In 3 to 5 pages, discuss what education means to Henry Adams and how his story was a microcosm for 19th century America.
The Education of Henry Adams
Topic: Research Paper #2
Due: April 30, 2020
Paper Question: Discuss what education means to Henry Adams and how his
story was a microcosm for 19th century America.
Review: Effect of Industrialization
• Freedom Changed: Post-Civil War, Reconstruction-era definition based on legal
equality was replaced by one restricted to liberty of contract.
• Liberty Transformed: The rise of an industrial economy, federally supported
economic expansion across the West, and political stagnation
disproportionately favored corporations over individual freedoms.
• Societal Transformations: Wealth, materialism, poverty, and class divisions grew
rapidly and incredibly unequally.
Review: Effect of Industrialization
• Changing Landscapes: The closing of the frontier, increased immigration, the
emergence of industrial cities, economic overproduction, religious zeal, and
military might lead the United States towards expansion and empire.
• New Social Thought: Social Darwinism, Socialism, and Anglo-Saxonism were
added to the social commentary alongside debates over free labor, liberty of
contract, and republicanism to help discern the nation’s virtue and morality
after the rise of industrialization in the 19th century.
• Redrawn Boundaries: Populism, Segregation, Labor Unions, Nativism,
Accommodation, and Imperialism all represent new boundaries of freedom
drawn in reaction to the changing permanency of 19th Century industrial
realties.
The Education of Henry Adams
Timeframe:
• Industrial Revolution, 1800 – 1900
Key Events:
• Free Soil vs. Popular Sovereignty, 1848 – 1854
• Civil War, 1861 – 1865
• Reconstruction, 1865 – 1877
• The Closing of the Frontier, 1870 – 1890
• Gilded Age Politics, 1870 – 1890
• Free Silver and Populism, 1892 – 1896
• American Expansion and Empire, 1895 – 1905
The Education of Henry Adams
Major Themes:
• Industrialization over Individualism
• Science over Humanism
• Reason over Faith
• Progress over Virtue
• Urban over Rural
• Class over Race
• Machine over Man
The Education of Henry Adams
• Overview: The Education of Henry Adams is a study of the forces that shaped
the life and mind of Henry Adams as well as many Americans of his generation
during the 19th Century.
• American Identity Crisis: Adams describes a general identity crisis in the United
States during its transformation from an agricultural society to an urban,
industrial world power.
• Central Question: “What could become of such a child of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, when he should wake up to find himself required to play
the game of the twentieth?”
American Royalty
• Federalism: His great grandfather, John Adams, was a Founding Father, the
Second President of the United States, and a Federalist, whose administration
was most marked by the French Revolution, the rise of political parties, and the
Alien and Sedition Acts.
• Nationalism: His grandfather, John Quincy Adams, was the Sixth President of the
United States, a nationalist, the author of the Monroe Doctrine, and proponent
of the American System, and his father, Charles Adams, was the U.S.
Ambassador to England during the Lincoln Administration.
• Maternal Lineage: His maternal grandfather, millionaire Peter Brooks, was one
of the wealthiest man in New England and another great-grandfather, Nathaniel
Gorham, signed the Constitution.
His Failed Education
• Education: He was exceptionally privilege from birth and received the most
prestigious formal education available in his day, including a degree from
Harvard, but still, Adams considers his education to have been a complete
failure.
• Value: Adams insists that this education had prepared him for life not in the
twentieth century but for life in the eighteenth century, a time that ended
decades before he was born.
• Industrial Realities: In the newly emerging, rapidly changing world of the
twentieth century, all education will have to be continuous and can no longer
guarantee success.
Technology
• Key Theme: Primary theme concerns the impact of technology and the Second
Industrial Revolution on 19th Century society.
• Industrialization Impact: Adams argues that the multiplication and acceleration
of mechanical forces led to the breakdown of moral relationships among
people and to the degeneration of their pursuits into money seeking,
capitalistic-driven ventures or complete apathy, which we know to be the
Gilded Age.
