PART SEVEN
A CALL FOR COMMUNITY
36
A Call for Community
Hutchins' sense of the Hiroshima holocaust—and the role he had played in it—was so oppressive that it plunged him headlong into the public affairs of the republic, in effect putting an end to his academic career. Sixty days after Japan's surrender he spoke, at the university chapel, on the atomic bomb versus civilization, predicting that other nations would soon have the bomb and "we shall never be able to appeal to the moral sense of mankind to protect us against it because we used it, and we used it when we did not need to. . . . [The bomb] has produced a world which must live in perpetual fear. And this world is particularly explosive, because it seems destined to be a bipolar world. Only the United States and Russia will be major powers; the other nations will be satellites grouped around them." (This was October 14, 1945.)[1]
If, in the atomic age, the Americans and the Russians refused to sink their national independence in a world state, the outlook would be bleak. But "states do not make communities; communities make states. A state requires authority as well as power, and the authority of a government rests on the common respect and the common conviction of its people. A world state can arise and endure only on the solid foundations of a world community. No such community exists, and, at the present rate of moral progress, none can be created before the world is full of atomic bombs.
"Is the situation, then, altogether hopeless? I think it is not; but the only hope is to increase the rate of moral progress tremendously, to increase it beyond anything we have ever dreamed of, to increase it to an extent which itself, at first glance, may seem hopeless.
"We know that we have a certain amount of time before the world is full of atomic bombs. We probably have not more than five years before some other country has them."[2] And in a speech a few months later:
"When the Russians have the atomic bomb, the position of the United States automatically undergoes a dramatic change. . . . One false step in foreign policy can mean the end, not only of our institutions, but also of civilization. . . . And we can not place our hope on [international] agreements. These agreements are absolutely imperative; but they will simply guarantee, if they are effective, that the next war will end with atomic bombs instead of beginning with them."[3]
Isolationism as a national way of life, he said, was an anachronism in the atomic age. "If we are finally to survive, we must now, as never before in history, act our age." The only way to act our age in the atomic age was to monopolize atomic energy in a world organization. There was no other hope of abolishing war, and mankind's survival required its abolition.[4]
"Let me tell you what we all know. One: There is no defense against the atomic bomb. The only defense is not to be there when it goes off. Two: In a war in which both sides have atomic bombs"—he was now speaking in March, 1947, when the United States still had a monopoly—"the cities of both sides will be destroyed. Three: Since one to ten atomic bombs can reduce any city in the world to ashes, it will not help us much to have more atomic bombs than an enemy country. Four: Superiority in land, sea, and air forces will mean little. The atomic bomb is a weapon directed against civilians. The economy which supports the military can be wiped out before the military can get started. Five: Our monopoly of the atomic bomb can not last more than five years."[5]
So the first desperate item of national business was the campaign for world government. Or, rather, the second. The first was the hurried education of the whole American people—indeed, the people of the whole world—to the acceptance of world community.
"We do not know what education can accomplish, because we have never tried it."[6] "The American people, whatever their professions, do not take education very seriously. And in the past there has been no particular reason why they should. This country was impregnable to enemies from without, and apparently indestructible. It could not be destroyed even by hysterical waste and mass stupidity of the people and its government. Foreign policy, for example, could be the blundering ground of nice old Southern lawyers, and education could be regarded as a means of keeping children off the street."[7]
This pastoral condition was no longer viable, not in the atomic age. "I admit that the Russians are hard to get on with. I do not like their form of government, their philosophy, or their religion."[8] "You may well ask how we can get other people to behave themselves. If our hearts are changed, and those of the Russians are not, we shall merely have the satisfaction of
being blown up with changed hearts rather than unchanged ones."[9] Taken by itself, world government was much too simple a solution for the overriding problems of the atomic age. Its adoption was not enough. The pre-condition was a change of heart everywhere in the world, to achieve the world community based on "a common stock of ideas and ideals" and upon "the recognition of the common humanity of all human beings."
How to do it? "I should like tentatively to endorse the suggestion of the delegate from Lebanon to the United Nations, who said that the common bond and the common tradition were most clearly revealed in the great works of the human mind and spirit. He suggested that, if all the peoples of the earth unite in the study of these great works, a world community might arise. Plainly the task before us is an educational task. We have to educate everybody, of every age, at home and abroad. And we have five years, more or less, in which to do it."[10]
Was he serious? Did he think that he, or anybody, or any catechism or revelation, would or could move the whole human race—more than half of which was illiterate or semiliterate—to "study these great works" by offering "some hope of laying the foundations of a world community"? Or was he, urged by a combination of cosmic necessity with his own compulsion, indulging in transparent polemics? "I do not say that the Great Books program upon which the University of Chicago and the Encyclopaedia Britannica are now embarked is the only answer. . . . I do say that it sounds promising." And to top its promise in a world of three billion people, "I confidently expect to see 15,000,000 Americans studying the great works of the human mind and spirit within five years."[11] (Within five years the Great Books adult discussion program across the nation enrolled closer to fifteen thousand than the fifteen million Hutchins had predicted—and the Encyclopaedia Britannica had withdrawn its modest support of it.) He saw hope in the proliferation of radio programs like the university's Round-Table on NBC radio, which with its audience of a million was far and away the country's largest educational broadcast—and which, within five years, would have been eliminated by the network's decision to sell the air time commercially.
