From 1870 onward, Henry Adams’s career was shot through with paradoxes. Despite ostensibly shunning the public eye, he became as near to a public intellectual as the America of his times allowed—but not through cultivating ties with the media. His days of personal involvement in journalism were tapering to an end. On the contrary, he entered social bonds and correspondence with the leading lights in the politics and culture of his era. Some of these ties were spasmodic and sometimes skin-deep, but others could not have been more intimate.
In 1877, Adams moved to Washington with his spouse after resigning from Harvard.
As he wiped the slate clean and made a fresh start in his life, he became one in a small clique of tight-knit friends. The so-called Five of Hearts (see Fig. 1.38) took shape in 1879. The handful counted as its members Henry Adams and his wife Marian Hooper Adams (known to familiars as Clover), the later Secretary of State John Hay and his life partner Clara Stone Hay, and the geologist Clarence King. This circle constituted the coterie of implicit readers for which he drafted letters, fiction, and history. At too rushed a glance, the fivesome could seem even more restricted than his associates among the best and the brightest at university. After all, they were all white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, and, to boot, preponderantly New Englanders. Yet the reality was not entirely so socially and culturally monochromatic.
Fig. 1.38 The “Five of Hearts,” comprising Henry Adams, photographer Marian Hooper Adams, geologist Clarence King, Secretary of State John Hay, and his wife Clara Stone Hay. Vector Art by
Melissa Tandysh, 2016. Image courtesy of Melissa Tandysh. All rights reserved.
Henry Adams’s engagement book notes that Clover and he were first in each other’s company on May 16, 1866, at a dinner party in London, when he was serving as his father’s amanuensis at the American Legation. She was on her Grand Tour with her father. Five and a half years later, the couple-to-be met more meaningfully in Cambridge at the home of Clover’s sister Ellen and her brother-in-law Ephraim Whitman Gurney. The encounter occurred not long after Henry Adams had accepted his Harvard appointment. On February 27, 1872, he proposed to his future wife, and on June 27, they married, before leaving on a honeymoon down the river Nile. They made their return voyage to America in mid-August of 1873.
Coming to grips with Clover individually, with Henry and her as a twosome, and with the modulations in their relationship in the final year before her suicide is challenging. Late in her all-too-short life she became an avid photographer. Yet she left of herself exceedingly few images, either visual or verbal, that allow us much insight into her inner self. Relatively few of her many letters have survived. Her own portrait must be pieced together almost entirely from those she made of others (see Fig. 1.39).
A person of no small brainpower, she was esteemed by Henry James as possessing “a touch of genius.” She was widely read. Conversant in French, German, and Spanish, she had been well schooled also in Latin and Greek. At times, she served her husband as an unpaid and unacknowledged research assistant. At least while they were abroad, she pitched in to lend a hand in the drudgework of his scholarly endeavors. More important was her social contribution. At home in Washington, she had as a hostess a flair for badinage that helped to make their home a hub of the beau monde in the city.
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Fig. 1.39 Marian Hooper. Photograph, 1869. Photographer unknown. Published in Ward Thoron, ed., The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, 1865–1883 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1936), frontispiece.
Of the other couple in the Five of Hearts, Clara Stone Hay, born into an exceedingly wealthy family in Ohio, looks to have been as stolid in character as embonpoint in physique. Tight-laced, without the flair as a writer that the other four possessed, she seems the odd person out. In contrast, her husband John had shown from an early age a way with words that in time he matched with a worldly wisdom. The two qualities go a long way in explaining why he had a close rapport with another American who had come of age along the Mississippi, Mark Twain. John figured among Adam’s closest friends and became his next-door neighbor. Heeding the realtors’ mantra
“Location, location, location,” the two families could not have deposited themselves any nearer the seat of power without filling it themselves: they resided in Lafayette Square, directly across from the White House. The original edifice was a double house that Hay and Adams commissioned together (see Fig. 1.40). The smaller portion of the structure belonged to Adams. It was the western home that faced Lafayette Park. The larger part was occupied by the statesman Hay and his family. Today, the Hay-Adams luxury hotel, built in 1928, covers the lot where their homes once stood.
