A Great Idea at the Time

by Alex Beam

  The city’s cultural institutions played along gleefully. The Newberry Library displayed first editions of many of the works, and the Art Institute, the public library, the Chicago Historical Society, and the Natural History Museum followed suit. On the next-to-last day Adler delivered a lengthy speech on “The Great Books in Today’s World” before an audience of 750 at the Fair Store, a famous discount store in the Loop. (“Everything for Everybody under one roof at a cheap price” was its motto.) He assailed his critics, including Masserman, and pulled out the rhetorical stops: “The Great Books movement aims in the direction of universalizing liberal education for adults—making it as normal as schooling—for children and youth, and extending it, as far as the franchise goes, to all students.”

  The week ended with Hutchins and Adler leading a Great Books seminar on Plato’s Socratic dialogues The Apology and Crito on the stage of Orchestra Hall. For the Potemkin discussion group seated on the stage, they had drafted some very fat men, and a few women: the owner of the Hitching Post restaurant; the general manager of Illinois Bell; an appellate court judge; the city’s corporation counsel; the president of the United Packing House Workers, a vice-president of the First National Bank of Chicago, and in some cases their wives. The opening question for the two-hour session: “Was Socrates guilty or not?” Twenty-five hundred Chicago glitterati filled the auditorium, and 1,500 would-be audience members were turned away at the door.

  With the Great Books, it seemed, all things were possible. “I am not saying that reading and discussing the Great Books will save humanity from itself,” Hutchins said, “but I don’t know anything else that will.” According to educational historian Amy Apfel Kass, “Hutchins and Adler had transformed a technique of general education into a vision of salvation; they believed their Bildungsideal could save mankind and the modern world from moral decay and physical destruction. . . . The Great Books movement, in short, offered an intellectual surrogate for, or supplement to, attendance in church.”

  FIVE

  THE MAKING OF THE BOOKS

  AMONG THE FAT MEN, one man was the fattest of the fat. He was William Benton, yet another Yale pal of Hutchins’s, yet another minister’s son, and yet another progenitor of the Great Books who simply couldn’t think small.

  By the mid-1930s, Benton had made a million dollars in advertising, always as an innovator, always as an idea man. He pioneered the use of cue cards (LAUGH!; APPLAUD!) to be held up in front of live audiences. When his company, Benton & Bowles, represented the Colgate Ribbon Dental Cream account, he dreamed up the notion that the cream not only cleaned your teeth but “freshened” your mouth. He was a mile-a-minute huckster who owned the Muzak Corp. for about a decade, hoping to create a demand for “subscription radio,” anticipating the market for cable television by about forty years. He was a force of nature who later in life would prove to be a force for good. Back when one could do such a thing, he once ran out on a runway and hailed down a commercial jetliner about to take off, because he had missed the previous flight. Hutchins occasionally introduced Benton as a man who had a lot to apologize for.

  Improbably, Benton, who hired and fired men before breakfast and became the first U.S. senator to stand up to Joe McCarthy, lived in terror of his domineering mother, Elma. After he won a Rhodes scholarship coming out of Yale, Elma asked why a man would fritter away two years at Oxford when he had perfectly good job offers sitting on the table in front of him. Benton turned down the Rhodes. When Benton left a promising career with National Cash Register to plunge into the uncertain, aborning world of corporate advertising, Elma disapproved. “Dear Billie,” she wrote, “I am sorry to hear that you are going into a business that says, ‘Palmolive soap is a good soap.’” Benson’s biographer, Sidney Hyman, wrote that Benton “grew into a man who seemed unafraid of anything, including God’s final judgment—unafraid of anything, that is, but his mother’s frown, while longing for her approving smile, which he never got.”

  In 1936, after reading in the newspaper that Benton was quitting the ad business, Hutchins lured him to Chicago. Benton agreed to work for the university for six months each year, as long as he didn’t have to do PR work. Hutchins made him a university vice president, which disguised his true function: He was Hutchins’s ambassador to the downtown plutocrats.

