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<h3  align="center"><a href="index.shtml">22. Chicago (1893)</a></h3>

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 <p>
&nbsp;&nbsp;DRIFTING in the dead-water of the fin-de-siecle -- and during
this last decade every one talked, and seemed to feel
fin-de-siecle -- where not a breath stirred the idle air of
education or fretted the mental torpor of self-content, one lived
alone. Adams had long ceased going into society. For years he had
not dined out of his own house, and in public his face was as
unknown as that of an extinct statesman. He had often noticed
that six months' oblivion amounts to newspaper-death, and that
resurrection is rare. Nothing is easier, if a man wants it, than
rest, profound as the grave.
<p>
&nbsp;&nbsp;His friends sometimes took pity on him, and came to share a
meal or pass a night on their passage south or northwards, but
existence was, on the whole, exceedingly solitary, or seemed so
to him. Of the society favorites who made the life of every
dinner- table and of the halls of Congress -- Tom Reed, Bourke
Cockran, Edward Wolcott -- he knew not one. Although Calvin Brice
was his next neighbor for six years, entertaining lavishly as no
one had ever entertained before in Washington, Adams never
entered his house. W. C. Whitney rivalled Senator Brice in
hospitality, and was besides an old acquaintance of the reforming
era, but Adams saw him as little as he saw his chief, President
Cleveland, or President Harrison or Secretary Bayard or Blaine or
Olney. One has no choice but to go everywhere or nowhere. No one
may pick and choose between houses, or accept hospitality without
returning it. He loved solitude as little as others did; but he
was unfit for social work, and he sank under the surface.
<p>
&nbsp;&nbsp;Luckily for such helpless animals as solitary men, the world is
not only good-natured but even friendly and generous; it loves to
pardon if pardon is not demanded as a right. Adams's social
offences were many, and no one was more sensitive to it than
himself; but a few houses always remained which he could enter
without being asked, and quit without being noticed. One was John
Hay's; another was Cabot Lodge's; a third led to an intimacy
which had the singular effect of educating him in knowledge of
the very class of American politician who had done most to block
his intended path in life. Senator Cameron of Pennsylvania had
married in 1880 a young niece of Senator John Sherman of Ohio,
thus making an alliance of dynastic importance in politics, and
in society a reign of sixteen years, during which Mrs. Cameron
and Mrs. Lodge led a career, without precedent and without
succession, as the dispensers of sunshine over Washington. Both
of them had been kind to Adams, and a dozen years of this
intimacy had made him one of their habitual household, as he was
of Hay's. In a small society, such ties between houses become
political and social force. Without intention or consciousness,
they fix one's status in the world. Whatever one's preferences in
politics might be, one's house was bound to the Republican
interest when sandwiched between Senator Cameron, John Hay, and
Cabot Lodge, with Theodore Roosevelt equally at home in them all,
and Cecil Spring-Rice to unite them by impartial variety. The
relation was daily, and the alliance undisturbed by power or
patronage, since Mr. Harrison, in those respects, showed little
more taste than Mr. Cleveland for the society and interests of
this particular band of followers, whose relations with the White
House were sometimes comic, but never intimate.
<p>
&nbsp;&nbsp;In February, 1893, Senator Cameron took his family to South
Carolina, where he had bought an old plantation at Coffin's Point
on St. Helena Island, and Adams, as one of the family, was taken,
with the rest, to open the new experience. From there he went on
to Havana, and came back to Coffin's Point to linger till near
April. In May the Senator took his family to Chicago to see the
Exposition, and Adams went with them. Early in June, all sailed
for England together, and at last, in the middle of July, all
found themselves in Switzerland, at Prangins, Chamounix, and
Zermatt. On July 22 they drove across the Furka Pass and went
down by rail to Lucerne.
<p>
&nbsp;&nbsp;Months of close contact teach character, if character has
interest; and to Adams the Cameron type had keen interest, ever
since it had shipwrecked his career in the person of President
Grant. Perhaps it owed life to Scotch blood; perhaps to the blood
of Adam and Eve, the primitive strain of man; perhaps only to the
blood of the cottager working against the blood of the townsman;
but whatever it was, one liked it for its simplicity. The
Pennsylvania mind, as minds go, was not complex; it reasoned
little and never talked; but in practical matters it was the
steadiest of all American types; perhaps the most efficient;
certainly the safest.
<p>
&nbsp;&nbsp;Adams had printed as much as this in his books, but had never
been able to find a type to describe, the two great historical
Pennsylvanians having been, as every one had so often heard,
Benjamin Franklin of Boston and Albert Gallatin of Geneva. Of
Albert Gallatin, indeed, he had made a voluminous study and an
elaborate picture, only to show that he was, if American at all,
a New Yorker, with a Calvinistic strain -- rather Connecticut
than Pennsylvanian. The true Pennsylvanian was a narrower type;
as narrow as the kirk; as shy of other people's narrowness as a
Yankee; as self-limited as a Puritan farmer. To him, none but
Pennsylvanians were white. Chinaman, negro, Dago, Italian,
Englishman, Yankee -- all was one in the depths of Pennsylvanian
consciousness. The mental machine could run only on what it took
for American lines. This was familiar, ever since one's study of
President Grant in 1869; but in 1893, as then, the type was
admirably strong and useful if one wanted only to run on the same
lines. Practically the Pennsylvanian forgot his prejudices when
he allied his interests. He then became supple in action and
large in motive, whatever he thought of his colleagues. When he
happened to be right -- which was, of course, whenever one agreed
with him -- he was the strongest American in America. As an ally
he was worth all the rest, because he understood his own class,
who were always a majority; and knew how to deal with them as no
New Englander could. If one wanted work done in Congress, one did
wisely to avoid asking a New Englander to do it. A Pennsylvanian
not only could do it, but did it willingly, practically, and
intelligently.
<p>
&nbsp;&nbsp;Never in the range of human possibilities had a Cameron
believed in an Adams -- or an Adams in a Cameron -- but they had
curiously enough, almost always worked together. The Camerons had
what the Adamses thought the political vice of reaching their
objects without much regard to their methods. The loftiest virtue
of the Pennsylvania machine had never been its scrupulous purity
or sparkling professions. The machine worked by coarse means on
coarse interests, but its practical success had been the most
curious subject of study in American history. When one summed up
the results of Pennsylvanian influence, one inclined to think
that Pennsylvania set up the Government in 1789; saved it in
1861; created the American system; developed its iron and coal
power; and invented its great railways. Following up the same
line, in his studies of American character, Adams reached the
result -- to him altogether paradoxical -- that Cameron's
qualities and defects united in equal share to make him the most
useful member of the Senate.
<p>
&nbsp;&nbsp;In the interest of studying, at last, a perfect and favorable
specimen of this American type which had so persistently
suppressed his own, Adams was slow to notice that Cameron
strongly influenced him, but he could not see a trace of any
influence which he exercised on Cameron. Not an opinion or a view
of his on any subject was ever reflected back on him from
Cameron's mind; not even an expression or a fact. Yet the
difference in age was trifling, and in education slight. On the
other hand, Cameron made deep impression on Adams, and in nothing
so much as on the great subject of discussion that year -- the
question of silver.
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