27
The Great Books Industry

His disappointing encounters with adult legislators led Hutchins to a new emphasis on a theme he had largely ignored in his fight to reform college teaching and university research: "This pedagogical principle that subjects requiring experience can be learned only by the experienced, leads to the conclusion that the most important branch of education is the education of adults. We sometimes seem to think of education as something like the measles, mumps, chicken-pox, or whooping-cough: having had it once, one need not, indeed one can not, have it again.

"To say that humans should learn only in childhood would mean that they were human only in childhood. And it would mean that they were unfit to be citizens of a republic." Republican citizenship required the continual exercise of the citizen's intelligence to achieve and extend justice, peace, freedom, and order; "the ideal republic is the republic of learning, the utopia by which all actual republics are measured."^[1]

Education is not a matter for children: "Apart from mathematics, metaphysics, logic, astronomy, and similar theoretical subjects, it is clear that comprehension comes only with experience. A learned Greek"—the learned Greek was Aristotle—"remarked that young men should not listen to lectures on moral philosophy, and he was right. Moral philosophy, history, politics, economics, and literature can convey their full meaning only in maturity. When I taught Macbeth to boys in a preparatory school, it was a blood-and-thunder story, a good one, and well worth teaching, but a blood-and-thunder story still. Macbeth can mean what it meant to Shakespeare only when the reader has had sufficient experience, vicarious or otherwise, of marriage and ambition to understand the issues and their implications.

"A boy may be a brilliant mathematician or musician and I have known

several astronomers who were contributing to the international journals at the age of thirteen. But I never knew a child of that age who had much that was useful to say about the ends of human life, the purposes of organized society, and the means of reconciling freedom and order. It is subjects like these about which we are most confused and about which we must obtain some clarification if our civilization is to survive."^[2]

To the extent that it faithfully reflected the education of adolescents, adult education in the United States—in contrast, say, with the adult Folk School system of Denmark—was essentially a vocational program. It assumed that the student would work under the geographical and technical conditions under which he or she has studied: "Vocational agricultural training is given to students in the Dustbowl, who race for Chicago the moment they are through school. Mechanical training is given on obsolescent machines in Chicago to students who find themselves confronted with entirely different ones when they get a job."^[3] The place to train hands for industry was in industry, as the wartime training of airplane mechanics demonstrated; the aircraft companies produced better mechanics in an intensive few weeks than the schools could produce in years.

The curse of vocationalism in adult education followed from the vocationalism which had overspread the universities because of the difficulty of interesting young people in what were known as "academic subjects": "The whole apparatus of football, fraternities, and fun is a means by which education is made palatable to those who have no business in it."^[4] But every boy and girl had a business to have as much true education as he or she could absorb, without regard to financial capability—education interestingly offered through the employment of great books instead of textbooks, and discussion instead of lectures.

"The fact is that the best practical education is the most theoretical one. This is probably the first time in human history in which change on every front is so rapid that what one generation has learned of practical affairs in the realm of politics, industry, business, and technology is of little value to the next. What the father has learned of the facts of life is almost useless to his son. It is principles, and everlastingly principles, not data, not facts, not helpful hints, but principles which the rising generation requires if it is to find its way through the mazes of tomorrow"^[5] —and the application of principle to the facts of life if the risen generation was to find its way through the mazes of today.

Where it wasn't vocational, adult education in the extension divisions of the urban colleges and universities in the first third of the twentieth century was almost entirely remedial or recreational. It taught arts and crafts for leisure time or retirement, or it provided training in fields like

language for immigrants or for natives who had been deprived of childhood schooling. But there was another, almost forgotten tradition in adult education characterized by the old Chautauqua movement and a scattering of public forums that dealt with the liberal studies. One of these, in the 1920s, was the People's Institute of New York under Everett Dean Martin, where series after series of free lectures were offered to an audience interested in nonvocational self-improvement. One of the lecturers—who were paid a pittance—was young Mortimer Adler of the Columbia University psychology department.

In 1926 Martin, prodded by Adler, Scott Buchanan, and other of his lecturers, obtained a two-year grant from the Carnegie Corporation to introduce great books discussion groups around the city, staffed by rising young Columbians like Clifton Fadiman, Jacques Barzun, Richard McKeon, Mark Van Doren, and Whitaker Chambers (of later Alger Hiss case fame and infamy). These relative youngsters—two of them serving as coleaders of each discussion group—were all products of John Erskine's general honors course at Columbia, in which, instead of textbooks, the course materials were the classics.

