Politics & Power Quote by Henry B. Adams

Adams lands the punch by borrowing Darwin’s prestige, then turning it inside out. On the surface, he’s joking that the American presidency “evolved” backward from Washington’s austere, mythic statesmanship to Grant’s scandal-streaked, politically outmatched administration. The line works because it treats “evolution” the way a partisan would: not as a neutral process, but as a ladder of improvement. Then it kicks the ladder away. If history is supposed to be progress, Adams implies, American politics has the nerve to look like devolution.

The intent is less anti-Darwin than anti-complacency. Adams, a patrician Boston intellectual watching the Gilded Age harden into a machine, is needling the era’s faith in inevitable uplift - moral, civic, managerial. Darwin becomes a rhetorical foil: the scientific story modernity loves most is recruited to expose modernity’s least flattering self-portrait. It’s a historian’s joke with a historian’s sting: institutions don’t refine themselves just because time passes.

Context matters. Grant’s presidency (1869-77) was shadowed by corruption scandals and the crude realities of patronage, at the very moment America’s industrial expansion was manufacturing new fortunes and new political incentives. By placing Washington and Grant as bookends, Adams isn’t doing biography so much as moral optics: the Republic’s founding “virtue” versus the Republic’s mass-democratic, capitalist adulthood. The subtext is elitist, yes, but also diagnostic. Adams is warning that progress in technology and territory can coincide with regression in public ethics - and that the story we tell ourselves about advancement is often just a comforting genre, not a law of nature.