Henry Adams 2

Thanks to an Elsewhere friend this ignorant person got clued in as to at least a contributing factor in the current obscurity of Henry Adams. So I did some poking around.

The first edition of The Education was a private printing by Adams, circulated among his friends many years earlier than the commercially published edition we know. This first edition contained letter exchanges with various friends, in which they batted ideas concerning Henry Adams's ideas back-and-forth. These letters are filled with anti-semitic observations. The letters are not part of the much later commerical publication of The Education, but painfully anti-semitic text remains within the memoir-contemplation of the author's past, the family's past, the nation's past and how all these pasts worked on him and the national political manueverings.

Mont San Michel and Chartres, studies in the Holy Grail of the medieval European Unity, as one then stomach-churningly must expect, contain a great deal more anti-semitic expression.

As these works are the only ones of Adams's anyone was looking at after his death in 1918, and they were taught in Literature classes, he understandably became less and less acceptable in undergraduate syllabii, particularly after the 1960's. (Not to mention, I will maintain, unreadable to anyone who isn't deeply versed by now in U.S. history -- and probably European history too, when one comes to Henry Adams's MSM and C studies.)

Page thirteen (page 19 in the journal article) in the pdf of "The Real Education of Henry Adams" by Richard A. Samuelson, one of a series of Reconsideration essays in the journal National Affairs, (Spring 2002) is very useful reading for Adams's anti-semitism. I'd quote it but this pdf version doesn't allow for c&p ... some do, this one doesn't.

Which means his historical studies of the Republican and Jacksonian eras of the nation such as his 9 volume history of Jefferson and Madison administrations have been ignored by historians for decades.

Very recently it seems, Henry Adams's work in these eras is receiving attention again. Sean Wilentz, all-round fair-haired historian, commentator on culture and politics, is one of those who has somewhat revived looking at Henry Adams again -- as in his mammoth (2005) Rise of American Democracy, and the equally fair-haired Garry Wills -- as in his (2005) Henry Adams and the Making of America. Both of these fellows are favorite historians consulted by the MSM from the NY Times to NPR. They both are favorites of the New Republic as well. Wilentz hammers Wills's scholarship in the New Republic.

Historians' biases and advocacy pov is not always easy to tease out, but teased out the bias, advocacy, point of view must be by each of us, in order to understand fully what they are telling us. How anyone can think that history is a dull, sleepy profession is hard to understand!