The Education of Henry Adams Today
Or
The Murderous Empire
At a time when the United States of America is revealing itself as an enemy of humanity, remembering those within the American cultural tradition who were critical of the path this country was taking—often foreseeing what was to come—can be of great importance in better understanding what we are experiencing today. And this understanding is fundamental to fueling resistance to the unprecedented destruction caused by the Empire.
Henry Adams belonged to one of the most distinguished families in the United States. He was the great-grandson and grandson of two presidents—John Adams, the first vice president and second president of the United States, and John Quincy Adams, the sixth president, respectively. His father, Charles Francis Adams, served as ambassador to England.
According to David S. Brown, author of the biography The Last American Aristocrat:
“In 1838, the year of Adams’s birth, Sam Houston served as president of the Republic of Texas; the removal of the Cherokee Nation west of the Mississippi gave rise to the anguished expression “Train of Tears” ; Frederick Douglass, carrying the identification papers of a free black seaman, escaped from bondage; and a twenty-year-old Abraham Lincoln spoke on “the perpetuation of our political institutions” before the Springfield, Illinois, Young Men’s Lyceum. Many older American citizens at that time had been subjects of the British Empire; eighty years later, in 1918, the year of Adams’s death, few relics of the early American republic remained. The Ford Motor Company was coming off its biggest year to date, selling an astounding 735,000 automobiles; Babe Ruth smacked eleven home runs for the Boston Red Sox in what proved to be the final season of the dead-ball era; James Joyce’s controversial novel Ulysses began serialization in the American modernist literary magazine Little Review; and Woodrow Wilson, attending the Versailles Peace Conference, became the first U.S. president to travel outside of the Western Hemisphere while in office. Kellogg’s and Coca-Cola, Budweiser and Buick were on the rise.”
Henry Adams witnessed the transformation of the United States from an agricultural nation into an industrial power. He left us a valuable account of those years in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams.
Published in 1918, the year of his death, it was immediately recognized as one of the great biographies written in the United States. The work won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize and was ranked first on a list of the 100 best English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century by the Modern Library.
More than just an autobiography, it is a great work of literature filled with profound and original observations on the world of the nineteenth century. For example: Henry Adams studied in Germany in the late 1850s and early 1860s and wrote the following about the nascent state-sponsored German nationalism he encountered there:
“All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be the most effective for State purposes. The German machine was terribly efficient. Its effect on the children was pathetic.”
Today we know what became of the “terrible efficiency” of the German system.
Above all, Henry Adams’s Education has important things to tell us about the transformations of the United States during its period of expansion, which can help us understand its current period of decline.
Politics in Washington
Henry Adams was closely acquainted with some of the best-known and most important figures in the United States during the 19th and early 20th centuries. He was a friend of Edith Wharton and of the brothers William and Henry James.
Thanks to his family connections, he had access to the corridors of power in the United States; he mingled with presidents and secretaries of state and was able to observe firsthand the workings of American political power. In The Education of Henry Adams, he offers us some very pertinent and revealing insights into the organization of power in Washington. As an abolitionist, he recognized very early on the enormous political influence of the pro-slavery lobby, remarking:
“The Slave power took the place of Stuart kings and Roman popes.”
He also acknowledged that in the U.S.:
“Practical politics consists in ignoring facts…”
The Trump administration ignores the facts in a way that would shock even a pessimist like Henry Adams.
It ignores the reality of climate change and its consequences. According to an article published in the British newspaper The Guardian (1):
“Donald Trump’s huge spending boost for the Pentagon will produce an additional 26 megatons (Mt) of planet-heating gases – on a par with the annual carbon equivalent (CO2e) emissions generated by 68 gas power plants or the entire country of Croatia, new research reveals.
The Pentagon’s 2026 budget – and climate footprint – is set to surge to $1tn thanks to the president’s One Big Beautiful Act, a 17% rise on last year.
Military emissions are closely tied to military spending.
The budget bonanza will push the Pentagon’s total greenhouse emissions to a staggering 178 Mt of CO2e, resulting in an estimated $47bn in economic damages globally, according to new analysis by the Climate and Community Institute (CCI), a US-based research thinktank, shared exclusively with the Guardian.”
