Albert Schweitzer addresses an informal gathering in Aspen in July 1949.
Editor’s note: This story is the third installment of a four-part Aspen Journalism series on Albert Schweitzer and his impact on Aspen and the world.
Albert Schweitzer’s visit to the United States in 1949 hit a high note in Chicago, where it all began as an elegant vision for a renaissance in Aspen. Beyond Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Schweitzer, and far beyond the Windy City, Aspen took on a new role thanks to a collective impulse that resided in the hearts and minds of the organizers of the Goethe Bicentennial and in the 2,000 attendees who had witnessed history in the making at 8,000 feet in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Planted in those hearts and minds were the seeds of what would become the Aspen Institute.
The history of Aspen is not complete without an understanding of how the Goethe Bicentennial of 1949 transformed this mountain town almost overnight and led to the founding of an organization of global repute and influence. Festival literature, written by University of Chicago Chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins, described great expectations for the enormous challenges of the day in post-World War II America:
“Things seem to be bigger; they do not seem to be better. We are at last face to face with the fact that our difficulty is a difficulty of the human spirit. … We are gathered here to search out in ourselves the depths of the spirit. … We call this spirit universal man, transcending the partial, the provincial, the passing. … The great society will not become the human community until it finds the common spirit that is man.”
From Schweitzer’s vantage, as he wrote in “The Philosophy of Civilization,” only risk-taking boldness could usher in an idealistic revolution: “The restoration of our world-view can come only as a result of inexorable truth-loving and recklessly courageous thought. A new Renaissance must come in which mankind discovers that the ethical is the highest truth and the highest practicality. I would be a humble pioneer in this Renaissance.”
Where Schweitzer’s influence on Aspen was contained to a single speech, the multi-day Goethe Bicentennial was an expansive, orchestrated blend of music and dialogue, an ambitious undertaking even for Walter Paepcke, the visionary Chicago businessman, purveyor of culture and Aspen Institute founder.
Daunting logistics and organizational snafus had plagued festival administrators because Aspen was such a long way from the cultural centers of the world, and Goethe was not a household name. Attracting musicians, writers, philosophers and the renowned Schweitzer to an obscure hamlet in Colorado required a leap of faith. Through it all ran an undercurrent of consciousness and purpose as Goethe had admonished two centuries before: “Since we come together so miraculously, let us not lead a trivial life.”
A troubled world
Held in the bleak shadow of World War II, when much of Europe was in ruin, the festival sought hope in the face of looming evils — totalitarianism, materialism, mechanization and the advent of the Atomic Age. Moral affirmation was necessary for survival as the world fell under the threat of mutually assured destruction with the rattling of nuclear sabers.
The Aspen Music Tent, designed by Finnish architect Aero Saarinen, stands out in the early landscape of the Aspen Meadows with 12,394-foot Highlands Peak to the west.
“The fact that all parts of the world are getting closer,” Hutchins wrote as a doomsday warning in “The Great Conversation” (the first volume in the Great Books of The Western World), “does not by itself mean greater unity or safety in the world. It may mean that we shall all go up in one great explosion. We know that there is no defense against the most destructive of modern weapons. Both the victor and the defeated will lose the next war.”
On the plight of modern society, Hutchins was incredibly prescient for today’s world of social media dominance: “Certainly the most unexpected characteristic of our time is the universal trivialization of life. Our rapidly expanding knowledge should have given us a sense of triumph, of achievement. The spread of the arts should have ennobled mankind, for they invoke the exercise of the highest powers that mankind has. Trivialization results from purposelessness, from the sense that nothing is important, from lack of faith. It manifests itself in triviality of what we read, listen to, and look at, in the triviality of the things we get excited about, in the numerous and expensive ways we have of amusing ourselves. Our rapidly expanding knowledge has provided us with time, and it has turned out to be time to waste. I have never gotten over the notion that fun is a form of indolence.”
A pressing concern for Hutchins was specialization, which he and other Aspen Institute founders saw as a limitation to the advancement of humanism: “Is there any reason,” asked Hutchins in his 1949 speech at the Goethe Bicentennial, “why the specialist should be an uneducated man, ignorant of everything except what his specialty requires, a stupid dolt as a citizen and a man, worse, in fact, than an illiterate peasant, because of his pride in his specialty?”
Dutch religion philosopher Gerardus van der Leeuw, in his Goethe lecture in Aspen, pointedly tapped into Hutchins: “Goethe can save us from specialism, that awful curse of our days, and teach us that all things hang together, that science can never confine itself to the domain which belongs to the schoolmaster; that art, religion, and science are different, but not apart; and that perfect knowledge and technique of the specialist cannot prevent him from being a subhuman ass.”
