In the history of the Gilded Age and its geopolitics, Henry Adams has a reputation for being an imperialist. While not universally subscribed to by historians, this characterization has waxed sufficiently as to eclipse Adams’s more complex, even contradictory, record on the American Empire. The evidence I will marshal will not prove that Adams was actually an anti-imperialist, but it will reveal the protean nature of Adams’s views of the American Empire. To get a grip on this relatively unexamined aspect of Adams’s thought, I will analyze his correspondence during the last decade of the nineteenth century in which he criticized the extension of American power across the Pacific, particularly in regard to its political economy, religion, and civilization. With the onset of the American Filipino War, Adams raged at the news of American atrocities. This paper shows that Adams’s outrage was part of an incipient civilizational ideology, one that neither materialized into an attachment to the anti-imperialist cause nor accepted the vaunted superiority of the West. Even though Adams possessed no principle to guide his thinking on the empire, his pessimistic evaluation of the extension of American power is enough to reconsider his reputation as an imperialist.

在镀金时代及其地缘政治的历史中，亨利亚当斯以帝国主义者而闻名。虽然历史学家并未普遍认同，但这种描述已经足以使亚当斯关于美利坚帝国的更为复杂甚至自相矛盾的记录黯然失色。我将整理的证据不会证明亚当斯实际上是一个反帝国主义者，但它将揭示亚当斯对美利坚帝国的看法的多变本质。为了抓住亚当斯思想中这个相对未经检验的方面，我将分析他在 19 世纪最后十年的通信，在这些通信中，他批评了美国权力在太平洋的扩张，特别是在政治经济、宗教和文明。随着美国菲律宾战争的爆发，亚当斯对美国暴行的消息感到愤怒。这篇论文表明，亚当斯的愤怒是早期文明意识形态的一部分，这种意识形态既没有具体化为对反帝国主义事业的依恋，也没有接受西方吹嘘的优越性。尽管亚当斯没有任何原则来指导他对帝国的思考，但他对美国势力扩张的悲观评价足以让他重新审视自己作为帝国主义者的名声。