Historians at Work: Brooks and Henry Adams

by CHARLES A. BEARD

ON FOUR counts The Law of Civilization and Decay, by Brooks Adams, is to be included among the outstanding documents of intellectual history in the United States and, in a way, the Western world. It deserves a prime place among the writings of the Adams family on the nature and course of social politics, from A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, by John Adams, to the three penetrating essays on history by Henry Adams, now reprinted in The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma. It has a distinct position in the long line of American protests against plutocratic tendencies in American development, which appeared in systematic form during the contest over the creation and launching of the Constitution and have recently found vivid expression in the New Deal. For an understanding of the temper that prevailed during the critical years which saw the advent of Cleveland democracy, the panic of 1893, the Populist uprising, and the triumph of McKinleyism, war, and imperialism, this book and the story of its composition are indispensable aids. The fact that young Theodore Roosevelt, destined soon to be President of the United States, gave The Law of Civilization and Decay a long review in the Forum in 1897 is merely one illustration of its manifold relations to the thought and sentiments of the age.

The Law of Civilization and Decay represents the first extended attempt on the part of an American thinker to reduce universal history, or at least Western history, to a single formula or body of formulas conceived in the spirit of modern science. And it is all the more striking in that it anticipated by many years several central contentions put forward in Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, and indeed the whole spirit of this German work, especially its pessimism in respect to the Enlightenment, Progress, and Civilization. On this ground alone Brooks Adams’s treatise on history, whatever its shortcomings, is entitled to rank among the classic expressions of American thought relative to the nature and history of humanity’s experience.

It is appropriate to recall that all great human causes turn on theories of history, that all the modern revolutions which have shaken the world have been inspired and justified by theories of history. Every piece of philosophic, economic, or political writing either presents such a theory or rests on assumptions, articulate or tacit, derived from it. Even criticism of letters and arts falls under a similar denomination. Broad and dogmatic as this assertion appears, I venture to make it as one that is imperative for thought and practice in modern times, and warrants a special emphasis on the value of Adams’s book as merely a theory of history.

Up to the appearance of The Law of Civilization and Decay in 1895, professional historians in the United States had done much writing and little theorizing. Few among them had ever asked themselves, at least publicly: What do we think we are doing when we are selecting facts and putting them together — writing history? Most of them imagined that they were zealously engaged in what Professor William A. Dunning called the relentless pursuit of facts, and never openly inquired into their operating assumptions or sought to discover whether the tumult of events and personalities in history could be reduced to any law or laws or given any sense as a coherent whole. In general they were inclined to be highly critical of all such efforts and to praise one another for eschewing everything that savored of “philosophy”— that is, of thought about history and the writing of history.

It was the dominant attitude of professional historians that Brooks Adams, an outsider, challenged with all his strength of mind. Born in 1848 and coming to maturity in an age when it was widely believed that Charles Darwin had discovered the “laws” of biological evolution — the struggle for existence, adaptation to environment, natural selection, and survival of the fittest, Brooks began to wonder whether “a science of history” was not possible — and if possible, what form it would take. While Henry Adams had studied, taught, and written history in a manner somewhat orthodox, Brooks had searched assiduously in the data of history for a clew to the rise and decline of civilization.

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In the summer of 1893, after the panic of that year had broken loose, Henry Adams, then traveling in Europe, was called home by his brothers and told that the community was bankrupt and that he was probably a beggar (Education). At Quincy he found his brother Brooks, of whom he had not seen much for several years, wondering about the origins and meaning of the economic crisis that had almost paralyzed American industry and finance. They reviewed the disturbances and politics of the times in the light of long history. And Henry afterward wrote in his Education that Brooks had spent ten years in studying the course of civilization, had “discovered or developed a law of history,” had traced the relation of civilization to the shifting in centers of exchange, and had come to the conclusion that anarchy, not collectivism, would be the outcome of the conflict between capital and labor.

Shortly after the appearance of his Emancipation of Massachusetts in 1887, which, he said, scandalized “all the reputable historians” of the state, Brooks was moved to read history backwards. In his efforts to unravel the tangled skein of history, he visited England, France, Germany, Italy, Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, India, and Mexico. On his journeys he collected materials, let his imagination take flight, and gathered impressions. After long wanderings, he settled at his father’s house in Quincy and began, he said, “to digest the chaos in my mind.”