The People's Institute experiment was a success, but there was no further funding for it. Ten years and more later, Adler and Hutchins, teaching the great books as a freshman honors course at Chicago, were moved to set up such courses for adults at the university's extension division downtown. The courses, taught by young members of the faculty, were not particularly popular in competition with the traditional evening school subjects. Then Adler concocted the scheme of establishing discussion groups around Chicago, much in the People's Institute manner of fifteen years before. The Chicago Public Library offered the use of its branches. The problem was to find a large enough number of group leaders, and Adler suggested to the university's dean of extension that the university train laymen to lead groups. Since the Socratic method involved the asking, not the answering, of questions and forbade lecturing, intelligent laymen might be ably trained to do the job and perhaps do it better than professional academics habituated to being experts and venting their expertise in lectures.

The effort, undertaken in 1944, was an immediate success. Other library systems, first in the Middle West and then all over the country, came into the program, and the University of Chicago found itself sending out extension faculty instructors to conduct training programs for lay leaders whose burgeoning groups met not only in libraries but in churches, factories, service and veterans' organizations, and in schoolrooms in the evening.

The burgeoning program was beset by two difficulties. Public libraries

could not lay their hands on enough copies of say, Dante, Plato, or Gibbon, to supply a group of twenty-five or thirty at the same time. Other agencies and institutions that sponsored groups were even harder pressed. Besides, the sponsors of the program urged group members to buy, rather than borrow, the books, since it was a Hutchins-Adler dogma that a book well read (and reread) was a book well marked. For the purpose of group discussion it was important that the participants all had the same translation of a given text and, if possible, the same edition for page referral in the course of discussion. Bookstores, like libraries, did not stock enough such copies of a required book to meet the simultaneous demand of twenty-five or thirty customers—or, as was often the case when there were several groups in the same community, for fifty, seventy-five, or a hundred copies.

That wasn't all. Lists of readings had to be developed for second-, third-and fourth-year groups—ultimately through ten years—plus readings for high school and junior high school programs. And the university extension division was soon over its ears in administering a nationwide undertaking. But it wasn't until the war ended that the Great Books Foundation was established as an independent entity with Hutchins as board chairman. At this point Lynn A. Williams, Jr., came into the picture. Trained as a lawyer and an engineer, Williams was an ostensibly roughneck industrial executive with a passion for the liberal education of adults without regard to their previous schooling. As vice-president of the Stewart Warner Corporation, running its Indianapolis plant, he solicited the university's assistance in setting up a great books program for his workers on company time, with Adler and another Chicago faculty man coming to Indianapolis to conduct the discussions.

The Chicago people, Hutchins included, were at once taken with Williams and his wrong-side-of-the-tracks facade. (Item: "You want to give the competition a pasting? You hire their best salesman, send him to Maine, and fire him." Item: "Don't can the guy who's no good; can the guy who hired him.") Hutchins offered Williams the presidency of the Great Books Foundation—and later the vice-presidency of the university—and Williams quit industry and became an academic.

In the last months of the war and the first postwar years the nationwide great books discussion program took off like a modest wildfire. The six- or eight-session training of volunteer leaders was almost invariably successful, with laymen on the whole readily mastering the art of intellectual inquisition. With group members required to argue from the books themselves in conjunction with their own common sense and common experience, and the one-upmanship of the better schooled thus excluded, groups soon came to consist of a remarkably broad social mixture. Men and

women who had never before mingled socially discovered that mingling intellectually was a lively introduction; the corridor hummed during the coffee-break in the middle of the two-hour sessions, and groups often regaled themselves with end-of-the-year social gatherings. The program, holding its participants from year to year, went far to confirm an old Hutchins thesis: persons of the most limited backgrounds and commonplace occupations were as susceptible to an exciting kind of self-education as their more liberally educated fellow citizens.

In the course of a long, prophetic lifetime Hutchins made two prophecies that the late Fiorello La Guardia would call beauts. In 1920 two of his undergraduate friends at Yale came to him with the mock-up, or dummy, of a projected weekly magazine; he told them it would never go and advised them to forget it. (The two friends were Henry R. Luce and Briton Hadden, and they did not forget it; the projected weekly was Time. ) The second of the two beauts is dated 1947, when Hutchins was chairman of the board of the newly established Great Books Foundation. In the last years of the 1940s the great books program for adults acquired strong momentum across the country. Seeing it as a tool to help pry the whole of American education away from vocationalism and "presentism," Hutchins and Adler flogged it (as the term would be a generation later) with an immense amount of hype (as the term would be yet another generation later). Articles appeared not only in the highbrows but in publications like Life . Public demonstration discussions were mounted in major cities. Hutchins and Adler packed three thousand people into Chicago's Orchestra Hall for a panel session on Plato's Apology , and the city's semiliterate mayor proclaimed a Great Books Week. Carried away by the hoopla, Hutchins prophesied that fifteen million people would be involved in the great book program within five years.

