A Great Idea at the Time Read online

  First, Adler drafted a pitch letter for the money men, and sent it to Benton for vetting. The perpendicular pronoun gave pause:

  Mortimer, on your third paragraph I hope you won’t object if I suggest that you reread it and consider carefully the pronoun “I.” It is not “I, Mortimer Adler,” who is trying to sell the Great Books or the patrons’ edition. It is “we, the Encyclopedia Britannica.” It is the Encyclopedia Britannica who has the big stake here and the big risk here, and if this were not true, I would not be sitting here at 11 o’clock at night reading your letter and pondering it and answering it.

  The solicitation, ultimately signed by Adler and Hutchins, summoned forth 250 subscriptions. But Adler had promised 500. So he spent six months traveling, cajoling and jawboning and selling. He was good at it. Paul Mellon sprang for 10 sets, to be distributed to colleges and libraries. Kay Graham’s father, Washington Post owner Adolph Meyer, had always been a big Adler fan. He bought 15.

  Late on a Friday afternoon, Adler secured an appointment with the taciturn Earl Puckett, chairman of Allied Stores, then the largest department-store chain in America. Here’s my idea, Adler said. Buy a set of the Great Books for each one of your eighty-five stores, and have them donate the books to the local public library for some free publicity. Puckett didn’t answer, but buzzed his secretary for a list of his store locations. Without speaking, he placed check marks next to roughly half the store names, and then rose to leave for the weekend. “We’ll take forty-five sets,” Puckett said.

  Hutchins and Adler tried this same gambit with Conrad Hilton. They cornered him in a drawing room of the Twentieth Century Limited transcontinental train and proposed that he buy a set of Great Books for the lobby of each of his hotels. No sale.

  Clare Booth Luce, Henry Luce’s wife and also a big fan of the Western canon, secured Adler an appointment with Texas oilman H. L. Hunt, said to be the eighth-richest man in America. The right-wing Hunt was obsessed with the spread of “liberalism” in America and had been bankrolling various educational enterprises—“ill-conceived efforts at propaganda,” Adler later called them. Adler met him twice, but couldn’t close the sale.

  Two days later, he bumped into Sears Roebuck chairman General Robert Wood in Chicago.

  “Were you in Texas recently?” Wood asked.

  Yes, Adler replied. Wood had just received a phone call from Hunt, inquiring whether Adler was a member of the Communist Party. The Communist Manifesto was one of the Great Books, and Hunt wasn’t buying.

  By 1952, McCarthyism was in full swing, and even though the selection committee had purged left-leaning troublemakers like Thorstein Veblen and Vladimir Lenin, the Manifesto ruffled some feathers. When the Bookies showed up at the White House to present President Truman with his set, a Hearst reporter queried Benton about his promotional necktie, which bore the names of all seventy-four Great Books authors.

  “What’s on that tie? Marx?”

  “That’s for Hart Schaffner and Marx,” Benton replied, breezily departing the press area.

  Publication means reviews. Regrettably, Henry Luce didn’t own every newspaper and magazine in America. Adler would later claim that everyone loved the GBWW, but that was not the case at all. Even his friend Gilbert Highet, who had taught at both St. John’s and Columbia, expressed plenty of reservations in the New York Times. Highet called the set’s omissions “astonishing”:

  For 1,500 years the world read Cicero (omitted) rather than Aristotle and Plato; for 2,000 years it read Horace and Sallust (omitted) rather than Ptolemy and Archimedes. The education of the West has long cultivated Racine and Moliere and Ariosto and Tasso; they are omitted. It has seldom included Fourier and Faraday; they are printed at length.

  Nobody understood why the scientific works had been included. In the Atlantic, another Adler pal and Columbia stalwart, Jacques Barzun, asked, “Of the score of scientists and mathematicians in the collection, how many are in any sense readable?” Even Science magazine, the official organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, noted that “few thinking persons are likely to linger very long over, say, tables giving for the 1840s, monthly magnetic declinations at Toronto, St. Petersburg, Washington, Lake Athabasca and Fort Simpson,” included in the GBWW text of Michael Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity.

