A Great Idea at the Time

by Alex Beam

  In 1943, a university officer had the bright idea: Let’s take the Great Books downtown! Specifically, he suggested teaching an evening seminar at the University Club smack in the heart of the Loop, a congenial location for the city’s movers and shakers. The idea had practical merit, and also spoke to Hutchins’s desire to educate the world, not just students. “The best education for the best is the best education for all” was his dictum.

  Hutchins sent out invitations to the trustees, their wives, and other titans of capital he hoped to soak for donations. The roster of the first downtown colloquium was quite impressive: Swift and his brother; Marshall Field, Jr.; Paul Harper, the son of William Rainey Harper; Meyer Kestnbaum, the president of clothier Hart, Schaffner and Marx; and Lynn Williams, the president of the Stewart Warner company. The class become known as the “Fat Men’s Group,” although not because the fat cats were overweight. U. of C. undergraduates had taken to calling the Great Books course “The Great Men’s Fat Book Class,” because some of the weekly readings were so long. So it was easy to rechristen the extramural version “The Fat Men’s Great Books Class.”5

  Newspapers found the story irresistible: Business troglodytes interact with Sophocles and Saint Thomas, and love it! Piled on top of the national hype for General Honors 101, the idea began to spread: You can have your own Great Books group, just like the college boys and the Fat Men. “Perhaps word of the Great Books hasn’t reached you,” wrote Chicago Tribune columnist Marcia Winn in 1943.

  Chicago has embraced the Great Books so eagerly that book-stores can’t keep a Great Book in stock long enough for the salesgirl to learn to pronounce the author’s name. . . . [B]y fall our most adept gunmen will be tossing aside their sawed-off shotguns in favor of the Great Books, and their Studs Lonigan argot for the flowing prose of the King James Bible.

  The university’s extension school, which had been offering undersubscribed Great Books classes, was suddenly deluged with applicants. In 1943, there were 165 Great Books students in Illinois. By 1946, there were 5,000. Great Books programs spread radially from Chicago, springing up in Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Detroit. An editor for the Ladies’ Home Journal declared that the movement was spreading faster than Alcoholics Anonymous.

  Aside from launching a tidal wave of interest in the Great Books, the Fat Men’s Group had at least one unexpected consequence. Two of its members, Container Corporation of America chairman Walter Paepcke and his wife Elizabeth, later founded the Aspen Institute, where Adler taught the Great Books to vacationing Fat Men and Women for almost forty years. (“I like to think he ruined the holidays of many a corporation executive by forcing him to read John Locke,” Joseph Epstein wrote, in a waspish appreciation of Adler’s life.) Paepcke savored the role of enlightened businessman and became famous in the 1960s for attaching “The Great Ideas of Man” to magazine advertisements for his box company, the Container Corporation of America.

  Just three years after the Fat Men first cracked open Plato’s The Apology, there were an estimated 3,000 Great Books groups up and running, primarily in the Midwest. “Everybody you meet belongs to a Great Books Discussion Group,” reported A. J. Liebling, in an acidulous New Yorker dispatch from what he condescendingly called the “Second City”: “The study of the Great Books can last a lifetime, even when the samplings taken of them are exceedingly small. (Two chapters of Gibbon, thoroughly digested in a discussion group led by one’s chiropodist, are supposed to be the equivalent of the whole work merely read.)”

  Hutchins’s office became ground zero for the movement. Letters flooded in, asking for suggested reading lists, and for tips in setting up local discussion groups. Anybody who had a beef with any text published during the previous 2,500 years of the Western tradition, it seemed, felt free to hold the University of Chicago president accountable. Sydney Morris from Highland Park, Illinois, complained to Hutchins that some of the books selected “so shock civilized decency that they are destroying the popularity of the course.” Case in point, Francois Rabelais’s Gargantua, in which he found these lines:

  Shittard, Squirtard, Crackard Turdous

  Thy bung hath flung some dung on us.

  “Gargantua was never a great book,” Morris continued. “It was condemned by the Sorbonne when it was first written and the vulgar of the world have dragged it down its dirty path to this day. Can’t you see these lovely young mothers spending the afternoon looking up the meaning of dirty words they had never heard of before?”

