Hay did not comment on these performances, but he was aware of the friction between women and Clarence King. Clara’s mother and sister were afraid of him, and King appeared to have a few trepidations of his own. Hearing a rumor that one of Lafayette Square’s most delightful young women, Emily Beale, was in love with King, Hay asked him what he thought of her. “To see her walk across a room, you would think someone had tilted up a coffin on end and propelled the corpse spasmodically forward,” King replied, effectively closing the subject of Miss Beale. A few weeks later, when she declared herself to King, he vowed to Hay that he would never again call at her family’s house.
In the autumn of 1880 Henry and Clover Adams returned to Washington after spending more than a year in Europe, where Henry had scoured diplomatic archives for a history of the United States during the presidencies of Jefferson and Madison. The Adamses rented a house on the northern border of Lafayette Square, at 1607 H Street, with only Lafayette Park between them and the White House. It was “a solid old pile,” Clover told her father, built around stout chimneys and sheathed in walls fourteen inches thick. The house had six bedrooms, rear porches on all three stories, and, in the words of their delighted new cook, a “powerful large” kitchen.
Henry and Clover stayed at Wormley’s while painters, plasterers, and carpenters renovated their new quarters. By December the Adamses and their four servants were ready to receive the fifteen wagonloads of furnishings they had left in storage. Oriental and Middle Eastern carpets—Bokharas and Baluchistans, Kashmirs and Kurdistans—were unrolled on the floors, and around the drawing room they stationed their dark red, low-slung leather armchairs. Art was everywhere: Japanese vases, Oriental bronzes, porcelain, drawings by Rembrandt and Michelangelo, oils by Turner and Constable. More than forty watercolors hung on the thirteen-foot-high walls of the library, and nearly three dozen prints lined Henry’s study. The indoor flora and fauna consisted of potted palms and a pair of Skye terriers named Boojum and Pollywog.
The Adamses had first come to live in the capital in 1877, after Henry gave up the editorship of the North American Review and his teaching position at Harvard in order to edit the papers of Albert Gallatin, Jefferson’s secretary of the treasury. For Clover, leaving Boston meant separation from her adored father, Dr. Robert Hooper, but Henry descended from Beacon Hill with no regrets. “I gravitate to a capital by a primary law of nature,” he told one of his English friends. “This is the only place in America where society amuses me, or where life offers variety.”
On the surface, variety seemed a peculiar claim to make for a town that trafficked only in politics. Art, intellect, and commerce, which rounded out the lives of older capitals such as London and Paris, had almost no practitioners in the District of Columbia. Libraries were scarce and small, a proper concert hall had yet to be built, and with the exception of the Corcoran Gallery, museums of art did not exist. But if Washington lacked finesse, it compensated with an unending procession of new faces. Congressmen came and went. So did senators, cabinet secretaries, and diplomats. Henry and Clover Adams could sit on the banks of this stream of humanity and dip their nets whenever they were, to use one of their favorite words, “amused.”
In leaving the North American Review, Henry said farewell to politics, and years later, when he wrote of his reformist crusades in The Education of Henry Adams, he would dismiss his political journalism as one more failed experiment. But in truth his departure from politics was less a defeat than a liberation. Once he stopped seeing his pen as an instrument of reform, he felt free to wander all the corridors of literary expression. As soon as he divorced himself from politics, he started working on the Gallatin papers and a companion biography, and he laid plans for his epic history of the United States in the opening years of the nineteenth century.
Like John Hay, Henry Adams viewed his career as a series of accidents. In his youth he had dreamed that he and his brothers and their friends would form the nucleus of “a national set of young men, like ourselves or better, to start new influences not only in politics, but in literature, in law, in society, and throughout the whole social organism of the country. A national school of our own generation.” When the nation failed to take note, Adams settled for the work that came his way, serving as his father’s secretary, a Washington correspondent, a magazine editor, and a professor of history. Not until his thirty-ninth year did he hit upon the plan of going to Washington and immersing himself in a labor that would take a decade to complete.
