Harvard's President Believed Books, Not Schooling, Were the Key To Education

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See rules at fridolayscore.com. And we're back with our American stories. And now we bring you one of our favorite contributors and producers, John Elfner, to tell us the story of the iconic book collection known as the Harvard Classics, created by a president of Harvard from the 1800s because of his unusual philosophy on education. In the early 1900s, a man named Charles Elliott made this bold claim. One could get a first class education from a shelf of books five feet long. That claim might strike some as surprising, but what is even more surprising is that this man, Charles Elliott, was president of Harvard University, a position he held for nearly 40 years.

It seems odd that the president of America's most prestigious university would say you don't need a school to become educated. But if you know a little more about Charles Elliott and the United States at the turn of the century, this statement makes more sense. During the early 1900s, the United States was experiencing rapid transformation. The American Industrial Revolution created loads of factory jobs, which were luring farmers from rural America and immigrants from across the ocean to American cities. The population of cities was skyrocketing during this period.

That's Dr. Robert Johnston. He's a history professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and he's an expert on this period. The social changes of the late 19th and early 20th century in the United States were among the most momentous in our nation's history. People came from all over the globe so that they could have better lives for themselves and for their children.

Of course, they were drawn to America to improve their economic circumstances, but for many, there was more to it than that. We might call these people strivers, people who really sought to improve themselves in what we think of as a classic American way. The desire of these strivers to improve themselves was recognized by members of America's established elite class, and none was more elite than Dr. Charles Elliott, the longest serving president of Harvard University. You heard Elliott's claim at the beginning of the story about the possibility of an education minus a university, and that was no hollow claim from Elliott. He had spent his last four decades as Harvard's president, transforming the institution from its original mission as a minister's training school to become a leading liberal arts college. As Elliott was nearing retirement, he began to consider how his transformation of Harvard could be shared more broadly with those who couldn't attend a university. Of course, the problem was that still very few people could go to college, not just Harvard, but any college.

And so what would you do if you wanted to create an opportunity for everyone? Elliott saw the nation's emerging striver class and began speaking to them on their terms. What if, he imagined, the classics taught at Harvard could be made more widely available, especially to those who couldn't afford to take four years off of work to attend a university? Central to that vision was his belief in the power of the written word to educate anyone. I'm telling you, this guy loved books, and he believed books, not teachers, were the surest path to becoming educated. Books are the quietest and most constant of friends.

They are the most accessible and wisest of counselors and the most patient of teachers. He even began to share in public addresses his belief that a university may not be necessary to become what he called a cultivated man. A three foot shelf would hold books enough to afford a good substitute for a liberal education to anyone who would read them with devotion, even if he could spare but 15 minutes a day for reading.

15 minutes a day. That's all it would take. And Dr. Elliott's bookshelf was the right idea at the right time. There was a public appetite for something like this.

Here again is Dr. Robert Johnston. Part of thinking of a better life, of capturing the American dream, was not just about making money and buying a better house, but in fact becoming cultured. And to do that, people realized that they wanted to be educated in a very broad and liberal way. Elliott later amended his estimation of the size of the bookshelf to five feet, and his frequent references to this idea earned it the name Dr. Elliott's five foot bookshelf. But it's not clear that this idea was anything Elliott ever intended to actually create. Sure, it was consistent with his ideas about the value of liberal arts education. But for Elliott, this five foot bookshelf idea seems to have been more of a rhetorical flourish than an actual intention.

And it was an easy claim to make since he likely assumed he'd never have to test the ability of his bookshelf to educate. That was until Peter Collier, one of the nation's biggest publishers, heard Elliott make this claim in his speech and said to Elliott, oh, yeah, prove it. Peter Collier was the publisher of Collier's magazine. Collier's billed itself as a weekly collection of fact, fiction, sensation, wit, humor and news.

The magazine featured prominent writers, including Jack London, Upton Sinclair and the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And the public ate it up. Collier's was first published in 1888, and by 1892, it was going to a quarter of a million homes in America.

By the time Charles Elliott was publicly ruminating about his five foot bookshelf, that number had grown to half a million. And why was there such a large audience for a magazine like Collier's at this time? It was because the changing nature of work was creating something new in the labor force, leisure time. People were working shifts instead of tending to a farm, which operates essentially 24 hours a day. And because shift work was predictable, so was free time.

As much as people were working and working many hours and working very hard, they did have the means and the hours available to go out and have genuine leisure opportunities in many ways for the first time at a mass level. They were able to read. And read they did. And now, thanks to Peter Collier, they had something to read that could make them what Charles Elliott called a cultivated man, the Harvard classics. Following on the great success of these mass subscription magazines, people like Peter Collier said, why can't we do this for a book series?

It would be the same model, the same demographic, and people would love to grasp the opportunity to get a genuine liberal education. Charles Elliott accepted Collier's challenge. And upon Elliott's retirement, he, along with several professors from Harvard, began selecting works that were worthy of inclusion in the five foot bookshelf.

They agreed that a 50 volume collection would be suitable. And in May of 1909, immediately following Elliott's retirement from Harvard, the work began. The list of works included that covered over twenty three thousand pages is too long to do justice to. But you can guess some of the authors, Plato, Cicero, John Milton, St. Augustine, Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, and so many others. The marketing of the Harvard Classics was genius, and Charles Elliott's renown was central to this marketing. He made several public statements like this one to advertise the Harvard Classics.

Within the limits of 50 volumes containing about twenty three thousand pages, my task was to provide the means of obtaining such knowledge of ancient and modern literature as seemed essential to the 20th century idea of a cultivated man. And the visual presentation of the Harvard Classics was ingenious as well. Upon its release, three distinct bindings were printed. A limited first edition run of twenty thousand copies included Charles Elliott's watermark signature on every page. The edition was known as the Deluxe Edition. Other limited editions of the Harvard Classics were marketed afterwards. There was the Elliott Edition, signed by Charles Elliott and limited to one thousand sets, and the Alumni Edition Deluxe. For the record, it isn't clear what made this edition Alumni or Deluxe, but to the buyers, it surely felt like a luxury. Many editions were published in crimson colored binding, and as everyone knew, the color crimson meant Harvard. And the Harvard seal was printed on the binding, so visitors to the house of an owner of the Classics could immediately identify the collection. Most importantly, there was an eager audience for this series.

City dwellers were eager to improve themselves, and the Harvard Classics promised the reader entrance into the status of the cultivated man. In the first two decades of the Harvard Classics publishing, over three hundred and fifty thousand full sets were sold, and countless more were sold as Collier's continued to publish various editions until 1970. You can still find sets in American households today. I grew up in a house with a full set on display. And where did we display it? Ironically, in a five foot bookshelf in our bathroom.

I'll let you insert your own joke there. But in the meantime, here again is Dr. Robert Johnston on the significance of the Harvard Classics. There's this idea that you can't have democracy without an educated citizenry, and I think there's actually much to that.

To have a functioning, good, working, truly democratic society, you do need to have people who are well educated at a very mass level. Series like the Harvard Classics were crucial to that. My family set of the Harvard Classics was recently donated to a local high school, and given the clear educational goals of Dr. Elliott's five foot bookshelf, this seemed like a pretty appropriate place for the Harvard Classics to be displayed.

You can still find complete sets online in pretty good condition. So if you have an empty five foot shelf and an available 15 minutes a day, maybe you want to get yourself a set of the Harvard Classics. And a special thanks to John Elfner for some terrific storytelling. And if you're lucky enough to be in his school, well, John's a history teacher in a public school system in Illinois. And my goodness, if we had more history teachers like this, history would actually be interesting. And what a story to tell about Dr. Charles Elliott and the shift from colleges as theology schools and divinity schools to classic liberal arts schools.

And now, well, whatever your opinion to what they are now. And my goodness, to have read these classics and have them in one space and sell 350,000 of them complete series showed you the truth of the appetite for these strivers. It wasn't just about money and it wasn't just about a home. It was about culture, too, and this leisure time to be able to read that the 20th century brought to, well, to everybody. Farmers, well, who had the time? Work, work, work. And the idea that we had this kind of time, one of the great, great advances in world history.

The story of Dr. Charles Elliott, the story of the Harvard classics, and so much more here on Our American Stories. Hey, it's your fave pop culture queen, Paris Hilton here with big news. I've created my very own 3D interactive world starting November 11th. Come visit Paris Hilton's living land.

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