SOURCE: "The Evolution of Brooks Adams," in Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 2, Spring, 1983, pp. 95-112.

[In the following excerpt, Carson surveys Adams's body of work, which she characterizes as born out of his politically conservative background.]

Brooks Adams generally appears in the history of American thought as Henry Adams's cranky younger brother, an eccentric misanthrope who reputedly began each day "by singing a song of his own invention, which consisted entirely of three repeated words: "God damn it! God damn it! God damn it!' In a less apocryphal vein is the recognition that The Education of Henry Adams was fertilized by Brooks Adams's audacious attempt to forge theoretical order from material and spiritual chaos.¹ For Henry Adams, the century ended on a note of Darwininduced despair. In contrast, Brooks Adams's personal Odyssey in the decade of 1893 to 1903 traced an arc from apocalyptic despair to progressive optimism and nationalistic celebration.

Brooks Adams might well merit attention solely for the insights his career offers into the crucial social and intellectual movements of the turn of the century: "genteel reform" politics, Free Silver, scientific historiography, Anglo-Saxonism, imperialism, and the Progressive movement toward rational, scientific government. Ultimately more compelling, however, is the question of the man himself. In reconciling the apparent contradictions of his thought and career, the historian is drawn into a recapitulation of Adams's own search for order—and perhaps, too, to a reaffirmation of the qualities that constitute the kind of intellectual heroism Adams celebrated, and may be said in his queer, crabbed way to have embodied.

The youngest child of Charles Francis and Abigail Brooks Adams, Brooks Adams was trained in the law, in the family tradition. Although he began his career in 1872 determined to be a lawyer in more than name only, politics and quarterly journalism soon encroached on his legal practice. An attack of "nervous illness" in 1881 forced Adams to curtail his practice almost completely, and he turned to writing, traveling, and caring for his refractory health.² In 1895, after several years of restless travel and reflection, he produced his magnum opus, The Law of Civilization and Decay. Surveying western civilization through cycles of growth, centralization and decay from the Roman Republic through modern Britain, Adams formulated a theory of the rise and decline of empire, based on a hypothesis of the alternating dominance of two "types" of men: the economic and the military-religious. The immediate impetus for this undertaking was Adams's sympathy with the silver cause, bred of the personal and national trauma of the panic of 1893. His conviction that the gold standard was imposed on society by greedy capitalists led him by degrees to examine the patterns of economic power and policy through world history. A deeper strain emerged from his lifelong fascination with the Middle Ages. His interpretation enthroned the ideals he saw as represented by the monk and the crusader, and cast "economic man"—the merchant, the entrepreneur, the banker—as history's Antichrist.

Through the late 1890's Adams watched with horror and then with exhilaration as the old world crumbled and a new global order seemed to emerge, with the United States gravitating to its natural position as a young and vigorous world power. Adams ruptured his fifteen-year liaison with the Democrats in 1900 to join the Republican party in what he hoped would be an attempt to forge a rational bond between big business and strong government in service of a newly mobilized society rising from the ashes of laissez-faire drift. After the accession of his friend and ideological ally, Theodore Roosevelt, Adams stepped into his long-coveted role of gadfly to the great. In 1903 he accepted a lectureship in constitutional law at Boston University, and in 1907, representing the city of Spokane, he prosecuted James J. Hill for monopolistic railroad practices. Beginning with The New Empire (1903), he devoted the rest of his writing career to elaborating his belief that in mass education, purposive centralization, and expert administration lay the keys to national and global progress.

How can we understand Adams's abrupt truce with modern capitalist society? It seems anomalous that a man in love with the superstitious, idealistic, static world view supremely represented to the Victorians by the Middle Ages should suddenly join hands with a dynamic, iconoclastic movement born of the complexities of a technological society. To get at such an understanding, we must discern the "logic" of events as it revealed itself to Adams in the course of this tumultuous fin-de-siècle decade. In tracing the evolution of his thought it becomes apparent that his drive to interpret his world was fueled by a rich and complex set of personal impulses. Even more intricately than most intellectuals, he saw his personal history as bound up and played out in the history of his times.

I

Ten years older than Brooks, Henry Adams early took it upon himself to act as his brother's intellectual cicerone. "[We] ought to try our hardest to tolerate the child, who is really a first-rate little fellow . . . That boy's disposition will either make something of him or kill him," Henry wrote to Charles Francis, Jr., in 1858.³ Henry was probably the single greatest influence on Brooks's life and thought, and their early relationship set the tone for a continuing, if erratic, closeness. As they grew older, Brooks came to use Henry as his favorite sounding board; characteristic was his claim in reference to the manuscript of The Law in 1894: "There is no one else whom I care to consult at all."⁴

It is hardly surprising, then, that Brooks seems to have derived little from his Harvard years except a confirmation of his nascent interest in the Middle Ages. "I don't know how it is," he wrote his father in 1868, "but I find, and always have found, that medieval history was more to my taste than either Greek, or Roman, just as I can't help confessing to myself that a Gothic cathedral, or ruined castle, pleases me more than a Roman ruin. . . ."⁵ As a first-year student at Harvard Law School, Brooks took up residence in Harvard Square with Henry, who had just been appointed professor of medieval history.⁶ A year later, Brooks's legal education as well as his informal exposure to Henry's ideas were interrupted by his father's summons to act as his private secretary at the Alabama Claims Commission in Geneva. When he returned to America in 1872, Brooks was admitted to the bar in Suffolk County.⁷

As a student, Brooks Adams had joined the Commonwealth Club, a political reform organization founded by one of his brother's first students, Henry Cabot Lodge.⁸ Now a young lawyer, he joined Lodge and Henry Adams in Carl Schurz's Republican reform movement, taking up his pen to promote the "new party" in 1874. His brother's North American Review printed this patrician battle cry: "The system now developing falls little short of placing absolute power in the hands of demagogues who use corruption as a means of controlling ignorant votes, since their fixed policy is to exclude integrity and intelligence from politics, and to rule by an appeal to folly and to fraud."⁹

