In his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, Adams has reflected upon the failure of the rhetoric of inviolate principles of the eighteenth-century America and reclaims his old beliefs by employing a new rhetoric of force which manifested in American imperialism of the early twentieth century. He is both a participant as well as the observer of the old and new rhetorical forces that fin de siècle America, I assert in this paper. I end with a note that the view of the manikin and tailor, as employed by Adams in The Education permits him to speak objectively as a historian of the eighteenth-century and as a prophet for the twentieth-century age of imperialism. Keywords: Autobiography, Age of Imperialism, fin de siècle America, manikin, tailor, observer, participant