Democracy An American Novel

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Democracy An American Novel

by Henry Adams

First published anonymously, March 1880, and soon in various
unauthorized editions. It wasn't until the 1925 edition that Adams
was listed as author. Henry Adams remarked (ironically as usual),
"The wholesale piracy of Democracy was the single real triumph
of my life."--it was very popular, as readers tried to guess who the
author was and who the characters really were. Chapters XII and
XIII were originally misnumbered.

Chapter I

FOR reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs.
Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington. She was
in excellent health, but she said that the climate would do her
good. In New York she had troops of friends, but she suddenly
became eager to see again the very small number of those who
lived on the Potomac. It was only to her closest intimates that she
honestly acknowledged herself to be tortured by ennui. Since her
husband's death, five years before, she had lost her taste for New
York society; she had felt no interest in the price of stocks, and
very little in the men who dealt in them; she had become serious.
What was it all worth, this wilderness of men and women as
monotonous as the brown stone houses they lived in? In her
despair she had resorted to desperate measures. She had read
philosophy in the original German, and the more she read, the
more she was disheartened that so much culture should lead to
nothing--nothing.

After talking of Herbert Spencer for an entire evening with a very
literary transcendental commission-merchant, she could not see
that her time had been better employed than when in former days
she had passed it in flirting with a very agreeable young
stock-broker; indeed, there was an evident proof to the contrary,
for the flirtation might lead to something--had, in fact, led to
marriage; while the philosophy could lead to nothing, unless it
were perhaps to another evening of the same kind, because
transcendental philosophers are mostly elderly men, usually
married, and, when engaged in business, somewhat apt to be
sleepy towards evening. Nevertheless Mrs. Lee did her best to turn
her study to practical use. She plunged into philanthropy, visited
prisons, inspected hospitals, read the literature of pauperism and
crime, saturated herself with the statistics of vice, until her mind
had nearly lost sight of virtue. At last it rose in rebellion against
her, and she came to the limit of her strength. This path, too,
seemed to lead nowhere. She declared that she had lost the sense
of duty, and that, so far as concerned her, all the paupers and
criminals in New York might henceforward rise in their majesty
and manage every railway on the continent. Why should she care?
What was the city to her? She could find nothing in it that seemed
to demand salvation. What gave peculiar sanctity to numbers?
Why were a million people, who all resembled each other, any way
more interesting than one person? What aspiration could she help
to put into the mind of this great million-armed monster that
would make it worth her love or respect? Religion? A thousand
powerful churches were doing their best, and she could see no
chance for a new faith of which she was to be the inspired prophet.
Ambition? High popular ideals? Passion for whatever is lofty and
pure? The very words irritated her. Was she not herself devoured
by ambition, and was she not now eating her heart out because she
could find no one object worth a sacrifice?

Was it ambition--real ambition--or was it mere restlessness that
made Mrs. Lightfoot Lee so bitter against New York and
Philadelphia, Baltimore and Boston, American life in general and
all life in particular? What did she want? Not social position, for
she herself was an eminently respectable Philadelphian by birth;
her father a famous clergyman; and her husband had been equally
irreproachable, a descendant of one branch of the Virginia Lees,
which had drifted to New York in search of fortune, and had found
it, or enough of it to keep the young man there. His widow had her
own place in society which no one disputed. Though not brighter
than her neighbours, the world persisted in classing her among
clever women; she had wealth, or at least enough of itto give her
all that money can give by way of pleasure to a sensible woman in
an American city; she had her house and her carriage; she dressed
well; her table was good, and her furniture was never allowed to
fall behind the latest standard of decorative art. She had travelled
in Europe, and after several visits, covering some years of time,
had retumed home, carrying in one hand, as it were, a green-grey
landscape, a remarkably pleasing specimen of Corot, and in the
other some bales of Persian and Syrian rugs and embroideries,
Japanese bronzes and porcelain. With this she declared Europe to
be exhausted, and she frankly avowed that she was American to
the tips of her fingers; she neither knew nor greatly cared whether
America or Europe were best to live in; she had no violent love for
either, and she had no objection to abusing both; but she meant to
get all that American life had to offer, good or bad, and to drink it
down to the dregs, fully determined that whatever there was in it
she would have, and that whatever could be made out of it she
would manufacture. "I know," said she, "that America produces
petroleum and pigs; I have seen both on the steamers; and I am
told it produces silver and gold. There is choice enough for any
woman."

