Guessing who wrote Democracy became a kind of genteel international parlor game. Adams took great pleasure in the failed efforts of critics and readers, including his brother Charles Francis Adams, to identify the author. Figuring out who was the inspiration for Senator Ratcliffe was a Washington political preoccupation. There were just too many Gilded Age senators who could have been a senator who “talked about virtue and vice as a man who is colorblind talks about red and green.”