Brooks had a draft of his book ready when Henry came home from Europe in 1893. Determined to take advantage of his brother’s historical knowledge and critical powers, he asked Henry to read the manuscript and to say frankly whether it was worth printing or was “quite mad.” After he had examined the draft carefully, Henry replied that it was “good and worth printing,” but warned Brooks against publishing it, on the ground that it would be a deathblow to any political or other ambitions that he might have. “The goldbugs will never forgive you,” Henry said. “You are monkeying with a dynamo.”

When Brooks expressed Indifference to any such dangers, Henry repeated his warnings and declared that the attacks on it would be worse than criticisms of his Emancipation. Then Henry seemed to wash his hands of the business, and told Brooks that he was to expect no open support from him. “I have no vocation for martyrdom,” Henry confessed.

To these admonitions, Brooks retorted: “So be it. I have no ambition to compete with Daniel Webster as the jackal of the vested interests.” He had worked hard on the book, he went on to say, and was convinced of the soundness of his conclusions, but did not want to be charged by “the goldbugs” with having written “a free silver squib.” Thereupon he asked: “What can I do?”

Again Henry told Brooks that he had better hold his tongue in his own interests and that he (Henry) did not “intend to mix in any political scrape of yours. Don’t think it.” If, however, Brooks was bent on publishing The Law of Civilization and Decay, Henry remarked, it would be better to issue it in London. It might be taken seriously there. Passions were running high in the United States and “the goldbugs have too much at stake.” In the autumn of 1893, Henry went to Washington and left Brooks to battle his own way with his manuscript.

The story of the volume is a significant, indeed dramatic, chapter in the intellectual history of the United States and of two prominent figures in that history — Brooks and Henry Adams. It is also, as we shall see, a chapter in the Education of Henry Adams, who, for various reasons, is better known to the American public than his brother, Brooks. To fix beyond debate the contours of these two chapters — one general, the other personal — it is necessary to go into details which might otherwise appear academic; and fortunately tor this operation I have at my command unpublished letters of Brooks and Henry Adams on which the following account is based.

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In the spring of the year following the conversations at Quincy — that is, on May 6, 1894 — Brooks wrote to Henry that he had been working hard on his book during the winter and intended to go to Europe for the purpose of making additional inquiries. Eight days later he informed Henry that he expected to bundle up his sheets shortly and ship them to London for publication. He expressed doubts whether the book was worth doing or anyone would ever read it.

But in a letter to Henry, dated Venice, June 30, 1894, he said: “I have decided to recast my book completely. To strip all the philosophy off it, except a preface of about a couple of pages in which I mean to suggest the notion [of] the law of intellectual selection, and its necessary result in causing centralization. . . . In any event I mean to cut out practically all the ‘philosophy.’” At that time Brooks had begun negotiations for a London publisher.

Still Brooks delayed and kept on reworking his manuscript. In November, 1894, he was back in Boston laboring over it. “I am rewriting it from beginning to end,” he wrote to Henry on the fourteenth, “and I suppose it will take me most of the winter.” He then expressed the hope that Henry could look over some parts of it and give his opinion on them. He also wanted Henry’s advice as to the choice of a good publishing house in London.

As Henry was soon to leave Washington on a visit to the West Indies and Mexico, Brooks wrote, November 19, that he wanted his judgment on a number of points; and again recorded progress: “I am working as hard as I can. ... I find the copy you read very crude and badly put together, and I am taking it all apart and recasting it entire. I am sure that it is worth at least a dozen of what it was before, but I can’t say that I am contented yet.” To this letter Mrs. Evelyn Adams added: “I want to say that he has written three chapters, with which I am delighted. The story is much more simply told, and very clear and interesting. I wish you could help him.”

A few days later Brooks sent Henry some of his chapters and asked his advice, particularly “as to a preface, concluding chapter, and also as to a name.” Henry evidently acted quickly. On December 5, Brooks wrote him that his criticisms had been helpful and that “I think it clear that I can’t finish in time to print next April.” Brooks turned Henry’s suggestions over in his mind and urged him to come back “and cheer us up a bit, and help me with my book. It’s my one jump, for good or bad . . . and really since I have read your notes I begin to fancy that there may be something in it after all. Evelyn has been working to keep me up to the mark where I should not chuck it over altogether.”

While Henry was in the West Indies, Brooks toiled on his drafts, without any aid from his brother. February 2, 1895, he wrote to Henry: “I want a name [for my book] terribly, and I cannot decide as to a closing chapter of philosophy.” Evidently Henry made some suggestions respecting a title. At all events Brooks wrote whimsically to Henry on May 14, 1895: “Talking of a name, I rather reluct at ‘History.’ It sounds like Harvard. I rather feel as though I might be some of those learned gents who roll up their eyes at me. Evelyn, who is reading me, suggests ‘The Path to Hell. A Story Book.’ I rather like the title only I think it promises too much. How can I assure my readers that I will show them anything so good as a path to ‘Hell’?”