His early articles testify that Adams found congenial the mugwumps' distinctive brand of conservatism tinged with panic. His appeals to "citizens of influence" to stem the ugly tide of political corruption were reinforced by urgent warnings of impending doom. "America has been wildly drifting for the past ten years . . . Nothing but a penetrating sense of their danger can save the people from having a dire choice thrust upon them,—the choice between anarchy and disintegration, or force."¹⁰ For the first time Adams sounded the Cassandran prophecy that would characterize his writings until the end of the century. The other note struck by reform Republicanism which carried lasting resonance for Adams was that of the irresponsible, uncultured soullessness of the creatures of new wealth.¹¹ In 1884 Adams bolted the Republican party for the haven provided by the Cleveland Democrats, where he sheltered, though increasingly uncomfortably, for the next sixteen years.

In a review of Trevelyan's Early History of Charles James Fox in 1881, Adams first revealed his attraction to overarching theories of historical process. In the course of defending the historical triumph of free competition, he espoused a theory of historical determinism in which the weak inevitably yield to the strong.

It is the shifting of power from class to class, and the effort of the new force to assert itself, that causes revolutions. Thus in the last century the power has passed from the few to the many, the centre of gravity had shifted, the whole social fabric was rotten, and was doomed to fall with a crash, because the feeble were in authority, and the weak cannot control the strong.¹²

Here in embryonic form first appears the strange mixture of Darwinism, physical metaphor, and economic determinism that would stamp Adams's subsequent work as both heavily derivative and peculiarly his own.

The professional leisure enforced by his illness in the l'880's gave Adams the opportunity to undertake his first full-length monograph, a work on early Massachusetts history solicited by Houghton, Mifflin for their Commonwealth series.¹³ Adams seized this opportunity to test and elaborate some of his earlier speculations on the broad processes of history. The Emancipation of Massachusetts portrays the gradual erosion of the all-encompassing power of the early Massachusetts Bay clergy, and the tenacious and sometimes brutal resistance they offered to incursions on their dominion. In Adams's hands, Puritan Massachusetts became a battleground of competing historical forces, personified by human actors in the grip of the impersonal workings of "natural" law: "Like all phenomena of nature, the action of the mind is obedient to law; the cause is followed by the consequence with the precision that the earth moves round the sun, and impelled by this resistless power his destiny is wrought out by man."¹⁴

The heroes of Adams's scientific saga were those who did battle against the small, closed, priest-ridden society, manifesting the courage "to break down the sacerdotal barrier, to popularize knowledge, and to liberate the mind. . . ."¹⁵ We are confronted by the anomalous spectacle of libertarian protest impelled by "that automatic, yet resistless, machinery which produces innovation"¹⁶; Adams's equation of the unhindered operation of the mechanistic laws of the mind with the growth of freedom of thought. This contradiction, as well as his condemnation of the "priestly caste," vanish from his later work. Time, reflection, and disillusionment would conspire to produce theoretical consistency.

In a note defending his work against the historian Charles Deane's criticism, Adams protested: "My book is not a history; it is not intended for one. It is an attempt to set forth a scientific theory of history which happens to be taken from Massachusetts, but which might as well be taken from India."¹⁷ Deane was not the only critic to fail to recognize Adams's purpose. His first major brush with an uncomprehending public dismayed Adams ("my estimate of popular intelligence has fallen," he wrote sourly¹⁸), and he turned to Henry for solace. "You my dear fellow, are, permit me to say, almost the only man, who has understood the point. . . ."¹⁹ That people were not "brighter than they are" would continue to be Adams's lament for at least another decade, as he delved further into the processes of history and became convinced of the impending doom of western civilization.

II

Although he had early shown a capacity for unorthodox thought, Brooks Adams was a political conservative and a strong-government man by heritage and by inclination. Until 1892 he had found the well-trodden path of the eastern reform movement quite sufficient to his ideological needs.

After Cleveland's election, however, conditions rapidly deteriorated and carried Adams's convictions with them. The panic in 1893 greatly affected the Adams family fortune, much of which was tied up in bank and property interests in Kansas City and Spokane. After an anxious summer together in the Old House in Quincy, the Adams brothers were relieved to see the bulk of their estate escape from jeopardy.²⁰ This personal scare as well as the broader social convulsions he observed prompted Adams to rethink his views on the gold standard, which seemed directly responsible for the panic. Characteristically quick to act on a new conviction, by November he had enlisted several of his academic acquaintances and launched a fragile bark christened "International Bimetallists"—an implicit disowning of the inflammatory "free silver" cognomen.²¹ Though the group quickly foundered, Adams himself spoke and wrote actively for the silver cause through the election of 1896—although near the end he faltered, rather frightened by his Bryanite bedfellows. For Adams, silver had become not only a respectable cause but also the only rational economic policy.²²

Though his ardor for silver coincided neatly with contemporary conditions, Adams portrayed it as the practical culmination of his study and reflection since The Emancipation of Massachusetts. After his first book, he had "read theology backward to the schoolmen and the crusades," then traveled to Europe, studying "countless churches and castles and battlefields" in pursuit of evidence to support his evolving theory of the action of natural law upon the human mind.²³ As Adams wandered back through the ages, the religious man persisted in his scheme, but his character and role in world history changed fundamentally as Adams's demonology shifted to include and finally center on "economic man." Later he recalled the "shock of surprise" he felt, standing like a latterday Gibbon amidst the ruins of Baalbek, when he realized that the competition between free and slave labor and Roman industrial inferiority "caused a contraction of the currency, and a consequent fall in prices by reason of a drain of silver to the East, and in this way brought on the panic . . . followed by the adulteration of the denarius under Nero."²⁴

