Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [85]
Harden set about building an indefatigable door-to-door sales force. Operating out of Los Angeles, Harden set up a course at which new salesmen learned how to use the Syntopticon [sic throughout the Time report; it seems impossible to get that word right] and to pronounce the names of the authors (reading them is not required).
In the field, Harden’s salesmen offered the Great Books (sold in sets costing from $298 to $1,175 depending on binding) for as little as $10 down and $10 a month, and threw in a bookcase and a Bible or dictionary to boot. In chart-studded sales broadsides, they talked earnestly of the importance of a liberal education for children, and displayed Great Books reading lists for youngsters. To help spread the Great Books idea, more than 50,000 adults were signed up in Great Books discussion groups (run by the nonprofit Great Books Foundation).
With this kind of hard sell, Harden increased Great Books sales 400%...in the first three years of his regime. Today his salesmen average an annual salary of $9,000, make as much as $30,000, and managers take home much more. Harden insists: “They are not just making money. They are carrying the banner.”
Some of Mr. Harden’s regional sales managers make $100,000 a year, which is a very pleasant banner to carry. They may not “just” be making money but they are certainly doing so. And one wonders what golden effulgence radiates from the banner Mr. Harden himself bears aloft? Who fished the murex up? What porridge had John Keats?
That the public bought less than 2,000 sets of the Great Books in 1952 and 1953 while last year they bought twenty-five times as many—this shows that Culture, like any other commodity, must now be “sold” to Americans. The difference was made by Mr. Harden’s high-pressure door-to-door sales campaign, which was “backstopped,” as we say on Madison Avenue, by lavish magazine advertising with full-color photographs of Men of Distinction—including Mr. Adlai Stevenson, alas—who praised The Product as unrestrainedly as so many debutantes endorsing the virtues of Pond’s facial cream: He’s famous, he’s intelligent, he uses the Syntopicon. The operation was designed to work off on the public a massive back inventory of a slow-selling item. It reminds one of those traveling book-agents of the last century who badgered and flattered hundreds of thousands of householders, as ignorant as they were innocent, into investing in the Complete Works of William Ellery Channing. Their sales pitch was the same: Respect for Culture, Keeping up with the Adler-Joneses, and, above all, the Obligation to the Children, who would be forever disadvantaged if their parents failed to Act Now on this Opportunity for a mere $10 down, $10 a month—which means over two years of paying for the set and puts the Great Books of the Western World in the same class of goods as TV sets and washing machines. “Sorry, lady,” says the man from the finance agency as he and his helper stagger out to the truck with one hundred pounds of Western Culture; “we just work here.” It is a false position for Drs. Adler and Hutchins to have gotten themselves into, though of course there was that $2,000,000 investment, half of it for the Syntopicon, one of the most expensive toy railroads any philosopher ever was given to play with. Still, I wonder what they really think of stocky, bespectacled Kenneth M. Harden and the effects of the hard sell as applied to Thuycidides and Rabelais? That is, Thoosiddidees and Rabbelay: “new salesmen [learn how] to pronounce the names of the authors; reading them is not required.” This last is sensible, since if the salesmen did read the works some of them have been plugging for six years, things might be even more balled