  Writing in the Saturday Review, Harvard science historian Bernard Cohen echoed his colleague George Sarton’s earlier indictment of the scientific material. “The ‘great books’ of science in this collection have only a kind of archaeological value” was the opening line of his withering review. Cohen pointed out that even men of science found works like Ptolemy’s Almagest impenetrable, and read them only with the aid of commentaries. “While we must applaud the first printing in English of translations of Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Kepler, we must also ask what general reader will ever read them?”

  John Leonard was among the many critics who unloaded on the Syntopicon’s 102 Great Ideas, in the National Review: “We are never told just how the pincer-like movement of the minds of Adler and Hutchins arrived at that curiously frightening number. It reminds me of the radio advertisements for a beer brewed in Southern California, which went through exactly as many trial runs before being perfected.”

  The most hostile review of all appeared in the New Yorker, from the pen of Dwight MacDonald. This essay, “The Book-of-the-Millennium Club,” is still used in writing classes, as a 4,700-word definition of invective. MacDonald mocked the selections, especially the scientific works. (“Infinitely unreadable.”) He mocked the complete absence of explanatory notes, victims of the Hutchins-Adler conceit that the texts spoke for themselves. (“Lacking such help, how can one be expected to take an interest in such problems, vivid enough to Aquinas, as . . . ‘Whether We Should Distinguish Irascible and Concupiscible Parts in the Superior Appetite?’”) He accused the editors of skimping on translations. (“Charles Eliot Norton’s prose Dante is unbelievably graceless.”) He mocked Hutchins’s much-quoted, high-flown rhetoric at the Waldorf launch party. (“Madison Avenue cant . . . poppycock.”) He thought Adler’s philosophical work was a joke. (“A jungle of jargon, a Luna Park of ‘nuclear agreements,’ ‘taxonomic questions,’ ‘explicative issues,’ etc.”) He couldn’t stand the Syntopicon. (“One has the feeling of being caught in a Rube Goldberg contraption.”)

  MacDonald dared to ask, “Why a set at all?” And naturally he provided an answer. The GBWW aimed “to fix the canon of the Sacred Texts by printing them in a special edition. . . . In its massiveness, its technological elaboration, its fetish of The Great, and its attempt to treat systematically and with scientific precision materials for which the method is inappropriate, Dr. Adler’s set of books is a typical expression of the religion of culture that appeals to the American academic mentality.”

  Well, everyone gets a bad review now and then. But a more important problem quickly raised its head. Just as Benton and his cohorts had feared in their darkest moments, no one wanted to buy the Great Books.

  In 1952, Britannica sold 1,863 sets of the GBWW, which listed for $250.00. In 1953, it sold 138 sets. The problem was that the Britannica salesmen, who worked door-to-door, didn’t much care for the Great Books. It was a lot easier, and more profitable, to sell a family on the world’s greatest encyclopedia than to sell a collection of musty writings that for some reason included faraway magnetic declinations, whatever those were. Something had to be done.

  After two years of anemic sales, Benton finally hired a super-salesman to fix the problem, one Kenneth Harden, who had been selling encyclopedias for thirty-seven years. Harden was a foot-in-the-door man, and he and Benton tossed the initial GBWW sales playbook to the winds. Let’s stop marketing to the 2 percent of the country who are “eggheads,” Harden argued. “Let’s go after the mass market—the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker.”

  Harden set up a special training program for his new, dedicated, Los Angeles-based sales force, “at which new
salesmen learned how to use the Syntopticon [sic] and to pronounce the names of the authors. (Reading them is not required),” Time magazine reported. Depending on the quality of the paper and the luxury of the bindings, the books were available in a variety of prices ranging up to $1,175, and of course salespeople pressed their installment plan—$10 down and $10 a month, sometimes offering to throw in a Bible, bookcase, or dictionary if it helped to close the sale.

