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The Book of the Week is “The Last American Aristocrat, The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams” by David S. Brown, published in 2020. This hodgepodge of a volume described the subject’s life and times.
In the Boston, MA area, Henry Adams was born in 1837 into a politically powerful, wealthy family. They were in the Whig party, which was anti-slavery. He graduated Harvard in 1858. In the 1870’s, he taught a class on the origins– an evolution over the course of centuries– of the legal systems in England and Germany, passed through generations via Anglo-Saxons.
Adams published his students’ writings, which were speculations. Since Adams was a major influencer in his place and time, such “history” was later published in textbooks. Like a game of “telephone” from one generation of students to the next, history becomes legendary. There’s no way to tease apart the myths from the truth.
In his scholarly lifetime, Adams’s cynicism about politics reached a crescendo by the 1890’s, when he believed there could never be honest government because it was exploited by the following parties (including but not limited to): Congressional movers, Wall Street shakers, bankers, robber barons, Irish, English, Germans, clerics, Jews, socialists and anarchists.
The Anti-American Imperialist League was formed in 1898 amid Theodore Roosevelt’s propaganda campaign to help Cuba gain its independence from Spain (a veiled way of taking a swipe at Spain’s empire). The group argued that America would be hypocritical if it took over the Philippines, given that the likes of the “Founding Fathers” fought off colonial-ruler England to gain its own independence.
Read the book to learn much more about Adams’s life, and how his teachings, writings and lectures inspired other Progressive activists in the generation after his death.