PART THREE
CHICAGO (1)

9
7:00 A.M.

The Association of American Law Schools met Christmas week of 1928 in Chicago. Its theme was Modern Movements in Legal Education. The centerpiece of the meeting was a symposium of the deans of Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and Yale. As the Yale dean walked to the platform he was stopped by a man twice his age, Frederick C. Woodward of the University of Chicago. The two had met before; Woodward had been dean of Chicago's law school until six months earlier, when President Max Mason had suddenly resigned and Woodward had agreed to serve as acting president of the university while the trustee-faculty search committee found a permanent replacement. Woodward was a blunt man. He said, "Hutchins, we are looking for a new president at Chicago, and your name has been suggested. Would you be willing to meet with a committee of the trustees?" Hutchins was a blunt man. He said, as he later recalled it, "I've got to make a speech. Don't be silly." After the symposium Woodward repeated the invitation, and Hutchins accepted it.^[1]

At lunch with the Chicago trustees he spoke without regard to possible personal consequences; he did not believe that he was being seriously considered. The trustees asked him about the University of Chicago. He knew nothing about Chicago, but he thought he knew something about universities and what ought to be done about them. How would he strengthen a university? Well, he'd begin by paying full professors fifteen thousand dollars a year. (The country's top salary was then ten thousand.) What about "this academic freedom business"? asked the vice chairman of the university's board, the country's biggest printer. Hutchins thought the academic freedom business was good academic business. The printer, Thomas B. Donnelley, said that there was a professor in industrial relations at the university, Paul Douglas (later to become a U.S. senator), who "ought to

be lined up against the wall and shot." Hutchins winced. There wasn't much he could do about his interrogator's stupidity, or his diction (in wanting to line up one man); but he could gratify his own impishness. "Why," he said, "do you think Professor Douglas ought to be lined up and shot?" Donnelley said, "Because he goes around saying he doesn't believe in the free enterprise system." There was silence around the table, and Hutchins said, "I'm a professor of the law of evidence, and I've just written an article in which I attack the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts for the errors which I claim it made in the admission and exclusion of evidence in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti. Is it your opinion that I should be lined up and shot?" "Well, no," said Donnelley, "that's perfectly all right." "If a man is a professor of industrial relations," said Hutchins, "shouldn't he be allowed to go around expressing his opinion on industrial relations?" "I think he ought to be shot," said Donnelley.^[2]

There was another wincer at the table, Harold Higgins Swift, the chairman of the board (a post he would hold for all but the last two years of the Hutchins tenure as president and chancellor). Harold Swift was a meat packer who might have been chosen by his college classmates Least Likely to Pack Meat. The third of the four sons of Gustavus Franklin Swift, who came from Massachusetts in 1875 to found the company which established Chicago as the world's hog butcher, Harold Swift was single-mindedly dedicated to the University of Chicago his life long, beginning with his graduation in 1907—one of the very few sons of the city's rich who did not go east to college then. He was a precise, meticulous bachelor of considerable cultivation in the arts; gentle, even prissy in bearing and manner; a man worried about the attitude of the local gentry to the university, but invariably coming down on the side of academic freedom when the gentry (including fellow trustees) were disturbed; an inordinately modest man, given to saying he "wanted one vote"—and abstaining from that when the academic body of the institution disagreed with him.

He relieved the uneasiness around the table after the lining up and shooting of Paul Douglas by asking the guest how he managed to get his several jobs done—deaning, teaching, writing, speaking, and money-raising. Hutchins said that he didn't get his jobs done, but he began each day manfully at 7 A.M. Swift wanted to know what time he got to the office, and Hutchins said that that was when he got to the office—7 A.M. The luncheon ended on that small-talk note, and the visitor caught the afternoon train back to New Haven. The morning following his return the telephone rang in the office of the Yale Law School at 7 A.M. and Hutchins picked it up. "This," said the caller, "is Harold Swift of Chicago. I wanted to thank you on behalf of our committee for the time you took to have

lunch with us. It was enjoyable and constructive." Hutchins was mildly puzzled: Harold Swift was known as a man who, like John D. Rockefeller, thought twice before making a long-distance call to say what could just as easily be said on a penny postcard. The puzzlement ended when he learned later that Swift couldn't believe he got to the office at 7 A.M. and couldn't resist the wastrel temptation to find out.^[3]

People are impressed by people who get up early, with the result, said Thorstein Veblen, that people who get up early are conceited in the morning and sleepy in the afternoon. "Consider the matter in Aristotelian fashion," said President Hutchins one morning at seven o'clock in his office. "Virtue is its own reward. But getting up early has rewarded me beyond the dreams of avarice. Therefore getting up early is not a virtue. It is a morally indifferent habit and I am a morally indifferent man. It had nothing to do with character. I get up early because I can't sleep late. My father and the army made me what I am today."

He wasn't a candidate in December, when Board Chairman Swift asked him what time he got to his office. He was still twenty-nine—he wouldn't be thirty until January. He couldn't believe that a great university, or even a not so great university, would hire so young a president; none ever had. The deanship of the Yale Law School had been a fluke attributable to a series of minor flukes beginning with the appendectomy of the lecturer in Public Utilities Law, and few (hard-headed philanthropists included) cared all that much what a law school did. But a university—. So he hadn't taken the Chicago matter seriously. He had done his best to put his worst foot forward, his Calvinistic best. One of his hosts long afterward recalled having had an uneasy impression of him. "Handsomest devil, never saw a man like him, before or since. Obviously brilliant and confident—or putting on a great show of confidence. But he certainly wasn't trying to sell himself. Either that or he was doing it with reverse English. Flip . . . supercilious . . .—and yet—he wasn't a showoff. He was serious, serious about education, about universities. . . . Puzzling. I suspected he thought he was more intelligent than we were. Well—he was."

He was invited back in February, and again in March. Now he knew they were serious. And now so was he. He wanted to be president of the University of Chicago. It had been established as a research institution, the only one of its kind that had not grown out of a college; it had been established only thirty-seven years before by a radical educator whose memory was still green, William Rainey Harper. Hutchins, as a consequence of his discovery of the ramifications of the law, had become interested in (of all things) education. No matter how far afield and into how many fields the law carried you, in the end it was essentially a procedural

study and a procedural practice. Politics and economics and ethics and psychology and logic were substantive disciplines, but the law was a profession; a profession was practiced, and the substantive element of its practice was procedure. His men and his mentors at Yale—the Clarks, the Douglases—were lawyers interested in jurisprudence, but first of all, lawyers. The difference between his approach and theirs was radical. As he turned to general education, to the fields they thought were relevant (but no more than relevant) to the law, his outlook diverged from theirs. They would always be friends, closely associated in professional and public undertakings. But they would become critical of him, and he of them. Insofar as he was a lawyer, he was concerned with constitutional law, that is, with the polity and with law as an instrument of the polity.

Thus he had been drifting into education and away from professional training. He was still mildly horrified to think of himself as an administrator; but maybe what an administrator becoming interested in education was destined for was educational administration. There was his internship under President Angell and his experience as dean of the law school. His father was a college president. "I thought as a result of observing my father and Mr. Angell at work that all you needed to do was have a bright young man get hold of one of these institutions, and he could fix it up. I thought I was a bright young man. I thought I would not make their mistakes, and that all I had to do to develop an adequate educational program was the opposite of what was done at New Haven. That's how bright a young man I thought I was."^[4]

In mid-April Harold Swift phoned him to ask when he could meet with the full board of trustees, most of whom he had met individually or in small groups. It was understood that the committee would present him to the board for election, and that he was willing to be presented. After lunch at the Chicago Club, attorney Laird Bell, then the youngest member of the board, and who would one day succeed Swift as chairman—asked Hutchins if he would care to join him for a few minutes in another room. The few minutes went on for a few hours, and "Laird and I, meeting for the first time, had very little to say to one another. It got to be embarrassing. I didn't know what was happening, but I could surmise (and so, of course, could Laird) that the 'enthusiastic unanimity' with which my appointment would be announced was being reached with mixed enthusiasm."^[5] It was almost dark when the members of the committee came in and informed him that he had been elected and that the board hoped that he would accept. He did.

The announcement, on April 26, was made by Swift, who rejoiced at "the unanimous and enthusiastic choice" and explained that although

President-elect Hutchins was a comparatively young man, his experience in university administration was greater than that of either the university's first president, Mr. Harper, or Harvard's Eliot when they assumed office each at the age of thirty-five. The president-elect posed for pictures and told the press that the University of Chicago was "the greatest educational opportunity in the United States . . . because of its geographical location, because of its tradition of freedom and enterprise, the excellence of its faculty . . . an able and enthusiastic group of investigators and teachers engaged in inspiring and valuable effort. . . . I welcome the opportunity." (Ten years later he would be writing in a personal letter to his Chicago friend and colleague Professor William Fielding Ogburn: "The faculty is bad, and you and I know it.")

He was saying all the right things and none of the wrong ones. The youngest man ever chosen president of a university, he responded to his election like a sere and sober pontiff. Nothing flip, nothing supercilious. When he brought his wife to Chicago a month later for a two-day visit to the campus and a full-scale press appearance, the Chicago-Daily News found him "tall . . . at once keen and kindly, with a manner both suave and gentle." The Tribune's feature writer, Philip Kinsley, had an ankle-deep in-depth interview: "Here is no revolutionist. . . . He has no idea of revolutionizing the University's work or even diverting it from its present channels. 'My largest opportunity,' he said, 'is in keeping the wheels of the University going as effectively as now.' He is not ready to announce any policies beyond these. 'I am in no position to talk about my educational program.'"

Did he have one? The Tribune man was not investigative; he recorded the young president's work at Yale "to establish a closer application of the social sciences to the law. He added to the law faculty professors of political economy and political science. Dean Winternitz was experimenting in the medical school with the application of the biological sciences, the closer relationship of psychiatry with medicine, for instance. It was finally decided to correlate these programs, and the plan of the Institute of Human Relations was launched. What happened at Yale, however is to be no criterion for the University of Chicago. It is important as showing the lines of his intellectual interest. He is a lawyer and an administrator who wishes to take advantage of scientific methods in aiding the human race."

The Tribune man had not been misled, but what he told his readers was misleading. "Closer application," "closer relationship," "experiment," "establish," "correlate"—the record sustained them all. The trouble was, is, and always will be, that the record isn't the record. In the world of

intangibles—arts, politics, learning, love—the record may conceal the reality and, in any case, doesn't reveal it. The record revealed that Dean Hutchins got five and a half million dollars from the Sterling Trust for a new law school for Yale. The record did not reveal that Dean Hutchins wanted a great deal less than that sum for a new law school in the New Haven slums next to the medical school so that the two schools, cooperating in the Institute for Human Relations, could more easily work together. But the Sterling trustees wanted a Gothic memorial to Mr. Sterling in the center of the campus, and that's what they got—"a five-million-dollar bowling alley," said Hutchins later. "It set the work of the law school back ten years." So "what happened at Yale" was not what had actually happened at Yale: the failure to get the institute properly off the ground; the failure to change the law school's professional approach to the law; the failure of the social sciences and the scientific method to touch reason, right, and justice, or normative jurisprudence, or moral truth; the failure of Yale University to do anything about intellectual community.

Once Hutchins realized that he was likely to be offered the job at Chicago he had turned his attention to the possibility of "fixing up one of these institutions." He had spent more and more of his time exchanging letters with friends at Columbia—and discussing Chicago with his friends in New Haven. (Pondering Yale's equanimity at his going, Hutchins paraphrased Scripture: the guilty flee when none pursue; "I must have been guilty, because nobody pursued me.") The administrative organization could not be changed overnight. What could be done overnight was to bring Bill Douglas to take the deanship of the law school, Mortimer Adler and Dick McKeon from Columbia and Scott Buchanan to be professors of philosophy, and some of the young social scientists like Donald Slesinger from Yale, and they'd pick up where they left off.

Chicago, the university not less than the city, would surely be tickled to have Thornton Wilder, the author of The Bridge of San Luis Rey , in the English department. Chicago was a roomier institution than Yale; the money—it was 1929, wasn't it?—was rolling in at the rate of some twenty-seven million a year. Who could object to the new president's bringing in a few brilliant men with him to strengthen the faculty? It was, and would ever after remain, marvelous to think that even a daring young man, even one with a limited experience of universities, imagined that a faculty like Chicago's would not object strenuously to being strengthened by a high-handed president. In his exuberance he supposed that the president of a university could get men appointed—in fields other than his own—the way the dean of a law school had been able to bring new men into his own faculty. Not only would Adler be rejected by the philosophy

department, Buchanan's appointment fall through, and Douglas turn him down, but Wilder would never be accepted by the English department except as a visiting lecturer.

Hutchins took office in July, and after a few days in Chicago—during which the reconstruction of the President's House was planned, to provide his wife with a studio for her sculpturing—the Hutchinses left for Europe. There was no tour; the Hutchinses made a beeline for Berlin, where Mrs. Hutchins wanted to arrange the bronze casting of some of her sculptures. (She specialized in heads.)

Toby Dakin—Winthrop Saltonstall Dakin—was a Princeton junior in 1929, majoring in German. He went to Berlin that summer too, and installed himself at the Pension Brunke in Potsdammerstrasse, the choice habitat of the better-paid American academics. He was surprised, the first evening he went down to dinner, to find the Hutchinses there. He knew who they were (and would one day marry Wilder's younger sister, Janet). The Pension Brunke was deluxe, as pensions go, but why (especially with prices as low as they were in Berlin) wouldn't the president of the University of Chicago be staying at the Adlon or the Bristol and availing himself of the privacy of a great hotel? The Brunke was a small place, and the guests ate at a common table. Hutchins was "a dazzling individual, and most amiable; he inquired about my studies and my plans and his interest was flattering." Mrs. Hutchins looked like a dazzling individual but she did no dazzling. She seemed to be completely preoccupied, sat silent through the meal, and as soon as coffee had been served she would catch her husband's eye and crook her finger; he would nod imperceptibly, close his conversation with his neighbors, and leave the dining room with his wife. That much Dakin remembered fifty years later; whether he wondered at the great man's subservience (or was it adoration?) he remembered not.^[6]

The European holiday was the first of the many that Hutchins would have at his wife's sovereign suggestion. But he managed—the long, devious life—to hold it down to three weeks. He had to get back to work on his inaugural address. He would be especially closely scrutinized because of his nonage—a prima facie insult to the tradition of the office. He would have to be general and acceptable and appear to be specific and bold. The object was to have the attenders at the inauguration say to each other, as they left the chapel, "Impressive . . . very impressive. . . You wouldn't think he was only thirty."

He had spoken at the chapel before, having, a few weeks after his election, been asked to deliver the convocation address to the class of '29. American education, he told the graduates, needed to be attacked, but not for the reasons that it was being attacked. It was being attacked for mak-

ing young people immoral and godless, for upsetting and disturbing them (a complaint that "might be phrased alternatively to read that the universities were teaching bolshevism"). He was able to inform his listeners—as he should have been, having been a party to the episode—that "one of the greatest scholars in the country wrote a university president of a man who was about to be made a dean, 'I wish strenuously to advise you not to make this appointment. Mr. X is a man who will unsettle the minds of young men at a time when they are most in need of settling.'" His own view was exactly the opposite of the great scholar's: "The purpose of higher education is to unsettle the minds of young men, to widen their horizons, to inflame their intellects. And by this series of mixed metaphors I mean to assert that education is not to teach men facts, theories, or laws; it is not to reform them, or amuse them, or make them expert technicians in any field; it is to teach them to think, to think straight, if possible, but to think always for themselves."

"The picture of the professors of America undermining religion, communizing the sons of capitalists, and knocking the lares and penates off the shelf is far removed from reality. I once taught a class of college freshmen a course called Introduction to the Social Sciences. But there were many aspects of the social sciences to which I could not introduce them, because they would not let me. There was only one Democrat in the class, and he battled alone against the protective tariff, with a degree of success in exact proportion to his numerical strength. The question whether vast military and naval expenditures were necessary could hardly be raised because everybody knew that the United States was the greatest nation on earth and ought to keep other countries in a state of wholesome awe. Suggestions that there were some slight weaknesses in the party system in this country, or in our foreign policy since the War, or that there were a few words one could say for the labor unions, were repelled as unworthy of a college professor. The social and political dogmas inculcated at the paternal breakfast table these gentlemen had accepted whole, nor were they inclined to listen to the words of a professor as against the teachings of practical men."

In his own age—his youthful audience knew how recent that was—you went to college to get to know the fellows "who provided one another with the gayest amusements and the most profitable relationships, and who afterward formed a great brotherhood of men ready and willing to help out socially, politically, and financially those of their brethren who might be down on their luck, ostracized from their party, or out of a job . . . the open sesame into the company of people who matter." This, not bolshevism, or irreligion, or immorality, was what was wrong with education. The

professor who wanted to indoctrinate his students hadn't a chance; they wouldn't listen to him, no matter what he said. Consider the case of the Harvard instructor who told his class, "The fool hath said in his heart there is no God"; the whole class wrote in their notebooks, "Professor X says there is no God."

"You may have heard that your generation is the hope of America. Mine used to be. If your generation makes no better use of its educational opportunities than mine there is little hope that the millennium will soon arrive or, if it does, that education will have been responsible for its coming."^[7]

This was addressed not to an inaugural audience but to a graduating class. If any of his colleagues-to-be were disturbed by his irreverence, there was no indication of it that commencement day; whatever else Hutchins would turn out to be, he would be entertaining. And most of whatever else he would turn out to be would come out in his inaugural, scheduled for November 19; by then he would have been on campus for three months.

What came out at the inaugural was an unentertaining analysis of the University of Chicago, historically and contemporaneously, and its relationship to the problems of American education. It wasn't deadly, but it was dead serious, sober, and proper; the only dead proper paper he ever read. There was a hint—only one—that it had been prepared by a man who had an appetite for phraseology: "If the first faculty of the University of Chicago had met in a tent, this would still have been a great university."^[8]

His intention was obvious. In every interview he was charged with being only thirty years old—what, the charge implied, could a fellow of thirty possibly know about running anything?—and his regretful rejoinder had been that his being thirty was something he couldn't do much about. In his inaugural address he decided to do something about it. The occasion would assemble the presidents of the country's leading colleges and universities, almost all of whom (the press pointed out the day after) were old enough to be his father and one of whom, the president of Berea, actually was. He would deliver a speech that would double his age in half an hour.

It didn't go on interminably, but it did go on. He addressed himself, one by one, to the certified problems, at every point supporting his analysis of them with well-researched references to the purpose and practice of his first predecessor, President William Rainey Harper. Whoever would read revolution into his proposals would have to read it into the founding father. Whoever would find this proposal or that insupportable would have to find Harper himself insupportable, and this no one at Chicago was

disposed to do. If the university's fifth president was a revolutionist—as the Tribune had assured its readers he wasn't—he was the undevoured son of the first, a traditionalist in the sainted tradition which had scandalized education thirty-seven years before.

He called for higher pay for professors—Harper had doubled the salaries of his day—to keep "the best men" from going into business and the professions. (Uneasy with his own materialism at this point, and the materialism he was ascribing to "the best men," he pleaded "the characteristic American feeling that there must be some connection between compensation and ability. It is hopeless to try to combat that feeling. . . . This matter will never be settled until professorial salaries are such as to make scholarship respected in the United States.") He called for continued educational experimentation in the institution whose "principal tradition has been that of freedom" and whose value had been "to try out new ideas, undertake new ventures, to pioneer." Citing the university's historic interest in the city and its problems, he called for continued investigation of social issues to counteract the layman's complaint that research was "remote from reality" (a complaint that would one day be launched against his own college program based on the great books and the liberal arts). Praising the "admirable cooperative work" of the faculty, he called for "formulation of University programs rather than departmental or school policies. . . . We must regard the University as a whole," the "common enterprise" to which each member would contribute his special abilities. He jettisoned—just this once—his insistence that the true function of the professional schools was to improve the professions, and not to train practitioners; he declared his support for the university's dual obligation (as he called it) to do both, and its dual obligation in education to devise the best methods of preparing men and women for research and creative scholarship and for teaching. In view of the traditional focus of the PhD on research, the university which produced more college teachers than any other might well consider awarding a teaching degree equivalent to the PhD.

His tone was that of thoughtful moderation, his proposals couched in terms of "considerations," "study," and "examination." On only one point did he take a clearly defined position: "At times, members of the faculty have suggested that we withdraw from undergraduate work, or at least from the first two years of it. But we do not propose to abandon or dismember the Colleges." The argument from authority was decisive: at a time when most educators were chiefly concerned with undergraduate teaching, William Rainey Harper had insisted upon a university established for research—but also "having a college." The college was intended

to be primarily a laboratory for experimentation in education and the preparation of teachers. This it should remain. "The whole question of the relation of the first two years of college to the high school on the one hand and the senior college on the other is one of the most baffling [in education]. Instead of withdrawing from this field we should vigorously carry forward experiments in it." How vigorously he would later insist on carrying forward the experiments—even unto awarding a degree at the end of the second year—his colleagues who heard him that day did not suspect. They were all in favor of vigorous experimentation's being proclaimed by incoming presidents. The new Laura Spellman Rockefeller Chapel, towering over the Midway and the restrained Gothic of the rest of the campus, represented the last of the great giver's personal benefactions (thirty-five million dollars in all) to the university. ("He gives with both hands," said Old Bob La Follette, "but he takes with many.") The massive chapel had all the lineaments of a cathedral, and the occasion was a cathedratic occasion.

It was the finest kind of a mid-October day—in mid-November—and the longer shadows subdued the sunshine to the appropriate combination of panoply and severity. The procession up the broad walk to the great doors was democracy's closest approximation to a coronation. Among the six hundred members of the academic procession that day on the Midway were the delegates of three hundred colleges and universities—including one hundred twelve presidents—marshaled in the order of the founding of the institutions they represented.

The investiture itself was short. After the address, the welcomes on behalf of the sister institutions east, west, north, and south, and the award of the doctorate of laws, honoris causa , to the president of Berea College, the Mighty Wurlitzer, which had thundered the processional, thundered the recessional, and the pageant receded in the order of the founding, from 1411, Saint Andrews, Sir Andrew Craigie to 1892, Chicago, President Robert Maynard Hutchins . "Impressive . . . very impressive," the president of Yale University, James Rowland Angell, was heard to say. "A good boy . . . he deserves everything he is getting."^[9]

This, then, if his vagrant lot was to cast him into education, was the ultimate rite of passage. Any list of the world's half-dozen great universities—or America's quarter-dozen—had Chicago at or near the top. And at the top of Chicago was the young man from Elm Street in Oberlin. It was 1929, November.

10
Of Cawse It's Impawtant

A university president (like any other) who means to get anything done has got to get it done in his first term; five years, say. The presidency of a great university is a great pulpit. Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, Woodrow Wilson of Princeton, and Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia all became national figures as university presidents; but none of them was anywhere near as widely known as young as Hutchins. He received a thousand speaking invitations a year and accepted a hundred—and appeared with increasing frequency in the slick magazines as well as the scholarly journals. There are immediate destinies for a man of such prepossessing and precocious parts.