These were worthy, and moderately significant, educational ventures, but even if they should be carried to the peoples of the whole earth they would still be only educational ventures, and what was wanted was a moral progress and a change of heart. He had always contended that character cannot be imparted or fortified directly, but only indirectly through the power of the liberal arts to habituate the student to sharp and independent thinking about means and ends. But the influence of the elevated intellect on the unelevated morals was a matter of years of even the
best education—and the best education was almost nowhere available (and almost nowhere in America).
He was grasping at straws, and when a friend told him so he said, "Where there is nothing but straws to grasp at, you grasp at straws." He had supposed (or so he said) that the Hutchins Plan would be imitated by universities the country over; it wasn't. He had supposed that colleges the country over would adopt the St. John's nonelective liberal arts curriculum; they didn't. He never gave up inflationary prediction. Twenty-five years later he hailed the announcement of England's Open University scheme—an admirable, but modest, program of adult education—as replacing that country's imperial dreams with "the vision of a community in which every citizen has the opportunity all his life to achieve the maximum development of his highest powers. . . . In the allocation of its financial resources the [British] state has given the highest priority to this commitment."
Exaggerating the impact, present and projected, of the adult discussion program in the great books and the Round-Table of the Air, he saw, he said, no reason to despair of proceeding rapidly in the direction of world community as the precondition of a durable world government, which, without that community, might well collapse into a world civil war. It was, he admitted, very late: "Perhaps nothing can save us. But with the good news of damnation ringing in our ears, we may remember that 'It is not necessary to hope in order to undertake, or to succeed in order to persevere.' "[12] Hutchins would undertake, through his first and only love, education, to achieve the unlikely objective of changing fifteen thousand, or fifteen million, or three billion human hearts; undertake, and persevere.
By the end of 1945 the three nuclear institutes were solidly established and the university relieved of its management of the wartime Argonne National Laboratory established by the government outside Chicago and the giant plutonium production facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Hutchins persuaded his board of trustees to create the post of chancellor of the university for him—that is, to kick him upstairs—and appoint his dean of faculties, Ernest ("Pomp") Colwell, a theologian, as president to take over the day-to-day affairs of the institution. His misbegotten intention was clear: as if he were an interchangeable man, he would henceforth be what most university presidents in fact were, a ceremonial dignitary who could be trotted out on appropriate public occasions. What he told his board was: "The idea of the chancellorship was that, since the University [has] grown to such a size and complexity, its principal officer should be raised above administrative routine so that he might . . . give his time to those matters which [seem] to him most important to its welfare."
He was bone tired of the bootless effort to achieve a basic change in the higher learning, or at least to establish at Chicago a working model for such a change—an effort into which he had poured his life, his unresting energy, and his unresting passion for the past quarter-century. "To think," he told a friend a few years later, as they approached a great university campus where he was lecturing, "that I never again have to work in a place like this." And, on another occasion: "My heart leaps up when I consider that I shall never again have to preside over a meeting of the University of Chicago Senate." He foresaw—it wasn't too difficult—the postwar expansion and concomitant disintegration of the universities. It was not only in the exact sciences, where government grants would determine and dominate the programs; the institution as a whole would undergo a transformation from a cloistered place of quiet intellectual endeavor to a vocationalist forcing bed, providing the kinds of problem-solving, on an ad hoc, hic-et-nunc basis that the achievement of the sustained nuclear chain reaction exemplified: the country had discovered, to its astonishment, that a university was good for something. There would now be relentless pressure, and irresistible funds, for short-term, result-oriented, "crash" undertakings, with fundamental research downgraded in favor of the application of what was already known. Fields would proliferate, and specialization and professionalism be intensified. The decline of the university as the world's one long-term workplace was beginning. Nor was it only the state schools which would soon be recognized as service institutions, providing whatever the public, or any powerful segment of it, thought was needed immediately; the private universities too would expand their facilities and faculties accordingly in the competitive drive for the production of gad-getry and the training of men and women in narrow disciplines instead of their education in the great fields of knowledge. The postwar university was further from Hutchins' vision than it had been when he began his academic career, and would grow even further. He saw himself well out of it, called by his stricken conscience to try his hand at changing the shape of things in the nation at large and in the world. Temporally it was a happy concatenation. He had come to the end of his academic rope with the national preeminence to accord him a respectful hearing on the great issues of the hour, beginning with the greatest of them—the bomb.
He had always had to decline five or ten speaking invitations for every one he accepted. Now he accepted many more than he had previously, especially from organizations and institutions that wanted him to discuss the overall social crisis rather than education. Relieved of his routine obligations to the university, he was out of town, in a given month, as much as half the time (with an additional strain, if any was needed, on his
grim domestic situation). In the first five years after the war he averaged five public appearances a month. Many of his performances were broadcast nationally over the radio networks. He spoke before medical schools and churches, chambers of commerce and high schools, library associations, town halls, congressional committees, the National Association of Manufacturers and the liberal National Citizens Political Action Committee, the National Industrial Conference and the radical National Council for the Prevention of War—and the University of Uppsala, in Sweden, and the German National Assembly, at Frankfurt. As always, his fees, ranging from twenty-five (or less) to twenty-five hundred dollars, went to the University of Chicago.