By all measures, the Adamses’ move to Washington was a splendid success. They started their days on horseback, exploring the wilds of Rock Creek Park or, with the aid of maps supplied by a general of their acquaintance, riding trails cut by the Union army during the Civil War. After a noon breakfast frequently shared with guests, Henry went off to the State Department archives to work on his history. At five o’clock he returned for tea and more guests, and in the evening they either dined out or entertained. In the summer, when Washingtonians fled the heat, the Adamses decamped to their cottage at Beverly Farms on Boston’s North Shore, near Clover’s father and her sister and brother.
Now that they were home, Henry and Clover were eager to pick up where they had left off. They had finished with Europe forever, Clover told her father. “The more we travel, the more profoundly impressed we are with the surpassing-solid comfort of the average American household and its freedom from sham. They beat us on churches and pictures in the Old World, but in food, clothing, furniture, manners and morals, it seems to us we have the ‘inside track.’” Washington promised more of these comforts than Boston or New York. With an annual income of $25,000—five times a senator’s pay—the Adamses could, said Clover, “strut around as if we were millionaires.”
As soon as the Adamses were settled on H Street, Clarence King and John Hay came to tea almost every day. More often than not, they were joined by Clara Hay, who spent much of the winter of 1880-81 in Washington. Apart from a few stray remarks in Clover’s letters to her father, the quintet who came to call themselves the Five of Hearts left no records of their gatherings, but by spring, when Hay and King left office, they had begun a lifelong friendship. Like most groups of friends, particularly collections of strong-minded individuals, the Five of Hearts owned a few common traits and an abundance of differences. Their strongest shared resemblance was physical: all of them were short. Henry Adams stood five-feet-four, Clover five-feet-two. Hay was Clover’s height, and a bit shorter than his wife. King, five-six and well muscled, was the burliest of the lot but still small enough to sit comfortably in the Adamses’ little red armchairs. In age they ranged from forty-two (Hay and Adams) to thirty-one (Clara). King was thirty-eight, a year older than Clover.
Pieces from the Five of Hearts’ tea service, which Clarence King gave the Adamses in 1885. © 1988STUART SYMINGTON, JR. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
They were sensitive, intelligent, charming, and, with the exception of Clara Hay, articulate and highly amusing. (Mrs. Hay had her uses in such company. As Henry Adams knew from his own silent forays into the London drawing room of Monckton Milnes, a dazzling talker was nothing without an audience. Clover, noting that Mrs. Hay “never speaks,” speculated that it was just as well since Mr. Hay “chats for two.”)
Each of the men had attained a degree of literary eminence, Adams at the North American Review, King with Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, and Hay with his comic ballads and Castilian Days, the volume of essays written during his stay in Madrid.
All five were enthusiastically American, albeit with an elitist point of view. “I wish,” said Clarence King, “that it could be engraved upon my tombstone that I am to the last fibre aristocratic in my belief, that I think the only fine thing to do with the masses is to govern and educate them into some semblance of their social superiors.” To Henry Adams, whose sympathies lay with the Democratic Party, it seemed that the noble experiment of the Founding Fathers was being perverted by the growing political power of the rich
, particularly financiers, and most particularly Jewish financiers. Adams would outlive this prejudice, but for much of his life, Jews were a lightning rod for his feelings about the demise of the democratic ideal. John Hay, unswervingly Republican, worried less about the rich than about the trade unionists, anarchists, and other castoffs borne on the immigrant tide. Immigrants, ran the conservative Republican argument, lacked the experience for the successful practice of democracy. Behind such claims it was easy to see the fear that the sheer number of immigrants spelled the end of a political system long dictated by an elite. As one visiting Englishman noted, clouds of melancholy and petulance hung over the American upper classes in the 1880s as they began to understand that their ballots carried no more political weight than those of any other voters.
