an international money standard.

Brooks opened his campaign with "The Gold Standard," a pamphlet written in 1894. Devaluation of silver, he argued, had brought depression and dissension. If the silver solution was not immediately implemented, Adams characteristically foresaw catastrophe. Nihilism "in Russia, agrarian insurrection in Italy; anarchism in France and Spain; socialism in England and Germany" were warnings of what could happen here under the gold standard.²⁰

Brooks Adams was becoming more radical. Even though he was a moderate silverite compared to the westerners, still the money issue, in the Populist context, was much hotter than civil-service reform or tariff reduction. Its potential explosiveness did not bother Adams in 1894, and 1895, and the campaign acted as a tonic. For years, he had "been preaching disaster and . . . suffering under the thing which is hardest to bear, the conspiracy of silence, and the being set aside as a harmless crank." But the popularity of "The Gold Standard" made people think of him as they did of other men. Approbation was particularly gratifying because it came from his own class. "I admit to being frankly more pleased at your letter," he told Lodge, "and one or two others I have received, than I have been at anything since Mrs. Adams told me she would marry me."

Although buoyed up by approval and resolving to fight hard, he remained convinced that the bankers would win. "Between you and me," he vowed to Lodge, "I think the end is near, but I am in the popular side of this fight and I mean to fight to the last."²¹

These were brave words, but Adams did not "fight to the last." Within a year of its unfurling, he hauled down his flag. In June, 1895, gratified at prospective recovery, he took comfort that "the bankers themselves are perfectly assured." Impressed by "Morgan's pool" which stopped the drain of gold, he admitted that "as for myself I am desperately anxious for the success of Morgan. Everything I am interested in hangs on that and I admit I cannot contemplate the collapse of the corner with equanimity." The possibility of another recession made "silver agitation .. . the worst thing for us, and the whole country. .. . If silver is to come it had best come naturally. . .. Not through a political, semi-revolutionary agitation, which would prostrate all values for several years."²² Brooks, after all, was bound hand and foot to the master class. Whenever opposition got too radical or too threatening or whenever his own finances were in danger, he retreated behind the battlements of the bankers and rallied to the standard of the dollar sign. Henry was right, when many years later while commenting on his brother's cataclysmic predictions, he claimed that Brooks confused personal interests with political perceptions.²³

An Adams, however, could not forever live in peace with a Morgan. "I can't disguise from myself that the victory of capital.. . will lead to anything but disaster to us," he wrote to Henry. "I can see no glimmer in the future, less than a year ago, far less than in 1893."²⁴

With a vision of ultimate doom weighing on his mind, Brooks entered the-campaign of 1896. At Chicago, he steered clear of both radicals and eastern bankers and supported the conservative silverite, Henry M. Teller. When Bryan was nominated, however, Brooks switched parties. Bryan's election, he feared, "would mean revolution and probably armed revolution." But Adams was not like other self-righteous McKinleyites who regarded the Nebraskan as the devil's latest disciple. If Bryan meant revolution and confiscation to Brooks Adams, McKinley meant oppression and depression. No matter who won, Adams would lose. Whether Bryan "is or [is] not [elected] appears to me to be the end of the Republic, or very near it."²⁵

When the "Great Commoner" went down to defeat, there were no cries of joy or jeers of derision from Adams. McKinley was not his savior, nor had Bryan been an object of his hatred. Sensing an affinity of basic outlook and seeing another vestige of civilization destroyed by the modern machine age, he had a word of condolence for followers of a lost cause not unlike his own. Never had he seen so impressive a sight as this election—"a rising of miserable, bankrupt farmers, and day laborers, led by a newspaper reporter, have made the greatest fight against the organized capital of the world that has been made this century—or perhaps ever."²⁶

When the brief elation of 1894 had passed, Adams reprinted The Law Of Civilization And Decay. The second edition, which came out in 1896, reflected his more pessimistic mood. A study of science and society had convinced him that man was but a plaything of fate. Determinism, the natural outgrowth of his worship for objective, scientific laws, was an admission of inability to cope with modern forces. This confession was emphasized by his personalized version of the Darwinian principle that anachronisms go under in the struggle for survival.

Like other personal characteristics, the peculiarities of the mind are apparently strongly hereditary, and, if these instincts be transmitted from generation to generation, it is plain that, as the external world changes, those who receive this heritage must rise or fall in the social scale, according as their nervous system is well or ill adapted to the condition to which they are born. Nothing is commoner, for example, than to find families who have been famous in one century sinking into obscurity in the next, not because the children have degenerated, but because a certain field of activity which afforded full scope, has been closed against their offspring.²⁷

What could Adams do? What could anyone born past his time do but wait for the inexorable laws of civilization to sentence him to oblivion?

Adams's pessimism, which culminated in the despair of 1896, was partly due to the cool reception of his books. Brooks's moods always fluctuated with his own image in the public eye. The great tragedy of his life, as in the lives of his ancestors, was his failure to receive plaudits from the populace. Rejection resulted in alienation, in the construction of a barrier between himself and humanity. Call it weakness, hurt pride, paranoia, or perverse selfisolation. However it is labeled, Adams's attitude defined his relationship with the world. Sometimes it appeared as self-pity, as when he wrote to Cecil Spring Rice, then a comparative stranger, "My dear fellow, I'm a crank; very few human beings can endure to have me near them, but I like to be with you, and I suppose I like to be with those who are sympathetic, the more since they are so few."²⁸ Less hesitant with Henry, he unburdened himself of a mixture of pity and pride, of paranoia and outraged justice:

I cannot disguise from myself, that for me too my race is run. I have nothing more to hope from the world. Here I am really an outcast. 1 hardly think you can appreciate not only how completely I am alone, but how I am shunned. I am treated as a man with a mark. As for a hearing I shall never have one, and now my strongest wish is to escape somewhere where I shall forget and be forgotten .. . this winter has been almost more than my nerves can stand; I am beginning to be frightened, . . .²⁹

Sometimes the syndrome was dominated by anger. He raged at those who refused to accept him, and hell could have had few furies more bitter than Brooks Adams scorned:

I don't care a damn for this country, or indeed for anything much except to get out of it at least for awhile, or at least out of Boston; Boston the modern Sodom.... Oh Henry; Oh my dear, what a bloody fool your brother has been ever since he was born, and he has lain in the gates of the rich like Lazarus. Why do I want to print a silly book that no one will read, and that I shall be cursed for, and laughed at for, by every chuckle headed gold bug who will be told by a reviewer that at last I have done the thing everyone was waiting for me to do. Proved myself insane.³⁰

By 1896, with western radicals moving into the silver crusade, Adams had no more stomach for the fight on "the popular side." The allies of 1894 had departed leaving him "but one lonely man against whom all society is banded. .. . to crush me, to ridicule and suppress me." The "weight of this monied mass" was on him and all he wanted was "to escape from the whole thing." As Henry had been disillusioned with Grantism, Brooks discovered that "I am not made for this fight. It is folly in me to enter it."³¹

Defenseless and exposed, the silver moment having failed him, Adams could find no new source of strength, no belief behind which to seek shelter. "If I believed in a god, in a future, in a cause, in human virtue, right or wrong, in an ultimate transfiguration of the human race," he wailed to Henry.³² But there was no cause and there was no belief—there was only loneliness.

