Linda wants to talk about The Smartest Kids in the World  (by Amanda Ripley) as well as The Education of Henry Adams, so we may have our plates pretty full. Dick’s copy of the latter dates from about 50 years ago, is over 500 pages long, and cost a whopping $1.65.

The Education won the Pulitzer prize and many consider it the finest autobiography ever written. According to Amazon the book “is much more a record of Adams’s introspection than of his deeds. It is an extended meditation on the social, technological, political, and intellectual changes that occurred over Adams’s lifetime. The organizing thread of the book is how the ‘proper’ schooling and other aspects of his youth, was time wasted; thus his search for self-education through experiences, friendships, and reading.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

We (that’s the editorial “we,” by the way) were intrigued by Adams’s characterization of Congress in Chapter VII.  So intrigued, in fact, we succumbed to the temptation to try to find out how a real senator would react to the portrait.

First Tuesday is fortunate to have such resources at hand. Diane was nice enough to take our appeal to Ben, and this is what he had to say:

Henry Adams, like so many from the Northeast, had disdain for all things Southern.  He considered Southerners uneducated and ignorant and he blamed them for inciting the start of the Civil War.  Perhaps because  Washington, DC was nestled in the South, he likewise had a Yankee bias against the federal government and all who were associated with it.

I must say I’m amused by his characterization of senators and congressmen.  Perhaps in those days members may have been more self-impressed than today.  But I have noted one or two of my former colleagues who were quite self-impressed.  The Senate has always been called the “most exclusive club in the world” and back then might have been looked at differently than today.  His references to the Senate as self-admiring shows his dislike for the body and its members.  He considers them as puffed up, masked, and conceited buffoons.  He also accuses them of pomposity and insincerity in their interpersonal relationships.  The reference “a friend in power is a friend lost” is another way of saying that politicians no longer have friends – just interests. Politics is another form of poison and the power ruins the politician.  Quite a jaundiced view of public service but probably a more popular view than one would like.

We must remember Adams’ views were shaped on the verge of a civil war and then the loss of life which he felt to be unnecessary.  One could easily have had a low opinion of it all.  This isn’t the first time that the American public has had a low opinion of Congress and it’s unlikely to be the last.

—Ben Nelson (U.S. Senate, 2001-2013)