A Great Idea at the Time

by Alex Beam

  When it comes to Great Books, no one is without an opinion.

  Translations would prove to be a thorny problem, as one editor explained in a memo about the English-language Homer available:

  Cayley, using a quasi-quantitative meter, which at first is hard to read, is a more skillful metrist than Herschel, but his diction, like Thomas[’s], is somewhat precious and Alexandrian, in fact Spenserian; he also falls down on some of the “big lines.” . . . Dart is often more felicitous in his phrasing than either Herschel or Cayley (he also uses a hexameter) but he is freer than either of the other, and often introduces his private theological comments into the text of the poem itself.

  Pilfering from existing works would not pose a problem, as this same editor explained how to “borrow” a Gibbon text from existing publications: “It would be perfectly ethical to use the Everyman or Modern Library edition, if the bracketed notes by O(liphant) S(meaton) were omitted. If Gibbon’s own notes were omitted as well, the length of the printed work would be cut down considerably.”

  The inclusion of scientific texts, like Ptolemy’s Almagest, or Nicholas Copernicus’s Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres, was bound to be controversial. Adler insisted on including them, but Adler knew next to nothing about science. The committee solicited the opinion of Harvard science historian George Sarton, whom they had originally hoped to include on the panel. They might have spared themselves the postage. “The classics of science are essentially different from the literary classics in that the latter are eternal, while the former are ephemeral,” Sarton wrote, as if explaining the world to elementary school children. “Science is progressive, while art is not.”

  When Hutchins and Adler bridled at his response, he wrote them again, asking, “Don’t you see the difference?”

  “Hamlet” is something established forever, unique and irreplaceable, while each scientific book is but a stepping stone for the next one. Newton’s achievement and personality are immortal; his book is dead except from the archaeological point of view. It is all right to study English in Shakespeare; it is all wrong to study astronomy in Newton.

  Like Trilling, Erskine thought the inclusion of the science texts was ridiculous, but no one listened to him, either. Even Hutchins didn’t hide his antipathy for the science books. “I must repel the suggestion that I have at any time said I would read Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Kepler,” he informed the committee. “I would never think of such a thing (neither will any purchaser of the Great Books).” Hutchins, who often took a pile of classics on his frequent cross-country jaunts, rarely disguised his annoyance with many of the supposedly grand texts. Channeling the thoughts of a million undergraduates longing to leave the library and play Frisbee in the quad, he called David Hume “an ass.” In a letter to Buchanan, Hutchins opined “that the Great Books seem either less great or greater when you read them again. I read the Modern Library edition of Molière the other day and cannot see how its inclusion can possibly be justified; it’s trash, Professor, and nothing else.”

  Adler complained to Buchanan about Hutchins’s “general ennui” vis-à-vis the selection process, and about his boss’s “silly prejudices”: “Worse than that, he is exercising prejudices about particular works, such as the Organon of Aristotle, the Laws of Plato, the Mediations of Descartes, On Christian Doctrine of St. Augustine—some of which I know he hasn’t read.”

  In an interview many years later with historian Hugh Moorhead, Hutchins clarified what was not obvious at the time: He was the project’s editor in chief. The committee worked for him, and he had absolute final say over what books went in or out. Hutchins claimed he exerted only a negative capability, vetoing, cutting, dumping the many recommendations, primarily because Benton had imposed a cap of sixty volumes for the set. Hutchins said that he insisted that only one book be included, Tristram Shandy, because it was amusing: “It’s a very funny book, and I thought the set was a little deficient along those lines.”

  Having chosen the seventy-four writers, all deceased and primarily Caucasian males (St. Augustine’s ethnicity is always in doubt), the bookmen now attacked the problem of the index. The concept was simple enough. They would hire a flock of recent college graduates, at $2.00 an hour, to read through the chosen 443 works looking for allusions to the 102 Great Ideas. Adler chose the 102 ideas, and never explained how he happened on that number, only that he was determined not to choose 100 Great Ideas.7 These ranged from Angel to World, via Logic, Love, Rhetoric, Same and Other, One and Many, Time, Truth, and Tyranny. The random choice of topics was a subject of ridicule for years to come. When Adler sent Benton a draft of the very first essay, “Angel,” Benton blurted out: “Where’s Adultery?” Adler told him adultery would be indexed under Family, prompting Benton’s reply: “What’s it doing there?”