If we are to rely on Adams's memory, then, his researches had shown up the hazards of monometallism even before the current panic hit. "The question with me was, how fully was I justified in applying these admitted facts of history to the crisis of 1893."²⁵ At the Quincy house that summer, Henry was treated to the outlines of Brooks's theory in the earliest manuscript of The Law of Civilization and Decay. "Brooks was then a man of forty-five years old," Henry recalled in his Education, "a strong writer and a vigorous thinker who irritated too many Boston conventions ever to suit the atmosphere; but the two brothers could talk to each other without atmosphere and were used to audiences of one."²⁶ Henry was impressed with the manuscript, as Brooks tells it, but he warned against publication. "I know not if you have any political or other ambitions, but this will be their death blow. The gold-bugs will never forgive you. You are monkeying with a dynamo."²⁷

Undeterred—perhaps even a little pleased—by Henry's grim warning, Brooks continued his work. In 1895 he judged his book ready for the press and placed it with the London firm of Swan Sonnenschein.²⁸ But at the last moment he panicked. "Oh Henry," he cried,

oh my dear, what a bloody fool your brother has been ever since he was born—what a fool he is now, even now when all the donkeys have kicked him, 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 goldbug. . . ."²⁹

The Law of Civilization and Decay hardly succeeds as a comprehensive theory of the rise and decline of civilizations. It is flawed from the start in its foundation on arbitrary and indefensible propositions. Yet it is nonetheless a "powerful and melancholy book," as Theodore Roosevelt called it³⁰: a cry of despair masquerading as dispassionate scientific theory. As such, it recalls much of both the academic and apocalyptic literature of its era; but it achieves a singular lyricism and intensity.³¹ Civilizations are born in barbarian innocence, raise their superstitious monuments to an omnipotent God, expand in pursuit of trade, centralize around capitals of commerce, and finally, having sacrificed military strength to wealth, crumble under a fresh onslaught of barbarian force.

Adams would have resented the accusation that The Law is no "law." He took great care to lay out the theoretical underpinnings of his work in a preface. These were, once again, compounded of transpositions of physical and biological theory into the social realm and a strange mixture of economic and psychological determinism. Launching his argument with the a priori assertion that instinct rather than conscious thought determines men's actions, Adams observes that these controlling instincts "divide men into species distinct enough to cause opposite effects under identical conditions." His empirical observations of the artistic and cultural expressions of past societies led him to conclude that these "species" must somehow alternate in periods of social dominance.³²

In order to fit these observations into a systematic scheme of social change, Adams had to suggest a viable sequence of cause and effect. This he finally borrowed from the physical realm. "The theory is based upon the accepted scientific principle that the law of force and energy is of universal application in nature, and that animal life is one of the outlets through which solar energy is dissipated."³³ The most common human outlets of this fixed store of energy were the mental states of Fear and Greed, which in a weirdly animistic historical synopsis Adams portrayed as somehow "possessing" and creating his dominant social types. "In the earlier stages of concentration, fear appears to be the channel through which energy finds the readiest outlet; accordingly, in primitive and scattered communities, the imagination is vivid, and the mental types produced are religious, military, artistic. As consolidation advances, fear yields to greed, and the economic organism tends to supersede the emotional and martial."³⁴

This shotgun wedding of the physico-biological and social realms is resoundingly Spencerian; but two things must be noted. First, it is difficult to establish Adams's direct debt to Spencer, though inconceivable that he was unfamiliar with Spencer's work. Secondly, their origin is less important than the use to which Adams bent these ideas. At this point in his evolution, Adams substituted an emphasis on "economic" for Spencer's preferred "industrial" society. While Spencer stressed the development of scientific and technical modes of thought as concomitants of this phase of social evolution, Adams pointed to the commercial or "economic" impulse as critical in shaping a centralized, industrial society. As Henry Adams most succinctly summarized Brooks's theory, "Civilization followed the exchanges."³⁵

Adams's personal financial worries must in part account for the attention he gave in The Law to those he deemed responsible for the recent national catastrophe: the bankers and the brokers—"economic man" epitomized. Yet Adams's animus had deeper roots, as might be guessed from the vehemence of much of his personal correspondence of the early 1890's. "I tell you," he wrote to Henry, "Rome was a blessed garden of paradise beside the rotten, unsexed, swindling, lying Jews, represented by P. Morgan and the gang who have been manipulating our country for the last four years."³⁶ Here Adams only reflected, albeit with marked violence, one ugly strain of the rhetoric of his time, which depicted conspiracy and manipulation behind every social and economic fluctuation, masterminded by an international community of Jewish bankers and businessmen.³⁷ This paranoia, fully shared by Henry Adams, was further fed by the "Mugwump mentality," hostile to what it perceived as the crudity and cultural ignorance of the industrial nouveaux riches. But Adams's prejudices and hatreds took on a distinctive coloration from the particular ideal he erected in opposition to the "economic man." "To me, 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 at one with Saint Anselm, or Godfrey de Bouillon."³⁸ Though Adams came of age during the American Gothic revival, and, through Henry and some of his friends, must have been exposed to the debates that accompanied Ruskin's reception in this country, his chief attraction to the Gothic was neither specifically aesthetic nor religious, but rather broadly nostalgic.³⁹ Again, Adams absorbed and then refracted this cultural strain through the lens of his unique world view. The ideals that the Gothic represented for him were not reproducible in or adaptable to the modern age; in fact, they stood in the historical memory as wrenching harbingers of inevitable decay. "There is not a barbarian anywhere singing a chant of war and faith, there is not a savage to build a natural hut, there is not a soldier to sacrifice himself for an ideal. To my mind we are at the end."⁴⁰

Indeed, The Law ends with a prophecy of doom. The cycle would not swing round once again. The acceleration of consolidation, due to the development of modern technology and communication, coupled with the decreasing fecundity of what he called "the more costly races,"⁴¹ generated two extreme types: the Western usurer, and the Eastern peasant bred to live on the scantiest nutriment. Their inevitable clash could only result in the victory of the "simpler organism" and the destruction of Western economic society.⁴²