His classmate, Bill Benton, remembered that the tenth reunion of Yale '21 speculated that Bob Hutchins would some day be the nation's president; and that was when he had only begun to make waves as President of Chicago. Five years later the waves would be breakers. Immediately after the Hundred Days of 1933, Roosevelt sent Harry Hopkins to Chicago to sound Hutchins out, and kept on sending emissaries. For the better part of eight years "Dear Mr. Roosevelt" was determined to get "Dear Bob" on the New Deal team, and Dear Bob was the only man he was ever determined to get that he never got. The emissaries kept coming to Chicago and going back to Washington with the same message that the persistently inquiring reporters got: "I am not interested in public life." Impossible; in Washington there is no such thing as a man who is not interested in public life. Impossible, too, that a man who was moldering in a Midwest monastery couldn't be had. The emissaries kept coming, among them (the boss was given to mixing his pitches) Roosevelt's "Mr. Wall Street," otherwise known as Sidney Weinberg of Goldman Sachs.

"Damn it all, Hutchins, it's impawtant."

"Isn't education impawtant, too, Mr. Weinberg?"

"Impawtant, of cawse it's impawtant, but it's been ovahdone ."

Of course education is important to a university president, including one who will resign a week later to become a vice president of Standard Oil at twice the salary. Stand him up in front of an audience (or a donor) (or a mirror) and he will say that civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. Hutchins said so too—without the banalities—and said it every time he stood up. The difficulty is to distinguish the straight men from the comics; you have to catch them off the platform, or, as Felix Frankfurter did Hutchins, on the platform of the Sixty-Third Street Station in Chicago, where the New York Central's New England States stopped on its way out to Boston and Cambridge. It was a dreadful stormy day in December of 1932, and the States (which Frankfurter was catching after a lecture in Chicago) was running forty minutes late. The amenities of the Sixty-Third Street Station being what they were, he and his host walked up and down the platform and talked.

Professor Frankfurter of the Harvard Law School was seventeen years older than Hutchins but they had been close friends since the young dean at Yale had assisted the great man in the fruitless futile defense of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. Frankfurter had wanted to be invited to Chicago for a lecture precisely at that most unlikely pre-Christmas time of the academic year. What he really wanted was to talk to Hutchins about Harvard's search for a new president. He knew that Hutchins didn't want the job, and he wanted Hutchins' advice. He got some of the advice in the Hutchins kitchen after the lecture, and some more of it on the Sixty-Third Street platform. When he got back to Cambridge he wrote his host asking him to put his advice in writing so that he could use it effectively.^[1] Hutchins did:

"You gentlemen who are sitting in deep cushions in Harvard Clubs about the country have probably not heard that the condition of American education is now so critical that we are facing in the West and Middle West the practical extermination of higher learning as we have known it. Most of the higher learning in America is carried on in the state universities. The legislatures, one after another, are wrecking them. . . . At this juncture the system of public education higher and lower requires strong and vocal leadership as never before. This leadership must direct attention not merely to the financial crisis but also to the sweeping changes which must be made to adjust the educational system to the demands of the present day. This means that we must revise our methods, our organization, and our curriculum. In the good old days Harvard supplied educational ideas to the United States. There can be no doubt that the system's lead-

ership resided in Cambridge. At the present time there is no evidence that Harvard is aware of the educational system or has anything to offer it. . . . I wish to see Harvard regain its position of leadership in educational thought and action. It should do so now when such leadership is more needed than at any period in our history. . . . The election as president of a nice Harvard man acceptable to nice Harvard men and consequently ignorant of American education and quite indifferent to its needs would be a fatal mistake for Harvard. There must be among your graduates, if you insist on electing one, a man who has knowledge of and ideas on the development of education in this country. I hope that you will satisfy yourselves that no such person exists before you become reconciled to the election of a safe, dull Bostonian, under whose leadership you will roll down the years in peace, quiet, and dishonor."^[2]

Frankfurter replied: "Your extraordinarily persuasive analysis—that happy blend that you have of impudent cajolery and venerable wisdom—came the very morning of the day that I had a chance to put in an effective lick. . . . Really, your letter not only as an astute document but as an expression of faith makes me love you more than ever with wisdom as well as with affection. . . . The dominant experience I brought back from Chicago was that out there there was a President who really was passionate about education,—and education as the pursuit, systematically, of the richest and most sensitive experience of life."^[3]

Apparently education was impawtant, and not, in Hutchins' view, overdone. He had no sooner got back to Chicago than he indicated his intention to overdo it, and less than a year after his installation, with no power other than persuasion, he had got the no-motion machinery of a great university to adopt the "Hutchins Plan." (The quotation marks here are significant.) The honeymooning faculty senate adopted his first proposal—presented on one side of one sheet of paper—in twelve minutes.^[4] It revived the "junior division" of the college—the freshman and sophomore years—by assigning it the responsibility for the development and administration of a program of general education. "Revived" is the word; the junior division had been the spectacular invention of William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago, in 1892. But at Chicago, no less than everywhere else, this segment of the university had been progressively orphaned by the phenomenal increases of scholarly specialization, in whose interest the graduate schools had all but absorbed the junior and senior years. Under the combined influences of specialization and the elective system, the education of a human being, without reference to his future occupation, had been nearly abandoned to the vocational interests of industry, commerce, and finance; to the whims of legislatures, parents, alumni, and benefactors; and to the vagrant heart's desire of the adoles-

cent. ("This institution," Professor Philip Schuyler Allen told a Chicago class just before Hutchins' advent, "is becoming an intellectual whore-house—I suppose that in mixed company I should say a brothel.—But I mean whorehouse. An intellectual whorehouse is a university which, like this one, permits its Home Economics Department to give a student credit for weaving a straw hat.")

It became a point of status—to avoid teaching in the first two years, which were ultimately delegated to what Hutchins called a "Coxey's army of graduate teaching assistants." This practice alone was an educational atrocity, and it was to be ever more atrocious as the state universities expanded and the colleges took to pretending to be universities. But it did not, then or thereafter, arouse any appreciable scandal in or out of education. Its victims were only students; its perpetrators were the scholars to whom the graduate teaching assistants would some day have to look for jobs; and the teaching assistants themselves (with an annual turnover of 50 percent) had no other way to earn a pittance to maintain their preparation for the PhD.

Sentiment overt and covert was strong at Chicago (and at other great graduate schools) for getting rid of the folderol of undergraduate education altogether. Just prior to Hutchins' advent, Dean Gordon Jennings Laing of Chicago's graduate school was saying that "not even in the best university is the graduate work on the scale and quality that would be possible if the institutions were entirely free from undergraduate entanglements." But Hutchins had no sooner hung up his fedora than he announced that he—he used the polite amorphism "we"—did not intend to abandon or dismember the college but to revive it: "A college is an institution devoted to the advancement of knowledge. A college in a university is an institution devoted to discovering what an education ought to be." The discovery, he let it be understood, would be made at Chicago and the college would be the laboratory.

The faculty senate, composed of the full professors, was unperturbed; it didn't care all that much about the college, one way or another. What should have perturbed it, but apparently didn't, was something else it subscribed to in those twelve minutes: perceptible, if only perceptible, breaching of the walls between the departments. They would retain their myriad identities, but they would be gathered into four basic divisions—the humanities, the biological sciences, the physical sciences, and the social sciences—charged with the development and direction of the programs at the junior/senior, graduate, and professional levels. The medical school, for instance—at Chicago, as everywhere, a splendidly isolated sanctum—would now be an integral part of the biological sciences division.

A university is an aggregation of separate sovereignties "connected," as

Hutchins put it, "by a common heating plant." The sovereignties are the departments. Proliferating as specialization proliferated, the departments were and are autonomous, each and severally pitted against the universum of the university. There was and is nothing to unify them except the demand of their own development—demand stimulated by the use of their work in practical applications. Forced to cooperate by the prospect of application, the natural science departments, still fighting each other for the research money that follows prestige, were yielding to interdisciplinary undertakings: in physics and chemistry; chemistry (and the biological sciences) and medicine; chemistry and geology; geology and physics; physics and astronomy; astronomy and meteorology; and all of them with mathematics. But where popular utility was less readily demonstrable, as in the social sciences, or indemonstrable, as in the humanities, there was, and still is, nothing to knock departmental heads together and every parochial reason to build walls ever higher.

The argument for the department was, and is, persuasive, at least in the natural sciences. Who except a microbiologist knows enough about microbiology to say what the department of microbiology needs, or whether its work is important, or whether, at budget time, its work is more important than, say, organic chemistry's or invertebrate zoology's? The more sophisticated the university, the more exalted the unintelligibility and the higher the walls around each departmental cosa nostra. And "areas" within a department were (and would be ever more so) almost as widely separated as the disciplines themselves.

Whoever would want to bring university out of diversity would have to mount an assault against those walls. There would seem to be one way—one very slow way—to do it. The professors of the next generation, if as senior high school and college students they had acquired a common stock of learning, and as graduate students and instructors continued to refine and rework that common stock irrespective of their special fields, could perhaps have something intelligible to say to one another and a common interest in going on saying it. But then the departments would have to be got out of collegiate education and subordinated even at the graduate level. But who was there to try to do it? Not an administrator with five years (at the most) to try to do anything, and with neither the general power nor the special credentials to get so much as a hearing.

A university president was not supposed to be a scholar and very rarely was; rarest of all the kind of scholar with whom scientists might communicate even elementarily—namely a scientist. The young president of the University of Chicago might be acknowledged to know a little something about law. But law was not a science, not even when it called itself jurisprudence. And here was a nonscientist who was so impudent as to claim to

have all of the competence—fortunately he could not claim to have any of the power—to reorganize a great university when he prided himself (as he himself put it) on having a nonmathematical mind (though he would subject every student to the study of mathematics, as the purest form of reasoning).

The twelve-minute faculty meeting that adopted the "Hutchins Plan" of divisional organization may be seen in distant retrospect as the president's first sly feint at those impregnable repositories, the departments. Survivors of that occasion say variously that there was no opposition because the defenders of things as they were and always would be were unprepared and unorganized, or believed that the president knew better than to suppose he could do anything about the hallowed sovereignties and prerogatives. Or were they momentarily mesmerized? Besides, the divisional consolidation made epistemological and pedagogical sense (on paper) and was later adopted (on paper) by colleges and universities generally. (A sporadic flourish of "interdepartmental" or "interdisciplinary" courses continued to appear across the country, even in the supposedly "soft" studies, as a supposed concession to the imperative vagaries of the New Student of the 1960s. The orthodox departmentalist continued to pay no attention to them.)

The second battery of proposals, a few months later, bit deeper into the academic bedrock, but they were adopted almost as readily as the first.^[5] The college teaching faculty was granted substantial autonomy;^[6] and the country's first faculty awards for excellence in undergraduate teaching were established by the University of Chicago in 1930, when Hutchins got the endowment for them from broker Ernest Quantrell.

In another of the second set of "Hutchins Plan" reforms, the elective system was invaded by year-long general courses in the four divisional fields. The course-credit system was junked. A Chicago baccalaureate would no longer represent an accumulation of unrelated oddments, no sooner passed than past. Instead of being graduated on the basis of what he had known and forgotten, the candidate for a degree would take a series of comprehensive examinations on what he now knew; he would take them whenever he thought that he was ready to take them, and take them as often as he wanted to. The residence requirement was reduced to a year, and though most students continued to complete the undergraduate requirements in three or four years, some passed the comprehensive after two years (and in one historic case a graduate of an Italian liceo passed them immediately after his admission to the college). The examinations were to be administered by an independent board of examiners—putting an end to the time-dishonored system of studying the instructor instead of the subject. Compulsory class attendance was eliminated.^[7] Freshmen were

to be graded Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory—the pass/fail "innovation" of a generation later. Some of the effects were measurable as early as the close of the plan's first year of operation, in the spring of 1932. With the elimination of compulsory class attendance at Chicago, attendance actually rose that year by 1.3 percent. Freshman failures went down from 6 to 5 percent, and dropouts went down by 5 percent. Applications rose—this in the depression pit of 1932—and went on rising. By all the tests that could be applied, the entering students were markedly superior to their predecessors, and in the first year of the program thirty-nine freshmen presented themselves for examination in subjects they had studied by themselves, without the benefit of instruction. They all passed, and passed with an average higher than the general average of the class. The pursuit of knowledge had become an undergraduate activity.^[8]

All of this was revolutionary, and Hutchins wanted all of it. But it wasn't Hutchins' revolution. Bits and pieces of it had been urged—and some of them instituted—at one time or another by Eliot and then Lowell at Harvard, by Harper and Dewey at Chicago, by Wilson at Princeton. But it had never been put together in a package, and most of the bits and pieces had fallen, or been swept, away by the competitive rah-rahism, "development" programs, and fragmentation of teaching and research in the 1920s. Most of the elements of the new program at Chicago had been proposed by a faculty committee which had been sitting (and sitting on it) for two years before Hutchins got there. Everybody everywhere knew that something fundamental had to be done. What doing it had waited on was somebody to say, "Let's do it now." The something that was done was a series of fundamental changes in structure. It did no more than brush against the bedeviling issues of deadly lectures and the lifeless content of traditional textbook curricula. The "Hutchins Plan" was not the Hutchins Plan.

But it was hailed at home and abroad as the first great educational reform of the century, and the young president as the century's first great educational reformer. In the midst of the general hubbub attending the reforms on the Midway nobody paid much attention to the great reformer's ominous animadversion: "We are now in a position to teach the wrong things in the right way."

What was the matter with him? Hadn't he got everything—well, almost everything—he wanted (or should have wanted)? The faculty as a whole had overridden the traditional uneasiness which some of the leading figures in the natural sciences and the professional schools voiced about deemphasizing specialization, which they wanted to emphasize as preparation for graduate work. The thirty-year-old president had cut a great swathe in a great hurry. He could move on any time, as move he must, and cut a great swathe in another great hurry somewhere else. And on, and on.

—Provided that he was ready to move on any time without having got any of the three things he really wanted. He wanted a "new" method of education. He wanted a "new" curriculum. And he wanted a genuine consolidation of research, a common set of principles which might establish an order and proportion of the goods of the mind just as there is an order and proportion of all other goods.

This last was the most scandalous of his three announced objectives (apart from his careful exacerbation of the anti-Catholicism of the academic adversaries by his use of the perfectly proper term "hierarchy" to indicate order and proportion). It was impossible for modern academics even in philosophy (or especially in philosophy) to accept his insistence that the "first principles" of "metaphysics," which would hierarchize all other disciplines, were to be determined by uncoerced consensus based on uncoerced investigation. How did he mean to investigate chimeras? Whose first principles? What metaphysics?

Hutchins said that the first business of scholarship was to recover the university from the confusion that constituted the chief glory of the higher learning. He denounced the happy anarchy that (in the name of academic freedom) held one subject matter to be as good as another. Naturally none of the anarchists really felt that way, or really approved of a budget that allocated as much money to what they regarded as frivolous projects as they themselves got for their own fundamental projects; but the freedom doctrine, if it protected the other fellow's frivolity, also protected their own fundamentalism; so they never complained outside the family. The family was the department, and little by little it came to be widely, and correctly, suspected that Hutchins' divisional organization at the university level and his general education program for the college were backdoor tricks to perpetrate the metaphysician's absolutism.

The fact that some academics thought that his objectives were something new—and resisted them for that reason—simply confirmed his conviction that educators were badly educated. The things he wanted were all of them very old.

He set the scientists against him by asserting that it was philosophy—specifically that crumbled cornerstone of philosophy which went (or had gone) by the name of metaphysics and professed itself the science of being—that put all other studies in their place and sent them about her sovereign business. He outraged the philosophers by insisting that the philosopher's work was not to teach philosophy—or philosophies—but to teach philosophizing. In the land where every man was king, every man must be a philosopher and not an alumnus who had swallowed, regurgitated, and forgotten lectures in other men's philosophies. There was no right way to teach the things that were not matters of rote; there was only

a right way to learn, in which the teacher was an auxiliary to the process, the classic "midwife" of ideas that the student himself must bring to birth.

In coming to that position—by whatever magic one comes to a position in such matters—Hutchins had enrolled himself in the everlasting dispute over cognition. How do we learn, and how, if at all, is what we learn imparted by others? "Man learns," said Erasmus, "at the school of example, and will attend no other." Augustine wept: "The unlearned arise and take heaven by force, and here are we with all our learning, stuck fast in flesh and blood"; and then, weeping, heard the voice of an angel saying, "Take up and read, take up and read," and the Book fell open to Romans 13:13, and he had no need to read further. "They are wise to do evil," said the prophet, "but to do good they have no knowledge." "The triumph of my art," Socrates told Theaetetus, "is in thoroughly examining whether the thought which the mind of the young man is bringing to birth is a false idol or a noble and true spirit. Like the midwife, I myself am barren, and the reproach which is often made against me, that I ask questions of others and have not the wit to answer them myself, is very just; the reason is that the gods compel me to be a midwife but forbid me to bring forth. And therefore I am not myself at all wise, nor have I anything to show which is the invention or birth of my own soul, but those who converse with me profit. . . . It is quite clear that they never learned anything from me. The many fine discoveries to which they cling are of their own making." The twentieth-century progressives, with John Dewey at their head, maintained that we learn by doing and argued that the school should somehow prefigure the experience of "real life."

But Hutchins could not get the right way of teaching—even teaching the wrong things—introduced at Chicago. Nor would he ever, until a race of teachers would arise in the spirit of Socrates, asking pertinent questions in persistent dialogue instead of reciting answers, forcing disputation instead of information on their students, converting education from a process of absorbing to a process of challenge and counterchallenge. Some young instructors, marvelously uncorrupted by their own experience as students, could employ the Socratic method; some always had. But not often the old hats, whose attitudes dominated the colleges and the universities. Socrates was, of course, born, not made; and until the schools, at whatever level, would recognize that there is no other true teacher and hunt out this one and hire him away from taxi-driving, or half-soling, or a bench in the park, or a jail cell, or even a schoolhouse, even the wrong things would never be taught in the right way.

The things the misnamed "Hutchins Plan" went on teaching in the wrong (not the right) way were the wrong things. These courses could not be taught via the textbooks that went on dominating, or trying to domi-

nate, education, books written (or pasted together) by academic hacks. The textbook publishers, corruptionists of school superintendents, school boards, state boards of education, were as rich as the schoolmarms (of both sexes) were poor. They could give a five-thousand-a-year professor five thousand dollars for a month's cut-and-paste job. His rank, on the title page, was secondary; what was primary was the name (by implication, the imprimatur) of the institution he was connected with.

With the rise of the one-semester or one-term "survey" courses for freshmen in the 1920s, the publishers had turned their attention to the assembly of teams to produce survey texts, which were just as pedantic. The most (and in some respect the only) impressive exception to this output was a series of Chicago faculty lectures in the university's one survey course, "The Nature of the World and Man," inaugurated in 1924. This introduction to the natural sciences became so popular that the university published it as a book, which colleges across the country had adopted long before Hutchins became president.

But the right things that Hutchins wanted taught the right way were neither lectures nor surveys. He wanted the Socratic method of discussion to draw the young into the great debates of the ages conducted by the great minds of the ages on the great issues of the ages. The great books would constitute the heart of a fixed curriculum to be taught to "everybody who can learn from books" in a four-year institution beginning with the junior year of high school, an institution open at public expense to every member of the rising generation, whether or not he or she meant to go on to university work. That curriculum would consist of the greatest books of the Western world and the arts of reading, writing, thinking, and speaking, together with mathematics, the best exemplar of the process of human reason. "If our hope has been to frame a curriculum which educes the elements of our common human nature, this program should realize our hope. If we wish to prepare the young for intelligent action, this course of study should assist us; for they will have learned what has been done in the past, and what the greatest men have thought. They will have learned how to think for themselves. If we wish to lay a basis for advanced study, that basis is provided. If we wish to secure true universities, we may look forward to them, because students and professors may acquire through this course of study a common stock of ideas and common methods of dealing with them."^[9]

The reason that these objectives—and the curriculum that served them—were unlikely to be pursued at Chicago or anywhere else was that they were profoundly un-American. And un-German. But the German university was a scholarly institution concerned entirely with investigation and the training of investigators. It did not prepare its students for the

practice of the professions but for the advancement of the professions, both in science and the humanities. Vocationalism (in every vocation but scholarship) was beneath it; beneath it, too, was everything that the American thought of as college life. The German (and European) elementary schooling was six years, after which the sheep, rigorously separated from the goats, went on to the four-year Gymnasium or—this was a twentieth-century development—to the science-oriented Realgymnasium . There they got their general education, which, after a total of ten years of schooling, was regarded as terminal. Most of them went into white-collar work, a relatively small minority to the technical institutes which produced professional practioners, and a very few to the university. There was no institution comparable to the American college on top of which, little by little, the PhDs from Leipzig superimposed little Leipzigs.

The result was the mélange of the American university. From the start it did not know what it was—a collegiate extension of general education, a center for research and scholarly training, or a gaggle of professional schools. And it never found out. The time came, with a rush, when American affluence sent a hundred (or a thousand) young people to "college" where European austerity sent one to the university.

The American founding fathers wanted to establish a popular form of government. Such government, even with a restricted franchise, had as its first requirement an educated citizenry. The American fervor for popular schooling, unknown anywhere else in the world, was such that by the turn of the twentieth century, education appeared to have become the state religion. But what was worshiped was not education. What was worshiped was the schoolhouse, which ultimately displaced the church as the national ground cover. What went on in the schoolhouse depended on what the public wanted, for (as Hutchins never wearied of quoting from Plato) what is honored in a country will be cultivated there. What was honored in modern America was the "practical"—the realizable return on the investment. Americans were the most practical people in history, and with good reason. They'd had to be. But their preoccupation with the practical—a national motto, "Do it," was coined by the Yippies a half-century later—diminished their interest in the theoretical to the vanishing point. Their founding fathers had been spectacularly practical theorists. But their latter-day heroes, right out of Horatio Alger, were nontheoretical, even antitheoretical, men. The only defensible object of schooling was, not thinking for oneself, but doing for oneself (and always for oneself).

Reality meant improving oneself, and improving oneself was a measurable matter of money. The disparagement of hereditary aristocracy in the euphoric name of egalitarianism disparaged only one kind of aristocracy; in a society where being born ahead was treason, the only way to be ahead

was to get ahead. The privileged few who, in the 1930s, went to college were expected to get rich. Parents scraped and borrowed to send their children to college, not so that they would be better than they themselves were, but so that they would be better off. For the poor, education meant a better job—or, in times like the thirties, any kind of job—and was appraised accordingly. Job training, once the province of apprenticeship, with the rise of technology became vocational training in the schools; and vocational training, to gratify both its democratic practitioners and its democratic beneficiaries, became "vocational education" (and, a generation of gobbledegook later, "career education").

This wasn't education, but it was what the country honored and, in its schools, its colleges, and its professions, cultivated. What Hutchins wanted had once been called education—the preparation, of the few to whom it was open, for independent participation in the common life and the development of the individual's highest powers. It was now called liberal education, generally disparaged as at best useless and at worst elitist. Hutchins called it education for democracy, on the ground that the best education of the few, where the few governed, was the best education for all where all governed. It was the education he fought for for twenty years at Chicago and for twenty-five years afterward; fought for unsuccessfully, and ever more unsuccessfully as the national plunge to illiteracy proceeded and the American "kid" entered college with thirty thousand hours behind him of staring at thirty thousand electronically projected dots on a glass screen. Still, the end of Hutchins' tenure at Chicago saw the great books occupying as much as 25 percent of the syllabi of the general courses of the College, and the College faculty preponderantly staffed by men (preponderantly younger men) who used the method of instruction-by-inquiry, in which the teacher was only the midwife.