In “The Philosophy of Civilization,” Schweitzer warned: “Overwork, physical and mental or both, is our lot. We can no longer find time to collect and order our thoughts. Our spiritual dependence increases at the same rate as our material dependence. The disastrous feature of our civilization is that it is far more developed materially than spiritually. Its balance is disturbed. The most widespread danger of material achievements consists in the fact that men become in greater numbers unfree, instead of free.”
Mortimer Adler, resident philosopher at the Aspen Institute, was a great intellectual force for the dissemination of ideas and civil discourse in his role as co-editor of the Great Books of Western Civilization, from which the Aspen Institute has long drawn seminar texts.
The Goethe Bicentennial Committee, led by Paepcke and Hutchins, was steeled to the task because the stakes were so high. Human culture was in a crisis, they agreed, and in desperate need of spiritual affirmation. In his poem “Lines From a Spring Afternoon,” William Wordsworth framed a context that was on the minds of these visionary reformers:
I heard a thousand blended notes while in a grove I sat reclined
In that sweet mood where pleasant thoughts bring sad thoughts to mind.
Through her fair works did nature link the human soul that in me ran
And much it grieved my heart to think what man has made of man …
Spreading the word
Aspen, cloistered deep in the Rocky Mountains, was fertile yet unlikely ground for idealism, spiritual renewal and the remaking of man. Hidden from the world, unspoiled, serene and stunningly beautiful, Aspen would provide an attractive venue for transcendent philosophical dialogue. Here was an opportunity for the spread of humanism — the philosophy asserting the dignity and worth of man, of man’s ultimate capacity for self-realization through reason, of man’s potential for good deeds through action.
Hutchins framed a nascent vision that presaged the creation of the Aspen Institute after the Goethe Bicentennial: “It is not too much to hope that the connections formed here in the past weeks by people from all over the world may be continued and strengthened and that through meetings, correspondence and publication, communication among men of goodwill may be established and may spread to other individuals and other groups everywhere.”
The festival would endeavor to realize Goethe’s admonition for “a treaty of peace between the individual person and cosmic order.” Despite the gravity of world events at the time, the festival had a jubilant air that permeated Aspen, where music soared as high as its mountains.
As a cultural ideal, the Goethe Bicentennial of 1949 was a consummate achievement, as noted dramatist and author Thornton Wilder poeticized in his address at the event: “Here, on all sides, we are reminded of Goethe. Here are the mountain peaks of the Prometheus and roadside flowers; here are torrent and stream; here visible to us, as they could not be above a lighted city, are the great stretches of sky and the lapse of the constellations. Here, with particular advantage, we may strive to follow him, trying to grasp his doctrine of the unity of all living things and the unitedness of all created things — where life and death and art and nature and the crystal in the mountain and the aspen tree, and Mozart’s C Major Symphony — all proceed from the shaping force at the heart of the universe.”
The festival was not to be repeated even though attendees clamored for more. Instead, the next year, 1950, saw the founding of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, where the momentum of July 1949 sought sustainability and a broadened scope. What would become a heady infusion of ideas and values, of philosophy and dialogue, was made possible by the growing financial support behind Paepcke in what he called “an experiment.”
Paepcke, who was of Germanic descent, had seen the Goethe Bicentennial as a means of restoring German culture to the civilized Western world. To raise the intellectual heights of Aspen, Hutchins teamed up with Mortimer Adler, who would become the Aspen Institute’s resident philosopher. Together, they designed text-based seminars based on the Great Books of The Western World (both men were Britannica editors) and moderated text-based discussions in the Socratic technique of inquiry for their target audience of corporate executives whom they deemed lacking in the humanities.
Adler was a Yoda-like gnome who came across as oddly out of place in Aspen because of his adversity to the mountain passion for physicality. He had not matriculated at Yale University because he refused to take the swimming test. Hutchins, likewise, eschewed sports. In one of his first acts as chancellor at the University of Chicago, he disbanded the football team. Hutchins’ attitude was summed up in what became a famous quip: “I get my exercise being pallbearer for my athletic friends.”
Hutchins and Adler were intellectual giants who found an equal match in Paepcke. Collectively, they fomented the idea of an intellectual centerpiece for Aspen that, at one time, included plans for a university, which prudent thinkers saw as too ambitious. Instead of a university, Aspen would become home to an institution where informed, civil dialogue and high moral values would enlighten local, regional, and global leaders.
