In 1949 Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke, both members of the "Fat Man's Great Books Course," organized a bicentennial celebration of Goethe's birth. Walter Paepcke, University of Chicago Trustee, was president of Container Corporation of America, and Elizabeth was a designer and decorator who helped to showcase the talents of Chicago designers by using their works in Container Corporation of America advertisements. The Paepckes' commitment to education and the arts meshed with University of Chicago Professor of Italian Literature Giuseppe Borgese's desire to bring recognition to humanist culture and to help revitalize an appreciation for German cultural achievements in post-War America. World War II was a great blow to what Hutchins had termed the "Great Conversation" of western civilization. To the Paepckes, Borgese, and Hutchins, the nationalism of the war years fractured western culture, and they meant to heal the wounds with a celebration of humanism to be held in the dying mining town of Aspen, Colorado. Albert Schweitzer was the featured speaker at the festival that also included Thornton Wilder, William Ernst Hocking, Jose Ortega y Gasset, and Robert Hutchins. Eero Saarinen designed the festival tent to accommodate the large crowds that gathered for the speakers and musical performances.
The Paepckes were overwhelmed by their success and anxious to establish a more permanent educational attraction in Aspen, where they had extensive real estate holdings. They first hoped to establish "Aspen College." Hutchins took the idea of a liberal arts college seriously enough that he considered asking Richard McKeon to join forces with the Paepckes to establish the new college. Because it was to be devoted only to the liberal arts, Paepcke joked that the library need only purchase the titles included in the Great Books of the Western World. But the financial infeasibility of a college caused the Paepckes to scale back their ambition--from the Goethe Bicentennial Convocation and Music Festival, they developed the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies into what Adler called the "Athens of the West," a regular series of summer programs that flourishes to this day where people vacation in a beautiful natural setting stimulated by intellectual and cultural fare.
In its first year Mortimer Adler led a series of Great Books lectures at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. The series bore little resemblance to the seminars Adler usually taught. It lasted throughout the summer with an ever-changing audience. In an effort to capture the spirit of his regular seminars, Adler selected a small panel to read a text that they discussed in front of the larger group of participants who had not necessarily read the book. The approach was a failure. Talking to people who had not read the assigned text defied one the Great Books seminars' basic tenets: that readers' direct interactions with the Great Books were a precondition for a stimulating and fruitful discussion.
Henry and Clare Boothe Luce, who had participated in some of the early panels, shared Adler's frustration with the format. Henry Luce suggested that Adler refocus the seminars on a few texts and a limited audience. Luce found typical American businessmen boorish philistines with little inkling of the Great Books. They seemed a perfect target audience--hungry for self-improvement, as long as it was not too taxing. Adler restructured the Aspen Institute classes into intensive two-week seminars comprising six two-hour sessions each week featuring readings geared toward businessmen. Coined "Executive Seminars," the classes offered the Great Books to America's vacationing business leaders who could enjoy scenery, cool mountain air, and other Aspen attractions as they pursued self-enlightenment and discovered management strategies in the writings of Marx and Machiavelli. Lest the intellectual work prove too strenuous, participants could enjoy a massage at the end of the session.
THE GREAT IDEAS: THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO AND THE
IDEAL OF LIBERAL EDUCATION