When America Wanted Homer: How the Left Replaced Greatness With Garbage

But the new home and family weren’t enough. These young men had been exposed to European culture: music, art, literature. So they filled their homes with classical music records to play on their hi-fi systems and filled bookshelves with the Great Books. Televisions broadcast classical concerts, ballet, and performances of Shakespeare, so you could engage in culture from your living room.

The den wasn’t just a family hideaway. It was a little academy — a place where tradition and beauty could be planted in the next generation.

The Great Books Moment

It was an extraordinary cultural awakening. Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins published the Great Books of the Western World 52-volume set in 1952. Book-of-the-Month clubs promoted Homer, Dante, and Aquinas. Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book became a bestseller.

Families tuned in to Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts on CBS or watched the Ford Foundation’s Omnibus program on Sunday afternoons. They didn’t see Shakespeare and Beethoven as “elitist.” They saw them as normal — as much a part of family life as the new refrigerator or washing machine.

For a brief time, it seemed that America might democratize greatness.

The Poisoned Wells

But while the homes filled with Homer and Beethoven, the institutions were already being captured.

• Universities turned away from “Western Civ,” branding it patriarchal and oppressive.
• Media shifted from cultural programming to cheap spectacle.
• Publishing drifted from curated classics to pulp and counterculture tracts.
• Foundations that once funded high culture began financing radical “critical” projects instead.

The kids raised on Great Books walked into classrooms where professors sneered at their parents’ shelves. What had been a treasure was rebranded as oppression. What had been aspiration was mocked as bourgeois pretension.

The Great Books moment didn’t fail because Americans lacked hunger. It failed because the institutions poisoned the wells.

Why the Hunger Never Died

The desire for greatness has always survived. It simply went underground.

• In the 1970s and 1980s, homeschooling emerged, often with a classical Christian bent.
• St. John’s College kept the Great Books curriculum alive.
• Mortimer Adler launched the Paideia Proposal in 1982, arguing for a return to classical learning.
• Conservative intellectuals like Russell Kirk and Allan Bloom pushed back against cultural decline.

And now, the hunger is resurfacing in force. Classical Christian schools have exploded — from about 140 in 2010 to more than 700 today. Homeschooling has nearly tripled since 1999, even after the COVID spike leveled off. Families are voting with their feet, rejecting institutional poison and reclaiming education for themselves.

What You Can Do at Home

Institutions may be captured, but your living room is not. You can still do what millions of Americans did in the 1950s — and this time, you don’t need Harvard’s permission.

Start small:

• Fill your shelves with Great Books. Even twenty minutes with Cervantes or Augustine changes the air of a household. Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book is a great guide and entry point, even though it's over seventy years old.
• Let your children grow up with Bach and Beethoven. Classical music is no harder to stream today than pop. If you're not sure where to begin, Aaron Copland's What to Listen for in Music is a great guide.
• Make family culture nights a habit. Read Shakespeare, listen to a symphony, or share a poem at the table.
• Talk about it. Ask questions, let your kids wrestle with greatness, show them they are heirs to something larger than themselves.

This is what ordinary veterans and young families did seventy years ago. They didn’t wait for elites to approve. They made greatness part of their homes.

The Lesson for Today

America once filled its homes with Homer, Plato, Dante, and Beethoven — but the left captured the schools, the airwaves, and the publishing houses.

If we want greatness again, we must not only read the Great Books. We must also build the great institutions to protect them. That begins with the four walls of our own homes — dens of greatness, filled with books, music, and conversation, where the hunger for truth is fed until it can no longer be mocked or denied.