Reviewers were for the most part polite, praising The Law's "depth," "originality," and "keenness of insight."⁴³ The public received The Law more favorably than either Brooks or Henry had hoped, buying out the first printing in three months.⁴⁴ Henry, busy circulating the book among his friends, wrote to Brooks in January 1896: "Of course it scares everybody. My only astonishment is that so far no one has ventured to attack it. . . . The British-American calico-school of civilization must be moribund when it does not take up such a challenge."⁴⁵ A month later Henry reported to Brooks, still in Europe, that his narrower message was also being heard: "[A] speech of Senator Mitchell of Oregon, Jan. 30, [gives] you a big puff . . . and the puff direct, even from a silver senator, has the merit of costing nothing."⁴⁶

Henry himself was proud of his brother and more than superficially impressed. What the reviewers said hardly mattered, for to him there was not one competent to judge the book on its merits. To a friend Henry wrote that The Law had become "my Gospel of anarchy."⁴⁷

III

"I have never seen so impressive a sight as this election," wrote Brooks Adams in 1896. "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 in this century—or perhaps ever."⁴⁸ As a Democrat and a silver man never quite reconciled to private citizenship, Adams took a nominal stance for Bryan that year, though his conservative instincts rebelled. He probably viewed McKinley's victory with some relief.⁴⁹

By 1897 Adams had gravitated both socially and ideologically toward the small group of men who would occupy the center of his orbit for the next decade. One bright spot of his short sojourn in Washington that year was his frequent lunches with Theodore Roosevelt. "I am immensely fond of him. He is, I believe, one of the very few sincere men I ever met in my life."⁵⁰ Roosevelt's extensive review of The Law of Civilization and Decay in the Forum in January 1897 had been sensitive to Adams's purpose. Though objecting to its pessimistic determinism, Roosevelt responded strongly to The Law's faintly jingoistic prophecies of decay: the fear that America might become nothing better than a nation of "hucksters," the weakness of the martial spirit among modern Americans, and the danger of "race suicide"—the failure of virility among the more "highly civilized" races. While acknowledging the alarming accuracy of some of Adams's observations, though, he ultimately declined to join in a gloomy prognosis of the nation's destiny.⁵¹ In fact, Roosevelt wrote privately to Cecil Spring Rice, sometimes he wasn't certain that Adams was "quite right in his head."⁵²

Such was the politician's reaction to the theorist. Adams, on the other hand, admired the successful New Yorker. In 1896, playing Cicero to Roosevelt's Pompey, he had written: "I have watched your career with deep interest. You may remember a year ago in Washington, I told you to sell. . . . You are an adventurer and you have but one thing to sell—your sword."⁵³ His advice to Roosevelt (superfluous, of course) reflected Adams's own ambivalence toward the sordid spectacle of contemporary American politics. Aloofness had its charms; but it also might be seen to reflect a kind of eviscerated moralism which Adams increasingly disdained. Was there not an equal moral courage in fighting it out in the midst of the fray?

Unfortunately, Adams's intermittent temptations to come out swinging had always had to contend with his basic temperamental unfitness for active politics. Henry once assessed the situation candidly: "Brooks is too brutal, too blatant, too emphatic, and too intensely set on one line alone .. . to please any large number of people."⁵⁴ In the late 1890's, however, Brooks Adams's visits to the nation's capital grew longer and more frequent. The pace of global events accelerated his intimacy with Roosevelt and Lodge, gave a new slant to his theoretical work, and offered an entrée into the highest government circles peculiarly fashioned to his talents and his temperament.

The Spanish-American War was the turning point. Word of the sinking of the Maine convinced him that at last the end had come. "I think we all feel as if we stood on the brink of a gulf. . . ."⁵⁵ When war was declared, he hurried to Washington. "Poor Teddy has been quite carried off his legs," he wrote with amusement; yet he himself was not immune to the atavistic appeal of war preparations.⁵⁶ In fact, as he wrote to his niece in France, the soldiers had won his "heart of hearts."

I have often told you that the old tradition was dead, 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 still lives. Gentlemen still survive. Men whom I verily believe to be as fine a type as ever marched with Godfrey de Bouillon, or sailed with Drake.⁵⁷

The victory at Manila was exhilarating and challenging. Adams took the plunge into imperialism. The annexation of the Philippines, "which is what we all have our hearts set on," was the manifest destiny of a new naval and commercial power. The pieces had fallen into place, and he discerned a pattern in the seemingly chaotic expansion of American influence. This realization coincided with his own sudden elevation to new respect. "Last year," he wrote to Henry, "if you remember, Roosevelt, Cabot, and others thought my views extreme. Roosevelt has thought it worth while to apologize to me . . . and to tell me that all I ever said fell behind the truth."⁵⁸

Adams laid out his new ideas in a series of articles in 1898 and 1899. Building upon the groundwork of The Law in charting the global flow of goods and capital, Adams added a new dimension, military power, to his geopolitical schema. The Spanish-American War had been but the last in a series of shocks necessary to break up the old world order established at Waterloo. "[D]isintegration is sweeping capital and industry in opposite directions from their former centres,—to the east from Paris, and to the west from London." France had "amalgamated" with the newly-consolidated Russian empire in self-defense. In counterbalance to the eastward tendency of French capital was the new westward orientation of Great Britain, which might be "not inaptly described as a fortified outpost of the Anglo-Saxon race, overlooking the eastern continent and resting upon America."⁵⁹

Vital to Adams's main conclusion was the development of the China trade. He joined Alfred Thayer Mahan in urging Anglo-American cooperation in the commercial exploitation of the East. Competition might lead to war; alliance between these maritime powers would, in the event of war, lead to certain victory. "Anglo-Saxons have little to fear in a trial of strength; for they have been the most successful of adventurers."⁶⁰