It is one thing (and no presidential thing) for a university president to think he knows what education ought to be. It is another and still less presidential thing to try to foist it on the great faculty of a great university. But the unpresidentialest thing of all is to show them how it is done. And this, in his honors course for (of all things) freshmen, Hutchins had the effrontery to do as soon as he became president and to go on doing year after year. In the History of Ideas course, 4 to 6 P.M. every Tuesday, with another impudent young pup cobadgering the forty honors students ranged around an immense seminar table, the president of the University of Chicago went ahead and taught in the way he said the professors ought to teach. And if that wasn't effrontery enough, his cobadgerer was the same Professor Adler who, that April day in 1937, was coming into Hutchins' office behind me to tell him (as Hutchins put it) what to think about Aristotle's Metaphysics .

11
Mert

In 1927—when as dean of the Yale Law School Hutchins was introducing such arcane subjects as economics, psychology, and even ethics, on the ground that it would not do a lawyer any durable harm to be an educated man or, in a pinch, to know right from wrong—a most unlikely author, a psychology instructor at Columbia, had written a paper criticizing the classic law school text, Wigmore on Evidence . Hutchins asked him to come to New Haven and talk. Mortimer J. Adler suggested a date two weeks ahead and spent the two weeks mastering (or appearing to have mastered) the whole body of the law of evidence.

At twenty-four—as at forty-four, sixty-four, and seventy-four—Mor-timer Adler talked a blue streak. He did so at this meeting—after he recovered from the shock of realizing the young man in tennis ducks wasn't the dean's clerk, but the dean. Adler knew that Hutchins was only twenty-eight; but a law school dean of twenty-eight, when you're a psychology instructor four years younger, is bound to be a somber man, and Adler had got himself up as somberly as possible, black suit, black hat, for the occasion. Hutchins didn't break the ice, he crushed it. "Tell me everything you know," he said, gazing down at Adler, "about the law of evidence."^[1] Evidence was Hutchins' own field, but Adler had come loaded.

The archives of that and subsequent meetings disclose that Adler told Hutchins, always at length and always at fever pitch, everything he knew, or thought he knew, or thought he might know, or thought that if he didn't know, nobody else did, about the law of evidence and everything else. And about everybody else. But Adler never recovered from his second shock, the realization that here was a grand master of the art of remoteness conveyed (conveyed; not covered) by badinage, an expert at fending off the personal question; sitting somehow apart from his every interlocutor in

the peculiarly discountenancing kind of judgment that put the interlocutor off balance: moral judgment. The guilty sense of being seen through was such that the father-figure gap never closed, not even in this closest and longest of all Hutchins' close relationships: "What did Bob say? Did he say anything about me?"

He was Hutchins' antithesis and Hutchins' complement; ferociously didactic, belligerent, consumptive of codified learning, and productive of uncodified learning. He was unfunny, ungraceful, and unquiet. The easy arrogance that Hutchins exuded, Adler had to articulate. Everything was, or in two weeks became, his field; sufficiently so, at least, to confound (or appear to have confounded) the men who claimed the field for their hard-earned own. In the half-century that followed, everything that Hutchins needed to know in a hurry—it was always in a hurry—Adler found out and compiled, in a still greater hurry.

The schools around New York City saw a thousand straight-A boys a year like Mortimer Adler driven into whatever occupation they could pry themselves into, sometimes in two or three occupations successively and sometimes in three or four at once. The New York legend has enough documentation behind it to confirm the supposition that a Mortimer Adler at, say, sixteen was certain to make it big and uncertain only whether to make it big as a lawyer, a doctor, a producer (or a banker or broker, bucking the closed-door gentiles in Wall Street), a playwright, a professor, a wholesale liquor dealer, or a dialectical revolutionary.

Adler was married—uncomfortable for her family and ultimately too uncomfortable for her—to a handsome, high-minded, stony lady from a North Shore Chicago suburb. She may have meant to derogate him by calling him Mert—though it may have been Clifton Fadiman, who didn't mean to derogate him, who nicknamed him. (Fadiman was a student, along with Lionel Trilling and Whitaker Chambers, in the first class Adler taught at Columbia.) Nobody called him Mort. Gentiles, except for his wife, called him Mortimer. Hutchins, a gentile, called him Mortimer. I called him Mert: for Mert was what he was. The "little fellow," the "little metaphysician," overpowered everyone and intimidated no one. He sassed you, you sassed him back, and he sassed you back, and you sassed him back, and he never let go or let up; let him but fail to satisfy a persistent freshman and he would go home and bone up for a week and come back to demolish the freshman (unsurprisingly), or (surprisingly) to report that the freshman had demolished him. While he was growing on you—and grow he did, marvelously—you were growing on him. Mert was what he was.

He had no genius (and wanted none) for concealing his ungentle despite for his fellow academics. His psychology of education—which he said he

got from Aristotle, and it must be in there somewhere—was that the educatee had first to be reduced from error to ignorance before knowledge could be imparted to him. When he spoke to his colleagues (which was seldom) or of them (which was often and in public), he snapped his jaws shut on a leg or an arm. His pugnacity was an astonishment and a splendor. There was no getting him to go easy or lay off, no headshake, nudge, or surreptitious shin-kick that he recognized as a signal to leave well enough alone; it wasn't well enough for Mert until his adversary was pinned to the mat. "He's so unpleasant," said a woman who had to work closely with him, "that it's a pleasure."

Some of us are born maddening; some achieve it; and some have it thrust upon them. Mert was a happy concatenation of all three blessings. On one immortal occasion—immortalized by, among others, Gertrude Stein—Hutchins invited Gertrude and Alice B. Toklas to dinner at the president's house at Chicago. Gertrude's version of her encounter with Mert (whom Hutchins had also invited with deviltry prepense) is recorded in her Everybody's Autobiography . It begins with her asking Hutchins what ideas are important and Hutchins' handing her a list of the books he and Adler were teaching in their honors course. She observes that none of them was originally written in English, and Hutchins (according to her) replies that there have been no ideas expressed in English. She replies that she gathers that in his view there are no ideas that are not sociological or governmental, and he says, "Well, are there?"

"Well yes I said. Government is the least interesting thing in human life, creation and the expression of that creation is a damn sight more interesting, yes I know and I began to get excited yes I know, naturally you are teachers and teaching is your occupation and naturally what you call ideas are easy to teach and so you are convinced that they are the only ideas but the real ideas are not the relation of human beings as groups but a human being to himself inside him and that is an idea that is more interesting than humanity in groups, after all the minute that there are a lot of them they do not do it for themselves but somebody does it for them and that is a darn sight less interesting. Then Adler began and I have forgotten what the detail of it was but we were saying violent things to each other and I was telling him that anybody could tell by looking at him that he was a man who would be singularly unsusceptible to ideas that are created within oneself that he would take to either inside or outside regulation but not to creation, and Hutchins was saying well if you can improve upon what we are doing I challenge you to do it take our class next week and I said of course I will and then Adler said something and I was standing next to him and violently telling him and everybody was excited and the maid came

and said Madame the police. Adler went a little white and we all stopped and then burst out laughing. Fanny Butcher had arranged that Alice Toklas and I should go off that evening in the homicidal squad and they had come and there they were waiting. Well we said good-night and we went off with the policemen."^[2]

All of Gertrude Stein's versions are unauthorized versions—as she herself would have been quick to say. There is another unauthorized, but widely attested, version (by the other dinner guests) of her "standing next to him and violently telling him and everybody was excited." This version has it that the violence was beyond telling, with the excited poet hitting the excited prosist on the head with her fist (she was taller enough than he to do it) and saying, "Young man, you like to win arguments. I won't argue with you any more. You fail to hold my attention."

New York hones the hide and the tongue. In high school, with a copy boy's job on the old Sun , Adler broke into print writing editorials at seven dollars a column and went on building his library, gorging himself on books that weren't assigned in courses, books like John Stuart Mill's autobiography (and arguing with the author in the margin). When he learned that Mill had read Plato before he was ten, Mert, at fifteen, "felt like a savage." He got a seven-dollar advance from the Sun and bought the Republic , read it, argued with it in the margin, and was off on one of his careers. He discovered that he was a philosopher like Socrates, a Jewish gadfly sent to sting the high priests and pretenders.

Plato led him to Aristotle, whose relentless logic suited Mert right down to where Aristotle stood: the ground. Plato was the first philosopher—but Aristotle arguing with Plato made of philosophy the queen of sciences. Between them they divided Western philosophy into the two schools that contended for the Middle Ages, the Augustinian, with its Platonic perturbations, and the Thomistic, which swelled into the twenty-one volumes of the Summa Theologica —which as a high school boy Adler bought one by one as he accumulated the money. Mortimer J. Adler did not know whether or not he believed in God; he once said that he had all of the reason and none of the faith. But he became one of the twentieth century's half-dozen most distinguished disciples of the greatest of all of Aristotle's commentators, Thomas Aquinas—Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church, who asked of men only that they reason with him about the body of faith (which could not be maintained if it contradicted reason, God being the author of both).

Disputation, as it had been Aquinas's business, and before him Aristotle's, was Mert's; a Talmudic terrier if ever there was one. By the time he met Hutchins he was a Thomist, and a Thomist in the best of standing

he remained for twenty years, until (of course) he challenged every one of the Holy Doctor's five proofs of the existence of God (part 1, question 2, article 3, "Whether God Exists?"). His best of standing, while he maintained it, was confined to the circle of Catholic philosophers identified with the liberalization of the social views of the Church following Leo XIII's "labor" encyclical Rerum novarum at the turn of the century. In time Adler came to be known as the foremost American Thomist and—with Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson of France, who became his friends—one of the world's foremost exponents of the doctrine.

Until Adler—and, alas, Hutchins—Thomism in the 1940s had a serious constituency only in the more advanced Catholic schools. In the secular (and nominally Protestant) institutions, "neo-Thomist" and "neo-Thomism" came to be devil words, with Mert as the devil. The "alas, Hutchins" was inevitable, as was Beardsley Ruml's gag that "a Thomist is somebody who's in favor of Hutchins." Here was a Presbyterian president of a Baptist institution—nobody cared about that little discrepancy any more—promoting Catholicism among the bright Jewish boys and girls who crowded into one of the few great private schools that had set no quiet quota on undergraduate admissions.

No questions agitated more back-room (and front-room) frenzy during the Twenty Years' War at Chicago than whether Hutchins was Mortimer Adler's Mortimer Snerd. His enemies were enjoyably divided on the issue: Hutchins was either a fool or a rogue, have it your own way. His admirers had much the harder time of it: since he could not be a rogue, he must be a fool, unless (1) Adler and Aristotle and Aquinas were all misrepresented by the opposition or (2) Adler and Aristotle and Aquinas were right. That they were all misrepresented was hard to believe, what with Adler's lectures "demonstrating" the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. (His demonstrations, based on timeless reasoning from timeless "common sense" assumptions, or self-evident truths, validated only by common experience, fascinated those devotees of the theoretical, the bright students—a phenomenon all the more maddening to their academic, and nonacademic, elders, who associated demonstration with the laboratory.)

The second option, that Adler, Aristotle, and Aquinas were right, was not much more palatable. How could men be right who had lived before the dawn of empirical science, who (in Aristotle's case) accepted slavery and (in Aquinas's) monarchy and the inquisition of suspected heretics? How could a twentieth-century apologist for such men be right? Down the years, some of these friendly acquaintances of Hutchins came to know Adler well and to understand and respect him (and Aristotle and Aquinas).

A few came to know him still better and to like him immensely. (In good company outside the academic bullring he was delightful.) But very, very few of them could ever bring themselves to believe that, on balance—a balance that always included public relations—Adler's influence on Hutchins was anything but unfortunate.

It wasn't. One of the reasons it wasn't anything but unfortunate, was that Poor Bob had never had it so good as when he had to carry extra weight, like a fast jockey. Milton Mayer—that glib radical—was a millstone around his neck, but Mortimer Adler was a windmill. Mayer probably wrote his speeches for him, but Adler probably thought his thoughts for him . If it hadn't been for Adler, Hutchins would not have tried to wreck the higher learning and turn the university into a seminary. Didn't he admit that he hadn't read a book before he met Adler? Where but from Adler could he have got his retrogressive ideas; his preoccupation with the Great Books, so-called; his denigration of science and scientific method; his Greco-Christian patter about virtues and vices and a curriculum derived from the medieval trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic; his inflammatory metaphysics ; his "science of first principles"? True, he had been brought up in a Presbyterian minister's home—but, my God, he had been in the army and he had been at Yale, and he had run a law school that staffed the junior partners' offices on Wall Street. Where could he have picked up those dusty answers if not from Adler?

His friends and his enemies were all of them wrong. It was Adler all right who brought him to the Great Books (or rather, the Great Books to him). It was Adler all right who got him started on Aristotle and Aquinas. It was Adler who dug up the citations Hutchins wanted and deluged him with innumerable, interminable memoranda. The metaphysical scheme—and much of its vocabulary—was Adler's. But the educational scheme was Hutchins' before he knew Adler, and so was the educational philosophy. He had not articulated them in the terms he used after his life with Adler began, but he had articulated them in the curriculum he introduced at Yale, in the method of instruction he called for, and in his unrelenting effort (insofar as the law school could reach) to integrate the scholarly disciplines. Adler wasn't that much interested in educational structure. The "Hutchins Plan" wasn't Hutchins', but the Hutchins Plan certainly wasn't Adler's.

But it was easier for Hutchins' friends and for Hutchins' enemies to blame Adler than to blame Hutchins. Hutchins would not disclaim Adler. Why should he? On the theoretical level he was righter than he was wrong—and righter than his red-eyed critics; the twentieth century was the first to discard the thought of the Greeks (or the faith of the Chris-

tians), the first to cut itself off from its own roots. On the practical level Mert may have been wrong in his indifference to the personal and social agonies of his time, but not a bit wronger than the traditional (and still characteristic) scholars who buried themselves in parochial investigations far less significant than Adler's.

At least Adler was not likely to be accused of writing Hutchins' speeches; he wrote far too badly for that. His language was bare and turgid ("Dear Mortimer: Thanks for the statement about the Honors course. I shall translate it into English and have it inserted into the catalogue. Ever yours, Bob"). But his mind was an Aristotelian laser. As a public lecturer, raising those exotic questions of his—Is Man Different from the Animals? Does God Exist? Is the Soul Immortal?—he wowed the women's clubs and the temple forums; nobody in twentieth-century America except Adler thought that such questions (lifted, along with the answers, from Aristotle, Aquinas, and Plato, respectively) were questions anymore. His cockiness aroused the frenzy of the few who came to his lectures loaded for him—or who thought they were. Once, in the question period after a lecture, a woman asked him if he could have made an equally strong argument for the opposite position. "That," said Mert, "is the first sensible question of the evening. The answer is, Yes."

Adler had no interest whatever in what was going on around him. It wasn't that he was unworldly; far, far from it. He was unconcerned. Hutchins lived in the present, for all his real or affected affinity for the desiccate past and his vehemence against "presentism." Whatever else Hutchins was, he was a modern man, a practical man, an American man. He was up to his ears in the affairs of his secular time and place, and he dealt with them in secular style. Adler did not participate in community life at any level, on or off campus. As a Jew, a New Yorker, an intelligent man, and an educated man, he was a visceral liberal of sorts who would vote (if he bothered to vote) for, say, the New Deal. But his habitual impatience rose to outright intolerance of the social activism of his associates. He dismissed them as sentimentalists and emotionalists and disturbers of his peace.

He did not care who wrote his country's laws. He dealt not with the laws, but with law, and not with his country's laws, but with any country's law anywhere any time, and with what nobody else gave a hoot about: the nature of law. His world was abstract and his meat was abstraction, and abstraction was always and everywhere the same. Except for his refusal to be programmed, he was the first-born of the first generation of computers. If you could have got him to sit still while you pushed a few facts down him, you could have got an immediate printout with which there was no

arguing. He could, and did, deal with democracy in the abstract, capitalism in the abstract, war in the abstract, world government in the abstract, man in the abstract, and God (how else?) in the abstract—with no documentation at all from a world in which these doctrines were embedded in the cracking and crackling concrete of life.

Warm among friends, hot among adversaries, Mert was, in fact, the absent-hearted professor. With Americans passionately divided on the issue of U.S. "intervention" versus "isolation" prior to Pearl Harbor, Hutchins was one of the earliest and most sonorous anti-interventionists on the left. Adler was silent until he was pressed for his view—pressed by Hutchins-Adler watchers who were pretty sure in advance that they'd get just what they got: ADLER AGAINST HUTCHINS ON WAR. The statement did not reflect any unusual intellectual pretension or consideration; Adler was for war for the reasons that intelligent, educated New York Jews were for it, and the reasons were not unsentimental or unemotional. Having said his piece, he returned to thirteenth-century crises and did not, in the furious years that followed, say another or display any interest in discussing his further views (if he had any) with any of his associates (including Hutchins) who had taken the opposite position. He had no time for transitory matters.

This, then, was what Hutchins, for whom read Adler, and his dead classics came down to: the reimposition of medieval authoritarianism, absolutism, hair-splitting; medieval Catholicism . You had only to catch a glimpse on those Gothic walks, where the heirs of Galileo trod, of the little convoys of pale priests and fluttering nuns on their way to visit his and Hutchins' Great Books class, and the case was clear: Adler was a secret convert, "the worst kind." (He would not descend, of course, to deny the canard.) And Hutchins—Hutchins just sat there .

Mert's colleagues had no access to his charms. He did not so much as go through the formality of joining the faculty club. He lived and worked as far away from campus as he could—just off Lake Shore Drive—in a two-story apartment. His lifelong marketplace moonlighting, all of it legal and some of it respectable, included lecturing to women's clubs for a platform agency which took him out on the road for a month a year. It included consultantships to anybody or anything: for Bamberger's department store he developed the theory that electric toasters and bobby pins evolve like new biological species—an admirer there called him the Drygoods Darwin—and in Hollywood he prepared the annual whitewash of the movie industry that appeared under the name of the tame watchdog Will Hays. In 1927, when he went to see Hutchins, he was holding down two teaching jobs at Columbia and one at CCNY—besides lecturing at the

People's Institute of New York and teaching a Great Books course in a church basement. His income was eleven thousand dollars at a time when an endowed professorship paid its eminent occupant ten thousand.

He was fanatically fastidious. His working materials had to be of the most lavish order and always in order. Every book in his own library was classified and catalogued, and none was ever lent. His pipes were sent out to be cleaned, and he screamed when he saw me pull a dirty pipe-cleaner out of my jacket pocket. What made Sammy run made Mert dust the seat of a chair before he sat down.

As intellectually excited as he was intellectually exciting, frisky, frenetic, and forever a-bubble with notions and nostrums, dancing around, jumping up and down, hollering his head off, and swinging from the chandelier, Mert was a one-man infestation of the ivory tower, a bulldozer in the academic grove. He was lovable in a hundred ways and hatable, if you didn't love him, in a hundred and one, even if it was only for his being a Jew of the kind that reminded learned gentiles that there are worse things than a genteel anti-Semitism. But one of the ingredients of every one of the hundred and one ways in which he was hated was envy. Consciously or unconsciously, the pedants wished they had half his head, half his gusto, and half the aplomb that takes a man through stop signs while the traffic cop, staring after him, takes off his cap, scratches his head, and says, "Well, I am damned."

What they should have envied him was half his industry. Many men like their work, but Mert liked working . He maintained an iron schedule and was never diverted from it—except by work. He made notes while he read, he made notes while he shaved and while he ate, and he probably made notes while he slept. (I know that he made notes when he dreamed and recorded them when he awoke.) He made notes when he talked and on the rare occasions (except in debate) when he listened. Of course he blew up, and blew up his home, somewhere along the dangerous age that runs from nine to ninety, but he regrouped his one-man forces a year or so later; and in his seventies, and into his eighties, he maintained a schedule that would kill a mechanical rabbit. In the Twenty Years' War at the University of Chicago one Mortimer J. Adler—and there was only one—was worth a battalion of self-respecting professors.

This, then, was Mert, chock-a-block with St. Thomas and St. Anselm and St. Ambrose and St. Bonaventura, and cheek by jowl with his pale priests and fluttering nuns (whose very vestments drove the academic "Protestants" wild), with Hutchins for an imprimatur and the Great Books for an imprint. He had got into the great books by way of John Erskine at Columbia. Erskine established a general honors course at Columbia using

the discussion method of teaching the great books. (He never used that expression.) Among his students there, or later in the adult program at New York's People's Institute, were Adler, Clifton Fadiman (who became the New Yorker's book reviewer), Richard McKeon (who went on to translate Aristotle), and Scott Buchanan. As a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, Buchanan, a disciple of Amherst's Alexander Meiklejohn, met another Great Bookie, Stringfellow Barr, who came home to teach ancient history at the University of Virginia and edit the Virginia Quarterly .

This was the Adler coterie—they were all thirty or under—that found in Hutchins their own propensity for liberal education combined with the muscle and the pulpit which Chicago provided. Outside the academy Fadiman kept close contact with them, as did a phenomenal character named Arthur L.H. Rubin (who lived with the Adlers for several years on Chicago's Gold Coast), an all-sorts man of independent means who had served as union-management arbitrator for the New York clothing industry. In time many others were, and remained, marginally involved, such as Thornton Wilder, who had grown up with Hutchins, and Mark Van Doren of Columbia. But Adler, McKeon, Buchanan, and Barr were to become (and ever to remain) Hutchins' general staff in the crusade for the revival of the humanist tradition, "the great conversation."

12
The Blue Sky

By the time that Hutchins was invited to take the presidency of Chicago there was no surprise in his airy suggestion that Mortimer Adler come on along with him. And no surprise in Adler's acceptance. (Columbia's psychology department wouldn't hold Adler very long anyway—or try to.) The deluge of Adlerian memoranda ("I have a grand idea for you. It's a little wild, but has a real kick.") became a cascade of schemes to abolish courses, credits, grades, textbooks, lectures—and why not (this seriously) professors somehow? Older and wiser (if not smarter) at twenty-eight, seasoned by administration of a law school, Hutchins knew that it was not going to be like that—but hadn't they for two years now talked about how it might be like that if there was ever to be a real university?

Each of them, sizing up the other in New Haven, suspected that the other, like himself, got his exercise swimming upstream. Each suspected that the other would go places. Each suspected, after their first few meetings, that they would go together.

It was like Hutchins to say "Come on along," and like Adler to say, "And do what?" Hutchins thought they ought to teach the Great Books together; in that way he'd get to read them. Adler wanted to know where they ought to teach them. Hutchins thought they ought to teach them all over the campus. Adler wanted to know to whom. Hutchins thought to freshmen, who hadn't had a chance to be ruined by professors. Adler thought there'd be trouble. Hutchins was sure there would be.

The trouble they had in mind, and they certainly had trouble in mind, would begin when they started teaching. A new university president has more pressing, not to say more useful, things to do than teach—and teach freshmen , and teach the Great Books , and teach them with another Johnny-come-lately as his coinstructor. The trouble would, they supposed,

begin the first day they met their freshmen, when the president of the university opened the honors course by saying, "It will come as a surprise to you to learn on the highest authority in this educational institution that the purpose of an educational institution is education."

Hutchins and Adler understood each other, though they spoke different languages—or, more precisely, the same language in different tones of voice, Adler undeceptively shrill and insistent, Hutchins deceptively bland and sedate. The radically different styles of the reasoning man and the reasonable man would ever afterward astonish their students (and not only their students). Adler told them what dialectic was and reached for the blackboard; Hutchins tilted back in his chair, quizzed them dialectically, and now and again turned to his fellow votary of dialectics to thank him for his enlightening lecture. (The students giggled, and Adler, who wasn't foolish, looked foolish.) They were two radically different kinds of men. But they possessed one kind of mind, and were of one mind about education.