But his main message, always stark, simple, disarmingly straightforward, piling up arguments (or assertions) in solemn series, whose mere weight was convincing, had an almost frantic ring now. Under such lecture titles as "The Atomic Bomb versus Civilization," "We Must Defeat War," "Peace or War with Russia?" and "The Good News of Damnation," he leveled a steady barrage of unremitting fire at his own government as the prime culprit in the continuing crisis and mounting confrontation with the USSR. With its atomic monopoly, the United States had reduced its conventional military power immediately after Hiroshima. Mr. Truman made it clear—his highly respected biographer suggests that he was dangerously underbriefed[13] —that his administration was relying completely on the exclusive American possession of the bomb. On October 8, 1945, according to the official historians of the Atomic Energy Commission, he met informally with reporters and, admitting that the scientific secrets had already spread throughout the world, insisted that the "engineering secrets were something else. The United States would not share them. As a matter of fact, no other country could use them. Only the United States had the combination of industrial capacity and resources necessary to produce the Bomb."[14]
Truman's "underbriefing" turned out to be dangerous indeed. In September of 1949—four years after Hiroshima and a year earlier than Hutchins had predicted—the Soviet Union exploded an atomic bomb. Mr. Truman's atomic monopoly strategy was dead. His response was the massive rearmament of the United States "against the Soviet design for world domination." The defense budget was tripled, and the government, over the moral protest of Robert Oppenheimer and other leading scientists, ordered the work to proceed on the development of the "super"—the hydrogen bomb. By the time the United States had the hydrogen bomb, the Russians had it, and within five years of competitive frenzy on both sides the weapons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were outmoded.
Back and forth across the country—and across the seas—Hutchins shuttled to speaking engagements, denouncing the Truman policies and proclaiming that "an armaments race in atomic weapons is a race nobody can win. The alternatives before us are peace or suicide. . . . The policy of the United States is based on force . . . confused, contradictory, and incoherent. It is a bad means to a bad end . . . immoral and suicidal . . . a policy adequately described by the historian Tacitus. He said, when force was the policy of the Romans, 'They make a desolation, and they call it peace.'"[15] This was as early on as November 1945 and he stepped up the rhetoric in the months that followed. "The foreign policy of the United States, as announced by Mr. Truman . . . is to have the largest army, navy, and air force in the world and thus ensure peace," he testified before the House Military Affairs Committee. "The policy is the sheerest folly, and it will end in disaster. A few well placed atomic weapons can make junk of all these vast preparations in a few minutes."[16] "A nation which now uses force will perish in the act of using it," he said in a nationally broadcast Modern Forum lecture. "These policies will weaken rather than strengthen the United States. They will involve us in a fruitless armaments race which will waste our substance, divert us from the task of building a better world, deceive us into thinking we are secure when we are not, and inevitably lead to war."[17]
He was ever more widely sought as a speaker, and ever more widely applauded. But he was opposing a spirit in the country which had its own momentum. President Truman had begun whipping up anti-Soviet passions in connection with persuading Congress to accept the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine in Greece and Turkey. The cold war in effect began with Hiroshima, the traditional anticommunism of the country having been galvanized by the American monopoly and the helplessness of a Russia drained of manpower and resources by the Nazi invasion. Hutch-ins' voice was not the only one heard in the land pleading for accord and the international control of atomic energy, but his was one of the weightiest and angriest. He went on calling for a massive program of domestic social reform: "Everyone knows that the education of negroes is far worse than that for whites. Everyone knows that the amount of education a young American obtains depends upon the income of his parents." But the Cold War was carrying everything before it.
Hutchins served as chancellor of the university for a year, 1945-46, and then applied for (and was granted) a leave of absence for the year 1946-47, assuming the chairmanship of the board of editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and moving his seat of operations downtown (but retaining an office and a secretary at the university). The Britannica—that
is, his friend Bill Benton—assumed the obligation of his $25,000 salary. He was already a member of the encyclopaedia firm's board of directors and a board member of EB Films, Inc., a thriving venture in classroom documentaries. Now he became chairman of the Britannica board of editors—a post he held for the next twenty-seven years. His formal explanation of the move was the pressing necessity to develop the joint operations of the Britannica and the university—including the great fifty-four-volume set of the Great Books of the Western World. But the formal explanation was for public consumption. In a memorandum to his board on February 12, 1947, he wrote, "My educational interests would lead me, if I return [to the university], to apportion my time in the immediate future about as I have this year." If I return . He told a very close friend that he needed a year away "to see if I can't do something about my domestic situation."
He did return to the university in 1948 to remain as chancellor for another three years, during which he withdrew further and further from his elevated post in favor of publicly pleading for action on the national and international crises. If his withdrawal from his university responsibilities was unfortunate, it was at least understandable. In the great showdown with the Burghers of Calais in 1944, culminating in the refusal of his board to come out flat-footed either way, he had realized that he had gone—like things in Kansas City—about as far as he could go. He had won a few battles, some of them, like the establishment of the College, considerable battles. He had not won the war. The war was not going to be won.
