Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T17:12:31.682Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Henry Adams and 1905: Prolegomena to The Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Charles Vandersee
Affiliation:
University of Virginia (University of Leeds, 1968–69)

Extract

We know precisely what Secretary of State John Hay was doing on 7 January 1905, and it had nothing to do with government affairs. Sixtyseven years old, and not in the best of health, Hay had an engagement that took him away from his comfortable Washington mansion on Lafayette Square, across from the White House. His destination was New York—the Italian Renaissance building at 7 West 43rd Street occupied by the Century Club. The New York Tribune duly noted his checking-in at the Wolcott Hotel, but it carried no notice of his mission, which for the moment was secret. Hay had once lived in New York, thirty years before, as an editor of the Tribune, after serving as Lincoln's secretary during the Civil War. While there he had also published his celebrated little book of western dialect poems called Pike County Ballads (1871). He had then gone on, with John Nicolay, to write a scholarly ten-volume History of Abraham Lincoln, and in 1897 had been appointed American minister to England. Now, with neither fanfare nor ambition behind him, he was in his seventh year as Secretary of State and at the apex of his career, having arranged the Open Door to Chinese trade and having negotiated several important Latin American treaties.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1968

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 199 note 1 Stedman, Laura and Gould, George M., Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman, vol. ii (New York, 1910), p. 445Google Scholar.

page 200 note 1 The Education of Henry Adams (Boston and New York, 1918), p. 371Google Scholar.

page 201 note 1 Details on the American Academy come from the following sources: Johnson, Robert Underwood, Remembered Yesterdays (Boston, 1929), pp. 443–5Google Scholar; Thayer, William Roscoe, The Life and Letters of John Hay, vol. ii (Boston and New York, 1915), pp. 396–7Google Scholar; Monteiro, George, ‘Henry James and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’, New England Quarterly, 36 (03 1963), 82–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fenton, Charles A., ‘The foundation of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1904’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 2 (Winter, 1961), 485–9Google Scholar; Stedman and Gould, vol. II, pp. 444–7. Aldrich, was described in a picture caption, Munsey's Magazine, 32 (02, 1905), 646Google Scholar, accompanying the article ‘American Authors of To-day’, by Richard Le Gallienne.

page 202 note 1 Details on Adams's house and furnishings come from: Henry Adams and His Friends: A Collection of His Unpublished Letters, ed. Cater, Harold Dean (Boston, 1947), pp. lxiiilxiv, cxvGoogle Scholar; Samuels, Ernest, Henry Adams: The Middle Years (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), pp. 259–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jordy, William, Henry Adams: Scientific Historian (New Haven, 1952), pp. 43–5Google Scholar; Chanler, Margaret, Roman Spring (Boston, 1934), pp. 300–1Google Scholar; MrsVan Rensselaer, Schuyler, Henry Hobson Richardson (Boston and New York, 1888), pp. 106–8Google Scholar.

page 202 note 2 ‘At Mr Adams's’, New Republic, 15 (25 05, 1918), 107Google Scholar.

page 202 note 3 To Charles Milnes Gaskell, 20 December 1904, in Letters of Henry Adams (1892–1918), ed. Ford, Worthington Chauncey (Boston and New York, 1938), p. 444Google Scholar; Samuels, , Henry Adams: The Major Phase (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), p. 592CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

page 203 note 1 Remembered Yesterdays, pp. 450–2; Ziff, Larzer, The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation (New York, 1966), p. 346Google Scholar.

page 203 note 2 Literary Digest, 48 (9 05 1914), 1120Google Scholar.

page 203 note 3 Colacurcio, Michael, ‘The dynamo and the angelic doctor: the bias of Henry Adams' medievalism’, American Quarterly, 17 (Winter 1965), 712CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

page 204 note 1 Samuels, , The Major Phase, p. 308Google Scholar; Cater, p. 565. The presentation copies to Holmes and Taylor, dated 1 January 1905, are now in Harvard College Library. La Farge's copy, inscribed the same date, ‘his pupil H.A.’, is at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. See Hayward, Ira N., ‘From Tahiti to Chartres: the Henry Adams-John La Farge Friendship’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 21 (08 1958), 358CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

page 204 note 2 The Major Phase, p. 308.