Undergirding his advocacy of a new departure in American foreign policy was a new morality: "necessitarianism," as Henry Adams dubbed it, or the futility of men's resistance to the inexorable laws of nature.⁶¹ "It is vain that men talk of keeping free from entanglements," Brooks wrote. "Nature is omnipotent; and nations must flow with the tide. Whither the exchanges flow, they must follow; and they will follow as long as their vitality endures."⁶² This was the old determinism of The Law, but with a new twist. As long as the tide must flow, it was better to ride it than be swept under. Adams had put forward a new and sophisticated version of Manifest Destiny: a concise and well-formulated melding of the ragged ends of expansionist arguments for retaining the Philippines. America was to be the seat of a new empire, an "Anglo-Saxon coalition" stretching from China to the British isles and "encompass[ing] the Indian ocean as though it were a lake, much as the Romans encompassed the Mediterranean."⁶³

Adams found an eager audience in the claque of ardent imperialists which had grown to include, not only Lodge and Roosevelt, but also Albert J. Beveridge, Mark Hanna, and of course John Hay.⁶⁴ Pleased by the attention and influence he now seemed to command among prominent Republicans, Brooks Adams was increasingly discomfited by his formal alliance with the Democratic party. In 1900 temptation proved too strong, and Adams bolted to McKinley (and his young running-mate, Roosevelt) just in time for the election.⁶⁵ Once more he indulged the vain hope that his vocal support might issue in some tangible reward, writing to Henry in November, "I am going to Washington to show myself for a week or two before I begin the work of the winter."⁶⁶

His hopeful self-display did him no apparent good at that time; but with McKinley's assassination came his chance at last to play the kind of role he had envisioned for himself back in 1896. "Thou hast it now," he wrote dramatically to the new President in September 1901: "King, Cawdor, Glamis, the world can give no more. . . . You will always stand as the President who began the contest for supremacy of America against the eastern continent."⁶⁷

Roosevelt did turn to Brooks Adams, among others, for advice on his new position.⁶⁸ Flattered—indeed, elated—Adams bid farewell to the years of crying in the wilderness. He gloated to Henry, "I find myself, for the first time in my life, growing actually popular." That did it. "[B]y God, I like it. I'm in for the new world. I go with it, electric cars, mobiles, plutocracy, and all. One don't live but once, when one is dead its for a long time, and a nation is only great once."⁶⁹

Now ensconced to his satisfaction close to the seat of power, Adams turned to the task of completing and perfecting his transformed vision of the world's future and America's destiny in it. In the summer of 1902 he pulled together and recast his recent articles as The New Empire, a forcible statement of his thought as it had evolved since the Spanish war. If not as powerful as The Law of Civilization and Decay, The New Empire rested on a firmer and more closely reasoned theoretical foundation. More important, Adams had found a way to abrogate The Law.

Man's history had been shaped and punctuated by the rise and dissolution of empires. An empire rose invariably at the crossroads of trade and could be loosely defined as a seat of commercial exchange politically guided by some form of administrative organism. Empires fell through starvation or defeat, supplanted in commercial dominance by a competitor's superior economic administration or vanquished in a military contest for trade outlets. In either case, at fault was the doctrinal, intellectual, or administrative rigidity of the defeated. They had failed to adapt to the ever-changing demands of nature.⁷⁰

In one neat formula, Adams had finally explained to his own satisfaction all the eccentrics who had refused to fit into his vision of world history: the Puritan clergy of New England, the medieval schoolmen, modern Harvard professors. All had been victims of intellectual rigidity: a stubborn insistence on the superiority of a priori doctrine of some sort to the irresistible mandates of an unreasoning Nature. This type of mind was dangerous, posing a threat to "progress" as Adams had come to define it. "This temper of mind is conservatism. It resists change instinctively and not intelligently, and it is this conservatism which largely causes those violent explosions of pent-up energy which we term revolutions."⁷¹

The key to survival was adaptibility, a set of mind which must be fostered in whole populations through systematic education. "Man cannot shape his own environment, but he alone of all animals can consciously adapt himself to the demands of nature. He does so by education. . . . Intellectual flexibility may be developed as readily as intellectual rigidity."⁷² For Adams, the backbone of such training was the scientific method. It alone drew its generalizations exclusively from fact; it alone maintained an openness to constant adjustment. This mode of thought Adams called "generalization."⁷³ In contemporary America, the scientific schools had outstripped the traditional liberal colleges in preparing young minds to deal effectively with the world. As "the offspring of the Church and the daughter of the medieval convent," the liberal college purveyed a form of education shackled by outworn ethical assumptions. Conversely, the process as well as the content of "scientific education" trained for adaptation.⁷⁴

In this focus on process, Adams had refined "necessitarianism" into an ethic of success for its own sake. In doing so, he had also finally cast aside the lifelong prejudices that had shaped The Law of Civilization and Decay. The cultural sterility of the greedy capitalist now gave way in his rhetoric to the superiority of the "trust" as tending toward the epitome of economic efficiency, "eliminating double profits, surplus wages, and needless rent."⁷⁵ National survival depended on external strength, which was only insured by internal cohesion brought about by the acceleration of the natural movement of society toward consolidation. But far from endorsing a random agglomeration of wealth sanctioned by a laissez-faire philosophy, Adams envisioned a concomitant strengthening of the state's administrative organs to deal with the ramifications of economic growth. "[A]dministration by masses is cheaper than administration by detail. Masses take the form of corporations . . . and if our political institutions are ill-adapted to their propagation and development, then political institutions must be readjusted, or the probability is that the whole fabric of society will be shattered by the dislocation of the economic system."⁷⁶

Thus while never relinquishing a certain fatalistic determinism, Adams pointed the way to a planned society. Like Darwin, he rejected the notion of a law of continual progress to mitigate the unfeeling harshness of nature. What science and technology could do for man would not be done automatically and would never finally arrest the dislocation of society by chance and nature. But, though man could only cushion the shocks of nature, he should do so, through the concerted actions of public and private agencies in developing a "cheap, elastic, and simple machinery" of administration. Process, not principle, mattered now to Adams; the good was the successful. "[T]here is but one great boon which the passing generation can confer upon its successors: it can aid them to ameliorate that servitude to tradition which has so often retarded submission to the inevitable until too late."⁷⁷