Brooks inherited the family propensity for turning private reverses into cosmic catastrophes. If Adams had been crushed by money-grubbing philistines, then the whole world would share this defeat. Amid his own disappointment, "The country . . . seemed . . . utterly barren," without "one ennobling instinct." Society was "at the end," he thought, "and the one thing" he found gratifying was "that we have no children."³³ The Adams habit of amplifying personal setbacks into national crises deflected guilt by placing the burden of failure upon society. Seeking relief from defeat by reading global misfortune into unsettling experiences was a characteristic response among cataclysmists.

Mutual moroseness made Henry and Brooks partners in misery. Having similar values and reactions, they pooled their emotional resources to compensate each other for wounds received from an unfeeling world. One conviction they held in common was a dislike for Jews. Brooks matched Henry's bigotry, bitterly condemning Jewry as the embodiment of the master class. A bit of free-silver anti-Semitism must have rubbed off, for he thought "the pure Jew," a "pure concentrated gold bug," a villainous parasite living off the hard earned gains of the producing class.³⁴ Through "a vast syndicate," the Hebrews controlled London and thereby "the world."³⁵ This vision of the conspiratorial Jew holding the globe in his mercenary grasp revealed Brooks's alienation from the contemporary era. The Jew symbolized both betrayal and the advent of financial capitalism. In arguing that the Jews had become supreme, Adams proclaimed his own displacement by business.

His estrangement also manifested itself in a longing for the past. Medieval history had been Brooks's favorite period since his youth. He eagerly responded to his elder brother's interest now that Henry, drawn by a similar need, was immersed in the Middle Ages. "I am delighted to hear that you have been making a Gothic pilgrimage," he told his brother. "On the whole, the parts of my life which I look back to with the greatest delight are those I have spent among the churches and castles of the Middle Ages." Like Henry, he had been overwhelmed by the cathedral where he "really and truly did believe the miracle, and .. . sat and blubbered in the nave and knelt at the elevation." The "Gothic is the greatest emotional stimulant in the world. I am of it, I understand it, I know how those men felt, and I am in feeling absolutely one with St. Anselm, or Godfrey de Bouillon."³⁶ The twelfth century, an age unsullied by commonness, became a refuge for alienated aristocrats.

Despair drove Brooks Adams abroad in 1895, but his spirits were not raised by the trip, and he surveyed foreign lands with the same scorn as his own. A journey to India brought forth strident racism and an almost Nietzschean contempt for the weak. "To the Western mind, the mind of the conquering race, . . . The Indians are slaves." Instead of exhibiting the conquerors' vitality, they only "endure—endure beyond all belief." In Anglo-Saxon freebooters like Adams, pacifism invoked instinctive contempt. Even racism, which had compensated inferiority feelings in so many others, did not bring comfort, however. Inert India, for Adams, was an example to nations like the United States of what happens when "the fighting races, the manly, bold and noble races, the only men who have ever done anything worth doing, have been annihilated, evicted from their lands, wiped out, and their place . . . taken by a mixed mass of usurers."³⁷

Adams's foreign trip initiated a crusade that occupied his remaining years. America's world position concerned him greatly, and he felt that the course of empire was the only route to national power. Geopolitics had fascinated Brooks for some time. As early as publication of The Law Of Civilization and Decay, he had believed that trade routes, access to markets, and ability to undersell competitors were the vital sinews of a country's strength. The visit to India, by awakening racism and expectations of an East-West conflict, stimulated his imperialist thinking. By January, 1896, he was sure that the United States was in a death battle for world supremacy that would end in defeat if the magnates continued to dominate soldiers and luxury to undermine Spartan living standards. Without soldiers or cheap goods, the West could neither conquer nor compete with the East. To Adams, the situation bore "every mark of premature decay." He gave Europe three generations and the rest of the "system" until the "twenty-first century" before total disintegration.³⁸

After 1896, Adams embraced imperialism. The silver crusade had ended dismally, and there was no better way to regain public favor than to court the present popular passion. Furthermore, expansion not only had mass appeal but one's closest friends advocated it. Imperialism, however, meant something more to Adams than a vehicle by which to win congenial companionship and popular approval. It engaged his interests, embodied his ideals, and thrilled every fiber of his being. Initially opposed by business, it was, for Brooks, another way to combat commercial encroachment. Through the quest for empire, he idealized force and deified the warrior. Thus he hoped to reinforce those vital qualities that he saw being undermined in the modern era. In addition, belief in racist expansion compensated for patrician decline. If the Brahmin élite had been displaced, at least he could still be part of the sovereign race. The cause also appealed intellectually; it furnished a global program corresponding to the world outlook for which Adams pleaded. Finally, the belligerency inevitable in imperialism was a fitting climax to the conflict of a Darwinian society. In mind and in spirit, if ever a man was suited to an idea, Brooks Adams was suited to imperialism.

At first, Brooks treated foreign prospects as glumly as he had domestic problems. America's commitment to empire, the Spanish-American War, was greeted with the usual pessimism. "I am in despair," he wrote Henry, "to have this silly business forced on us, where we can gain neither glory nor profit. . ." He fretted about the nation's finances and military ability and about his own bank account.³⁹ As Brooks put it, however, nothing "lays me out" like a victory. Accordingly, after Manila, he adjudged "our world position" much improved.⁴⁰ But global strategy was not nearly as thrilling as the specific exploits of America's forces. Adams, brimming with pride over victory, retracted his long standing accusation that the country was under the golden thumb of the financiers. "I have often told you that the old tradition was dead," he said to his young niece, "that the world was the Jews and that State Street and ignominy were all that was left us now. I was wrong. The old tradition lives. Gentlemen still survive."⁴¹ The war meant America's rebirth and Adams's own resurgence. "Taking Boston, in general," he gleefully remarked, "it is beginning, if you can believe such a thing, to trifle with our notions."⁴²

The conflict intensified Adams's nationalism. Conscious of being on the popular side for once, Brooks proudly proclaimed that "I am an expansionist, and 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."⁴³ Victory made him wave the flag even more grandly. Prewar despair had disappeared, and the new century dawned optimistically on an Adams who believed the nation's pre-eminence to be at most only a few years away.

