Fusilier

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In 1940, with the U.S. on the edge of war, Adler gave the whole U.S. academic profession a tongue-lashing which it never forgot or forgave. Speaking at an open-air meeting of eminent scientists, philosophers and theologians in New York, Adler declared that the dominant doctrine in the U.S. was "the affirmation of science and the denial of philosophy and religion." The professors were hypocrites in paying lip service to religion: "They give true-false tests, but never take them . . . Religion is either the supreme human discipline, because it is Gad's discipline of man ... or it has no place at all . . .[The professors] dishonor themselves as well as religion by tolerating it when . . . they really think that faith is superstition." Most U.S. professors, he said, are positivists. They haven't the guts to make up their minds about what is right & wrong—"[They] might be obliged to risk [their] academic reputation . . . Democracy has much more to fear from the mentality of its teachers than from .. . Hitler. . ."

Just as he thundered: "The Tower of Babel we are building invites another flood," the canopy over their heads burst open and a flood of accumulated rainwater came down on the audience.

Toward war's end, Adler became strangely quiet: he had, in fact, withdrawn from the battlefield to tackle the enormous job of the Syntopicon.

Deadline for God. When William Benton (who had just become head of the Encyclopaedia-Britannica) decided in 1943 to publish a set of the Great Books, he wanted a gimmick that would induce the reader actually to lift the books off the shelf. Adler suggested an index which would guide people to any topic they were interested in. The index was supposed to cost $60,000 and take two years to produce. Before Adler was through, it took nearly $1,000,000 and eight years.

He started with a handful of helpers in two cellar offices, and a list of 4,000 ideas that had to be boiled down to manageable size. Adler spent months just throwing away ideas, deciding which rated a separate pigeonhole of its own and which could be slipped in with some other idea. When, after nearly three years, the list was finally pared down, the staff assembled in Index House, a rambling greystone house on the Midway. They were to read through the 443 great books —plus the Bible, which is not included in the set but which Adler decided to index —and to find references to each of the Big Ideas on Adler's list and their 3,000 topics. The staff (50 indexers at the peak of the work, plus 75 clerical workers) worked through all the books four times. At first, they were assigned six ideas a week. Later Adler stepped up the tempo to seven. Deadlines were strict and proclaimed by grim bulletins: "Oct. 22—God."

Each decision about keeping, changing or dropping references (Adler has figured out that 900,000 such decisions were made) was recorded with special words, figures and symbols. As the work wore on, people got married, were divorced, or died. Adler drove everyone (including himself) with frightening energy, frowned on illness and pregnancy—one woman put off having a baby until the work was done.