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Heirs of an Honored Name - The Decline of the Adams Family and the Rise of Modern America (Hardcover)
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Heirs of an Honored Name - The Decline of the Adams Family and the Rise of Modern America (Hardcover)
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John and Abigail Adams sired the first dynasty to shape American
politics but they would not witness their family's calamitous fall
from grace. When President John Quincy Adams died in 1848, so began
the slow death of the family's political legacy - a decline that
mirrored the fall of the Republican Party. The Adamses would
abandon their forefather's enlightened republicanism, yielding to
the temptation of oligarchy and personal spoils. In Heirs of an
Honored Name, award-winning historian Douglas Egerton depicts a
family grown famous, wealthy - and aimless. After the Civil War,
the country's future was up for grabs. Republicans disillusioned
with President Ulysses S. Grant's governance looked to the Adams
family to steer their party back to its 1840s roots. Instead,
family patriarch Charles Francis Sr. refused to fight for the
nomination in 1872 and 1876 and the family eventually quit the
political arena altogether for the luxuries of Gilded Age America.
With the party of Lincoln transformed into a lobby for robber
barons and imperialists, the younger Adamses - Charles Francis Jr.,
Henry and Clover Adams and Louisa Catherine - found refuge
alongside many upper-class New Englanders in an imagined medieval
past of aristocratic preeminence. They were born elitists, each as
highly educated and ambitious as they were uniformly disagreeable
and overly competitive. Egerton mines their extensive personal
writing and correspondence to offer an absorbing tale of
aristocratic infighting and familial strain, showing how every
Adams lived in the shadow of his or her name, expecting great
things of themselves and their progeny. Yet they rarely lived up to
those expectations and blamed others for their supposed misfortune.
Heirs of an Honored Name tells the enthralling, troubling story of
the nation's first family and the end of an older, aristocratic
America amid the upheavals of the Gilded Age.
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