osprey_archer | Book Review: A Great Idea at the Time

I read Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books as if it were a box of bonbons. The whole story is just peak mid-twentieth century America: the boy wonder college president, the brain trust (largely his classmates from Yale!) who picked out the works for the Great Books of the Western World, their absolute self-assurance that this was the best that had ever been written and thought and the almost messianic belief in the power of Art and Culture to save us all.

”I’m not saying that reading and discussing the Great Books will save humanity from itself,” Hutchins said, “but I don’t know anything else that will.” Later in life he became obsessed with creating a one-world government to control the threat of the atom bomb, for which he felt a tormenting guilt, as the first tests that eventually led to the bomb occurred on the University of Chicago campus during Hutchins' tenure as president (on the grounds of the old football field, available for testing because Hutchins had disbanded the football team).

Given this incredibly high ambition, both Hutchins (the boy wonder college president) and Mortimer Adler, his right-hand man, died convinced that they were failures. Beam mentions discussing this with Charles Van Doren, who knew them both, and Beam commented, surely that's not the case?, and Van Doren replies gently, "No, I think they were right." Certainly in both cases their reach far exceeded their grasp.

(And yes, this is THAT Charles Van Doren, who acquired national infamy as a quiz show cheat. After his disgrace, Mortimer Adler stood by him and gave him a job as an encyclopedia salesman to help him get back on his feet, which is a lovely and human moment from the famously abrasive Adler.)

In general, though, most people connected with the creation of the Great Books were phenomenally successful. My favorite is Beam's commentary on Benton, who in 1945 became “assistant secretary of state for what the United States would never call propaganda - he oversaw the United States Information Agency, among other things…”

The Great Books were enormously popular (in the sense of sales if not, perhaps, in the sense of actually being read) through the 1960s, but as the counterculture gained steam they fell out of favor. However, Beam points out, they have had a long, long afterlife, during which they remained a hobby for a fervent though graying part of the population - he describes his attendance at a weekend Great Books conference, where the book discussions sound delightful - and the curriculum (with some emendations) at the tiny college of St. John's.

I find St. John's enchanting. A year or two before I went to college, Smithsonian magazine published an article about St. John's, and its eccentricity thrilled me so much (the Johnnies' game of choice is croquet!) that I actually considered applying. But upon further consideration, the book list defeated me. I could have gotten on board with the ancient Greek classics, but I just couldn't with reading Newton and Lavoisier and various other centuries-old scientific thinkers.

(This was apparently a stumbling block for Hutchins' Great Books, too: many, many people, including a large portion of the committee!, thought the inclusion of outdated scientific works was ridiculous, no matter how ground-breaking they had been at the time. Other parts of Aristotle's work might be for all time but his physics certainly were not.)

I still find it enchanting, though, and I did feel a bit wistful about the might-have-beens as I read it. When some Johnnies got arrested during the Civil Rights Movement, they scrawled ancient Greek graffiti inside the jail cells. How cool is that?

This is, of course, more or less the kind of college that Hutchins wanted to turn the University of Chicago into; he had only a very peripheral involvement in St. John's. It is certainly an irony of his life that his vision was realized so fully by someone else. But there is something beautiful about the fact that this vision was realized by someone.