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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2022
In the history of the Gilded Age and its geopolitics, Henry Adams has a reputation for being an imperialist. While not universally subscribed to by historians, this characterization has waxed sufficiently as to eclipse Adams’s more complex, even contradictory, record on the American Empire. The evidence I will marshal will not prove that Adams was actually an anti-imperialist, but it will reveal the protean nature of Adams’s views of the American Empire. To get a grip on this relatively unexamined aspect of Adams’s thought, I will analyze his correspondence during the last decade of the nineteenth century in which he criticized the extension of American power across the Pacific, particularly in regard to its political economy, religion, and civilization. With the onset of the American Filipino War, Adams raged at the news of American atrocities. This paper shows that Adams’s outrage was part of an incipient civilizational ideology, one that neither materialized into an attachment to the anti-imperialist cause nor accepted the vaunted superiority of the West. Even though Adams possessed no principle to guide his thinking on the empire, his pessimistic evaluation of the extension of American power is enough to reconsider his reputation as an imperialist.
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23 Henry Adams to Clarence King, Apr. 22, 1891 in Letters, Levenson et al., 3:468.
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26 This is strikingly true of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). According to a recent study, the ABCFM stood in judgment of the Hawaiian society and was “convinced that profound social change was imperative.” Linnekin, Jocelyn, “New Political Orders” in Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders , eds. Denoon, Donald, Firth, Stewart, Linnekin, Jocelyn, Meleisea, Malama, and Nero, Karen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 194 Google Scholar.
27 Henry Adams to Anna Cabot Mills Lodge, Oct. 21, 1890 in Letters, Levenson et al., 3:306. Both Adams and John La Farge recognized the hybrid nature of Samoan religion: technically, it was neither purely Samoan nor Anglo-Saxon, but a mixture of the two. For a discussion of syncretism, see La Farge, John, Reminiscences of the South Seas (New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1912), 129–30Google Scholar.
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36 See Cirillo, Vincent J., “Fever and Reform: The Typhoid Epidemic in the Spanish-American War,” Journal of the History of Medicine and the Allied Sciences 55 (October 2000): 363–97CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
37 Henry Adams to John Hay, May 26, 1898 in The Letters of Henry Adams, 1892–1899, vol. 4, eds. J.C. Levenson, Ernest Samuels, Charles Vandersee, and Viola Hopkins Winner (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988), 594.
38 Quoted in Healy, US Expansionism, 33.
39 Henry Adams to Worthington Chauncey Ford, Nov. 26, 1898 in Letters, Levenson et al., 4:624.
40 Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, Jan. 15, 1899 in Letters, Levenson et al., 4:661.
41 Storey, Moorfield and Codman, Julian, Secretary Root’s Record: ‘Marked Severities’ in Philippine Warfare: An Analysis of the Law and Facts Bearing on the Action and Utterances of President Roosevelt and Secretary Root (Boston: George H. Ellis Co., 1902), 25 Google Scholar.
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44 May, Glenn Anthony, “Was the Philippine-American War a ‘Total War’?” in Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–1914 , eds. Manfred F. Boemeke, , Chickering, Roger, and Forster, Stig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 446 Google Scholar.
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55 Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, Nov. 29, 1898 in Letters, Levenson et al., 4:627.
56 Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, Feb. 5, 1898 in Letters, Levenson et al., 4:680.
57 Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, Dec. 4, 1898 in Letters, Levenson et al., 4:630.
58 That platform regarded the occupation of the Philippines as the denial of American liberty. See Cullinane, Michael Patrick, Liberty and American Anti-Imperialism, 1898–1909 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Many anti-imperialists also worried that once begun, territorial expansion would propel the nation into other adventures and damage its republican ideals. See Tompkins, E. Berkeley, Anti-Imperialism in the United States: The Great Debate, 1890–1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970), passimCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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61 Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, Jan. 22, 1899 in Letters, Levenson et al., 4:670.
62 Henry Adams to Brooks Adams, Feb. 7, 1901 in Letters, Levenson et al., 5:194. A few days later, Adams reported to Elizabeth Cameron that he had become an “anti-imperialist.” See Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, Feb. 11, 1901 in Letters, Levenson et al., 5:198.
63 McCormick, Thomas J., China Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893–1901 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), 107 Google Scholar. McCormick’s interpretation follows that of Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1963). A more recent elaboration of this school of thought can be found in Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000),Google Scholar chapter one.
64 Schirmer, Daniel B., Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Co., 1972), 45–63 Google Scholar. Disagreeing with Schirmer is Welch, Response to Imperialism, 84ff.
65 Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, Jan. 22, 1899 in Letters, Levenson et al., 4:670.
66 See Brown, Last American Aristocrat, 340.
67 See John Hay to Henry Adams, May 27, 1898 in Letters of John Hay and Extracts from Diary, vol. 3, ed. Clara S. Hay (Washington, DC, 1908), 126, Rare Books & Special Collections, University of Notre Dame.
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69 Quoted in O’Toole, Five of Hearts, 318 (italics added). The Open Door to China appears to have been the subject of ongoing friendly disputation between Hays and Adams: In the spring of 1899, the secretary of state wrote the historian: “You are wrong, as usual, about the open door. It is wider than ever for us.” John Hay to Henry Adams, May 18, 1899 in John Hay Papers, 1783–1999, reel no. 3, Library of Congress. Hay was genuinely frustrated with how the American press covered the Open Door: He complained to Adams that the policy was regarded as too imperial for some but not imperial enough for others. See John Hay to Henry Adams, Sept. 25, 1900 in John Hay Papers, reel no. 3, Library of Congress.
70 A different type of civilizational ideology can be found in Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1896). Among secondary sources, see Hoganson, Kristin, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; An excellent source on the perils of attributing to writers a theory they do not possess can be found in Skinner, Quentin, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8:1 (1969): 3–53 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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76 Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, July 16, 1905 in Letters, Levenson et al., 5:692.
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79 I have benefited from Orr’s commentary in “I measured her as they did with pigs,” 274ff.
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84 Quoted in Kinzer, Stephen, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2017), 82 Google Scholar.
85 See Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, 50–51.
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91 Henry Adams to John Hay, Nov. 2, 1901 in Letters, Levenson et al., 5:304 (italics added).
92 Insight into Adams’s “antipathy to war” can be found in Carter, Stephen D., “The Precise Issue: Henry Adams, Global War, and the Role of Force in American History,” The New England Quarterly 88 (December 2015): 555–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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