To the Editor:
Congratulations to Samuel McCracken [“The Scandal of Britannica 3,” February] and to COMMENTARY on further exposing the scandal of the new Encyclopaedia Britannica. He touches almost all the bases with appropriate emphasis, particularly the huge and deplorable stain of ideological and political bias.
The fact is that the organization of the work—particularly the separation of the larger articles in the Macropaedia from the shorter ones in the Micropaedia—is more than an “eccentric innovation” or a “commercial novelty.” It is a function of the ideological bent that animates the whole enterprise.
The encyclopedia as a whole was intended to underline larger unities among human groupings and activities generally as well as greater cohesion among the intellectual disciplines. To exemplify the latter theme, the Propaedia (the volume that organizes knowledge) was created; it functions as a structural illustration of the “faith that the whole world of knowledge is a single universe of discourse.” The former theme was implemented by fashioning huge, synthetic unities and by organizing subjects under broad titles pitched at a high level of generality. These articles were grouped in the main body of the set and the rest (whatever could not be made to fit the pattern) was dumped into the trash can of the reference index. Despite the announced intention of being neutral and descriptive, the result is as prescriptive and tendentious as Mr. McCracken claims. In an age of intellectual and social fragmentation, it could hardly be otherwise.
There is no doubt that a quasi-public resource of enormous influence has been deformed. There is considerable doubt, however, that demonstrating that it has been deformed is going to make any difference. The Encyclopaedia Britannica is marketed by high-pressure sales techniques directed largely at low-income groups. (A recent TV Guide had a Britannica ad in which the lure was none other than the star of I Love Lucy.) The market for these books is, therefore, likely to be unaffected by the kind of expose offered by Mr. McCracken. What affects the publishers of Encyclopaedia Britannica are sales and profits, and only when these begin to dip will there be any changes.
Robert G. Hazo
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
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To the Editor:
Samuel McCracken’s critique of Britannica 3 is the finest of several I have read. W. T. Couch, in a letter in the University Bookman (Summer 1975), makes several comments and asks several questions along the same lines as those of Mr. McCracken.
Mr. Couch writes that “instead of facing the real problem of eliminating fragmentation, Britannica 3 in its three-part organization simply indulged in a new form of the old gimmickry into which encyclopedia salesmen have tended to push editors when editors have been unable to do the work that lessens the need for spurious sales arguments.” Mr. McCracken says virtually the same thing when he writes that “this arrangement has nothing to recommend it except commercial novelty.” . . .
I am particularly interested in the last three paragraphs of Mr. McCracken’s essay. I worked for about six weeks as a salesman for Britannica, Inc., and I was given the opportunity to experience the commercial merchandising of this product. Not once during the short training period were the salesmen told anything about the company’s difficulties with the Federal Trade Commission. We were told that other encyclopedia salesmen had been using deceptive practices to sell books, but not Britannica.
I suggest that there is an irreconcilable contradiction between what the editors of Britannica 3, especially Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, have written and believed in for many years, and what they say and believe when marketing these books. . . . If every prospective customer for the Britannica products were successfully educated along the lines Hutchins and Adler recommend in their writings, then the customers could not and would not buy these books from salesmen who mouth their spurious arguments. Of course, if the salesman stopped their spurious sales methods, if they were thoroughly educated (not “trained”) to explain the books . . . then the consistency of the company and the university would be impressive and not at all contradictory, even though profits might decline.
David Murphy
Lebanon, Ohio
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To the Editor:
Reviewing a forty-million-word reference work appears on the face of it a formidable task, but since the 15th edition of Britannica came out I have been astonished at the lighthearted intrepidity with which lay reviewers approach it. At least three pieces of reviewing equipment would seem to be indispensable: an expert knowledge of some major encyclopedic subject area, e.g., one of the physical sciences, to permit evaluation of a representative part of the coverage; experience in editorial work, to give insight into the problems of production and how well they were solved; and investment of a substantial amount of time in preparation for the review.
Samuel McCracken does not claim or give evidence of the first requirement (and in fact he airily disclaims all knowledge of science). His erroneous analysis of the faults of the Micropaedia demonstrates his lack of the second. I should think, then, that his shortcomings in respect to the first two requirements might have stimulated him to an exceptional effort to fulfill the third; evidently not. The Micropaedia‘s innumerable excellent entries nowhere found in the 14th edition entirely elude him.
But what I am most puzzled by, in Mr. McCracken’s article and in several others as well, is the reviewers’ incapacity to put a finger on any of the genuine faults in the new Britannica. One exception is the review Robert McClintock of Teacher’s College prepared for the National Academy of Education. I don’t particularly agree with Professor McClintock’s pedagogically-oriented critique, but I respect his bringing a legitimate viewpoint to his review, along with a seriousness of purpose.