page 204 note 3 Letters (1892–1918), pp. 485, 495.

page 204 note 4 Education, pp. 497, 460.

page 204 note 5 Commager, , ‘Henry Adams’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 26 (07 1927), 253Google Scholar; Cowley, Malcolm, in Books That Changed Our Minds (New York, 1938), p. 5Google Scholar; Hochfield, George, Henry Adams: An Introduction and Interpretation (New York, 1962), p. 114Google Scholar.

page 205 note 1 Education, pp. 452, 457.

page 205 note 2 Cater, pp. 558–9.

page 205 note 3 Education, p. 505.

page 206 note 1 To Hay, John, 3 and 6 05, 1905, Letters (1892–1918), pp. 447, 448Google Scholar.

page 206 note 2 The Letters and Friendships of Sir Cecil Spring Rice, ed. Gwynn, Stephen, vol. i (Boston and New York, 1929), p. 450Google Scholar; Letters (1892–1918), p. 448.

page 206 note 3 World's Work, 9 (03 1905), 5892Google Scholar; Dillon, E. J., ‘The doom of Russian autocracy’, American Monthly Review of Reviews, 31 (03 1905), 303Google Scholar.

page 207 note 1 North American Review, 180 (03 1905), 323Google Scholar.

page 207 note 2 Review of Reviews, 31 (05 1905), 584Google Scholar.

page 208 note 1 The Outlook, 80 (29 07 1905), 796Google Scholar; Literary Digest, 30 (15 04 1905), 551Google Scholar, quoting from Gladden, 's ‘The Church and social problems’, International Quarterly, 11 (04 1905), 140Google Scholar.

page 208 note 2 Editorial, Teachers' Salaries’, The Outlook, 80 (29 07 1905), 805Google Scholar; Bureau of Labor Statistics cited in World's Work, 9 (03 1905) 6011Google Scholar; Literary Digest, 30 (15 04 1905), 551–2Google Scholar. quoting from Gladden, pp. 141, 147; Adams's income, Cater, p. xcii.

page 208 note 3 Samuels, , The Young Henry Adams. (Cambridge, Mass., 1947), p. 280Google Scholar.

page 208 note 4 The Muckrakers, ed. Arthur, and Weinberg, Lila (New York, 1961), pp. 205–6Google Scholar; Literary Digest, 31 (12 08 1905), 207Google Scholar.

page 209 note 1 American literature’, The Outlook, 80 (15 07 1905), 687Google Scholar.

page 210 note 1 Nixon, Paul, ‘American “Rhodes Scholars” at Oxford’, American Monthly Review of Reviews, 31 (06 1905), 717Google Scholar.

page 210 note 2 Education, pp. 212–21.

page 211 note 1 Review of Reviews, 31 (06 1905), 755Google Scholar; Marsh, Edward Clark, ‘The Year in Literature’, Town Topics, 48 (11 12 1902), 51Google Scholar; Horwill, Herbert W., Forum, 37 (0709 1905), 99Google Scholar; Cater, pp. 543–4.

page 211 note 2 The Outlook, 80 (12 08 1905), 913Google ScholarPubMed; Boynton, , The Critic, 47 (07 1905), 58Google Scholar; Education, pp. 141, 143.

page 212 note 1 The Outlook, 80 (10 06 1905), 389–90Google ScholarPubMed.

page 212 note 2 Bois, Bessie du, review of The Troll Garden, The Bookman, 21 (08 1905), 612Google Scholar; The Critic, 46 (04 1905), 349Google ScholarPubMed.

page 213 note 1 The Critic, 47 (11 1905), 477Google ScholarPubMed; Literary Digest, 31 (9 12 1905), 886Google Scholar; Samuels, , The Major Phase, pp. 78, 428Google Scholar.

page 213 note 2 Clement Shorter in the London Sphere quoted in Literary Digest, 30 (18 03 1905), 394Google Scholar.

page 213 note 3 Editor's Study’, Harper's Monthly Magazine, 3 (07 1905), 315–16Google Scholar.