  Benton wanted to sell directly into people’s core anxieties, as he explained the set’s “snob appeal”:

  Good promotion and good selling interpret [the set’s intellectual] promises in terms of the individual’s basic desires. How does he become more attractive to the opposite sex? How does he impress people at a party? How does he learn what he needs to know in order to get promoted? How does he acquire the sheen and the glamor of people such as Hutchins, Adler, the Fat Man’s Class in Chicago and the five hundred Founders? How does he impress the boss?

  Light reading for “the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker.”

  Simultaneously, Britannica carpet-bombed magazines and newspapers with its national ad campaigns. This text ran all over the country:

  A problem? Consult this evening with the greatest minds of the Western world, grasp their precious wisdom. Start reading immediately at the point of your own maximum interest.

  The ability to Discuss and Clarify Basic Ideas is vital to success. Doors open to the man who possesses this talent.

  Thousands now turning to Great Books as increased life expectancy provides more time for mental recreation.

  A Prime Source of Self-Improvement and an inexhaustible fund of adult entertainment.

  The Great Books are capable of being both these things because the best entertainment is that which elevates as it entertains. When the current best-sellers are forgotten, the Great Books will still be great.

  Ad copy from Chicago’s Leo Burnett agency depicted a cemetery headstone, which read: “Here Lies the Mind of JOHN DOE Who at Age 30 Stopped Thinking.” The ad continued: “Great Books alone can’t make you a vice-president. Or Chairman of the Board. But they can stimulate your mind, and sharpen your judgment.” The ads emphasized the Great Books’ improbable “Ten Year Reading Plan”—competing with the Harvard Classics’ “Fifteen Minutes a Day” program—which theoretically escorted the customer though the fifty-two volumes (not counting the two-volume Syntopicon) in just under 4,000 days.

  Britannica printed up endorsements from the celebrities of the day, such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Adlai Stevenson, who was a paid consultant to Benton. Stevenson “praised the product as unrestrainedly as so many debutantes endorsing the virtues of Pond’s facial cream,” Dwight MacDonald wrote, taking a second whack at the Great Books, again in the New Yorker. MacDonald proved to be the scorpion that couldn’t stop stinging. He hated the Great Books. He trashed them again in a famous 1960 Partisan Review essay, “Masscult and Midcult”: “It is one thing to bring High Culture to a wider audience without change; and another to ‘popularize’ it by sales talk in the manner of Clifton Fadiman or Mortimer J. Adler.”

  Benton didn’t sign up just eggheads to hype the set. Boxer Gene Tunney extolled the virtues of the books in one national campaign: “Anyone can read these books with profit and enjoyment. And, because of your new development, the Syntopicon, one can sit down to this mental feast and select the morsels that are most appealing to the individual or to his interest or mood of the day.”

  The hype brought results. Just a few years after Harden’s crew took over, Britannica sold 35,000 sets a year. In 1961, it sold over 50,000 sets, worth $22 million. The Harvard Classics were feeling the heat. Hilariously, Harvard started marketing “The Idexicon,” billed as “a revolutionary new guide to the priceless wisdom of 300 years of civilized man. It arranges the great wealth of masterpieces contained in The Harvard Classics into major idea groups so that you can be guided in your reading. . . . With the Idexicon you can ‘tune in’ to the thinking of great minds in every area of modern living. . . . It is as easy to use as a dictionary.”9

  But the hype brought trouble, too. The Federal Trade Commission busted Britannica not once, but twice, for deceptive sales practices. The salesmen used a variety of tricks—among them, trying to pass themselves off as assistant professors from the University of Chicago. In a memo to his division managers in 1961, after the first settlement of F TC charges, Harden wrote: “We ran across a case today in Spokane where the salesman claimed to be a PhD from the University on a $25,000 a year salary. . . . Needless to say, we terminated his association and put him on the Do Not Employ List.”

  In one version of the masquerade, the salesmen would claim to be contacting potential scholarship students on behalf of the university. Russell Everett of East Paterson, N.J., wrote to Hutchins’s successor, U. of C. Chancellor Lawrence Kimpton, asking if the salesman who had called him was really with the university’s Research Division. And had Mr. Everett’s daughter really been selected as one of thirty-three New Jersey high school students to participate in a U. of C. survey?