Yet, as has been already said, Mrs. Lee's first experience was not a
success. She soon declared that New York might represent the
petroleum or the pigs, but the gold of life was not to be discovered
there by her eyes.

Not but that there was variety enough; a variety of people,
occupations, aims, and thoughts; but that all these, after growing to
a certain height, stopped short. They found nothing to hold them
up. She knew, more or less intimately, a dozen men whose
fortunes ranged between one million and forty millions. What did
they do with their money? What could they do with it that was
different from what other men did? After all, it is absurd to spend
more money than is enough to satisfy all one's wants; it is vulgar to
live in two houses in the same street, and to drive six horses
abreast. Yet, after setting aside a certain income sufficient for all
one's wants, what was to be done with the rest? To let it
accumulate was to own one's failure; Mrs. Lee's great grievance
was that it did accumulate, without changing or improving the
quality of its owners. To spend it in charity and public works was
doubtless praiseworthy, but was it wise? Mrs. Lee had read enough
political economy and pauper reports to be nearly convinced that
public work should be public duty, and that great benefactions do
harm as well as good.

And even supposing it spent on these objects, how could it do
more than increase and perpetuate that same kind of human nature
which was her great grievance? Her New York friends could not
meet this question except by falling back upon their native
commonplaces, which she recklessly trampled upon, averring that,
much as she admired the genius of the famous traveller, Mr.
Gulliver, she never had been able, since she became a widow, to
accept the Brobdingnagian doctrine that he who made two blades
of grass grow where only one grew before deserved better of
mankind than the whole race of politicians. She would not find
fault with the philosopher had he required that the grass should be
of an improved quality; "but," said she, "I cannot honestly pretend
that I should be pleased to see two New York men where I now see
one; the idea is too ridiculous; more than one and a half would be
fatal to me."

Then came her Boston friends, who suggested that higher
education was precisely what she wanted; she should throw herself
into a crusade for universities and art-schools. Mrs. Lee turned
upon them with a sweet smile; "Do you know," said she, "that we
have in New York already the richest university in America, and
that its only trouble has always been that it can get no scholars
even by paying for them? Do you want me to go out into the streets
and waylay boys? If the heathen refuse to be converted, can you
give me power over the stake and the sword to compel them to
come in? And suppose you can? Suppose I march all the boys in
Fifth Avenue down to the university and have them all properly
taught Greek and Latin, English literature, ethics, and German
philosophy. What then? You do it in Boston. Now tell me honestly
what comes of it. I suppose you have there a brilliant society;
numbers of poets, scholars, philosophers, statesmen, all up and
down Beacon Street. Your evenings must be sparkling. Your press
must scintillate. How is it that we New Yorkers never hear of it?
We don't go much into your society; but when we do, it doesn't
seem so very much better than our own. You are just like the rest
of us. You grow six inches high, and then you stop. Why will not
somebody grow to be a tree and cast a shadow?"

The average member of New York society, although not unused to
this contemptuous kind of treatment from his leaders, retaliated in
his blind, common-sense way. "What does the woman want?" he
said. "Is her head turned with the Tulieries and Marlborough
House? Does she think herself made for a throne? Why does she
not lecture for women's rights? Why not go on the stage? If she
cannot be contented like other people, what need is there for
abusing us just because she feels herself no taller than we are?
What does she expect to get from her sharp tongue? What does she
know, any way?"

Mrs. Lee certainly knew very little. She had read voraciously and
promiscuously one subject after another. Ruskin and Taine had
danced merrily through her mind, hand in hand with Darwin and
Stuart Mill, Gustave Droz and Algernon Swinburne. She had even
laboured over the literature of her own country. She was perhaps,
the only woman in New York who knew something of American
history. Certainly she could not have repeated the list of Presidents
in their order, but she knew that the Constitution divided the
goverument into Executive, Legislative, and Judiciary; she was
aware that the President, the Speaker, and the Chief Justice were
important personages, and instinctively she wondered whether they
might not solve her problem; whether they were the shade trees
which she saw in her dreams.