His withdrawal was, in at least one respect, not only unfortunate but impermissible. He had mastered his impatience magnificently in fighting with his faculty for twenty years, but there was one issue in which he let his impatience have its way. That was the crumbling of the university neighborhood, a problem that had nothing to do with education but distinctly threatened to destroy the university and to destroy it soon. The war had drawn millions of people into the industrial centers of the country from the hinterland, and especially from the southern hinterland. Blacks (then known as Negroes) from the most backward areas of the country thronged into cities like Chicago, and into Chicago in greater numbers than anywhere else. There were previously unheard-of job opportunities, in unskilled work in particular. Employment at good wages also attracted poorly educated, unskilled or semiskilled white workers, particularly from the South—but the "problem" was the influx of Negroes.
They had long been concentrated on Chicago's South Side, a few miles northwest of the university, which was separated from that concentration
by a great park on its western boundary. Another great park on its eastern boundary fronted on Lake Michigan, on whose beach a race riot (so-called) occurred in 1919 when a Negro boy swam into "white" water and was stoned and drowned. Ever since then the university neighborhood of Hyde Park had felt itself threatened by the incursion of Negroes, who had slowly expanded into the immediately neighboring area of Kenwood, north of the campus. Woodlawn, south of the campus and across the broad Midway Plaisance, had long been disintegrating, but it had remained lily-white through the 1920s and the 30s.
The university had never practiced discrimination—at least not formally—on its faculty or in admission to its student body. And its faculty, nearly all of whom resided within a few blocks of the campus, included a high proportion of social liberals. These liberals wanted housing opportunities for the expanding Negro population—but on the whole they were in the consolatory habit of wanting such opportunities to be made available somewhere else. They had not openly protested the university's membership in the local property owners' associations organized by the real estate brokers and designed to prevent Negro ownership or occupancy. In 1920 the Hyde Park Property Owners' Association Journal announced that "every colored man who moves into Hyde Park . . . is making war on the white man. Consequently he is not entitled to any consideration. . . . There is nothing in the make-up of the Negro, physically or mentally, which should induce anyone to welcome him as a neighbor." The University of Chicago was a member in good standing of that association, indeed, its leading member.
Just before the war Negroes constituted 3 percent of the population of Hyde Park; ten years later they constituted 38 percent. The university was hemmed in. But the Negroes were hemmed in by another kind of barrier—the "gentleman's agreement" or restrictive covenant among property owners agreeing not to sell or rent to "non-Caucasians." In the immediate postwar years many of the newcomers to the city lost their jobs, and the slum landlords of the once fashionable houses of the area had cut those houses up into one-room apartments, each room housing a family in squalor. The area disintegrated rapidly—very rapidly. Saloons and brothels appeared on the business streets, youth gangs vandalized the neighborhood, and by 1948 Hyde Park had the highest crime rate in Chicago.
The worsening situation had reached the point where neither students nor faculty went out at night except in groups. University buildings were now kept locked in the evening and the campus was floodlit all night, as were the adjacent streets. The university's private force was now the
second largest police department in the state of Illinois. Faculty were beginning to leave, regretfully taking jobs at lesser institutions, and undergraduate enrollment was dropping; the dormitories of the undergraduate college were across the Midway, which was a no-man's-land at night and even witnessed daytime robberies, muggings, and rapes. Under the Hutchins scheme, the college, admitting students after their sophomore year in high school, included many sixteen- and fifteen-year-olds, and even a few fourteen-year-olds. The university was a critically unsafe place.
As the 1940s ended, it was clear that something radical had to be done: either to save the university where it was or move it or shut it down. Closing it or moving away would be unprecedented in American education. It was one of the world's great institutions of higher learning. But push was rapidly coming to shove. Closing it was unthinkable; moving it, to the suburbs north or south of the city, to central Illinois, or to the west coast to merge with Stanford, was equally unthinkable. It was a quarter-billion-dollar plant, and financial contributions to its work over a period of seventy years had been considerably greater than that. How would one sell a great collection of Gothic buildings? "There is not much of a market for a secondhand university," said one trustee. But something would have to be done, and done soon, and done on a large scale. It was made-to-order for the Hutchins style.
But he had said and done nothing as the storm gathered. It was not directly an educational problem. He had not seemed greatly interested. But he had—he thought—an idea. The idea was to have the university buy up the whole area, redevelop it, and integrate it racially. He took his idea to sociologist Louis Wirth, an academic opponent who, however, shared his views on civil liberties and civil rights. Wirth conducted a survey to determine feasibility and costs and Hutchins took the survey to his board, adding to his proposal the possibility that they get the university's charter changed so that it would be a public or semipublic institution eligible for public funds. The board was aghast: what Hutchins was talking about was nothing less than socialism—yet again. "Besides," said the chairman of the finance committee, "we can ride it out. We have 98% of the surrounding property tied up by restrictive covenants." Now Hutchins was aghast: "I said that in my opinion the covenants were unenforceable and that they were in any case immoral."
The trustees did not care about the immorality and did not accept his view of the illegality. They refused to budge. "I wrote my moral adviser, my father, and told him that I intended to resign. He let me down: he advised me to stay on for the greater good, and so on. He thought I could work from within. He was wrong." So were the trustees. A few months
later the U.S. Supreme Court, in Shelley v. Kraemer , decided without a dissenting vote that such covenants were designed to deprive persons of the equal protection of the laws.
