Democracy
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2022
Language: eng
Subjects: Widows -- Fiction; Political fiction; Washington (D.C.) -- Fiction; Legislators -- Fiction; Socialites -- Fiction; Fiction; Satire
Description: <p>At age thirty, Madeleine Lee, a wealthy, wellborn widow, has tired of Gilded Age New York and its shallow society. She decides to spend the winter in Washington with her sister, renting a house on Lafayette Square, within easy reach of all the intense partying, horse-trading, and other activities that politics requires.</p> <p>As she makes friends (and enemies) with the locals, one question remains uppermost in Madeleine Lee’s mind: “Who, then, is right? How <em>can</em> we all be right? Half of our wise men declare that the world is going straight to perdition; the other half that it is fast becoming perfect. Both cannot be right. There is only one thing in life that I must and will have before I die. I must know whether America is right or wrong.”</p> <p>She visits the White House, George Washington’s estate, and the newly established Arlington Cemetery, accompanied by politicians, diplomats, aristocrats, and the newly rich. But it’s not until a marriage offer from an ambitious senator that things come to a head. Mrs. Lee must decide what she is and isn’t willing to do to satisfy her own ambition for power, and whether she can trust herself to use that power for good.</p> <p><i>Democracy: An American Novel</i> was first published anonymously on April Fools’ Day in 1880. The fact that <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/henry-adams">Adams</a> hid his identity helped make it a best seller, as readers tried to guess who was close enough to Washington society to portray it so knowingly—and maliciously.</p> <p>It wasn’t until two full years after Adams’s death that his publisher identified him as the novel’s author.</p>