A Great Idea at the Time

by Alex Beam

  “I said to him, ‘Bob, you’re crazy, you brought to life a whole generation,’” recalls Hyman, who took the Hutchins-Adler Great Books course at the university in 1935. “We thought of ourselves as the Hutchins Generation. What other college students say something like that?”

  By far the best book about Hutchins, and one of the shortest, is Hutchins’ University, by former U. of C. history professor William McNeill. The president was a “quixotic character” whose “failure was real enough,” he writes. But the college’s students and teachers “really believed that Chicago’s curriculum was the best there was anywhere in the world. For them,” McNeill says, “the university was a very special place. Their presence helped to make it so; but so did Hutchins, with his lofty manner, electric wit, and rhetorical extravagances.”

  “He also made it a very special time, remembered by those who lived through it with awe. Greatness, or something very much like it, walked among us then.”

  It’s not clear who came up with the idea of relaunching the Great Books in 1990. There had been talk of a new edition to honor Adler’s 75th birthday in 1977, but cooler heads prevailed. In his second autobiography, Adler attributes the idea to then Britannica chairman Robert Gwinn, and describes his own reaction as “immediate, affirmative and enthusiastic.” There is no doubt that Adler careered headlong into the project, not unlike the Imperial Guard rushing to their doom at Waterloo.

  The world was not clamoring for a sequel to the “Great Books of the Western World.” Benton and Hutchins had long since passed away. The Federal Trade Commission had launched three separate enforcement actions against Britannica, two involving the Great Books. The supersalesmen whom Kenneth Harden unleashed in the 1960s either had been folded back into the Britannica force or drifted west to sell computers, cars, whatever the consumer was hankering for at the moment.

  By 1990, the Great Books idea seemed especially shopworn. John Erskine championed the Great Books in reaction to curriculum changes that had taken place one hundred years before. A lot had happened in a hundred years. Forget Forensics! Queer Studies was showing up in the academic mainstream, at major universities such as Duke, Yale, and the University of California. It seemed unlikely that a prominent queer theorist like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick would be integrating the Great Books into her syllabus anytime soon: “Virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition,” she wrote in her 1990 book, Epistemology of the Closet. At Smith College, the ladies of the Asian Studies Association, the Black Students Alliance, Ekta (South Asian students), the International Students Organization, Korean Students at Smith, Nosotras (Hispanic students), and the Smith African Students Association were staging a sit-in, demanding the college immediately create a multicultural student center. A hundred miles or so to the north, the ultraconservative Dartmouth Review was publishing excerpts from Adolf Hitler’s call to action, Mein Kampf. These weren’t the Columbia men in neckties, sitting down with John Erskine and Mark Van Doren to discuss The Iliad. These weren’t the properly awed University of Chicago undergraduates content to watch President Hutchins blow literal and figurative smoke rings at the end of a seminar table. By 1990, the famous student takeover of Columbia University was twenty-two years in the past. This was not a world the 88-year-old Mortimer Adler was ready to take on.

  Jesse Jackson inveighs against Western culture at Stanford. CHUCK PAINTER / STANFORD NEWS SERVICE

  Did anyone look out the window? Britannica and Adler chose the very moment that the Western canon and “dead white males” in particular were under siege, to sell their “new” collection. It seems comical to recall that Jesse Jackson showed up on the Stanford campus in 1988 to join in the famous, anticanon sloganeering against an unpopular course requirement: “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Western Culture’s got to go!” But he did.

  Adler was singularly unsuited to serve as canon fodder. He didn’t get the ’60s or the ’70s or the ’80s at all. He had inveighed against “the cult of sensuality, addiction to a life of play and frivolity, the existentialist cop-out which consists in living from day to day with . . . no thought of a good life as a whole” and condemned “over-indulgence in sex,” and “psychedelic escapism” in his books and essays.10 After the Stanford hijinks, he wrote a long essay decrying multiculturalism. He allowed that cultural pluralism was socially desirable, but . . . don’t touch that bookshelf! In learning, he wrote, “[w]hat is desirable is a restricted cultural pluralism; that is, the promotion and preservation of pluralism in all matters of taste, but not in any matters that are concerned with objectively valid truth, either descriptive factual truth or prescriptive normative truth.” Translation: Aristotle leaves the syllabus over my dead body.