  Mortimer Adler surrounded by several dozen of the 102 Great Ideas. TIME & LIFE PICTURES / GETTY IMAGE

  In a promotional film for the set, a world-weary Hutchins explains to Adler that “most of my friends are interested in money, fame, power, and sex—I don’t see those in the 102 ideas. What are we going to do about those?” Flustered and impatient, Adler answers that the index has its own appendix, an 1,800-word “inventory of terms.” Frowning, as if speaking to a thick undergraduate, he informs Hutchins that “your friends would be gratified, I’m sure, to find references in the Great Books to sex.” Or would they? The inventory directs readers looking for the “good parts” to writings on sexuality by Aquinas, Hobbes, Darwin, and so on.

  “War a great idea but not Peace?” media theorist Marshall McLuhan asked in a 1951 essay. When McLuhan saw a picture in Life magazine of each idea’s file card stacked in a small box, he likened them to tiny headstones, “as though Professor Adler and his associates had come to bury and not to praise Plato and other great men.”

  Saul Bellow, who had returned to the South Side after finishing his studies at Northwestern, worked on the index. Newly married, Bellow was happy to have landed this “whopper of a job” that allowed him to read the classics on a bench in nearby Jackson Park, site of the 1893 World’s Fair. Bellow described himself “as a sort of strawboss” to whom other indexers reported. “I, in turn, am responsible to Hutchins, and Hutchins to God and St. Thomas.”

  The real straw boss was Adler, who gave up all other university work to concentrate on the index. He fired off memos like lightning bolts:

  Aristotle and Aquinas are doing fine, but Kant, Descartes and Plotinus must catch up. . . . Under Topic 2B, I find only three references to Aristotle and three to Locke. This cannot be all. Something has got to be done about this. . . . We cannot rest on such a random collection with such a major topic. I am sure I am right. Don’t give in.

  In a letter, Adler recalled,

  One man in charge of Aristotle and Aquinas would work 72 hours at a stretch, pile up $1000 overtime and knock off to go to the races. Adler would carefully record the fact that during the work on say, monarchy, nature and necessity, the worker had his mind on the ponies.

  Yes, he is referring to himself in the third person.

  Adler and Benton had an amusing exchange about naming their index of ideas. Benton never thought index would do. Adler pointed out that both encyclopedia and thesaurus were invented words, so Benton set him the task of inventing a word for the index to the Great Books, a word that “gradually will become a familiar common word, no matter how strange it may seem at first.” Adler vowed to come up with twenty or thirty possible neologisms, and he did, proposing cyclopticon, topologue, and topolexicon. Perhaps they might have become household words. Syntopicon never did.

  Compiling the index nearly bankrupted the Great Books project even before it got started. Originally budgeted at $60,000 and intended to take two years, Adler and his indexing army of 120 staffers took over an entire floor of the university’s Social Sciences building and burned through close to a million dollars—half the Great Books’ entire budget—before Benton reined them in.

  The Syntopico
n emanated a distinct odor of flummery, although among the committee members, only Scott Buchanan set his objections down on paper. “Buchanan continued to view the Index as sheer folly and crude commercialism,” Amy Apfel Kass wrote. It was “neither scholarly nor an interpretive aid,” he complained to Hutchins. “It is simply Mortimer getting his staff to blow up to a monster his own bogus tricks of research, scissors and paste mixed with his today’s current position in philosophy. . . . People will be disgusted and angry, if they ever look at it.”