At last, on May 27, 1895, Brooks was able to tell Henry that his manuscript had gone off to London and about a week later sent him a draft of the Preface. It was in response to Brooks’s request for advice on the problem of the introduction that Henry wrote his letter of June 5, 1895, published in his Letters, Vol. II, p. 70, on which I comment below (p. 92). Henry advised Brooks to go through the Preface carefully and “strike out all the egotism you can reach. . . . Every omission improves. I have suggested possible condensations by pencil-marks on the text.”

Soon everything was ready except the title and some kind of advertisement designed to catch the public interest.¹ An agreement was made with Sonnenschein in London for publication, on condition that Brooks Adams should “stand the charges.” Henry went over to London while the book was in press and kept up a lively interest in the project.

The reception accorded to The Law of Civilization and Decay in England, on its publication in October, 1895, was disappointing to Brooks Adams, but the reception of imported copies in the United States was highly gratifying. Henry wrote to Brooks on February 7, 1896, that the first supply of copies imported by The Macmillan Company in New York had been exhausted, that a second supply had just arrived, and that a third supply was on the way from England. At the moment Brooks was in India making studies of economic conditions under British imperialism. After his return to Quincy, in May, 1896, Brooks informed Henry that Macmillan had sold out, and that Sonnenschein had no more copies ready. “I believe,” he said, “that the sale of our ‘Civilization’ is practically unlimited just now, if it could only be pushed; unlimited I mean to the extent of the editions we ever publish of such a thing.”

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Meanwhile Brooks was busy with his revision for direct publication in New York. On March 7, 1896, while still in India, Brooks asked Henry to send an annotated copy to his Paris address, so that he could compare it with his own annotated copy and talk it over with Sonnenschein. In June, 1896, Brooks was at home in Quincy again, working on his revision. He reported the fact to Henry on June 13 and added: “Far from having been injured by writing my book I find that I have never stood so well, and though I am no more loved than I was, at least I do not find any longer any disposition to laugh.” In the midst of his labors, Brooks took time to visit the Democratic national convention at Chicago, where Bryan triumphed over the “goldbugs.” “Of all the sights I have ever seen,” he wrote, July 12, 1896, to Henry in Paris, “it was one of the most impressive. I know now precisely what the [French] convention looked like in 1789. If I ever saw revolution it was in that meeting.”

By the middle of August, 1896, while Bryan’s campaign was getting into full swing, Brooks could announce to his brother that the last of the proofs had been sent to The Macmillan Company. The Law of Civilization and Decay soon came out under the American imprint. The Macmillan edition was reprinted in February and in September, 1897, in October, 1898, and in July, 1903. And it certainly furnished fuel for the political conflagration then raging.

Now Brooks was turning his attention to a French translation. Henry had suggested it to him in a letter of May 14, 1896, proposing at the same time a development of the first and last chapters. Wendell Holmes encouraged Brooks by telling him that he thought the second edition better than the first; and the reception by the press was favorable — “amazing,” Brooks described it. But he was not ready to publish a French edition. “I want more criticism,” he told Henry, in a letter of October 18, 1896. “If you can’t come to New York please take a copy of my book, and, having chewed on the last chapter, the preface, and the first ten pages of the second chapter, interleave your notes and send it to me.” While in Paris, on January 15, 1897, Brooks acknowledged the receipt of Henry’s report. Henry had made some suggestions respecting Byzantium. Brooks replied that he was not sure that he agreed. But on May 15, 1897, Brooks added: “I am going to rewrite the Roman and Byzantine part of my book. ”

Through the summer and autumn of 1897 Brooks in Quincy worked on his revision for the French edition. In December, he and Henry were in Paris, arranging with Alcan for the publication of the French edition and with Auguste Dietrich for the translation into French. During that winter Brooks remained in Paris and Henry was with him, at least for a portion of the season.

Brooks’s drudgery was not yet over. The French translation was given to the printer and the proof had to be read. This operation he carried on at Quincy during the autumn of 1898. The business of verification was also assumed by Brooks and like a true scholar he discharged that obligation. “As I try to verify every fact and every date from the originals and look up all the quotation, it is a big job,” he explained to Henry in his letter of October 17, 1898.

