From
this tiny shoal in a swift-moving stream among the stars, one can imagine the
historian Henry Adams musing that history is brief, empire briefer, and the
bellicosity of nations of minor moment. At a less distant perspective, one can,
as well, recall George W. Bush outlining the threat of Hussein’s
Iraq
to
Western Civilization and the presumptive choice of preemption and war that he
then embarked upon. Henry Adams and George W. Bush survey their worlds from the
beginning of their respective centuries. This is a brief rumination of
distinctions that arise in a parallax of their views.
John Quincy Adams and George W. Bush share a pair of peculiarities that of
all our Presidents they alone possess. Each
succeeded their fathers to the highest office in the land.
Each, as well, was elected to the Presidency with fewer popular votes
than the opponent they defeated. The
Adams
election was decided against Andrew Jackson in the House of Representatives. The
Bush election was decided against Al Gore by political faction in the Supreme
Court of the
United States
.
Henry
Adams was the grandson of President John Quincy Adams and the great grandson of
the nation’s 2nd President, John Adams. George W. Bush was the son
of President George Herbert Walker Bush and the grandson of Senator Prescott
Bush. Both men assumed that they, as well, would be heir to national office. It
seemed the natural course for the sons and scions of Senators and Presidents.
The Education of Henry Adams won
the Pulitzer Prize in the year of the author’s death, 1918. His
“education” was predicated on an ideal enlightenment that was always just
out of reach; the more the scion tried to overtake it the more distantly the
image appeared to withdraw.
Early in the 20th century he would write:
America
was
posing as the champion of order and legitimacy…
no one in
Washington
was
fitted for his duties… The only defense of the system was that, as the
Government did nothing well, it had best do nothing … The few people who
thought they knew something were more in error than those who knew nothing.
Early in the 21st
century we find little has changed. Like a Yankee Socrates,
Adams
was
forever lamenting that he knew nothing and was not likely to ever know more:
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
most effective for State purposes… One began at last to see that a great many
impressions were needed to make a very little education …. How many would turn
out to be wrong, or whether any would turn out to be right was ultimate
wisdom… he asked only a pretext for throwing all education to the East wind.
The
charm of the book is in an erudition which its third person narrator finds
impossible to disguise. Before he entered into his chosen vocation he was
engaged as a diplomatic assistant to his father during the elder Adam’s tenure
as Minister to Great Britain. Few would argue that diplomacy is Bush’s
strongest suit. He has squandered a
worldwide empathy and replaced it with a seething bitterness over America’s
adventures along the Tigris and Euphrates.
Henry
Adams was America’s great cosmopolitan. He traveled throughout the world and
was no stranger to the extensive blossoming and expansion of his own
country. In an early monogram on Captain John Smith he famously debunked the
romance and myth of Smith’s reported rescue by Pocahontas. He later chronicled
the History of the United States through monumental volumes on the
administrations of Jefferson and Madison. He was an intimate in salons of power
in Europe and Washington. As visitor, friend and confident he was the counsel of
successive administrations from his childhood until his death. Along with his
political histories he wrote extensively on Gothic architecture.
His idea of Paradise was motoring through France to Chartres or Mont St.
Michel.
Adams enjoyed the friendship of scientists, authors and inventors and had
a discerning eye for character. A
hundred years ago he reflected on the degree of its presence in the son of a
great Southern leader:
He was simple beyond analysis; so simple that even the simple
New England student could not realize him. No one knew enough to know how
ignorant he was; how childlike; how helpless before the relative complexity of a
school. As an animal the Southerner
seemed to have every advantage, but even as an animal he steadily lost ground.
He was not a scholar; he had no intellectual training; he could not analyze an
idea.
The
classmate of which Adams spoke was Ronald Lee. Adams knew him a few years before
Ronald's father, General Robert E. Lee, would lead battles from which many of
their fellow students would not return. A
sterling character in a father does not, of necessity, produce one in the child.
Speaking
of Lee's son, Adams reports that if he:
…brooded
a few days over an imaginary grief and substantial whiskey, none of his Northern
friends could be sure that he might not be waiting, round the corner with a
knife or pistol …
In
September of 2002 President Bush confessed to a congregation of clergy:
You know I had a drinking problem. Right now I should be in a
bar in Texas, not the Oval Office. There is only one reason that I am in the
Oval Office and not in a bar. I found faith. I found God.
… he had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with
evil forces to be abolished … that duty implied not only resistance to evil,
but hatred of it … whether boy or man in his long struggle with a stingy or
hostile universe, [he] had learned also to love the pleasure of hating: his joys
were few.
History
will show Saddam Hussein to have been an extension of America’s own reach into
the oilfields and politics of the Middle East.
Historian Adams reflected on Victoria’s reach and empire: “Rome was
actual; it was England; it was going to be America.”
Adam’s is caustically
sympathetic:
… as long as he could argue that his opponents were wicked he could join
in robbing and killing them without question.
Education insisted on finding a moral foundation for robbery. He could
hope to begin life in the character of no animal more moral than a monkey unless
he could satisfy himself [as to] when and why robbery and murder were a virtue
and duty.
The “Axis of Evil” is at
the crossroads of any despotism too psychically buried to be recognized by the
imagination. I leave to the reader the determination of whom the world presently
believes more likely to be lurking round the corner with a knife or pistol.
