Henry Adams and the American Experiment

"Henry Adams and the American Experiment," with a new introduction by author David R. Contosta, was initially composed at a time when the United States had seemingly lost its moorings. There was the needless and apparently endless war in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy just five years after the killing of Robert's brother John F. Kennedy, and the Watergate scandals of the Nixon presidency.

A century before, Henry Adams (1838-1918), the direct descendant of founding father and second President John Adams as well as sixth President John Quincy Adams, had grave doubts about his nation's experiment. For him, and many others, the Civil War put into question the claim that American democracy could settle any dispute rationally and peacefully. Rampant political corruption in the era after the Civil War only confirmed Henry's worries about the country. Had the United States really managed to escape from the common failings of humanity?

Adams believed that rapid, and in many ways bewildering change, around 1900 boded ill for the century ahead. As he wrote in his unique autobiography, "The Education of Henry Adams," the world had entered "a far vaster universe, where all the old roads ran about in every direction, overrunning, dividing, subdividing, stopping abruptly, vanishing slowly, with side paths that led nowhere, and sequences that could not be proved."

In the early twenty-first century, the old, familiar roads seemed to be disappearing even more rapidly and running about in ever more perplexing ways. Fears over a vanishing world, along with vast uncertainties about the future, became a main reason why millions of Americas saw Donald Trump as a savior and elected him president in 2016. Some of his most devoted followers would go on to launch a violent attack on the US Capital on January 6, 2021, which nearly extinguished the American political experiment.

Henry Adams seems more relevant than ever.