by Alex Beam
Harden’s dark arts started to lose their potency in the late 1960s. Not only were unit sales slowing down, but sales leads—the mother’s milk of future business—were increasingly harder to come by. He and Benton did what retailing pros naturally do. They commissioned a market research study.
Carried out by Marplan-Chicago, the “GB Awareness Study” had some good news. The customer satisfaction rate was very high—90 percent. Only one-third of the owners said they used the Syntopicon, which surprised no one. Of course, owners “complain of too little time to make use of the GB,” Marplan reported, “although they proclaim their intention to read them more.”
The majority of users hailed from the engineering, technical, and service professions, and were interested in “present[ing] themselves well to others in terms of external appearance and behavior.” So Benton was right. They were nerds hoping to get a date by yammering about Tolstoy or Laurence Sterne. Except these nerds were really nerdy: “The GB owners and prospects are ‘loners’ or individuals who find the greatest satisfaction in solitary pursuits such as reading. . . . The GB owners and prospects are not people-oriented and show little comprehension of the motivations of others. In fact, they consider people quite disruptive to their lives.”
Here was the not-so-good news. Marplan identified a group of nonowners whom they called the “really awares.” These men and women knew a great deal about the GBWW and the Syntopicon, plus they weren’t socially maladjusted. Marplan said they were “more self-directed, socially oriented, and more broadly read or educated” than actual or prospective GBWW owners. They thought the Great Books might be swell for other people, but they didn’t need them, thanks. “Marplan essentially concluded that the ‘really awares’ were too smart to own the Great Books,” historian Tim Lacy concludes.
The marketing pros also decided to launch a myriad of “brand extensions,” which probably bought the Great Books a decade or two of extra life. First came the ten-volume Great Ideas Program, to which both Benton and Saul Bellow contributed prefaces. Britannica also published The Great Ideas Today, Great Ideas from the Great Books, and Gateway to the Great Books, aimed at children ages 10 to 15. Adler and Hutchins nominally edited the Gateway and Great Ideas Today, which continued publishing until 1998. John Van Doren, Mark Van Doren’s other son, went to Chicago in 1969 to take over that series. “I found it was hard to find people who had anything new to say about these disciplines, because they don’t change annually, that much,” he recalls. “I began to commission articles on substantive issues by people who knew something about them, without claiming that ‘This was the year in physics,’ or ‘This was the year in biology.’”
Food for the soul: A 1962 New Yorker cartoon. © THE NEW YORKER COLLECTION, 1962, EVERETT OPIE, FROM CARTOONBANK.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
For a while, the Great Books were important enough to be made fun of, in New Yorker cartoons and even in a parody recorded by Chicago’s then-new Second City comedy troupe in 1961. The setting was the downtown branch of the University of Chicago, where a motley crew of local citizens wander into a classroom to discuss Oedipus Rex. The substitute leader notices that there are very few members in this group. “There were a lot more in the class when we started but War and Peace came along and wiped us all out,” Scott Peregrine III explains. There are a few period jokes, including this outburst from satisfied Aeschylus reader Belden Stratford: “I had my first catharsis. [I]t was a small one but that’s a start.”
Adler remained in a state of continuous, promotional overdrive. He wrote a syndicated newspaper column, “Great Ideas from the Great Books,” which resulted in a book. His writing ended up in almost every publication in America, although sometimes changes were requested. The associate editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal generally liked Adler’s lengthy encomium to the Books, but had trouble with the first line. “I think the problem which bothers us most is that your first sentence (‘You have read Plato’s Apology’) is improbable,” John Morris wrote Adler.