"A large part of the rest of my administration," said Hutchins afterward, "was spent trying to do something about the area against the resistance of a board of trustees that would spend no money on it." But nothing was done until after his resignation in 1951. His immediate successors presided over the dismantling of the Hutchins Plan, but they undertook the rehabilitation of the area on a colossal scale. With the pas, age of the Federal Housing Act in 1954 and the adoption of slum clearance and urban renewal legislation, government funds at all levels became available. The trustees then appropriated thirty million dollars of the two hundred fifty that went into replacing the surrounding slums with middle-to-upper-class apartments and town houses on a racially integrated basis. Ten years later the fifty-block area was a new neighborhood, 40 percent of whose residents were Black. (They were not, of course, the impoverished blacks who had been there before, but that was a problem that Hutchins, even had he been interested in it, couldn't have solved.)
Crime was radically reduced—to the still deplorable level of the city generally—and faculty and students no longer left. The university was saved. But it wasn't Hutchins who saved it. There is no hard evidence that he spent "the rest of my administration" trying to do anything about it—and considerable recollection that he didn't. Economics Professor (and later U.S. Senator) Paul H. Douglas was a fervent admirer of Hutchins' positions on academic and civil liberties. "Hutchins behaved like a thoroughbred"—"the University [under Hutchins] was uninterested in the community around it." As the grand gesture of buying up the area was typical Hutchins, so was his dropping the whole thing after his trustees refused to talk about it. The trustees owned the university. They were the university. Nothing could be done to save the institution from the encroaching disaster if it was not clone by them. An apparently petulant, apparently insensitive Hutchins was wrong, almost fatally wrong in terms of the physical survival of the university. He wasn't interested in physical survival. He was interested in educational survival. He was on the right side, but he was content just to be there, and many of his associates then and thereafter believed that he felt that such mundane matters were beneath him. The president's—now the chancellor's—house on the campus was well staffed and well guarded by the campus police. The housing of the faculty was the faculty's problem. The students were old enough to look after themselves; he had long been given to pointing out that in the Middle Ages youngsters of twelve, thirteen, and fourteen traveled alone
across Europe to live in the centers of learning. In the last two years of his administration, with no great encouragement (or discouragement) from him, faculty members and students banded together under the leadership of liberal residents of the area to form the organization which spearheaded its ultimate rehabilitation.
For a man who stayed put as long as he stayed put at Chicago, he was singularly interested in the mobility of educational plants . Twenty years earlier he had blandly suggested a merger with Northwestern University in suburban Evanston, whither Chicago's undergraduate work would be moved bodily. President Walter Dill Scott of Northwestern, aware of Hutchins' contempt for the kind of institution Northwestern was, stiffly rejected the proposal. On one ceremonial occasion Hutchins said that the University of Chicago would have been a great university the day it opened in 1892 if it had consisted of a tent, and when the university was under attack in the Illinois legislature he suggested that universities in general, in order to be truly free, be conducted in tents which could be folded and moved elsewhere whenever they failed to satisfy the community. By the time he resigned, the University of Chicago had come perilously close to folding its tents; he had been too busy calling for a world community to call very insistently (once his trustees had rebuffed him) for community in one neighborhood of one city, and that neighborhood his very own.
37
A Perennial Adolescent
I was sitting in the sitting room of my modest—but roomy—residence off the campus of the University of Chicago. It was an early June day in 1949. The phone rang. The caller was one of those great men who do not deign to identify themselves when they call. "Is it true," said the caller, "that a Jew will do anything for money?"
"I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people," I said. "It is true, however, that this Jew will do anything for money. What is your best offer?"
"You have an unoccupied room in your house," said the caller. "I'm bringing a Nazi physicist and his wife to the university for six months. He needs a room, and his Aryan colleagues won't take him in. Will you?"
"If the price is right."
It was, and a few weeks later there arrived on the Mayer doorstep, without much luggage, the "Nazi physicist," an apple-cheeked man and his tall, handsome wife (the daughter of a Swiss general). The physicist was both renowned and notorious. He was renowned for his 1939 discovery (at twenty-seven) of the nuclear chemistry of solar energy and the publication, in 1948, of his masterful Theory of Nature . He was notorious (if only in America) as the wartime associate of the Nobel Prize-winning Werner Heisenberg at the University of Strasbourg. Presumably the brilliant Heisenberg group had been charged by Hitler with developing an atomic bomb. Some of their American colleagues believed they had done their Nazi best and failed for want of the crucial ingredients; some, fewer, believed they had pretended to try but had sabotaged the project.
The Nazi physicist (who wasn't a Nazi, but an anti-Nazi) was Professor Doctor—and soon to be Baron—Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. His notoriety did not depend on his wartime work in nuclear physics. It was
assured—and, largely, generated—by his being the eldest son of the Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker.