  Even Benton, initially enthusiastic, started to worry about the vast size of the Syntopicon. In 1949, Benton sent Hutchins a letter quoting “a very revealing conversation” he and Adler had with his banker, Jack Janson. “Jack asked Mortimer how he would use the index when he wanted to give a speech about salesmanship.” The obvious answer is that you couldn’t. “Mortimer explained that there was nothing about salesmanship as such in the Great Books.”

  So Benton had yet another brainstorm: an “index to the index”! He called it the “Applied Course,” a simplified meta-list of great ideas that would point out “suitable subjects for discussion at your Christmas dinner or at Thanksgiving. . . . After all, I want to read the Great Books in order to be popular and successful—and what are the applications that I would like to make of these Great Books that will help me and my child to become popular and successful?”

  The Syntopicondex? Mercifully, the idea never got off the ground.

  The Syntopicon eventually gobbled up 2,428 pages, the entire Volumes 2 and 3 of the fifty-four-volume set. The vast, unreadable index had swollen to 3,000 subtopics and 163,000 separate entries, not exactly a user-friendly compendium of 3,000 years of knowledge. In his Preface, Adler insisted the Syntopicon “is first of all a book to be read . . . [a book that] will take its place beside the dictionary and the encyclopedia in a triad of fundamental reference works.” If he had a sense of humor, one might have assumed he was joking.

  I suspect that Volume 1 of the set, Hutchins’s eighty-two-page essay on “The Great Conversation,” likewise went unread. More’s the pity, as it is a beautiful, eloquent, at times humorous, and brief defense of the Western tradition told with Hutchins’s trademark wit and conciseness. The slim introduction summarized the emotional arguments against modernism from “The Higher Learning in America,” and also revealed Hutchins’s state of mind in 1952—and where it was going.

  “Great books have disappeared, or almost disappeared from American education,” the Presbyterian minister’s son declared. “We regard this disappearance as an aberration.” Hutchins devoted a few pages to lacerating the progressive educational theories of John Dewey; the two men had been jousting in high-minded publications for at least fifteen years, although Hutchins’s latest fusillade used humor, his ultimate weapon. He mocked (and of course, simplified) Dewey’s notion that education should conform to young people’s wants. “All young Americans of a certain age now want to be cowboys,” Hutchins wrote. “I doubt whether it would be useful for the schools to concentrate on cowpunching in its moral, social, political, scientific and intellectual contexts.” The purpose of education, Hutchins repeated for the hundredth time, is not to learn how to do something but “to develop a good mind.”

  “The products of American high schools are illiterate; and a degree from a famous college or university is no guarantee that the graduate is in any better case.” This familiar Hutchins theme led to his call for a lifetime’s worth of “interminable liberal education” as the sine qua non of “effective citizenship in a democracy.” Toward the end of the beautiful essay, which prefigures the last few decades of Hutchins’s life, he started to go off the rails. “We say that it is unpatriotic not to read these books,” he wrote. “You may reply that you are patriotic enough without them.” And now for the rhetorical climax: War is coming, he warned. Hutchins firmly believed that the atomic device developed on his campus would eventually, necessarily, be used by the United States or by the Soviet Union: “Therefore we must have world law, enforced by a world organization, which must be attained through world co-operation and community.” Using the Great Books to “revive the great tradition of liberal human thought” can result in nothing less than “a world republic of law and justice.” In other words, a Utopia.

  When these words were published in 1952, Hutchins had just left the University of Chicago to spend a quarter century promoting the idea of world government, inveighing against the arms race, and agitating for liberal democracy and universal justice. It would prove to be a very disappointing twenty-five years indeed.

  SIX

  FASTER, PUSSYCAT! SELL! SELL!

  ON APRIL 15, 1952, the university and Britannica finally launched the Great Books of the Western World at a gala dinner in the Jade Room of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The books had been chosen, the dreaded Syntopicon had been put to bed, and a special $500 buckram-bound “Founders’ Edition” of the Great Books stood on the dais. Although impossible to read—Britannica printed the books in double-columned, nine-point Fairfield type; for comparison, my footnotes are set in eight-point type—the books were quite pretty. Arrayed on a shelf, or in a semicircle, the spines irradiated the hues of a muted rainbow, imitating the colors assigned to disciplines on academic caps and gowns. The literature and poetry books were yellowish. Theology and philosophy were blue. Britannica chose green for the math and science books, and red for law, philosophy, and the social sciences.