page 214 note 1 The Letters of Mrs Henry Adams, ed. Thoron, Ward (Boston, 1936), pp. 352, 328Google Scholar; Viereck, in The Critic, 47 (07 1905), 87Google Scholar; Howe, Helen, The Gentle Americans 1864–1960: Biography of a Breed (New York, 1965), pp. 34Google Scholar.

page 214 note 2 Education, pp. vii, ix, 358; The Major Phase, pp. 348–53.

page 215 note 1 Literary Digest, 30 (11 03 1905), 357Google Scholar; New York American quoted in same, 31 (11 November 1905), 698; Bostwick in same, 31 (7 October, 1905), 481; The Critic, 47 (11 1905), 387Google ScholarPubMed.

page 216 note 1 Marsh, E. C., ‘The year in literature’, Town Topics, 50, (10 12 1903) 40Google Scholar.

page 216 note 2 Henry James to Henry Adams, 22 February, 1905, in Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Quoted by permission of James's literary executors, Paul R. Reynolds, Inc. Reference to Adams as ‘philosophic father’ was in a letter from Adams's home, 13 January, 1905, to Mary C. Jones (Sayre, Robert E., The Examined Self (Princeton, 1964), p. 185)Google Scholar.

page 217 note 1 France, Wilmer Cave, ‘Mr Henry James as a Lecturer’, The Bookman, 21 (03 1905), 71Google Scholar; Saturday Evening Post, 177 (11 03 1905), 12Google Scholar.

page 217 note 2 The Critic, 46 (01 1905), 20Google Scholar.

page 217 note 3 Literary Digest, 30 (4 03 1905), 314Google Scholar, quoting Gertrude Atherton in Argonaut of 6 February.

page 218 note 1 World's Work, 9 (01 1905), 5766Google Scholar; Literary Digest, 30 (4 02 1905), 185Google Scholar; The Critic, 46 (04 1905), 299Google ScholarPubMed; to Mrs Chanler, 8 February, 1905, Cater, p. 560.

page 218 note 2 Low, A. Maurice, in The Annual Register: A Review of Public Events at Home and Abroad for the Year 1905 (London, 1906), p. 442Google Scholar.

page 218 note 3 The party was widely publicized; a brief and colourful account is in Kaplan, Justin, Mr Clemens and Mark Twain (New York, 1966), p. 373Google Scholar.

page 218 note 4 On Howells, , Literary Digest, 31 (12 08 1905), 209Google Scholar; on Wendell, and Whitman, , The Outlook, 30 (15 07 1905), p. 688Google Scholar.

page 219 note 1 Holt, Henry, ‘The commercialization of literature’, Atlantic Monthly, 96 (11 1905), 600Google Scholar; New York Evening Post quoted in Literary Digest, 31 (23 12 1905), 950Google Scholar; Adams, , ‘Reading in college’, The Harvard Magazine, 3 (10 1857), 314, 316Google Scholar.

page 219 note 2 The Critic, 47 (11 1905), 473Google ScholarPubMed; Yeats, , ‘America and the arts’, Metropolitan Magazine, 22 (04 1905), 5354Google Scholar; Education, p. 341.

page 220 note 1 Unpublished letter of 9 May 1905, quoted by permission of the Adams Manuscript Trust and of Mr David Jonah, John Hay Library of Brown University.

page 221 note 1 Cater, pp. 572, 574.

page 221 note 2 Letters (1892–1918), p. 451 n.; Beringause, Arthur F., Brooks Adams: A Biography (New York, 1955), p. 263Google Scholar; Cater, p. 574; Toklas, Alice B., What Is Remembered (New York, 1963), p. 18Google Scholar; Letters, pp. 437, 458, 453.

page 222 note 1 Bradley, A. C., Shakespearean Tragedy, 2nd ed. (London, 1905), pp. 147, 91, 107, 114Google Scholar; Education, pp. 4, 52.

page 222 note 2 Letters (1892–1918), pp. 485–6.

page 223 note 1 Education, p. 505.

page 223 note 2 Mumford, Lewis, ‘Apology to Henry Adams’, Virginia Quarterly Review, 38 (Spring 1962), 197Google Scholar, quoting Letters, p. 460.