SOURCE: "Brooks Adams," in The Harvard Graduates' Magazine, Vol. 35, No. 140, June, 1927, pp. 615-27.

[In the following excerpt, Ford surveys Adams's major works.]

Brooks Adams, born at Quincy, Massachusetts, June 24, 1848, died at Boston, February 13, 1927. He was the youngest son of Charles Francis Adams and Abigail Brooks, daughter of Peter Chardon Brooks. After some years in English schools, his father being the American Minister to the Court of St. James's, he was prepared for Harvard College by Professor Ephraim Whitman Gurney, later to be professor of history in the University. Graduating in 1870, he passed one year in the Harvard Law School, but was taken by his father to Geneva to serve as his Secretary during the Alabama Claims Arbitration. In 1873 he was admitted to the Suffolk bar. It was characteristic of him to take an office in a building other than that where his father and brothers were, and to remain alone, forming no law partnerships, except for a single year, when he was associated with William S. Macfarlane, who removed to New York. In 1883, after having practically retired from active practice, he joined his brothers in the Adams Building, 23 Court Street, and later followed them to the India Building, 84 State Street, Boston.

What turned him to historical writing can only be conjectured. In 1885 he wrote to Charles Deane: "I am for my sins, trying to write something about this State [Massachusetts]. There are, of course, to a man so ignorant of church history, in particular, as I, a number of points I should much like to get cleared up, on which I can't find much light in the books." A more probable cause than that which he assigned was an inherited interest in history and the example of his brothers. Charles Francis Adams had printed in an edition of half a dozen copies his Episodes of New England History, afterwards developed into "Three Episodes of Massachusetts History," and had recently completed his well edited edition of Morton's New English Canaan. Henry had already shown his bent by his four volumes of the "Life" and "Writings of Albert Gallatin," the first contribution in his notable historical series. With leisure on his hands and with such examples before him it was only natural for Brooks to enter the same field. His first book attracted more general attention than he could have anticipated, but awakened no greater hostility than he could have hoped for. It struck a somewhat new note in Massachusetts historical writing.

The merit of the Emancipation of Massachusetts lies in its vigorous denunciation of certain phases of colonial history and its promise of a new weighing of authorities. It cannot be said that the chapters hang together, for each is rather a separate essay. Nor can it be admitted that the writer discovered hitherto unknown facts, or developed a vitally novel interpretation of known facts. The reader is left in doubt what was the "emancipation" and how or by whom emancipation, if any, was accomplished. The defects of presentation did not in any degree make the work less readable or timely. The overpraise of the Puritan, the unbroken laudation of the early New Englanders, had reached an absurd degree and an attack, resting upon a good use of recognized authorities, came as a welcome relief. The smug self-satisfaction that pervaded the historical writing of the day received a shock which obliged a reconsideration of a blind worship of certain idols and a clinging to carefully nursed prejudices. That the blow came from an Adams made it the more telling, for the Adams tribe were all rebels on proper occasions. From that day the filiopietistic school of history was laughed out of court. Too much credit cannot be given to the native writer who attacked that preposterous structure. It crumbled at the first blow.

A critic suggested that the book showed that Adams had in him the making of a novelist, and instanced the opposite case of Motley, who began as a novelist and ended as a historian. The suggestion was not unkind, for imagination is as useful in good history as in a good novel. Adams's imagination enabled him to conceive a theory of historical interpretation; its limitations prevented a full fruition in application. A single idea colored all the chapters and became somewhat monotonous. The same fault affected his Law of Civilization and Decay, published in 1896, put forth as a product of the Emancipation. From the religious experience of New England he went back to the Reformation, and thence through the school-men and crusades. "I thus became convinced that religious enthusiasm, which, by stimulating the pilgrimage, restored communication between the Bosphorus and the Rhine, was the power which produced the accelerated movement culminating in modern civilization."¹ Commerce was antagonistic to the imagination, and the medium by which commerce expressed itself he found in its coinage or money. Convinced that conscious thought played an exceedingly small part in moulding the fate of men, he believed that as the external world changed only those survived whose nervous system—he used also the word mind—was adapted to the conditions to which they were born. Finally, he perceived that "the intellectual phenomena under examination fell into a series which seemed to correspond, somewhat closely, with the laws which are supposed to regulate the movements of the material universe." History then must be governed by law. As the law of force and energy is of universal application in nature, animal life being one of the outlets through which solar energy is dissipated, human societies differ among themselves in proportion as they are endowed by nature with energy. He coined terms which recur again and again throughout the book—the velocity of social movement in any community is proportionate to its energy and mass; its centralization is proportionate to its velocity; "therefore, as human movement is accelerated, societies centralize." His conclusion preached downright fatalism:

In proportion as movement accelerates societies consolidate, and as societies consolidate they pass through a profound intellectual change. Energy ceases to find vent through the imagination, and takes the form of capital; hence as civilizations advance, the imaginative temperament tends to disappear, while the economic instinct is fostered, and thus substantially new varieties of men come to possess the world.

Nothing so portentous overhangs humanity as this mysterious and relentless acceleration of movement, which changes methods of competition and alters paths of trade; for by it countless millions of men and women are foredoomed to happiness or misery, as certainly as the beasts and trees, which have flourished in the wilderness, and are destined to vanish when the soil is subdued by man.²

In spite of this dominant note the study of the rise and fall of trade, the routes it followed and the media of exchange, is valuable and brilliantly written. Rarely has an economic treatise been set forth in so attractive yet irritating a form.

It is worthy of record that the book was reviewed in The Forum by Theodore Roosevelt, who characteristically expressed the warmest admiration with emphatic dissent from parts of the thesis. Somewhat to his amusement Roosevelt was attacked for "having dealt too gently with Brooks," the seasoned Charles A. Dana being one of the objectors. In a letter to Senator Lodge, Roosevelt expresses himself, as was his wont, freely: "Brooks Adams's theories are beautiful, but in practice they mean a simple dishonesty, and a dishonest nation does not stand much higher than a dishonest man."³ The method of the Emancipation had been extended to the wider field of world history. The constantly repeated phrases seemed to force the acceptance of his theme as a well-established historical law—almost axiomatic. Although the book reached a second issue, it never had the influence it deserved and for a peculiar reason, not necessarily inherent. It appeared when the acrimonious contest on monetary standards divided the country and those who favored silver found in it a support to their contention that a period of contraction of the currency was a period of suffering, and that the bankers, having the power to enforce contraction, used that power tyrannically. The "mighty engine of a single standard" favored the bankers. That application of his studies raised a prejudice against the book, an unexpected political intervention. To attribute the study and much of the form it took to his brother Henry would not be far out of the way, for Henry believed in silver and in an even more general and radical dissipation of energy than Brooks had suggested. Writing of the "panic" of 1893 Henry said:

For the first time in several years he saw much of his brother Brooks in Quincy, and was surprised to find him absorbed in the same perplexities. Brooks was then a man of forty-five years old; a strong writer and a vigorous thinker who irritated too many Boston conventions ever to suit the atmosphere; but the two brothers could talk to each other without atmosphere and were used to audiences of one. Brooks had discovered or developed a law of history that civilization followed the exchanges, and having worked it out for the Mediterranean was working it out for the Atlantic. Everything American, as well as most things European and Asiatic became unstable by this law, seeking new equilibrium and compelled to find it. Loving paradox, Brooks, with the advantages of ten years' study, had swept away much rubbish in the effort to build up a new line of thought for himself, but he found that no paradox compared with that of daily events. The facts were constantly outrunning his thoughts. The instability was greater than he calculated; the speed of acceleration passed bounds. Among other general rules he laid down the paradox that, in the social disequilibrium between capital and labor, the logical outcome was not collectivism, but anarchism; and Henry made note of it for study.⁴