  Harvard Classics: 22,462 pages, with 360 words on a page (average) Great Books: 32,000 pages, with 816 words on a page (average) . . .of books... . . . the Harvard Classics . . . have the deadly appearance of a set of books. . . . The paper of the Harvard Classics is of a quality inferior to the paper chosen for Great Books. . . .

  Adler likewise criticized Harvard’s use of excerpts rather than full texts, and mocked President Charles Eliot’s vaunted fifteen-minutes-a-day reading plan.

  On behalf of Kimpton, Secretary W. V. Morgenstern replied:

  Your surmise about Mr. Corris being an encyclopedia salesman is probably correct. Salesmen for “The Great Books of the Western World” recently called a number of parents in Ridgeway, New Jersey, representing the University of Chicago and said it was interested in assisting their children in learning about college study methods. We . . . have been engaged in some vigorous discussion with the publisher about this misrepresentation. The University is not engaged in any survey, and it would certainly not undertake any inquiries to parents without full knowledge of the school authorities.

  The ever-inventive salesmen sometimes passed themselves off as canvassers for the Advertising Research Analyst group, and asked the families they visited to fill out a questionnaire. “What would you do after you complete the questionnaire?” an FTC investigator asked one salesman.

  A. I would read the bottom line of the last page which says in appreciation for the help you have given us I have been instructed to fill you in briefly on the Syntopicon and The Great Books Program and to obtain a few additional reactions.

  Q. And then what would you do?

  A. Then you started into the [sales] presentation.

  The prepared script read like this:

  Hello, Mr. Jones. I’m Bill Smith from the Great Ideas Program. Someone in your family requested a free booklet, and I stopped by to deliver it. Incidentally, it’s free.

  You’re welcome, Mr. Jones. You see, one of the reasons we are delivering the booklet in person is that the company is making a study of the effectiveness of national advertising in each local area. . . . May I step in and complete my report so I can return it at once to our director of national advertising?

  Another trick was to issue a “certificate” for a free vacation, or, as a complainer told the Commission, “Someone called up and said that our name was entered into a contest, and we hadn’t won first prize, but we had won a consolation prize.” The prize had to be delivered in person, of course. Sometimes they sold a fake research service, which amounted to someone Xeroxing a page from an encyclopedia and sending it to the customer. The Britannica reps also perfected a technique called the “Mexican build-up”(!), in which they would show a long list of goodies, assign inflated prices to each item, and then “discount” offers to levels above the actual retail prices. With the Great Books, they would present a “founders” price of $500 or $700, and
then promise a deal at $350, still north of the then-actual $300 retail price. Perhaps this was a common retail practice in Mexico. Who knows?

  The penalty for these shenanigans was stiff. After the FTC’s Final Order of 1976, all salesmen had to hand their prospective customers a three-by-five-inch file card, with the representative’s name, affiliation, job title, and the words “The purpose of this representative’s call is to solicit the sale of [The Great Books of the Western World]”—in ten-point type. Each sales contract had to include a price list, stating in twelve-point, boldface type that “THE FOLLOWING PRICES ARE THE only AUTHORIZED PRICES AT WHICH THE LISTED ITEMS MAY BE OFFERED.” “It was embarrassing and it sometimes made it harder to sell,” says Charles Van Doren, the son of Adler’s friend Mark Van Doren, who worked at Britannica at the time. “It was like the disclosure on a package of cigarettes.”

  In his memoir, An Open Book, critic Michael Dirda recalls “the young salesman, in short-sleeved white shirt and dark tie” who showed up at his parents’ home in Ohio. The man cleverly

  neglected to mention the outmoded translations, the ugly double columns of type, the lack of explanatory notes and the 102 arid essays (by Mort) in The Syntopicon, that wrong-headed index to the so-called “Great Ideas” (among them Love, God, and Truth). Instead he offered the kind of snake-oil enticements common to all door-to-door fast talkers: easy monthly payments, a handsome bookcase thrown in, a free dictionary. I admired his patter and remembered it, a few years later, when I took a job selling Fuller Brush products.