After living in New York City the first 27 years of my life, then moving to Chicago and living there for the next 22 years, I might have expected, when I made my next move westward, to settle on San Francisco as my permanent home.
I lived there only 10 years, as director of the Institute for Philosophical Research. In 1963 the Institute, which started in San Francisco in 1952, was relocated in Chicago, where I have been living ever since.
The move back to Chicago occurred because of my increased involvement in the affairs of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica company. I jumped at the opportunity to return.
This is a friendlier city than New York. Living near Lake Michigan is more beautiful than living near the Hudson River, which I did as a young man. I like the Art Institute, the Chicago Symphony and the general cultural atmosphere in Chicago.
I arrived here the first time in 1930 at the invitation of Robert Hutchins, then president of the University of Chicago. He was interested in my teaching a General Honors Course with him.
The plan was to take a select group of freshmen and read the great books with them for two years-in the Columbia University fashion, discussing one book a week for two hours.
This was something I had been doing at Columbia with Mark Van Doren, the eminent poet, essayist and literary critic who was one of Columbia’s most beloved teachers.
I was appointed associate professor of the Philosophy of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. Teaching the great books with Bob Hutchins was one fine experience.
Some of the transcontinental travelers who included a visit to the Hutchins-Adler seminar were Katherine Cornell, Lillian Gish, Ethel Barrymore, Orson Welles, Westbrook Pegler and Eugene Meyer, publisher of the Washington Post, whose daughter Katherine (to become Kay Graham) was a member of the class.
Of all the celebrities who found some fascination in these seminars, the only one who challenged the whole enterprise was Gertrude Stein, who had been invited to lecture at the university.
At a dinner party for her given by Bob and Maude Hutchins, both Bob and I were absent because our class met that night. After class was over, we joined the guests for cognac and coffee.
As we took our places at the table, Gertrude turned to Bob and said, “Where have you been, Hutchins?” Taken aback by the abruptness and forcefulness of her attack, Bob replied, “Miss Stein, Mr. Adler and I have been teaching the great books.”
She pounced on him with even more vigor. “Don’t call me Miss Stein,” she said, “call me Gertrude Stein. What are the great books?”
After an explanation, Gertrude asked quickly, “Do you read these books in their original languages or in English translations?”
Hutchins explained that our freshman students did not have competence in Greek, Latin, Italian or French, pointing out that ideas somehow transcend the language in which they are first expressed.
“Not so,” our grand inquisitor replied. “Greek ideas must be studied in Greek, Latin ideas in Latin, and so on.”
Shortly thereafter the police arrived to take Gertrude on a tour of Chicago at night in a squad car. The way I felt about her at that moment, I wished they had done it earlier and taken her for a ride Chicago-style.
After the party broke up, Alice B. Toklas turned to me and said: “This has been a wonderful evening. Gertrude has said things tonight that it will take her 10 years to understand.”
In 1947, with the rapid growth of the great books movement, the Great Books Foundation came into being with help from the University of Chicago and contributions from several charitable foundations.
Within a year, more than 7,000 adults in the Chicago area enrolled in seminars organized by the Foundation. Less than a year later, more than 43,000 persons had become members of great books groups in 300 cities all over the country.
The mayor proclaimed the week of Sept. 25, 1948, Great Books Week.
During that week I delivered a number of addresses, one, entitled “The Great Books in Today’s World,” to a large audience at the Fair Department Store. Bob Hutchins and I conducted a discussion of Plato’s dialogue on the trial of Socrates before a capacity audience of 3,000 in Orchestra Hall.
Participants, seated around a table, included Marshall Field Jr., publisher of the Chicago Sun; Meyer Kestnbaum, president of Hart, Schaffner & Marx; and Ralph Helstein, head of the Meatpacker’s Union.
In 1950 the University of Chicago Round Table, nationally broadcast by NBC, devoted a half hour to a conversation between Clare Boothe Luce and me about the great books and the great ideas.
Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke were members of the University Club great books class from its beginning in 1942-43. Our association prompted Walter, who was chairman of the Container Corp., to talk to me about his dreams for Aspen, following the striking success of the Goethe Festival, which had been held there during the summer of 1949. Our conversations led to the establishment of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, with which I have been intimately affiliated ever since.
In 1949, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Goethe’s birth, invitations were sent to Goethe scholars in this country and abroad. What created nationwide excitement was the announcement that Albert Schweitzer would come from Africa to deliver a talk.
A gift of $5,000 to his hospital in Lambarene played no small part in persuading him to come. Even so, he might not have made the long journey but for his mistaken impression that Aspen was a suburb of Chicago and not 1,000 miles or more farther west.
Looking back on my life since I left home, I count myself unusually fortunate that almost all the work I have elected to do has consisted of tasks that I would gladly have taken on even if I had had an independent income.
According to a story told by Plutarch, Plato, when asked to enumerate the circumstances for which he was grateful, mentioned being born a Greek rather than a barbarian, and in the time of Socrates rather than at any other time.
Among the elements of good fortune in my life, I would certainly include being born in the United States and being born in this century. In many critical respects, the environment, both physical and social, has changed drastically in my lifetime.
I have grown increasingly aware of the threats to the future raised by the deterioration of the environment, population growth, the depletion of energy and other resources, the shortage of food and the failures of schooling. Throughout all this, I have not found it necessary to adopt different principles or to reorder my priorities.
Some of my contemporaries have been strongly affected by current crises. To use the current jargon, many of them have suffered alienation, future shock and identity crisis, loss of faith or a shift in values.
Yet, in all honesty, I have not found life more difficult, more complicated, more dehumanized, more uncomfortable, more fearful. However difficult it may be to lead a good human life at any time, I doubt that it is any more difficult to make a good life for one’s self today than it was at any earlier moment in human history.
The future no longer seems benign to me, as it once did. I am concerned about the circumstances under which my children will live and the kind of lives they will be able to lead. I am concerned about the human prospect.
