Grandson of one president (John Quincy Adams), great-grandson of another (John Adams), Henry Adams (1838—1918) was born into a family that came as close as any in New England to the status of heritable aristocracy." Had he been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple and circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest," he wrote at the start of his extraordinary memoir, The Education of Henry Adams," he would scarcely have been more distincdy branded, and not much more heavily handicapped in the races of the coming century." Here was Adams's obsessive theme: the immeasurable gap between the world of his fathers and the vertiginous times in which he came to adulthood—characterized by a ceaseless flood of immigrants, the brutal mechanization of war, the battering of religion by science, and the transformation of time itself by the ever increasing speed of human enterprise under the stimulus of technology. Nowhere in Adams's writing is this theme better expressed than in the recollected incident of his walk to school with his grandfather. It is a wistful remembrance not merely of John Quincy Adams as the laconic Yankee but of a lost moment when the rules of civilization could be transmitted between the generations without having to be stated at all. It is followed here by a short passage about Boston in which Adams makes clear that New England has never been all about obedient submission.

The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial, revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped, from his greatest grandmother's birth, in the odor of political crime. Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged. That duty implied not only resistance to evil, but hatred of it. Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy, and generally find it so, but the New Englander, whether boy or man, in his long struggle with a stingy or hostile universe, had learned also to love the pleasure of hating; his joys were few.