As a son of Beacon Hill and Harvard, Henry Adams would never understand, much less endorse, the Western political ascendancy of which John Hay was a part. To someone who had polished his manners in the best London houses, men such as Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, and the other Ohioans who came to the White House after the Civil War seemed hopeless primitives, and Henry agreed with his brother Charles’s characterization of Western politicians as men of “mixed ability, cant, vulgarity and shrewdness.” Describing the “amiable and clever” John Hay of Cleveland to an English friend, Adams said that his only fault was political: “he has always managed to keep in what I think precious bad company. I never could understand why, except that I never knew more than two or three men born west of the Alleghenies who knew the difference between a gentleman and a swindler. This curious obliquity makes him a particularly charming companion to me, as he knows intimately scores of men whom I would not touch with a pole, but who are more amusing than my crowd.”
Clara Hay and Clover Adams had no politics apart from the politics of their husbands. Nor did they have the right to vote. But except for their disenfranchisement, the two women had little in common. Contented with a world centered on family, home, and church, Clara was the very model of the woman celebrated in the popular Victorian poem “The Angel in the House.” Clover, with no children, no religious faith, and no outlet for her abundant intellectual energy, knew depths of restlessness and resentment unfathomed by the placid Mrs. Hay. Clover detested the luncheons and musicales that delighted Clara, though she graciously put aside her feelings and consented to pour when the visitor from Cleveland hosted a reception.
Clover also introduced Clara to the creations of Charles Worth, the Parisian couturier favored by wealthy Americans. Worth had won her eternal loyalty on a day when he had focused his attentions entirely on her, oblivious of the Mrs. Astor and the Mrs. Vanderbilt in his waiting room. A blue-and-green Worth gown acquired on her last stay in France not only filled her soul but “seals it hermetically,” she claimed. As she could demonstrate to Mrs. Hay, and to Clarence King, who shared Clover’s sartorial passion, the inside had been finished as meticulously as the outside. When the dress began to fray and fade, she said, she would wear it wrong side out.
King boasted of once owning a coat so fine that a dying Paiute Indian chief had asked to be buried in it. King obliged and a few days after the funeral noticed it on the back of another member of the tribe. The brave had so admired King’s coat that he robbed the grave.
It was hard to tell when King’s narrative instincts caused him to stretch the truth, but neither the Adamses nor the Hays were inclined to subject their favorite Heart to rigorous scrutiny. With his unbroken chain of successes, King was an object of veneration to Hay and Adams. “When the Lord might have made other men like him,” Henry wondered, “why the D. didn’t he?” Clover, listening to the hero worship, mockingly declared that she “never knew such fanatic adoration could exist in this practical age.” Henry noted that women “were jealous of the power [King] had over men; but women were many and Kings were one. The men worshipped not so much their friend, as the ideal American they all wanted to be.”
Above all, Hay and Adams admired King because his life showed no gap between idea and act: he thought, then he did. In politics, the only sphere in which Adams had tried to exert influence, his thoughts invariably led to the conclusion that action was futile. Hay was less despairing but found it easier to carry out the wishes of others than to steer his own course, which made him as Hamlet-like as Henry Adams. In the realm of public service, which all three men considered an obligation of their class, only King had discharged his duties with a sense of satisfaction. Adams still waited for someone in government to ask his help, and Hay could not wait to leave Washington. In December 1880, when President-elect James Garfield asked Hay to move from the State Department to the White House to fill the post of secretary, Hay had turned him down with bitterness and no trace of regret. “The constant contact with envy, meanness, ignorance, and the swinish selfishness which ignorance breeds, needs a stronger heart and a more obedient nervous system than I can boast,” he told Garfield. Hay did not intend to hold public office again. In the future he would give as much time and money to politics as his circumstances allowed, and that, he insisted, “is all anybody can ask of me.” It was an honorable plan but far from the triumphs of Clarence King, surveyor of the Fortieth Parallel and father of the U.S. Geological Survey.