In a P. T. Barnum-esque ploy, Adler arranged to program the Syntopicon onto a UNIVAC computer at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. In theory, the user would choose one of six subjects, such as “God” or “Liberty,” and then place a check mark alongside the names of four of the seventy-four GBWW authors. But the UNIVAC didn’t always perform on cue. A young woman wanted to know what Swift, Faraday, Tolstoy, and Freud had to say about the freedom of the individual in society. But in an irate letter that Adler wrote to UNIVAC’s John Kamena, he reported that “[t]he print-out she received contained one quotation each from Swift and Freud and the statement ‘Among the authors requested only those listed above have discussed the subject of liberty.’” “She was puzzled and angry—and justifiably,” Adler wrote, “because she was certain that Tolstoy had discussed liberty.” Adler said the printout should have read: “Among the authors requested only those listed above have discussed the subject of the freedom of the individual in society in the works included in ‘Great Books of the Western World.’”
Adler even managed to sneak back into the White House. The Kennedy administration held weekly seminars at Hickory Hill, Robert Kennedy’s Virginia residence, for “the capital’s highest-echelon eggheads,” according to the New York Times. Inevitably, Adler popped up, lecturing on the Declaration of Independence to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, press secretary Pierre Salinger, U.S. Information Agency director Edward R. Murrow, and GBWW pitchman Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., now a White House aide. When the seminar ended, Adler took the occasion to push his reading list of personal favorites: “Locke, Aquinas, Aristotle, and Plato.”
Unit sales of the Great Books of the Western World peaked in 1961, and their most profitable year was 1968. But the frenzied publicity and multiple-line brand extensions kept sales going throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Adler wished more than once that he had a piece of the action. He occasionally asked Benton for a one-dollar royalty for each set sold, and Benton just laughed him off. “Nine years of work on the sets and the Syntopicon turned out to be in the end what it was at the beginning—a labor of love,” a not very happy-sounding Adler later groused. “One has to have a cushion of wealth,” he concluded, jabbing at Benton, “in order to take the risks, and enjoy the advantages, of an entrepreneur.”
Over time, the Great Books made plenty of money for the University of Chicago, just as Benton had promised. Britannica, the business Benton had begged the U. of C. trustees to invest in, eventually returned $60 million to Chicago, almost doubling founder John D. Rockefeller’s $34 million worth of donations.
The university’s official history has this to say about “Benton’s folly”: “The Great Books of the Western Word was a financial disaster, until it was sold as Hutchins feared it would be—by door-to-door salesmen touting ‘culture’ to an insecure American middle class.”
SEVEN
SECOND VERSE NOT THE SAME AS THE FIRST
MORTIMER ADLER LIVED to see the twenty-first century; not such a great blessing, in retrospect. By the late 1980s, when Adler began plotting a Great Books encore, Hutchins and Benton had been dead for ten and fifteen years, respectively.
Benton passed away in 1973, after a fascinating career in business, politics, and academia. In 1945, President Truman drafted him to be an assistant secretary of state for what Americans would never call propaganda—he oversaw the United States Information Agency, among other things—and Benton was very good at it. He helped create UNESCO, and threw himself gleefully into what soon became an all-out war against the Soviet Union in the marketplace of ideas. Two years later, Truman appointed him to a vacant Connecticut Senate seat, and Benton beat Prescott Bush in the 1950 special election. Benton loved being a U.S. senator, if only for a while. The term lasted just two years, but Benton made the most of it. He was the first and for some time the only man to call for the expulsion of red-baiting Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy from the Senate. Benton lost the seat in 1952, which proved to be a landslide year for Eisenhower
and the Republicans.
For his part, Hutchins had embarked on a long, gradual, downward trajectory. His perfect marriage to the beautiful sculptress had ended badly. On the one hand, Maude was what might have been called, in another era, neurasthenic. She was frequently ill, and proverbially on the edge of, or actually immersed in, nervous breakdowns. At times, she refused to let her husband leave the house, staging tantrums to keep him at home. On the other hand, through her sculpture, poetry, and fiction writing, Maude was becoming a liberated woman, a term that wouldn’t enter the vernacular for another twenty years. Starting in the 1940s, the New Yorker printed her poetry, and in 1950, she published the first of five novels, The Diary of Love, with the avant-garde New Directions Press. Diary—“the tell-all confession of a young girl who grew up with the devil in her flesh!” according to the publisher’s blurb—was almost banned in Chicago and was burned in Great Britain, per the order of a prudish magistrate. Hutchins wanted out of the marriage, but Maude wouldn’t accede to a divorce. Ignominiously, he had to hide out in hotel rooms and private clubs to force his wife to sue him for desertion in 1948.