Adams had arrived by his unique route at the point where much of contemporary American political thought was converging. He joined the ranks of the technocrats of the Progressive era: believers in government by scientific principles, a bureaucracy of experts, the promotion of process as ideal.⁷⁸ Adams had rejected the notion of progress—yet his new program assumed the possibility of some sort of progress. He had rejected reason as a primary force in human affairs—yet what but reason informed the concept of the "generalizing mind"? Finally he had explicitly rejected the possibility of absolute moral values. Yet implicit in The New Empire, behind the impersonal, technocratic façade, was the belief that human life should not be unnecessarily harsh or tragic.

IV

Clues to a resolution of the apparent contradictions in Brooks Adams's thought and life may be sought at several levels. At bottom, however, is an irresolvable paradox in Adams's self-consciousness: the search for an identity that contended, on the one hand, against his personal anomie, his sense of being purposelessly adrift in time, and on the other, against his rootedness in a family tradition that spanned and colored the history of his nation.

"I belong to an archaic type," he once wrote to Henry.⁷⁹ He felt isolated in history, passionately at one with Godfrey de Bouillon and the doomed crusaders. "Even the artists, men like LaFarge, don't see the heart of the great imaginative past. They see a building, a color, a combination of technical effects. They don't see the passion that this meant, and they don't feel that awful tragedy, which is the sum of life. The agony of consciousness."⁸⁰ History weighed heavily on Adams. The tragedy was the inexorable passage of time that confounded stasis and brought ruin to those who sought to fix their lives on an unchanging ideal. Adams's natural enemies were the unthinking creatures of time: those who had no consciousness of what they destroyed in passage. The archaic idealist joined the Boston patrician in Adams in condemning the Gilded Age capitalist. Brute insensitivity was the spiritual hallmark of the economic man. If Adams was misunderstood it was the result of being dropped into a crass age. "I am jealous of strangers—they don't see the pictures I do, and if ever I try to show them they only stare. .. . To make public is to vulgarize."⁸¹

Adams had a more palpable claim to archaism, as the scion of a long prominent family, now fallen in fortune not, apparently, because of any failure of natural talent and energy, but because the times had passed it by. Brooks Adams shared his brother Henry's obsessive concern with the metaphysics of the family annals. It is not surprising that both turned—protesting all the way—to the study and writing of history.

Perhaps it was egotistical in the Adams brothers to perceive in the fate of their family larger issues that merited the world's attention. But there is really no gainsaying their positive, indelible, and fundamentally accurate assumption that they were somehow special—so special that even original and successful careers as historians, editors, lawyers, and consultants to the powerful could not erase a lingering sense of failure. "I apprehend," wrote Brooks to Henry, "that I approach pretty nearly being utterly without a use in the world I live in. It is a sign that the blood is exhausted and that we have come to an end. Apparently our generation was all right. We seemed to have ability, energy, and opportunity, and yet we have all tried and have not suited ourselves or anybody else."⁸²

The manifest futility of laying blame for this impotence wholly on society or on oneself led Brooks Adams to a belief in social Darwinism. Certain abilities, and the "types" who possessed them, would atrophy as civilization lost its use for them. That this scheme of evolution was nonteleological rendered resistance or blame even more pointless. Even scientists admitted, in the laws of thermodynamics, that anarchy ruled in the universe. One man had little recourse against relentless natural law.

But there is a paradox in Adams's reverence for his forebears. They did not stand as symbols of a static set of ideals. John Adams was a leader of the Revolutionary generation, and John Quincy Adams a prophet of the union of government and science. In 1919, after Henry's death, Brooks gathered together a few of his brother's last essays and published them with a long introduction entitled "The Heritage of Henry Adams." In it he tried to sketch the lines of thought that proved Henry to be the direct intellectual descendant of John Quincy Adams. His grandfather's chief contribution to American democracy had been his tireless, thankless work in the causes of scientific education and scientific government in the United States. His ideal was democracy as an evolutionary vehicle, a form of government and social order that would free man's instinct toward progress and open the opportunity of education and advancement to all. Instead, he had seen the beginning of the "degradation of the democratic dogma" with Jackson's election and had lived to foresee the dissolution of the Union in civil war. According to his grandson, Adams had fallen victim to "that fallacy which underlies the whole theory of modern democracy—that it is possible by education to stimulate the selfish instinct of competition .. . so as to coincide with the moral principle that all should labor for the common good."⁸³ And Henry Adams, sitting in the gallery of Congress in 1869, had "blushed for himself when he heard the list of names for Grant's new cabinet. "He understood at length, as his ancestor had learned, that mankind does not advance by his own unaided efforts, and competition, toward perfection."⁸⁴

Brooks Adams came to read a pattern in his family's history: worldly success disguising ultimate failure. Of John Adams he once wrote: "The old man's judgment and instinct was better than Washington's—his fault was that he was so unequal."⁸⁵ This is an infinitely expressive statement. John Adams had been unappreciated because he had been misunderstood; John Quincy Adams had exhausted himself in the cause of science and American progress; even Brooks's father, Charles Francis Adams, had been left alone to handle the crisis in Anglo-American relations during the Civil War. For Brooks, the record was both tragic and proud. One family, generation after generation, had struggled toward unity and progress against the mechanical laws of nature, and of human nature, which dictated chaos and disintegration.

By 1919, seven years before his own death, Brooks Adams had not only become once more disillusioned with American democracy, but he had become fully conscious of his place in the family tradition. "The Heritage of Henry Adams" is not only the articulation, but to a great extent the invention, of that tradition. The task of making order from chaos had come full circle in being written out in family history.

