Henry Adams clung to the idea of a ruling elite in American life
Dec 22, 2020
3 minutes
Historian and memoirist Henry Adams never forgot the family gardener who, when Adams was a child, made him question his birthright with the stinging reproach, “You’ll be thinkin’ you’ll be President too!” Adams, a great-grandson of Founding Father and second president John Adams and a grandson of sixth president John Quincy Adams, never achieved the political prominence he at one time took for granted. In an excellent new biography, “The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams,” historian David S. Brown vividly conveys
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