The note of social hopelessness ruled Brooks from that time. It was the year after the issue of the Law of Civilization and Decay that I first met Mr. Adams—a legacy of his brother Henry, when Brooks occupied for one winter the house on H Street, at this moment being torn down to make room for a modern office building. I was in charge of the national commercial statistics and had come to know Henry intimately, through a common interest in the balance-of-trade conundrum—insoluble except by way of generals, not by actual statistics. Brooks's problem involved wider considerations. He was already preaching the unholy domination of the bankers and the assured, any, imminent downfall of Europe—a universal cataclysm which economically foreshadowed a day of judgment. His first note to me, dated May 14, 1897, contained the sentences: "I am full of gloomy fears. I do not know where we are going, nor do I see any light ahead. There seems to me to be no headway on the ship and that we are going on the rocks. I hope I may be wrong." If that hope ever took shape he never confessed to entertaining it. His earnestness, his wide reading, his unusual interpretation of usual data, and his unshakable certainty, were extremely interesting to a mere statistician, whose occupation was to gather unlimited tables of figures for others to misinterpret. From that time I saw much of him, read letters from many parts of the world to his brother Henry, and myself corresponded freely with him, and the drift of his endeavor tended in one direction—to warn of the end of the economic world. His best writings treated of that subject and the deepening shadows of his convictions placed him in the van of pessimists.

In 1900 he published America's Economic Supremacy, a special study of the last three years of the decade but east in the mold of the Law of Civilization and Decay. The international center of empire and wealth was moving from England westward and the instinctive effort of humanity to adjust itself to the new conditions had caused the unrest that prevailed in Europe and in Asia. Even should the seat of wealth and power rest for a time in America the industrial development of Asia might prove the stronger and in the end become the more important factor. American social and political institutions, he thought, were ill-adapted to meet such a contest or responsibility successfully. Much of his speculation, rather loosely supported by figures, has been disproved by events; the essay on "Natural Selection in Literature," being a comparison between Scott and Dickens based upon a social change, is extremely suggestive as a critical excursion and may be remembered. "What divided Dickens from the men of letters who had preceded him was the gulf which divided Cobden from Chatham. Dickens was the child, the creation, of the "Industrial Revolution.'⁵

Not satisfied with what he had written on trade routes and their influence on civilization, and having gone more deeply into the subject by consulting European libraries, he published in 1902 The New Empire. It was not so much an expansion of his theory, for he had already covered in outline the world on the subject, as a closer presentation of a phase. The note struck in the preface gave his idea of his undertaking: "All my observations lead me to the conclusion that geographical conditions have exercised a great, possibly a preponderating, influence over man's destiny. I am convinced that neither history nor economics can be intelligently studied without a constant reference to the geographical surroundings which have affected different nations." The influence of environment, geographical or other, was no novelty, however imperfectly the governing principles had been defined. But when Adams baldly stated that in the decade before 1900 "the seat of energy has migrated from Europe to America" and insisted upon "American supremacy," he went beyond what the facts justified. He himself qualified his own statements. If American corporations, thanks to applied science, had shown unequaled economy and energy in administration, the national government showed signs of decrepitude. All administrative systems tend to become rigid, "more especially political systems, because they are most cumbersome." On the other hand, nature is in eternal movement; unless the government adapts itself to change catastrophe follows. The British nation suffered through intellectual rigidity. If America should become the "new empire," it must be an enormous complex mass, "to be administered only by means of a cheap, elastic, and simple machinery; an old and clumsy mechanism must, sooner or later, collapse, and in sinking may involve a civilization."⁶ To reach that conclusion the history of the known world had been related and the reader, rather disturbed by his breathless career through the ages, is not quite convinced that the remedy, suggested rather than imposed, will answer to the undeniably able exposition of the past.