A study conducted by the Conflict and Environment Observatory reports:
Militaries are huge energy users whose greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) make a significant contribution to the climate crisis. However, countries do not systematically record and report their military emissions so the real share of this source of emissions remains unclear. The Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS) and Scientists for Global Responsibility estimate that everyday military activity could be responsible for around 5.5% of global emissions, meaning that if the world’s militaries were a country, they would be the fourth largest emitter in the world. Furthermore, as military spending increases and the rest of society decarbonizes, that proportion is set to rise.
Fundamentally, increasing military spending will increase military emissions. Ramping up military production to increase stockpiles is energy-intensive and, while technological advances in lower carbon military technologies remain limited, the current procurement push together with the reliance on older and allegedly more known and thus trusted technologies means that militaries will be locked into fossil-fuel intensive equipment to be used for decades to come. A recent report from the European Defence Agency noted the lack of standardized ‘green’ procurement across EU militaries, with less than 40% of respondents reporting a ‘green’ procurement policy in place; noting that ‘green’ does not necessarily equate to low-carbon in this context. However, it has been found that military expenditure contributes to a rise in emissions even when technological progress with the military sector is taken into account, contributing to the so-called treadmill of destruction effect where the general dynamics of militarization can harm the environment outside of direct impacts. “(2)
Henry Adams very clearly identified what it is in American politics that leads to increasing militarization and ever more wars:
“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds (…).”
The two factions within the U.S. political system known as the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have systematically fostered the hatreds that today drive virtually every action of the U.S. government:
Hatred of Palestinians and of the entire anti-colonial struggle.
Hatred of Russia, China, and Iran.
Hatred of immigrants and African Americans. Hatred of indigenous peoples wherever they may be.
Hatred of Venezuela, Cuba, and all the countries of the Global South that dare to challenge the empire.
Hatred of the planet itself and all its forms of life.
No one today can deny that the United States systematically organizes hatred on a global scale.
The Imposition of Capitalism
Capitalism is not a “natural,” “spontaneous” system, as they would have us believe. It is an imposed system, and Henry Adams recorded the historic moment of this imposition:
“For a hundred years, between 1793 and 1893, the American people had hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and back, between two forces, one simply industrial, the other capitalistic, centralizing, and mechanical. In 1893, the issue came on the single gold standard, and the majority at last declared itself, once for all, in favor of the capitalistic system with all its necessary machinery. All one’s friends, all one’s best citizens, reformers, churches, colleges, educated classes, had joined the banks to force submission to capitalism; a submission long foreseen by the mere law of mass. (…) A capitalistic system had been adopted, and if it were to be run at all, it must be run by capital and by capitalistic methods (…) the whole mechanical consolidation of force (…) created monopolies capable of controlling the new energies that America adored.”
For Henry Adams, “simply industrial force” was not capitalism. For him, only what we would today call financial capitalism was truly capitalism. The conflict between industrial and financial capitalism began very early in U.S. history, and Henry Adams realized that financial capitalism was, in fact, shaping the entire society. He wrote:
“The world, after 1865, became a bankers’ world…”
The current deindustrialization of the United States and Western Europe is a fact, and its roots lie in choices made as far back as the 19th century, as observed by Henry Adams—and it is no coincidence that he was one of the first in the United States to recognize the importance of Karl Marx’s analyses of capitalism. In The Education of Henry Adams, there are several references to Karl Marx, such as this one:
“(…) though he had no idea that Karl Marx was standing there waiting for him, and that sooner or later the process of education would have to deal with Karl Marx much more than with Professor Bowen of Harvard College or his Satanic free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill.”
The Challenge of Russia
Henry Adams’ observations on Russia are highly relevant to our times.
David S. Brown wrote in the book cited above:
“On the questions of war and Empire, Henry took conflicting positions. One can find in his correspondence many and sincere comments sharply critical of American expansion. (…) In other moments, however, the emergence of American power made him proud.