  In the course of remaking the university, Hutchins had butted heads with some of the trustees. There had been a scandal involving the niece of drugstore magnate Charles Walgreen, one of the city’s megarich. She complained that she was being subjected to “Communist influences” at Mr. Hutchins’s university. Inevitably her uncle started sounding off, and the right-wing Chicago Tribune , owned by Hutchins’s blood enemy, the reactionary Colonel Robert McCormick, gleefully served as a megaphone. Hutchins dispatched Benton to Walgreen, and Benton smoothed things out. Benton was an adman, and he understood businessmen without condescending to them. He was one of them. He settled Walgreen down, and even jawboned the crusty tycoon into underwriting the Charles R. Walgreen Foundation for the Study of American Institutions. Then Benton went to work on McCormick, and smoothed him out, too. Benton had charm. Benton had brains. And, like Hutchins, Benton was an idea man.

  One day over lunch in the Loop, Benton was listening to yet more bellyaching from a U. of C. trustee, this time from General Robert Wood, chairman of the board of Sears, Roebuck & Co. In 1920, Sears had bought the Encyclopedia Britannica, but had never been able to do much with it. Sears’s bread and butter was catalog sales, and its customers weren’t sending away for high-end encyclopedias. The books had a market—surprisingly, half its customers had less than $25,000 in annual income—but they had to be sold door-to-door. Moreover, Sears didn’t have the expertise to update the volumes, or the resources to commission new editions. In the past it had tried to enlist the U. of C., and then Harvard, into producing new versions, with Sears footing the bill. There was no interest. Most important, the Britannica was barely breaking even.

  Inside Benton’s head, lights were flashing. Why not donate Britannica to the University of Chicago? Benton suggested. After some back and forth, Wood agreed. Then it turned out the university didn’t want Britannica. Too risky, the trustees deemed. So, in 1943, Benton bought the company himself and gifted one-third of the stock to the university, along with any profits the encyclopedias generated. Britannica acquired the imprimatur of a major research university, and Chicago got a no-lose gift, with some significant upside potential.

  Now Benton owned a prestigious publisher. What to do with it? While he and his wife were participating in the Fat Men seminars, Benton had been complaining that some of the classics were hard to find in stores. Other people were having trouble finding them, too. The Great Books Foundation was losing money by publishing below-cost paperback reprints of some classic works that it refused to promote, fearing the taint of “commercialism.” (As the Foundation encountered financial difficulties in its early years, Hutchins characteristically assured Foundation president Lynn Williams that “the ravens will provide.”) The quality paperback revolution was still in the future. Books weren’t cheap, and they mainly resided in libraries. Translations of the classics were in especially short supply. St. John’s College had been forced to translate some of the Greats Books for its own, on-campus use. One Great Books discussion group had to drop The Brothers Karamazov because the Modern Library edition was out of print.

  So Benton, who liked to boast that he generated at least 500 ideas a week, one or two of which might be worth something, had yet another brainstorm: Why not publish the Great Books? “What have we got a publishing house for?” he thundered. “Let’s publish these books and make them available.”

  Hutchins wasn’t keen on the idea. He said the university shouldn’t be in the business of making “colorful furniture.” Trust Benton—or Adler; both men later took credit—to come up with an idea. Benton agreed with Hutchins about the Great Books’ fundamental unreadability: “The thought of reading them would terrify an
y potential buyers who would perhaps fail to buy if they thought they were supposed to read them.” Suppose we published the Great Books along with an “idea index”? Benton suggested. This would provide a framework for Adler’s contention that the masterpieces of Western thought “spoke” to each other in a Great Conversation, always capitalized to emphasize its inherent momentousness. So instead of taking the suggested ten years to read the books, you could look up justice in the idea index and see what Aristotle, John Locke, and even Fyodor Dostoyevsky had to say about the subject . . . without having to pull their tomes off the shelf!