  Nine long years had passed since the project began, longer than the Trojan War, someone noted. Setting the dial to maximum hyperbole and self-congratulation, speaker after speaker approached the rostrum. Benton, now the junior senator from his home state of Connecticut,8 called the project “the most significant publishing event since Dr. Johnson’s dictionary.” Although he still owned Britannica, Benton had left the University of Chicago, naturally, because his mother disapproved. “Hutchins is marching to a certain doom,” she wrote him, “and you are being dragged along to it by him.”

  Hutchins was evangelical in his praise of his own handiwork:

  Here is our heritage. This is the West. This is its meaning for mankind. Here is the faith of the West, for here . . . is that dialogue by way of which Western man has believed that he can approach the truth. The deepest values of the West are implicated in this dialogue. It can be conducted only by free men. It is the essential reason for their freedom.

  Turning to his friends, Clifton Fadiman orated, “You who have bought the Great Books are taking upon yourselves part of a magnificent burden, the burden of preserving as did the monks of ancient Christendom, through another darkening, if not Dark Age,” and so on. Hailing the “truly epic struggle to publish the Great Books,” Fadiman said that Benton “will be remembered less for his political career . . . than as the man whose courage and vision made possible what is symbolized by the evening.”

  Sic transit gloria mundi. Of course, Benton isn’t remembered at all.

  Conveniently, John Erskine, the man who started it all, had passed away the previous year. Although Hutchins and Adler occasionally mentioned the “onlie begetter” of the idea they had been championing for a quarter century, the three men had grown apart. Erskine thought including the science texts in the Britannica collection was absurd, and he held up the pedagogy at St. John’s College, where students performed the experiments of Galen and Hippocrates, for special ridicule. In his 1948 memoir, My Life as a Teacher, Erskine wrote: “To ask boys and girls in college, or adult students off the campus, to waste time retracing the literary gropings of outdated science, is in my opinion ridiculous if not criminal.”

  In addition, he thought Hutchins and Adler had blown the value of the Great Books way out of proportion. I found an odd, undated speech in Erskine’s Columbia papers, delivered in French on “Spiritual Life in America.” In the speech, written at the height of the Great Books’ commercial success, Erskine mocked Robert Hutchins’s wildly unrealistic prediction that 15 million Americans would sign up
for Great Books groups, and accused the University of Chicago president of “vulgarizing the most puissant works of human genius” in merchandising the classics:

  Juxtaposed with the “Great Books” we have the “Great Ideas”; several years and millions of dollars allowed a group of studious young people to come up with a number: exactly 102. For each one of them, they created an inventory of the important books that analyzed these ideas. They had curious, at times depressing, results; it seems that a lot more has been written about sin than about virtue. Don’t smile at this naiveté; Americans love to express their conclusions in percentages.

  In a 1946 memoir, Erskine noted that some people (read: Hutchins) tried to turn his Great Books course into “some specific philosophy, and others have tried to expand it into an educational method for teaching all subjects. With these aberrations I have no sympathy whatsoever.” “I was concerned with no philosophy and no method for a total education,” he concluded. “I hoped merely to teach how to read.”

  Now the Great Books had loftier claims.

  Even before the Waldorf dinner, Adler had been hawking the books like a benighted drummer from a Sinclair Lewis novel. Benton made him do it. With the Syntopicon madness threatening to break the bank, Benton had threatened to pull the plug on GBWW, and stop throwing good money after bad. Adler came up with an idea to raise cash. He pitched Benton on the $500 “Founders’ Edition” described above and bet he could sell 500 of them to all the famous people he, Benton, and Hutchins knew. Could the nonswimming, “analerotic” Platophile sell? Benton was willing to give him a try.