Certain of Britain’s eclipse and doubtful of Germany’s global reach, he identified Russia, with its sprawling population, immense territory, and vast resources, as America’s likely future adversary. As the old imperialism wounded down, he was determined see for himself what fresh menace might follow in its place.”
Henry Adams visited Russia and noted in his autobiography:
“Russia had nothing in common with any ancient or modern world that history knew; she had been the oldest source of all civilization in Europe (…).
Yet Russia was too vast a force to be treated as an object of unconcern (…) and her movement might be the true movement of the future, against the hasty and unsure acceleration of America. “
That Russia might be a source of civilization and that its movement might be the true movement of the future must fill the many scholars and political analysts currently in the service of the Empire with rage and indignation…
However, it was Henry Adams’s experience in London—where he accompanied his father as secretary of the U.S. Embassy—that offers us the most interesting and revealing parallel to our own time.
As already mentioned, Charles Francis Adams, his father, served as ambassador in London during Abraham Lincoln’s presidency and the American Civil War. The British Empire was at its zenith, and the young American republic was severely weakened and facing its most perilous hour.
Lord Palmerston was then Prime Minister of England and Lord John Russell was Foreign Secretary. Although Lord Russell officially advocated a policy of neutrality, he was sympathetic to the Confederates and, according to Henry Adams, intended to take advantage of the war in the former colony to divide the young republic:
“Every act of Russel from April, 1861, to November, 1862, showed the clearest determination to break up the Union. “
According to Adams, Russell is “bent on breaking up the Union as a diminution of a dangerous power”.
A campaign to demonize Abraham Lincoln and the Union was launched in London to legitimize support for the slave-owning Confederate army and bring about the breakup of the Union.
As Henry Adams observed:
“London was altogether beside itself on one point, in special; it created a nightmare of its own, and gave it the shape of Abraham Lincoln. Behind this it placed another demon, if possible more devilish, and called it Mr. Seward. In regard to these two men, English society seemed demented. Defence was useless; explanation was vain; one could only let the passion exhaust itself. One’s best friends were as unreasonable as enemies, for the belief in poor Mr. Lincoln’s brutality and Seward’s ferocity became a dogma of popular faith. “
William H. Seward served as U.S. Secretary of State in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet throughout his entire presidential term.
The British Empire, aware that the young American republic would become a “dangerous power” in the future, attempted to divide it and, to that end, launched a campaign to demonize its president, Abraham Lincoln.
The attempt failed, but the U.S. learned the lesson taught by the British Empire and, in the future—in our time—would use the same procedure to weaken the “dangerous powers,” its adversaries, especially Russia and Iran.
The demonization campaign against Abraham Lincoln was the precursor to the demonization campaign against Vladimir Putin and Ayatollah Khamenei, the “ferocity” of both already being “a dogma of popular faith,” skillfully fueled by the mainstream media.
And just as the British Empire sought to “break up” the Union, the United States sought to “break up” Russia and is now seeking to “break up” Iran. The imperial goal is the same.
Henry Adams observed that “if Mr. Lincoln was not what they said he was – what were they?”
If Vladimir Putin and Ayatollah Khamenei are not what academics, political scientists, lawmakers, and the mainstream media in the service of the Empire claim them to be—then what are they?
Abraham Lincoln, Vladimir Putin, Ayatollah Khamenei—all considered “brutal and ferocious,” all victims of the same demonization campaign by an imperial power that feels threatened and insecure.
Great Britain showed Henry Adams what an empire is capable of.
Nor did the destruction caused by imperial rivalries in the nineteenth century go unnoticed by him:
“Since 1850, massacres had become so common that society scarcely noticed them unless they summed up hundreds of thousands, as in Armenia; wars had been almost continuous (…).”
And Henry Adams also understood where progress driven by the forces of financial capitalism—which he so despised—would lead:
“Was assassination forever to be the last word of progress? (…) The stupendous failure of Christianity tortured history.”
Prophetic words in the wake of the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, along with his daughter-in-law, his granddaughter, and more than a hundred children killed by the explosion of an incendiary missile fired at a school by a state that so proudly boasts of both its technological prowess and its Christianity.
Franklin Frederick