Brooks
Adams
1848-1927
Born: June 24, 1848 in
Massachusetts, United States
Died: February 13, 1927
Occupation: Historian
Source Database: Dictionary
of American Biography
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Adams, Brooks (June 24, 1848 -
Feb. 13, 1927), historian, youngest son of Charles Francis Adams and Abigail
Brown (Brooks) Adams, was born at Quincy, Mass. After some years in English
schools he entered Harvard College, graduated in 1870, and after a year
in the Law School accompanied his father to Geneva, serving as his secretary
during the Alabama Claims Arbitration. On his return he opened a law office
in Boston, but like his brothers soon turned to historical investigation.
His first work, The Emancipation of Massachusetts (1887), by its
vigorous assault upon the accepted manner of dealing with early New England
history, attracted attention, caused retort, and served as a wholesome
protest against a somewhat blind acceptance of ancestor-worship. He then
turned to a study of trade-routes and their influence upon the history
of peoples and nations and published the Law of Civilization and Decay
(1895), a work of a high order as history which laid down the principle
that human societies differed among themselves in proportion as they were
endowed by nature with energy, a principle later developed by Henry Adams.
Since he supported the side of silver when the question of the free coinage
of that metal was dividing the country, the merits of the book as an economic
study were overshadowed by its political aspects. Having announced his
principle that civilization follows exchanges, or commercial growth and
decay, he sought to apply it to modern history and conditions. Could success
have been attained, a means of forecasting the march of empire might have
been given to the student of social movement; but his generalizations,
brilliant and far-reaching as they were, did not lead to a universal law
or even a suggestion of one, such as he desired. The domination of the
bankers and the approaching collapse of social institutions were ever present
to him and this neutralized in great part the usefulness of his work. In
a series of volumes he stated and restated the problem and carried his
"law" into a new field of experience. In America's Economic Supremacy
(1900) he predicted the moving of the center of empire to America; in The
New Empire (1902) he set forth the supremacy of America and in Theory
of Social Revolutions (1913) he pointed out the ineffectiveness of
the capitalist class in the United States in matters of government.
Becoming a lecturer in the Boston
University School of Law in 1904, for seven years he illustrated the legal
aspects of his economic studies and wrote with force on trusts and railroads
as public agents. Elected a member of the Massachusetts constitutional
convention in 1917, he favored the initiative and referendum. After the
beginning of the World War, in which he saw a fulfilment of his predictions
of the collapse of modern civilizations, he returned to social studies
in his "Revolt of Modern Democracy against Standards of Duty" (Proceedings
of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, vol. IX). He then wrote
an elaborate preface to Henry Adams's "Letter to American Teachers of History,"
and published both, with additional material, under the title, The Degradation
of Democratic Dogma (1920). He received recognition abroad, and The
Law of Civilization was translated into French and German, the Economic
Supremacy into German, and The New Empire into German and Russian.
In whatever he wrote he showed a gift for generalization with a tendency
to carry it beyond reasonable bounds. His chapters have substance and show
sound and wide research, his explanations of social movement and disturbance
are suggestive. He never held public office, nor did he ever seek it. He
was the last to occupy the Adams house at Quincy, which on his death was
devoted to public service as a memorial of the Adams family. He married,
Sept. 7, 1889, Evelyn Davis, daughter of Admiral Charles Henry Davis and
Harriette Blake Mills. She died Dec. 14, 1926. He himself died, at Boston,
less than two months later.
-- Worthington Chauncey Ford
FURTHER READINGS
[Memoir
by W. C. Ford in Harvard Grads. Mag., June 1927; also memoir in
Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., LX, 345.]
Source Citation: "Brooks
Adams."Dictionary of American Biography Base Set. American Council
of Learned Societies, 1928-1936. Reproduced in History Resource Center.
Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group.