He was wrong by something like 14,957,000. The movement peaked in the flush of the first postwar years to a maximum of some 43,000 enrollees in some three hundred communities—a not inconsiderable achievement. Then it leveled off, perhaps coincidentally with the onset of McCarthyist anti-intellectualism in the 1950s. It never recovered its sensational early steam, and Hutchins and Adler drifted away from it. Thirty years later it was still in business nationwide (and Lynn Williams was its board chairman). It was still the nearest thing the country had to liberal education for adults.

With the university out from under the administration of the program after 1947, money to support the independent Great Books Foundation had to be come by elsewhere. Paul Mellon's Old Dominion Fund kicked in. So, later, did the short-lived Fund for Adult Education (a Ford Founda-

tion subsidiary set up by Hutchins after he had left the university for its associate directorship).

But the necessity to obtain the books in quantity provided the solution of the financial problem. The foundation published t paperback sets of eight or ten readings for each year's program and sold them at a modest profit to the participants. (There was no tuition fee; the lay leaders were unpai and the meeting places were provided without cost. The book profits, plus continued grants, also supported the travel and salaries of two or three leader trainers and an office staff.)

Supplying cheap paperback reprints to the community in the libraries and churches was one thing; supplying them to the Fat Men was another. The Fat Men were—or was—the brain child of Vice-president Will Munnecke, late of Marshall Field's. In the spring of 1943—oh yes, there was a world war on—Munnecke bethought himself of a little scheme on which he sounded out a few of the trustees and other Chicago nabobs with whom he was on good terms socially. The response was gratifying, and he went to Hutchins with the proposal that there be an invitation-only great books group of leading (i.e., financially corpulent or fat) Chicagoans and their wives to meet once a month at the posh University Club downtown, with Hutchins and Adler as its coleaders and Milton Mayer as water boy. And so the class continued, with a necessarily changing constituency, for thirty years. (Adler was delighted, when Hutchins left the university, to go on conducting the class solo, and uninterruptably, in violation of the ironclad tradition of two leaders for each group. He subsequently set up his own Men's group in San Francisco, and another one as an "executives' seminar" at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. A similar elite class was organized, with Adler and Mayer as its leaders, in Indianapolis, and it was as a member of this group that Lynn Williams moved into the great books circle.)

As "the generals" took more and more of his time and energies, Hutch-ins was ever harder pressed to pay attention to the things he cared about and the things he had to do at the university. He cared about the great books program, made speeches about it, and took part, with Adler (and occasionally Mayer), in public demonstration discussions of sure-fire items, like the Declaration of Independence and the Communist Manifesto in combination, in well-filled auditoriums across the country. But he had to leave the administrative work to Adler and the people at the extension division. Adler, with no generals on his back, was eager to jump into the expanding program and serve as its powerhouse.

Hutchins tried hard to show up for the Fat Men's class, for obvious reasons. It included a few of his influential friends among the one-third of

his board who joined it. None of his most obdurate enemies on the board took part, though they were invited to. And apart from trustees it included some donors to the university and a few influential lawyers. The atmosphere of the meetings was saucy and refreshing, with the Gold Coast elite submitting themselves to friendly inquisition on the sorts of political, economic, religious, and, to some extent, the personal phobia and mania that were rarely mentioned, much less argued, in their respectable circles. Had the meetings not been closed to the press, Colonel McCormick's Chicago Tribune could have reported some subversive discussion, with supposedly nice people (the town's very nicest) batting Marx, free love, atheism, and even the Republican Party around. The Hutchins badinage was a mite restrained among the rich, but it still provided an unfailing entertainment, and some real enlightenment. The Fat Men's was a good class, and a tactically useful one.

But the finding of the books for it was something special. The gentry were not given to scrabbling in the second-hand bookstores: they were given to getting what they wanted new and to getting it when they wanted it. This meant the Chicago bookstores turning up thirty-five or forty copies of a bit of Plotinus, Hume, or Faraday in a hurry. (Adler's reading list for this special group was independent of the list for the regular program.)

The book problem soon seemed to be insoluble. But there was one Fat Man who specialized in solving the insoluble, at, if possible, a profit and, if possible, a colossal profit. This was William Burnett Benton—who had shortened his name to William B. to save time, and then to plain William to save still more time—the Hutchins classmate from Yale who served as on-and-off vice-president of the University of Chicago and as publisher and one-third owner (he had given the university the other two-thirds) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Benton suggested to Hutchins and Adler that the Britannica publish a great set of the Great Books.