Adams, John Quincy, 1857-1919

John Quincy Adams (1857-1919) was a political economist and the longtime secretary of the New York City Art Commission. He was born in Lewis County, N.Y., but as a young man moved to Illinois where he worked as a teacher and principal in public schools. He married Mary Louise Hendee (1860-1930) there in 1882. He attended Northwestern University and graduated with a B.S. degree in 1892, then spent three years studying political economy at European universities, in Paris, Vienna, and Berlin and finally in Halle where he earned his PhD. The University of Pennsylvania hired him as an instructor at the Wharton School of Business in 1892, but in 1899 he resigned to return to Europe for a time and, as he wrote in a letter, explore "ideas of Art with relation to Political Economy." During this period he spent time with the Scottish sociologist and town planner Patrick Geddes, with whom he had some ideas about urban beautification in common.

In 1898, in the wake of the Exposition of 1993 and the City Beautiful movement, the New York City Art Commission had been established with the aim of selecting New York's public art and architecture and drafting laws to regulate it. By 1904 Adams had become one of its secretaries, a position he held until his death in 1919, the same year that his article "Growth and Work of the Municipal Art Commission" was published.