But what had John Quincy Adams to do with Godfrey de Bouillon? The most suggestive answer perhaps is that to Brooks Adams they were both heroes: not simply personal heroes, worthy of emulation, but rather heroes of a passion for unity, doing battle against a chaotic and amoral world. It was that quest for unity that Adams had celebrated, and mourned, in the "religious man" of The Law of Civilization and Decay: that "ecstatic dream, which some twelfth-century monk cut into the stones of the sanctuary. . . ."⁸⁶ It is no wonder that, viewing the callous insensitivity of economic society to the wreckage of what was to him the sublimest beauty man had conceived and erected on earth, Adams should pass harsh judgment on human nature and on history.

As a young man he had worked for reform within the Republican party, but the reform movement had collapsed under the weight of an apparently hopeless corruption. As a slightly older man he had witnessed the social distress caused by an economic policy dictated by politics and blind greed. It was not just Adams as Boston Brahmin or even as Gothic aesthete who warred against the politicians and capitalists of the Gilded Age. He perceived in the politics and culture of his era the subtle, killing anarchy of drift, and he rebelled against it from the start. Even after repeated rebuffs, he never really abandoned the role of seer-cum-minister to the American people. Behind the dark fatalism of The Law of Civilization and Decay lay, in the herculean task he had set himself, the same quest for overarching system, explanation, rationale.

So when, in the heady years following the defeat of Spain, he sat down to draw the blueprint of a new American supremacy, Adams himself had not fundamentally changed, although his immediate attitudes toward his country and his world had. Certainly it is hard to pierce the tough armor he had forged for himself by the beginning of the new century, when he wrote, "There is but one logic, the logic of the real—there is but one moral, the moral of success. I can see no other."⁸⁷ But in his culminating concept of the "generalizing mind," one perceives not only a fundamental reaffirmation of the role of reason in human destiny, but also an essentially moral response to the cruel amorality of nature's laws. As an Adams, Brooks was taking up the fallen standard: an heroic role that he understood himself only years later, but that, despite the cynicism and disillusionment of the previous decade, was at one with both his training and his nature.

A cynic and an idealist, a misanthrope and a reformer, Adams was a man of contradictions, explicable only in terms of his unique mind and temperament. He is a remarkable study in the individual's compulsion to bend and interpret his world in the light of his deepest personal needs. At the same time, Adams had an undeniable impact, however diluted, on his times; and he did not stand alone in the intense mixture of anguish and exhilaration with which he met the turbulent end of the century.

NOTES

For their helpful comments on this and an earlier version of this essay, the author wishes to thank Donald Fleming, James Turner and Helena Wall.

All letters from Brooks Adams to Henry Adams, unless otherwise noted, are from the Adams Collection in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and are cited here by permission of the Houghton Library and the Massachusetts Historical Society.

¹ The story of Adams's private matins is offered by David Hackett Fischer in Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 139. Two excellent essays on Adams's thought are Daniel Aaron, "The Unusable Man: An Essay on the Thought of Brooks Adams," The New England Quarterly 21 (March 1948), 3-33; and William Appleman Williams, "Brooks Adams and American Expansion," The New England Quarterly 25 (June 1952), 217-232.

2 There are two full-length biographical studies of Brooks Adams. The better one is Arthur Beringause, Brooks Adams. A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955). An earlier study is Thornton Anderson, Brooks Adams. Constructive Conservative (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1951).

3 Worthington Chaucey Ford, Letters of Henry Adams, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1938), 1:10.

4 Brooks Adams to Henry Adams, 14 November 1894 (hereafter cited as BA to HA).

5 Brooks Adams to Charles Francis Adams, 24 March 1868. Quoted by Beringause, p. 45.

6 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Modern Library, 1931), pp. 302-304.

7 Beringause, pp. 50-53.

8 Beringause, p. 49; Alden Hatch, The Lodges of Massachusetts (New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1973), pp. 28-29.

9 Brooks Adams, "The Platform of the New Party," North American Review 119 (July 1874), 43.

10 Brooks Adams, "Oppressive Taxation and Its Remedy," Atlantic Monthly 42 (December 1878), 765-767; "The Platform of the New Party," p. 60.

11 See John G. Sproat, "The Best Men": Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), esp. pp. 150-151.

12 Brooks Adams, "The Last State of English Whiggery," Atlantic Monthly 47 (April 1881), 569.

13 Beringause, pp. 77-78.

¹⁴Brooks Adams, The Emancipation of Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press, 1887), p. 41.

15 Emancipation, p. 42.

16 Emancipation, p. 363.

17 Brooks Adams to Charles Deane, 26 January 1887. Charles Deane Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society.

18 Â A to HA, 11 March 1887.

19 Â A to HA, 7 March 1887.

20 Beringause, p. 102; Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams. The Major Phase (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 116.

21 Adams rounded up Francis Amasa Walker of MIT and F. Benjamin Andrews of Brown University, among others. Â A to HA, 25 November 1893.

22 Among Adams's efforts during this period was a popular pamphlet, The Gold Standard. An Historical Study (Boston: A. Mudge & Son, printer, 1894). A revised edition took the reader . . . To April 1895 (Washington, D.C.: R. Beall, [1895]).

23 Brooks Adams, "The Heritage of Henry Adams," introduction to Henry Adams, The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (New York: The MacMillan Co., 1919), p. 88.

24 "The Heritage of Henry Adams," p. 89.

25 "The Heritage of Henry Adams," p. 95.

26 The Education of Henry Adams, pp. 338-339.

27 "The Heritage of Henry Adams," p. 90.

28 Â A to HA, 9 May 1894; Beringause, p. 115.

29 Â A to HA, 14 May 1895.

