seeks out new heroes from whom he can learn. As
secretary to his father, ambassador to Great Britain
(1861–68), Adams finds little redeeming in English-
men and British politicians. In England, he learns
the Englishmen show more compassion for the
American confederacy than he initially thought.
And, upon returning to the United States, he finds
little in the people that he can salvage for his edu-
cation. Henry votes for Ulysses S. Grant after the
war because he thinks a decorated military hero will
lead well, but, in an entire chapter devoted to Grant,
he ends up finding the president distasteful. All in
all, Adams sees a decline in the United States from
Washington to Grant. Once again, he returns to
Harvard, this time to teach medieval history, but his
educational idealism finds university life mediocre
at best, and he considers this more education lost.
The book jumps forward at this point 20 years
because, as Adams reminds the reader, his is a story
of education, and only matters pertinent to education
are noted. This is a new educational starting point
for Adams, he writes. At this time in his education,
he wishes to drop studying what the world does not
care for anymore and concentrate his education on
what interests people. At the Chicago Exposition
of 1893, he notices the dominance of wealth and
science. Clearly, it seems to Adams, the country is
moving in a path that favors capitalism and tech-
nological power. These are contrasts to what Adams
calls his 18th-century education, and as symbols of
power and wealth, they contradict his ideas of medi-
eval art. At the Paris Exposition seven years later,
Adams once again comments on the importance of
these symbols, specifically in the demonstration of
the dynamo, an electrical generator invented for pro-
ducing power. In the famous chapter entitled “The
Virgin and the Dynamo,” Adams compares the
Virgin Mary’s power for stimulating human ener-
gies with the dynamo’s power. Believing the dynamo
might somehow provide a specific world plan for
him, much as writing about the Romans had stimu-
lated the 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon,
Adams believes he has finally found a satisfactory
way of looking at history. By placing the medieval
expression of art into a system of history, he finds a
way that he, and he hopes other people, might better
cope with historical pattern and change.
Although much of the Education bases itself on
Adams’s personal learning, the book is an attempt
to come to grips with the larger ethos of education.
What Adams sees in the Virgin, for example, is a
symbol of force; in the dynamo, he envisions the
same notion of force, as comprehended by modern
man. The medieval mind symbolized its power of
force in the Virgin, so this forms the connection
to Adams’s idea of the dynamo—a symbol of the
technology of the oncoming 20th century—and its
effects on his life, which began in Quincy and Bos-
ton, symbols of the young America.
Michael ModarelliinnOcence and experience in The
Education of Henry Adams
The symbolism in Henry Adams’s autobiography
clearly marks his progression from innocence to
experience. As Adams traces the paths of symbols
from his childhood home in Boston, he essentially
delineates his route from innocence to experience.
Born in an upper-class home in Boston and raised in
Quincy, where his grandfather, John Quincy Adams,
walked him to school, young Henry becomes imme-
diately influenced by his illustrious relative. For
Henry, his grandfather represents the shaping of
America, the glorious common sense of the 18th
century, and he often thinks of John Quincy’s role in
the formation of the country as well as his journeys
to foreign lands as a diplomat.
John Quincy Adams was not Henry’s only
hero—in his youth he idolized George Washing-
ton, Edward Gibbon, his great-grandfather John
Adams, and others. In these heroes Henry found
men whose interests lay in wide realms; these were
men of action and, most specifically, men whose
values reflected conventional New England attitudes
of self-discipline, character, and accomplishment.
But Henry’s life, which means his education, forms
the kernel of the Education, and it is John Quincy
Adams who precipitates this journey, taking young
Henry by the hand and walking him in silence to
the school on a hot morning. Symbolically, then,
his grandfather ushers Henry into the Adams fold
and into education at a very young age, marking the
gradual transition from innocence to experience.The Education of Henry Adams 131