What neither of the two seemed to have realized when the tall one said to the short one, "Come on along," was that the trouble would begin when Mortimer J. Adler had to be appointed to the faculty of a great university. To the extent that Adler was unidentified when he came along, he was suspect. To the extent that he was identified, he was more suspect still. The psychologists at Columbia told their Chicago colleagues that Adler might be a philosopher, but they doubted it. The philosophers said that he might be a psychologist, but they doubted it. He was, all agreed, an ebullient young man; objectionably so.

The honeymoon that saw Hutchins get almost everything he wanted (or should have wanted) saw him, in the Adler case, get one furious, first-first-class beating. It wouldn't have been much of a beating for another, less truculent administrator. After all, it was a single appointment, and a junior appointment at that. But it was the most important appointment, the most important beating, and the most important association of his career.

When Adler came on along, early in 1930, Hutchins had not yet unleashed his assault on departmentalism. But there could have been no doubt around the campus that he would, if he meant to do anything at all about the higher learning. The department—any department—was the enemy. The enemy's general staff were the senior members of the department, and the senior members of the department were the great specialists. Adler wasn't great when Hutchins invited him to come along, or (at twenty-four) senior. He wasn't a specialist; he was a strident enemy of specialization. He was the original Professor of the Blue Sky.

But there was no Department of the Blue Sky, and Adler had to be

appointed to a department. Statutorily the president made all the appointments to the faculty—or, rather, forwarded them to the board of trustees, which made them. The way it went (and goes) was something else entirely. The board had all the nominal power, but nobody, including the board, thought that the board had any academic competence. In practice the department brought the appointment to the president (who had no competence in that or any field) and the president "recommended" the appointment to the board; the president was the messenger boy.

A messenger boy with a message of his own is an autocrat begging for a broken head. Hutchins went begging for twenty years. He should have "known better." He didn't, and he never would. In the winter of 1943—he'd been president for thirteen years—Igor Stravinsky and Jacques Maritain came to Chicago at the same time, to lecture for the Committee on Social Thought, an interdepartmental beachhead which Hutchins had established with private funds. The three had lunch with economist John U. Nef, a solid Hutchins man, who presided over the committee. As they rose from lunch, Hutchins invited both visitors to join the faculty of the University of Chicago. Stravinsky was unable to consider the invitation, but Maritain was interested. The Frenchman was the leading living Thomist and one of the world's leading living philosophers. A convert to Catholicism, he had broken with the church leadership by supporting the Spanish Loyalists in 1936, and now, with France occupied by the Nazis, he was stranded in America.

Nef, in his memoirs, tells us that three times in the next few years Hutchins tried to get Maritain appointed in the philosophy department. The department blocked the appointment each time—even when Hutchins offered to put Maritain on the committee's private payroll. There are two accounts, both of them doubtless correct, of what happened. In Nef's, Hutchins sent "emissaries" (probably Nef) to the department chairman, who said, "Maritain is not a good philosopher." Emissaries: "Is there a good philosopher in the Department?" Chairman: "No—but we know what a good philosopher is."^[1] The other account has Hutchins pressing one of the department's logical positivists (whose own appointment Hutchins had urged) with the need to balance the dominant pragmatism of the department. Logical positivist: "Maritain is a propagandist." Hutchins: "You're all propagandists."

The appointment was never made. Maritain continued to lecture a few days a year in the committee as a visiting professor—the department's acquiescence wasn't required for such status—until 1958. He finally accepted a permanent post in another (and better) philosophy department—Princeton's. Jacques Maritain was no young Johnny-come-lately

like the Mortimer Adler of 1930; he was, in 1943, and earlier, a man of the first eminence in European scholarship.

When, on the other hand, Hutchins himself presumed to stand pat against a departmental recommendation, the few friends he had closed ranks against his presumption. The history department chairman, William E. Dodd—later Roosevelt's heroic ambassador to Berlin—had been one of the trustee-faculty committee that had chosen Hutchins as president. On one occasion in the early 1930s, he came in to inform the president that the department wanted to have a certain man appointed in ancient history. "It's my impression," said Hutchins, "that he isn't very good." "He's one of the most respected men in his field," said Dodd. "I know that," said Hutchins, "but I don't respect him. But I'm willing to be converted. Let me talk to him." The candidate came to Chicago and, to his surprise, found himself discussing Roman history with the president, who wasn't an historian. After he left, Hutchins said to Dodd, "I'm sorry, but I think he's no good. He's worse than I thought he was before I met him. If the department insists, I'll forward its recommendation to the board with the strongest possible objection attached to it."^[2] The department withdrew its recommendation, and the relations between the heroic chairman and the stand-pat president were never again quite the same; very far from it. The two had liked each other, the old historical revisionist (of the Civil War) who admired President Woodrow Wilson of Princeton and the young revisionist of education who studied Wilson's futile attempts to do something sensible about the American university. Dodd had introduced Carl Sandburg to Hutchins, and these two, too, had taken a shine to one another. Dodd had been far from unhappy when Hutchins invited Sand-burg to lecture at the university—in the university, but not in the history department. For Dodd was a stern departmentalist, a product of the de-partmentalist supremacy at Leipzig. In 1936 he was called home from the U.S. embassy in Berlin for critical consultation on the Nazi threat, and came back to Chicago to meet with his colleagues and their graduate students. "From what they say," he wrote in his diary, "the University's merging of history into the social science as a minor subject is most discouraging. They lament the failure of the University to give American history in a large comprehensive way, and add that they can not get sufficient knowledge except upon their own initiative and with library work. This is Hutchins' system. I have long feared his scheme of limiting departments and avoiding departmental selection of professors would greatly injure this institution. Nothing is more important than eminent professors developing their subjects in their own way, first being sure the professors are worthy of appointment. I am distressed at the University of Chicago.

Sometimes I wish I might again bring pressure to bear here."^[3] Two years later, when Hitler found him persona non grata in Berlin, he came back to the university and did bring all the pressure to bear that he could.

The complication in the Adler case was that Adler seemed not to conform to any acceptable department type. He belonged (if at all) in the Blue Sky, and all the nonphilosophers in all the nonphilosophy departments always agree that the repository of the Blue Sky is the philosophy department. And that was where the trouble was going to be.

A philosophy department of ten men would like as not have ten mutually unintelligible schools in it. The exception would be the department headed by a man who, in the patient, persistent exercise of seniority had weeded out every school but his own and weeded in his acolytes—an understandable proclivity. The two most notable such cases were Chicago and Columbia. In both institutions the philosophy departments were implacably Deweyite—and, since John Dewey was preeminently a philosopher of education, so were Chicago's School of Education and Columbia's Teachers' College.

Dewey was no more a philosopher than Adler was, or Goethe, or Jefferson, or Emerson, or Russell. Adler was (or was to become) a commentator on systematic philosophy and an elaborator of it. Dewey was a learned critic of it; a highly original thinker (as neither Adler nor Hutchins was) in the tradition of the educational reformers of early twentieth-century Germany. To call him (still less Adler, least of all Hutchins) a philosopher was only a commonplace courtesy; even at the painstaking hands of brilliant disciples, "Deweyism" defied systematization. What John Dewey was was a psychologist of learning who believed that the principles of growth—the central term of his doctrine—had been discovered by modern psychology in its experimental form. "Change," "process," "experience" were all. There was no real dichotomy between science and philosophy except as to subject matter, no nonscientific method of obtaining knowledge, no immutable knowledge, no immutability, no fixed natural or moral (much less divine) law, no species aeterna . "Everything," said Socrates of the Deweys of his time, "is a charming flux." The contemporary child learned in and from contemporary society: "The school is not a preparation for life," said Dewey. "It is life itself." It is the life the child is living in the place that he lives that interests him, not the life of a past he didn't know and couldn't relate to himself. Education had to be child-centered, interest-centered, activity-centered. John Dewey was the nearest thing to a philosopher that a nonphilosophical America had produced in the twentieth century. When Hutchins began his career, Dewey was the most influential educator of his time.

To the extent that Dewey was a philosopher, he was above all else a philosopher of science as (he said) "the organ of general social progress." He saw the hope of the world in the refinement of the arts of precise measurement, controlled experimentation, and the conscientious collection and confrontation of the facts. He saw the social sciences coming into their own as true sciences, producing findings as irresistible in their application to human life and human society as the mathematician's are to engineering. It went without saying—though he said it—that he was irreligious, incapable (like the consecrated scientist) of recognizing that the validity of his own method, his own materials, his own objectives rested squarely on faith in those indemonstrable assumptions that Hutchins and Adler (like Aristotle before them) insisted on calling first principles or, as one ardent Dewey disciple called them, "the ultimate trivialities."

In the early 1920s, as the most eminent of the Columbia faculty Dewey characteristically attended the meetings of the student philosophy club, and at one meeting one of his students was delivering a paper on philosophy and religion. Professor Dewey's face warmed as the intense, insistent young man warmed to this theme, finally quoting a passage from Dewey himself and saying, "There is certainly nothing of the love of God in this utterance." Dewey blew up. He got to his feet, said "Nobody is going to tell me how to love God," and walked out.^[4]

The outrageous young man, Mortimer J. Adler by name, then began harassing the outraged sage with very long letters arguing that later Dewey lectures contradicted earlier Dewey lectures. Dewey, generous, tolerant, responsive, read the letters aloud in class for a while, and then (as Adler tells it) summoned this jump-up member of the rising generation to his office and suggested that he lay off; which, of course, Adler didn't. Picture the preposterous confrontation: the American philosopher, in his towering midsixties, with a Praetorian guard of loving disciples and a swirl of reverent students at his hem—and an unloving, irreverent upstart in his early twenties tearing into him with that merciless kind of picayune analysis that Dewey considered the root of sterile scholarship. It was precisely that kind of analysis, demanding the definition of terms and then the definition of the terms used in the definition, that "Deweyism" was incapable of standing up to.

Adler was a one-man category. That he should turn up at Chicago—and with Hutchins as what Dewey must have regarded as his mouth-piece—added a peculiarly sensitive injury to the insult. For Chicago (like Columbia) was Dewey country.

To be a non-Deweyite at Chicago was one thing; to be an anti-Deweyite an unthinkable another, above all in the philosophy department, whose

two senior members, George Herbert Mead and James Hayden Tufts, both of them friends and contemporaries of the master, rotated the departmental chairmanship between them. Mead had great distinction as a pragmatist. (Tufts was memorable for a jaw that made Don Quixote look chinless.) Their junior faculty was predominantly Deweyite, and Chicago at the apex of Deweyism was generally regarded as one of the country's strongpoints in philosophy. That it was so regarded was itself a commentary on the condition of the discipline in America. The department was weak in every area except pragmatism, and spectacularly weak in the Greek and scholastic traditions, which underlay all of Western thought prior to the work of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James at the end of the nineteenth century—and the thinking of the two great pragmatists (unlike that of their followers) by no means represented a clean break with ancient and medieval Europe.

Hutchins knew that this was the kind of philosophy department he was going to have. What he didn't know was that he was not going to have it. The record of the disaster has to be pieced together from a few letters, a few memoranda, and a few fading recollections. On June 27, 1929, four months before he was even inaugurated, he got a letter from Adler informing him that Scott Buchanan and Richard McKeon had both refused the philosophy chairmanship at Cornell because they preferred to join Hutchins at Chicago; it is clear that Hutchins was (or thought he was) handing out jobs like a politician between election day and inauguration day. He was either magnificently presumptuous or magnificently innocent, and his experience at Yale militates against his having been innocent.

So far as any record indicates, he had not at this point discussed any of these men with the philosophy department. It didn't take anything more than a philosophical tyro to recognize that the department was incestuous. To legitimate it meant to strengthen the classic areas. Adler already had some small status as a medievalist. Buchanan and McKeon were "Greeks."

Hutchins' lifelong fight for general education was directed against the provincialism of what he called the uneducated specialist. He could have traded all his multifarious crusades for this one—and just possibly have been more effective in the end than he was. His uneducated specialist was Artistotle's natural slave, born and bred to serve a purpose that was not his own. He was, still is, and always will be, in and out of education, something much more pernicious than the popular hyperbole suggests—the man who knows more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing at all.

The elective system encouraged ever more premature specialization in

collegiate, even in subcollegiate, education. For young men and women bent on an academic career, the earlier a student got started up the ladder the better—and one ladder rather than just any. It meant the narrowing of perspective not to one field but to one area in that field, and to one school (that is, one man) in that area. And in 1930 Chicago's "Deweyite" philosophy department was a characteristic case in point. Adler was previsioned at Chicago—letters going back and forth between the Midway and Morningside Heights—as a Thomist (or, by way of further denigration, if that should be possible, a neo-Thomist). That took care of Adler, however roundly he was criticized in bona fide Thomistic circles as a dilettante and however headily he might take issue with the angelic holy doctor of the Church on points of the highest order (including the cornerstone "five proofs" of God's existence).

That noble jurist, Felix Frankfurter, for all his European training, repeatedly, and heavy handedly, twitted Hutchins about his "Tomism," his "Tomist institution," and his "Tomist belief in universals." Hutchins just as repeatedly (and with no success whatever) tried to convince Frankfurter that it took more than teaching St. Thomas to make a man a Thomist, just as it took more than delivering milk to make a man a cow. On one playful occasion, while Frankfurter was still at Harvard, Hutchins wrote him, "I want very much to have you go on the Supreme Court. For that reason I should take the time to explain to you the difference between the Platonic and Thomistic views of universals. I can not have one of my friends exhibiting his ignorance in the law courts. Unfortunately, I am so occupied just now in trying to make my students understand this point that I can not undertake your education in addition. I shall have to content myself with pointing out that 'Thomist' is spelled with an 'h'."^[5]

The western end of the Midway-Morningside Heights correspondence did not elicit anything much about Buchanan apart from the fact that, like Adler, he was suspiciously involved in the great books and had been teaching them evenings to unsuspecting immigrants at Everett Dean Martin's People's Institute in New York. His specialty seemed to be logic, but logic of the fossilized, (i.e., prepositivist) sort. McKeon, like the other members of the Hutchins consortium, was under thirty; but he had already published on Aristotle. (His edition of Aristotle's basic works appeared a decade later and remains a scholarly landmark.) Thirty-five years later he recalled his amazement at being classed as an "Aristotelian": "In the first place, my interpretation of Aristotle does not agree with what is commonly held, on the authority of recent scholars, to be Aristotelian doctrines and errors. I have never troubled to point out these differences because

the name 'Aristotelian' is used not to describe a person or a position but to be unkind, and if I was to be charged with guilt by association, I could not do better than be associated with 'the Master of Them That Know.'"^[6]

It was six wild and wooly months before Hutchins (now installed as president) replied to Adler's June 1929 letter in which it was clear that Adler, Buchanan, and McKeon were to come to Chicago. On December 4, Hutchins informed Adler that Buchanan would teach logic, McKeon medieval philosophy, and Adler "the geometrics of the soul," but it would be a year before the Holy Trinity (as Hutchins put it) would be operative, the stock market (and with it the university's budget) having collapsed between Dear Mortimer's letter and Dear Bob's reply. The appointments of Buchanan and McKeon would have to wait until 1931; but Adler was to come on as soon as he could for the academic year 1930-31.

Buchanan was an associate professor at Virginia when Hutchins told him—just like that—to "come along." He went to the president to tell him of the offer, and the president, in an effort to keep him, went immediately to the board and got Buchanan a promotion to full professor. A few weeks later Buchanan, hearing from Hutchins (just like that, again) that there was no money for the Chicago appointment that year, had to tell the president that he wanted to stay. The president, of course, who had no previous suspicion of Buchanan's apparent duplicity, now had no choice but to conclude that the Chicago invitation had been a fake on Buchanan's part (with or without the connivance of Hutchins), designed to obtain the Virginia promotion.

Forty years afterward Dr. Irene Tufts Mead, daughter of Professor Tufts and daughter-in-law of Professor Mead, was sure that Hutchins had simply informed the department of 1930 that Adler and McKeon were to join it (she did not recall Buchanan's having been involved); and there was no one, after forty years, to gainsay her recollection. Mead and Tufts, she said, were "incensed" and the whole department "felt depreciated."^[7]

Shortly after confirming his invitation to Adler, Hutchins asked the department to have lunch with him and Adler in a private dining room at the faculty's Quadrangle Club. Adler showed up in amiable (if amiably contemptuous) form, and Hutchins amiably introduced him around the table.

The weather, the depression, and the low quality of the lunch having been taken care of, the philosophers turned, as usual, not to philosophy, but to courses. The department was giving an introductory course "covering" the field. When Adler asked what field, he was told "Philosophy." His ears and his hair went up, his jaw began jutting: one course covering philosophy. Whether it was Adler or Hutchins who asked the inevitable question is unrecorded, but instantly asked it was by one or the other of them:

What were the students reading for the course? Nor is the identity of the answerer known, but answered the question was: Will Durant's Story of Philosophy .

Silence; Hutchins drumming inaudibly on the table, Adler swelling as he reddened. He always seemed to stammer when he was enraged, and he stammered: "But—but—but that's a very bad book." He was right, of course, and somebody around the table besides him and Hutchins must have known he was right; maybe everybody. Durant was prefabricated pop, directed at the mass market. It "explained" philosophy—all philosophy—to people who wanted (or thought they wanted) all philosophy explained to them. Philosophy—the Queen of the Sciences. A university . And not just a university, but Chicago . Adler would have been a little (but only a little) less horrified if the students had been given a standard textbook instead of the original writings of the philosophers themselves. But Durant—.

After Adler finished his outraged stammer there may be supposed to have been an outraged silence on the part of the entire party of the second part. And then the philosophy hit the fan. One thing led—as it would, logic being a province of philosophy—to another. The man who challenged Dewey, and then (as Dewey himself would have done) challenged Durant, was denounced as an Aristotelian . The luncheon did not end on the ostensibly amiable note on which it began. What Hutchins must have suspected, he now knew, and so did Adler. There would be a finish fight and it would determine the course, perhaps of Adler's career, certainly of Hutchins'.

To lose his first fight would be a premonitory scandal; if he could not do anything with the philosophy department, what would he be able to do with the departments in which he himself could not pretend to any competence whatever? He was, after all, a lawyer; he knew that his power under the university's statutes was the power of persuasion—nothing more. If he was ever going to get anything done, he had to win this one. If he lost it, he might as well resign—or resign himself to being a messenger boy. He had been in office six months.

If Hutchins was arrogant and grim, Adler was arrogant and manic. He wouldn't fight the stupid bastards—them and their Durant—and wouldn't take the job if they offered it to him. Hutchins corrected him: he wouldn't have to fight, but he would have to take the job. And it would be offered to him. Hutchins knew he could pull it off.

He thought he knew.

He went to the department with a proposal. An outside committee of philosophers would be invited to evaluate the department—member by

member—to determine its qualifications vis-à-vis Adler's. The proposal did not even get as far as the method by which the committee would be selected—an issue on which no agreement would be likely. The department spurned the proposal and exploded. Tufts, who had reached the retirement age but could have been invited to stay on a year-to-year basis, retired. Mead, with an offer from Columbia, decided to resign. (He died the same year.) Two of the three younger members of the department quit and got jobs at other schools. The department was not merely wrecked; it as good as disappeared.

Hutchins was beaten. Badly beaten. He knew better than to go back to what was left of the department and push the appointment, and Adler, still sure that he'd be coming to Chicago anyway, didn't want him to try. The law school was more amenable. It was a solid professional drill-ground of the kind Hutchins had found (but hadn't left behind him) at Yale. It prepared good students for good bar examinations and good law offices, and its faculty, including the senior members, had no special adherence to doctrine. Chicago's recognized Yale's as a law school of its own rank and the ex-dean of Yale as a member of its own fraternity and an able administrator. There was no objection—not at the time, at least—when Hutchins recommended Adler's appointment, not as associate professor of philosophy, but as associate professor of law.^[8]

For twenty years thereafter Adler, when he wasn't teaching the Great Books honors course with Hutchins, came hurtling across town (and through all the stop lights) to the law school to teach, naturally, The Philosophy of Law, The Nature of Law, Law and the Nature of Man—in one word, philosophy. With no more than a minor assist from Adler, Hutchins transformed Chicago's Law School; its emphasis shifted from the training of lawyers to the education of jurists, much as the first universities educated theologians and left the preparation of preachers to the seminaries. Hutchins (like Adler) was a Natural Law man, and the curriculum, as it was generalized, was strengthened in that area. But the subsequent appointments testified to Hutchins' insistence that what he wanted was not to "pack" the faculty but to make it more representative of conflicting viewpoints than faculties in the nature of things tended to be.

Philosophers—that is, professors of philosophy—across the country joined Dewey in deploring the Hutchins-Adler attentat. A Harvard man was reported (by Tufts) to have said that the sacrifice of a philosophy department was a high price to pay for the education of a president. But there was no report of the matter in the learned, much less in the unlearned, press; and no open outcry on the Chicago campus or anywhere else. The affaire was Hutchins' sorriest hour. It could have been used—

and, had it occurred a few years later, would have been—as a bomb under him. But this was the beginning of his tenure. The surviving memoranda—even those written by members of the philosophy department—uniformly suggest that the reasons for not making the issue public were on the whole lofty. The least lofty of the sentiments: nobody in one of the world's scientific centers cared what happened to the philosophy department or the law school. If there is one thing that is supposed to do a university less good than trouble, it is the disclosure of trouble. Hutchins was new and (as the then chairman of the board of trustees said several years later) didn't know the ropes. He had made a power grab and had failed, and he wouldn't be likely to try it again—a view that discloses a charming combination of naiveté and optimism. Perhaps he had some sort of right to have his man at hand; and, after all, Adler was an academic and did have rank at Columbia.

Of course Hutchins wanted to "pack" the faculty, just as Roosevelt wanted to "pack" the Court—but not quite. The political reformer saw no way to break into the classic circle of self-perpetuation short of breaking the circle; so too the educational reformer. But the political reformer wanted his own programs supported. The educational reformer wanted to introduce diversification into a stultified and stultifying system. In so far as Hutchins' own views were unrepresented—as they were in the philosophy department, and not only there—he would appear to be trying to do what the political reformer tries to do. But the record pretty well sustains Hutchins' insistence that what he wanted was a broad representation regardless of his own persuasion. There were only four "Hutchins men" among the more than five hundred appointments during the first ten years of his presidency; and of those four—Adler, McKeon, Buchanan, and Barr—only two, Adler and McKeon, remained, and only one, McKeon (who made it into a reconstructed philosophy department in 1934 and subsequently became dean of the humanities division), was appointed as a full professor. Of the eleven holders of distinguished-service professorships elevated to that Olympus during Hutchins' first decade, nine were scientists, one an educationalist opposed to Hutchins, and one, McKeon, a "Hutchins man." When Ralph Waldo Tyler of Ohio State was offered the chairmanship of Chicago's Board of Examinations—he later became dean of the social sciences division—he asked Hutchins, "Are you sure I'm the man you're looking for? I'm what they call a Progressive Educator and you're what they call something else altogether," and Hutchins said, "I know what you are, and I know what I am, and I want you here."

But the memory of the Adler debacle died a long, hard death; indeed, it never died. It was maintained by the recognition on the part of friends and

enemies alike that Hutchins did want to exercise power the statutes didn't give him in order to get men he respected into the institution—and men he respected were likely, given the prevailing imbalance, to be men of his own views. He was a lawyer, given, like some lawyers, to legality. For twenty years he tried to get the statutes changed to give him the kind of power a parliamentary ministry has, subject to dismissal on a vote of no confidence—or, alternatively, to strip the office he held of all power and retain the president as merely the chairman, or presiding officer, of the faculty. He never succeeded.

