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hand than he-American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many
Puritans and Patriots behind, an education that had cost a civil war. ...
Adams would have liked to help in building railways, but had no edu–
cation. He was not fit."
What is Adams's point-that the Jews are more fit than he is because
they were not educated the way he was? And if they are more fit, is that
a good thing? Adams often seems to enjoy proclaiming himself unfit.
The unfit, he implies, are morally scrupulous, whereas the fit-i.e ., the
Jews-have no scruples whatsoever. All they have is energy.
Adams insists that he was a failure, yet he was hardly a financial fail–
ure; he was a successful capitalist whose knowledge of stocks and bonds
saved his family from financial ruin.
It
grated on Henry James that the
independently wealthy Adams complained about being a failure.
Adams, he says, was "what
I
should have liked to be-a man of wealth
and leisure, able to satisfy all his curiosities, while
I
am a penniless
toiler." Was Adams a political failure? He did not have a political career,
but he never tried to have one because he disdained party politics. As
Holmes shrewdly said :
"If
the country had put him on a pedestal,
I
think Henry Adams with his gifts could have rendered distinguished
public service." Adams, Holmes said, "wanted it handed to him on a sil–
ver platter."
If
it was humbug of Adams to call himself a failure, it was also odd
to say that his entire generation was unfit. His older brother Charles
was a successful businessman who became president of the Union
Pacific Railroad. His friends included a successful scientist, painter,
jurist, novelist, and philosopher, as well as several major politicians and
statesmen: John Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt.
Adams means they are unfit in one sense only; they do not share his cos–
mIC peSSImIsm.
Sometimes Adams seems to exult in his sense of failure and in his
knowledge of the coming collapse. On a return from a trip to Europe in
1904, he describes how unfit he is for life in the 1900s.
Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man,
speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world
irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable, and afraid. All New
York was demanding new men, and all the new forces, condensed
into corporations, were demanding a new type of man-a man
with ten times the endurance, energy, will, and mind of the old
type. ...As one jolted over the pavements...the new man seemed
