The Dream of a Democratic Culture

Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea

T. Lacy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137042620
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: History of Education

This book presents a moderately revisionist history of the great books idea anchored in the following movements and struggles: fighting anti-intellectualism, advocating for the liberal arts, distributing cultural capital, and promoting a public philosophy, anchored in mid-century liberalism, that fostered a shared civic culture.

1

The Great Books Movement, 1920–1948

Chicago Mayor Martin Kennelly proclaimed “Great Books Week” for the city late in September 1948. Historians note that Kennelly, known as a “squeaky-clean” reform mayor, had overseen some lean times, culturally, after World War II and into the early Cold War years. Those barren times caused A. J. Liebling to designate Chicago “The Second City” for its lesser achievements in relation to New York City. The down times no doubt fed into enthusiasm for even lesser celebrations such as “Great Books Week.” The Chicago Tribune proclaimed the designation recognized “the Great Books Foundation’s cultural and recreational” contributions to the city. Illinois Governor Dwight Herbert Green and President Harry S. Truman endorsed the event. The week’s top attraction was a great books discussion demonstration in Orchestra Hall.¹

That demonstration featured Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins leading discussions of Plato’s dialogues, Apology and Crito. Attendees included Chicago luminaries such as Marshall Field III, head of the famous department store chain; Ralph Helstein, stockyard union leader; Meyer Kestenbaum, president of Hart, Schaffner and Marx (tailored menswear company now known as Hartmarx); and Robert L. Simons, “proprietor of the Hitching Post restaurants.” Aside from these notables, another 2,500 persons “jammed Orchestra Hall”—with 1,500 purportedly turned away at the door.²

Why were Adler and Hutchins the stars of the show? Due to the prominence of the University of Chicago in the city, and the fact the both men had been in the news fairly often since the early 1930s due to their writings and public speaking engagements, they were very public Chicago intellectuals. They were celebrity intellectuals in a period, noted by Warren Susman, when celebrities and personalities were sources of cultural change—in a decade, moreover, when the notion of “culture” reassured people of a shared American character. But, more directly, their discussion of Plato probably resembled the routine of Socratic questioning they, as professors and chief raconteurs, had inflicted on their students since the fall of 1930. This involved Adler’s acting the straight man to Hutchins’ being the “witty interrogator.” They sometimes argued “moot points” for “amusement.” Adler saw Hutchins (Figure 1.1) as without peer in the art of “repartee.” Adler later admiringly recalled Hutchins’ “lightning flash rejoinders” that astonished his friends and even Adler at times.³

For his part Adler was no slouch, even if less admired. In his memoirs of Hutchins’ presidency, William H. McNeill called Adler a “show-off.” Despite his distaste, McNeill recalled Adler’s “argumentative skill” and “seriousness.” Thomas Aquinas’ “scholastic method” of posing questions and raising objections fit “Adler’s habit of mind perfectly.” McNeill also observed that “Hutchins never disagreed with Adler in public.” Hutchins, moreover, seemed “to relish the dismay Adler’s pugnacious arguments aroused” among his opponents, at the University and beyond.⁴ It was with these contrasting styles that both offered the public, ironically, a singular, unachievable paradigm for discussing great books. Both in the classroom and their Orchestra Hall event, it was a performance and a lesson in critical thinking. On the latter, despite their singularity and personality, their subsequent writings point to something larger: they hoped the applicable aspects of their model for vigorous discussion would be emulated across America. It was a vision of democratized culture that consisted of challenging oneself with reading and thinking about great books. They wanted an educational movement, and their models were limited, but there is no indication that they wanted ideological purity or philosophical tidiness.⁵

Figure 1.1 Robert Maynard Hutchins, 1941.

Source: University of Chicago, Special Collections Research Center, Photographic Archive.