But neither did he fail completely; such men seldom do. Within a year of the Adler appointment the separate college faculty had been established, and within a year of that victory the faculty senate abrogated the requirement that all members of the college faculty be members of departmental faculties in the four upper divisions of the university. The dean of the college was empowered to recommend to the president appointments to the college faculty without departmental status. It was a Chicago first and a Hutchins triumph. Now, by virtue of his power to appoint deans—a power the faculty could override only by open rebellion—he could in effect appoint professors in the college. In the divisions he was careful to appoint deans of unexceptionable credentials, as witness Tyler in the social sciences. His appointment of his friend Beardsley Ruml, Tyler's predecessor, raised eyebrows among the natural scientists; but they did not much more care what happened in the social sciences division than they cared what happened in the philosophy department or the law school. Among the social scientists there was some objection to the lusty activist—it was "B" Ruml who later invented the pay-as-you-go system of withholding income taxes—but here Hutchins had his way on the assumption that Ruml would soon move on; and he did, after a couple of years: to the board chairmanship of Macy's. (Hutchins, who enjoyed his company and his brashness, wistfully announced that Ruml had leaped from the ivory tower into the bargain basement; Mrs. Hutchins topped that one by observing that "B" had exchanged ideas for notions.)

All that the reformer had to do now, with his separate college faculty, was to be patient and live long enough, and he would get the college he wanted. He despised patience as a high-grade way of doing nothing. He would, however, live a very long time. Long enough to realize that he would never get the college he wanted.

13
The End of Everything

Hutchins was chosen president of the University of Chicago because, he said, "it was 1929." It was, more precisely, the spring of 1929, and everybody agreed that America was poised for takeoff into the wild blue-chip yonder. President Coolidge announced ex cathedra that prosperity was permanent—a prosperity built upon the rock of the participatory democracy in which four million common capitalists were buying stock on margin. What was wanted that spring, was a clean-cut, energetic young man who would go downtown and get the money.

He was inaugurated in the fall, on the third Wednesday following Black Thursday. In the intervening three weeks between that Thursday in October and that Wednesday in November there had occurred the End of Everything—or, more exactly, the Beginning of the End. It would go on, and on, and on for another ten years.

Not excepting the company towns like Detroit, Chicago was struck harder and faster by the stock market crash than any other center. Two local factors were devastating. One of them was Samuel Insull, a real tiger, but a paper titan. Insull's Middle West Utilities was the 1920s antecedent of the go-go conglomerate of forty years later. Nothing had ever been bought so widely or hit such day-by-day highs—and then day-by-day lows, pulling the city, rich and poor, up, and then down, with it. The other devastating factor was real estate. Like Florida and southern California, Chicago, with its unbounded expanse outside the loop of the downtown "L," was empty-lot-crazy. (In time the downtown banks and department stores went to the wall, too.) Real estate speculation (especially in second mortgages) was almost as pervasive as Insull stock. The Michigan Avenue skyline was dominated by the mortgage banking house tower of S. W. Strauss and Company and its electric sign, "Never a Loss to Any Inves-

tor in 99 years." (In the course of the 100th year all the investors lost everything.)

Chicago money was new and adventurous, but for those very reasons sensitive. It had no cushion like eastern money's, nothing to fall back on when margins were called, no ancient holding deep down in the sock. There were twenty-five thousand suicides in the United States in 1930, and Chicago's led all the rest. An additional twenty-five thousand deaths that year were pronounced "accidental." Two-thirds of the suicides were incontestably assignable to "financial difficulties"; suicide increased 10 percent among blue-collar and 20 percent among white-collar policy holders—apart from the "accidental" deaths, which were predominantly white collar. Within two years after Black Thursday the life insurance companies had paid out some three hundred million dollars on suicides.

The university president who went downtown to get the money might or might not find the prospect in, or in business, or in being. Within the course of three months three Chicagoans on Hutchins' "A" list got off the list the hard way. One was a banker, one a merchant, and one a financier who dabbled in science. The banker plunged from a window seat in his seventh-floor apartment, the merchant from a ninth-floor bathroom. The financier plunged from the roof of a ten-story garage he owned.

A sorry state for a privately endowed university in a city which never did know what it needed a university for. Benefactions plunged faster than bankers, merchants, and financiers. Half of the Chicago alumni were school teachers, and half the country's school teachers were out of work, or not getting paid, or getting paid late, or getting paid in script. Teachers and their supporters set up a cry for federal aid; traditionalists said that federal aid would mean federal control. Hutchins called for federal aid to save the nation's public schools. He took to the public prints to press the doctrine that federal aid did not necessarily mean federal control. It did not mean government control in England; why need it do so here? The public schools had to be saved to save democracy. But he repudiated such aid for private schools.

As Chicagoans, the university's trustees were not disposed to be fiscally conservative; as trustees, they were. The diversified portfolio's rock-bottom return was a modest, unsinkable 4.3 percent. But the rock bottom dropped out. They discovered to their horror that, like all trustees, they had not been conserving the institution's assets but gambling with them, speculating where they thought they had been investing. As the panic proceeded into 1930, 1931, 1932, money, any kind of money, from any source and for any purpose, dried up.

Hutchins had come to Chicago guilty of the worst offense in the

businessman's lexicon: he had never had to meet a payroll. But he was innocent of the businessman's characteristic faith: he believed that there were more important things than making money, keeping money, or even spending money; things that had to be done no matter what.

The trustees knew better than to suppose that he could operate a quarter-billion-dollar corporation. These ivory-tower types knew how to expand, but they did not know how to retrench. If the faculty had to keep him in line on education, the board had to keep him in line on money—or try. (They never succeeded; in his twenty years at Chicago, including the Depression decade, he never ran a deficit of less than a million dollars.) He had a few real supporters, among them the most public-spirited man in town, Julius Rosenwald of Sears Roebuck and Company. Rosenwald was the man he could go to for the anonymous ten (or hundred) thousand to match a gift or repair the plumbing or the scholarship fund. It was Rosen-wald who provided him with a general rule of administration which he had never heard put that way before: when you're stuck with a lemon, make lemonade out of it. The year 1930 was the juiciest lemon a university (or any other) president could be stuck with.

It is doubtful that Hutchins was familiar with J.M. Keynes's two-volume Treatise on Money , published the year the money ran out: 1930. Keynes, whose economics was crudely characterized as "spending the country rich," was another who had never had to meet a payroll. (Franklin Roosevelt was another.)

By the time Hutchins had framed his institutional economics, in, of all things, a speech to the YMCA in 1933—as an alumnus who had worked for the "Y" on a summer holiday in Cleveland—he was a rabid Keynesian in practice. To the YMCA the president of the University of Chicago spoke as follows:

"If we can determine analytically the function of the YMCA, subsidiary problems will settle themselves; we can test the performance of the organization and suggest its future. And in the first place, I should observe that the Young Men's Christian Association is not a business. It is not an investment trust or a bank or a hotel company. Its investments, its property, its hotels can be justified only as assisting it to carry out its main function—whatever that may prove to be. Consequently, emphasis on the business aspects of the organization is a false emphasis. Laymen, and particularly those who become members of boards of trustees, quite naturally think in terms of the tangible assets of the organization. It is not surprising that sometimes they seem to regard these things and the preservation of these things as the sole object of the institution. It is the perpetual task of professional leadership to direct the mind of the public and

of boards of trustees to the real function for which such institutions were established. This problem is particularly serious now [since the crash of '29]. Professional leadership must demonstrate to lay boards that what is 'sound' finance in business may not be sound in philanthropic activities.

". . . The temptation is strong to think only of the property, not of the purposes it was accumulated to serve. . . . The YMCA should stop worrying about its budget and think about its program. If the program is a good one, support for it will be forthcoming. If the program is bad or non-existent, the properties are useless anyway. . . . A professional leader who is compelled to think first about money and second about professional ideals is not likely to make a strong fight for those ideals when they come in conflict with vested interests. Particularly is this true if he may be removed for expressions or activities which may run counter to the views of the ruling class."^[1]

For "YMCA" read University of Chicago. For "professional leadership" read Hutchins. For "boards of trustees" read the board of trustees of the university. For "the ruling class" read the benefactors and potential benefactors of the university.

As Chicago's productive endowment became daily less productive and new money daily more improbable to come by, trustee institutions were peculiarly affected. The Chicago trustees knew nothing about the enterprise they held in trust. Some of them were moderately well educated, or rather, schooled. Some of them were (among other things) unschooled, like the industrialist who, attacking the faculty for permitting Earl Browder to speak on campus, said: "I know the faculty of the University of Chicago. They are not strong and virulent men." Some trustees were unintelligent. Hutchins reported one conversation to his old friend Raymond Fosdick of the Rockefeller Foundation: "A trustee of the University of Chicago said to me 'There is no use in worrying about the intellects of these young people. God gave them their intellect and there is nothing you can do about them. All you can do is to have them meet other nice young people under auspices of nice older people and give them a good time.' I said 'What's the difference between running a university and running a country club?' He said, 'None.'" Some of them were intelligent but uninformed. A few of them were intelligent, informed, and enlightened. And a few of them were unintelligent, uninformed, and benighted.

The vice-chairman of the board who told Hutchins that Professor Paul Douglas, the liberal economist (and later U.S. senator), should be "lined up and shot," and the head of the Gas Company—an Insull errand boy—

resigned from the board when Hutchins declined to fire Douglas and the board declined to fire Hutchins for his disinclination to fire Douglas.

Then there was Sewell Avery of Montgomery Ward and Company, immortalized by being carried out of his office by U.S. marshals when he refused to negotiate with his employees under the National Labor Relations Act. (As late as 1948 Avery, back in his office, threatened to have the same Professor Douglas arrested if Douglas, in his successful campaign for the U.S. Senate, appeared in the neighborhood of the mail order plant.)

Hutchins pondered Julius Rosenwald's advice to convert the lemon into lemonade. The question was how. "My education as an administrator," he remembered afterward, "began in 1931 when I opened Aristotle's Ethics for the first time and read, 'In practical matters the end is the first principle.' I was shocked to realize that in the ten years I had been in universities I had never seriously asked myself what they were for. I had taken them for granted, had assumed that the aims they proclaimed were valid, and had attempted to administer them in terms of those aims. About the only idea I had of the University of Chicago when I went there was that it was great. The Depression seemed to postpone any immediate hope of making it greater in ways that I understood: I could not expect to make it richer; it was more likely that I would take it into bankruptcy. What was a great university, anyway?"^[2]

The only defensible role for the university—a role that no other institution would or could fulfill—was that of a center of independent thought and criticism. If the university abandoned its distinctive function and rolled along with the vicissitudes of its time and place, it had no claim on public tolerance, much less public support. But to resist the pressures, maintain the independence of the institution, and reconstruct it the better to serve its distinguishing role, seemed to be an unlikely undertaking in the best of seasons.

And these were the worst of seasons. But they provided an occasion that the best did not: "We were able to do things on financial grounds that would have been regarded as impossible in prosperous times.

"If you encounter a depression of the severity of the one we encountered, and that lasts as long as that one, you've got to do one of two things. You've either got to say that you'll cut the whole thing percentage-wise across the board, cut 20% if your income goes off 20%, or you've got to say, 'Now we're up against it. Now we have to ask ourselves what things we value and what things we don't, what things we value more and what things we value less.' This required us, whether we wanted to or not, to think about the kind of institution we had on our hands.

"We took the second course. We said, for example, 'We're not going to cut faculty salaries unless we absolutely have to'—a decision that required the prior decision that faculty salaries are more important than cleaning up the gymnasium or mowing the lawns. Once the University was embarked on this line, the Depression required it to define itself, reorient itself, reorganize itself, to think about everything once more, to try to act intelligently in the light of its resources. If we had taken the other line and cut everything across the board, we could have gone through the Depression just as thoughtlessly as we went through periods of prosperity. I don't recommend Depression, but it would be a good thing to try to establish its moral equivalent, so that a university would have to act as if there were one, or as if there were going to be one, all the time."^[3]

It was the counterpart of Thomas Jefferson's recommendation of periodic revolution—or Hutchins' recommendation (to Westbrook Pegler) that universities ought to be torn down every generation and established all over again.

His genius lay in the application of the first principle to the vicissitudes of the academic hour. If there was no money to be got by doing the right thing or the wrong thing, a man might just as well try to do the right thing and pursue the policy of incantative financing. The trustees would have to be persuaded that he was fiscally sound, or at least that he was not fiscally berserk. Here the Depression was a godsend. Many of the conservative rich, having discovered that they had not been conservative and were no longer rich, were open (as they would not have been six months before) to suggestion. Under the now prevailing conditions—conditions which prevailed ever more painfully as the 1930s proceeded—they were disposed to release fiduciary control to the administrator and see if he could do anything. They saw that he could.

As the "Hutchins Plan" was implemented in 1931 and 1932, three hundred courses were dropped from the curriculum, and nobody missed them. It was clear to the faculty that the transcendent problem was survival—the university's and their own. There were no jobs to be had. Whoever was dissatisfied with being told that he would no longer be teaching his favorite course, knew that he was not as dissatisfied as he would be on the bread-line. Young men and women could be got for coffee and buns, and Hutchins scoured the countryside for them; and the age level of the faculty dropped perceptibly while, by virtue of that same fact, Hutchins' strength in the faculty rose. The plan, which boasted of the small tutorial sections it introduced, did not make any public noise about the concomitant introduction of lecture sessions in which as many as six hundred of the one thousand freshmen were herded into an auditorium to listen to a great man

tell them all about it. The big lecture sessions were not only concomitant, they were compensatory, financing the tutorial program with no increase in staff. Not a peep out of the faculty old boys who might have complained (but didn't, because most of them preferred lecturing anyway) that the lecture was the very antithesis of what Hutchins said he wanted. Not a peep—naturally—out of the trustees. The students, always more serious at Chicago than they were at most places, had become still more serious as the Depression deepened; most of them would learn, even in packed auditoriums.

But it would take more than fewer courses and larger classes to meet the continuing crisis. The University of Chicago had never been a place that professors left readily, and the faculty was heavily loaded with men and women who had been around long enough to acquire the very expensive status of lifetime tenure. But tenure is no protection to a professor when financial conditions are critical. His job can be abolished, his department can be abolished, his division can be abolished—and he with them. There were at least a few occasions, during the early 1930s, none of them on public record, on which a trustee made such a tentative suggestion. As an administrator Hutchins had no tenure. Though he favored such scandalously "socialistic" schemes as a national system of unemployment and medical insurance—and old age pensions—he had seen too many tenured professors of thirty-five or forty drawing a permanent pension in the form of a full salary. But faculty job security was an essential ingredient of the university as a center of independent thought and criticism. It is said that his rejoinder to the proposal of invading tenure was short: "It is out of the question," so clearly enunciated that the proposal was never pressed further.

Salary cuts were something else. In the 1930s there was not a commercial enterprise (and scarcely a noncommercial enterprise) which survived without slashing wages and salaries again and again. Here he made a modest counterproposal to the board. Except in the medical schools, where men with private practices could not be got part-time at less than $18,000, Chicago was paying a top faculty salary of $10,000—$2,000 to $5,000 less than competing institutions in the East. The Chicago minimum was a shameful $3,500. "We have always said," Hutchins reminded the board, 'that the faculty was the University. We have always said that the function of the administration was to minister to the needs of the faculty. Let us see if we can make it through by cutting administrative salaries on a progressive percentage basis." This would be painful for the highest-paid administrators and excruciating for the lowest paid. But the faculty should be the last to suffer, and indeed, this was the time to hire, at every level, first-class

men and women whose salaries had been reduced at other institutions. The morale of the faculty—which was voiceless in such matters—would be greatly buoyed. The morale of the administrative officers was secondary. Hutchins did not need to point out to the board, or to the faculty, that his own $20,000 would, on the progressive basis he proposed, be hit the hardest. (He proposed that he take a 25 percent reduction; the board agreed to 20 percent. The salary of the chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, for comparison, had been cut from $35,000 to $31,000.)

On financial grounds alone, he proposed a consolidation of the university's seventy-two budgets into twelve, to make the business of the university more manageable. What it did, besides making it more manageable, was to make it more manageable by him. The process, highly esteemed in the Depression and ever thereafter, was called streamlining. It reduced bureaucratic shuffling all the way down (and up) the line and facilitated intelligent allocation of dwindling funds. Its appeal to the trustees was irresistible. (In a letter to the board chairman, Harold Swift, who raised the question of merging some investments, Hutchins wrote, "I am in favor . . . of merging everything that we can possibly merge.")^[4]

The combined terror and euphoria—the latter the result of the salary policy—temporarily distracted the attention of the faculty from the implications of the budget consolidation. It could have been seen, but only by unglazed eyes, as a great grab for executive power at the expense of the professors who were the university. The twelve new budgets were those of the divisions and the professional schools, a few of whose deans (but only a few, so early in the administration) were more or less sympathetic to the educational views of the man whose influence over their appointment, while it was far from absolute, was much more significant than his influence over appointments to the faculty.

But it took still more—more than combining budgets, cutting courses, packing classes, and sweating salaries—to keep the university afloat during the years in which personable young men who could sell anybody anything were going begging and nobody could sell anybody anything. Casting about, with the lemon/lemonade metaphor always in mind, Hutchins discovered one of the university's operations that was losing a lot of money—an operation he would have been delighted to lay the axe to even if it had been making money. The lemon, hot potato, or nettle, was big-time football.

14
The Unkindest Cut

The once unbeatable Maroons had, by the early 1930s, achieved in football a grip on the Big Ten basement from which there was no prospect of their being dislodged. Scores were of basketball dimensions, and the weekly gate did not cover the cost of liniment—at Chicago the largest single item of athletic expense.

There was no mystery about this melancholy state of muscular affairs. Thirty—even twenty—years earlier Chicago had been a large university; in the course of the 1920s it had become a small one. It still had two thousand male undergraduates. (California had 7,500. Even Harvard had 3,700.) An ever increasing proportion of its students were transfers—young men who moved to Chicago for strictly scholarly reasons. The proportion of self-supporting students had increased steadily. The proportion of street-car students, with no interest in athletics, had increased steadily. And Chicago had—and was proud to have—no School of Physical Education as a shelter for broad-shouldered collegians who could not have remained collegians in any other department. (As early as the 1930s it was estimated that 50 percent of the Big Ten varsity players were phys-ed majors.)

It was possible—of course it was Hutchins who said it—to win twelve letters without learning how to write one. This was the inevitable consequence of the almost universal practice of subsidizing players through the generosity of football alumni; there was no point in buying high school stars on the hoof if they had to be able to read and write by the time they become eligible at the end of their freshman year in college. Big-time football corrupted the higher learning academically and financially.

Everybody everywhere knew it. Everybody everywhere mumbled it, including a Carnegie Foundation study. "The trouble with football," said

Hutchins right out in public, "is the money that is in it"—or was supposed to be in it. Football, like crime, didn't pay; the president of Oberlin College had just made a study of football costs in twenty-two typical colleges and learned that twenty of them lost money. Coaches' salaries ran as high as twenty-five thousand dollars, in an era when the salaries of full professors averaged five thousand. One university, which paid its president eight thousand a year in 1930, could not get the coach it wanted for less than fifteen thousand to maintain his dignity. Equipment, advertising, travel (including Pullman trains with accommodations for the sports writers) were enormously expensive. The construction of ever bigger stadiums was back-breaking.

Big-time football was supposed to attract more students, but every additional student cost the institution money—even including the privately endowed institutions, colleges and universities with high tuition fees. These last were in a position to resist the pressure to enlarge their enrollment; they did not want more but better students. Big-time football was supposed to bring in gifts too—another myth based on the hallucination that the kind of people who admired football would admire a university like Chicago if only it had a winning team. (There was a companion hallucination that a great team would make a university that wasn't great look like a great university.) Harvard, Yale, and Chicago led the list of the country's universities in terms of donations and bequests during the 1920s and 30s, and Williams, Wesleyan, and Bowdoin led the list of colleges—all of them with notably inconsequential, and some of them with positively bad, football teams.

Chicago's outlay was, by comparison with its sister schools in the Big Ten, minuscule. It did not buy players under or over the table. Its stadium (one of two in the Western Conference that wasn't mortgaged) was one of the country's lesser arenas. Its head coach had a modest salary, and it did not schedule cross-country games. Even so it was losing money on football—it was lucky to sell 5,700 of its 57,000 seats—and there was a depression.

But there was nothing to be done about it.

The reason why nothing could be done about it was the Grand Old Man. The Old Man was Chicago's oldest—and only indigenous—collegiate tradition except for the campus carillon rendition of the Alma Mater at 10:06 every night because the Old Man wanted his players to start for bed at 10:00 and to get there when the Alma Mater was finished at 10:06:45. The most reverent moment of the year was the moment at the Interfraternity Sing when the old grads of Psi Upsilon marched down the steps to the fountain in Hutchison Court with the Old Man at their head.

If ever there was a granite figure that bespoke the granite virtues, it was his.

In 1892 William Rainey Harper, like most of his predecessors and successors among university presidents, denounced "the spectacular entertainment of enormous crowds of people." The difference between Harper and his predecessors and successors (prior to Hutchins) was that he thought he could do something about it. The new University of Chicago would provide a playing field for games—if there were students who wanted to play them. (Harper had never had any time for them, himself.) As his director of athletics, head coach, and captain of the football team, he hired a stern young man who had been a Bible student of his at Yale. Amos Alonzo Stagg was appointed as an associate professor (at $2,500 a year) with lifetime tenure—the first (and very probably the last) such appointment in history. His job would never depend upon his winning games. But he won them; in his heyday, all of them. As a stern middle-aged, and then old, man he continued to believe in the literalism of the Bible and the amateurism of sports. If (as untrackable rumor had it) some of his latter-day players were slipped a little something—even so much as priority in getting campus jobs—he never knew it. If their fraternity brothers selected their courses (with professors who liked football) and wrote their papers for them, if, in a word, they were intellectually needy, he never recognized it; apart from coaching football, he was not intellectually affluent himself.

The Old Man was sacred, sacred to a relatively small but ardent segment of the alumni, sacred to some of the old professors who had come with him in 1892, sacred to some of the trustees who, in their time, had had their picture taken on the Yale Fence, sacred to the students, who had nothing else to hold sacred, sacred to the local barbers and their customers, sacred, above all, to the local sports writers who, with the Cubs and the White Sox where they were, had nothing much else to write about. The first Marshall Field had given Harper a great tract adjoining the original campus for the student games that Harper spoke of. It was called, of course, Marshall Field, but it had long since become Stagg Field. The Old Man was untouchable—and so, therefore, was football.

Hutchins, who did not like to sit and watch anything, especially gladiators, attended the home games in his carefully battered and beer-stained football fedora, on the theory, it may be assumed, that it was good for a man to do the things he did not want to do. He was not violently opposed to exercise; to have been violently opposed would itself have been more exercise than he was impelled to. He was opposed to both violence and exercise.

He could not see why people had to hit, kick, or throw things around, why they could not keep in condition by getting up early, going to work, going home, going to work again, and going to bed; and eating and drinking enough to keep going. If other, and especially younger, people were so underworked and overfed that they thought they needed to disport themselves, he had no objection to letting them go somewhere and do it. Like Harper, he could not imagine where they got the time for it and held himself responsible, as an educator, for their having time on their hands.