If King’s gift to the Five of Hearts was, as Adams put it, a “bubbling energy which swept everyone into the current of his interest,” their gift to him was escape from the dinners and parties that posed such vexing challenges to his bachelorhood. The hospitality of the Adamses’ hearth was legendary in Washington, and no one contributed more to the legend than the multitudes excluded from Clover’s guest lists. To the Adamses’ friend Henry James, who transformed Clover into Mrs. Bonny castle in a short story called “Pandora,” she was “the lady of infinite mirth.” As James discerned, her salon “left out, on the whole, more than it took in,” and the rare senator allowed entrance was scrutinized with “a mixture of alarm and indulgence.” Mr. Bonnycastle also surveyed Washington from lordly heights, but with singular broad-mindedness: “Hang it,” he told his spouse, “let us be vulgar and have some fun—let us invite the President.”
Asking the Adamses to dinner by no means guaranteed a return invitation, and Clover had little regard for the social convention that permitted strangers to leave their cards in the hope of winning a summons from the hostess. The exclusionary impulse noted by Henry James was genuine, but it was not, as many assumed, a simple matter of snobbery. Lacking the snob’s preoccupation with wealth and power, the Adamses screened guests by a single criterion: did they amuse? In life as in letters, Henry Adams was a devotee of form. Life could have interest and meaning only when it had shape, and finding the right shape meant choosing what—or whom—to exclude. A bore, like an ill-chosen word, was an error of aesthetics.
There is nothing like a secret for reinforcing a sense of exclusivity, and in the winter of 1880-81, Clarence King and the Hays, as the crème de la crème of the drawing room at 1607 H Street, were made privy to a confidence shared only by Henry and Clover Adams and two or three others. In 1880, while the Adamses were safely out of the country, a New York publisher named Henry Holt had brought out an anonymously written political satire called Democracy. An instant bestseller, the novel also turned into a national guessing game as newspapers and magazines speculated on the author’s identity. John Hay and Clarence King, well known for their objections to Washington society, found themselves on the list of suspects, as did the sharp-tongued Clover Adams. No one in the country guessed that the culprit was Henry Adams.
The protagonist of Democracy was Mrs. Lightfoot Lee, an attractive young widow with Henry’s unblinking intelligence and Clover’s sensitive nerves. Bored with Europe, convinced she was “American to the tips of her fingers,” Madeleine Lee decided to move from New York to Washington. Like a passenger on an ocean liner, she was unable to rest until she had visited the engine room and talked with the engineer: “She wanted to see with her own eyes the action of the primary forces; to
touch with her own hand the massive machinery of society…. She was bent upon getting to the heart of the great mystery of democracy and government. She cared little where her pursuit might lead her.”
Madeleine rented a home on Lafayette Square and quickly met her principal object of study, Senator Silas P. Ratcliffe of Peonia, Illinois. (Names do not sit lightly on the characters of Democracy; the “Rat” and the “Peon” signified, and Adams expressed his resentment of the rising financial power of American and European Jews by naming a Jewish character Schneidekoupon—literally, “coupon clipper,” a derisive term for one who lives on investments.) A man of silver hair and vast experience, Ratcliffe fascinated Madeleine Lee. She was eager to learn, the senator an obliging teacher. Patiently he explained that “no representative government can long be much better or much worse than the society it represents. Purify society and you purify the government. But try to purify the government artificially and you only aggravate failure.” In another lesson Ratcliffe admitted his part in an election fraud during the Civil War, justifying his wrongdoing on the ground that it guaranteed a higher good—the preservation of the Union. A shaken Mrs. Lee was left to wonder where her political ideals fit in “this wilderness of stunted natures where no straight road was to be found, but only the tortuous and aimless tracks of beasts and things that crawl.”
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