The Mugwump Reputation, 1870 to the Present

Abstract

In her memoir, Education by Uncles, Abigail Adams Homans recalled with wry wit the burden of being niece to Henry Adams, Brooks Adams, and Charles Francis Adams all at the same time. These grandsons of John Quincy Adams were the generation of Adamses for whom service to their country became an unsolved problem. The Gilded Age was very hard on them. In keeping with family tradition, they left a massive record of their confrontation with the United States-letters, diaries, essays, histories, and autobiographies. Yet no passage in their writings quite captures their taut relation to the American environment vividly Mrs. Homans's recollection of her Uncle Charles's daily nude swims off the Scituate rocks south of Quincy, Massachusetts . I can still see him, she wrote, as he used to stand on a cold September morning gazing out at a gray sea while pensively rubbing his bald head and happily murmuring, 'My God, how dreary!' '1' The solitary figure of Charles Francis Adams, mugwump-stout, naked, chilled, and grimly exhilarated by the leaden bleakness around him-is a fitting image with which to begin a fresh look at his generation of reformers and their place in history. The Adamses had grown accustomed to hostile surroundings and had fashioned an austere family style out of their response. In an earlier, more deferential era, the style had been useful in governing the terms on which an Adams could mix service to a majority with personal self-respect. That era was over now. In the post-Civil War years the Adams style no longer interested the American majority. But the Adamses were reluctant to end their public connection. They kept trying to assert themselves in ways that brought both the satisfactions of self-respect and those of national influence. And this effort grouped them constantly with other gentlemen who also found the outlook dreary and who also liked to stand alone.