The Great Books debate

This is a Chicago story. It could not have happened in New York. It could only have happened in Chicago, a city that was, at the time our story begins in 1929, “like the Incredible Hulk, America’s second-largest city, burst[ing] out of its carapace, swollen with immigrants, capital, hustlers, poets, muckrakers, ideas, world-beating architecture and enviable energy.”

That description comes from a nifty little book called “A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books” by Alex Beam, and there is one more item we need to add to his list of the city’s attributes: earnestness. Chicago was and is an earnest city, a city filled with do-gooders (and some do-badders too, but for those, please refer to the political stories). Out of that earnestness, out of that sunny bounce and tomorrow-is-another-day optimism, has come so much of the city’s hectic growth in the 20th and 21st centuries. Chicago is a city that is acutely aware that it is not New York. That awareness -- sometimes correctly viewed as defensiveness -- is a renewable fuel source, just as surely as are sun or wind.

Thus it is no wonder that the Great Books movement, which has found a wry and witty biographer in Beam, began right here, in a city that has carried a bit of a chip on its shoulder from the get-go. New York would not have needed a Great Books program; New Yorkers, presumably, were already reading Milton and Herodotus and didn’t need a special installment-plan deal to help them do it. New York considers itself the center of the intellectual universe. Always has, always will. (Your quintessential New Yorker sometimes reminds me of the kid at that snooty prep school at which Lisa Simpson once matriculated. Spotting a book under her classmate’s arm, Lisa says, “Oh -- so you’re reading Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’?” The disdainful reply: “Re-reading, of course.”)

But Chicago -- ah, Chicago is insecure. Chicago thinks it has to prove itself. Always has, always will. And what better way to demonstrate scholarly gravity than by launching a book series aimed at bringing enlightenment to the masses? Even the name -- the Great Books -- reeks of Chicago, of an unabashed belief that greatness is possible to identify and, after identifying, to possess. The Great Books program smacks of a conviction that the classics matter, that earnest cerebral effort can make one a better citizen and a superior human being.

And it all began in 1929 when Robert Maynard Hutchins was named president of the University of Chicago. He brought an infectious enthusiasm, a can-do spirit, to the campus. He also brought, soon thereafter, Mortimer Adler. It was Adler, a diminutive Columbia University professor, who teamed up with Hutchins to teach a Great Books course. The idea is summed up in Hutchins’ mantra: “The aim of higher education is wisdom,” he wrote in 1936. And in what better place might one search for wisdom than in the Great Books, e.g., Plutarch’s “Lives,” Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations,” Virgil’s “Aeneid”?

The class led to a publishing project called the Great Books of the Western World, a handsomely bound 54-volume series encompassing 443 works that was sold to moms and dads across the country who were eager to rear smart, well-informed kids. “The Great Books craze gathered momentum at the end of the 1940s, and remained relatively strong into the early 1960s,” Beam writes. Sales “flat-lined in the 1970s,” he adds, “and later fell off the cliff. An attempted 1990 relaunch of the Great Books -- this time with women! -- was a disaster.”

Indeed, the culture wars of the 1970s and ‘80s, sparked in part by the accurate observation that “Great Books” actually meant “great books written by dead white males,” helped doom the movement. “Battle of the Books: The Curriculum Debate in America” (1990) by James Atlas provides a summary of the vicious skirmishes on college campuses over the issue: What should students be required to read? Heaven knows, the Great Books movement is easy enough to ridicule. Several critics who praised Beam’s book seemed to interpret its message just that way: Look at how those rubes stuffed their homes with shelf upon shelf of Aeschylus and Thucydides, of John Stuart Mill and Leo Tolstoy! Get a load of those middlebrow Midwestern suckers, trying to buy culture as if it were a new sofa or drapes! Ha!

That is not, however, the lesson I took from all of this. “A Great Idea at the Time” seems to me to be a sweetly sorrowful tale, a story of well-intentioned academics who hoped that others might feel the same joy they felt when clutching magnificent -- and ferociously challenging -- works of art. Did all those who bought the Great Books end up as scholars at places such as the University of Chicago? Of course not. But education, by the thimbleful or by the truckload, never hurt anybody, and it helped a great many. Hutchins and Adler tried. We could use their kind of optimism right now.

I see it as a poignant story, and few if any authors could have told it better, or with more bemused skepticism and deep human understanding, than Beam. I see it as a story of ambition and longing and hope. But that’s just me. I’m an earnest sort. I can’t help myself: I live in Chicago.

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jikeller@tribune.com