Adams's next book, America's Economic Supremacy, developed the argument for America's assumption of world power. The Panic of 1893, once a source of dismay, had actually brought about the nation's economic supremacy. Driven by depression to undersell Europe, America had turned the Continent into a market and had become leader of the western coalition against Germany and Russia. The outcome of the struggle between Orient and Occident would be decided in Asian markets. Due to recent territorial acquisitions, the United States had only to drop its isolationistic traditions, and hegemony would easily be secured. The Teutonic-Slavic combination, once quite formidable, was, in Adams's fin de siècle optimism, bankrupt and obsolescent.

In order to sustain its position, the nation had to adjust to changing conditions. Success in modern life meant economy, activity, and centralization. Business, above all other contemporary forces, had met these demands. Corporate efficiency had enabled America to undersell other countries and capture international markets. Since empire was the political counterpart of the trust, Adams, by advocating one, had come to support the other. The combination of personal prosperity, the imperialist crusade, and capitalistic support of military conquests had caused him to repudiate his former antipathy toward the corporations.

Adams remained sanguine for the next few years. America's Economic Supremacy sold widely and was respected in the right circles. For once, Brooks was accepted by the influential intelligentsia. "Opinion is running . . . strong with the new movement," he wrote. "As I happen to be pretty widely identified with the new departure it naturally makes a change in my position; and to my intense astonishment, I find myself, for the first time in my life, growing actually popular."⁴⁴

These already high spirits soared at Roosevelt's accession. With Theodore as President and Cabot running Congress, it seemed for a time as if the commercial tide had been rolled back, as if America's destiny was once again being guided by aristocrats who believed in action, imagination, and expansion. At last, Brooks Adams would have a hand in national policy. A lifetime of hungering for recognition, of being frustrated by issuing clarion calls that bounced back as empty echoes, seemed to be over. Only a few months before Brooks received his great chance, Henry attested to his brother's craving for power. He pointed out that his own displacement was as nothing compared to that of "poor Brooks," who was "the real sacrifice, for he was ambitious."⁴⁵ A truer comparison between the brothers has never been made. Henry had relaxed his grip on the twentieth century and was sinking into the passive romanticism of Virgin adoration, while Brooks still tried to make his way in this world. Long after one Adams had given up, the other, still driven by a Puritan conscience and a reformer's energy, eagerly grasped his final chance for power. At last, his ambition was to be realized. "Thou hast it now: King, Cawdor, Glamis, the world can give no more," Brooks cried perhaps a bit vicariously to Roosevelt. So inspired was he in his fight for Roosevelt that he lauded him as greater than the greatest Roman emperor. "Hail Caesar!" Hail Theodore!—"The President who began the contest for the supremacy of America against the eastern continent."⁴⁶

Brooks was deliriously happy in the months following the inauguration. Anticipating a Roman triumph, he willingly forgot years of iconoclasm and embraced values upon which he had previously spat. Now "that we have the world at our feet," he was "for the new world. . . . electric cars, mobiles, plutocracy and all." After all, he reasoned, "I don't live but once, and when one is dead its for a long time and a nation is only great once. One might as well try to cut off a hunk of fat, even if you don't like a particular kind."⁴⁷ Adams, like Donnelly, was the marginal man—condemning what he really wanted and praising a way of life that was at best a consolation for what he could not have. Usually, he posed as the lonely aristocrat, the forgotten man martyred by his age, but when ambition beckoned, he became a modern man. How the tune changed when success was the piper!

America was the macrocosm of Adams' euphoria, and he well-nigh burst with national pride. America's "enemies were either foolish or bewildered." For the "first time," Brooks felt "that for us is the earth and the fullness thereof."⁴⁸ Utopia never meant much to Henry Adams. After Mugwumpery failed, he awaited an adverse fate. For activists like Brooks Adams and Ignatius Donnelly, however, resignation was impossible. As changes in personal fortune triggered elation or depression, their visions of the future fluctuated between wish-fulfillment and wish-destruction. In the all-or-nothing-world of these cataclysmists, utopia alternated with disaster.

Adams's nationalism was not notable for its uniqueness. Like a thousand other patriots before and after, he called for a native culture and was thrilled by any display of national power. Military glory became more of an obsession than ever before. "As to me there is nothing so magnificent as the soldier's death," he said at a veteran's memorial service. "War may be terrible, but it is also beneficent, for it has given us the noblest type of manhood that, I believe, the race has ever known. It has given us the American soldier."⁴⁹ The man on horseback, whether twelfth-century knight or twentieth-century warrior, was always Brooks's hero.

Even those hopeful times, however, were not without problems. Believing war to be "the ultimate form of economic competition," Adams anticipated that America's prosperity would invite strife. Germany and Russia could not be squeezed out without violence, and, as a last resort, they would start a "war to the death,—a struggle no longer against single nations, but against a continent."⁵⁰

The danger of impending conflict seemed to escape most citizens. By being woefully unprepared, inadequately armed, and pacifistic the people indicated that they had not "maturely considered" their position in the power struggle and were still hampered with "old prejudices" against making war and conquering territory. The worship of force that led Brooks Adams to admire uniforms also convinced him that an "opulent, unarmed" America was putting a "premium" on European aggression."⁵¹

Another weakness was our decentralized and disorganized government. Survival depended upon organizing for cheap production, but even in a hopeful mood Adams doubted whether there could be such consolidation to capture foreign markets. Although the country's industries were expanding, "administrative power does not grow with the mass." Haphazard organization was unable to manage the unprecedented mass and accelerated energy created by science and competition. Already "society is quivering under the strain," a "social reorganization must take place, or something would give way."⁵²

By 1904, these doubts had undermined Brooks's confidence. Business, once the force behind national greatness, now symptomized administrative inefficiency. In order to establish an adequate measure of government control over commerce, he re-engaged the vested interests. Adams's campaign for railroad rate regulation was carried out in the same moderate fashion as his previous reform efforts. Brooks did not cross the Rubicon of radicalism by demanding state ownership, but, in true Progressive style, he rapped errant corporations across their greedy hands with the rule of law. He asserted that transportation should be regulated by government because travel on highways is a "public trust" and railroad monopolies were setting "arbitrary" rates that taxed people far in excess of a fair return. Therefore, the railroad was violating one of the most sacred Progressive canons, "equality before the law." But for Adams, "sovereignty" was even more important than equity. If the government did not act, private corporations would encroach upon its powers, subvert the law, and seize control of the nation. Then the state "will have become a formal instrument serving as a mask to protect a sovereign oligarchy," and the capitalists would absorb "the whole national wealth." These two essentials of Progressivism, equality before the law and the public sovereignty, had to be maintained—otherwise "constitutional government" would be destroyed. On its ruins would arise the bugaboo of all middle class reform—the threat of violent conflict between those who had too much and those who had nothing. "The worst convulsions which have rent society," he warned, touching Progressivism's most responsive chord, "have been caused by the effort of the weak to free themselves from unequal exactions imposed by the strong."⁵³

Brooks was thoroughly imbued with the spirit of New Nationalism. He recognized the value of trusts and even advocated more economic concentration, but he never forgot the difference between good and bad corporations. He worshipped neither Adam Smith nor Andrew Carnegie. If free enterprise would destroy our economy because it was inefficient and antiquated, monopoly would strangle it through greed and corruption.