Athleticism—the perversion of athletics to commercialism—he abominated. Most of all he abominated the myths that were fabricated to justify it. Far from its being good for the minds and morals of the students, it was not even good for their health. It injured—even killed—some of them in the name of that false morality which held that nothing is as important as winning, and it developed in some of them the "athlete's heart" that would kill them prematurely. It did not habituate them to the games that they could play in later life. It did not even provide college students with exercise, if exercise was what they wanted or needed. Chicago had six thousand students, three thousand of them undergraduates, two thousand of them males. Athleticism did nothing for the females except get them excited (a bad thing in a woman) and it exercised, or overexercised, eleven of the two thousand undergraduate males.

The local sports writers, football alumni, football professors, football trustees, football students, and football barbers, yes, and the Old Man himself, still coaching in his seventies, all suspected Hutchins from the first—and they were right. He assured and reassured them, via the sports writers, that football would always be an integral part of the Chicago program. They didn't believe him—but they were wrong. They should have asked him, "Intercollegiate or intramural?" and they didn't. But you can't fool the sports writers. That sixth sense they all had kept them from being reassured by his reassurances. It told them that he was some kind of an intellectual; and intellectuals, as everybody knows, think that they are too intellectual for athletics. The sports writers took note of his backhand jabs. They took note when he said that a university is not a bodybuilding institute. They took note when he said that the country needed brains almost as much as it did brawn. They took note when he told the YMCA that "the American public is overexercised and overbathed. The great resources of the YMCA should not be directed primarily at aggravating this great evil."^[1] They took note when he cited the Big Ten rules against subsidization. They took note when he embellished the proposal of the student editor—a Hutchins Plan boy—that instead of buying football players, the colleges should buy race horses: "Alumni could show their

devotion by giving their stables to alma mater. For the time being, Yale would be 'way out in front, for both Mr. Jock Whitney and Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney graduated there. But by a judicious distribution of honorary degrees horse fanciers who never went to college might be induced to come to the assistance of institutions which had not attracted students who had become prosperous enough to indulge in the sport of kings. Chicago could, for instance, confer the doctorate of letters upon that prominent turfman, Alderman Bathhouse John Coughlin, and persuade The Bath to change the color of his silks from green to maroon. The alumni could place their money on Chicago across the board. The students could cheer. Most important of all, the horses would not have to pass examinations." And they took note when Hutchins told the unsubsidized Chicago eleven, before it went down to yet another 86-0 defeat, "Your strength is as the strength of ten because your hearts are pure."

They took note. And so did the Grand Old Man, whose squads grew fewer and smaller year after year and whose unbroken record of unbeaten seasons, season after season, was now an unbroken record of beatings.

It took almost ten years—nine, to be exact. The trustees were skittish. The university had a big-domed reputation, maybe too much so for its own good. Its public relations ranged from nonexistent (except for the regular announcement of Nobel Prize winners and such) to positively poor. Football was a drag—and it cost money—but maybe it had to be kept for public relations purposes. Besides, it sort of sustained internal morale, didn't it? The trustee who wanted to know was Albert Lasker, the advertising mogul who had once owned the Chicago Cubs and in sports matters was generally deferred to by most of the board members. According to his biographer, Lasker said to Hutchins, after many a board meeting on the subject, "Football is what unifies a university—what will take its place?" And Hutchins said, "Education."^[2] This (says the biographer) brought Lasker around, in 1937, and Hutchins' hand in the board was strengthened—and still further strengthened when trustee John Nuveen, a stockbroker weekdays (and a churchgoer Sundays) came to the settled conclusion that the subsidization of college athletes was positively immoral, and probably irreligious.

A year later the canny suspicions of all the sports writers were materialized when Hutchins turned sports writer. Proponent and practitioner of impatience, he had spent almost a decade talking it over (and over and over) with trustees, donors, faculty, students, and barbers. He had gone again and again to the sports writers and the football alumni beseeching their arguments for the retention of big-time football not by Notre Dame but by the University of Chicago. They had none that made sense in terms

of a center of independent thought and criticism. His presidential colleagues in the state universities explained that their budgets depended directly on football because it was the one activity of the institution that the legislators understood. None of them was willing, on the record, to reveal that darkest secret of the academic underworld, the cost of their stadiums, in spite of the plea of the American Association of University Professors that it be made public. All of them said that somebody ought to do something.

Somebody did something, but not until somebody else did something else. The somebody else was the Grand Old Man himself. The 1936 season was the Maroons' worst to date. At its close Hutchins and Stagg conferred—something they had never done before. Like many college graduates, these two graduates of Yale did not have much in common. At the close of the conference Stagg announced that after forty-four years as Chicago's coach he was leaving. Not retiring—leaving. It was a very bad day for the university in the local papers. It was a very bad day for Hutchins on the campus and off. It might not be his fault that the university could not play good football—though his sniping hadn't done any good—but it was certainly his fault that the Old Man was being let out. Another head coach was dutifully hired; Amos Alonzo Stagg took off into the sunset, and in his nineties was still coaching football at a small college in California. He lived to be a hundred, and if Hutchins had lived to be a hundred he would never have overcome the bitterness of the lovers of things-as-they-had-been, a bitterness aggravated by the sports writers and their full-page recapitulations of "the great days of Chicago"; when, some years later, President Truman recalled General MacArthur from Korea, one long-memoried Chicagoan recalled the similar awful agony that had accompanied the retirement of the Grand Old Man at Chicago. The football fans did not need to ask the question, but they asked it: could there be any doubt any longer that the Boy President meant to dismantle the university?

The Maroons had a worse season in 1937 than they had had in 1936, and a worse season in 1938 than in 1937. It was at the close of the 1938 season that Hutchins turned sports writer and blew the whistle across the country. "Gate Receipts and Glory" appeared in the Saturday Evening Post .^[3] It began:

"The football season is about to release the nation's colleges to the pursuit of education, more or less. Soon the last nickel will be rung up at the gate, the last halfback will receive his check, and the last alumnus will try to pay off those bets he can recall. Most of the students have cheered themselves into insensibility long since.

"This has been going on for almost fifty years. It is called 'overemphasis on athletics,' and everybody deplores it. It has been the subject of scores of reports, all of them shocking. It has been held to be crass professionalism, all the more shameful because it masquerades as higher education. But nobody has done anything about it. Why? I think it is because nobody wants to. Nobody wants, or dares, to defy the public, dishearten the students, or deprive alma mater of the loyalty of the alumni. Most emphatically of all, nobody wants to give up the gate receipts. Every code of amateurism ever written has failed for this reason. . . .

"Athleticism is not athletics or physical education but sports promotion, and it is carried on for the monetary profit of the colleges through the entertainment of the public. . . ."

The sports writer—Robert M. Hutchins—then proceeded to an analysis of the cause of the symptoms:

"The apologists for athleticism have created a collection of myths to convince the public that biceps are a substitute for brains. Athletics, we are told, produces well-rounded men, filled with the spirit of free play. Athletics is good for the health of the players; it is also good for the morals of the spectators. Leadership in sports means leadership in life. Athletes are red-blooded Americans, and athletic colleges are bulwarks against Communism. Gate receipts are used to build laboratories and to pay for those sports which can't pay for themselves. Football is purely a supplement to study. And without a winning team a college can not hope to attract the students or the gifts which its work requires.

"These myths have a certain air of plausibility. They are widely accepted. But they are myths, designed, consciously or unconsciously, to conceal the color of money and to surround a financial enterprise with the rosy glow of Health, Manhood, Public Spirit, and Education."

Armed to the teeth with the vital statistics, he proceeded to strip the myths, one by one, of their plausibility, and to go on from the cause and the symptoms to the cure:

"We must reform ourselves. How?

"The committees which have studied the subject—and their name is legion—have suggested stricter eligibility rules, reduction of training periods, elimination of recruiting and subsidizing, easier schedules, limitation of each student's participation to one sport, and abandonment of the double scholastic standards for athletes. . . . These reforms will never achieve reform. They may serve to offset athleticism at those few institutions which are already trying to be colleges instead of football teams. But it is too much to hope that they will affect the colleges and universities at large.

"Since money is the cause of athleticism, the cure is to take the money out of athletics. This can be done only in defiance of the students, the alumni, the public, and, in many cases, the colleges themselves. . . . The task of taking the money out of athletics must be undertaken by those institutions which are leaders, institutions which can afford the loss of prestige and popularity involved. I suggest that a group of colleges and of universities composed, say, of Amherst, Williams, Dartmouth, Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Michigan, Stanford, and California agree to take the following steps, to take them in unison and to take them at once:

"1. Reduce admission to ten cents. This will cover the handling costs. For years prominent educators, all the way from Harper, of Chicago, to Butler, at Columbia, have insisted that college athletics should be supported from endowment like any other educational activity. Colleges should support athletics out of their budgets, or get out of athletics, or get out of education.

"2. Give the director of athletics and the major coaches some kind of academic tenure, so that their jobs depend on their ability as instructors and their character as men and not on the gates they draw.

"While these two steps are being taken, it might be well, for the sake of once more putting students instead of athletes on the college playing fields, to try to stimulate the urge to play for fun and health, instead of the urge to win at any cost. There are two ways to do this, and many colleges and universities are trying both with considerable satisfaction to their students:

"1. Broaden the base of athletic participation, so that all students, graduate and undergraduate, big fellows and little fellows, can play. The development of intramural athletics, which costs less than the maintenance of present programs, is a step in this direction. The English system of selecting a varsity from the intramural teams toward the end of the season and then playing a limited number of intercollegiate games suggests itself at this point.

"2. Emphasize games which students will play in later life, when they need recreation and physical fitness as much as in college. Such sports are tennis, handball, skating, swimming, softball, bowling, rackets, golf, and touch football. Few college graduates are able to use football, baseball, or basketball, except as topics of conversation.

"I think that after the steps I have suggested have been taken by the colleges and universities I have named, the rest of the country's educational institutions will not long be able to ignore their example. Nor will the public, once the break has been made, attempt for long to prevent reform. The public, in the last analysis, pays for the colleges and the univer-

sities. It wants something for its money. It has been taught to accept football. It can, I am confident, be taught to accept education.

"The public will not like ten-cent football, because ten-cent football will not be great football. The task of the colleges and the universities, then, is to show the country a substitute for athleticism. That substitute is light and learning. The colleges and universities which taught the country football, can teach the country that the effort to discover truth, to transmit the wisdom of the race, and to preserve civilization is exciting and perhaps important too."

Going public did it. It didn't do it anywhere else—there was no Hutchins at the colleges and universities he listed—but it did it at Chicago. The row, at Chicago, was out in the open at last—and high time. It took exactly one more year of pushing, hard now, in the board of trustees—this time in the face of a student poll overwhelmingly for football and "legitimate subsidization."

At the end of December 1939, the Chicago board decided in a series of special meetings to get out of intercollegiate football and develop an elaborate program of intramural football—the answer Hutchins would have given down the years if his fellow sports writers, when he told them that football would always be an integral part of the Chicago program, had thought to ask him, "What kind of football?" The announcement, made during the Christmas student holiday, was published on the front pages, not of the sports sections but of the news sections, across the country. As soon as the students got back, Hutchins called a special convocation, in which he said he hoped it was not necessary to tell them that a university was an educational institution, that "education is primarily concerned with the training of the mind, and athletics and social life, though they may contribute to education, are not the heart of it and can not be permitted to interfere with it. All questions of management are questions of emphasis. Even so variegated an institution as a department store, which may teach skiing or distribute Christmas baskets, must be tested at the last by its success as a department store. An educational institution can do one thing uniquely: it can educate. It is by its success in performing this one function that it must be judged. The object of the University of Chicago, therefore, is to help you get the finest education that its resources and intelligence can supply. It is your responsibility to make the most of your opportunities, to cooperate with the University in the achievement of its aims—and to go forth and preach the gospel."^[4]

It was by all odds the most spectacular and most durable educational reform of Hutchins' whole career. The irony, a Hutchins kind of irony,

was that it was not an educational reform at all but merely the elimination of one obstacle to education.

The abolition of football did not save all that much money—not at Chicago—and it didn't save it until the worst of the Depression was past. In the first years after Hutchins' departure from Chicago and the succession of a "community oriented" president, there was talk of reviving intercollegiate football on the Midway, but it would never be done. The empty stands at Stagg Field looked blindly down on students playing the intramural games that William Rainey Harper and every other educator thought were good for students. Underneath the abandoned stands, on December 2, 1942, at 3:25 P.M. , Enrico Fermi told a young physicist to go ahead and pull a cadmium rod out of a metal "pile"—and the Atomic Age began. And then the stands were torn down, and the Regenstein Library was erected where they'd stood.

In a sense, nobody would ever forgive Hutchins football—nobody, including the opponents of football. He had done what the opponents thought ought to be done—and the proponents agreed could not be done. The proponents were righter than they were wrong: nobody who was anybody followed Chicago's example, and big-time football went from more to more at the colleges and universities Hutchins had named (and at all the others), its progress unimpeded by the popular rise of avowed professionalism. (In 1982 Texas A & M University agreed to pay its head coach $275,000 a year.)

15
The Red Room

"We do just what the Old Man orders," said Charley Wheeler.^[1] "One week he orders a campaign against rats. The next week he orders a campaign against dope peddlers. Pretty soon he's going to campaign against college professors. It's all the bunk, but orders are orders." Wheeler, a Chicago Herald-Examiner reporter, was speaking to Assistant Professor Frederick Schuman of the University of Chicago, in Schuman's office. (The professor had arranged to have a colleague present to corroborate the conversation.) The Old Man was W.R. Hearst, the owner of the Examiner and forty-one other metropolitan newspapers. The date: December 18, 1934.

"Pretty soon he's going to campaign against college professors ."

Two months later, Hearst unleashed his editorial hordes against the Red professors. In the Examiner of February 24, 1935, under the headline, HOPE LIES IN SOVIET, U. OF C. TEACHER SAYS, Schuman was grossly misquoted; and an editorial in the same edition of all the Hearst papers condemned some of the country's foremost educators as "advisors to Moscow . . . authorized disseminators of Communist propaganda in the U.S. who deliberately and designedly mislead our fine young people and bring them up to be disloyal to our American ideals and institutions and stupidly to favor the brutal and bloody tyranny of Soviet Russia."

The new Hearst crusade, like so many before it, was highly, not to say totally, imaginative. With the Great Crash, America had lost its bearings. A bewildered country, angry at being bewildered, was angrily determined to discover the traitors; for traitors there had to be, or it couldn't have happened at all. Roosevelt put the finger on the rich—it wasn't hard to do—and the poor and near-poor were his. But the poor and near-poor were the natural Hearst constituency, and this constituency mistrusted intellectuals; and professors were intellectuals.

Hearst could not hope to hold his natural constituency with agonized editorials about "confiscatory taxes" that "soaked the thrifty." His constituency hadn't been able to be thrifty, and it was unemployment, not taxes, that they found confiscatory. What Hearst had ordered his editors to call the Raw Deal was crawling with professors—Red professors, corrupting the young and selling out the country to the Bolsheviks. The way to destroy the Raw Deal was to convince the Hearst readers (still one out of every four families in the country) that Roosevelt was a tool of the academic devils.

The crusade was imaginative, but it was desperate too. The Hearst empire was bleeding to death; gross revenue was down from $113,000,000 to $40,000,000. Half his newspapers were now losing money—none more than the Chicago Herald-Examiner . And FDR had moved in with higher taxes on corporation and upper-bracket incomes. Reading his cabinet a draft of his 1935 tax message to Congress, the president looked up at one point, grinning, and said, "That's for Hearst." The Lord of San Simeon had always been able to lump all his publications together for tax purposes, to offset his winners with his losers. No more.

Early in 1935 the Red Terror approached a crescendo in every Hearst town that had a university. Hearst reporters disguised as students enrolled in classes and then exposed the seditious utterances of the instructors. The Syracuse Journal carried a typical "news" headline: DRIVE ALL RADICAL PROFESSORS AND STUDENTS FROM THE UNIVERSITIES. California, Pittsburgh, Washington, along with Columbia, Harvard, NYU, and Howard, all came under sustained barrage. But the crème de la Kremlin was the University of Chicago.

The universities all had Red professors, but only one had a Red president. By 1935 Hutchins was one of Hearst's bêtes rouges . In addition, he had outraged "the Chief" personally. As chairman of the Chicago Regional Labor Board he had found for a CIO union, and the Hearst papers denounced him as an accomplice of Communists and murderers. Hutchins went right ahead calling the shots as he saw them, and Hearst, finding that he couldn't lick him, tried to join him; he offered him a job as a Hearst publisher. Hutchins turned it down and became an accomplice of Communists and murderers again. At the Tribune Tower in Chicago he occupied an even more distinguished niche: on the orders of the "Morning Colonel," R.R. McCormick, the Tribune never used his name, referring, when it had to, only to "the president of the University of Chicago."

The Hearst American divided the Chicago P.M. market with the News , which had fallen into the hands of the "Evening Colonel," Frank Knox (a former Hearst executive). The recently established tabloid Times , the only

New Deal paper in town, was a very poor third. The morning field was as good as monopolized by the unscrupulously reactionary Tribune . Its feeble competition was the lurid Herald-Examiner —the sickest kitten in the whole Hearst litter.

There was strong medicine handy in the San Simeon pharmacopoeia, in the person of Victor Watson. Watson's ultimate suicide fortified the frothing legend that he was crazy; people who came into his office at mealtimes and found him cutting his steak with his copy-shears certainly thought he was. Victor Watson was Hearst's peripatetic fomenter. A man who would start anything and stop at nothing, he enjoyed the prerogative of putting the chief's mouth where his money was. (It was Watson whose forgery of documents designed to provoke an American invasion of Mexico in 1927 moved Senator George W. Norris to characterize the Hearst newspapers as "the sewer system of American journalism.")

Hearst sent Watson to Chicago to do what it would take to save the Examiner . What it would take was a Red scare to end all Red scares. The whole country was inflammable in the early 1930s, but Chicago was something special. It was a Roosevelt town—in some small measure because of the graveyard vote produced by the Democratic machine, whose boss, Mayor Edward J. Kelly, was the creature of the Republican Colonel McCormick, and whose next-in-line, State's Attorney Tom Courtney, was the creature of the Republican Colonel Knox. (You had to hold on to your hat in Chicago politics.)

In the early spring of 1935 Miss Lucille Norton of Seattle was an eighteen-year-old University of Chicago freshman who lived with her uncle. At dinnertime she was given to regaling him with her adventures on campus. The professors were teaching her free trade and free love—it was not always clear which, or whether there was a difference. They were teaching her communism out of Communist textbooks. They were teaching her. . . . Years afterward her uncle voiced the tardy suspicion that she had been having him on, as an escape from the boredom of the avuncular table . . . but that was years afterward.

Miss Norton's uncle may not have been one of the most scintillating men in Chicago, but he was one of the most influential. One of the reasons that he was influential was that he was the city's biggest newspaper advertiser, whose double-page spreads meant life or death to a staggering sheet like the Examiner . If ever there was a druggist—not a pharmacist, a druggist—it was Charles R. Walgreen, the owner (according to Who's Who ) of five hundred drugstores in thirty-nine cities. He had attended a small-town business college, apprenticed himself to a pharmacist, and gone on from there to invent the drugstore which also sold drugs and

which specialized in garish edibles at its long lunch counter. (At the height of the Walgreen Affair the university's dour publicity man, Bill Morgenstern, heaved a sigh and said, "To think that the higher learning in America is at the mercy of the man who thought up tuna-fish marble cake.")

Apart from his membership in the Sons of the American Revolution, Walgreen's civic record was pretty close to blank. But he had performed one philanthropic act of cataclysmic consequence. He had given a scholarship to the University of Chicago—on the shameless condition that he be allowed to name the recipient. The university lived to regret (and right soon) its shameless acquiescence to the shameless condition: the recipient was Walgreen's niece, Miss Norton.

On April 10, 1935, while Victor Watson sat in his office at the Examiner carving his steak with his shears, Charles R. Walgreen notified President Hutchins by letter (with copies to the university's trustees) that he was withdrawing his niece from the University of Chicago. "I am," he wrote, "unwilling to have her absorb the Communist influences to which she is so insidiously exposed." Hutchins replied immediately, asking for evidence. Walgreen's reply was a demand for an open meeting of the trustees—to be attended by the press. Hutchins replied that the university would "ignore your vague and unsupported charges until it receives the evidence it has asked for."

Out from behind his five hundred drug counters in thirty-nine cities Charles R. Walgreen was, and ever after remained, a guileless man, much too guileless to do what he did unguided. He had a guide, and a guileful guide. On April 20 the New York Times reported from Chicago that "the brew had been simmering for some time . . . and some of the legislators were itching for an investigation. . . . One widely current report has it that the local link of a national chain of newspapers has been diligently heaping fagots under the pot."

The morning after Miss Norton's withdrawal, the Examiner had a front-page exclusive on it. Walgreen announced, according to the Examiner , that he had "plenty of ammunition" to support his charges. "When it comes to Communism and advocating violence in overthrowing the government of our country," he was quoted as saying, "I am dead set against it." The Examiner was able to report—exclusively—from the state capitol at Springfield that Senator Charles W. Baker (Rep., Davis Junction) would that same day introduce a motion to withhold funds to state-subsidized educational institutions found guilty, on investigation, of teaching subversive doctrines and to deny tax exemption to private institutions found similarly guilty .

Senator Baker had been introducing his motion for years, with Hearst

support. This time it went through with a whoop and a holler and the almost unanimous support of the rural Republicans who had controlled the legislature for a century by refusing to redistrict the state in favor of the metropolitan Democrats. Denial of tax exemption would close an institution like the University of Chicago. The end of the privately endowed university's independence was at hand. The yahoos were at the gates. A few senators opposed the action, including James J. Barbour, who called it "a damned fool resolution that would make another Tennessee out of Illinois." Barbour was named to the investigating committee along with another Chicago Democrat and three downstate Republicans.

Druggist Walgreen was a front for the political forces that, by 1935, were grimly mobilized for a last-ditch stand against the New Deal. Communism was the bogey; the real objective was the cornucopia of social legislation. If the "Roosevelt Revolution" was not turned back in the 1936 presidential election, it never would be. The "Walgreen" case was the Examiner 's baby, but the Hearst American (of course), the News , and the Tribune had to string along—had to and wanted to. Had to, because Walgreen was their biggest advertiser too. Wanted to, because they were all hell-bent on destroying That Man. The shaky little afternoon tabloid Times had to string along too. But it didn't want to and, under the intrepid management of its publisher, Emory Thomason, and its editor, Richard Finnegan, it didn't. Walgreen withdrew his advertising from the Times —a mortal blow—and the paper was later picked up by Marshall Field to be merged with his morning Sun .

Hutchins was at odds with most of his trustees regarding the limits of academic freedom. In 1931 he told the American Association of University Professors, "Four times in two years, Chicago interests have raised with me the propriety of private or public utterances of members of our staff. We have got to make ourselves clear. The only question that can properly be raised about a professor with the institution to which he belongs is his competence in his field. His private life, his political views, his social attitudes, his economic doctrine—these are not the concern of his university."^[2] Even the enlightened and devoted chairman of the board, Harold H. Swift, was disturbed by Hutchins' uncompromising position. He gently reminded "Robert" that in the past the university had fired faculty members for immorality. Robert did not argue the point, but just as gently let it be known that as long as he was president no professor would be fired for anything but incompetence. It was obvious that the Walgreen charges would involve the activities of faculty members outside the classroom and off the campus. The issue of the professor's rights as citizen would have to be joined.