In keeping with an Adamsian tradition of filial service, Henry had assisted as right-hand man to his father in England during the Civil War. Yet that employment was private: he never held public office or served the government. Still, thanks both to his illustrious name and even more to his relationship with John Hay, he enjoyed extraordinary access to the inner workings and levers of American power (see Fig.
1.41). It might be tempting to view Adams as basking in the reflected glory of these
wheelings and dealings. After all, his friend was adjacent to a heady succession of chief executives. As a very young man, Hay (who had been raised in Indiana and Illinois) was appointed a secretary to Abraham Lincoln. Later, he was one of the longest-serving Secretaries of State. His service under both Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt enabled or even obliged him to make an imprint on US diplomacy that remains unparalleled. Since his forte was foreign policy rather than domestic public affairs, it would be going too far to call Hay a kingmaker. The politics of the times was as much a free-for-all as ever, but the statesmanly Hay managed to stay largely unmarked and untainted. Such was his intimacy with national chieftains that he kept watch by the bedsides of both Lincoln and McKinley when they died after being wounded by assassins. Coincidentally, but not irrelevantly, Hay’s only break from lifelong public service came in a five-year stint as a journalist in New York, which overlapped roughly with Adams’s appointment at Harvard University.
The last of the five was the swaggering and swashbuckling Clarence King (see Fig. 1.42), a Yale graduate raised in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.
His panache made a deep impact upon Hay and Adams—the former even named a son Clarence after this friend. Beyond being intelligent and inventive, King had a vitality and derring-do that they admired. He earned admiration as a frontiersman of formidable energy, a mountaineer of proven mettle, and a raconteur of the first rank.
Especially in view of his expertise as a prospector, he can be read metaphorically in hindsight as a high-carat diamond in the rough. However, when we put the loupe to our eyeball and peer closely, the quality cut of the precious stone stands out less than do the unpolished edges.
Fig. 1.40 Hay-Adams residences, N.W. corner of 16th and H. Streets, Washington, D.C.
Unknown photographer, 1885. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
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Fig. 1.41 John Hay. Photograph by Hollinger & Rockey, ca. 1897. Washington, DC, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
King’s triumphs as a prospector and surveyor culminated in his appointment as the first head of the United States Geological Survey. In 1881, he resigned from that post and never returned to government employment. Most memorably, he grabbed headlines by exposing an attempted flimflam. The swindle involved gemstones that had been planted to deceive potential investors. Yet after the early éclat from the great diamond hoax of 1872, his promise flatlined. Over the long run, he drew a blank and failed to deliver in all his own ventures.
When King died, the insolvency of his estate made clear how far short of the mark he had fallen in business. Compounding the downward whorl of financial collapse, the conduct of his personal affairs would have shocked the Five of Hearts, had all his intimates known even a little of the double life he led. Hay and Adams (although to a much lesser extent and capacity) felt obliged as men of honor to cover their friend’s debts. The money was the least of the posthumous scandal that they paid to hush.
Under the false name of James Todd, King had conducted a sham marriage and shadow existence. Although white and blue-eyed, he passed himself off as a railroad worker of African-American ancestry. In this guise, he entered common-law marriage with a woman in Brooklyn who in the parlance of the times was a Negress. The two had a public wedding of sorts. Todd hoodwinked his partner into thinking that he was of her race but light-skinned, and he fathered five children by her. All the while, King concealed this side of his world from all his Caucasian acquaintances. Could he have done more? Should he have been braver? Anti-miscegenation legislation had criminalized interracial marriage in many states. Even absent such laws, social views ran strongly against unions between the races. King had every reason to keep quiet about his liaison, and after his death his friends paid dearly to keep what was then dirty laundry from being aired.
Fig. 1.42 Clarence King. Photograph, ca. 1882–1884. Photographer unknown.
Published in Clarence King, Memoirs: The Helmet of Mambrino (New York, London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 37.
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