A Great Idea at the Time

by Alex Beam

  But here is the point: The Harvard Classics made a lot of money. The admen didn’t shy away from hucksterism (e.g., “How to Get Rid of an Inferiority Complex”)—buy the five-foot shelf! Collier sold 350,000 sets of the Classics in twenty years. Those are not Gone with the Wind-type numbers, but they are not bad for challenging reading.

  In 1916, the Harvard Classics caught the eye of a precocious 15-year-old in Washington Heights, Manhattan, who had quit high school to work at a daily newspaper, the New York Sun. In a nighttime extension class offered by Columbia University, young Mortimer Adler bumped up against the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, who could read Greek at 3 and by age 5 was conversant with Plato’s dialogues. Throw me in that briar patch, was Adler’s age-inappropriate reaction. In search of Plato, Adler looked in on his neighbor, one Sam Feldman, a lawyer and inveterate book buyer, who owned Mr. Eliot’s famous shelf. Adler quickly devoured four of Plato’s dialogues and became “so fascinated by the Socratic method of questioning that I persuaded my friends to engage in mock dialogues.” “I have it on the testimony of my sister that I was a difficult child,” he recalled.

  The young Adler, who would later trumpet the superiority of his and Hutchins’s 62-inch shelf, the Great Books of the Western

  World, to Mr. Eliot’s paltry 60 inches, proclaimed himself “dissatisfied with the incompleteness of the selections from Plato.” “I bought a secondhand set of the Jowett translations in five volumes and began to spend time at my desk at the ‘Sun’ reading the dialogues of Plato instead of doing the work that earned my weekly paycheck,” he later wrote.

  Comes now John Erskine, a professor in the early-twentieth-century Ivy League mold, son of a well-to-do New Jersey factory owner, whose acolytes later called him the “spiritual father” or “onlie begetter” of the Great Books. Although Erskine indeed begat many of the events described in this book, paternity of the Great Books movement was only one chapter in his very unusual life. An expert on Elizabethan poetry, Erskine was also a gifted pianist who left his Columbia University sinecure in 1927 to become the first president of the reorganized Juilliard School of Music, which had merged with the Institute of Music Art. And although he bears much responsibility for tormenting successive generations of Columbia undergraduates with required “core curriculum” classes devoted to Herodotus, Thucydides, Montaigne, and Boccacio, Erskine himself wrote for a much broader audience. Starting with his breezy, inane, best-selling novel, The Private Life of Helen of Troy, his popular novels, loosely grounded in the classics, graced many a national best-seller list.

  A gentleman of the old school—he was a vestryman at the 92nd Street Trinity Episcopal parish, where he rubbed shoulders with the Columbia trustees—Erskine was refreshingly free of hang-ups. He knew a great book when he saw one. “A great book is one that has meaning, and continues to have meaning, for a variety of people over a long period of time,” he proclaimed, and he knew that he wanted to teach such books to undergraduates. Erskine had been a Columbia undergrad himself, and he shared the campus sentiment that his students were reading less good literature than their fathers had. In 1916, the University’s Committee on Instruction fretted that the electives curriculum, aping Harvard, was eroding the “social aspect of scholarship,” inasmuch as students were wandering off in all directions. Furthermore, the Committee noted that the typical Columbia student “is said not to know the great authors in polite literature; he is said not to know what has happened in the world; and he is said not to know the master ideas in philosophy and science.” They compared this hypothetical student unfavorably with “the superlatively educated college man of only a generation or so ago, who was on speaking terms with the classics in the fields of literature, of history, of philosophy. . . .”

  Erskine, like Robert Hutchins after him, felt it was “the elective system within American education that had contributed to the students’ lack of familiarity [with ‘great’ authors and] to an inability to talk about them,” according to Great Books historian Hugh Moorhead. “College students, he noticed,”

  could no longer hold conversations with their fellow classmates on anything held in common other than one or two textbooks. . . . In Erskine’s own college days, at the beginning of the century, everyone took the same courses, had the same books, many of them great. . . . Both good literature and good conversation, the two complementing one another, flourished.

  Just before proposing a great-books course to the Columbia faculty in 1917, Erskine accepted an assignment to join the American Expeditionary Force in France as an educational adviser, first to the YMCA, and then to the U.S. Army. At General John Pershing’s request, Erskine opened a huge, temporary university for 12,000 American soldiers waiting to return from France after World War I. Pershing worried that his doughboys, freed from the trenches, might wreak havoc on the French countryside. “All they need is something to occupy their minds,” Pershing told Erskine. “Keep their minds busy, or they’ll concentrate on girls and cognac. Then there’ll be street fights, and France will want to throw us out.”

  Erskine’s university at Beaune offered courses in history, English, geometry, arithmetic, bookkeeping, commercial law, foreign trade, principles of accounting, shorthand, agriculture, engineering, heating and ventilation, and automobile mechanics—anything that might appeal to a demobilized soldier. Erskine loved the job—“If you were here for five minutes, you would see that this work is the moral and intellectual salvation of thousands of boys,” he wrote his mother—and he loved the idea that Beaune had no academic departments and no degree requirements, unlike its stateside equivalents. “When you apply at the door of a university for instruction in a particular thing,” he told his soldiers in 1919, “you find that the university expects you to become a candidate for a degree. . . . [I]t expects to label you.” And he was perfectly happy to have grown-ups in the classroom. “The education of adults ought to be as natural in society as the education of youth,” he wrote.

