Henry Adams

Grandson of John Quincy Adams and the fourth child of Charles Francis Adams and Abigail Brooks. In James Traub’s biography John Quincy Adams (which Kyle read), Henry appears through a childhood scene he later recounted: as a six- or seven-year-old throwing a tantrum to skip school, he was taken by the hand by his grandfather — known around the house as “the President” — and walked the mile to school “in perfect silence.” What Henry remembered decades later was gratitude that his grandfather “had uttered no syllable of revolting cant about the duty of obedience and the wickedness of resistance to law.” The book also quotes the older, disillusioned Henry Adams describing politics — “the profession of all of them” — as the “systematic organization of hatreds,” marking how far he had drifted from the political world of his forebears.

Context: Henry Adams (1838–1918) was an American historian and writer, author of The Education of Henry Adams and History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison, and the great-grandson of John Adams.

Where this appears

• John Quincy Adams — quoted for the boyhood walk-to-school anecdote about his grandfather and for his later definition of politics as the “systematic organization of hatreds.”