  From the culture’s point of view, Adler was a dead white male who had the bad luck to still be alive. To the left, he didn’t exist. But the right wing had renounced him as well. In 1988, University of Chicago philosophy professor Allan Bloom hit the jackpot with his jeremiad, The Closing of the American Mind, which spent thirty-one weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Bloom deplored the loosey-goosey state of American education, and acknowledged, “Of course, the only serious solution is the one that is almost universally rejected: the good old Great Books approach, in which a liberal education means reading certain generally recognized classic texts.” Bloom professed love for the Great Books, but disdained the “cult” founded by his erstwhile University of Chicago colleagues. “It is amateurish,” Bloom wrote. “The whole movement has a certain coarse evangelistic tone that is the opposite of good taste.” For Adler, he had nothing but contempt: “Adler’s business genius recognized [America’s desire for equal access] and made a roaring commercial success out of the Great Books. He was not even concerned about the translations he used, let alone about learning languages.”

  Adler, the perennial showman and egomaniac, was wounded by Bloom’s slight. He called his former colleague “that fool, Allan Bloom” in a series of increasingly bitter interviews. In Adler’s papers, there is a draft of a speech called “Setting the Record Straight,” outlining the high points of his rebuttal to Bloom, which he would merchandise to anyone who would listen.

  “Because of the serious defects, inexcusable negligence, and downright errors in Mr. Bloom’s treatment of great books, democracy and philosophical truth, I am impelled to set the record straight,” Adler fumed. “I would be less than candid were I not to add at once that I am also motivated by his one reference to me. Its insinuation that my only concern with great books was making money out of the sale of the Great Books of the Western World, published in 1952 . . . is an infra dig slur.” The 86-year-old Adler pointed out that he had been teaching the Great Books with John Erskine before Allan Bloom was born: “Allan Bloom is either inexcusably ignorant of all the work we did, which he should have gracefully applauded; or worse, he intentionally ignored it in order to give the impression that his own recommendation that the great books be read by college students was an educational innovation by him.”

  On Firing Line, William F. Buckley taunted his old pal by reciting Bloom’s formidable sales figures. Adler jumped at the bait. “[Bloom] and his master, Leo Strauss, teach the Great Books as if they were teaching the truth. But when I teach them, I want to understand the errors,” Adler railed, as if public television viewers had the faintest idea who the German-born philosopher Leo Strauss was, or what errors Adler was talking about. “They indoctrinate their students with the ‘truth’ they find in the books,” Adler continued. “Strauss reads Plato and Aristotle as if it was all true, i.e., women are inferior, and some men are destined to be slaves.”

  While inveighing against Bloom, Adler was preparing to launch the new, revised 1990 edition of the Britannica Great Books. The selection process was déjà vu all over again. Again, Adler convened a board of experts, most of them plucked from his hip pocket, like Co
lumbia’s seemingly ageless Jacques Barzun, former Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins, Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and others. And again, there was the exchange of memos among board members lobbying for personal favorites: “Mr. Cousins agreed strongly with those of you who wanted Flaubert, but that still left Flaubert with only 4 votes. He objected to dropping Fielding, saying that he did not know how one could choose between Fielding and Austen, that the absence of either one would cause comment.”

  The changes were underwhelming indeed. The committee voted four Great Books authors off the island: Apollonius of Perga, and his “Conics” (“I regretted dropping the ‘Conics’”—Adler); Joseph Fourier’s “Analytical Theory of Heat”; Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. “I thought we were wrong in dropping Fielding,” Adler wrote, and couldn’t refrain from adding, “And I thought we were wrong in adding Voltaire’s Candide . . . Candide is not a great book.”

  Into the gaps left in the original fifty-four-volume set, the committee inserted many names left on the table when Hutchins, Erskine, Adler, Buchanan & Co. were doing their horse-trading in 1943 and 1944. John Calvin finally made the cut, as did François Rabelais, Molière, Racine, Voltaire, Diderot, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, de Toqueville, Balzac, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henrik Ibsen, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain. As a sop to modernity, the committee added six new volumes of twentieth-century works to the Great Books, canonizing eleven new scientists, seven new philosophers, seven new social scientists, and twenty new practitioners of “imaginative literature.”11 Along with Austen and Eliot, Willa Cather and Virginia Woolf were the sole women to be included in the Great Books. No blacks or Hispanics appeared on the list.

  Britannica dutifully prepared its sales force for the inevitable questions. A 1990 marketing memo noted that glaring exclusions of most women and all people of color “will be the hottest critical commentary when the set is released—and we welcome it! We expect much controversy. . . . [T]his kind of coverage will do much to bring ‘Great Books’ back as a topic for debate once again.”

  It gets worse. The anonymous briefer continues: “We have also answered an objection of more recency—namely, where are the women? We have come a long way, baby, and thus we have Jane and George, as well as Willa Cather and Virginia Woolf in the 20th century.”

  To which one can only say: Ouch.

  The formal talking points explain that “we did not deliberately select Great Books on the basis of an author’s nationality, religion or subject area. Neither did we select Great Books on the basis of gender or race.”

  Preparing for the fancy kick-off, black-tie banquet event at the Library of Congress, festooned with such conservative celebrities as William F. Buckley and Gertrude Himmelfarb, Adler thought it would be best not to broach what he called the “affirmative action” issue. Britannica’s top PR man, Norman Braun, counseled otherwise: “The issue will come up. To omit it from the list of questions and responses may invite press accusations of editorial racism, etc.”

  It did come up. At the ceremony during which Adler and Britannica boss Gwinn presented a complete, $1,400 set to Librarian of Congress James Billington, a Library staffer named Prosser Gifford ventured that “[s]urely the great Latin American authors are part of the ‘great conversation.’” Gifford, the only dissonant voice that appears in the Library’s account of the meeting, also noted that “the great conversation of ideas in the Western tradition is not limited to people who live in the North Atlantic” areas of the world. Silence, groundling! Adler scoffed at the “irrelevance of these criticisms.”

  But scoffing takes you only so far. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., then a professor at Duke, got the ball rolling in an interview with the New York Times: “It distresses me that the editors couldn’t find more women and people of color to include in this new edition. . . . Obviously, there’s still a ‘whites only’ sign on what precisely constitutes a great thinker.” The Chicago Tribune’s John Blades wrote, “The absence of black writers from the expanded library of classics seems certain to rile an increasingly vocal body of critics who maintain that the standard literary texts (or canon) slight or ignore the work of women and various religions and ethnic groups.” Blades quoted Adler as insisting that “there are no ‘Great Books’ by black writers before the 1955 cutoff. ‘There are good books by blacks—about 10—that are worth reading for one or two ideas, and they are in the Syntopicon.’ [Adler] says the debate over the canon is ‘Utter nonsense. Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish. . . . This is the canon, and it’s not revisable.’”

  This is precisely what the ever-more-addled Adler was telling interviewers around the country. Blacks “didn’t write any good books,” he told the Los Angeles Times. If there are no Latino authors, it’s because “[selection committee member] Octavio Paz didn’t recommend any.” Too Eurocentric? If “[Asians] came to the West, they better learn Western culture. If they want to stay Japanese, they should stay in Japan.”

  In the same month as the launch, Adler told Jet magazine’s primarily black audience: “I think probably in the next century there will be some Black that writes a great book, but there hasn’t been any so far.” In a letter to Adler, the president of the school council of Chicago’s Goldblatt Elementary School quoted from the Jet article, and said: “The racism implicit in these remarks is rivaled only by their untruth.” William Johnson, president of the Urban League of Rochester, sent a letter to Britannica executive Gwinn, with a copy to the Urban League’s national president: “I have a question: Can you clarify the criteria by which writers, thinkers and scientists are selected for your publication? Perhaps then I will better understand why important themes—oppression, racism, equality, freedom, history, culture, identity—are reflected only in the works of Eurocentric writers, thinkers and scientists.” Johnson added: “Until this error is corrected, I cannot and will not recommend that anyone purchase these volumes.”

  Mortimer Adler lived on eleven more years, in progressively failing health, until his death in 2001. He continued to teach seminars to the business “bozos,” as he called them behind their backs, at the Aspen Institute. Since the early 1980s, he had been promoting an elementary school version of the Great Books, called the Paideia Proposal (paideia means “education” in Greek), that had pretty much run out of gas by the time of his death. For much of his life, up until 1995, he published or edited a book a year. Like Hutchins’s, some of Adler’s later efforts flirted with absurdity. He published an Aquinas-like “proof” that God created the cosmos. He took to calling latter-day philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein “ignoramuses,” scoring their insufficient appreciation of Aristotle.

  Although he had converted to Catholicism shortly before his death, Adler’s memorial service took place at the high Episcopal church he frequented while living in Chicago, St. Chrysostom’s on the Gold Coast. His friend Max Weissman read the Twenty-Third Psalm. Adler’s first son Mark also read, and Mark Van Doren’s son Charles delivered the last of three eulogies. Charles, a former lecturer at Columbia, does not like to talk about the quiz show scandal that effectively ended his life in polite society, but he mentioned it at Adler’s service: “And then there came the time when I fell down, face down in the mud, and he picked me up, brushed me off, and gave me a job.”

  Adler did give Van Doren a behind-the-scenes job at Britannica, after his best friend’s son had suffered national disgrace. “He saved Charlie’s life,” Sydney Hyman says. “Everyone knows that.” “He was very loyal to people,” Charles’s brother John recalled. “He had all sorts of philosopher pals on some sort of retainer to Britannica. But people were not loyal to him.”

  Adler never had an academic job after he left the University of Chicago in 1946. He was generally unwelcome on American campuses, with the possible exception of St. John’s, and lived off his Britannica work, occasional grants for “philosophical” inquiry, his Aspen seminars, and his frantic publishing schedule. “You won’t find his name in a dictionary of ph
ilosophers,” John Van Doren continued. “There is not a single mention of him in the most recently published Dictionary of 20th Century American Philosophy. He doesn’t exist. I think it’s a great pity.” “He made people believe that they could think seriously about ideas outside the university academic structure,” says Howard Zeiderman, a tutor at St. John’s. “He did something that was terrifically important, because there is a hunger in this country on the part of people who want to think. For better or worse, he tried to address that.”

  Like Hutchins at the end of his life, Adler, too, judged himself harshly. Charles Van Doren told me about one of the last conversations he had with Adler, who was speaking by telephone from his retirement home in San Mateo, California: “He said: ‘You know, Charles, everything that I’ve done has been forgotten. My life has been a failure.’ And I said: ‘Oh no, Mort, of course that’s not true,’ and I repeated that thought in every way. And he said: ‘Don’t. Don’t. What I’m saying is true.’”

  I told Van Doren that Hutchins had said much the same thing, and I remarked that extremely intelligent, vain men are sometimes overly self-critical. Van Doren corrected me: “No, I think they were both right.”

  EIGHT

  THE PEOPLE OF THE BOOK

  WHERE DID THOSE 1 million sets of Great Books go? Hundreds if not thousands went to libraries, quite possibly never to be opened a second time, after a staffer dutifully affixed an ex libris sticker inside the front cover of all fifty-four volumes. Thousands became adornments, either in corporate offices or in the kind of living rooms that functioned as imagined “salons,” spaces so tidy and vacuumed that family members never dared set foot in them. And thousands of copies, perhaps tens of thousands, were actually read, and had an enormous impact on the lives of the men, women, and children who read them.