Continuing his studies Adams published in 1913 his Theory of Social Revolutions. The idea pervading the book may be thus briefly sketched. Civilization is nearly synonymous with centralization; but social consolidation (he changes the word) implies an equivalent capacity for administration. Revolutions have for the most part supervened on administrative difficulties. A new mind, formed or aided by triumphant science, rises through social revolution and a redistribution of property. The capitalistic class, in control, showed an absence of success in government, believed it could purchase all it wanted—courts, legislatures and elections—and was precipitating a conflict, instead of establishing an adjustment. It was a lawless class, unequal in mind to cope with the extremely complex administration of modern industrial civilization. Without a great change the capitalist will decline and capital become fugitive.⁷

There was another feature to his activities which, had it been cultivated, held promise of more permanent results—his studies in legal history. His active law practice ceased after 1881 and was never renewed until he became a lecturer in the Boston University School of Law in 1904, a position he held for seven years. His colleague, in a sense his master, was Melville M. Bigelow, of whom he said: "More learned lawyers doubtless have lived than was Mr. Bigelow. I do not dispute the fact. But if so I have never met them."⁸ In that surrounding he might have formed a permanent place, for it was both congenial and centered his reading. Lecturing stimulated him and his students, to such a degree that a trustee of the University regarded him as dangerous and secured his dismissal. That he held the attention of his hearers goes without saying; he enjoyed the contact as much as they. He embodied fragments of his lectures in two chapters of Centralization and the Law on "The Nature of Law—Methods and Aims of legal education" and "Law under Inequality; Monopoly." A brief essay on "Unity of Law" he contributed to the Bulletin of the Boston University School of Law. More important, and better examples of his manner of weaving his social and historical studies into a presentation of a legal argument, were two printed papers.

In 1910 he printed his brief in the case of the City of Spokane vs. Northern Pacific Railway under the title Railways as Public Agents: A Study in Sovereignty, the contention being that "uncontrolled methods of monopolistic administration of railways, which have hitherto been tolerated in the United States, are incompatible with the continuance of constitutional government." There is also in print a brief of unknown date on the French Spoliation Claims, which contains much historical reference and should be read in connection with his more careful presentation of the historical facts in The Convention of 1800 with France.⁹ As a member of the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1917 he made an address in favor of the Initiative and Referendum, and he spoke rather as a student of past history than as a lawyer, and the connection with the Initiative was of the slightest. It became in the end a reassertion of the need of collective administration. Mr. Albert E. Pillsbury writes of that incident: "He talked political philosophy to the members, who listened respectfully, but most of them with the amused curiosity of a child at the appearance of a new and strange animal. His voice and vote were given for the Initiative and Referendum, which seemed inconsistent with his lack of faith in democracy, but he privately defended his position on the ground that the measure would furnish a safety-valve against the oppressions of capital."¹⁰ This naturally leads to the position he held in matters of government.

Democracy has come to have many meanings and, like most political terms of frequent use, has no accepted definition. American democracy, in origin, development and present status, challenges controversy whenever used to buttress a cause or disprove an opposing argument. The subject occupied much of Adams's speculation in his later years. However absorbed in studying world conditions the great experiment of a government by the people in America offered what might almost be termed an inherited problem. John and John Quincy Adams could be eloquent on the efforts they had made to direct a republic and the trials to which they had been subjected at the hands of a democracy, and the second half of the nineteenth century had greatly complicated its operations. Brooks had already shown at full length the rule of the money power, tracing its history from the eleventh century; he watched the progress of the mad war and the apparent justification of his worst fears on the social instability of Europe; and he brooded in doubt of the ability of the American people to hold their own in the face of such a visitation and its probable permanent results. In an address, June 17, 1916, he made the statement that to him "it seems far from improbable that we shall find to our sorrow, when the present conflict has closed, our fortunes to have been more deeply concerned in the readjustment impending than were the fortunes of many of the nations already fighting." Using the rise of trade paths and facilities as a measure he showed how little coherence in political thought could be found in our history, how state and section had maintained conflicting interests and opinions which even the establishing of unquestioned nationality by the Civil War could not harmonize. To him the conclusion was inevitable: that the largest and richest nation of the world had lost in its collective energy in thought and action. He had occasion in the same year to speak on "The Revolt of Modern Democracy against Standards of Duty" before the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He assumed that no national civilization can cohere against those enemies which must certainly beset it, if it fail to recognize as its primary standard of duty the obligation of the individual man and woman to sacrifice themselves for the whole community in time of need. He then pointed out how far the Americans had gone in opposing what they believed to be the "tyranny of self-sacrifice." Reverting to his earlier train of ideas he again expressed his belief that "we Americans are nearly incapable of continuous collective thought except at long intervals under the severest tension." The particular, the selfish interest, dominated the collective interest. "Democratic ideal" was only a phrase to express our renunciation as a nation to all standards of duty, and the substitution therefor of a reference to private judgment.