Adams regarded his skirmish with the railroads as part of a general offensive Roosevelt had mounted against the vested interests. Although victorious in his own battle, he was disconsolate because the campaign on Capitol Hill seemed lost. The honeymoon of 1901-1903 was over. Capital had vanquished even his idol, the Lochinvar of the upper class, Theodore Roosevelt. "The magnates have won," he told Henry. "You are now to have Mr. Morgan and his hired hands owning the Senate, the Senate really naming the judges, and the judges executing the orders of the Senate." Anticipation of business rule awakened cataclysmic thoughts dormant since Roosevelt's accession. Once again, Adams doubted the duration of "this system."⁵⁴

Underlying the gloom of these years was keen disappointment at being denied the recognition he so eagerly desired. "Ten years ago," Brooks once remarked, "I admit, I should have liked to hold office, but a man cannot be young forever, nor can he be Jack of all trades." To this disclaimer, however, he added, "I have turned toward writing, not from choice, but from necessity." But even if he is taken at his word about holding office, there was still the attraction of moving behind the facade of titles to grasp real power. By 1902, any hopes along this line had also been dashed. After having "had a good look at Washington," he was sure that, although "they are willing enough to use me, and take my ideas when convenient . . . they don't want me about."⁵⁵ Deprivation of a long awaited and ardently sought after reward raised old suspicions of persecution. Others would "steal" from him, they would get "money" and "fame" properly his.⁵⁶ Being shunted aside just when he expected his hour to strike brought back the old depressing sense of worthlessness. Once more he felt "nothing one does matters very much one way or the other." Effort made no difference in an "age notable for the way it could ignore."⁵⁷

Depressed by Roosevelt's failure to halt business, disappointed at not having an official role, and watching his contemporaries disappear through the attrition of old age, Adams sank into cataclysmic thoughts. As a result of Russia's defeat in 1905, he was sure Europe would collapse, thus precipitating the final "struggle."⁵⁸ In 1906, he set the date for international catastrophe in 1925, but two years later, after being "shaken most uncomfortably," he doubted whether disaster would hold off that long.⁵⁹

As the present grew more forbidding, the past became more precious. Increasingly conscious of the passing of his class, Adams indulged in a sentimental requiem with his equally nostalgic brother: "Almost the worst is that I feel as if we were the last of it. I'm afraid the next generation knows little and cares less for the things we cared for."⁶⁰ Brooks spent summers in the "Old House" at Quincy and decided to turn it into a memorial. He collected all the Adams memorabilia and, in a fit of ancestral possessiveness, prevailed upon his brothers to prevent family papers from being scrutinized by eyes that were not Adamses.' Adoration of the past extended to early heroes like Washington but concentrated chiefly on his own famous forebears. One offering of this worship was a biography of his grandfather. In such esteem did Brooks hold John Quincy, however, that, always prejudiced against family studies and doubting whether his own did full justice to its subject, he withheld publication.

A deep urge to establish continuity with the past is readily apparent in this work. John and John Quincy Adams are portrayed as having the same values, suffering the same slights, and enduring the same emotional anguish as their descendant. They, too, led thoroughly miserable lives, and their discouragement stemmed from the same source—popular rejection. Brooks saw his grandfather very much in his own image. To him, John Quincy Adams was the last of a species, the vestige of a vanishing society. John Quincy "belonged to a dying civilization," an era that "cherished antiquated standards of right and wrong." These virtues made him ineffectual against "the Jacksonian faction" and so he was swept aside in the triumph of a corrupted democracy.

Beliefs, as well as moods, were shared by the men. John Quincy had had little use for businessmen and was so resented that "the wealthy manufacturers of the North. . . . thought him a semidemented incendiary." As an expansionistic Secretary of State, he had had the astounding foresight to realize that "the equilibrium of human society" was moving across the Atlantic. The Adamses, agreeing on national destiny, were also in accord on the means of its implementation. John Adams and his son had advocated a strong military establishment. They represented "the nation militant," basing "their whole theory of life upon the necessity of the use of physical force."

The author's feelings of persecution were projected on the figures in this biography. His grandfather and great-grandfather appeared as the innocent objects of vicious opprobrium. Criticism against John Adams must have been "engendered by personal malice, since no one any longer attempts to dispute the purity or wisdom of his acts." His son, John Quincy Adams, despite great vilification, "was the last and perhaps the extremest specimen of an illustrious race of patriots and statesmen."⁶¹

Brooks now completely identified with his ancestors. Writing to Henry in 1909, he said of their grandfather and of themselves: "No one ever understood him, no one will ever understand us—but he was right and we are right." "Adams was heavy, I am heavy. We are what we are, we cannot be changed." In the defeat of John Quincy Adams, he read the doom of America: "Washington and he were the only two men who conceived of America as a unity and tried practically to realize their ideas. They failed and with them our civilization has failed."⁶² Eighty years after that misfortune, another family failure had occurred. Once again, an Adams was scorned when he tried to point out the road to salvation. Indeed, one wonders to which Adams Brooks was referring in 1909.

Brooks had previously been ambivalent toward the past. His early book, The Emancipation of Massachusetts, was filled with ancestral criticism. At times, when he seemed to be moving in harmony with the dominant modern forces, Adams praised the present. But now that his star had definitely set, comfort lay only in the past. Unfulfilled ambition made only those things never contested seem worthy of winning.

Advancing age and contemplation of family tradition made Adams more conscious of class ties. He was even pained by the death throes of foreign aristocrats. A Tory setback in the elections of 1910 occasioned regret that England's "landed aristocracy" had not lasted "for my time." Their defeat meant "that the whole world is to be swept away before my eyes." It saddened him to realize that all is "gone, everything I love or understand or respect, is dead with the wild animals, and the country and poetry, and color and form." For him, perhaps, it was also "time .. . to die."⁶³ America's failure to halt business encroachment made him feel even more strongly the deposition of "an old ruling class whose power is broken, whose privileges are being taken away, who is facing an economic position with which they admit they cannot deal, and who is half wild with fear of attack."⁶⁴ It was the twilight of the gods for Brooks, as he praised Oliver Wendell Holmes for being "the last of the great race who have had at once the taste and the power to do them [make speeches] perfectly. Like poetry it dies with us."⁶⁵ Even taste, that last refuge of the patricians, was being destroyed by the onslaught of the ascending class.