The Baron von Weizsäcker, descendant of a distinguished line of theologians, diplomats, and naval officers, was a career ambassador who elected to remain in Nazi Germany (and accept an honorary generalship in the Hitler SS) as State Secretary in Joachim yon Ribbentrop's Foreign Ministry. In spite of the testimony of leading Allied officials and church men, he was convicted in 1948 on circumstantial evidence by the two-to-one verdict of an all-American tribunal at Nuremberg. The Norwegian underground hero Bishop Primate Eivand Berggrav characterized him as "one of the noblest men of our generation"—but his official signature appeared on documents ordering the deportation of Jews from France. (He was sentenced to an anomalous seven years in prison, but the US High Commissioner for the Occupation of Germany soon pardoned him.) Like his father, the physicist Carl Friedrich was a diplomatic man. When the anti-Nazi Professor von Laue boldly mentioned the forbidden name of the Jew Albert Einstein in connection with relativity, his friend Weizsäcker suggested that he protect himself by saying that the "Aryans" Lorentz and Poincaré had formulated the theory before Einstein. The fearless von Laue rejected the suggestion—and survived in Germany. But the anti-Nazi Heisenberg did not hesitate to give the "Heil Hitler" greeting, and, like his associate Weizsäcker, to continue to work in Germany throughout the Nazi period in order to try to hold German science together and rebuild it after the war. Largely unsophisticated Americans—including largely unsophisticated American scientists and judges—had a hard time understanding such behavior. They were unaware, on the whole, that the Hitler regime regarded all theoretical physics—which alone could develop the bomb—as contemptibly Jewish.
The University of Chicago physics department refused to accept Weizsäcker as a visiting professor; he was appointed to the university's Committee on Social Thought (which had independent funds raised by Hutchins). At the university he delivered a distinguished series of lectures. Returning to Germany after a successful university tour of the United States—and his residence in the Mayers' back bedroom—he joined with a dozen fellow physicists in refusing to do further nuclear research, even though the German Federal Republic was committed not to develop atomic weapons. In 1957 he accepted a professorship of philosophy at the University of Hamburg, and in 1970 he was invited by the greatest research institution in Germany to establish the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Preconditions of Human Life in the Modern World. He remained a lifelong associate of Hutchins in the latter's Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.
Hutchins' invitation to Weizsäcker was part of his one-man mission—yet another iron in the fire—to reintegrate German culture into the life of the postwar world. Immediately after the German surrender in 1945 he had called, and would continue to call, for generous and constructive treatment of the defeated nation and the distinction between its people and its wanton leaders. But he had not waited for the end of the war to begin his missionary work. The German surrender was predictable by the end of 1944, when he wrote to the presidents of Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, and Princeton, and the universities of California and Wisconsin, asking if each of their institutions would undertake, as soon as hostilities ended, to send two faculty members to Germany and accept two German professors. Travel costs and wage supplements for the German visitors would be met by the American hosts. But the American universities declined to participate; the scheme was "premature," though refugee German scholars in America had urged that it be made ready to activate as soon as hostilities ended.
So Chicago went it alone, or rather, Hutchins did, supported by some humanists and social scientists on the faculty and by a few natural scientists. The exchange between Chicago and Frankfurt's Johann Wolfgang Goethe University was set up in 1946, the first of its postwar kind, with the involvement, at the Chicago end, of Arnold Bergstraesser, professor of German cultural history, and Professor G.A. ("Antonio") Borgese, the historian and critic. "The Frankfurt-Chicago arrangement was so successful that I went to Germany to take credit for it."
Invited to address the National Assembly of that country on the centenary of the democratic revolution of 1848, Hutchins spoke solemnly in German, focusing on the role of the universities in the achievement and preservation of self-government. It seemed to him that the political realities of occupied Germany made the outlook for democracy more forbidding now than it had been a century earlier. What was wanted was high moral purpose and hard intellectual work, "and the place for the hard intellectual work which must be done if democracy is to be instituted and to endure is the universities." The present was so grim that one might ask if there was going to be a future. Man's science, his technology, his weapons, and his machines have turned upon him. We are accustomed to thinking of history as a struggle for power: "If that conception is correct, history is about to close, for the struggle for power now leads fatally to war, which can have no end except in annihilation. Half mankind is starving; the other half, not excepting my own country, is afflicted with great fear.
"The totalitarian animal, the man with the machine gun, appeared in the world because of a profound degradation of the ideas of man and the state, of justice and liberty. . . . The questions before us are of this order:
whether there is some way in which modern man will be able to live without becoming daily less and less human; whether it is possible to organize economic life so that the needs of the community take precedence over the profit of individuals; whether it is possible to accommodate the legitimate demands of the society and the imprescriptible rights of the human person. . . . These are intellectual questions. . . . They are not German questions or American questions. They are world questions. The world is now one. . . . Whether we have one good world or one bad one will depend in large part on the leadership that the intellectuals of the world are prepared to exert."[1]
In the 1940s Walter Paepcke, a German-descended industrialist in Chicago, acquired a great deal of land around the village of Aspen, Colorado, with a vague view to establishing a ski area and a still more vague view to establishing a cultural center in the mountains. He had discussed these visions with Hutchins, on whose university board he sat, and in 1948, with the stimulus of the Frankfurt exchange and his efforts to restore Germany to the intellectual world from which it had been isolated by Nazism and the war, Hutchins picked up the possibility of celebrating the bicentennial of Goethe's birth in 1949. Again Bergstraesser and Borgese took the lead and, with another one of Hutchins' blue-ribbon committees headed by that most elder statesman, Herbert Hoover, they organized the three-week Goethe Convocation at Aspen, an event which featured Albert Schweitzer, Thornton Wilder, José Ortega y Gasset, and Hutchins as speakers, and a concert series by the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra under Dmitri Mitropoulos.[2] The Goethe bicentennial was an international triumph, and it played a considerable role in the restoration of Germanic studies in the United States. On its foundation Paepcke established the cultural center he had had in mind—the subsequently famous and fashionable educational and artistic center known as the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies.