  A production of “Antigone,” at the Aspen Institute. Mortimer Adler sits center

  stage, to the right.

  DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

  There is no record of a reply from the president’s office. However, the habitually diplomatic Hutchins did answer Mrs. C. E. Carroll of Libertyville, Illinois, who wrote in to complain about Candide:

  Dear Mrs. Carroll,

  . . . Voltaire was, perhaps, the single most influential figure of the eighteenth century, and Candide is his most characteristic work. I do not care for it, but I do not see how it can be overlooked.

  With the Great Books catching hold, Hutchins and Adler decided to launch the Great Books Foundation, using some money from the university till and a grant from philanthropist Paul Mellon’s Old Dominion Foundation, which had also bankrolled St. John’s College. At the age of 33, Mellon, an un-apologetic dilettante, spent six months struggling with the curriculum at St. John’s after reading about the new school in Life magazine. Euclid stumped him. “Highly embarrassing for a Yale and Cambridge graduate,” he reported in his autobiography, Reflections in a Silver Spoon. Undergraduate life suited him. “I bought a little house in Annapolis, going home on the weekends for some foxhunting, then returned by car early on Sunday evenings to catch up with my reading.” He complained about his shortcomings in math to Carl Gustav Jung, who advised him not to worry, by return post. “Mathematics is not a function of intelligence or logic,” Jung opined. “It is an asinine prejudice that mathematics has anything to do with the training of the mind. . . . I think you waste your time absolutely when you try to study mathematics.”

  Mellon, inspired by Jung and “longing for a more active life,” left St. John’s after six months and enlisted in the army, which seconded him to the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA. He would remain a lifelong supporter of the Great Books.

  The Great Books Foundation hired outriders to spread the gospel outside the Midwest, and they generally met with success. “‘Plato-for-the-Masses’ Drive to Bring Classics to Public” was one of hundreds of inevitable headlines, this one from the Christian Science Monitor. Four years after the Foundation came into existence, there were 2,500 Great Books discussion groups all over the country, in public libraries, in church basements, chamber of commerce offices, corporate conference rooms at IBM and Grumman Aircraft, in private homes, on army bases, and, yes, in prisons.

  The Foundation’s newsletter, The Gadfly,6 described some exchanges from the Great Books course inside Attica prison, led by Marius Risley and George Hertz. In the first instance, Risley is discussing the Book of Job, classic prison fare:

  RISLEY: “It seems to me that Job had some bad breaks in ‘The Book of Job.’ How would you react to a bad break, Mr. _____?”

  A forger, serving six to 20 years, said, ‘You’ve just got to learn to live with the bad breaks and adapt yourself to them, because they’re inevitable.’

  “Are you a fatalist, then?” snapped Mr. Risley.

  “I don’t mean you have to go along with the whole stream, if that’s what you mean,” snapped the prisoner in reply.

  Down the hall, The Gadfly reports, a different class was “verbally dissecting” Hamlet, which one inmate, serving five to ten years for criminal assault, found “sordid.”

  Discussion leader Hertz asked, “Did anyone feel any emotion about the killing of Polonius by Hamlet in the play?”

  “No,” replied a prisoner, “It’s just like h
e was killing a rat.” The prisoner, a former laborer, is serving 20 years to life for murder.

  Even Hollywood got in on the act. With considerable fanfare, actress Julie Adams, the beautiful star of The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and her then husband Ray Danton, embarked on a suggested ten-year reading plan for the Great Books in the mid-1950s. “It’s very hard to find anyone in Hollywood who digs Aristotle,” she told the Associated Press. “I used to go around buttonholing people and saying things like, ‘Do you know how great Thoreau is?’ They would just cringe,” she now remembers. “I probably bored them talking about it.”