Disappointments in the Roosevelt era turned the aggressive seeker after power into the victimized old man. Feebleness partly excused failure, and guilt was neutralized by a withdrawal from society. Nostalgia for the past and martyrdom in the present—such self-dramatization was all that remained after a life of defeat. The passing of his class convinced Brooks that disintegration was imminent, and he vied with Henry for the most pessimistic formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. "I have reached precisely your conclusions," he wrote, "except that I incline to think that energy is absolutely lost and that it is not degraded." He was morally certain that "men are losing energy—mental energy I mean and very fast."⁶⁶ "The only question" now "is one of time," and even twenty-five years was "too long."⁶⁷

Adams's cataclysmic mood varied. At times he felt himself yielding "to the depression of age." Catastrophe had become a "fixed idea," and he began "to fear lest .. . it makes me doubt my own balance. I talk and think of little else."⁶⁸ Unfortunately, these fruitful introspections disappeared as others came to share his outlook. As always, acceptance dissolved his self-doubt. Gratified at being "actually accepted as orthodox and conservative," Brooks suddenly discovered that "I have more than I ever deserved."⁶⁹ He had become "an exceptionally happy man, . . . happier than I have ever been," even if "the atmosphere about us is so charged with an indescribably sickening decay that it is very hard to resist depression." Thought the old crowd was dying, and "we have not much further to go," Adams found "this satisfaction, thank God! At least I have lived. I have known the old world. I have loved, and hoped and believed . . . the deluge may come—but we have lived."⁷⁰

Did this euphoria amid disaster mean that his gloomy prophecies had been a pose? Brooks's intimates sometimes thought so. "I have known you for sixty-odd years," wrote Henry, "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."⁷¹ Such an estimation is substantiated by his chameleon moods, in which somber expectations alternated with personal elation. But, even if Adams was not above gilding the lily or using the world as a stage for his own tragedy, a genuine atmosphere of despair hung about him. There was nothing of the poseur in these words of regret at his inability to commit himself to an ideal or cause:

I wish I could have faith in Christ. It is sad to have no inner light as we near the end and I have none. I cannot care, as you do, for the race in general. I am no philanthropist. My nature, my race, my blood confines my affections and bounds my interests. If they are doomed I care not for the future. It is too cold for me. For me, the world dies with them. Very seriously, I envy you who can find consolation in the stars, as I envy men like Newman, who can find rest in the Church.⁷²

While in this somber mood, Adams wrote The Theory Of Social Revolutions. In his other works, he had debated the people's willingness to administer energy released by modern science and business. In the new book, a veritable graveyard of abandoned hopes, he questioned whether "finite minds" ever have the capacity to organize such boundless forces. The discrepancy between organization and production of energy, only a danger in 1904, had already enabled the capitalists to seize "sovereignty." Once in command, the magnates had shown themselves unscrupulously greedy, bankrupting debtors and twisting the laws to serve their ends. To protect themselves from corporate servitude, workers had formed unions. Now the two groups were squaring off for a battle that "may at any moment, shatter the social system; while under our laws and institutions, society is helpless." At one time, he had believed there was a chance capitalists could apply economic centralization to administration; now he concluded that specialization would prevent them from functioning outside of business. Paradoxically, the very specialization that had enabled captains of industry to seize power might be their undoing. Unless the vested interests became more responsible and adapted to new social demands, they would go the way of previous élites. Brooks warns that "the experience of the English speaking race" included a violent upheaval "about every three generations."⁷³ According to his calculations, capitalists had taken control around 1865, approximately two generations before. There was little time left.

In the Theory Of Social Revolutions, the final formulation of Brooks Adams's philosophy, Progressivism is fused with Darwinian determinism. Unlike Henry, who emphasized the laws of thermodynamics, Brooks clung to the Darwinian framework throughout his lifetime. Perhaps the younger Adams held onto the doctrine of evolution because he still struggled to survive in the modern world long after his brother had surrendered. Since business had failed to adapt, it must abdicate sovereignty or be annihilated. Some power must be found to mediate between management and labor, to suppress revolutionary forces by establishing the supremacy of law. To Adams's Progressive mind, only government could ensure equity. Roosevelt's Square Deal offered society its last chance to avoid becoming a jungle in which the struggle for existence could only go against its unfit leaders.

World War I confirmed Brooks's conviction that catastrophe was inevitable. In this cataclysmic mood, Adams published an article designed to crush the false illusions of our civilization. "No society," he asserted, "ever has succeeded or ever can succeed, in realizing any ideal or abstraction whatever, because,... the interposition of the flesh makes impossible the fulfillment of the law. And yet to-day our democratic society gravely proposes to cause infinite nature to permit man to live in peace." "Unable to reconcile himself to the calamities of his lot" the selfish American dreams "that he may escape self-denial and hardship by omitting those duties which entail a sacrifice." Brooks demanded that these delusions cease and that mankind face up to the fact that it was an atom of "measureless space . . . never being at rest, never in perfect equilibrium, but assuming forms which have the aspect of competing selfishly with each other." In such a cosmos, man could never achieve any goal, let alone the ideals of peace and freedom.

Adams vented his distaste for modern America by bitterly assailing democracy. Popular rule was actually a conspiracy of "recklessness and self-complacency" against "the common safety." It exalted "the individual" over the necessity for community cooperation. Without discipline, "even an approximation to order, justice, mercy, peace, or any of the ideals is impossible."⁷⁴ Even survival was impossible in a society atomized and immobilized by the centrifugal force of human selfishness. Shortly, Brooks expected, a "more cohesive and intelligent organism . . . shall spring upon us and rend us as the strong have always rent those wretched . . . feeble creatures who are cursed with an abortive development."⁷⁵

Disgust for democracy was consistent with the Calvinist creed that attracted Adams in his later years. Submersion in family history and a confession of faith at the First Parish Church on November 11, 1914 (an adherence to an Old Puritan custom), were signs of his tapping of ancestral roots. Henry fled to history in order to escape his conscience, but Brooks embraced the past to reaffirm a rigid moral code. The elder brother pleaded for mercy; the younger demanded retribution. Brooks embraced the communitarian and even the authoritarian aspects of Protestantism. "No society like anything which we or our ancestors have known, can cohere without a faith in revealed religion," were the words of his confession.⁷⁶ "Perfection," to the new saint, presupposed "a code of moral standards" that would provide barriers against selfish irresponsibility. Sensual desire offered one challenge, but the real task was to overcome the sin of pride. Adams echoed his stern-visaged Puritan fathers by declaring that man's "greatest enemy is always his own vanity and self esteem," his refusal "to admit his own intellectual impotence in the face of the infinite, and endure with resignation his destiny. He is always aspiring to dominate nature and is always suffering defeat." "Democracy," reveling in "personal liberty," encourages rebellion against proper restraint and enables lust and pride to master men.⁷⁷ What could be more reminiscent of Governor John Winthrop' s distinction between "Civil Liberty" and "Natural Liberty" than Brooks Adams's "Can War Be Done Away With?"

