STEPHEN MILLER
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to
Jews.} He called the major financial centers-Lombard Street, Wall Street,
State Street-"Juden-gassen," and he told Hay that the "Jew question is
really the most serious of our problems.
It
is capitalist methods run to their
logical result." Hay found Adams's obsession with Jews tiresome; he joked
that Adams even blamed natural disasters on the machinations of Jews.
According to Adams, Jews were more than financiers who held the
levers of financial and political power; they were a demonic, destructive
force.
In
The Education
he speaks of Heinrich Heine's "derisive Jew laugh–
ter," and in his letters he speaks of "infernal Jewry." His anti-Semitism
probably reached a fever pitch during the Dreyfus Affair. He applauded the
prosecution of Dreyfus because it was stoking the fires of anti-Semitism.
The Dreyfus Affair "has resulted in enormously stimulating the anti-Semite
feeling in France....The current of opinion is running tremendously
strong, now that the whole extent of the Jew scandal is realised."
In
the 1900s, Adams's interest in Jews abated somewhat-not
because he was less anti-Semitic but because he decided that the main
reason Western civilization was heading toward collapse was the power
of new technologies that man could not control.
If
in the
History
Adams
argued that scientific and technological progress was for the most part
a positive force, he now argued that it was a negative force.
In
1892 he
told Brooks Adams, his equally pessimistic younger brother, "I appre–
hend for the next hundred years an ultimate, colossal, cosmic collapse;
but not on any of our old lines. My belief is that science is to wreck us,
and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell." Science
and technology had created forces that man would not be able to con–
trol.
In
1906, he asked a friend: "What is the end of doubling up our
steam and electric power every five years to infinity if we don't increase
thought-power? ...Our power is always running ahead of our mind."
Although Adams attacked scientific and technological progress because
he thought its ultimate effect was destructive, he also hoped to make use
of science
to
plot the course of history.
In
"The Tendency of History," an
address given in absentia to the American Historical Association in 1895,
he said that it was wrong to assume that scientific theory supported
progress. A science of history could no longer expect to take "the form of
cheerful optimism which gave Darwin's conclusions the charm of a possi–
ble human perfectability." A science of history would have to fix "with
mathematical certainty the path which human society has got to follow."
Adams at times implied that such a scientific project was essential in order
to prevent the collapse of civilization, but for the most part he suggested
that nothing could be done to prevent this collapse.