A majority of the board members—including Chairman Swift—recognized the real issue in the matter of the druggist's niece. The real issue was the destruction of the free university, beginning with the freest of them all. Sharply divided over Hutchins' educational reforms, his faculty were solid in their admiration of his defense of academic freedom. The students adored him as a stand-up guy, and when the Walgreen case broke, the Big Men on Campus (including the captains of all the varsity teams) drafted an open letter accusing the accusers.

There was no doubt, as the date of the Walgreen hearings approached, that Victor Watson was performing a masterful orchestration, with his steak shears as baton. In day-by-day front-page revelations, the Examiner leaked the substance of "Walgreen's" case, and it was no secret that the paper was providing the senate committee staff with its documentary evidence. Then the Tribune announced that attorney Joseph B. Fleming would represent Mr. Walgreen at the hearings. Colonel McCormick had decided to muscle into the act in a big way: Fleming was the Tribune 's lawyer.

The day after Walgreen first made his charges, Watson stuck in his steak shears and pulled out a plum. On April 12, 1935, there was a nationwide antiwar "strike" on the campuses. The movement had been growing for more than a year among students with no Communist leanings, the winds having carried the pacifist "Oxford oath" across the Atlantic from Britain. The morning after the strike all the Hearst papers carried a Herald-Examiner photo of an unidentified group in the university of Chicago contingent carrying a banner reading YOUNG COMMUNISTS. "According to persons who assert they know," said the New York Times carefully, "the banner was furnished by an outside interested agency that wanted a picture that would sustain the charge of rife sedition." Victor Watson sat in his office, with his au jus shears in his hand.

The Examiner was able to inform its readers that the prosecution's star witness in the Walgreen hearings would be Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling. Mrs. Dilling, self-styled super-expert patriot, was director of the Patriotic Research Bureau of Chicago and author of The Red Network . This celebrated who's who of the Communist conspiracy included Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, Senator Robert A. Taft, Chairman Glenn Frank of the Republican Party Policy Committee, President William Green of the AFL, and the National Council of Churches, the National Catholic Welfare Conference, and the YWCA. But the most dangerous man alive—in Mrs. Dilling's book—was Professor Robert Morss Lovett of the University of Chicago, known to the Chicago Tribune as "a pacifist, bolshevik, communist, and pale pink radical" (though the New York Times could not

think of "any act in his life inconsistent with the purest patriotism," and President Eliot of Harvard once said, "Lovett is a man by whose character Harvard is willing to be judged").

The prospect of Mrs. Dilling and Professor Lovett as contending protagonists was enough to pack the Red Room—it was actually called the Red Room—of the old LaSalle Hotel. But there was a third personage involved, who would pack any hall in America. The hearings opened when Robert Hutchins, tall, inordinately handsome, inordinately commanding, walked into the Red Room, bent over a roundish, smallish, balding figure seated at the complainant's table and said amiably, "Mr. Walgreen, this is going to cost you half a million dollars." The druggist blinked up at Hutchins and was still blinking when the chairman of the committee read the senate resolution which authorized the investigation and introduced counsel—Joseph B. Fleming for Mr. Walgreen and Laird Bell and James H. Douglas, Jr., for the university. Still blinking, the complainant was called to the stand.

His niece, he said, had expressed no decided views on social questions until she entered the University of Chicago. Then "her thoughts as disclosed by her conversation centered on Communism and its various tendencies." In her social science course she was required to read "the Communism [sic] Manifesto by Karl Marx and F. Engels . . . and it was during this period that she told me that the family as an institution was disappearing. I asked her where she got that idea and she said, 'At school.' . . . I became somewhat bewildered. . . . It becomes a serious matter when a professor upon being asked, 'What do you think of free love?' replies, 'I believe in free love for myself.'"

He told her, he testified, that she was getting to be a Communist, and she replied, "I am not the only one—there are a lot more on the campus."

"Don't you realize that this means bloodshed?"

"Yes, but how did we get our independence—wasn't it by revolution?"

"Well, Lucille, are they really teaching you these things over at the University?"

"No, I don't think they are teaching it to us."

"Are they advocating these things?"

"No, not exactly."

"Well, where do you get all these radical ideas?"

"Well, we have a lot of reading on Communism."

"More than on our own government?"

"Oh, yes, much more." Even in her English course, said Uncle Charles in conclusion, Lucille was required to read a section of a Communist book called The New Russian Primer .

Q (by the committee). What professor was it that required that the Karl Marx Manifesto be carefully read? A. It is listed in the syllabus. It is Professor Gideon. Q . G-i-d-e-o-n, is that right? A. I think so. Q . Is he the man that puts the Bibles in our hotel rooms? A . I think it is his father—the old fashioned kind. Q . Who is this professor that is advocating free love? A . Well, it is Professor Schuman. Q . A five-year plan—that was set out in The New Russian Primer , was it? A . Yes. . . . Q . And we have a better plan? A . I think so. . . . Q . Well, I do too. Hoover thought so too. I don't know who else thinks so, besides us three. A . I do not keep very close to the political situation. . . .

The blinking druggist stepped down and Board Chairman Swift of the university took the stand. This top-drawer representative of Chicago's butcher-baker gentry affirmed his conviction that there was no Communist teaching at Chicago, that no faculty member was a Communist, and that no faculty member advocated violent overthrow of the government or tried to instill such ideas in the minds of students. He went on to recite a long litany of indices that ranked Chicago just behind, just even with, or just ahead of Harvard as the most eminent university in America. He welcomed this opportunity. . . .

Hutchins took the stand, all six feet three inches of him, and presented the committee with the catalogue of the university's 3,492 courses taught by 901 instructors. He had examined the complete outlines of the 161 undergraduate courses in social, political, and economic problems and found nothing subversive in them. "The University," he went on, "would not permit the indoctrination of students or the use of the classroom as a center of propaganda. On the other hand, the professor is not disfranchised when he takes an academic post; he may think, live, worship, and vote as he pleases. Under the laws of Illinois it is illegal to advocate the overthrow of the government by violence. (304 Ill. 23.) Anybody who thinks that any of our faculty are doing so should inform the State's Attorney of Cook County."

All of this was delivered in the Boy President's characteristically wooden manner. But now his voice rose a shade. "The members of the faculty of the University of Chicago are law-abiding, patriotic citizens. On their behalf I repudiate the charges against them." And then, half-turning to face Charles R. Walgreen, he concluded extemporaneously, "Those who have made these charges are either ignorant, malicious, deluded, or misinformed," and sat down.

The next witness was Charles E. Merriam, chairman of the Department of Political Science, a member of President Hoover's National Committee on Recent Social Trends, and a member of President Roosevelt's National

Resources Board. Merriam had been a member of a distinguished faculty for thirty-five years and was now its most distinguished member. Famous for his imperturbability and his easy slouch, he was a tower of rage as he assaulted "the persons" who were assaulting his university. "I charge them, wittingly or unwittingly, with attacking one of the strongest forces for the stabilization and maintenance of our civilization. I charge them with grand larceny of human reputation and achievement. . . .

"If there is unrest in this land, and there is, and if many men in their bitterness and discontent reach out blindly in a feverish struggle to find a way out, then we must seek out the causes of discontent and cure them; otherwise the anguish and the bitterness will grow greater. . . . Only madness moves those who in the name of American liberty try to suppress thought on how that liberty may be preserved." There was silence as Charley Merriam, neither raging nor slouching now, but bent like a very old man, fumbled his way back to his seat at the counsel table.

The university concluded its case in chief by calling Mrs. Edith Foster Flint, the professor of English in charge of the college course that used a passage from The New Russian Primer . The committee was favored with a lecture in the elementary procedure of confronting college students with critical materials drawn from every field of knowledge and opinion and requiring a comparative analysis of them. The lordly Mrs. Flint was not in the habit of being interrogated, and, when nobody presumed to interrogate her now, she stepped lordlily down.

The chairman of the committee was in the process of adjourning the hearing for a week when the prelude to the fun began. A man in a U.S. Army uniform—he had been a soldier, but no longer was—stood up in the back of the room and said, "In the name of the American Legion, may I say a few words?" The chairman said, "We will be glad to hear from you. Will you come back here at another time and. . . ." The ex-soldier interrupted him: "Here is the Red meeting of Professor Robert Lovett, the Commission they had in the city of Chicago. . . . That is for three hours May Day a Red Flag floats over the University of Chicago. Three hours May Day. . . . Professor Lovett was connected with that convention. . . . In the name of the American Legion, Disabled Veterans of the American Legion, Disabled Veterans of the World War, and the Veterans of the World War. . . ."

June rolled away with week-to-week recesses in the Red Room, attributed by a Hearst blabbermouth to Victor Watson's order to keep the thing going as long as there was pay dirt in it. The original scenario, or game plan, did not call for Miss Norton's appearance, lest she cave in under cross-examination by her corrupters. But a communications breakdown occurred (reportedly between the Hearst Building and the Tribune

Tower), and one of the committee members, Senator John W. Fribley (Rep., Pana) said that he would like to have Miss Norton produced. She was produced a week later. She read a statement in a very small voice. At the University of Chicago she had "gained the feeling, through readings and contacts, that Communism would be an excellent form of government, despite the fact that its installation would undoubtedly necessitate a revolution. . . .

"Through reading and lectures we were told repeatedly that the family is disintegrating. This was emphasized by Professor Schuman's remark, 'I believe in religion for some people, and free love for myself,' at a symposium at which I was present. It never occurred to me that Professor Schuman might be insincere." Sen. Barbour (who had opposed the investigation): Did the students break out in laughter after Professor Schuman made that remark? A . (Pause.) I think there was some laughter. . . Q . Did the remark indoctrinate you? A . (Long pause.) No.

A committee member asked her if she still believed in communism. Again a long pause, a small voice: "No." Nobody asked her how she had become detoxified in the sixty days that followed her removal from the university. There was no cross-examination by her now frustrated corrupters.

Assistant Professor Schuman took the stand, a very sharp young man whose book, The Nazi Dictatorship , was already a minor classic. Married; two children, both legitimate. He said his name had once been misused in support of the Communist candidate for president in 1932—he had voted for Roosevelt—and confessed to having attended a banquet for the Communist candidate for vice-president (a Negro). The banquet was sponsored by the Chicago Defender , a Negro Republican newspaper, at a time when he, Schuman, was making a study of the Negro in American politics.

Before he could be asked about his advocacy of free love his place was taken by Associate Professor Harry A. Gideonse. Gideonse advised the honorable committee that neither he nor his father distributed the Gideon Bible, and that he was responsible for the freshman social science course which included the Communist Manifesto —and Herbert Hoover's American Individualism . He invited Mr. Walgreen and the committee to cross-examine him. When they declined he informed them that he had participated in the symposium—not a class—in which a silly student had interrupted the discussion to ask if the panel believed in free love. "Perhaps Professor Schuman should have said, 'I am going to be funny,' before he spoke."

Attorney Fleming then presented a mass of documentary evidence, including (in addition to the Manifesto ) announcements of radical meetings

in the student Daily Maroon and several items of current Communist-front propaganda, some of which bore the names of Schuman and Lovett. While he was reading the committee an exposition of Party doctrine by William Z. Foster, Professor Merriam asked for permission to make a point of order: Oughtn't the Red Room to be cleared of students while Mr. Fleming was reading these materials? No response from Attorney Fleming.

The end was in sight. One last session would do it; one last spectacular session, presenting Mrs. Dilling for the patriots and Professor Lovett for the corrupters. The great day came. The senate committee sat at one end of the Red Room at a long trestle table on a temporary dais. At a table on one side of the room, sat Hutchins and Board Chairman Swift, flanked by attorneys Bell and Douglas (both of them trustees of the university). Facing them, at a table on the other side of the room, sat Charles R. Walgreen. On one side of him sat Attorney Fleming. On his other side, in a red dress, sat an attractive, indeed, arresting woman, who didn't blink. Directly behind her, whispering to her, sat a large, beefy man of reddest countenance. These two counselors were Victor Watson's friends at court.

The beefy man was Harry A. Jung, founder, president, and chairman of the American Vigilant Intelligence Federation. His counselee, the druggist's counselor, was Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling.

Mrs. Dilling had hold of a very good thing. Her Red Network (dedicated to Harry A. Jung), an alphabetical list of traitors in reference-work form, was a staple of American Legion posts across the land, and of police departments (including New York's and Chicago's), sheriffs' offices, and Klan, Bund, and Save-the-Constitution societies. Its authenticity was attested by the Army and Navy Register , the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, and the chairman of the National Americanism Commission of the American Legion. It was cited regularly as expert testimony at state legislative and congressional hearings. Now with Walgreen, Hearst, and the Tribune behind her, Mrs. Dilling's time had come.

She leaped to her feet before the last syllable of her name had been sounded and explained that she had to talk fast because she had too much to tell the committee in so little time. There was no previous record of her ever having been interrupted—but she was interrupted this time, by Senator Barbour, the committee's opposition member. She had run through half the Chicago faculty, including Hutchins as a sponsor of the Soviet-American Institute, "of which Jane Addams was a sponsor," when Senator Barbour seized the chairman's gavel and brought it down hard on the echoing trestle table. The explosion stopped the witness long enough for Barbour to say: "Do you want an hour or two to run down the memory of Jane Addams?"

"I can give you an hour or two on her record," said Mrs. Dilling, "but Eleanor Roosevelt's is worse, and Professor Robert Lovett's is the worst of them all"—and she immediately started in on Justice Brandeis, "one of the biggest contributors to this filthy, lousy little college [Commonwealth College] down in Arkansas"—and immediately went on to Board Chairman Swift of the University of Chicago: "There's a cream-puff type that would get its throat cut. Some rich men play with chorus girls, others with booze, and others with Communism. Mr. Swift wouldn't have a nickel left—he wouldn't have that pretty suit he's wearing—if the ideas he's playing with had their way."

While Mr. Swift looked somberly down at the vest of his pretty suit, and even Walgreen and his lawyer looked down at theirs, the witness lit into "the notorious, Communist-aiding American Civil Liberties Union. . . . Smoke-screening with incessant cries for 'free speech,' 'free press,' and 'free assembly,' the Civil Liberties Union by means of legal battles all over the country, and tons of well-financed propaganda, fights to keep the way open for Communists to agitate revolutionary theory that leads to revolutionary practice and the destruction of all freedom and the American Constitution. The University of Chicago not only retains a president and teachers with Communist affiliations, but also allows them to sponsor Red meetings on the campus." A reporter for the New Deal Chicago Times concluded his account of Mrs. Dilling's testimony with; "[All punctuation added]"—but a sober-sided man on the copy desk struck it out.

After two hours of this farrago the chairman of the committee hit the exploding table with his gavel—it was well past his lunchtime—and asked if there was any cross-examination of the witness. Attorney Bell for the university looked up from the contemplation of his vest and shook his head sadly. At the rear of the room a tumult began. It seemed that a spectator had turned to the man next to him and whispered, "Is that Mrs. Dillinger?"—Mr. Dillinger having passed away a year earlier in front of the Biograph Theatre—and for his impertinence the spectator received a punch in the nose from his neighbor, who turned out to be Mrs. Dilling's husband Albert, whose sole known occupation was to hold up Communist posters at his wife's meetings while she told the audience, "You don't know the Red Harlot, the Red Beast, and the signs of the times that are coming. Albert and I have been in Russia. The food makes you sick at your stomach. It did me. It really did. I don't care what anybody says. We saw Lenin. He's God in Russia. Pickled in alcohol under glass. A little sandy-whiskered thing. I thought to myself—pooh, you don't amount to much."

The Red Room was still reeling from the testimony of the lady muck-

raker when the name of Harry A. Jung was called. The beefy, red-faced man who had sat behind Walgreen and Mrs. Dilling from the start of the hearings took the stand. The founder, president, and chairman of the American Vigilant Intelligence Federation was unknown to some of the people in the room—but not to Attorney Fleming, who, it will be remembered, was not only Mr. Walgreen's lawyer but Colonel McCormick's: Jung's American Vigilant Intelligence Federation had long enjoyed rent-free hospitality in the colonel's Tribune Tower.

Once a professional labor spy, Jung was now a tinhorn fascist of no real consequence; his specialty was the distribution of the Jewish-plot forgery known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion . He began his testimony by reading the names of Chicago faculty members who belonged to Communist organizations like the ACLU. When he got to the name of Professor T.V. Smith, Senator Barbour said, "Is that our colleague from the Fifth Senatorial District of Illinois?" When Jung said it was, Barbour said, "Who called this man to testify?" Nobody knew and nobody ever found out. "I call for adjournment," said Senator Barbour, and the committee rose. As the room emptied Jung was still in the witness chair, testifying to the empty dais.

The case against the university had collapsed—almost. Walgreen—that is, Victor Watson—had one last hope of extracting a diamond from the dung. There was a letter—a genuine letter, not a forgery—that had passed from Watson to the senate committee. It had been written a decade earlier to a Russian refugee who had asked, and got, the help of an American man of letters in publishing a book exposing Soviet corruption. When the book flopped, the refugee accused the man of letters of having sabotaged it in behalf of the Soviet government. The man of letters courteously—always courteously—replied, in a scribbled note of consolation, that he himself "did not care whether the book reflects on the Russian government or the United States government or any other—all in my opinion being rotten. Sincerely yours, Robert Morss Lovett." (The scribble was introduced by the senate committee as its Exhibit 19 in the Walgreen hearings, and the committee, in its final report, said that "if all the exhibits offered in evidence against Professor Lovett were disregarded except Exhibit 19, proof of his disloyal conduct is conclusive.")

If Watson lost everything else and nailed Lovett, the chief would be satisfied. More then satisfied. "I have never understood how I first offended Hearst," Lovett once told a friend. "It is true that I called him Public Enemy Number One, but everybody else had a list of public enemies, so I thought that I should have one of my own."

Mrs. Dilling's most dangerous man alive shambled into the Red Room

with his tattered old briefcase under his arm—the handle had fallen off in the early 1920s—his high, wispy (where it wasn't barren) old dome shining in the June sunlight. He was stout and slow, with a head like Hearst's (nothing so leonine, of course), and his suit was as shapeless as he. Two or three students got up from their seats and escorted him to the witness chair. Obviously a broken old man—a shame to have to dismember him.

What the dismemberers didn't know was that they were up against a man whose false façade of genteel senility had long since earned him the sobriquet of the Buster Keaton of the Saints. The deceptive thing about Bob Lovett was his air of bewildered innocence, coupled with the ineffable politeness of the Boston Brahmin he was. The deceit had been penetrated by his mother when he was very young: he asked her why he should remember the Ten Commandments for the dollar she gave him, when his aunt had given him ten dollars for remembering not to pick his nose. The politeness persisted unfailingly into his dotage: testifying against him on a charge of riot, a policeman told the court, "And when I went to put him in the wagon, the old gentleman there, he held the door for me."

The old gentleman's official status was itself deceptive: professor of English at the University of Chicago since 1893. Hundreds of thousands of school children had struggled through "Moody and Lovett," the History of English Literature he had written in 1916 with William Vaughn Moody. At Chicago, with a year off to edit the Dial , and a decade as literary editor of the New Republic , he had launched more young writers than any man before or since—beginning with Frank Norris, Malcolm Cowley, Lewis Mumford, Edmund Wilson, Howard Mumford Jones, and Carl Van Vechten. Recently there had been a crazy wild Irish kid who talked big and did nothing, who came into Lovett's office on campus one day and threw a short story on the desk and turned to go. Lovett pushed him into a chair and held him there while he read the story. Then he said, "Do you know what we're going to do, Jimmy? We're going to stretch this into a novel." The story was Studs Lonigan .

But there was another Lovett outside the classroom and the editorial office, of whom his adorers said that wherever there was trouble, there was Lovett. (His deplorers said that wherever there was Lovett, there was trouble.) He was an inveterate recidivist. He had been brought to bar a couple of dozen times in the course of a lifetime of un-American activities. He had gone bail for Communists, Nazis, anarchists, pacifists, and black and white rioters. Cofounder (with Roger Baldwin) of the American Civil Liberties Union, he had sat for days on end in police courts all over the country. Discovered thus sitting one day by one of his academic colleagues, he explained, "I am fixing the court with my eye in an effort to

intimidate it into a carriage of justice." His historic defense of the IWWs before Judge Landis in Chicago may have contributed to their conviction by a jury of professing Christians: "There is a ritual of violence and a ritual of Christianity," Lovett testified on that occasion, "to which the subscribers, in both cases, pay lip service without in the least intending to put them into practice." (Two years after the Walgreen affair the broken old man shambled into the General Motors plant at Flint, Michigan, at the height of the great sit-down strike. Holding his five shares of GM stock over his head, he informed the grinning strikers that "my management is mistreating my workers and I am here as one of the owners of the corporation to tell my workers that I am behind them.")

He'd been chairman of the Sacco-Vanzetti League and the Committee for the Relief of Russian Women and Children, president of the Friends of Freedom for India and the socialist League for Industrial Democracy, and was now vice-president of the American League against War and Fascism—and a member of any and every organization that asked him. The FBI found his name on four hundred letterheads, only four of which could be safely said to be free of the taint of communism—the Pulitzer Prize Committee, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Harvard Club of New York, and the American Red Cross. If the Communists were fighting the Mooney and Scottsboro cases to provoke the class struggle, Lovett was fighting the same cases to rectify injustice; if they were using him for their purposes, he was using them for his. "I have never been as afraid of liberals going Communist," he once said, "as I have of their pulling out of liberal organizations when the Communists, with their discipline, their persistence, and their eagerness, threatened to seize control." Persons who valued their good names above trash had a hard time understanding Robert Morss Lovett.

He sat in the witness chair in the Red Room and undid his crumbling briefcase. "I have here," he said, nobody having asked him what he had there, "the lectures I deliver to my classes in seventeenth-century literature at the University of Chicago. I should like to read them aloud on this occasion. I am unable to find anything subversive in them, but there may be something of the sort, and I should like to have expert opinion in the matter." This time the senators blinked. What was this ? His piles of lecture notes in front of him, the most dangerous man on earth sat there a picture of disingenuous aplomb.

The first to recover was Mr. Walgreen's lawyer, Mr. Fleming. He asked the witness if he approved of "the slacker oath against our country." Lovett pushed his lecture notes aside and said, "If you refer to the so-called Oxford Oath not to bear arms, I regard it as the individual equivalent of

the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1925 by which the United States gave up war as an instrument of national policy. Congress is not authorized to declare war, because the Kellogg-Briand Pact is equally law with the Constitution of the United States." The senators stared as they heard this thirty-second classroom lecture in political science. The first of them to recover wanted to know what Professor Lovett would do if Germany declared war and his grandchildren were asked to go. Lovett said, "I should do exactly as I did in the case of my son, who was killed at Belleau Wood. I should tell them nothing. I should not attempt to decide for another individual."

The senators stared some more, until Mr. Fleming asked the witness whether he was the author of the letter which had passed from Mr. Watson of the Examiner to the senate committee—the letter that asserted that all governments are rotten. The witness said that indeed he was, and he wished to refer the committee to that morning's edition of the Chicago Tribune , which carried a front-page cartoon in which a figure labeled "world dictators" is driving "poor old world" along a road marked "back to the dark ages," while overhead burst bombs labeled "Fascism," "Communism," "Nazism," and "New Dealism." The witness understood the cartoon to mean that the present government of the United States was rotten, but perhaps somebody—and he looked around the room until his bewildered gaze fell upon Mr. Fleming—could enlighten him to the contrary. This time the Tribune 's (and Mr. Walgreen's) lawyer stared at the red plush drapes that had been pulled to block out the lowering sunlight of late afternoon.

