Court of Reason
Engberg, Edward
Dialogue Incorporated COURT Or REASON ROBERT HUTCHINS AND THE FUND FOR THE REPUBLIC Frank K. Kelly The Free Press, $19.95, 722 pp. Edward Engberg OUR STORY begins in late 1952. At the instance...
...Meetings seem almost always to convene against a backdrop of some domestic or international crisis, as if all that might be needed was a word from the Center...
...and in doing so to make the title of his work stand up as more than mere presumption...
...EDWARD ENGBERG was with the Fund for the Republic, off and on, for 17 years...
...He treats the main principals even-handedly to the point of charity...
...The Dialogue disintegrates into shambles, emitting poisons that no fresh Pacific sea breezes can dispel...
...In 1959, Hutchins gathers up his troops and repairs to a retreat at Santa Barbara, California-there, as the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, to think things over...
...Under such chapter headings as "Sound the alarm bells, alert the American people" and "In a gathering of furor, Hutchins attacks the Fund's foes," Kelly shows Hutchins in his Manhattan office listening to staff reports of pleas for help, then dispatching money and moral support to wherever at the front it might be needed: race relations, legal rights of aliens, blacklisting, fear in education, loyalty oaths and security programs, et alia-together with a few grants that come under the heading of covering your backside from your enemies...
...Lear he wasn't, nor Abe Lincoln, either...
...Even so, to mistake extravagance for justice is, in this context, no cardinal sin...
...In Hoffman's question and in the character of Robert Hutchins, Frank Kelly believes he has the makings of tragedy...
...No subject is too vast for their attention," a visiting journalist writes, "no project too visionary for their concern...
...It then commissions fund-raisers and direct mail solicitation experts to build a "constituency" of members and to bring in the needed bucks...
...In 1964, for an instance, the Center meets "bursts of hostility between blapks and whites in many places" head on...
...On May 14, 1977, Hutchins dies...
...REVIEWERS MICHAEL eigen is a practicing psychologist and psychoanalyst, and co-editor of'Evil: Self and Culture (Human Sciences Press...
...Kelly brings him on stage as if that weren't quite enough...
...The Fund and the Center did much good work...
...Like many of us, the Center comes to exist in a state of (as someone has said of David Stockman) "controlled schizophrenia...
...Kelly relates much that is of use and interest (What price glory...
...Hype and snipe" a visitor to the Dialogue is heard to mutter...
...He never forgot the early mornings when he knelt beside his father on a bare floor, praying for God's guidance and the courage to do what was right...
...It published "a daring proposal for the formation of new interracial towns on the edges of suburbia and the clearance of industrial slums from the decaying central sections of the cities...
...He works, in epic scale, for 652 W x 6" pages of ten-point type to persuade us that the decline and fall of Robert M. Hutchins and the Fund for the Republic merits our pity and ought to raise our fears...
...is one" moral that comes to mind...
...He appears primed for the denouement of an imposing career...
...He used his large gifts-among them a talent for worrying about the right things-to attempt much and to achieve much...
...I do not know which worry will win...
...The evil in the world had to be opposed...
...So, too, readers who don't mind scraping some syrup off to get to the waffle...
...McCarthy is gone...
...The heathens of un-Reason no longer storm the gates...
...Kelly's tale rolls and thunders to less than shivering effect...
...it is merely irritating...
...At the same time, new and messier insurrections begin to mobilize under banners which seem hostile to Reason, as if it were no more than the chimera of the Corporate State...
...The invisible hand dealt him good cards and he played them well...
...At the instance of Robert Maynard Hutch-ins, an insurgence of figures who had made names for themselves in one way and another decide to pool their credentials with a bundle of Ford Foundation cash-$15 million of it, eventually-to do something about McCarthyism and to raise a flag in memory of Thomas Jefferson...
...Still, the chorus is called upon to belabor the deed: "Hutchins had acknowledged that the search for peace was incidental to the Center's main purpose, which he had defined as 'clarifying the basic issues,' but the Center had been called upon to help humanity and that call could not be ignored...
...Fund-raising extravaganzas punctuate the selfconsciously monkish devotions...
...But in the absence of kings and eagles, tragedy wants a small stage, lest it be seen as played for farce...
...It is a pretty good group," Paul Hoffman, the chairman wrote to a friend, "worried about civil liberties and also worried about its respectability...
...But then the stage subsides into hush...
...In the deed, the...
...In Kelly's presentation, accordingly, Hutchins comes across as a man of singular virtues -courage, intelligence, courteous wit and compassion, all directed by an almost unappeasable conscience and made effective by a Mt...
...A summons arrives for convocation of the second Pacem in Terris conference to deal with Vietnam...
...Kelly elects to take that chance...
...From all accounts, camouflaged as the very apostles of Reason, they now occupy seats of great power throughout the Republic...
...Dean of the Yale Law School at age twenty-six, President of the University of Chicago at thirty, Hutchins has already lectured, hectored and in other ways evangelized a wide swath of ink through the news hole of the nation's consciousness...
...At the outset we see Hutchins plunge in, as if fired by-was it Mencken's?- dictum, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable...
...One might easily dismiss the entire extraordinary episode as no more than a saga of self-serving liberal piousness brought to undoing by its own pretensions...
...He grew more and more angry at the power and persistence of evil in the world, in others, and in himself...
...The Center introduces upper-case Dialogue and invests it with salvific qualities...
...but, meanwhile, the product behind the hype starts to unravel...
...The question is, Who will pay the bills...
...Rushmore presence-but afflicted by one tragic flaw: a regal, Lear-like vanity...
...JANET GROTH is a member of the English department at the University of Cincinnati...
...None need complain that he left anything out...
...Once gathered on the Other Coast, the loyalists begin daily meditations...
...Center acted honorably and may be even to some effect...
...Except for taxing us with his insistent reverence, he tells the story well...
...With the eye of a Machiavelli, Kelly faithfully details internecine scheming, backbiting, and betrayals-ah, the betrayals-that would cause an academic senate to blush...
...He resigned as a fellow of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in 1969 and now writes and lives in Santa Barbara...
...Hutchins, too, merits something better than hagiography...
...Kelly's account, alas, makes it easier still...
...That may have been made to work...
...The Center goes broke...
...ROSEMARY RADFORD RUETHER is a member of the faculty at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in Illinois, and the author of several books, including Faith and Fratricide (Seabury), The Radical Kingdom (Paulist-Newman), and, co-editor, with Rosemary Keller, of Women and Religion in America (Harper & Row...
...There, except for last bows and a clearing of the stage, the tale ends...
...Future scholars probably will thank him...
...The story ends twenty-seven years and $42 million later when a remnant of the original noblesse hands over the oblige, with not much else, to the University of California at Santa Barbara...
...He wants too hard to make us believe, and so loses, to extravagance, his gamble on big-production tragedy...
...Kelly catalogues it all extravagantly, again and again, to the point of farce...
...So far, so good...
Vol. 109 • June 1982 • No. 11