With the usual plethora of irons in the fire—too many, said those who accused him of superficiality—Hutchins was doing other things besides restoring Germany to the community of nations. And the other things he was doing had some serious effect on the pro-German entourage he had acquired before, during, and after the war. Most of these people were political and, especially, economic conservatives. He, on the other hand, was growing more radical all the time. Across the land he went, calling for rapprochement with the Soviet Union and denouncing the militarism and rearmament programs at home. But nearly all of his pro-German admirers were violently anti-Soviet and anti-Communist. They could not but see Hutchins as soft—the powerful Chicago Tribune was constrained to
vituperate him as "a perennial adolescent"—and little by little the allegiance and financial support of his pro-German admirers withered.
Cold war sentiment was already powerful—and growing—within days after Hiroshima. No respectable individual or organ openly proposed an attack on the half-shattered Soviet Union, but the American diplomat and former governor of Pennsylvania, George H. Earle, in a debate with Hutchins in April 1946, urged that "the Congress of the United States and the President immediately appropriate two billions of dollars per year for the development of our atomic bomb. Then to have great fleets of atomic bombers scattered and hidden over a wide area of the United States and Canada, and the Bolshevists given to understand that as reprisal, following the first Russian atomic bomb dropped on us, we can and will wipe out every city, town, and village in Russia." "While we have the atomic bomb," Hutchins replied, "Russia is defenseless and this force is unnecessary. When Russia has the atomic bomb, we shall be defenseless, too, and this force will avail us little." Dragging the skeleton out of the closet, Hutchins concluded: "If we are going to war, we must go now . . . . If we are not willing to go to war at once, then threats, intimidations, bomb rattling, and vast displays of assorted military power can result only in feverish attempts by Russia to build up her own military strength, to form a bloc of her own as a counterweight to the Anglo-American bloc. . . . Are we willing to launch a Pearl Harbor attack on Russia now . . . ? We have done everything we could to foster the mass persecution complex with which the Russians are afflicted."[3]
The campaign for universal military training—peacetime conscription—was likewise under way immediately after Hiroshima and even before, ardently supported by President Truman and the generals. Along with other eminent educators, Hutchins attacked it as irrelevant after the atomic bomb was dropped, and went on to denounce it during the debate over the next two years: "Peacetime conscription as a substitute for an intelligent program of education, public health, and economic opportunity is . . . ridiculous . . . a military absurdity. . . . In the next war the greatest handicap a country can have will be large masses of men, half trained by obsolescent officers with obsolete equipment. Professor Einstein has estimated that in the next war two-thirds of the populations involved will be killed. This seems a conservative guess. What the combatants will principally need is not soldiers, expensively trained to fight the war before last, but plumbers, electricians, doctors and nurses. This is what Hiroshima needed."[4] The House Military Affairs Committee, which asked him to testify on the conscription bill, was divided in its enthusiasm when he went on to call the proposal "un-American" and "the most useless of all
forms of preparation." He continued, as did several other notables, to speak and write on the issue in a variety of publications and on no end of platforms. A bitterly divided Congress reflected the sentiment of a bitterly divided country and adopted universal military training in 1948.
Just as he had always talked about education no matter what the topic of a lecture was, so now he always talked about world government and the development of a world community to guarantee its acceptance and its survival. Invited by Marquette University to deliver a lecture on the philosophy and theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, he chose to speak on St. Thomas and the World State. "The Catholic tradition . . . points clearly toward the necessity for world government," he said, working hard at his theme. "In the measure that Catholics have had better grounds than have those whose life was more completely immersed in earthly nations for denying sovereignty to nations and for asserting the existence of an international society, and in the measure that Catholics have had St. Thomas' incomparably lucid analysis of positive law for the establishment, maintenance, and progress of any society, Catholics have, then, always been virtually for world government."[5]
His maximalist position, involving the complete surrender of national sovereignty, never changed, nor did he ever give over arguing for it. Twenty-five years after he first took to the hustings in its behalf, and ten or fifteen years after the world-government movement had lost its whole audience, he said, "The nation state is rapidly becoming an anachronism. No nation can now manage its own economy or protect its own people. Hence it can no longer carry out the only purpose it has had. All problems are now world problems. The nation state is an obstacle to their solution. The industrial system, as the multinational corporation shows, is now at odds with the nation state, which now stands in the way of its expansion over the globe and its claim to roam the world at will free of geographical barriers politically imposed. The industrial system now makes the world state necessary."[6]
Necessary, perhaps; but the sovereign nations and their hostile alliances hardened their nationalist attitudes as the years and the decades passed. The hope waned and the anachronistic nation-state waxed, and Hutchins would live to be a lonely voice in the anarchical jungle alive with nuclear weapons whose possessors—all members of the impotent United Nations—would no longer discuss international control. He would ever thereafter remain the Chicago Tribune's perennial adolescent.
The year 1949 may have been the busiest year of the perennial adolescent's life, fighting, as he was, on an assortment of fronts. One of those fronts was not the University of Chicago, where, returned as chancellor, he
maintained a pro forma stance while he continued to be the institution's fundraiser and all-round front man. But all unexpectedly he was dutifully called on, that spring, to stave off another attack on the university by the Illinois legislature—the same sometimes less than august body that had been roundly whipped when it went after the university and Hutchins in the notorious Walgreen affair of 1935. The issue of course was the same; when one of the trustees asked the chancellor, "Are you really teaching Communism in the political science department?" the chancellor said, "We are indeed. And we are teaching cancer in the medical school."
In 1949 things were different from 1935. Roosevelt was gone, Truman's loyalty-security program was in full spate, and our Glorious Ally was the Red Beast again, this time face to face across the boundary in Berlin. Legislative hearings were on in state after state, and their prospects brightened as the climate of the country worsened. They no longer used innocent druggists who might be had on by nineteen-year-old nieces; for their road shows they now had a stable of professional ex-Communists as interrogators, headed by one J. B. Matthews.
The ex-Communists were tough, but they suffered the disadvantage of being out-of-towners. Publisher Victor Watson and the Chicago Herald-Examiner were both gone, and their owner, the dying Hearst, had lost a great deal of his nationwide clout. This time around, the Red hunters 'turned their biggest guns on the State Department and the army, though the universities were still hammered some. When the Illinois legislature, debating a congeries of loyalty-security bills, was harassed by unruly students from the University of Chicago, it voted another investigation of the institution for subversion. Hutchins informed the new committee that "rudeness and redness are not the same"—and challenged it to find an instance of subversion. He went on to advise the inquisitors that "the policy of repression of ideas cannot work and never has worked. The alternative to it is the long, difficult road of education. To this the American people have been committed. It requires patience and tolerance, even in the face of provocation. It requires faith in the principles and practices of democracy, faith that when the citizen understands all forms of government he will prefer democracy and be a better citizen if he is convinced than he would be if he were coerced."[7]
In his Academic Freedom in Our Time , the Columbia historian Robert MacIver wrote that Hutchins' "statement and subsequent responses to the 1949 committee constitute perhaps the most signal deliverance of the principles of academic freedom that any political investigating body has ever heard—but it obviously had no influence on the committee." [8] Obviously—yes. But Hutchins was looking beyond the obvious. Here was
another occasion to midwife the Socratic learning process, the long, difficult process of education that requires patience and tolerance even in the face of provocation.
But Board Chairman Swift and Attorney Bell (soon to succeed Swift) had grown older and tireder, and Hutchins, at the advanced age of fifty, was older and tireder still. Déjà vu, déjà dit, déjà entendu . The 1949 investigation flopped sonorously—the committee issued no report, the legislature refused it further funds, and the Illinois loyalty-security bills did not pass. But it was another hard round, and a wearying one for the champion of academic freedom in his role as educator of legislatures. Laird Bell loved Hutchins and knew him well; he knew that the more bored the president was the likelier it was that he would turn to banter to carry him through a long day or a short evening. Back in 1934 Felix Frankfurter had written Franklin Roosevelt, "I am very glad to infer that you are annexing Bob Hutchins"—the inference was mistaken—"He has many admirable qualities, and not the least among them is that he pursues his social purposes with healthy humor." Bell was worried about the healthy humor in a situation of this kind, but, knowing Hutchins, he knew better than to talk straight to him. Instead he offered to bet him twenty-five dollars that he could not get through the hearings without making a wisecrack. Hutchins took the bet.
J.B. Matthews interrogated him on the Communist associations of the faculty.
Q (by Matthews). Is Dr. Maude Slye on your faculty?
A . She was. Dr. Slye retired many years ago after confining her attention for a considerable number of years exclusively to mice.
Q . Dr. Slye was an Associate Professor Emeritus?
A . She is an Associate Professor Emeritus. She was an Associate Professor. "Emeritus" means retired.
Q . She is retired on pension?
A . Oh, yes.
Q . And still has the prestige of the University associated with her name?
A . No way has yet been discovered of stopping being a Professor Emeritus when you are a retired professor. As a professor Dr. Slye was a distinguished specialist in cancer research.
Q . She was studying cancer when she was studying mice?
A . Correct. She was studying cancer when she was studying mice.
Q . Are you acquainted with the fact that Dr. Slye has had frequent affiliations with so-called Communist-front organizations?
A . I am acquainted with the fact that she has had so-called frequent associations with so-called Communist-front organizations.
Q . Is there not such a thing as indoctrination by example?
A . Of mice?[9]
When the 1949 hearing ended, and the universities of America still stood, Bell demurred at paying off the twenty-five-dollar bet. Hutchins wanted to know why—he thought, he said, that his restraint was a real triumph of avarice over art. Bell said that his reply to Matthews' last question had been a wisecrack. Hutchins proposed that they lay the matter before Political Science Chairman Charley Merriam for arbitration. The two parties to the suit, both being lawyers, elected to represent themselves at bar. The case was heard at the bar of the Shoreland Hotel on the Lake front. Merriam took the matter under advisement then and there, and, as the waiter approached with the check, he handed down his judgment in favor of Hutchins. "What about the last answer to Matthews?" said Bell indignantly.
"What other answer could he have given?" asked Merriam.