  Adams, 81, still gets roles in Lost and CSI: NY, and still adores the Great Books, although she left the Beverly Hills discussion group many years ago. When I spoke with her in the spring of 2008, she and her current boyfriend were planning to tackle the new Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace. Adams still has both the low-cost Great Books Foundation paperbacks and the stately Britannica volumes in her Los Angeles home. “I wouldn’t part with them, they were a very big part of my life,” she says. “Exploring life and what it all means—those are the questions the Great Books ask. I wish they were still everywhere. I wish the movement hadn’t petered out.”

  “Black Lagoon”-era Great Books devotee

  Julie Adams.

  COURTESY JULIE ADAMS

  Millionaires, murderers, gorgeous starlets, all of them cozying up to Aristotle, and maybe even to Archimedes and Apollonius. In a word: Why?

  The Great Books craze gathered momentum at the end of the 1940s, and remained relatively strong into the early 1960s. The inherently suspicious Foundation figures claim there were 50,000 Americans enrolled in groups in 1947 and, after dipping to around 25,000 in the 1950s, rose back to around 47,000 in 1961, which coincided with the balls-out marketing push for Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World set.

  How to explain the popularity? Many reasons come to mind. Post-World War II America was creating a broad middle class, with purchasing power and a modicum of intellectual curiosity. The G.I. Bill for demobilized soldiers propelled tens of thousands of young Americans into higher education. Fifty thousand Americans graduated from college in 1920. By 1930, that figure had more than doubled. By 1950, the first beneficiaries of the postwar legislation were graduating, almost 450,000 of them.

  Coincidentally, the notion of a “general education,” or a prescribed program of study, was making a comeback. With much ado, a Harvard faculty committee deliberated for two years on “the objectives of a general education in a free society,” to produce a 267-page report that undid Charles Eliot’s curriculum-busting reforms of the previous century. Published in 1945, the Harvard study urged the creation of undergraduate requirements in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences “that would emphasize the heritage of Western civilization and endow all students with a common intellectual background,” according to historian Timothy Cross. The Harvard graybeards basked in publicity for suggesting ideas that had been in place at Chicago and Columbia for many years. “Seldom has such an effort, two years in the process, been devoted to reinventing the wheel,” remarked Stanford professor W. B. Carnochan.

  In addition, the movement first dubbed “middlebrow” in 1933 became a flood tide washing across the land. In The Making of Middlebrow Culture, historian Joan Shelley Rubin offers a partial catalog of salubrious, intellectual diversions finding favor with the middle class—the Book-of-the-Month Club, the popular histories of Will and Ariel Durant, newspaper book reviews, and the Saturday Review of Literature among them. Rubin devotes plenty of attention to John Erskine and to Adler and Hutchins. “With friends like these, literature needed no enemies,” she concludes. The Reader’s Digest launched its Condensed Books in 1950, just before the appearance of Britannica’s Great Books.

  The Great Books discussion group of Elgin, Illinois, 1954. COPYRIGHT © 2008 BY THE GREAT BOOKS FOUNDATION

  There was middlebrow on the airwaves, too. In the middle of the twentieth century, it was still far from obvious that the broadcast media were destined to become an intellectual wasteland. From 1933 to 1955, NBC carried a show called The University of Chicago Roundtable, a weekly showcase for such luminaries as Hutchins, Adler, Enrico Fermi, Milton Friedman, Clare Booth Luce, and Saul Bellow. From 1938 until 1952, Great Bookie Clifton Fadiman—also a Book-of-the-Month Club judge— hosted a popular radio show called Information Please, sharing the microphone with a member of the Algonquin Club’s famous Round Table and with a New York Times columnist. In 1940, Stringfellow Barr designed a CBS show called Invitation to Learning, featuring Columbia’s Mark Van Doren, the first man to coteach General Honors with John Erskine, and later, Fadiman. Barr was hoping to re-create a General Honors-like discussion on the air. CBS quickly fired the high-minded Barr, but the “longhair radio show,” as Time called it, had a million listeners after three years and lasted into the early 1950s. Adler pushed his way into the early days of television, with a forgettable, fifty-two-part series of shows on the Great Ideas that ran in San Francisco in 1954. A publishing company that was hawking a pamphlet called “Have You Read 100 Great Books?” claimed that after the war, forces “have awakened—and reawakened—an ever mounting desire of countless folk to turn to books, not only for entertainment, but for education as well.”

