The Aspen Institute: How a Dying Mining Town Became an Ideas Capital

Walter Paepcke arrived in Aspen in nineteen forty-five to a town that was functionally a ghost. The silver boom that had made Aspen one of the wealthiest cities in the Rocky Mountain West in the eighteen eighties had collapsed in eighteen ninety-three with the silver price, and the following fifty years had taken the rest. The population was under a thousand. The Wheeler Opera House, built in eighteen eighty-nine for about one hundred thousand dollars, had a leaking roof. The Hotel Jerome had a mattress problem.

Paepcke was a Chicago industrialist, the chairman of the Container Corporation of America, and a man who had spent the war years thinking about what democratic civilization needed to survive its encounter with fascism and nuclear weapons. His conclusion, arrived at with his wife Elizabeth, was that democratic culture needed institutional infrastructure: a place to gather, think, and rehearse the values it was supposed to be fighting for.

He bought most of Aspen. He restored the Wheeler. He recruited Albert Schweitzer, who had not left Africa in years, to attend a conference in the Rocky Mountains. The Goethe Bicentennial Convocation of nineteen forty-nine brought Schweitzer, Ortega y Gasset, and Arthur Rubinstein, among others, to a former silver-mining town at seven thousand nine hundred feet. The Cold War political logic was explicit: Paepcke believed the West needed the same kind of ideological weight as the Soviet Union, and he believed it would come from culture rather than dogma.

The Aspen Music Festival grew from that gathering. The Aspen Institute has hosted every category of public intellectual since. The skiing followed the culture, not the other way around. Aspen became a ski destination because it was already an intellectual one, and the combination turned out to be commercially self-sustaining in ways Paepcke could not have fully anticipated.