Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.: Henry Adams anticipated today’s world in his “speculations about the shape of things to come”

Schlesinger at a 2004 Library of America
event celebrating the publication of the
LOA edition of Studs Lonigan.
Photo by Star Black.

Born ninety-six years ago, on October 15, the eminent historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was an unfailingly supportive advisor and friend of The Library of America right up until his death in February 2007. A prolific writer and Pulitzer Prize winner, Schlesinger served as special assistant to President John F. Kennedy. During his tenure at the White House, he discussed with President Kennedy the need for a comprehensive, authoritative edition of American writing, such as The Library of America would later become. He was a longtime member of the LOA Board of Advisors.

A decade ago, on April 8, 2002, Schlesinger was one of six prominent writers who delivered a few remarks at the twentieth-anniversary celebration of The Library of America, which took place at the The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. Joining him on the stage were Gail Buckley, Michael Cunningham, Elmore Leonard, Richard Price, and Wendy Wasserstein. The presenters were asked to speak about writers from the LOA series for whom they feel a special affinity. Schlesinger chose Henry Adams, and his remarks appear below.

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What a glorious moment this is! I can remember when The Library of America was only a gleam in the eye of Edmund Wilson—and here it stands today, a cultural triumph as brilliantly and securely established as the Pleiades series in France, a marvelous boon to the reeducation of the American people.

I think few would be more admiring of this achievement than the Library author I have thought to speak about tonight—the great historian and mordant social commentator Henry Adams (1838–1918).

His Education led all the rest when a panel mobilized by the Modern Library voted for the greatest non-fiction book written in English during the twentieth century. And Adams would feel as querulously at home in the twenty-first century, much of which he anticipated in his obsessed speculations about the shape of things to come.

He was a modern, indeed a post-modern, man in many of his concerns. About the role of women, for example, “The American always ostentatiously ignored sex, and American history mentioned hardly the name of a woman. . . . American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.” Yet, Adams said, without understanding the movement of sex, history was “mere pedantry.”

He was early in spotting the revolution underway. “The woman had been set free. . . . In every city, town, and farmhouse, were myriads of new types—or type-writers—telephone and telegraph-girls, shop-clerks, factory hands, running into millions on millions, and, as classes, unknown to themselves as to historians. . . . All these new women had been created since 1840; all were to show their meaning before 1940.” He almost predicted Rosie the Riveter.

Julia Ward Howe was the only woman member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters at the start of the twentieth century. “If we put Julia Ward Howe on our membership lists,” Adams wrote the Academy’s secretary, “. . . I do not see how we justify omitting Edith Wharton.” Adams protested in vain. The author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was too much of a patriotic saint, and Edith Wharton, alas, wrote novels about divorce. For years after Mrs. Howe’s death in 1910, the old guard succeeded in keeping women out. Edith Wharton was not elected to the Academy until 1930, a long twenty years after Henry Adam’s protest.

Adams was also prescient in his concern over the concentration of private economic power. As he commented when large corporations first began to afflict and undermine our democracy, the Erie Railroad, he said, had “proved itself able to override and trample on law, custom, decency, and every restraint known to society, without scruple, and as yet without check. The belief is common in America that the day is at hand when corporations far greater than Erie . . . will ultimately succeed in directing government itself.”

He continued gloomily, “Under the American form of society no authority exists capable of effective resistance. The national government, in order to deal with the corporation, must assume powers refused to it by its fundamental law—and even then is exposed to the chance of forming an absolute government which sooner or later is likely to fall into the hands it is struggling to escape.”

Some years later he defined what he called McKinleyism as “the system of combinations, consolidations, trusts, realized at home, realizable abroad.” He would not be in the slightest surprised by the dismantlement by the Reagan and Bush administrations of effective restraints on corporate power—McKinleyism in spades.

But what especially establishes Adams’s postmodern character are his technological anticipations. He was obsessed by the acceleration of history. “The world did not double or treble its movement between 1800 and 1900,” Adams wrote in 1909, “but, measured by any standard . . . the tension and vibration and volume and so-called progression of society were fully a thousand times greater in 1900 than in 1800; —the force had doubled ten times over, and the speed, when measured by electrical standards as in telegraphy, approached infinity, and had annihilated both space and time.” Nothing, Adams thought, could slow the technological juggernaut. “The law of acceleration . . . cannot be supposed to relax its energy to suit the convenience of man.”

Adams’s law of acceleration now hurtles us into a new age. The shift from a factory-based to a computer-based economy is more dynamic—and more traumatic—even than our great-grandparents’ shift from a farm-based to a factory-based economy. The Industrial Revolution extended over generations and gave time for human and institutional adjustment. The Computer Revolution is far swifter, more concentrated, more drastic in its impact.

Henry Adams’s old contrast between the Virgin and the Dynamo is fulfilled today in the replacement of the Dynamo by the Computer. In 1909 Adams foresaw the dissolution of what he called the Mechanical Phase into the Electric Phase, to be followed by the Ethereal Phase, which, he predicted, would last till about 2025. Maybe the Internet represents the transition from the Electric to the Ethereal Phase.

Nor was Adams unaware of the catastrophic possibilities of his Law of Acceleration. On April 11, 1862, almost 140 years ago today, a few days after the battle of Shiloh, while the Monitor and the Merrimack, pioneer ironclads, were maneuvering around Newport News, Henry Adams wrote, “I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Some day science shall have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world.”

All I can do is to say: read Henry Adams!

Previously on Reader’s Almanac
Elmore Leonard: John Steinbeck “set me free”

The literary masterpiece about Washington: has any topped Henry Adams’s Democracy?