  Maybe the time savings would add up to two hours a day, who knows? Benton was a modernist apostle of efficiency, and if the index of ideas wasn’t efficient, then nothing was. The game had been joined. In 1943, Chicago announced its plans to publish the Great Books of the Western World.

  Adler would have been happy to choose the books by himself, and after everyone else had died, he claimed that he did. But Hutchins knew better how to navigate the academic kelp forest. A high-profile committee of great intellects needed to be convened, to commit great and visible acts of deliberation so that no one could later accuse the Chicago “medievalists” of packing the Great Books list with their personal favorites. Although, in the end, of course, that is exactly what they did.

  Membership on the Great Books selection committee was almost foreordained. Adler and Hutchins, of course. John Erskine, who evinced little interest in the project, had to be a member. Mark Van Doren, who had taught the Erskine seminar with Adler and had become America’s popular Poetry God, agreed to join. Two other bookmen whelped from the Erskine bloodline joined: Scott Buchanan and his close friend “Winkie” Barr, who were running St. John’s down in Annapolis. Three other men rounded out the committee: Alexander Meiklejohn, progressive educator and a former president of Amherst College; the future University of Chicago dean Clarence Faust; and Chicago chemistry professor Joseph Schwab, the token scientist of the lot. Not everyone rallied to the flag. Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish declined, as did Lionel Trilling, Columbia’s legendary literary critic. Trilling frowned on Great Books pedagogy in the academy, and thought the inevitable inclusion of difficult scientific texts doomed the Britannica venture from the get-go. “Such an excess of zeal or faith is likely to defeat the purpose of the enterprise,” he wrote to Hutchins. Trilling, nothing if not practical, thought the editors’ determination not to include commentary or explanatory footnotes further doomed the prospective Great Books reader.

  The committee of once-alive white males, and their handiwork. TIME & LIFE PICTURES / GETTY IMAGE

  Happily for us, the nine committeemen left a rich paper trail of their ten meetings that stretched over two years. At the first gathering in December 1943, Adler laid out the criteria for exactly what could be considered a Great Book. Each book chosen should 1. Be important in itself and without reference to any other; that is, it must be seminal and radical in its treatment of basic ideas or problems;

  2. Obviously belong to the tradition in that it is intelligible by other great books, as well as increasing their intelligibility;

  3. Have an immediate intelligibility for the ordinary reader even though this may be superficial;

  4. Have many levels of intelligibility for diverse grades of readers or for a single reader rereading it many times; and

  5. Be indefinitely rereadable. . . . It should not be the sort of book that can ever be finally mastered or finished by any reader.

  The first meeting generated a “first string” list of indisputably great authors whose works would be represented without debate:

  Homer The Bible

  Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes Herodotus, Thucydides

  Euclid Plato, Aristotle

  Galen St. Augustine, St. Thomas

  Dante, Machiavelli Cervantes

  Shakespeare Galileo, Harvey, Newton

  Hobbes Descartes

  Spinoza, Pascal Locke, Hume, Rousseau

  Gibbon Dostoevski

  Marx Tolstoy

  Freud

  Then, according to the minutes, the members set to bickering about the “second string”:

  ERSKINE: After all the discussions we had about the relation of the books on the list to each other, [and] their availability for comparison in the study of the humane tradition, I should have thought that Molière would be an inevitable choice. His best works are not only masterpieces of the theatre, but they are monuments of French thought, and they have provided a rich supply of germinating ideas.

  BUCHANAN: I . . . protest dropping Molière.

  MEIKLEJOHN: Wish we could keep him.

  VAN DOREN: Molière will go out only over my bruised body. He is the perfect comedian, the classic comedian, and also he is universally delightful; he will be read by cooks and Congressmen with equal pleasure. . . . Keep him, in the name of sanity and sophia.

  Molière would have to wait forty-eight years to be included in the Great Books relaunch of 1990.