The proof supplied by the French printers, Brooks declared to be “disgraceful.” It was full of errors and “slovenly” in composition. He paid a handsome tribute to his translator, Dietrich, but he had to “slave” over the French version to the bitter end. “Now this is a fact, substantially: I have translated that book myself,” he wrote to Henry on December 28, 1898. “I have had to supervise, in sober earnest, every word which has been written.”

Like all conscientious authors, he apparently held out as long as he could and then, overcome by sheer weariness of the flesh, he delivered himself into the hands of the printers. In March, 1899, La Loi de la Civilisation et de la Décadence appeared in Paris. On April 6, 1899, Henry Adams wrote to Brooks from Paris that he had been at Alcan’s, secured copies of the book, and “found them, in appearance, very satisfactory.” In May, Henry gave Brooks the pleasure of learning that his book was “in the shop-windows” of Rome, “as well as in Paris.”

An edition in German followed a few years later. On December 18, 1906, Brooks wrote Henry that he was working on the German proofs of the book but needed help, “as I know too little German to be able to criticize.” December 19, 1906, Henry advised Brooks to get expert assistance, saying, “I would never make myself responsible for that language” (unpublished letter).

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Although Henry advised Brooks in 1893 against the publication of his manuscript and would have nothing to do with it openly, he wanted to help his brother’s cause along. So he wrote, as he afterward explained to Brooks, “a sort of preface or introduction,” designed to open the way for a public reception of the volume when it appeared. This essay was his famous Letter of December 12, 1891, on “The Tendency of History,” which served in place of his presidential address to the American Historical Association in that year.

In speaking of the Letter, Henry said to Brooks that without some such introduction The Law of Civilization and Decay would be ignored in a conspiracy of silence or furiously attacked by professional historians. The teaching profession, Henry elaborated, “is like the church and the bankers, a vested interest. And the historians will fall on any one who threatens their stock in trade quite as virulently as do the bankers on the silver men.”

As a matter of fact Henry’s essay on the tendency of history was a fitting preparation for the launching of Brooks’s volume the following year. If it had been deliberately formulated for that purpose, it could not have been more skillfully conceived and executed. However considered, in my opinion it was, and yet remains, high among the most comprehensive, penetrating, and profound utterances ever made, at least in the United States, on the office of the historian and the nature of history. The terrible course of history since 1894 and the plight of historians in Europe seem to be, in many ways, illustrations of Henry Adams’s discernment, pleas, and warnings, made manifest in his Letter.

As the Letter is a closely knit and reasoned document, no adequate digest or summation of it is possible. But a few propositions may be drawn from it here.

These propositions are: A science of history is possible, is probable, and historians will not, can not abandon the attempt to attain that objective, “ unless for reasons that would cause all science to cease.” In form, the science of history may take on the pessimism of great European capitals; it may point to a socialistic triumph; it may announce that the present evils of the world — its huge armaments, its vast accumulations of capital, its advancing materialism and declining arts — will continue and will be exaggerated over another thousand years; or it may point to a reversion to the church and absolute faith, ringing the death knell of science. Whatever its form, the science of history would have to be submitted to four powerful tribunals for silencing unwelcome opinions: the church, the state, property, and labor. Within the next fifty years (1894-1944) historians may be compelled to say with Galileo whether the world moves, and if so in what direction.

It is thus evident from these brief and inadequate statements that Henry did not by any means fully endorse in his Letter the conclusions of Brooks’s volume. In indicating the forms which a science of history might take, he merely made room for the letter and spirit of Brooks’s work. And at the same time he expressed the thought that the science of history might bring “into sight some new and hitherto unsuspected path for civilization to pursue,”thus leaving the door open for the possibility of an optimistic interpretation of history.

Actually, Henry was never completely satisfied with The Law of Civilization and Decay. He complained to Brooks that the Preface was imperfect and that it should be more scientific. He told him that, granting the soundness of his “law,”he had merely shown man to be a failure and had not explained why man had been a failure and could be nothing but a failure. “To leave human development where you do,” he informed Brooks, “is hardly satisfactory, nor is it surely scientific history. . . . You should write a scientific summary.”

To this Brooks made a frank answer: “Such a task was beyond me. Therefore, I declined Henry’s suggestion to join him in Paris and work at the scheme he proposed, and went back to my old life in America. From that time Henry lost interest in my further publications, though he continued faithfully to read them, but always with the same complaint, ‘that I got nowhere.’”²

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General readers will be inclined to ask what influence Henry had on the ideas and form of The Law. Indeed they may surmise, because of the national distinction which Henry attained after The Law appeared, especially in the field of the theory of history, that Henry was the more powerful thinker of the two and that he materially affected the thought and substance of Brooks’s work.

