The classics of Western civilization—often known as Great Books—have an image problem. On campus, some faculty members detest them on the grounds that Western civilization has nothing to offer, while others cringe at the dominance of “dead, white males.” Those who love the works mostly remain behind the scenes.
Now Alex Beam, a columnist with the Boston Globe, attempts to skewer the Great Books even further. He has written a short, irreverent volume, A Great Idea at the Time, that caricatures some of the Great Books promoters. He also pokes fun at the fondness some people feel for these classics.
But his effort backfires—even he ends up liking the Great Books.
Attempting to follow in the footsteps of Simon Winchester, who covered the 70-year history of the compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary with a light touch, Beam chronicles the push to revive the Great Books in the 1930s and 1940s. Led by Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, and Mortimer Adler, his intellectual sidekick, the movement was an ambitious effort to promote western classics. The characters were colorful and the enterprise was a bit strange.
Hutchins was a brilliant law professor who became president of the University of Chicago at the age of 30. At Chicago he established a core curriculum centered on the classics, aided by Adler, a philosopher whom he lured from Columbia University. Hutchins taught an honors course that quickly became, in Beam’s words, “one of the most famous undergraduate courses in the country.”
But the fame surrounding Great Books came from the public, not the students. The name, complete with capitalization, is familiar to many Americans because of Great Books discussion groups. These started with seminars in downtown Chicago for businessmen and their wives, but by 1947 there were 3,000 groups in the Midwest. The movement was big—although the fact that it was based in the Midwest might explain the disdain expressed in a New Yorker feature in 1952, and perhaps even by Beam today. (My father, now 93, remembers participating in a Great Books group in St. Louis. An engineering school graduate, he recalls: “It introduced me to works I had never read.”)
Given the difficulty of reading works by Plato and Shakespeare, this grassroots activity was astounding. The postwar years revealed what became known as “middlebrow” culture. Middle-income people, many with college degrees, were eager to learn. Beam points out that this was also the era of the Saturday Review of Literature, the Book-of-the-Month Club, and by Will and Ariel Durant (not to mention the card game Canasta).
The popularity of Great Books groups led to a fateful decision by Hutchings and Adler—to join with Encyclopedia Britannica (already partly owned by the university) and publish a Great Books collection.
Given the complexities of publishing, that may not have been a wise decision; an even less judicious one was to include a two-volume index, supervised by Adler, that linked topics (“great ideas”) with their locations in the Great Books. This index, dubbed Syntopicon, gave an other-worldly aspect to the project (the indexing also cost a great deal of money).
The entire process of publishing and marketing these tomes gives Beam opportunities to ridicule. For example, he excerpts transcripts of distinguished professors deliberating whether to accept into the canon Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Herman Melville (they made it) or Walt Whitman and Mark Twain (they did not).
But then the collection didn’t sell (after all, points out Beam, it was published in nine-point type without introductions or footnotes). So the university found a powerhouse salesman to unload the books. This is the most troubling part of the whole phenomenon (at least for me). It was, indeed, the “encyclopedia salesman” at the door. Beam reports that the Federal Trade Commission twice “busted” Encyclopedia Britannica for misrepresentation in selling Great Books.
But beyond this fiasco, Beam is always gunning for Mortimer Adler. Beam describes Adler as an unlikable person without fully telling us what was so wrong with him. Yes, he was eccentric. And, yes, the Syntopicon should probably be laid to rest (if it hasn’t been already).
Even so, I do not understand what was so bad about him and why the libertarian humorist P.J. O’Rourke (in a cover blurb) calls the Great Books movement an “intellectual fraud.” Hutchins, Adler, and associates such as Mark Van Doren may have been arrogant or patronizing. But what’s wrong with preserving knowledge and disseminating it?
Furthermore, Beam is inappropriately flippant. For example, he takes a gratuitous hit at President Bush. Beam is discussing efforts in England to list the 100 best books—long before the Great Books movement developed in the United States. A selection came in from the Prince of Wales (later to be Edward VII), known more for his affairs than his knowledge of literature. Beam says that he had a “George W. Bush-like distance from the literary affairs of the day.”
That’s nothing, though, in comparison with Beam’s libel of the Dartmouth Review. Speaking about the 1990 reprint of the Great Books collection, Beam claims that at the time “the ultraconservative Dartmouth Review was publishing excerpts from Adolph Hitler’s call to action, Mein Kampf.” This is not true; in a 1998 National Review column Jeffrey Hart explained that “someone slipped a quotation from Mein Kampf into a much longer quotation from Theodore Roosevelt that always appears on the Review masthead.” Once the editor discovered this, he stopped distribution of the paper, wrote an apology, and issued a new edition. But the vandalized text became scripture.
Despite these lapses, Beam refreshingly takes a different tack in the second half of the book. He attends some Great Books seminars; he visits St. John’s College (bastion of Great Books); and he finds people who grew up with the Great Books—and loved them.
By the end of the book, Beam himself is hooked. He gobbles up works by Aristophanes, John Stuart Mill, and Epictetus. After a Great Books weekend (part of his research) where he discussed Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, he buys a popular thriller at O’Hare Airport. He can’t stand it. His tastes have changed. “Curse you Sophocles! Curse you, Sherwood Anderson!” he says.
In sum, the name Great Books has baggage, Western civilization has baggage, and some of the people who tried to resurrect the Great Books were a little weird and got carried away. But the Great Books survive, and we will probably survive better if we read them.