So unfavorable an opinion of the rule of the people could easily be discounted by objecting to its source and its expression. Yet inheritance and provocative language the rather insisted upon the fundamental truth of the indictment. What replies were made drifted into that wordy laudation of democracy which has been such an obstacle to clear thinking and statistics of progress reached nowhere in the face of a wrecked Europe and the notorious trend towards selfishness in America. What may be regarded as Brooks Adams's final word on the subject took the form of an introduction to Henry Adams's Letter to American Teachers of History, reprinted in 1920 with the title "The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma." He abated in no respect his dark explanations of the past and gloomier foreboding for the future, but he supported them by the lives and opinions of his grandfather, John Quincy Adams, and of his brother Henry. The degradation of energy applied to the intellect as well as to nature, and Democracy, an infinite mass of conflicting minds and of conflicting interests, "loses in collective intellectual energy in proportion to the perfection of its expansion. . . . I hope I have set forth his [Henry's] doctrines of modern social movement with sufficient clearness to indicate his meaning." The manifold applications to stated phases of that movement can only be appreciated by reading all that he has written. That he had no large following need not be matter for surprise; that he had earnest admirers was certain.

It is obvious that Mr. Adams exhausted his views on social movement and administration in his Law of Civilization and Decay and his later outpourings repeated rather than really enlarged his outlook. He received recognition abroad in greater measure than at home. The Law of Civilization, with added matter, was translated into French and German; the Economic Supremacy appeared in German and the New Empire in German and Russian translations. He commented on the little attention he thought his writings had received in the United States and, with a note of bitterness, noted how often his researches and theories, and even his set examples, were quoted without credit. Every writer has much the same feeling. Dealing with what is current he expresses only what is in the air, open to any other observer who gives it attention. Adams's strength was in his presentation of the past—the far past—and his earlier methods gave good results, putting in a connected and attractive form what was not readily accessible, or what had been buried in the overpowering learning of foreign, chiefly German, authors. Those same methods held danger. He would strike off an opinion on a present social phase, based on economic facts, as conspicuous as it was true, a brilliant summary of complicated relations. A little later he would have carried the question to the seventeenth century, linking it with legal or monied incidents of that time, still maintaining his thesis and strengthening it by apposite arguments. Yet later he had reached the middle ages, Rome, Greece, Egypt and the dawn of civilization, still searching, still convinced, but having lost the original question. It was no longer an explanation of immediate social ill, but the history of the development of an idea. To a certain point he carried us with him, unquestioning and wondering; but the fated break came; some wide chasm overleaped by a flash of perception beyond our mentality, and we saw him disappear in the beginnings of things, now wholly separated from his original proposition, but enthusiastic in plotting connection and sequence that held out the promise of an all-inclusive generalization. That it should also be all conclusive, final, seemed of secondary moment.

In reviewing the writings of Mr. Adams the impression grows that his message, as he conceived it, was neither novel nor complete. A custom by long usage grows into a law, and a generalization may in time come to be accepted as a law. The law of civilization put forth by Adams in 1896 again appeared twenty-three years later as a theory of social revolutions. Details had been dropped and new illustrations added. No change of terms could conceal the fact that the earlier note was repeated in the later year, but the change from law to theory seems to suggest doubt on his own part. The persistence of the note through all his writings gives a certain consistency to the product, while emphasizing the real restrictions of his conclusions. His chapters have substance and show sound reading; his explanations of social movement and disturbance are suggestive. That he had a true remedy for social ills cannot be admitted, and much of his speculation went by the board after 1914. It is difficult to make a true appreciation of his life work. His influence was felt by few, but it was a select few.