Here, then, was the explanation of her restlessness, discontent,
ambition,--call it what you will. It was the feeling of a passenger
on an ocean steamer whose mind will not give him rest until he
has been in the engine-room and talked with the engineer. She
wanted to see with her own eyes the action of primary forces; to
touch with her own hand the massive machinery of society; to
measure with her own mind the capacity of the motive power. She
was bent upon getting to the heart of the great American mystery
of democracy and government. She cared little where her pursuit
might lead her, for she put no extravagant value upon life, having
already, as she said, exhausted at least two lives, and being fairly
hardened to insensibility in the process. "To lose a husband and a
baby," said she, "and keep one's courage and reason, one must
become very hard or very soft. I am now pure steel. You may beat
my heart with a trip-hammer and it will beat the trip-hammer back
again."

Perhaps after exhausting the political world she might try again
elsewhere; she did not pretend to say where she might then go, or
what she should do; but at present she meant to see what
amusement there might be in politics.

Her friends asked what kind of amusement she expected to find
among the illiterate swarm of ordinary people who in Washington
represented constituencies so dreary that in comparison New York
was a New Jerusalem, and Broad Street a grove of Academe. She
replied that if Washington society were so bad as this, she should
have gained all she wanted, for it would be a pleasure to
return,--precisely the feeling she longed for. In her own mind,
however, she frowned on the idea of seeking for men. What she
wished to see, she thought, was the clash of interests, the interests
of forty millions of people and a whole continent, centering at
Washington; guided, restrained, controlled, or unrestrained and
uncontrollable, by men of ordinary mould; the tremendous forces
of government, and the machinery of society, at work. What she
wanted, was POWER.

Perhaps the force of the engine was a little confused in her mind
with that of the engineer, the power with the men who wielded it.
Perhaps the human interest of politics was after all what really
attracted her, and, however strongly she might deny it, the passion
for exercising power, for its own sake, might dazzle and mislead a
woman who had exhausted all the ordinary feminine resources.
But why speculate about her motives? The stage was before her,
the curtain was rising, the actors were ready to enter; she had only
to go quietly on among the supernumeraries and see how the play
was acted and the stage effects were produced; how the great
tragedians mouthed, and the stage-manager swore.

Chapter II

ON the first of December, Mrs. Lee took the train for Washington,
and before five o'clock that evening she was entering her newly
hired house on Lafayette Square. She shrugged her shoulders with
a mingled expression of contempt and grief at the curious
barbarism of the curtains and the wall-papers, and her next two
days were occupied with a life-and-death struggle to get the
mastery over her surroundings. In this awful contest the interior of
the doomed house suffered as though a demon were in it; not a
chair, not a mirror, not a carpet, was left untouched, and in the
midst of the worst confusion the new mistress sat, calm as the
statue of Andrew Jackson in the square under her eyes, and issued
her orders with as much decision as that hero had ever shown.
Towards the close of the second day, victory crowned her
forehead. A new era, a nobler conception of duty and existence,
had dawned upon that benighted and heathen residence. The
wealth of Syria and Persia was poured out upon the melancholy
Wilton carpets; embroidered comets and woven gold from Japan
and Teheran depended from and covered over every sad
stuff-curtain; a strange medley of sketches, paintings, fans,
embroideries, and porcelain was hung, nailed, pinned, or stuck
against the wall; finally the domestic altarpiece, the mystical Corot
landscape, was hoisted to its place over the parlour fire, and then
all was over. The setting sun streamed softly in at the windows,
and peace reigned in that redeemed house and in the heart of its
mistress.

"I think it will do now, Sybil," said she, surveying the scene.

"It must," replied Sybil. "You haven't a plate or a fan or coloured
scarf left. You must send out and buy some of these old
negro-women's bandannas if you are going to cover anything else.
What is the use? Do you suppose any human being in Washington
will like it? They will think you demented."

"There is such a thing as self-respect," replied her sister, calmly.

Sybil--Miss Sybil Ross--was Madeleine Lee's sister. The keenest
psychologist could not have detected a single feature quality which
they had in common, and for that reason they were devoted
friends. Madeleine was thirty, Sybil twenty-four. Madeleine was
indescribable; Sybil was transparent. Madeleine was of medium
height with a graceful figure, a well-set head, and enough
golden-brown hair to frame a face full of varying expression. Her
eyes were never for two consecutive hours of the same shade, but
were more often blue than grey. People who envied her smile said
that she cultivated a sense of humour in order to show her teeth.
Perhaps they were right; but there was no doubt that her habit of
talking with gesticulation would never have grown upon her unless
she had known that her hands were not only beautiful but
expressive. She dressed as skilfully as New York women do, but in
growing older she began to show symptoms of dangerous
unconventionality. She had been heard to express a low opinion of
her countrywomen who blindly fell down before the golden calf of
Mr. Worth, and she had even fought a battle of great severity,
while it lasted, with one of her best-dressed friends who had been
invited--and had gone--to Mr. Worth's afternoon tea-parties. The
secret was that Mrs. Lee had artistic tendencies, and unless they
were checked in time, there was no knowing what might be the
consequence. But as yet they had done no harm; indeed, they
rather helped to give her that sort of atmosphere which belongs
only to certain women; as indescribable as the afterglow; as
impalpable as an Indian summer mist; and non-existent except to
people who feel rather than reason. Sybil had none of it. The
imagination gave up all attempts to soar where she came. A more
straightforward, downright, gay, sympathetic, shallow,
warm-hearted, sternly practical young woman has rarely touched
this planet. Her mind had room for neither grave-stones nor
guide-books; she could not have lived in the past or the future if
she had spent her days in churches and her nights in tombs. "She
was not clever, like Madeleine, thank Heaven." Madeleine was not
an orthodox member of the church; sermons bored her, and
clergymen never failed to irritate every nerve in her excitable
system. Sybil was a simple and devout worshipper at the ritualistic
altar; she bent humbly before the Paulist fathers. When she went to
a ball she always had the best partner in the room, and took it as a
matter of course; but then, she always prayed for one; somehow it
strengthened her faith. Her sister took care never to laugh at her on
this score, or to shock her religious opinions. "Time enough," said
she, "for her to forget religion when religion fails her." As for
regular attendance at church, Madeleine was able to reconcile their
habits without trouble. She herself had not entered a church for
years; she said it gave her unchristian feelings; but Sybil had a
voice of excellent quality, well trained and cultivated: Madeleine
insisted that she should sing in the choir, and by this little
manoeuvre, the divergence of their paths was made less evident.
Madeleine did not sing, and therefore could not go to church with
Sybil. This outrageous fallacy seemed perfectly to answer its
purpose, and Sybil accepted it, in good faith, as a fair working
principle which explained itself.

Madeleine was sober in her tastes. She wasted no money. She
made no display.

She walked rather than drove, and wore neither diamonds nor
brocades. But the general impression she made was nevertheless
one of luxury. On the other hand, her sister had her dresses from
Paris, and wore them and her ornaments according to all the
formulas; she was good-naturedly correct, and bent her round
white shoulders to whatever burden the Parisian autocrat chose to
put upon them. Madeleine never interfered, and always paid the
bills.

Before they had been ten days in Washington, they fell gently into
their place and were carried along without an effort on the stream
of social life.

Society was kind; there was no reason for its being otherwise. Mrs.
Lee and her sister had no enemies, held no offices, and did their
best to make themselves popular. Sybil had not passed summers at
Newport and winters in New York in vain; and neither her face nor
her figure, her voice nor her dancing, needed apology. Politics
were not her strong point. She was induced to go once to the
Capitol and to sit ten minutes in the gallery of the Senate. No one
ever knew what her impressions were; with feminine tact she
managed not to betray herself But, in truth, her notion of
legislative bodies was vague, floating between her experience at
church and at the opera, so that the idea of a performance of some
kind was never out of her head. To her mind the Senate was a
place where people went to recite speeches, and she naively
assumed that the speeches were useful and had a purpose, but as
they did not interest her she never went again. This is a very
common conception of Congress; many Congressmen share it.