It was getting on for the committee's suppertime. The witness sat there expectantly, still prepared to read his seventeenth-century English literature lectures. The chairman proposed adjournment sine die , and nobody objected.

The Walgreen hearings had petered out. But not the Walgreen affair. On June 26 the senate committee issued its report—the only report ever issued in consequence of the resolution to investigate "Communism in state-supported and tax-exempt institutions in Illinois." Senator Baker, the author of the resolution, dissented, finding the University of Chicago "entirely partisan and pro-Communistic," but three of the other four committee members called his dissent "a bid for publicity in three of the metropolitan newspapers in Chicago. It is not based on evidence offered at the committee's hearings."

The majority report, signed by four of the five members, acquitted the university of subversive teaching or indoctrination: "All oral testimony offered by Mr. Walgreen does not prove the charges against the University of Chicago, even if his witnesses were uncontradicted." But Assistant Pro-

fessor Schuman should be censured for his reckless associations, and "Fair consideration of all the evidence compels a conclusion that Professor Robert Morss Lovett has pursued an unpatriotic course of conduct for many years. Exhibits offered in evidence disclosing Professor Lovett's activities in Communistic or unpatriotic organizations and his association with Communist speakers, regardless of their reputation, prove that Professor Lovett cannot be an asset to any forward looking institution."

But the two Chicagoans on the committee, both Democrats, felt constrained to rinse their hands before the doddering heretic was handed over by the holy office of Victor Watson to the secular arm of the university: "We cannot fail to express our feeling that the outside activities and some of the extra-campus associations of Professor Lovett are not conducive to effective or helpful service on his part as a member of the faculty of the University of Chicago, and that in view of his long service and scholastic achievements in the field of English literature, he is deserving of honorary retirement, with usual and suitable provisions for emeritus professors. It is in no unfriendly spirit that we express the belief that his long years of study and authorship and a family affliction incident to the World War may have weakened his judgment."

What could a forward looking university do about a faculty member unhinged by long years of study and authorship? Lovett, like all full professors, and unlike the young Schuman, had lifetime tenure. His unpatriotic course of conduct had taken place off the university's premises and therefore (according to Hutchins) entirely outside the university's responsibility or jurisdiction.

For a week the wolves howled in concert under Victor Watson's copy-shears baton. The chief wanted Lovett's skin nailed to the wall. Not a word was heard from the forward-looking university. Not a word was said about a special meeting of the Board of Trustees requested by Hutchins. And then the Examiner burst forth with its triumphant front-page streamer: U. OF C. TO LET LOVETT GO. Watson had carried the day for the chief. The chief had carried the cause for the country. The Raw Deal—and the pacifist, Bolshevik, Communist, pale pink radical professors—had been depth-bombed out of the water. The ship of state was once more on course.

"Under pressure of the demand for his ouster," the Examiner reported in twelve-point bold, "the University of Chicago has decided to drop Professor Robert Morss Lovett from its faculty, according to authoritative sources." At the end of the sensational story, in eight-point lightface, was the kicker: "The University administration contemplates retiring him on Christmas Day. At that time Professor Lovett will be eligible for a pen-

sion." (With forty-two years of service Lovett had been eligible for a pension for a long time, but it was true that he would reach the compulsory retirement age of sixty-five on December 25, 1935.)

When Hutchins reached his office the morning of the Examiner 's bombshell, he found Professor James Weber Linn waiting for him. As usual, a burning cigarette stub, less than an inch long, hung from "Teddy" Linn's lips—a miracle that had transfixed generations of Chicago undergraduates waiting for him either to swallow it or go up in smoke. Standing in the doorway to block the president's entrance Linn said, "Hutchins"—he had never before called him anything but Bob—"if the trustees fire Lovett you'll receive the resignations of twenty full professors tomorrow morning." "Oh no, I won't," said Hutchins, "my successor will."

That afternoon a statement was delivered to the downtown papers for immediate release. It was signed by Robert M. Hutchins, and it announced that in view of the distinction conferred upon the University of Chicago by Professor Robert Morss Lovett's scholarship and teaching, and his unfaltering capacity to continue his work, the Board of Trustees had waived the compulsory retirement age of sixty-five in this one instance and persuaded Professor Lovett to remain on the faculty.

After the university's reappointment of Lovett, Hutchins received a letter which began, "Dear Bob," and ended, "You must have had a vile time with that inquisition. I sometimes think that Hearst has done more harm to the cause of democracy and civilization in America than any three other contemporaries put together. Always sincerely, Franklin D. Roosevelt."^[3]

With the ignominious collapse of the "Walgreen" case—and of the chief's great crusade against the country's Red professors—the guileless druggist should have retired to his five hundred drug stores in thirty-nine cities. But he didn't. On June 8, a week before the hearings ended, Harold L. Ickes wrote in his wonderful Washington diary: "Merriam came in to see me this afternoon. Walgreen has been making distinct overtures to him and Merriam thinks he is pretty sick of the whole business."^[4]

Hutchins had a flaring nostril for money, and a backhand genius for prying it loose. "Mr. Walgreen, this is going to cost you half a million dollars ." The druggist had gone to Merriam even before the hearings ended and said, "Nobody out there will talk to me."—five hundred drug stores in thirty-nine cities, and "nobody out there will talk to me." Now the senate committee, which was supposed to have been his stooge, had dismissed his charges as hearsay and failed to retire Lovett (or even to censure Schuman). He betook himself to Merriam again, confessed the distress which nothing on his prescription shelf would palliate, and said,

"What can I do about Hutchins?" Merriam replied, "I don't know . . . I don't know. You've hurt his feelings pretty badly."

A couple of months after Walgreen learned that he had hurt Hutchins' feelings pretty badly, Physics Professor Henry Gordon Gale bumped into the president on the campus. "I know we had to stand behind Lovett," said Gale, "but he's cost the university millions in gifts." "Oh, I don't know, Henry," said Hutchins, "this last time around he brought us in about four million dollars."

At the conclusion of the Walgreen hearings the Rockefeller Foundation, without referring to the matter, had made an unrestricted gift to the university of three million dollars "for general excellence." A letter with a "token check" of ten thousand dollars had been received, together with an offer of "whatever service for which you may wish to call on me," from a resident of far-off Long Island, one Marshall Field III (whose grandfather had given the new university the acreage that was later known as Stagg Field). Another ten thousand dollars, followed almost immediately by $250,000 more, came in with a letter to Hutchins from the five children of the founder of Sears Roebuck and Company:

"We are impressed by your liberal and courageous stand in behalf of academic freedom. . . . The Rosenwald Family Association has not, as yet, received its bequest under the will of Mr. Julius Rosenwald. We are unable, therefore, to express our confidence in your administration as we should like to do. It is our present intention to make the University of Chicago one of three principal beneficiaries as soon as we are in a position to do so."

All of that did not add up to a firm four million. What added up to it was the meeting of Hutchins and Charles R. Walgreen. Hutchins gave the occasion all he had, turning the insouciant screw until the victim came up with a blushing bid of $250,000. Hutchins was overwhelmed—but he did not see how the university could do what it wanted to do on $250,000. It wanted to establish the Charles R. Walgreen Foundation for the Study of American Institutions. How much would it cost to establish the Charles R. Walgreen Foundation for the Study of American Institutions? It would cost—let me see, now—approximately $550,000. Hutchins walked out with the $550,000 (and Charles R. Walgreen) in his pocket.

But it was something of a two-way ride. The $550,000 had no effect whatever on the curriculum of the University of Chicago, but it had a considerable effect on the digestion of the university's president. For the next two years, until Walgreen's death, Hutchins had lunch with the druggist in the druggist's office on an average of once a week. The druggist

asked for, and got, a great deal of administrative advice on the management of his five hundred drugstores in thirty-nine cities, and the president got, without asking for it, the occasional opportunity to advise the druggist on a new variant of tuna-fish marble cake about to be introduced at the Walgreen lunch counters.

A year or so after it was all over, Hutchins made a speech which he sent on to his friend Walgreen. In the speech he said; "There would not be much point in sending young people to college if they were not going to learn something they did not know before. Parents who are not willing to have their children enter the world of ideas should keep them at home."^[5] A couple of days later Walgreen phoned to tell his friend Hutchins how much he had enjoyed the speech. There was something else—he had something new for the Walgreen lunch counters that he'd like Hutchins to try. If Hutchins didn't mind, he'd send his chauffeur over with a sample of it right away.

Hutchins said he didn't mind, hung up the phone, took a pill out of his desk drawer, and waited.

16
Cease-Fire

Hutchins never did get the college he wanted or (unlike simpler men) understand why he didn't. Why wasn't it self-evident to advocates of the elective system that children couldn't possibly know what it was they would need to know in later life? Why wasn't it self-evident that liberal education was the best preparation (to the extent that education was preparation) for the vagaries and vicissitudes that commence with commencement? That specialized study (and, at a low level, vocational training) was no preparation at all for those vagaries and vicissitudes? That technology would continue to reduce and eliminate the crafts and skills which vocational training imparted? That a man, no matter what his occupation, needed more to know how to live (and die) than how to make a living? Why wasn't it self-evident that a self-governing people could not hope to perpetuate self-government without the development of their powers to comprehend, analyze, and judge the social issues that turned on their understanding of the nature of man and society?

He didn't understand. He never would.

But he would never be closer to getting what he wanted than he was by the spring of 1937. The reasons he was close were wholly extraneous to the merits of his case. In those seven years of financial collapse following the crash of 1929 he had performed the financial wonders that saved the university. In those seven years of anti-intellectual assault on education by the yahoos he had stood and fought for academic freedom and, more than any other front-fighter in America, beaten back the superpatriots who were bent on destroying the independence of the universities generally, and his own in particular.

After the reforms—the "Hutchins Plan" so-called—that had been got through the faculty senate in his first year-and-a-half in office, his stock

went down as his faculty opposition consolidated. There was a succession of reports that he was quitting—for a New Deal job, usually—and a continuum of rumors that conservative trustees (and they were almost all of them conservative) were under pressure from their rich friends downtown, or their poor friends on the faculty, to get him out. Little by little the reports and the rumors subsided. He would certainly go on, one of these days, to those higher things to which, if ever a man was destined, he was. But by 1937 it was acknowledged, uptown and down, that, for all his educational idiocies, he had been heroic against the financial bears and the political boa constrictors. His early offenses—above all, the affaire Mert—had been neither forgiven nor forgotten. They were, however, soft-pedaled for the nonce in a kind of second honeymoon.

Half honeymoon and half standoff.

The Hutchins batting average on structural reform—"teaching the wrong things the right way"—was close to .500. Won: The faculty senate accepted his proposal to give the college jurisdiction over the last two years of the University High School. Lost: The trustees, "accepting" the proposal, rejected the integration of the eleventh and twelfth grades in the first two years of the College as a four-year unit, which Hutchins (and many other educators) wanted as a segment of a "six-four-four" system to replace the eight years of elementary school followed by four years of high school and four years of college.^[1]

As for teaching the right things, he appeared (but only appeared) to have carried the day when, on March 9, 1937, the senate adopted a uniform four-year college curriculum which all but eliminated electives on the "Hutchins" principle that (as the senate worded it) "the end of general education can be achieved best by helping students to master the leading ideas and significant facts in the principle fields of knowledge, with a view to the development of intelligent action." The program provided a mélange of fifteen courses (ranging from a year to three years each) in the four great general fields of study. It would run parallel with the two-year program of the college, already adopted, and was thought of as ultimately serving students who would enter it (primarily from the University High School) at the end of the tenth grade.

But—it would utilize course syllabi, which instead of being constructed around the great books, merely included some readings from them. Three times in those years the faculty of the college, "Hutchins' own," denied him his all-out great book curriculum. His batting average on content, in spite of the spectacular new curriculum: .500 at best. As to method, though the small class size in the new four-year program conduced to discussion, nothing fundamental was done to get rid of the soporific lecture—nor indeed could it

be done, there or anywhere, then or any time, except by the slow infusion, over years, of Socratic young men and women (a) possessed of and (b) devoted to general education. The Hutchins batting average on method: perhaps .500—mostly by extrapolation from the actuarial table.

Not bad. Not too bad. But not too good. His two-front war for academic money and academic freedom had got him a reprieve—nothing more. In ten years of depression, before the federal government contracts began, the Chicago take from Hutchins' fund-raising would exceed every university's in America except Harvard's and Yale's. Eventually, over the twenty-year span of his administration, Hutchins would bring in ninety-three million dollars. On the second front he had, in the midthirties, saved Chicago, and perhaps American universities generally, from a more formidable disaster than depression. He saved their freedom of intellectual and political inquiry from the Un-Americanist witch-hunters; more precisely, from the potentates of business and industry who promoted the hunts and maintained the huntsmen.

The faculty opposition was charmed by his fund-raising and his freedom fight, but it was not charmed out of its educational principles. As of 1937 his heroics off the campus had simply deferred the counterattack. Within a year the opposition would find its feet; in 1938 the faculty senate voted for a "review" of the presidency—true, it was never completed—and a year after that he suffered a portentous setback when the biological sciences division refused any longer to accept the comprehensive examination as a substitute for the course credit system. But that would not be until 1939, when his position was fortified by the secret government negotiations which established the "Metallurgical Project" (and ultimately the achievement of the self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction).

In 1929 Chicago's eminence rested, as it always had, on research, especially in the physical sciences. Some of Hutchins' colleagues (and some of his readers) would accuse him, during the whole of his career, of indifference to empirical research, hostility to the natural sciences, preoccupation with humanistic education at the collegiate level, and a special contempt for Deweyism. Apart from the fact that nine of the eleven men elevated to distinguished-service professorships during the first decade of his administration were natural scientists (and one a Deweyite educationalist), he more than maintained the university's eminence attested by the Hughes Report of 1924—five years before his advent—which ranked Chicago first in more departments than any other American university.

It was specialization that determined a university's rank: the university with the greatest number of great men was the greatest university, and the university with the greatest number of great men in a given field had the

greatest department in the field. The University of Chicago of 1929 was great because it was a geographical locus, and nothing more, of specialists working in isolation or with one or two similarly specialized colleagues and a half-dozen specialized students, while the undergraduates nibbled around the collegiate smorgasbord. It was this Chicago that Hutchins tried to transform from a locus into a center, from a congeries into a community, from a diversum into a universurn . What he succeeded in doing was to alter (no more than that) undergraduate teaching and the undergraduate curriculum while doing his duty, as a man of duty does. His duty was to find and reward the specialists who would make Chicago a second Harvard—or a first. But the alteration of undergraduate teaching, and the undergraduate teaching staff for whom he obtained autonomy within the institution, was more than superficial. Caught up in the hot bidding for big money and big men, especially in science and medicine, he pushed what money he could get his hands on into the development of the Hutchins Plan. In the dark night of the 1930s, Hutchins would tell the unsalable prospect why he should buy Chicago: "It's not a very good university—it's only the best there is."

After the first five years of his assault on the overemphasis of science and specialization, Chicago led the country in the number of its Nobel Prize winners in science; and according to the authoritative American Men of Science , which indicates by a star the names of scientists distinguished in their respective fields, Chicago had the greatest number of starred scientists in proportion to its faculty of any university in the country—and was second only to Harvard in total number. A Fortune study in 1939 concluded: "When you come to equate endowment and income figures with scholarship, a reasonable case could be made out that Chicago gets more B.T.U.'s of teaching and research energy per dollar than any other U.S. university, even including Harvard." And when Hutchins resigned, in 1950, one out of every fifteen men listed in American Men of Science was a Chicago product, one out of every eleven in Leaders of Education , one out of every ten in the Directory of American Scholars .

The fact is that most of Hutchins' opponents in the faculty and on the board were, and always would be, ambivalent about him. None—at least none of the faculty—was ever found who wanted to see him go. What was wanted was to bring him into line, or get him back into line, and keep him there. Not a chance. Their miscalculation was as extravagant as his own that he would ever get the college (or the university) that he wanted. The lawyer was careful always to proceed constitutionally, but there is no constitution so perforate as the gentlemanly statutes of a university. Ralph Tyler, whom Hutchins hired as University Examiner in spite of Tyler's

insistence that he was a progressive educator, suggested that the statutes be examined closely to see if they inhibited the establishment of degree-granting committees by the divisions, without departmental involvement in appointments. The lawyer, after close examination, reported back that there was no inhibition. The result was the proliferation of such novel dodges under the aegis of the social sciences and humanities divisions, where Hutchins' strength lay, and whose deans, Robert Redfield (and later Tyler) and Richard McKeon, were Hutchins supporters. Indeed, they enabled the conglomerator to appoint men who already were, or in time would be, eminent as non-Hutchins and anti-Hutchins men: men like Edward Shils, David Riesman, Rexford Tugwell, and Bruno Bettelheim (the first three rejected by the sociology department). By the time Tyler retired as dean of the social sciences there were eight such committees (the precise number of bypassed departments) in the division. Two of the committees—Human Development and Social Thought—achieved durable eminence. The latter, under the chairmanship of a close Hutchins associate, the economist John U. Nef, included one of the most distinguished anti-Hutchins crusaders, the laissez-faire economist Frank Knight, and ultimately provided a home for the young Deweyite turned novelist, Saul Bellow.

The committee stratagem, legitimate as it was, contributed considerably to the head of steam that was building in the faculty boiler. It was a trick. It was one way of Hutchins' getting what he wanted if he couldn't get it another, and his enemies were unmollified by the character of the appointments that indicated (or should have indicated) that what he wanted was fresh air in the institution. What vented some of the steam was the appointments themselves—but were they only window dressing, to be removed in due season?—and the fact that they were confined to the social sciences, the least respectable area of the university. The social science departments were outraged, of course, but nobody cared that much; and in addition to Ralph Tyler, Hutchins had some of the biggest guns of those departments more or less with him, including Robert Redfield in sociology and the frisky heavyweight Charles Merriam in political science. It went without saying that the trickster knew better than to try the independent committee in the natural sciences, where the real firepower was concentrated and where Hutchins was well advised (futilely, in the event) not to tread.

But there was one committee that was not in the social sciences but in the humanities—the locus of the philosophy department—a committee generically different from all the others except for the president's power of appointment to it. That one, the nonteaching, non-degree-granting Com-

mittee on the Liberal Arts, was a Hutchins baby staffed entirely with Hutchins babies and independently financed by Hutchins' friends. Its operation came close to blowing the lid off during the one year it functioned at the top of one of the twin towers of Harper Library. There, under those unvisited eaves, was where the conspiracy against the higher learning was hatching. Its personnel was unabashed evidence, even unto its staff director, the same dollar-a-year Arthur L.H. Rubin who shared his old friend Adler's duplex on the Gold Coast and had, wanted, and needed no academic credentials.

Hutchins told the story, in, as usual, capsule, to the Columbia Oral History Project thirty years afterward: "I thought that liberal education was in a fair state of collapse. . . . It happened that McKeon, Adler, Buchanan, and Barr were all interested in this question, and I thought it would be interesting to see what they could work out. This was regarded, of course, as a threat to the University faculty. I was bringing in these outsiders"—Adler was already there, but still an "outsider"—"who were in some way going to carry away the University, invade the prerogatives of the faculty. It caused a great deal of excitement, but as far as I know it did no harm." "Did they come up with any recommendations?" "They never had time, because the St. John's opportunity opened, and Barr and Buchanan went there. McKeon then became a regular member of the faculty. Adler was already a member of the faculty."^[2]

Buchanan, writing in the Amherst Graduate's Quarterly only a year after the occasion, was a bit more vivid: "The University saw red, and they almost burned our books so that we couldn't read. Our presence made . . . [the] Dean of the Humanities a great deal of trouble. It was a great relief for everybody but the donors of the money for this project when St. John's College called the members of the Liberal Arts Committee to put its program into operation."^[3] The year of the liberal arts committee—1936-37—was more furious than the Adler year had been, not only because the Adler business was more narrowly confined (and arose at the beginning of the Hutchins regime) but because it aroused otherwise apathetic elements in the faculty (and the board) who wanted nothing so much as a rest from perpetual revolution; they had approved the great structural reform of the four-year-college program and they did not see why they should be pushed in the direction of considering content .

And it was content, and, essentially, nothing but content, that interested Hutchins. Announcing the liberal arts committee's creation he had said: "In view of the state into which . . . [some] disciplines have fallen, the vocational attitudes of most students, and the . . . hostility of many professors, it is doubtful whether . . . [the liberal arts] can be adapted to contemporary

conditions. The difficulties of framing a general education without some resort to them, however, justify the attempt." The agitation over the Committee on the Liberal Arts, financed outside the university's budget and engaging the efforts of men who were not widely thought to be otherwise useful, is marvelous to reflect on in these days of the multi-mega-university in which immense academic engines flourish undisturbed in the special interest of commercial and industrial enterprises and international warfare. Why shouldn't Chicago have housed as high-minded an undertaking as the liberal arts committee? The answer could only have been, and was, nothing but a nameless terror: What is he going to do to us next?

Overnight it blew over. St. John's College in Annapolis, one of the oldest institutions of higher education in America, was on the rocks. Admirers of Hutchins got it for coffee and buns and asked him to make it the college he wanted. He should have—perhaps. He would have been putting his life where his mouth was. But Chicago was a nonpareil pulpit and St. John's none at all. And Chicago was a great university, St. John's was a bankrupt college. And Chicago was a going institution, St. John's a hard try from scratch. And Chicago, where the president had no power, was a powerful place in which to be a powerless president; St. John's was the boondocks. It would have been a stupendous gesture—a Hutchins kind of gesture. But . . . but what? Buchanan (who could have persuaded him if anyone could) remembered his last-ditch try on a train to Annapolis to meet with the board: "Why not? We don't need much money, and we can do what we want to do." "A general has a row of medals across his chest, and the row of medals distinguishes him from being nothing. The University of Chicago is my row of medals. Without them I'm nothing." So he said no. He accepted the chairmanship of the St. John's board, and Barr and Buchanan tossed a coin to determine which of them would be president and which of them dean. (Barr lost and took the presidency.)

Thus Hutchins' college—or something like it; not quite—came into being, the only college in America with a completely fixed curriculum: four years of language, four years of mathematics, four years of science, and four years of great books. The whole faculty (with the modest title of tutor, the teachers being the great minds of the ages) would have to teach all four years of the "greats," from Homer and Aeschylus and Archimedes and Ptolemy to Jefferson and Marx and Freud and Russell.

St. John's made a modest splash, largely because of its association with Hutchins. Forty years later, with a second campus at Santa Fe, New Mexico, it continued to make a modest splash. It was still the only college of its kind in the world, still the kind of college Hutchins generally envisioned, where some six hundred students on the two campuses were getting a

straight-out liberal education. Barr and Buchanan opened the school in the fall of 1937 with an overdue mortgage of $350,000 on the property. Walter Lippman paid it a state visit and ventured to predict that men would some day say that St. John's was the seedbed of the American Renaissance.

A modest splash in the educational world—and an immodest sigh of relief at Chicago. Hutchins had moved his circus and his clowns out of town and that would be that. There was no resentment over his role at Annapolis. He had his plaything now and could be expected to do his real job where his real job was and, like a busy man with a mistress, divert himself on an occasional evening off. There would be no American Renaissance outside the great universities—outside the greatest of them—and a jerk-water college would be the seedbed of another footnote in the history of the higher learning. The terror of the Committee on the Liberal Arts dissipated. In the spring of 1937 the Chicago board and faculty, each in its own way, each by its own measure, took stock of Robert Maynard Hutchins and found him (now that he'd got his shenanigans out of his system, or at least out of sight) pretty good. And, of course, in some non-academic respects, pretty great.