  In May 1944, the board took to voting authors on or off a list of potential greats:

  [Marcus] Aurelius: 6 for; Schwab against.

  SCHWAB: “He doesn’t say anything. Highly teachable, but no real content. The fact that he was an emperor is the only thing that makes it good, and that is a bad criterion.”

  [Jean Jacques] Rousseau: 6 for; Schwab against.

  SCHWAB: “Never so few fine statements set in so much crap. Not original or fundamental.”

  ERSKINE: “Not a philosopher, but one of the greatest spokesmen for humanity.”

  ADLER AND VAN DOREN: “Terribly original.”

  Melville: 6 for; Erskine against.

  ERSKINE: “Of no such size, beauty, importance as Whitman; if Whitman out, then Melville out.”

  Dickens: 4 for; Erskine, Van Doren violently for.

  ERSKINE, ADLER: “If Dickens goes, Melville goes.”

  SCHWAB: “Not really against, not really for. He’s boring.”

  Mark Twain: 3 for; Faust, Schwab, Barr against.

  “All against Twain want it understood they love him.”

  Duns Scotus: Schwab for; 6 for tabling.

  ADLER: “Nobody knows about Duns Scotus.”

  Rousseau and Melville eventually made the cut, but Dickens, Whitman, and Twain did not. Adler was correct that nobody knows about Duns Scotus, the medieval theologian known as “Doctor Subtilis.” There are several other works that draw a complete blank for the twenty-first-century reader. For instance, a lively debate ensued over the possible inclusion of the now-forgotten William Thackeray novel Henry Esmond. Hutchins told a colleague that “I asked Mr. Adler to read ‘Henry Esmond,’ because I was nervous about it. Mr. Adler asked Mr. Mayer to read it. Mr. Mayer asked Mr. Bellow [Saul Bellow, working on the Syntopicon] to read it.”

  Bellow said no.

  Even more time and ink were shed over the possible inclusion of the Icelandic saga “Burnt Njal,” the gruesome tale of Bergthorsknoll farmer Njal Thorgeirsson, whose enemies incinerate him and his family in their home. “‘Burnt Njal’ is exceedingly important,” Barr told the committee. His colleague Buchanan “pointed out that it was the source of English common law,” according to historian Hugh Moorhead, “and Van Doren made a case for its extraordinary contemporaneity, witness the Dumbarton Oaks conference,” which in the fall of 1944 was trying to create the United Nations.

  From the minutes, we learn that “Mr. Hutchins went on record as not liking sagas.” He also blackballed the cornerstone of Norwegian literature, the “Niebelungenlied.”

  A year later, Barr was still tugging at the bone in a letter to Hutchins:

  A month ago I reread Burnt Njal for one of the Washington seminars. Far from having overestimated it before, I think I underestimated it. It is not merely a magnificent narrative; it is not merely a penetrating study of human beings; but it poses the vast problem of how real law may emerge from a lawless community—the problem San Francisco [where the United Nations charte
r was being discussed] is now preparing to bungle.

  “Burnt Njal” never made the Great Books list.

  The committee members eventually dropped the Bible, for two reasons. First, they concluded that it was the one book Americans possessed, and they would own a version they liked. Second, Benton predicted that selling the Bible might trigger religious wars on the domestic front: “There are selling complications involved, where a Protestant is married to a Catholic, where buyers may want to exchange one Bible for another Bible after arrival of the set, etc. etc. Eliminating the Bible will simplify inventory, bookkeeping, and selling problems.”

  Benton rarely put his oar in, but others did. Milton Mayer, who often took the minutes at the committee meetings, threw in his two cents:

  What about Hardy? What about him? He wrote the longest sentence in the English language.

  Madre Dio, what about Pitt?

  Wasn’t there ever a Pole who could write at all? I am thinking of Szymczak, but Szymczak was President of the Northwest Trust & Savings Bank on Milwaukee Avenue.