He was in a sense proud of his ancestry, proud of the "Old House" at Quincy and its contents, and proud of his father's achievements. He rather resented criticism of the presidents and opposed an extensive biography of his father. Not oversympathetic with any of his brothers he disliked to listen to praise of them. It was a form of jealousy, unconscious, for he looked upon himself as holding a distinct position and expected others to recognize it. Charles Francis and Henry had inherited from John Quincy Adams—the one in his active interest in public questions, the other in his taste for science. John Adams had been a great lawyer, and from him Brooks claimed to derive his characteristics. Teaching law would have been a profession, for the search after general principles fascinated him; but the practice of law in these days is quite another matter from its practice in the Massachusetts of the eighteenth century. The union of law and revolution in John Adams differed entirely from the same union in Brooks Adams. The unrest of modern conditions was reflected in the restlessness of Brooks's mind. Its fineness and inheritance were wasted on questions of secondary import. Public employment might have concentrated this energy and made it of public service, but the opportunity never came.

With all his eager participation in modern life he had a strong regard for earlier beliefs and practices. He harked back to the first days of New England when he rose in the Stone Church at Quincy and made public profession of his faith. There was no wish to be peculiar; the act was wholly spontaneous, sincere, intended to serve as an example as well as an effort to bring back into use a once honored custom. We could have looked for such an act from many others rather than from him. Again heredity may explain. John Quincy Adams lived a life of deep religious conviction and wrote letters to his son on the study of the Bible, which passed through many editions and are still to be met." Charles Francis Adams, the elder, entertained a faith undisturbed by the advance of science which so often took the shape of attacks on revealed religion. The form of Brooks's confession would have surprised his forbears, yet it merely denounced the appeal on moral questions to private judgment as leading to "an emasculated church, a renunciation of the old canons of duty, and an impotent administration of justice." Neither science nor philosophy had offered explanations or substitutes, and, renouncing the agnosticism of his youth, he accepted the ecclesiastical tradition. "Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief."

He married, September 7, 1889, Evelyn Davis, daughter of Admiral Charles Henry Davis and Harriette Blake Mills, and a sister of Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge. She died December 14, 1926. After his marriage he passed his summers in the "Old House" at Quincy and after 1910 his winters at 33 Chestnut Street, Boston. In both homes he and his wife had an appropriate setting of family portraits, old china and silver. The man who wrote the Emancipation which shocked the older generation was the same man who amused a younger generation—and himself—thirty-three years later, in making Moses a vulgar magician and suicide. In the last chapter we forget the printed extravagances and remember the man of brilliant though ungoverned mind, the framer of dazzling pictures and remarkable generalizations, the host of aggressive and stimulating conversation, never so well pleased as when he felt you in opposition, and the friend whose demands were large, but whose compensation in suggestion and direction was larger. He was the last of his generation, contributing his accentuated personality in the group of four notably individual brothers.

NOTES

¹Law, VI.

²Law, 297.

³Correspondence of Roosevelt and Lodge, 1, 231. See also his rather pertinent comparison between Brooks Adams's conclusions and those of Gustav Le Bon on p. 218.

⁴Education of Henry Adams, 338.

⁵America's Economic Supremacy, 139.

⁶The New Empire, 211.

⁷ The concluding chapter of the work has been summarized.

⁸Proceedings, LIV, 293.

⁹Proceedings, XL, 377.

¹⁰Boston Evening Transcript, February 14, 1927.

¹¹ "It is said that one of the best readers in his time was the late President John Quincy Adams. I have heard that no man could read the Bible with such powerful effect." (Emerson on "Eloquence," in Letters and Social Aims.)