• Multiverse: Modern science had produced a view of the universe radically
different from that held in the 19th Century, and the new view was called a
“multiverse,” which in Adams’ day meant a universe in chaos, lacking any kind
of ordering principle.
His Father’s Education
• Free Soilers: Adams’ father, Charles Francis Adams, had been instrumental in
forming the Free-Soil Party in 1848, and he ran for vice president of the United
States on the party’s ticket with Martin Van Buren.
• Puritan Morality: Henry Adams believed that his own education which was
based on Puritan morality, politics, and literary matters was chiefly an
inheritance from his father.
• Progress as Virtue: He believed his formal education was a failure, and as an
adult, he believed what he needed as a student were courses in mathematics,
French, German, and Spanish—not Latin and Greek.
Postgrad Experiences
• European Experience: His teacher, James Russell Lowell, suggested Adams spent
nearly two years abroad touring Europe after graduation from Harvard.
• German Experience: Adams enrolled to study civil law in Germany, found the
lecture system atrocious, and then devoted most of his stay in Europe to
experiencing art, opera, and theater; he also became more self-aware about
the social consequences of urbanization and class division while in Germany.
• Diplomatic Experience: He returned to Boston in 1860, initially to study law, but
in the elections that year, his father was chosen to be a U.S. representative,
and Adams accompanied him to Washington, D.C., as his personal secretary and
soon befriended John Hay.
England
• Ambassador Adams: In 1861, U.S. president Abraham Lincoln had chosen
Charles Adams, Henry’s father, to be minister to England, and Henry once again
followed his father.
• Civil War: The Adams party had barely disembarked when they heard bad news:
England had recognized the belligerency of the Confederacy, and the North was
now England’s undeclared enemy.
• Political Apathy: The Battle of Bull Run proved so crushing a blow to American
prestige that Charles had believed he was in England on a day-to-day
sufferance, and Henry Adams’ political apathy increases while in England.
Industrial Progress
• Transformation of the West: On his return to the United States, Adams noted
how he had been impressed by the “movements” of his fellow Americans, who
were now harnessing a mechanical energy that led them to “travel,” literally
and figuratively, in the same direction.
• Class Conflict: In contrast, the Europeans, he believed, were trying to go in
several directions at one time.
• Industrial Realities: Still, hindered by his limited education and by his long
absence from home, he had difficulty adapting to the new industrial America.
Out of Place
• Adams’ Reality: Adams had no means of earning a livelihood in industrial
America.
• Applicable Skills: He had earlier developed some taste as an amateur in art,
wrote several articles for the North American Review, and did achieve some
recognition with his essays on legal tender in the Edinburgh Review.
• Gilded Age: Adams hoped that he would be offered a government position in
the administration of Ulysses S. Grant; however, Grant, a man of action, was not
interested in reformers or intellectuals like Adams.
Return to Harvard
• Redrawing the Lines: Adams earned a position as an assistant professor of
medieval history at Harvard, and taught there for seven years, and during this
time, he tried to replace the lecture system with seminars and individual
research.
• The Free Individual in the West: He resigned his position in 1871 and traveled
west to Estes Park, Colorado, with a government geological survey, where he
met Clarence King, a member of the survey party.
• Industrial Example: King had a systematic, scientific education and had his
choice of scientific, political, or literary prizes, leading Adams to reflect on his
own limitations.
New Revelations
• Adams the Historian: After Harvard, Adams made his permanent home in
Washington, D.C., where he wrote a series of books on American history.
• 1893 Depression: His friend Clarence King was facing bankruptcy in the
Depression of 1893, causing Adams to lose all hope in education.
• Chicago’s World Fair: He visited the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and from his
observations of the steamship, the locomotive, and the newly invented dynamo
(electric generator), he concluded that force is the one unifying factor in
American thought.
• 1890s America: Back in Washington, he saw the adoption of the gold standard
and concluded that the capitalist system and American intervention in Cuba
offered signs of the direction in which the country was headed.
Dynamo Theory
• Paris World’s Fair: During a visit to the Great Exposition in Paris in 1900, Adams
formulated what would become his dynamo…