Adams's antidemocratic diatribe reflected his alienation from contemporary America. A "growing reluctance to express my views in public," evidenced the distance between him and his fellow citizens. "So far sundered from most of his countrymen did he find himself, that he shrank "exceedingly from thrusting on them opinions which will give offense, or more likely still, excite derision."⁷⁸ Brooks was reluctant to express himself because the country's basic ideal was the source of all his problems. Democracy created an open society, which permitted the wrong people to eclipse the Brahmin élite. By substituting change for permanence, individualism for community, and anarchy for order, popular rule upset aristocratic calculations and turned patrician virtues into weaknesses.

The war was not a pleasant period for Adams. In 1915, his brother Charles's death triggered another wave of despondency. "Good luck has followed him to the end," he wrote Henry. "I wish I dared to hope that a like passage might be mine." Death in the family accentuated the emptiness of life. As Brooks looked "back through the long series of years," he wondered "more day by day what it has all been about and why I am here at all."⁷⁹ His depression was so overwhelming that the old stimulants failed to raise his spirits. America's triumphs did not "lay him out" as lesser victories had done twenty years earlier. Even long-awaited election to public office—that of delegate from Quincy to the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1917-1919—failed to encourage him.

In 1918, Adams was struck an even more crushing blow in the death of Henry. When his brother died, he wrote to Holmes bemoaning the loss that "nothing can ever . . . make good." From boyhood, Henry had "filled a place in my life which was all his own and now, I frankly admit that, reason with oneself as I may, I cannot pull myself together at all—I do not suppose I ever shall be able to."⁸⁰

Adams entered his last productive year with a heavy heart. His first venture was a new edition of The Emancipation of Massachusetts. The preface to this reprint sharply pointed up the differences between the old man of 1919 and the youthful optimist of 1887. Adams professed amazement that he had once maintained "the Twelfth and Thirteenth centuries" to be "as contrasted with the Nineteenth, ages of intellectual torpor." The venerable pessimist was startled by "the self-satisfied . . . finality of my conclusions." He renounced an earlier confidence in progress and repudiated any past belief in the order of the universe or the unity of science. In a passage similar to Henry's Education he recanted his former faith: "Each day I live I am less able to withstand the suspicion that the universe, far from being an expression of law originating in a single primary cause, is a chaos which admits of reaching no equilibrium and in which man is doomed eternally and hopelessly." As society sank deeper into directionless anarchy, an acceleration of energy was hastening our doom. Signs of disaster abounded. Imminent defeat by Asia, disorganized administration, and the triumph of desire over discipline all indicated that "democracy in America has conspicuously and decisively failed" and that "capitalistic civilization, . . . is nearing an end."⁸¹

Brooks's last publication was, fittingly, an introduction to Henry's Degradation Of The Democratic Dogma. Henry's work on the cataclysmic implications of the Second Law of Thermodynamics was in keeping with his mood. Characteristic also was Adams's lengthy discourse on the family. In this last projection of himself onto the past, he portrayed his grandfather as a tragic hero betrayed by the "Democratic Dogma." John Quincy embodied all the noble ideals, he was enlightened, rational, scientific, patriotic, and incorruptible. Yet in the end, these very merits led to his rejection. Trapped by virtue, he was lost in a struggle with slick charlatans who capitalized on the common man's selfishness. To Brooks Adams, John Quincy was a lion amid jackals. But a whole pack of jackals is too much even for a lion.

Brooks Adams was sure that in resisting the allurements of the harlot democracy, he had avoided his grandfather's failure. He too had "inherited a belief in the great democratic dogma" but had "learned .. . to look on man, .. . as a pure automaton, who is moved along the paths of least resistance by forces over which he had no control. In short, I reverted to the pure Calvinistic philosophy." Fortified by Calvinism, Brooks skirted the pitfalls of his ancestor. He realized "that the strongest of human passions [are]—fear and greed," and he put no more faith in chaotic science.⁸² Above all, Brooks was wary of democracy. This system, the child of idealism, science, and free will, had inherited all their faults. It was steeped in chaos and complexity. Democracy had deified competition and surrendered to selfishness. Adams could take pride in the fact that he had not yielded to the blandishments of popular rule. But even an arid pride is not satisfied by avoiding defeat, especially at the price of not entering the fray. His was still a Calvinistic pride to be gratified only when the millennium arrived. On that glorious day, when "the ultimate conclusion came," when "social war, or massacre" would end democracy, Brooks Adams and his kin would sit at the right hand of God.⁸³ In spite of this grim triumph, however, the grandson shared in his grandfather's downfall. It was clear that he too had been beaten, for he would hardly demand vengeance for a defeat that he had not suffered. Nonetheless, Adams called for the judgment day and claimed justice. He did not really, however, want them at all, for in his innermost heart, a voice plaintively cried for mercy.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that, although "I have known him [Brooks Adams] from boyhood. .. . yet I still don't quite know what to think."⁸⁴ These words are heartening to those who study Brooks Adams and also do not "quite know what to think." From the complex personality and the diverse moods, however, some basic emotional patterns do emerge. Clearly, his doubts about himself and his country rose out of status anxiety. Adams, keenly aware of belonging to a declining class, evinced the self doubt and ineffectuality that often accompany social displacement. A life that did not fulfill the promise of its birthright of national leadership must have been a nightmare of failure. Out of such feelings came the authoritarian conviction that man could neither master his fate nor be autonomous without sinning. The dead weight of the past was a staggering handicap for Brooks, and his whole life was a struggle to prevent himself from buckling under. Restlessness and ennui, anti-Semitism and imperialism, escape through Calvinism or cataclysmism were all attempts to lay down this burden. But Adams was too proud, too sensitive, and too intelligent to forget his legacy, and through the pathetic rationalizations and self-deceptions there frequently flashed insights that revealed painful awareness of his predicament. "I apprehend that I approach pretty nearly being utterly without a use in the world I live in," he told Henry in 1901. "It is a sign that the blood is exhausted, and that we have come to the end. Apparently our generation was all right. We seemed to have ability, energy and opportunity, and yet we all have tried and have not suited ourselves or anybody else."⁸⁵