Former U.S. Sen. John Kerry, center, speaks during the 2024 Aspen Ideas Festival. The early summer festival perpetuates the Aspen Idea by offering lectures and discussions on the grounds of the Aspen Meadows campus.
From Goethe to global
Since its founding in 1950, the Aspen Institute has long attracted a who’s who of prestigious and important actors whose global influence has emanated from an ever-expanding set of programs and outreach. The Aspen Institute dropped “Humanistic” from its title in the 1950s as too confining for the enlarging of its leadership-based seminars. Fellowships and policy programs were added as corporate funding and recognition grew. The institute eventually spanned the globe.
Former Aspen mayor and Aspen Institute vice president, John Bennett, described the organization’s scope in a 1999 speech to the Society of Fellows commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Goethe Bicentennial: “We know the stories of world leaders convening in Aspen to explore ideas and issues, but many are unaware of some of the institute’s quieter achievements.”
Bennett listed the 1950 Photography Conference that attracted such greats as Ansel Adams, Minor White, Eliot Porter, Beaumont Marshall and Aspen’s own Ferenc Berko. Aspen was the venue for Aspen Film, the oldest film festival in America, and launched a 1962 global climate change conference, the first of its kind. Aspen helped lay the groundwork for the creation of the National Endowment for the Humanities and initiated the first-ever United Nations Conference on the Environment, held in Stockholm in 1972.
“In 1990,” Bennett recounted, “the institute hosted the Aspen Summit held by President H.W. Bush and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on the second day of the Gulf War. In 1997, the institute helped organize the first Bipartisan Congressional Retreat ever held in the history of our nation. And in 1999, President Clinton, Prime Minister Netanyahu, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan gathered at the institute’s former Wye Campus in Maryland to conclude the Wye River Peace Accord.
“Today, as it did in 1950, the institute seeks to elevate our nation’s quality of leadership through exploring the great ideas and values that have arisen over 3,000 years of human civilization, and it convenes these leaders for informed, values-based dialogue on the most important issues of our day.”
Although the Aspen Institute has grown by magnitudes since its distant origins, the Goethe/Schweitzer humanistic imprint is seen on many of its programs and initiatives.
Today’s Ideas Festival is a Chautauqua-like convocation of thinkers and doers who present in casual settings for exchanges with attendees, much like what the Goethe Bicentennial afforded more than seven decades ago. Although there are no quantifying or qualifying metrics for the Institute’s full reach, its myriad connections and offerings have empowered executives, educators, politicians, reformers, artists and global influencers.
As to the institute’s relevance, Bennett posed a rhetorical question: “Is the importance of ‘confronting our own nature as human beings,’ to quote Walter Paepcke, and our need for individual self-fulfillment any less great today than before?” Aspen, said Bennett, must become “a model, not merely for being a wealthy town in a beautiful place, but as a model of civilization in a small community, and a model for excellence.”
What began in 1949 with Goethe and Schweitzer was a catalyst that dramatically changed a small, peaceful, simple and somewhat remote community into a global networking entity. Leading that change was Walter Paepcke, one of the most enlightened, values-driven leaders of Aspen’s past whose influence provided a turning point by recognizing a key strategy for Aspen’s long-term future: tourism.
Whether skiers or seminarians, musicians or physicists, designers or philosophers, visitors would become the stabilizing influence for Aspen’s once-faltering economy. For decades, the city had struggled in the lull between its silver mining past and its resort future. The Goethe festival had attracted the first crowd of cultural tourists to Aspen, and it was deemed an overwhelming success on which the city could capitalize. Starting in 1950, Aspen got down to the business of promotion by marrying economic development to cultural and recreational offerings in a novel synthesis to which few other communities had ever aspired.
In the immediate aftermath of the Goethe phenomenon, The Aspen Times cautioned that a full-blown blitz on tourism would be hampered by “the lack of housing, the shortage of dining space for more than ordinary crowds, disrupting the free and easy life of some few Aspenites, and generally cluttering up the streets and shops with extra people, some of them with money to spend.”
A second Goethe event was not to be. Instead of “Festival II,” Aspen became the long-term venue for the newly formed Aspen Institute. In this way, the Paepcke imprint was to be stamped permanently on Aspen. This notion was cleverly alluded to in the late 1950s at a birthday celebration for Paepcke at the renovated Wheeler Opera House, where one lady toasted, “To Walter P. Possible who has made everything Paepcke.”