  Back at Columbia, Erskine again pitched his great-books course idea for the 1920 academic year. “Why not treat The Iliad, The Odyssey, and other masterpieces as though they were recent publications, calling for immediate investigation and discussion?” he proposed, pointing out that most classics were shorter than contemporary novels and had been written for broad audiences in their time.

  I was told that reading Homer in translation would be the same thing as not reading Homer at all. . . . I couldn’t help adding that I marveled at my colleagues who did their reading exclusively in the original. I publicly offered them my sympathy for never having read the Old Testament, nor the words of Christ. Of course the Old Testament was possible for any colleague who knew Hebrew, but there was no text extant of the words of Christ in the language he spoke.

  “The faculty rejoinders were rather warm” was Erskine’s genteel way of saying that the German Department didn’t want Goethe to be studied in English, the Latin Department felt The Aeneid was unreachable in translation, and so on down the line. One faculty member wrote a letter complaining that the proposed two-year-long General Honors course, which would devote a single two-hour seminar to one work each week, would prove too difficult for the typical Columbia College man: “When is he to eat and sleep? How much real grasp will he get of any of these authors?” Erskine’s plan “will be most unfortunate for true scholarship in Columbia College,” this anonymous faculty member wrote:

  If that institution is to make a choice, it should stand for exact knowledge of a few things rather than for superficial acquaintance with many things. I firmly believe that it is better that a man should get to know ten authors well in his last two years in college, than that he should learn the names of the eighty-four men presented to him on this list (emphasis in original).

  Eventually, “worn out by futile talk,” as Erskine put it, the exasperated faculty allowed him to proceed.

  Erskine adopted a formula for teaching the Great Books that is still used today. Two teachers sat in a classroom
with about twenty or twenty-five students and launched a discussion, Socratic style. The teachers were “selected for their disposition to disagree with each other,” Erskine recalled in his 1948 memoir, My Life as a Teacher. A typical question used to launch the two-hour discussion might have been: “What is the ruling passion in The Iliad?” Erskine didn’t require his assistants to be experts on The Song of Roland or the Federalist Papers; he merely wanted them to be smart, and to have read the book. The conventional baggage of literary criticism—biographical details, the historical context—was excluded from the classroom. Just the text, mister, two hours of it, with only one short break.

  Mortimer Adler, who had enrolled in General Honors as a Columbia junior in 1921, started teaching the course as a graduate student in 1923. He and his coteacher Mark Van Doren taught “like debonair amateurs,” Adler later wrote, “assured that even if the book under consideration was difficult . . . we at least should be able to read it better than our students.”

  At least most of the time. In his memoirs, Adler recalled that the first year he taught the class, he overprepared and lectured the young men instead of provoking discussion. One especially brilliant student “took the class away from me any time he wanted by asking better questions or interjecting more sophisticated comments.” Exasperated, Adler bumped into the man on campus one day and confessed his feelings of inadequacy. “Would you like me to help you teach the seminar?” Clifton Fadiman asked. Fadiman later became the book editor of the New Yorker, editor in chief at Simon & Schuster, a lifelong friend of Adler’s, and an inveterate “Great Bookie.”

  Adler’s coteacher Van Doren also became a lifelong friend, a renowned Columbia professor, a prolific anthologist and tastemaker like Fadiman, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. Their correspondence was extraordinarily affectionate; Adler named his first son after Van Doren. Another General Honors teacher, Rexford Tugwell, became a member of Franklin Roosevelt’s “brain trust” and headed FDR’s Depression-era resettlement administration. Adler’s class also included Lionel Trilling, who became a popular and accomplished English professor at Columbia. Trilling and his equally famous colleague Jacques Barzun taught a version of General Honors, rechristened the Colloquium on Important Books, for thirty years.

  In its eighty-eight-year history, General Honors has been abandoned, renamed, relentlessly retooled, and then twinned with a Classical Civilization curriculum also introduced at Columbia in 1920. Erskine’s class exists to this day. LitHum, or Literature and the Humanities, and CC, Classical Civilization, are still taught in two-hour-long sessions in Hamilton Hall, right where Erskine first addressed his first class.

  The history of the Great Books proceeds on two tracks: college courses and adult education. The first formal Great Books courses for adults were held at the People’s Institute, which operated out of Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art on Manhattan’s Union Square. Founded in 1897, the Institute mainly sponsored lecture series and discussion groups on the burning issues of the day. Typically, it offered three lectures a week, sometimes attracting audiences of over a thousand to Cooper’s cavernous Great Hall. Anyone could and did show up: bums, lawyers, businessmen, and students. With speeches devoted to communism, pacifism, and atheism, conflict was inevitable. When a biologist delivered a stirring defense of vivisectionism, cutting up animals for medical research, a near riot ensued, and the police had to be summoned. It was not unheard of for an audience member to wake up in the middle of a lecture, mount the stage, and deliver competing remarks from the same platform.