One inference may be considered first. Henry read Brooks’s work while it was in manuscript form in the summer of 1893. In the records available there is no evidence to the effect that, at this stage in the development of The Law, Henry suggested any significant changes in the book or that Brooks made any fundamental changes as a result of his conversations with Henry. As far as the records go, Henry approved the book in general as “sound.” He soon left Quincy, and Brooks finished off the manuscript for the London edition, with occasional calls upon Henry for assistance.

That the first edition of The Law of Civilization and Decay was the work of Brooks, Henry made emphatically clear in a letter to Brooks written in Washington on June 5,1895. Brooks had proposed to dedicate the book to Henry. But Henry told him that it would be a mistake. It might suggest to critics that the book was really Henry’s. “The book,” Henry said, “is wholly, absolutely, and exclusively yours. Not a thought in it has any parentage of mine.” Furthermore, Henry refused to be publicly associated with such a book. If Brooks chose to show the logical conclusion to the historical development of our society, Henry would do nothing to stop him: “By all means work out your full destiny, but work it out alone. My destiny — or at least my will — as an element of the social mass movement — lies in silence, which I hold to be alone sense. Even my name, in a dedication, talks too much to please me.”

But what of the two sets of annotations which Henry made for the guidance of Brooks in revising his work for the New York and the Paris editions? In them, did Henry advance suggestions and proposals that led Brooks to make structural changes of vital significance?

Fortunately answers can be made to these questions. Through the courtesy of the Brooks Adams Estate, I have had the privilege of examining both copies of The Law of Civilizationand Decay which Henry annotated for use by Brooks in revisions. I have compared page by page and line by line all of Henry’s suggestions, additions, and modifications with the corresponding pages and lines which Brooks published after considering his brother’s notations. And this examination reveals the fact that Henry’s comments, with two or three exceptions, did not go beyond alterations in details, and that these exceptions did not in any way alter the interpretation or theory of history which Brooks had worked out for his first edition. They were, rather, confirmations.

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That this experience with Brooks Adams and his manuscript was more than casual in Henry’s life, we have evidence. The long discussions carried on by the two brothers at Quincy in the summer of 1893, during the great economic crisis, were marked by intellectual excitement. “If I live forever,” Brooks wrote in 1919, “I shall never forget that summer. Henry and I sat in the hot August evenings and talked endlessly of the panic and of our hopes and fears, and of my historical and economic theories, and so the season wore away amidst an excitement verging on a revolution.” In a letter to Mr. Alfred Knopf, dated September 30, 1942, Mr. Henry Adams, of Boston, wrote: “Brooks Adams, my uncle, told me that during that summer they used to sit in the evening in the study the two Presidents used, and talk till late at night about economic forces that governed civilization.”

Referring to their meeting of that summer, Henry noted in his Education (p. 338): “For the first time in several years he [Henry] saw much of his brother Brooks in Quincy, and was surprised to find him absorbed in the same perplexities [respecting the forces at work in the panic]. Brooks was then a man of forty-five years; a strong writer and a vigorous thinker who had irritated too many Boston conventions ever to suit the atmosphere; but the two brothers could talk to each other without atmosphere and were used to audiences of one. Brooks had discovered or developed a law of history that civilization followed the exchanges, and having worked it out for the Mediterranean was working it out for the Atlantic. Everything American, as well as most things European and Asiatic, became unstable by this law, seeking new equilibrium and compelled to find it. Loving paradox, Brooks, with the advantages of ten years’ study, had swept away much rubbish in the effort to build up a new line of thought for himself, but he found that no paradox compared with that of daily events. The facts were constantly outrunning his thoughts. The instability was greater than he calculated; the speed of acceleration passed bounds. Among other rules, he laid down the paradox that, in the social disequilibrium between capital and labor, the logical outcome was not collectivism, but anarchism; and Henry made note of it for study.”

What Henry Adams would have done after 1893 if he had not had this experience with Brooks’s work on The Law of Civilization and Decay no one can determine. It is a fact, how - ever, that the flowering of Henry’s interest in the theory of history — the grand course of civilization — came after, not before, that extraordinary experience with his brother’s bold, powerful, and comprehensive effort to grapple with the secret of history. And a comparison of Henry’s writings before 1893 with his writings after that year shows that during the period 1893-1899 he acquired certain fundamental conceptions of history, explicit in The Law, which subsequently bulked large in his historical thought and writing. Of the fact there can be no doubt. But this is not the place to amplify The Education of Henry Adams.