Her sister was more patient and bolder. She went to the Capitol
nearly every day for at least two weeks. At the end of that time her
interest began to flag, and she thought it better to read the debates
every morning in the Congressional Record. Finding this a
laborious and not always an instructive task, she began to skip the
dull parts; and in the absence of any exciting question, she at last
resigned herself to skipping the whole. Nevertheless she still had
energy to visit the Senate gallery occasionally when she was told
that a splendid orator was about to speak on a question of deep
interest to his country. She listened with a little disposition to
admire, if she could; and, whenever she could, she did admire. She
said nothing, but she listened sharply. She wanted to learn how the
machinery of government worked, and what was the quality of the
men who controlled it. One by one, she passed them through her
crucibles, and tested them by acids and by fire.

A few survived her tests and came out alive, though more or less
disfigured, where she had found impurities. Of the whole number,
only one retained under this process enough character to interest
her.

In these early visits to Congress, Mrs. Lee sometimes had the
company of John Carrington, a Washington lawyer about forty
years old, who, by virtue of being a Virginian and a distant
connection of her husband, called himself a cousin, and took a
tone of semi-intimacy, which Mrs. Lee accepted because
Carrington was a man whom she liked, and because he was one
whom life had treated hardly. He was of that unfortunate
generation in the south which began existence with civil war, and
he was perhaps the more unfortunate because, like most educated
Virginians of the old Washington school, he had seen from the
first that, whatever issue the war took, Virginia and he must be
ruined. At twenty-two he had gone into the rebel army as a private
and carried his musket modestly through a campaign or two, after
which he slowly rose to the rank of senior captain in his regiment,
and closed his services on the staff of a major-general, always
doing scrupulously enough what he conceived to be his duty, and
never doing it with enthusiasm. When the rebel armies
surrendered, he rode away to his family plantation--not a difficult
thing to do, for it was only a few miles from Appomatox--and at
once began to study law; then, leaving his mother and sisters to do
what they could with the worn-out plantation, he began the
practice of law in Washington, hoping thus to support himself and
them. He had succeeded after a fashion, and for the first time the
future seemed not absolutely dark. Mrs. Lee's house was an oasis
to him, and he found himself, to his surprise, aimost gay in her
company. The gaiety was of a very qulet kind, and Sybil, while
friendly with him, averred that he was certainly dull; but this
dulness had a fascination for Madeleine, who, having tasted many
more kinds of the wine of life than Sybil, had learned to value
certain delicacies of age and flavour that were lost upon younger
and coarser palates. He talked rather slowly and almost with effort,
but he had something of the dignity--others call it stiffness--of the
old Virginia school, and twenty years of constant responsibility
and deferred hope had added a touch of care that bordered closely
on sadness. His great attraction was that he never talked or seemed
to think of himself. Mrs. Lee trusted in him by instinct. "He is a
type!" said she; "he is my idea of George Washington at thirty."

One morning in December, Carrington entered Mrs. Lee's parlour
towards noon, and asked if she cared to visit the Capitol.

"You will have a chance of hearing to-day what may be the last
great speech of our greatest statesman," said he; "you should
come."

"A splendid sample of our na-tive raw material, sir?" asked she,
fresh from a reading of Dickens, and his famous picture of
American statesmanship.

"Precisely so," said Carrington; "the Prairie Giant of Peonia, the
Favourite Son of Illinois; the man who came within three votes of
getting the party nomination for the Presidency last spring, and
was only defeated because ten small intriguers are sharper than
one big one. The Honourable Silas P.

Ratcliffe, Senator from Illinois; he will be run for the Presidency
yet."

"What does the P. stand for?" asked Sybil.

"I don't remember ever to have heard his middle name," said
Carrington.

"Perhaps it is Peonia or Prairie; I can't say."

"He is the man whose appearance struck me so much when we
were in the Senate last week, is he not? A great, ponderous man,
over six feet high, very senatorial and dignified, with a large head
and rather good features?" inquired Mrs. Lee.

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