STEPHEN MILLER
Henry Adams: The Confusions of Cosmic
Pessimism
I
N I907 HENRY JAMES AND HENRY ADAMS both published books
that were in part meditations on the American future. Adams's
The
Education of Henry Adams
was privately printed and offered only
to friends; James's
The American Scene
was based on the "gathered
impressions" of a ten-month trip he made to the United States in I904
after a twenty-year absence.
It
is often wrongly assumed that James and
Adams, who were friends, had the same dark view of the American
future. Many of james's remarks about the United States are negative,
but the impressions of a "restless analyst, " as James called himself, have
little in common with the grandiose pseudo-scientific theories of the
deeply pessimistic Adams.
Adams's and James's books have one thing in common; both addressed
a question that we continue to wrestle with: the effect of immigration on
American democracy. Many observers thought the new immigrants posed
a threat to the health of American democracy. In
The American Com–
monwealth
(I888), James Bryce said that the immigrants "follow blindly
leaders of their own race, are not moved by discussion, [and] exercise no
judgment of their own." Adams was more pessimistic than Bryce, though
not solely because of immigration. In I906, when he was writing
The
Education,
he told a friend that "our whole system, social, political, and
moral, is so rotten that a good strong push will upset it all."
Thirty years earlier Adams had not been such a pessimist. Moving to
Washington in I877 with his wife, Marian "Clover" Hooper Adams,
Adams hoped to playa behind-the-scenes role in reforming American
democracy. "The fact is," he wrote in I877, "I gravitate to a capital by
a primary law of nature. This is the only place in America where soci–
ety amuses me, or where life offers variety. Here, too, I can fancy that
we are of use in the world, for we distinctly occupy niches which ought
to be filled ...
.I
belong
to
the class of people who have great faith in
this country."
In his witty novel,
Democracy
(I88o), and in his two-volume
History
of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas
