A Great Idea at the Time Read online

Assuming that one of the learned professor’s children had answered the door, Adler stuttered, as he often did when flustered. “I am here to see Mr. Hutchins.”

  “That’s me,” replied the vision in white. “Come on in.”

  And so the Talmudic Terrier met the Boy Wonder.

  There are many ways to characterize the unlikely pairing, and the lifelong friendship and collaboration, of Hutchins and Adler: Hutchins as Don Quixote, Adler as Sancho Panza. Hutchins as the patrician WASP whom the low-born Adler held in awe. Adler as the striving, ambitious son desperately seeking to please the laconic, distant father. I find it easier to think of them as two fascinating people, one of whom you would like to be, and one of whom you would not.

  One would like to have been Robert Hutchins. Success came easily and early to Hutchins. At least he made it look easy. By the time he met Adler, he was not only dean of a great law school, he had also married a statuesque beauty—an artist, sculptor, and novelist. Maude Hutchins was an aristocratic, enigmatic vamp who dressed only in black and white. Adler, a troll next to the godlike Hutchins, had embarked on what began as a coup de foudre love affair with a beautiful Barnard girl he spotted at a Nantucket beach party and later devolved into a loveless marriage of convenience. (“I should have had more sense,” he confessed.) Adler was brilliantly book-smart, logorrheic, and endlessly self-absorbed. He wrote not one but two autobiographies, and often added his own works to Great Books reading lists for courses he taught. I was transfixed watching an educational TV show he made in 1953 called “How to Watch Television,” an allusion to his best-selling book, How to Read a Book. Adler showed mid-century audiences “how to actively watch a television program”—by watching himself on television.

  First, Hutchins. His father was indeed a minister, and a very successful one, who taught at Oberlin College and then ran Berea College, a philanthropic, no-tuition school for the penniless children of Appalachia. Robert attended hyperliberal Oberlin (more of a cause than a college, it was said), served as an ambulance driver in World War I, and then entered his father’s alma mater, Yale, as a junior. Hutchins was a gifted writer and a charismatic speaker, “a preacher at heart,” according to biographer William McNeill. Hutchins broke with his father’s religion after leaving home in 1918 and “spent the rest of his life trying to find a substitute for his father’s Bible, without ever quite succeeding,” McNeill writes.

  Hutchins cared enough about religion in later life to remember when and where he swore off churches for good, after hearing a sermon by University of Chicago chaplain Charles Whitney Gilkey in Rockefeller Chapel. The chaplain began his sermon with the familiar chestnut “Yesterday I was on the golf course, and as I teed off I was reminded that we must follow through in life.” Something inside of Hutchins snapped. “These were not serious gatherings,” he recalled. “They were social assemblies of one kind or another.” I would not be the first to point out that proselytizing the classical education contained in the Great Books became a lifelong, quasi-religious crusade for the minister’s son from Ohio.

  By the time Adler caught up with Hutchins, the winsome dean had crammed a lifetime of accomplishments into twenty-nine short years. Voted most likely to succeed in the Yale class of 1921, he delivered the senior-class oration on the subject “Should Institutions of Learning Be Abolished?” In that speech, he likened Yale to a “convenient country club” that conferred “social graces” upon its undergraduates. Hutchins was a scholarship boy who had to wash dishes to earn his tuition. That put him in a small minority at the blue-blooded Ivy League finishing school, where the prep school hordes called boys who worked their way through college “Arabs” and “Chinese.” Hutchins was alert to the social and intellectual entropy of the self-satisfied “college man.” In another speech, he took note of Yale’s astonishing political homogeneity: Only 7 of 236 graduates of the Sheffield Scientific School identified themselves as Democrats. “Those who grow apprehensive about atheism and Bolshevism in the colleges merely betray their ignorance,” he railed, “for the most conservative places in America today, as faculty members know, are the universities.”

  The young Hutchins once remarked that being a “Yale man” had many benefits, but “these benefits had nothing to do with any intellectual development.” The idealism of Oberlin and the cynical sense of entitlement he encountered at Yale made Hutchins a small-“d” democrat for life.

  After graduation, Hutchins took a not very promising job at the Lake Placid School in upstate New York, a boarding school of last resort for well-to-do young men who were having trouble passing the College Board entrance exams. On the mistaken assumption that Hutchins was interested in education—he swore he wasn’t—Yale president James Angell quickly recalled the newly married graduate back to New Haven to be secretary of the university. Angell mentored Hutchins and allowed him to study for a law degree while working in the administration. With his easy charm and gift for gab—biographer Harry Ashmore writes that Hutchins’s many speeches for Yale were touched by “sardonic gaiety”—he addressed dozens of alumni groups, passing the hat for donations. Speaking to the reunion class of 1896, he reminded them of students, such as he, who “had not been born in Pierce Arrow limousines” and urged them to give generously to scholarship funds.

  In 1925, Hutchins received his law degree. Within a year, he was the acting dean of the Law School. By 1927 he was the dean, subtly propelled into office with Angell’s hand on his back. Hutchins had ideas, and quickly acted on them, or at least tried to. He wanted to make admission to Yale Law based solely on grades, to reduce the number of “gentlemen” finding their way in through family connections. He sought to merge legal studies with the new social sciences, and hoped to add an anthropologist and a psychologist to his faculty. Columbia Law School had just turfed out a like-minded pack of reformers, one of them another scholarship boy, William O. Douglas from Yakima, Washington, whom Hutchins promptly hired and befriended.

  Douglas’s brusque classroom manner prompted a revolt of his students, who sent a committee to Hutchins demanding the future Supreme Court justice be fired. In his memoir, Go East, Young Man, Douglas wrote that

  the students were the grandsons of very eminent and at times disreputable characters, and that as a result of the wealth of their ancestors the students had been spoiled all their lives. I said I thought it was time they learned that when they stood before a court or a jury, they would be judged by their perception and fidelity to the law, not by their ancestors.

  “It’s fine with me if you fire me,” I said.

  “Don’t be silly. I’m merely passing the complaint on to you,”

  Hutchins told me.

  “I am inclined to bear down even harder on the spoiled brats.”

  “That would be revolutionary and wonderful.”

  Hutchins was the Golden Boy. Within eighteen months, he was already receiving preliminary feelers about filling the vacant presidency of the University of Chicago. The world of elite uni-versities was quite small in 1929. Angell, for instance, had been recruited to teach philosophy at the University of Chicago by John Dewey and remained a professor there for a quarter century. He knew the men on the University of Chicago search committee and confided to them that his fractious, brilliant young colt of a dean probably needed five more years of seasoning before taking over a major research university. They politely ignored his warnings, and Hutchins eventually took the job, partly because he had a problem that was not immediately apparent on first meeting: Robert Hutchins was easily bored.

  Dreamboat at large: In the inscription to William Benton, Hutchins says he resembles “a retired, second-rate Shakespearean actor gazing into his past.” DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

  That had never been Mortimer Adler’s problem. He, too, had crammed a lifetime’s worth of work into little more than a quarter century. Like Hutchins, Adler was a scholarship student. (He remembered standing next to the future Justice Douglas, a Columbia Law School st
udent, waiting in line for a scholarship voucher at the bursar’s office.) His father’s jewelry business was not prospering after World War I, and Adler agreed to walk the twenty-five blocks down Broadway to save sixty cents a week, and to make his own lunch, to husband the two dollars a week in spending money his family could give him. Like Hutchins, Adler made himself noticed as an undergraduate. The same John Dewey who had lured James Angell to Chicago had since moved to Columbia, where he was perhaps America’s leading public intellectual, founder of the “Chicago school” of pragmatic philosophy, educational reformer, and more. The 62-year-old Dewey, known as “the Jove of Morningside Heights,” intimidated the stripling Adler not one whit. Here is part of a letter that Adler slipped under Dewey’s door after a lecture, taking his professor to task for “completely avoid[ing] any suggestion of a duality of subject and object, or of experience-of-the-thing and the-thing-experienced”:

  BUT from the standpoint of the absolute monism of naïve realism and immediate experience, as you presented it, there is the following dilemma: Either the immediately existent diagram of the staircase changes-in-existence from moment to moment, or immediate experience is solipsistic, for the evidence of two observers reporting different things to be immediately present to them at the same point and at the same time cannot be accepted by either one of the two.

  Dewey instructed his teaching assistant to tell Mr. Adler to stop writing letters.

  A couple of years later, at a Philosophy Department colloquium, Adler, now a graduate student, laid into an important Dewey text, Reconstruction in Philosophy. Dewey, known for his soft speech and mild temper, was sitting just two chairs away, building up steam. When Adler quoted a Dewey passage, and commented, “There is certainly nothing of the love of God in this utterance,” the venerable philosopher lost his cool. “Nobody is going to tell me how to love God,” he fumed, stalking out of the room.

  Like Harvard president Charles Eliot, John Dewey also casts a long shadow across this book. Unbeknownst to both of them, Dewey and Adler would spend their lifetimes in public combat. At Chicago, Dewey had been put in charge of the university’s elementary school, where he pioneered perhaps the most innovative educational curriculum in America. For Dewey, “knowledge is inseparably united with doing,” Louis Menand wrote in The Metaphysical Club:

  One of Dewey’s curricular obsessions, for instance, was cooking. . . . Dewey incorporated into the practical business of making lunch: arithmetic (weighing and measuring ingredients, with instruments the children made themselves), chemistry and physics (observing the process of combustion), biology (diet and digestion), geography (exploring the natural environments of the plants and animals), and so on.

  Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy had little use for the “alleged discipline of epistemology” so dear to the ancient Greek philosophers whose works Adler would spend his life proselytizing. “Dewey thought that ideas and beliefs are the same as hands,” Menand writes, “instruments for coping.” Dewey’s progressive educational theories rejected the notion of required curricula and “worthwhile” courses like the rubbish that Eliot had just cleared out of the Harvard catalog, such as Forensics, or hour-long recitations of useless, forgotten texts. Those were precisely the courses that Adler and Hutchins would later try to put back into the curriculum, with much attendant friction.

  That would come in the future. But in 1924, two things seemed clear. First, Mortimer Adler was never going to get tenure in the Columbia Philosophy Department. Indeed, he quickly switched to psychology. Second, Mortimer Adler was an unholy pain in the neck.

  “I was an objectionable student, in some respects perhaps repulsive,” recalled Adler, who peppered his autobiographies with similar flashes of self-awareness, e.g. his curious revelation that he registered the cable address “Analerotic, Chicago” with Western Union so he could be reached by telegraph. Early in their relationship, Adler described himself to Hutchins as “[e]asily intoxicated; is married to a beautiful woman; has no children but you never can tell; is not good-looking but quite loveable; Jewish and German by ancestry but anti-semitic and Esperanto by nature . . . always philosophical, except in water.”

  Adler, who awaits his biographer, had indeed married a handsome woman, with whom he had two sons. A notorious philanderer, he divorced his first wife after thirty-three years of marriage and later remarried an attractive Britannica secretary more than thirty years his junior. They, too, had two sons. “Mortimer didn’t have much luck with women,” Joseph Epstein reported in a posthumous appreciation. Epstein quoted from an Adlerian love letter that contained the phrase “I love you with the passions attendant thereto.” “Between his first and second marriages,” Epstein writes, “Adler became engaged to a woman who, with her boyfriend, had been hatching a plot which called for insuring him into the stratosphere and then, with the aid of her boyfriend, shaking him down and possibly bumping him off. Adler’s friends had her followed by a detective, and when the plot was revealed, he didn’t at first want to believe it, then spent months of depression trying to get over it.”

  In Adler’s note to Hutchins, the phrase except in water refers to a famous scrap of Adler-iana: He refused to take the swim test required for graduation from Columbia. A few years later, the university would award him a PhD in psychology, but no bachelor’s degree.

  Like Hutchins, Adler was a fervent believer in search of a belief. Abjuring his parents’ Judaism, Adler called himself a pagan, by which he meant a sort of deist. His oldest son Mark reports that “Judaism obviously had little effect on him. There was no Jewish tradition in the family whatsoever. When he read the classics, he found that the theology of the Roman Catholic church was quite important, and he became heavily involved with Catholic beliefs.” It is true that Adler developed an obsessive interest in the neo-Aristotelian Catholic theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, and during the 1930s he became a relatively prominent Thomist theologian. In Chicago, Adler first worshipped at the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, high churchman T. S. Eliot’s spiritual home in the Windy City. He married two Episcopalians, and at the age of 81, during a five-week stay in the hospital recuperating from a viral infection, he converted to their faith. Soon he was attending, and even preaching at, the highbrow, high-church, high-net-worth St. Chrysostom’s on Chicago’s Gold Coast, north of the downtown Loop. Rhoda Pritzker remembers seeing him at the annual Bless the Animals service:

  I went every year with my Yorkie, Emily Bronte Pritzker. She was losing her sight, but it didn’t help much, she was blind last 4 years. Anyway, everyone gathered outdoors, cops on horses, dogs, cat, rabbits, with owners, waiting. Finally the massive door opened and who should walk out very first, wearing long white robes, carrying the biggest crucifix ever designed, but Mort Adler.

  Fifteen years later, two years before his death at age 99, Adler converted to Roman Catholicism.

  Mortimer Adler was impossible, but he was not boring, and Robert Hutchins liked that. Over the years they perfected an intellectual Mutt ’n’ Jeff act, with Hutchins playing the stern protective parent and Adler the bumptious and unruly child. In multiple-page, single-spaced, self-typed letter after letter over sixty years, some of them mailed from offices on the same campus, Adler preens, struts, and begs for Hutchins’s approval. Yes, they socialized, but Adler, the author or coauthor of almost sixty books and a dervish of a typist, adored the written word. In a typical letter, “full of self-pity,” Adler asks Hutchins: “To whom else can I go with my problems, when they are of this sort? This, Bob, is the burden of friends. To be your friend, I’ve got to be able to write you letters of this sort. . . . To be my friend, you’ve got to be able to receive them.”

  When I asked writer Sidney Hyman, who knew both men for most of their lives, if Adler had been in love with Hutchins, Hyman burst out laughing. “Everybody was in love with Robert Hutchins! My God! He walked into the room and you couldn’t not be in love with him. Humorous, ironic, brave, beautiful, unflappable, dismissive of cant—” Hyman ran out
of adjectives. Hutchins “made homosexuals of us all” was his friend Scott Buchanan’s memorable comment.

  Here is a typical Hutchins bank shot, from his Chicago files. In 1948, with the Great Books frenzy in full swing, he received a letter from the St. Alphonsus Convent in New York City:

  Dear Mr. Hutchins,

  I’m interested in finding out some of the forces that reacted in Dr. Adler’s life to develop the high type of moral philosophy he has?

  I would appreciate comment from you in regard to influence Dr. Adler and his writings have been exerted and to what extent in our present educational situation. [sic]

  Thank you very kindly,

  Sister M. Saint Agnes

  Hutchins replied, with a blind copy to Adler, of course:

  Dear Sister Agnes,

  I am sorry, I can’t explain Mr. Adler.

  Sincerely yours,

  Robert M. Hutchins

  At that first meeting in New Haven, Adler and Hutchins talked, it seemed to both men, forever. During the first three hours, they discussed evidence. Hutchins was interested in the legal exceptions to the hearsay rule: for instance, the occasional allowance of deathbed proclamations as evidence, on the grounds that men and women rarely lie when facing their Maker. “Hutchins wondered, quite properly, whether modern psychology might not throw light on these accretions of the law,” Adler later wrote in his 1977 autobiography, Philosopher at Large, “either by supporting or by challenging the assumptions of the judges who created these exceptions to the rule excluding hearsay.”