Writing in the City Journal, Christopher Hitchens laments that America’s first-tier novelists have neglected Washington as the focus of their novels. “Can one imagine a Dickens without London or a Zola or Flaubert without Paris?” He dates the root cause of such oversight to the negotiations whereby Alexander Hamilton gave in to Thomas Jefferson’s desire for a capital near Virginia in exchange for Hamilton’s National Bank—American’s cultural and political capitals were thereby forever riven in twain.

Hitchens finds the original model for the Washington novel in Henry Adams’s Democracy. Adams published it anonymously on April Fools’ Day 1880 and it became an immediate sensation, going through fifteen printings over the next thirty-five years before any edition carried his name. Guessing the identity of the author became a popular parlor game (much like what happened in 1996 with Primary Colors). John Hay, Clarence King, even Adams’s own wife were suspects. In 1911 Adams told a correspondent, “Really, of course, Henry James wrote it, in connection with his brother Willy, to illustrate Pragmatism.” The only correct guess came from the British novelist Mrs. Humphrey Ward.

Arthur Schlesinger testified to the novel’s staying power in a The New York Review of Books in 2003:

People today read Democracy not as a roman á clef but as a gallery of political types and as a novel of political ideas. Adams . . . was less interested in portraying real personages than he was in defining Washington types—the unscrupulous politician, the naïve idealist, the lightweight reformer, the cynical diplomat, the cunning lobbyist, the congressional hangers-on. The cast of Adams’s Democracy populates Washington today, which is why the book is still in print. . . Democracy: An American Novel is all too true for Washington under corporate domination at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Many writers have attempted Washington novels since 1880 and in his article Hitchens catalogs several contenders: Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost; Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent; Christopher Buckley’s Wet Work; Thomas Mallon’s Fellow Travelers; Gore Vidal’s Lincoln, Burr, and The Golden Age; Ward Just’s Honor, Power, Riches, Fame, and the Love of Women and Echo House.

A bit of Googling reveals that the search for the great Washington novel has its own tradition. Mark Athitakis surveyed a number of candidates in 2008 and quoted Jeffrey Charis-Carlson, “a scholar of District literature”; “[The consensus is that] the great Washington novel is something of an oxymoron.” Writing about the decline of the Washington novel in The New York Times Book Review in 1995, Terry Teachout argued that “the best novels about American politics, Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (1946), and Edwin O’Connor’s All in the Family (1966) and The Last Hurrah (1956) are, significantly, not about Washington at all.”

Bloggers Steven Riddle and Mark Judge, responding to Hitchens, question this assumption that novels about politics can really capture all of what Washington is. Riddle nominates Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears as “a very fine Washington novel” and Judge argues that if Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist is not a masterpiece it is certainly “a great, timeless novel.”  

What should the Great Washington Novel be “about”? What novel about Washington have the critics missed? Is there not a candidate we can believe in?

Related LOA works: Henry Adams: Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education

James Thurber: “Nobody else ever reads a volume of letters and anybody who says he does is a liar”

In the October 8, 1938, issue of The New Yorker James Thurber finds inspiration in a passage by Henry Steele Commager on the Letters of Henry Adams:

Adams was a great letter writer of a type that is now almost extinct . . . his circle of friends was larger perhaps and more distinguished than that of any other American of his generation.

In the short spoof “The Letters of James Thurber,” Thurber ponders how his own letters might compare:

James Thurber was a letter writer of the type that is now completely extinct. His circle of correspondents was perhaps no larger but it was easily more bewildered than that of any other American of his generation.... The effect of Thurber’s letters on his generation was about the same as the effect of anybody’s letters on any generation; that is to say, nil. It is only when a man’s letters are published after his death that they have any effect and this effect is usually only on literary critics. Nobody else ever reads a volume of letters and anybody who says he does is a liar.

I have been unable to find any one of Thurber’s many correspondents who saved any of his letters.... “We threw out when we moved,” people would tell me, or “We gave them to the janitor’s little boy.” Thurber gradually became aware of this on his return to America (the Final Phase) because of the embarrassed silence that always greeted him when, at his friends’ homes, he would say, “Why don’t we get out my letters to you and read them aloud?” After a painful pause the subject was quickly changed, usually by putting up the ping-pong table.

The publication in 1981 of The Selected Letters of James Thurber and in 2002 of The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom, and Surprising Life of James Thurber reveal Thurber actually to be, in Robert Gottlieb’s words “a compulsive correspondent as well as a sentimental one, churning out streams of letters,” as many as 1,200 a year. Most of his correspondents treasured them, although Janet Maslin notes in her review of The Thurber Letters that one of his old flames did destroy his lovestruck letters to her the night before her first child was born. Maslin clearly disagrees with the author of The New Yorker piece about the what might be gained by reading the letters of James Thurber:

With datelines ranging from "Hell, Friday" to the vacation spots frequented by Thurber and his second wife, Helen, these letters truly roam the wide world. They can—and should—be admired by anyone interested in comic genius, the lost art of great correspondence, the arcs of ambition, celebrity and age ("Our generation is melting away like snow in the sun," he wrote shortly before his death in 1961), the wonders of inspired whimsy, and the transformation of youthful enthusiasm into chronic dissatisfaction.

Of related interest:

• Thurber’s “You Could Look It Up” was a recent Story of the Week.
• Keith Olbermann reads a Thurber selection every Friday evening. Watch him read “A Box to Hide In” from the LOA collection James Thurber: Writings and Drawings.
• The 2010 Thurber prize was awarded this week to Steve Hely for his literary-pretension-skewering novel, How I Became a Famous Novelist.

Related LOA works: James Thurber: Writings and Drawings (includes "The Letters of James Thurber"); Henry Adams: Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education