The inept journalism that preposterously accused Britannica’s top editors of a left-wing bias, a charge to which Mr. McCracken also subscribes, has been thoroughly discredited in a point-by-point rebuttal that caused the Washington Post, at least, to print a commend-ably full retraction.
Joseph Gies
Oakton, Virginia
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Samuel McCracken writes:
David Murphy rightly suggests that Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler ought to face up to the behavior of their wayward godchild. The scandal of Britannica 3 is sufficiently malodorous that these men ought either to provide a cogent and persuasive public defense or to dissociate themselves from Britannica 3. Much the same, of course, might be said about the University of Chicago, whose protective aegis continues to lend a bogus respectability to the enterprise.
But away with this negativism. It is a pleasure to report that in Joseph Gies, Britannica 3 has found a defender fully worthy of it.
One of Mr. Gies’s difficulties is his inability to read. I nowhere “disclaim all knowledge of science,” gravely, tearfully, or airily. I do disclaim the kind of expert knowledge of science requisite to review major articles. As a matter of fact, I have a serious amateur’s knowledge of astronomy and have dabbled fairly widely elsewhere in the sciences. But my professional field is the humanities, especially literature and history. I presume—it is not always easy to know what Mr. Gies really means—that he would have had me undertake a comprehensive review of the articles on English literature. But I proceeded on quite a different basis, emulating the state’s practice in testing drivers. If you can’t pass the vision test, they don’t let you take the written test; and if you can’t pass the written test, they don’t let you take the driving test. My article was about how badly Britannica 3 fails the vision test. (And Professor McClintock’s article, alluded to by Mr. Gies, is about how Britannica 3 fails the written test.)
Mr. Gies blandly refers to my “erroneous analysis of the faults of the Micropaedia,” but he neither specifies nor documents this alleged erroneousness. He does not even make clear whether he believes that there are errors in the Micropaedia that I have failed to analyze correctly, or that I err in seeing errors there at all. He uses his unilateral declaration of error as evidence for the idea that I lack “experience in editorial work, to give insight into the problems of production and how well they were solved.” This appears to mean that it takes an encyclopedia editor to exculpate one. As it happens, I have a fair amount of experience with editorial work. But that is irrelevant. No amount of whining from Britannica 3 about the difficulties of production could negate its errors and intellectual shabbiness. In this, as in all intellectual endeavor, performance is what counts.
Mr. Gies’s evidence that I did not spend enough time on my article is that the “innumerable excellent entries” in the Micropaedia that do not derive from the 14th edition “elude” me. That I have not dealt with such capsules—there are some—is, however, not a sign of precipitate haste. The amount of time I spent in preparing the article—over a period extending from July 1974 to the end of 1975—was, I suspect, the despair of the editors of COMMENTARY; and my original manuscript was nearly three times as long as my final one. Whatever my faults, haste is not one of them.
I did not deal with Britannica 3‘s pretensions to be a university because I found it so inadequate as an almanac. Professor McClintock’s review is devastating, but marred by his erroneous belief that Britannica 3 is a superior reference work.
Mr. Gies’s final paragraph is still troubled by basic reading difficulties. I nowhere accused Britannica 3‘s editors of “left-wing bias.” Given their practice, I do not, however, see how such a charge, which might be false, could be preposterous. Britannica 3‘s rebuttal to those who criticized it for publishing articles on the USSR and the East European countries supplied by the governments of those countries, besides containing a statement to the effect that no fair-minded person could believe Britannica 3‘s claim that the Communist party was the “leading” political party (i.e., one of several) in the Soviet Union, consisted primarily of the claim that as long as the Britannica told the truth in articles on the history of, say, the Soviet Union, it did not matter whether it lied in another article describing the country. I have already discussed this curious practice in my article. Since the editor, Warren Preece, has explained that the Britannica retains the right to edit its articles as it pleases and to print them anonymously over the author’s objections, the encyclopedia clearly embraces the various blatant falsehoods uttered by its Soviet authors.
And Mr. Gies gets it all wrong once again when he says that the Washington Post printed “a commendably full retraction” of an article critical of Britannica 3. To the contrary, as Mr. Gies would have seen were he capable of reading an English sentence, the senior editors of the Post’s news department stood by the article as printed. The Post’s ombudsman, complained to by the editors of the Britannica, published a piece agreeing with their view that occasional honesties always cancel out occasional lies. But even he denied that he was entering “a total defense of the Britannica.”