Kennelly’s fete for the Great Books Foundation likely seemed old news for the few Chicagoans who were up-to-date on the city’s intellectual scene. By 1948, the Great Books Foundation had been in operation in Chicago for almost a year. The University of Chicago’s “University College,” in cooperation with Chicago’s Public Library, had already experimented with free great books classes around the city since 1944. The success of that program had led to extensions in Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Detroit in 1946. By the next year, the program had spread to 17 cities, necessitating the formation of the Foundation.⁶

During the period from the 1920s to the 1940s, the great books idea began as an experiment in New York City and ended as a national phenomenon based in Chicago. Promoters transformed the idea from a small-scale educational novelty housed in a few elite universities to an adult education movement concerned with democratizing the larger culture through great books. Although Hutchins was important to this, it was Mortimer Adler (Figure 1.2) who enabled the transition. Adler first came into contact with the great books idea when he took John Erskine’s General Honors course at Columbia University in 1920. The People’s Institute, which operated in the mid-1920s, proved to be an influence for Adler in the long term. But it was How to Read a Book, published in 1940, that promoted the General Honors strain within the Great Books Movement. Thereafter Adler and his intellectual community would come to purposely promote a high-level, less-formal educational program of uplift not bounded by rules of higher education institutions. While this community began its discourse over the merits of the great books idea in New York, Chicago became the accidental, if happy, launching ground for the Great Books Movement.

Figure 1.2 Mortimer J. Adler, very young, undated.

Source: University of Chicago, Special Collections Research Center, Photographic Archive.

How to Read a Book: The inspiration

When Adler left Columbia University for the University of Chicago in 1930, at the invitation of Robert Maynard Hutchins, he went from relative obscurity to basking in Hutchins’ afterglow as a minor Chicago celebrity. Hutchins and his wife Maude had become members, according to Mary Ann Dzuback, of the city’s “intellectual aristocracy” as soon as Hutchins was inaugurated as the University of Chicago’s president, in November 1929. Dzuback noted that Maude was attractive, and that “men and women alike found Robert’s good looks and sharp wit irresistible.” Although less charismatic and attractive than Hutchins, Adler was grafted into that aristocracy.⁷ Adler built on Hutchins’ afterglow to become a public figure in his own right.

When he came, Adler brought the great books idea with him. While introduced to great books in Erskine’s aforementioned General Honors course, it was Adler’s experience at the People’s Institute that instigated and reinforced his—and his friends’—belief that great books could be accessible to all readers. Formed during the Progressive Era, in 1897, by Columbia University professor Charles Sprague Smith, it was an offshoot of the Cooper Union mechanics school. The People’s Institute existed under the assumption that all deserved, or needed, educational and cultural uplift. As Leon Fink wrote of that period, “education ranked . . . high on the agenda” of Progressive intellectuals and reformers. Considering the logic of reformers he added: “If the people were to seize their democratic birthright for the greater good . . . they must engage their higher faculties of reason” and be “schooled in sense of civic duty.” This would make them a “democratic public.”⁸

The great books idea became a part of the Institute’s story during the directorship of Everett Dean Martin. He became director in 1921 and shortly thereafter articulated his view of the Institute’s educational philosophy. In his 1926 work, The Meaning of a Liberal Education, he argued that education’s task is to “reorient the individual, to enable him to take a richer and more significant view of his experiences, to place him above and not within the system of his beliefs and ideals.” To Martin a liberal education meant “the kind of education which sets the mind free from the servitude of the crowd and from vulgar self-interests.” He added, “Education is simply philosophy at work. It is the search for the ‘good life.’” The structure that would mix Martin’s liberal arts program with the great books idea was an Institute subsidiary called “The School of the People’s Institute,” or simply “The School.” Its mission included teaching philosophy, psychology, biology, and literary criticism. A grant from the Carnegie Foundation, given around 1925, enabled the hiring of Scott Buchanan, a Harvard-trained philosopher and Rhodes Scholar, to run The School.⁹

Buchanan’s work as a teaching assistant at Columbia, in turn, brought him in contact with Mortimer Adler and other Columbia graduate students, whom Buchanan eventually solicited as lecturers for The School. At one point, the book enthusiast Clifton “Kip” Fadiman served as secretary for the staff of lecturers. Mark Van Doren, already a Columbia professor, taught during the first year of the experiment. Recruited by Buchanan, The School also hired the Aristotelian philosopher Richard McKeon. He had studied under the historian-philosopher Étienne Gilson at the Sorbonne in France. But, most importantly, the Columbia connection also involved educational ideas. To wit, sometime in The School’s first year Buchanan and Adler proposed to Martin the idea of conducting General Honors-style classes. Martin agreed and the Institute’s School began its great books experiment in 1926 with a series of seminars.¹⁰

