Henry Adams
Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838 – March 27, 1918) was an American historian and a member of the Adams political family, descended from two U.S. presidents. As a young Harvard graduate, he served as secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, Abraham Lincoln's ambassador to the United Kingdom. The posting influenced the younger man through the experience of wartime diplomacy, and absorption in English culture, especially the works of John Stuart Mill. After the American Civil War, he became a political journalist who entertained America's foremost intellectuals at his homes in Washington and Boston.
For other people named Henry Adams, see Henry Adams (disambiguation).
Henry Adams
Henry Brooks Adams
February 16, 1838
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
March 27, 1918 (aged 80)
Washington, D.C., U.S.
Rock Creek Cemetery
Washington, D.C., U.S.
Frances Snow Compton
English
American
American
- Charles Francis Adams Sr. (father)
- Abigail Brown Brooks (mother)
During his lifetime, he was best known for The History of the United States of America 1801–1817, a nine-volume work, praised for its literary style, command of the documentary evidence, and deep (family) knowledge of the period and its major figures. His posthumously published memoir, The Education of Henry Adams, won the Pulitzer Prize and went on to be named by the Modern Library as the best English-language nonfiction book of the 20th century.[1]
Later life[edit]
In late 1885, Adams moved into his newly-completed mansion next door at 1603 H Street, which was designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, an old friend of Adams and one of the most prominent architects of his day.[27] (The house was razed in 1927 and the Hay-Adams Hotel was built on the site.)[28]
Following his wife's death, Adams took up a restless life as a globetrotter, traveling extensively, spending summers in Paris and winters in Washington, D.C., where he commissioned the Adams Memorial designed by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and architect Stanford White for her grave site in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
Views[edit]
Anglo-Saxonism[edit]
Considered a prominent Anglo-Saxonist of particularly the nineteenth-century, Adams has been portrayed by modern historians as anxious about the immigration of the era into the United States, particularly from Eastern Europe.[30] More starkly put, Adams also wrote of his belief that "the dark races are gaining on us".[31] He considered the U.S. Constitution itself as belonging to the Anglo-Saxon "race", and as an expression of "Germanic freedom".[32] He went so far as to criticize fellow scholars for not being absolute enough in their Anglo-Saxonism, such as William Stubbs, whom he criticized for downplaying the significance, as he saw it, of "Germanic law" or hundred law in its contribution to English common law.[33]
Adams was nevertheless highly critical of the English. He referred to them as a "besotted race" from whom nothing good could come and "wanted nothing so much as to wipe England off the earth."[34]
Antisemitism[edit]
Adams's attitude towards Jews has been described as one of loathing. John Hay said that when Adams "saw Vesuvius reddening ... [he] searched for a Jew stoking the fire."[35]
Adams wrote: "I detest [the Jews], and everything connected with them, and I live only and solely with the hope of seeing their demise, with all their accursed Judaism. I want to see all the lenders at interest taken out and executed."[36] To one friend, he wrote: "Bombard New York. I know no place that would be more improved by it. The chief population is Jew, and the rest is German Jew."[37]
His letters were "peppered with a variety of antisemitic remarks", according to historian Robert Michael, as in the following citations from historian Edward Saveth:
