The Old Adams

TheCanadian Review of American Studies, Volume 10,Number 2, Fall, 1979 TheOld Adams Elizabeth Waterston Earl N. Harbert. The Force So Much Closer Home. New York: NewYork University Press, 1977. 224 pp. It takes temerity to write yet another biography of Henry Adams. Earl Harbert's The Force So Much Closer Home must jostle for a place on a shelf already laden with books by Samuels, Stevenson, Jordy, Hochfield, Wagner, Conder and Lyon. This new volume claims a place on that shelf because of its emphasis on the way Henry Adams studied, focused and redirected the force of his own family tradition. Adams pored over the family records as assiduously as any modern "Adams scholar" -with as sharp an eye on the ironic discrepancies between public and private papers, but with a naturally sharper sense of the "mystery of his birthright." Harbert in turn collates Adams' writings with those records. In his apprentice work, Harbert says, Henry Adams chose (or was given) subjects that forced an early caustic examination of family assumptions, and of family achievements. In the essays on John Smith, on Lyell and on civil service reform, Adams viewed historic and scientific documents and contemporary politics. In each essay, he grew beyond the traditional family stance, but in ways that were themselves a new application of family habits of analysis, balance and nervous pride. Next Harbert shows Henry Adams writing biographies based on family papers, and novels based on his own still-hopeful experience in Washington and New York. In his biographies of Gallatin and Randolph, Adams studied two men who were the antitheses of the Adamses: one more scientific and controlled, the other less rational but in some ways more powerful. He also 206 Elizabeth Waterston through writing the biographies clarified his own views of slavery, politics, the Constitution, regionalism,-and learned how far he was from traditional Adamsism. Through mastery of the biographer's art, through wit, grace and pungency, Adams educated himself beyond his hereditary limitations. At the same time he reduced his own power as actor and potential politician. But Harbert presents his views of Adams' two biographies in a chapter which also evaluates Adams' two novels as revealers and changers of the Adams family force. The double-pairing is very effective. In Democracy as in Randolph, Henry Adams sees how politics can cause the moral senseto atrophy. In Esther as in Gallatin, he sees the attraction of detachment. "Once he had told the political story, Adams felt free to dramatize the play of other social forces he saw in the world." He showed how in science, in religion and in art a protagonist could be educated but could still preserve some traditional Adams attitudes: reverence for rationalism and balance, skepticism, dread of vanity, sense of public duty. In place of a general view of a series of works, the next chapter offersa brilliant and detailed analysis of the single monumental History of the United States during the Administration of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In this story of the period which represented an early hiatus in Adams power, Henry Adams studied the transition to republicanism. His ideal was to be more scientific, less legalistic than his forebears in his views of the changes of the period: to present "facts in their sequence," without "mould of a theory." His achievement, though fairminded, is nevertheless still tinged with subtle bias. Harbert's careful analysis of the way this bias works is masterful in itself and is also a salutary lesson in the necessity of very close reading of historians' prose, even the syntax being shown as slipping a bit of bias into the olympian tone. Deeply camouflaged, Henry's family piety nevertheless moves beneath his posing of alternatives. "Principled conduct," for instance, becomes equated with "Political failure," in this period of Adams-in-abeyance, 1800 to 1817. Randolph reappears in this history, seen, more clearly than in the biography , as comparable to the fictional senator Ratcliffe in Democracy, and the all-too-real President Grant in "Civil Service Reform." Randolph's weakness now is seen as rising not just from his slave-owning southernness or his personal quirk of temper, but also from his "habit...