The Institute’s School formed 13 total discussion groups averaging 15 working-class New Yorkers per group, each with one discussion leader. The groups were explicitly organized “to represent a cross-section of educational and social level, age, and race.” Six of the 13 groups studied “general interest,” great books-like programs—involving about 90 of the 150 total participants. Little is available, from the working-class reader’s perspective, on the effectiveness of these groups. Adler and Whittaker Chambers taught the “Renaissance and Modern Thought” seminar. For a November 1926 report, Adler relayed that their group was “lively in discussion,” “likely to read,” and “shockable”—but “untrained intellectually” and “full of prejudices and ‘ideas.’” After another December session, Adler reported that the “discussion of Descartes was better than I expected.” The discussion of Shakespeare, in another meeting, resulted in Adler’s highest praise: the worker readers were “as good as my Columbia groups.”¹¹ Aside from Adler’s word, the great books’ effectiveness in the Institute’s School can be inferred from the continuation of the democratic experiment another year through 1928.

Even after moving on to new ventures nearly all of this cohort—Adler, Buchanan, Fadiman, Van Doren—cited their experiences with the Institute’s great books program in two ways. First, as proof that the great books could in fact be taught and learned outside the academy. And second, as their source of optimism about the possibilities of great books-style reading groups.¹² Their experience at the Institute’s School caused them to believe in the accessibility of great books among unschooled but enthusiastic readers. The experiment with ethnically diverse working-class New Yorkers seeded a movement based on fostering a more unified, shared, and democratic life of thought.

Returning to Chicago, Hutchins welcomed Adler’s transmission of the great books idea. Prior to his arrival, internal studies by the university had concluded that the same highly specialized professors who ran successful and powerful graduate programs were not translating that success into a good undergraduate college. Hutchins had been hired, in part, to change this. After discussions with Adler, he became convinced that bringing a General Honors-like program to the undergraduate college would fix the problem. Indeed, in his history of the Hutchins years at the University of Chicago, William McNeill asserted that “Adler did more than anyone else to shape Hutchins’ mature ideas about education.” Adler was Hutchins’ most important advisor during this period, articulating for Hutchins a philosophy of education. Hutchins compiled those ideas in a few books, most notably Higher Learning in America (1936). Despite Adler’s influence, at the time Hutchins himself received much of the credit and blame for great books-related changes at the university. Hutchins’ charismas overshadowed his staff and the University itself during his tenure.¹³ If Hutchins provided the style, Adler helped give the administration its substance.

A great deal of descriptive and analytical scholarship exists on the controversy, known as “The Chicago Fight,” that surrounded the curricular changes proposed and implemented by Hutchins and Adler at the University of Chicago. Those internal changes matter less here, however, than the external perception of them, that is, what those changes meant for the reputation of the great books idea. Those perceptions were manipulated by Adler and Hutchins in that, as coteachers of the General Honors course, they regularly invited promine...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 The Great Books Movement, 1920–1948
• 2 Branding the History of Ideas: Adler, Lovejoy, and Britannica’s Great Books, 1943–1952
• 3 Making “Seventy-Four Corpses . . . Pay Off”: The Context and Commerce of the Great Books, 1952–1968
• 4 “Mixing Vice and Virtue”: Adler, Britannica’s Cottage Industry, and Mid-Century Anxiety
• 5 The Common Sense of Great Books Liberalism, 1965–1970
• 6 Diminished Dreams: Great Books in an Age of Crisis, Fracture, and Transition, 1968–1977
• 7 “The Poobah of Popularizers”: Paideia, Pluralism, and the Culture Wars, 1978–1988
• 8 “The Most Rancorous Cultural War”: Bloom, Adler, Stanford, and Britannica, 1988–2001
• Coda and Conclusion: Lessons for the Twenty-First Century
• Appendices
• Notes
• Index