by Alex Beam
KINSLEY, bemused: “So fate is sinking and equality is rising.”
8 In 1950, Benton faced Prescott Bush, the father of one future president and the grandfather of another, in a special Senate election. Bush, an investment banker who was also president of the American Golf Association, courted Connecticut’s putative “Yale vote” by posing in campaign ads with the college’s famous singing group, the Whiffenpoofs. Perhaps the Yale men had trouble finding the polls; Bush lost by just over a thousand votes.
9 Adler the irrepressible salesman firmly believed that his Great Books were far greater than any ever produced at Harvard. Just before the GBWW launch, he composed a five-page, single-spaced memo for Britannica management, highlighting the many superiorities of the Chicago set:
10 Regarding Adler the bluestocking, historian Tim Lacy gets off a good line: “This all came from the man Hutchins himself labeled a ‘sybarite’ and the same Adler who engaged in several extramarital affairs through the 1940s and 1950s.”
11 The complete list of twentieth-century additions appears in my (Randomly Annotated) Great Books list, at the end of this book.
12 A few years ago, Columbia’s undergraduate satirical revue, the Varsity Show, memorably lampooned the college core. In “The Sound of Muses,” blind, toga-clad Homer, played by an African-American actor, visits Columbia and no one recognizes him. They think he is Ray Charles. Homer’s friend Zeus offers to teach all of Columbia’s LitHum sections, and breaks into the show-stopping song, “More of the Core.” Sample lyrics: “Modern books are just a distraction / Give me the ancients! / Give me the action!” In the musical, Zeus takes over the core. He lengthens each class time from two to four hours, cancels all of Columbia’s noncore classes, and naturally boots all the women out of the syllabus. In a spirited dance number with Plato, Aristotle, and Dante, Virginia Woolf gives Homer an earful: “You’re just another man in the canon / Writing books that I don’t want to read / You might be prolific / but you’re soporific indeed.”
13 Chicago’s History Department scathingly assessed the omnididact Barr, damning him as an “exceptionally pleasing person” who “makes no pretense of scholarship or scholarly productivity in the sense in which those terms are understood at the University of Chicago.”
14 After he left the college in 1946, Buchanan started inveighing against the New Program. When he returned to speak at Commencement the following year, he was beating the drum for a “permanent revolutionary committee” that would continually overhaul the curriculum. Heretically, he urged the inclusion of non-Western literature in the program: “We ought to have gone at the Oriental books simply and hard, and we’d have cracked them,” he said. “The best way to learn these things is to teach them. . . . Don’t stand on your competence.”
15 G. K. Chesterton writes of a lady friend who picked up a selection from Aquinas titled The Simplicity of God. She faltered, put down the book, and said, “Well, if that’s His simplicity, I wonder what His complexity is like.”
Copyright © 2008 by Alex Beam
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Text set in 11 point Caslon
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beam, Alex.
A great idea at the time : the rise, fall, and curious afterlife of the Great
Books / Alex Beam.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-0-786-72698-1