To the outside world, Hutchins still projected a glamorous, successful front. In 1949, with twenty years of university experience under his belt, he again appeared on the cover of Time magazine, holding forth about the immanence of Truth and Justice, and strewing Hutchins-isms in his wake, e.g. “Compared to Chicago, Yale is a boy’s finishing school,” or of Chicago, “The faculty does not amount to much, but the president and the students are wonderful.”
The magazine proclaimed the 50-year-old Hutchins to be at the top of his game. Only a few intimates knew that his greatest ambitions had gone unfulfilled. Hutchins might have been one of the great Supreme Court justices of the twentieth century, and he longed for a seat on the Court. But his close friend William O. Douglas and others warned him that he would have to earn it, by first serving in political jobs in the Roosevelt administration. Franklin Roosevelt dangled New Deal administrative posts at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission in front of Hutchins, but the haughty educator glaring down from the newsweekly cover turned the president down. Hutchins wanted to play for one team only, his own, and Roosevelt in turn felt no compunction to elevate him to the best job in jurisprudence. At the 1940 Democratic convention in Chicago, Hutchins—the mediagenic “boy wonder”—was boomed for the vice-presidency, but nothing came of it.
The lion in perpetual summer: Hutchins in Santa Barbara.
DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, DAVIDSON LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA
Two years after the Time cover, Hutchins left the University of Chicago. He landed first at the newly created Ford Foundation, from which great things were expected. “In two years we will change the temper of the country,” Hutchins boasted. Not quite. The Ford Foundation of the 1950s was little more than a tax dodge for Henry Ford II, who didn’t want his name to become a lightning rod for negative publicity, which Hutchins was serving up by the truckload. Hutchins jousted with the biggest windmills of the time, plunging into the fight against McCarthy and the battle for civil rights. Ford’s dealers didn’t much fancy Hutchins’s crusades, either. Within just a few years, Hutchins bailed out of Ford, taking several million dollars of Henry’s money to launch two vanity projects, the brief-lived Fund for the Republic, and then “El Parthenon,” the Santa Barbara-based Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, housed in a phony Greek temple overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Hutchins would spend almost twenty years at the Center, parading around the grounds in flowery Hawaiian shirts, weaving his Thunderbird amid the avocado groves in the Montecito hills. The idea was to re-create Plato’s Academy in America’s golden paradise—a year-round, warm-weather Davos, if you will—but the world’s greatest minds wouldn’t play along. Intellectual celebrities like George Kennan, Aldous Huxley, and Jonas Salk would drop in, and hold forth for Hutchins and the paying visitors for a day or two on airy themes such as “The Public Interest in Education” or “Energy Policies and the International System.” But no one stayed for very long. It was, as Joseph Epstein noted, “all of it talk talk talk.”
The creation of the atom bomb and the subsequent U.S.-Soviet arms race left Hutchins slightly unhinged. Right after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki hecatombs of 1945, he plunged himself into the world federalist movement and championed the dotty Committee to Frame a World Constitution. There was not going to be a world constitution. Quite the contrary, the world was going the other way, breaking into eastern and western camps, arming to the teeth, and preparing for a forty-five-year-long Cold War. From Santa Barbara, Hutchins organized three international “Pacem in Terris” conferences, in which notables with time on their hands would gather somewhere scenic and bloviate about world peace. His ban-the-bomb work landed him squarely on the screen of the House Un-American Activities Committee, but that was the kind of attention Hutchins welcomed. William F. Buckley called one of the “Pacem” conferences the “Hutchins International Conference to Hate America.” It is hard to imagine a day passing when an ironist like Hutchins didn’t remember how much his scientific mobilization of the University of Chicago and Dr. Fermi’s machinations under the empty bleachers of Stagg Field contributed to the nuclear nightmare that preyed so much on his mind.
