Later in Chicago

Why "Later in Chicago"? The title is a reference to Henry Adams, (1838-1918). His great-grandfather was President of the United States, as was also his grandfather. His father was a leading American diplomat. Henry Adams became an historian who by learning, thought, and hard work developed two great insights. His Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (privately printed in 1904) was a scholarly study of the architecture and literature of the Medieval church. In it, Adams concluded that the living force of Western culture was centred in the female principle exhibited by the Virgin Mary. He did not think. however, that Mary's influence on Western Europe would be permanent. Lack of material benefit tended to discourage the builders. In 1893 while attending the World's Fair in Chicago, Adams received his second insight. He watched the dynamo of American inventor, George Westinghouse, and found in it, a new source of power more suited to the needs of America! n materialism. As a result he wrote The Education of Henry Adams, privately printed in 1906 but issued to the public in 1918. No book of its decade ever awakened more discussion in America, and to the power of the goddess in a section of his The Education of Henry Adams called "The Virgin and the Dynamo" America and its inhabitants were offered an alternate god — this time not human but a standardized machine which captured the allegiance of men who became, in the words of William Blake, what they beheld.