Updated: Sep 16, 2023
Being a soldier is boring. Until it's terrifying.
That was the conclusion of Captain Charles P. Curtis, commander of a Navy destroyer during World War I. He observed that, except for the time spent actually fighting, men aboard ship had little to do. That's why decks were swabbed and masts repainted continuously.
Curtis noticed that many of his men had shipped out with small copies of the Book of Common Prayer or The New Testament, but most treated those as lucky charms rather than reading material, and paperbacks as we think of them today hadn't been invented.
After the war, Curtis studied law at Harvard and began a busy practice in Boston. But he kept thinking about the men he'd commanded and wished there was some way to both entertain soldiers and expose them to interesting, even provocative ideas. In short, he wanted to make a Bible for humanists, with brief excerpts from the most essential books from world history. And he wanted to make it small enough to fit a soldier's pocket.
Curtis read widely from an early age and acquired a lifelong habit of jotting down notes on and excerpts from things he'd read, eventually filling many notebooks. When World War II broke out he wondered if he could put together a book for soldiers like the one he'd thought about since the first great war.
He approached an acquaintance, Ferris Greenslet, with the idea. Greenslet, educated at Columbia, was the garrulous Curtis' opposite. Brilliant but quiet and introverted, Greenslet had joined the Houghton Mifflin publishing company in 1910 as director before being named its literary editor, a job he kept for five decades.
Greenslet loved the idea of such a book. He had the same habit as Curtis of making notes and excerpts from everything he read, and between the two they seemed to have read everything. They combined their notebooks with a few suggestions by others and found they had more than enough material to construct their enormous anthology.
Their goal was to distill three thousand years of (what they considered) the best of writing in or translated into English, with plenty of observations and connections and questions of their own. The result was their 1945 book The Practical Cogitator, or The Thinker's Anthology.
Some of the excerpts are short, only a line or two or a pithy quote; others are very long, all stitched together with brief notes and asides by the two editors. Throughout, the complementary personalities of Curtis and Greenslet are evident, as completely opposite but equally persuasive arguments appear side by side.
Their assumption was that to be truly educated a person should be able to hold two thoughts in mind at once. For example, a chapter on history begins with two quotations, one from Bismarck--"History is simply a piece of paper covered with print; the main thing is still to make history, not to write it"—alongside one from Oscar Wilde—"Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it." The Communist Manifesto bumps up against Jefferson and Adams, memoir up against history, Twain up against Confucius.
(The editors' sly sense of humor and playfulness about language shows through clearly. An entire history of social class is found in their single quote: "I find it will not do," said the Duchess of Argyle, dying. "Desire the Duke to leave the room.")
The editors gave much thought to the book's structure, as its chapters build from Greek philosophy and basic science through fundamental writings on systems of government, war, nature, physics, and poetry, where only that form can capture a particular idea. They finished their book in 1945, just in time to quote Oppenheimer about nuclear weapons.
Sometimes the smallest observations are the most interesting. Queen Elizabeth the First commanded a Britain that was neither Great nor unified; her coronation documents would cause trouble if she listed all the lands she claimed. The solution? A court lawyer suggested that a simple "etc." be added after England, Scotland and Wales, rather than listing any disputed territory. Wars might be fought, or averted, with just a few strokes of the pen.
For a variety of reasons, Curtis and Greenslet's book didn't come out until World War II was almost over. It sold for $3 and its 650 pages were thin and the typesetting close, so it was small and light enough to fit in a standard pocket (but still thick enough to maybe stop a bullet). To Houghton Mifflin's surprise, its initial pressing sold over 30,000 copies, most of them to civilians. In the years just after World War II, it seemed, the public was ready to reflect on what all the fighting had been for.
A second edition, again very small and cheap, was issued during the Korean War, and Greenslet's son produced a third edition in 1962, both of which sold in healthy numbers. It's unknown how many of those editions were bought by soldiers compared to civilians.
Of course, the book is a product of its time and reflects a view of history that seemed old-fashioned even by its second edition. Many of the pieces Curtis and Greenslet chose are dated, and few are by women or writers of color. Many of the writers they quote are barely remembered now.
Still, to pack so many ideas and streams of thought into so few pages and sustain the dynamic between such different-minded readers as Greenslet and Curtis, and for their book to sell so well, was a revelation.`
The Practical Cogitator has gone in and out of print ever since, discovered and then forgotten. With many universities abandoning their English and Humanities courses, perhaps every undergraduate should be required to read at least a healthy selection from it.
Why should they? The famous psychologist and anthropologist Gregory Bateson recalled that his father, an atheist, required him and his brother to read the Bible. His father said he expected both of them to become atheists as well, but he didn't want them to be "empty-headed atheists" (emphasis his).
The purpose of a humanities education is arguably to know why you're rejecting what you reject, just as jazz musicians have to know theory to break the rules of music. The Practical Cogitator might still convince some young readers that self-education is a lifelong project and a necessity for a full life. It's on the short list of books I'd take with me on a desert island or in solitary confinement, a succinct view of history up to Curtis and Greenslet's era. It makes a good argument that civilization has been worth it.