  Southern College historian Benjamin McArthur offers another explanation for the Great Books brushfire: The god of scientific materialism, the animating ideology of communism and fascism, had failed. “Scientific materialism, the new coin of academia, was tainted by its association with totalitarian horrors and now seemed an inadequate base for democracy,” he writes. “Hutchins had been preaching since the early 1930s that an ‘education for democracy’ must rest on the immutable tenets laid forth by the great works of our Western tradition. That message won a wide hearing in a nation hungry for guidance.” Cultural historian James Sloan Allen seconds that view: “The world war was exactly the kind of cultural crisis—not just a political crisis—that Hutchins and Adler had predicted for a world dominated by value-free fact-finding, moral relativism and the distrust of intellect.”

  McArthur has another, simpler explanation for the attraction of the Great Books klatches: The groups offered companionship, “an attractive sense of community in the biweekly gatherings.”

  With an international war effort over, people welcomed a return to the neighborhood fires of their local libraries surrounded by familiar faces. “Your friends and neighbors will be there,” a foundation promotional brochure promised. “You will meet your minister, banker, lawyer, company president, fellow worker, doctor, [and] grocery clerk.”

  In 1957, the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center surveyed 2,000 Great Books group participants, hoping to find out who they were. Then and now, there were almost twice as many women as men, and most not only had attended college but also described themselves as “educated”: “They tend to be highly educated, quite married, somewhat female, disproportionately professional men and wives of white collar husbands; infrequently ‘intellectuals’; under-mobile; possibly disproportionately irreligious; possibly under-proportionally Catholic; sociable; joining Republicans and Democrats.”

  The Great Books had come a long way from the longshoremen and soap-box declaimers of the People’s Institute. “Factory workers and toilers were simply not participating,” concludes historian Hugh Moorhead.

  Not everyone jumped onboard the Great Books bandwagon. One speed bump on the road to universal culture was Miss Nell Unger, a contrarian librarian in Portland, Oregon, who was in no mood to drink Mr. Hutchins’s Kool-Aid. In 1947, she rebuffed the overtures of the Great Books Foundation and accused it of being little more than a front for the University of Chicago’s forthcoming commercial venture, the Great Books of the Western World. She cursed Hutchins for trying to shoehorn “the damned classics” into American education. “Ordinary people are not capable of understanding these books,” Unge
r wrote to the Foundation.

  More astonishingly, Dr. Jules Masserman, scientific director of Northwestern University’s National Foundation for Psychiatric Research, lashed out at the Great Books in the journal Diseases of the Nervous System. “It is regrettable indeed that certain teachers of our youth revert to this form of medieval scholasticism at a time when old errors should be left to moulder in the dust of history,” Masserman wrote. The Great Books were a form of escapism known as “substitute behavior,” he insisted. “Other forms of evasion, he said, are “preoccupation with trivia of fashion, the spurious excitement of spectator sports, the false hopes of reckless gambling, the diversions of profligate sensuality, or the numbing haze of alcohol and drugs.” Masserman scoffed that the books are selected by “intellectual betters and so attempt to solve all the unprecedented problems of today by the ancient artifices of Aristotle or the pert platitudes of Plato.”

  That pseudoscientific eyewash did not land on sympathetic ears in Chicago, where few men were strangers to the spurious excitement of spectator sports or the blandishments of the saloon. Chicago Daily News columnist Sydney Harris, himself a Great Books group discussion leader, answered Masserman in the vernacular: “Just stay away from Plato, doc, and keep your eye on Freud. That’s job enough for one man.”

  The catcallers were swimming against the tide. In 1948, the same year of Dr. Masserman’s outburst, Chicago mayor Martin Kennelly proclaimed the last week in September to be Great Books Week and erected a three-foot-high electric sign atop City Hall: “Register for Great Books.” Not known as a bookworm, the mayor referenced Carl Sandburg, saying, “I think Chicago should be known as something besides the ‘hog butcher of the world.’”