It was one thing to admit ineffectuality, but it would be asking too much of any human being that he shoulder full responsibility for a lost life. Brooks admitted to being an anachronism, but he never forgave the society that had made him one. Of all human conditions, irrelevance is the hardest to bear and the most difficult for its sufferer to forgive. The longer Brooks was ignored in his own time, the more he professed to scorn the present and to admire the past. When the present grew so unbearable that the divergence between the two could no longer be spanned, it followed that the modern era had to be destroyed. Lacking virtue, which meant not appreciating an Adams, twentieth-century society could not survive. The bitterest charges, the most dire accusations, were hurled against the pre-emptors. The Jew, the banker, and the industrialist were held responsible for society's miserable state because they typified contemporary culture. They had driven the Adamses from their perch; they were interlopers destroying America's native aristocracy. Not knowing the past, not having shared in building the present, their ravenous hands mercilessly tore civilization apart. But Brooks, angry at being displaced, would be revenged. In his own alienation, the new leaders became aliens; his own guilt for failure would be purged by society's destruction.

Since Adams had been born at the juncture of the present and the past, since he existed in the twentieth century but really lived in the eighteenth, he was deeply divided. Inability to come to terms with himself and his age caused contradictions in his thought and behavior. He could plead for centralization, expansion, and adjustment while claiming that preindustrial traits were necessary for adaptation. Ultimately, despite his commitment to modern times, he chose the past and rejected the magnates in favor of aristocrats like George Washington, John Quincy Adams, and Theodore Roosevelt. Great discrepancies also appeared between his diagnoses of radical social ills and his prescriptions for superficial nostrums. Despite his cataclysmic predictions, Adams was almost as much a Mugwump while he called himself a Progressive as when he agitated for civil-service reform in the 1870's. The challenge of science also stirred irreconcilable notions. Brooks argued repeatedly that the application of scientific principles to social problems was our only salvation. Yet, at the end of his life, he embraced Calvinism and claimed that science was leading us to chaos.

Adams's values were as much at war as his ideas. Although asserting aristocratic obsolescence, he trusted only Roosevelt and Lodge. Professing to be a rigid determinist, he spent his life trying to divert the nation from its fate. Thus despite his claim of amoral pragmatism, he would up condemning America for its sinfulness.

His conflicting moods, values, and ideas were the results of a divided personality. A lifetime of dismal prophecy did not prevent his friends from thinking him something of a poseur. Nor did frustration at not being taken seriously prevent him from playing the "crank." Rather, it led to a transparent disdain for humanity that showed that he had been cut to the quick by lack of recognition.

Interminable contradictions were created by a deeply dissatisfied, doubt-ridden existence. In desperation, Brooks sought solace by suppressing the warring elements within him. Authority in any form, but chiefly military or religious, promised peace. Democracy, on the other hand, was feared and hated because it preached autonomy for one who craved discipline to curb his clashing emotions. Even the relief of losing his individuality was denied him, however. Adams was unable to fall back on the religion of his forefathers although he had made a confession of their faith. How could one believe in a god who escaped his responsibility by allowing "young men to grow old?" How could one love a god who left one's life in "a devilish turmoil."⁸⁶ That was life for Brooks Adams—"a devilish turmoil." He was at war with society and at war with himself, and his great tragedy was that he could achieve neither victory nor peace.

NOTES

¹ Charles Francis Adams, Sr., "Diary," June 24, 1861, microfilmed Adams Papers, Widener Library (Cambridge). Cf. December 19, 1871.

² Brooks Adams, "The Seizure of the Laird Rams," Proceedings: Massachusetts Historical Society, XLV (December, 1911), 243-244, 247.

³ Adams to C. F. Adams, January 26, 1868, Adams Papers.

⁴ Adams to C. F. Adams, March 24, 1868, Adams Papers.

⁵ Adams to C. F. Adams, February 24, 1868, Adams Papers.

⁶ Adams, "The Platform of the New Party," North American Review, CXIX (July, 1874), 47, 60, 60-61.

⁷ Adams, "Review Of James Fitzjames Stephen's Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," North American Review, CXVIII (April, 1874), 445, 447.

⁸ Adams to Henry Cabot Lodge, August 20, 1879. All letters to Lodge cited here are in the Lodge Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

⁹ Adams, "The Last Stage of English Whiggery," Atlantic Monthly, XLVII (April, 1881), 569.

¹⁰ C. F. Adams, "Diary," July 21, 1877.

¹¹ Mrs. Duncan Cryden, quoted in Arthur F. Beringause, Brooks Adams (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1955), pp. 71-72.

¹² Adams to Lodge, September 4, 1881.

¹³ Adams to H. Adams, March 7, 1887. Unless otherwise noted, Adams's letters are from Houghton Library (Cambridge).

¹⁴ Adams, The Emancipation of Massachusetts (Houghton Mifflin Co.: Boston, 1887), pp. 42, 363-364, 40.

¹⁵ Adams to H. Adams, March 11, 1887.

¹⁶ Adams, The Plutocratic Revolution (New England Tariff Reform League: Boston, 1892), pp. 1-2, 4.

¹⁷ Adams to Lodge, November 23, 1892.

¹⁸ Adams to H. Adams, January 4, 1893.

¹⁹ Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay, (2nd ed., Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1943), pp. 58-59, 60, 184, 303, 304-305; 326, 328-329, 336-339.

²⁰ Adams, The Gold Standard: An Historical Study (New England News Co.: Boston, 1894), p. 34.

²¹ Adams to Lodge, May 6, 1894.

²² Adams to H. Adams, June 24, 1895, Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. Cf. Adams to H. Adams, October 28, 1896, Adams Papers.

²³ H. Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, September 5, 1917, quoted in Worthington Chauncy Ford, ed., The Letters of Henry Adams: 1892-1918, II (Houghton Mifflin Co.: Boston, 1938), 645.

²⁴ Adams to H. Adams, April 22, 1896.

²⁵ Adams to H. Adams, July 12, 1896.

²⁶ Adams to H. Adams, October 31, 1896.

²⁷ Adams, Law, pp. 58-59.

²⁸ Adams to Cecil Spring Rice, June, 1888, quoted in Stephen Gwynn, ed., The Letters and Friendships of Cecil Spring Rice, I (Constable and Co.: London, 1929), 97.

²⁹ Adams to H. Adams, February 2, 1895.

³⁰ Adams to H. Adams, May 14, 1895.

³¹ Adams to H. Adams, June 24, 1895, Massachusetts Historical Society. Cf. Adams to H. Adams, September 21, 1895; Adams to H. Adams, October 13, 1895; Adams to H. Adams, August 17, 1896; Adams to H. Adams, November 15, 1896.

³² Adams to H. Adams, September 9, 1896.

