Paepcke,Walter Paul b.June 29, 1896; Chicago, Illinois d.April 13, 1963; Chicago, Illinois
Highly successful and innovative German American businessman, an extraordinary promoter of the arts and sciences, who was instrumental in creating the New Bauhaus in Chicago and the Institute for Humanistic Studies at Aspen, Colorado.
Paepcke’s strong ties to German high culture and to ideas of humanism can neither be separated from his upbringing nor from his wealth. Both gave him the absolute independence to pursue his ideas without having to care about public opinion. Instead he was in a position to influence and shape public opinion. His ties to Germany existed on an intellectual level and not, as with most other German Americans, on the basis of personal feelings and an attachment to German forms of socializing. Instead he was one of the leading American businessmen in bringing together commerce and the arts.Paepcke’s father, Hermann Ludwig August Paepcke, had been born in Teterow, grand duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, in 1851 and had immigrated to Texas in 1872. He engaged himself in the lumber and packing industry and soon became very successful. In 1885 he founded the Chicago Packing Box Company. Ten years later he founded the American Box Company and bought many mills and lumber businesses around the country. By that time he was already a millionaire. In addition to his business and his family, German culture was of great importance to him. For the various executive offices of his many companies he chose only men of German descent. He always lived in Chicago’s North Side amid a strong and predominantly German neighborhood. Thus, Walter Paepcke grew up in a household where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller were recited regularly and where he learned the German language from birth. He received a classical education at the Chicago Latin School and later went to Yale, where he studied economics and German literature, thus reflecting his father’s passions.
When Hermann Paepcke died in July 1922, Walter Paul Paepcke, twenty-six years old, had already been in charge of the company for one year. As the lumber business was declining, he first had to nurture the company back to health before he could make his decisive move: In June 1926 he formed the Container Corporation of America (CCA), after having bought the Mid-West Box Company and the Philadelphia Paper Manufacturing Company. After early profits of over $1,000,000 in 1927, CCA got into some trouble during the Great Depression but recovered and again grossed a profit of $1,287,000 in 1936 (Allen 1983, 23). It was not business alone though that constituted the personality of Walter Paepcke. Having been introduced to the world of art by his father, Paepcke found a congenial partner and inspirator in his wife Elizabeth, the daughter of his father’s friend William A. Nitze, chairman of the Romance Language Department of the University of Chicago. She was not only a legendary beauty of her time but also the guiding spirit in one of the boldest and most successful experiments in the history of American business: the introduction of modern art into company design.
On the suggestion of his wife, Paepcke established an art department for his company and made the president of the Art Directors’ Club of Chicago, Egbert Jacobson, its head on April 1, 1935. The first artist to work for CCA was the famous French poster artist A. M. Cassandre. Others like Toni Zepf, Man Ray, Henry Moore, Jean Carlu, Richard Lindner, Willem de Kooning, Herbert Bayer, Fernand Leger, and Miguel Covarrubias soon joined him. The unique advertising campaign these artists helped to create not only put CCA in the limelight but set standards for others, too. Paepcke did not stop there. When the famous painter and teacher at the Bauhaus, the Hungarian Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895—1946) came to Chicago in 1937, Paepcke was the essential force in creating the New Bauhaus in Chicago and making Moholy-Nagy its head.
The rise of Nazism had driven the Bauhaus and its members out of Germany. With Paepcke’s financial help they found a new home in Chicago. The Paepckes and the Moholy-Nagys became close friends, and in March 1944 Walter Paepcke was one of the founding fathers of another cultural landmark of design: the Institute of Design at Chicago.Paepcke’s ideas and visions were not confined to Chicago, though. The remote village of Aspen in Colorado lay dormant since the silver mining bust had ended its glorious days of exuberance in 1893. Again, it was Elizabeth Paepcke who set the eyes of her enterprising husband on an object that became the jewel in the crown for Walter Paepcke. She had seen only an ideal area for America’s newest popular sport: skiing. Riding the crest of his business triumphs, Paepcke himself saw more: a new cultural center for music, literature, and philosophy. Buying most of the land in and around Aspen in 1945, he first began developing Aspen into a modern ski resort with the longest ski lift in the world to create a successful economic basis for his wider schemes: to establish a modern Weimar (the city the famous Goethe lived in from 1775 until his death in 1832) in America together with his friend Walter Gropius. First came the annual Aspen Music Festival in the old remodeled opera house, then a health center, and finally his Institute for Humanistic Studies at Aspen in 1951. The climax of Walter Paepcke’s cultural life, the fulfillment of his dreams, came true in June 1949, when his vision of the Goethe festival, the Goethe Bicentennial Celebration at Aspen became a reality.
Dimitri Mitropoulos conducted the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra for the opening of the festival. The world-famous
physician Albert Schweitzer was the guest of honor (it was the first and last time Schweitzer came to the United States). And the American playwright Thornton Wilder, as well as the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, gave lectures, among many other illustrious guests from all sections of the arts.
The list of the festival’s guests, the notable lectures, and the influence of the Aspen Institute on the arts and on American business in the 1950s are impressive. The importance of Paepcke’s achievement was to have bridged the deadly and horrifying abyss of Nazi Germany, not to forget the horrors of the Third Reich or to diminish German guilt for millions of innocent deaths, but to remind the cultural world of what Germany had once stood for in the realm of the arts, and that German humanism, though severely shattered, could still give meaning to the modern world.With Walter Paepcke’s death in April 1963, however, things began to change. The Aspen Institute modified its program, slowly moving away from the pure humanistic concept to more specific economic, social, and political problems of American society. New programs, organizations, and seminars such as the Aspen Film Conference and the Aspen Center for Theoretical Physics were established. This expansion at the same time diminished Aspen’s role as a humanistic shrine, as a center for humanistic studies. In 2005 the institute sees itself as an international organization whose programs are designed to enhance the ability of business and political leaders to understand the issues that challenge the national and international community. A dominant focus of the institute had been on EastWest relations. The more the institute grew, the more it lost its clear shape as once conceived by Robert Hutchins, Walter Paepcke, and Mortimer Adler. At the end of the sixties, the recreational aspect of the city of Aspen had outgrown the cultural one, and skiing—what Elizabeth Paepcke had had in mind originally—became the most important economic and social factor for this town. Aspen grew into a fashionable resort for the political and financial jet set, as well as for Hollywood stars, and the prices of everything there went up astronomically. In 1978 the Aspen Skiing Corporation was sold to Twentieth Century Fox for $40 million. Gary Cooper had been proud once to be host to Ortega y Gasset on the occasion of the Goethe Festival at Aspen; in 2005 the tourist feels thrilled when catching a glimpse of Sylvester Stallone.
Andreas Reichstein
See also Bauhaus; Gropius, Walter Adolph References and Further Reading Allen, James Sloan. The Romance of Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983.
Bayer, Herbert. Herbert Bayer: Painter, Designer, Architect. New York: Reinhold, 1967.
Childs, Marquis W. “The World of Walter Paepcke.” Horizon (September 1958): 96-103, 133-134.
Reichstein, Andreas. German Pioneers on the American Frontier. Denton: University of North Texas, 2001.