Unfortunately, Hutchins lived to see some of his most important educational handiwork undone, almost immediately after he left Chicago. His grand plans had come close to bank-rupting the university. Too gleefully, perhaps, Hutchins’s successor Lawrence Kimpton told the board of trustees that Chicago had been running a 10 percent operating deficit since 1938. The anti-Hutchins counterrevolution struck quickly. The faculty dismantled the tenth-grade-through-sophomore-year Hutchins College, as it was called, just three years after he left. The plan had been an unmitigated disaster, as undergraduate admissions to the Midway collapsed after the war. “Nobody came,” Kimpton explained. Later he would bluntly trash Hutchins in an oral history interview published after his death:
Every queer and unusual student who disliked athletics and the normal outlets of younger people was attracted to the College. . . . The Great Books course was a joke, and Hutchins knew it was. When I used to kid him about it, how superficial and shallow it was, he would say, “Well, it’s better than getting drunk,” and I think that’s a pretty good summary of it. It certainly made no intellectual contribution.
Perhaps naively, I asked University of Chicago dean John Boyer if there was a portrait or bust of Hutchins in the university’s administration building where we met for an interview. “We’re not into busts,” Boyer replied. Boyer has written several tightly argued monographs on the university’s history that are not particularly flattering about Hutchins’s contributions to the U. of C., except when praising the president’s absolutist defenses of academic freedom.
Adler explained the failure of the Hutchins-Adler experiments to interviewer George Dell in 1976:
We were moving against the tide, not with it. This country was pragmatic. . . . [T]he whole talk was about how does higher education pay off in jobs and money. We really had ideals and aspirations for education that were thoroughly against the American grain. And I have to add that we were not very ingratiating in the way we proposed. We always laid down the line.
I can’t say goodbye to Robert Hutchins without mentioning one of his most admirable qualities: bravery. Yes, he demonstrated physical bravery as an ambulance driver in World War I, but he also exerted great moral courage throughout his life, in a manner we no longer expect or require of university presidents. As a young law professor at Yale, he wrote a brief supporting the Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. At Chicago, he stood up to the Commies-under-the-bed drugstore magnate Charles Walgreen—the two men ultimately became friends—and he stood up to the Illinois politicians who liked to inveigh against the occasional “pink” U. of C. professor, who might support labor unions or subscribe to the wrong period
ical. Hutchins also supported faculty members who had vehemently opposed his reform proposal at the university. His biographers say it was the Oberlin College in him, his unflagging do-goodism that often bled into a cloying self-righteousness.
Hutchins never shed his most unattractive trait: He was easily and often bored, and almost always said so. He once opined that the nuclear age offered a choice: “to be blown up” or “to die of boredom.” The U. of C. trustees bored him, he told his father. The student radicals of the 1960s, whom he defended in every public square he could find, bored him. His friend and acolyte Martin Mayer reports that Hutchins’s last word was uttered from a hospital bed to his second wife Vesta, who had asked how he was feeling: Hutchins’s reply—“Bored.” At a lavish fund-raiser intended to save the Santa Barbara Center, Hutchins heard himself praised by the luminaries of the day, including Henry Luce, Norman Cousins, and Adlai Stevenson. Hutchins was moved, but not so moved as to abandon his trademark diffidence: “If I am such a great man,” he told the star-studded audience, “why haven’t I been able to quit smoking?”
After Hutchins died in 1977, columnist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote: “A remarkable man, Robert Hutchins, perhaps a great one. Unhappily, he won’t be missed, he won’t even be remembered.” Unsparing of others, Hutchins was most unsparing of himself. “I should have died at 35,” he told a friend when he was 75. Two years before his death, Hutchins confided to an interviewer that “my life has been an entire failure.” He told the same thing to his former student Sydney Hyman, who became William Benton’s biographer: “Everything I’ve touched, I’ve failed.”