30 Theodore Roosevelt, review of The Law of Civilization and Decay, Forum 22 (January 1897), 575.

31 Among studies dealing with the literature of the 1890's, see Larzer Ziff, The American 1890's: Life and Times of a Lost Generation (New York: The Viking Press, 1968), esp. pp. 206-228. Dorothy Ross has written a fascinating and provocative article delineating a movement from millennial to historicist perceptions of social change in American fin-de-siècle writing: see "The Liberal Tradition Revisited and the Republican Tradition Addressed," in John Higham and Paul Conkin, eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 116-131.

³² Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943), p. 58. This edition contains an excellent introduction by Charles A. Beard.

³³The Law, p. 59.

³⁴The Law, p. 60.

³⁵The Education of Henry Adams, p. 339.

³⁶ Â A to HA, 10 October 1896.

37 Among the studies that deal with this phenomenon, two stand out: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), and Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967). For a lurid picture of Henry Adams as an anti-Semite, see Barbara Miller Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants. A Changing New England Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 38-41.

38 Â A to HA, 21 September 1895.

39 See Roger B. Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), esp. ch. 4, pp. 157-186.

40 Â A to HA, 17 August 1896.

41 This alarmist argument, which ultimately fed the eugenics movement, struck a chord in many contemporaries, notably Theodore Roosevelt. See his review of The Law in Forum 22 (January 1897), 586-587; also a letter from Roosevelt to Cecil Spring Rice, 5 August 1896, in Elting E. Morison, ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 8 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), 1:554. For secondary commentary, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land. Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1969), esp. pp. 150-153; Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), pp. 175-184; Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants, esp. pp. 59-81.

42 The Law, pp. 332-333.

43 See, for example, G.B.A., review of The Law of Civilization and Decay, Yale Review 4 (February 1896), 451-453; also John L. Stewart, review of The Law of Civilization and Decay, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 8 (July 1896), 163-167. This was a thoughtful and more critical assessment.

44 Beringause, p. 130.

45 HA to  A, 24 January 1896.

46 HA to ÂA, 7 February 1896.

47 HA to Elizabeth Cameron, Ford, ed., Letters of Henry Adams, 2:76; also see HA to Sir Robert Cunliffe, Letters of Henry Adams, 2:91.

48 ÂA to HA, 31 October 1896.

49 See BA to HA, 12 July, 9 August, 6 September, 12 September 1896; also Samuels, Henry Adams. The Major Phase, p. 169.

50 ÂA to HA, 29 April 1897. Theodore Roosevelt and the Adams brothers made their first social contacts through Henry Cabot Lodge. In 1889, Brooks Adams added family to old school ties when he married Lodge's sister-inlaw, Evelyn Davis (after thoughtfully warning her that he was "eccentric to the point of madness"). In the same year Theodore Roosevelt came to Washington as Civil Service Commissioner. He and Lodge had become political allies in 1884 when both refused to join the patrician stampede out of the Republican party after Blaine's nomination. Now that residual political enmities had cooled, Roosevelt and the Adamses took each other's personal measure at the Lodges' house in the capital. See Beringause, p. 95; Henry Dean Cater, Henry Adams and His Friends: A Collection of His Unpublished Letters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1947), lxci-lxvii; Ford, ed., Letters of Henry Adams, 1:398; Matthew Josephson, The President Makers: The Culture of Politics and Leadership in an Age of Enlightenment, 1896-1919 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1940), esp. pp. 42-45.

51 Theodore Roosevelt, review of The Law of Civilization and Decay, Forum 22 (January 1897), 575-589.

52 "For Heaven's sake don't quote this, as I am very fond of all the family." Roosevelt to Spring Rice, 29 May 1897, Morison, ed., Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 1:620.

53 ÂA to Roosevelt, 25 February 1896. Quoted by Matthew Josephson, The President Makers, p. 26.

54 HA to Elizabeth Cameron, 12 January 1902, Ford, ed., Letters of Henry Adams, 2:367.

55 BA to HA, 20 February 1898.

56 BA to HA, 29 April 1898.

57 ÂA to Abigail Adams, 25 May 1898, Adams Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

58 BA to HA, 22 May 1898.

59 Brooks Adams, "The Spanish War and the Equilibrium of the World," in America's Economic Supremacy (New York: The MacMillan Co., 1900), p. 10.

60 "Spanish War," p. 24; see also Alfred Thayer Mahan, Lessons of the War with Spain and Other Articles (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1899), vii-xi.

61 HA to ÂA, 20 August 1899, in Harold Dean Cater, ed., Henry Adams and His Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1947), p. 473.

62 "The Spanish War," p. 23.

63 "The Spanish War," p. 25.

64 See Walter LaFeber, The New Empire. An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), pp. 85-101; Williams, "Brooks Adams and American Expansion," pp. 217-232; Marilyn Blatt Young, "American Expansion, 1870-1900: The Far East," in Barton J. Bernstein, ed., Towards a New Past (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), pp. 176-183.

65 ÂA to HA, 26 November 1899, 19 July 1900.

66 ÂA to HA, 13 November 1900.

67 ÂA to Roosevelt, 21 September 1901, quoted in Beringause, p. 204.

68 Beringause, pp. 204, 216-217.

69 ÂA to HA, 13 October 1901.

70 Brooks Adams, The New Empire (New York: The MacMillan Co., 1903).

71 The New Empire, xiii.

72 The New Empire, xvi.

73 The New Empire, xxviii.

74 The New Empire, xxiv.

75 Brooks Adams, "The New Industrial Revolution," The Atlantic Monthly 88 (February 1901), 165.

76 The New Empire, xxxiii.

77 The New Empire, p. 211.

78 For a concise statement of the new political ideal, see Robert, H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), p. 161.

79 ÂA to HA, 15 January 1897.

80 BA to HA, 13 October 1895.

81 ÂA to HA, 22 April 1896.

82 BA to HA, 5 July 1901.

83 "The Heritage of Henry Adams," pp. 78-79.

84 "The Heritage of Henry Adams," p. 109.

85 ÂA to HA, 6 October 1904.

86 The Law, p. 349.

87 BA to HA, 28 February 1901.