In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

158 Paul A. Bové of mind was everywhere and demanded original ideas and tactics to overcome it. Hay is Adams’s hero in the final chapters of The Education precisely because, against overwhelming inertia, by mind, skill, and imagination he achieved goals aimed at the success of the grand vision. Adams imagined the politician on the model of artist as the only possible figure of success inside such masses of inertia. The artist politician could, with proper conditions, coax the needed coupure in history, an achievement based on analytic perception of real possibilities that itself grounds the active imagination of a future. Of course, lest utopians of all stripes object here, we admit that such realism-based imaginings are constrained by actually existing conditions—a claim easily made against utopians and all others who object from what predetermined positionality they might embrace. Adams and Hay together embody a political adaptation of a late-Romantic Euro-American commitment to individualized aesthetic accomplishment moved to the arena of geopolitics understood as a matter of world history with species-wide importance. Their anxiety about the success of US aspirations , which we might as well call their own aspirations for the species— to be achieved through the exercise of US instrumentalities—were placed within two other conflicting narratives of state theory that underlay their own remaking of the aesthetic politician. In “Twilight,” Chapter XXVI of The Education, Adams opens with a characteristic analytic mockery of a social world that “jogged” past what it judged to be the “futilities of St. Gaudens, Rodin and Besnard.”24 Just as the Western world’s habits of indexing and measuring by money value made China part of only the trivial forms of popular literature, so the same world’s inability to measure the seriousness of its aesthetic accomplishments made it impossible to weigh the potential they afforded in the political and strategic fields. The value of art was never more strongly defended than here, when Adams insists that it provides the better training for strategic imagination than Wall Street or politics! The author Henry Adams notoriously portrays the character “Adams” as close to his own thinking and experience while making use of the character to reveal developments in thought and history. Normally, the text portrays “Adams” as failing to perceive and understand but gradually coming, by surprise, to see something others had already seen. In this instance, “Adams” misjudged Hay’s chance of success, and “Like them [Europe’s politicians] all, he took for granted that the [Foreign] Legations [in Beijing] were massacred, and that John Hay, who alone To Make a Way 159 championed China’s ‘administrative entity,’ would be massacred too, since he must henceforth look on, in impotence, while Russia and Germany dismembered China, and shut up America at home.”25 Great art comes as a sublime surprise to its audience, often with the effect of retrospective recognition that makes the invisible obvious. Hay had brought a New World Order into being: “History broke in halves,” says Adams.26 Hay had acted independently of European powers, asserted US leadership, “rescued the Legations, and saved China.” For “Adams,” still acquiring education, the event was sublime, “meteoric,” absolutely original in “American diplomacy.” The aesthetic effect was simple: “the world was struck dumb.” Civilization “submitted” to US leadership because Hay had discovered the secret that the inert had a “mere instinct of docility” ready “to receive and obey his orders.” This aesthetic coup achieved the political effects of legitimation and pleasure; society approved what it had not seen or understood and “burst into almost tumultuous applause.” Hay had pursued a dramatic gesture that in an instant supervened against all extended narratives of ostensible decay and drift. Word and act incarnated themselves as the result of mind and power. History broke in two; amnesia set in, and all stories and affects of decay were forgotten. Success was the measure of Hay’s apotheosis and it renewed him: “Hay was too good an artist not to feel the artistic skill of his own work, and the success reacted on his health, giving him fresh life.”27 Hay’s success in preserving China from European predation and in extending the American system settled the competition between competing narratives or theories of history and political power that undergirded Adams’s and Hay’s anxieties about the likely success of US force. As many historians of US imperialism have made clear, Alfred Thayer Mahan’s great books on sea power have provided the...

Share