  In 1926, a newly hired staff assistant, Scott Buchanan, knew the Institute wanted to broaden its offerings; the Carnegie Corporation was increasing its funding from $2,500 to $10,000 a year. His friend, the 24-year-old Mortimer Adler, had a suggestion: Why not offer the Columbia General Honors program to a public audience?

  Erskine, who had not only taught adults at the upstate New York Chautauqua Institute but had also run a mini-university at Beaune, wasn’t interested. Van Doren had also taught Chautauqua courses, yet he, too, declined. But Adler was “on fire” with the idea, Buchanan later recalled, and together with Institute director Everett Dean Martin, they got Carnegie on board. Adler and his Columbia colleagues would offer two courses on the History of Thought, one Classic and Medieval, the other Renaissance and Modern. The first year attracted 134 students, broken into six groups, with two discussion leaders, just as they were conducted on the Columbia campus at Morningside Heights. The groups met in churches, YMCAs, settlement houses, and sometimes in the instructors’ homes. The courses were free, but students were warned that they would have to pay between ten cents and a dollar for each of the twenty books on the syllabus, if they couldn’t find them in a library.

  Adler and Whittaker Chambers—yes, that Whittaker Chambers—team-taught a class on “Renaissance and Modern Thought” at the Community Church on East 34th Street. In order to get paid, Adler had to submit a “Leader’s Class Report,” and his handwritten weekly summaries are now in an archive at the New York Public Library.

  In November 1926, Adler reported that his group was1. lively in discussion

  2. full of prejudices and “ideas”

  3. likely to read

  4. “shockable”

  5. untrained intellectually and needs dialectic therefore

  In December, following a session on Descartes, Adler recorded that “[t]he discussion of Descartes was better than I expected. They were most interested in God and his existence.” Following a Shakespeare class, he wrote that his Institute-niks were “as good as my Columbia groups.” High praise indeed.

  Fadiman and Richard McKeon, who would later become a dean at the University of Chicago, taught “Classic and Medieval Thought” at the West Side YMCA on West 5th Street. “Recalling that Socrates had taught in the market place,” Fadiman wrote in his essay collection Party of One,

  [w]e saw nothing wrong in continuing our discussion over cafeteria tables. Our students were wildly random. Merchant mariners marooned until the next voyage. . . . Brash dogmatists who had read Marx and didn’t want to understand anything else. Pale-faced Emersonian clergymen. Young stenographers, their eyes reflecting the solitude of the dismal hall bedroom. Comfortable matrons pouncing on a bargain in culture. Professional arguers trailing their soap boxes. Recent immigrants seeking a key to a bewildering America. Those too poor to go to college. Those thirsty for something college had been too poor to give them.

  Under the influence of the Great Books, Fadiman wrote, “[t]he Marxist launched fewer manifestoes. The arguer stepped down from his soap box. The truck driver grew less arrogant, the immigrant less humble.” One of his students was a night watchman who lived on a barge in the East River and did his reading at the Public Library on 42nd Street. McKeon wished the partially educated bargeman would get a degree, because “he would have been a better teacher than most of the ones we have in college.”

  Carnegie viewed the downtown Great Books classes as “experimental,” and they lasted for only two academic years, 1926-1927 and 1927-1928. Within just a few years, Adler, Buchanan, and McKeon would be reunited at the University of Chicago.

  TWO

  THE ODD COUPLE

  THERE IS A LOVELY, revealing story of how Mortimer Adler, the son of a Washington Heights jewelry salesman, first met Robert Maynard Hutchins, the refined child of a high-minded Presbyterian clergyman. The year was 1927, and Hutchins was dean of the Yale Law School. Hutchins was turning the law school upside down, democratizing admissions, broadening the course offerings, and rewriting the musty textbooks where necessary. He was personally reworking J. H. Wigmore’s classic text on evidence, and learned from a friend that Adler, then a 24-year-old graduate assistant at Columbia, had alluded to the dialectics of legal casuistry in a footnote of his soon-to-be-published book, Dialectic . Letters were exchanged. Characteristically, Adler speed-read all five volumes of Wigmore, “with growing puzzlement and consternation,” as he wrote to Hutchins:
“There is a job of profound logical clarification to be done.”

  Hutchins invited Adler to visit him in New Haven. Stepping off the train on a muggy August day, Adler was dressed in a black suit and hat. “My experience with deans at Columbia,” Adler later recalled, “led me to expect a man of advanced years, portly in appearance, and somberly dressed.” Not at all. A young man, only three years older than Adler, answered the door at the dean’s office. He had dark, wavy brilliantined hair and stood 6 feet 3 inches tall. In some photographs, he resembled the young, sallow, ladykilling Orson Welles. He was “collar-ad” handsome, with the kind of good looks one saw in magazine advertisements. Black wasn’t his color. Hutchins was wearing white tennis trousers, a white T-shirt, and sneakers.