³³ Adams to H. Adams, August 17, 1896. Cf. Adams to H. Adams, August 25, 1896; October 15, 1896.

³⁴ Adams to H. Adams, October 15, 1896; Adams to H. Adams, March 25, 1896.

³⁵ Adams to H. Adams, July 26, 1896.

³⁶ Adams to H. Adams, September 21, 1895.

³⁷ Adams to H. Adams, December 23, 1895.

³⁸ Adams to H. Adams, March 7, 1896.

³⁹ Adams to H. Adams, February 27, 1898; Adams to H. Adams, April 29, 1898.

⁴⁰ Adams to H. Adams, May 22, 1898; Adams to Abigail Homans, April 26, 1898.

⁴¹ Adams to Abigail Homans, May 25, 1898.

⁴² Adams to H. Adams, May 22, 1899. Cf. Adams to A. Homans, May 25, 1898.

⁴³ Adams, Springfield Republican, September 20, 1898, quoted in Daniel Aaron, Men of Good Hope (Oxford University Press: New York, 1951), p. 267.

⁴⁴ Adams to H. Adams, October 13, 1901. Cf. Adams to H. Adams, April 30, 1901.

⁴⁵ Adams to Mrs. Cameron, February 3, 1901, quoted in Ford, op. cit., II, 313.

⁴⁶ Adams to Theodore Roosevelt, September 12, 1901, quoted in Beringause, op. cit., p. 203.

⁴⁷ Adams, to H. Adams, October 13, 1901.

⁴⁸ Adams to Lodge, March 27, 1901.

⁴⁹ Adams, "Address at the Memorial Service to Lieutenant Edward Bumpus," Boston Evening Transcript, October 16, 1901, p. 9. Cf. Adams to Holmes, April 13, 1902; Adams, "Address at the Reform Club Dinner," The American Architect, LXXIV December 28, 1901), 99-100.

⁵⁰ Adams, "The New Industrial Revolution," Atlantic, LXXVII, (February, 1901), 165. Cf. "War and Economic Competition," Scribner's Magazine, XXXI (March, 1902), 352; Adams to H. Adams, July 5, 1901; July 27, 1901; September 12, 1902.

⁵¹ Adams, "Reciprocity or the Alternative," Atlantic, LXXVIII (August, 1901), 153-155; "War as the Ultimate Form of Economic Competition," Proceedings: American Naval Institute (December, 1903), 829-881; "Economic Conditions for Future Defense," Atlantic, XCII (November, 1903), 632-649.

⁵² Adams to H. Adams, September 26, 1902; Adams to H. Adams, December 11, 1902.

⁵³ Adams, Railways as Public Agents: A Study in Sovereignty (Plimpton Press: Boston, 1910), pp. 53-54, 136-138, 143, 144. Cf. Adams to Henry Teller, December 19, 1907.

⁵⁴ Adams to H. Adams, April 10, 1906.

⁵⁵ Adams to H. Adams, April 28, 1902.

⁵⁶ Adams to H. Adams, February 3, 1903.

⁵⁷ Adams to H. Adams, October 6, 1904.

⁵⁸ Adams to H. Adams, July 2, 1905.

⁵⁹ Adams to H. Adams, January 9, 1906; Adams to H. Adams, April 15, 1908.

⁶⁰ Adams to H. Adams, January 1, 1908. Cf. Adams to H. Adams, January 9, 1906; May 21, 1905.

⁶¹ Adams, "John Quincy Adams" (1909), Unpublished ms. in the Massachusetts Historical Society, pp. 165, 396, 564-565, 299, 256, 80, 406.

⁶² Adams to H. Adams, March 6, 1909. Cf. Adams to H. Adams, January 28, 1910.

⁶³ Adams to H. Adams, January 28, 1910.

⁶⁴ Adams to H. Adams, November 12, 1910. Cf. Adams to H. Adams, April 9, 1911.

⁶⁵ Adams to Holmes, June 29, 1911, private collection of Mark DeWolfe Howe, Harvard Law School.

⁶⁶ Adams to H. Adams, March 1, 1910.

⁶⁷ Adams to H. March 2, 1910.

⁶⁸ Adams to H. Adams, March 10, 1910; Adams to H. Adams, April 5, 1910.

⁶⁹ Adams to H. Adams, October 22, 1910; Adams to H. Adams, November 12, 1912.

⁷⁰ Adams to H. Adams, April 9, 1911.

⁷¹ Adams to B. Adams, January 30, 1910, quoted in Ford, op. cit., II, 532. Cf. Theodore Roosevelt to John Hay, May 3, 1897, quoted in Elting Morison, ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, I (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1951), 609; Oliver Wendell Holmes to Sir Frederick Pollack, August 9, 1897, quoted in Mark DeWolfe Howe, ed., Holmes-Pollack Letters, II (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1941), 76.

⁷² Adams to Holmes, March 9, 1913, private collection of Mark De Wolfe Howe.

⁷³ Adams, The Theory of Social Revolutions (The Macmillan Co.: New York, 1913), pp. 3-4, 17-19, 27-30, 6-7. Cf. Adams, "The Collapse of Capitalistic Government," Atlantic, CXI (April, 1913), 433-444.

⁷⁴ Adams, "Can War Be Done Away With," Publications: American Sociological Society, X (December, 1915), 104, 104-105, 104, 105-106.

⁷⁵ Adams, "The American Democratic Ideal," Yale Review, V (January, 1916), 233.

⁷⁶ Adams, quoted in Mark DeWolfe Howe, Who Lived Here (Little, Brown and Co.: Boston, 1952), p. 12.

⁷⁷ Adams, "Can War Be Done Away With," pp. 106, 115, 106.

⁷⁸ Adams, "Democratic Ideal," p. 225.

⁷⁹ Adams to H. Adams, March 20, 1915.

⁸⁰ Adams to Holmes, April 18, 1918, private collection of Mark DeWolfe Howe.

⁸¹ Adams, The Emancipation of Massachusetts (Houghton Mifflin Co.: Boston, 1919), pp. 152, 166-167. Cf. Adams, "Collective Thinking in America," Yale Review, VIII (April, 1919), 623-640.

⁸² Adams, "Introductory Note," in H. Adams, The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (The Macmillan Co.: New York, 1919), pp. v-vi, vii, viii.

⁸³ Adams, "The Heritage of Henry Adams," Ibid., p. 121.

⁸⁴ Holmes to Pollack, May 25, 1906, quoted in Howe, ed., Holmes-Pollack Letters, II, 123.

⁸⁵ Adams to H. Adams, July 5, 1901. Cf. Adams to H. Adams,

⁸⁶ Adams to Mark De Wolfe Howe, June 22, 1921. December 21, 1899.