The Great American Column

...The question is, what feelings in us do these predictable depictions create or sustain...

...They are laughable in west- ern culture generally, but particularly in America where the standard national virtues are antithetical to an educator's attitudes or conduct...

...As for the paradox that education can be regarded both useless and dangerous at the same time, it is resolved in our gen- eral hatred for things invisible, the things schools deal with...

...Tnmmn was conscious that he would have a place in history himself, and to some extent he probably regarded the Library as representative of poster- ity...

...No matter what the particulars of the adversary relation- ship are, the audience must suppose that the teacher, be he majestically compli- cated, introspective, generous, even he-roic, is, because of the nature of his work, moving in circles...

...Once out and on their own, one trusts for them a healthier life...

...He was not heard to men- tion it again...

...But it is the anti-Romantic factor which goes most roughly against our grain, against, the kind of intuitive right thinking we like to think we possess...

...In his knowledgeable comments and his judgment in handling people he showed some of the characteristics that had proved valuable to him as president...

...If schools were only undramatic, we wouldn't mind so much--~r focusing on fraternity rites and love affairs would simply be an expression of theatrical preference...

...What was important was that he knew and understood the people that were "average" (in the best sense) and communicated with them...

...Useless, unmanly, even anarchic...

...And he The Great American Column...

...Tlius, uninformed people often supposed that he had been some kind of justice of the peace instead of the chief administrative official of a county of four hundred thousand people...

...Given this conception, our movie school- teachers always choose to prove their value in brutal terms, a decision which only deepens antagonistic suspicions, and thereby pleases everybody...

...A fe~ sentences from Garry Wills' remarks about Frank Meyer in a special section about him in National Rev/ew (April 28, 1972) serve us well here, limning the man many of his friends knew so well: "Though Frank wrote widely, he made his real impact as a person, remote yet gregarious, irascible yet affectionate, opinionated yet infinitely likeable...

...One grandly befuddled teacher, lost in and to his subject of study, unable comically (The Bells o~ St...

...Teachers in movies are always funny, clownishly, as in The Absent-Minded Professor, grotesquely as in The Blue Angel...

...Now, as in The Graduate, we usually get the.picture songless to suggest stark modernity, but the conception of a world apart remains unchanged...

...One character is locked into his role seemingly forever...

...Our clas- sic American leader and model is not the teacher-educated, but the self-edu-cated man...

...But he put his knowledge of history to serious purpose, adducing historical analogies countless times in connection with his own actions...

...It is the life of June Allison and Peter Lawford vaulting staircases while leading a Hollywood glee club in "Varsity Drag," the life of All McGraw playing the violin, or whatever the hell she played, the life of Tom Courtney run- ning his lungs dry, and the life of Law- rence Olivier feeding poetry to a teeny bopper, but it is not the real life, the life of the pocket...

...to make connections with his students or butside realities...

...Movies a-bout the subject consequently take on an aura of fantasy...

...The teacher does not really exist without the student who, depending on the movie, is either the object of his professional function, the source of his rejuvenated aspirations, the redemption of his own biography, the apple of his eye, the thorn in his side, or the eternalizer of his bore- dom...

...After 19~ he had reason to be skeptical d polls,and he always said we wouldn't know anyway for fifty years whether or not a man had been a good president...

...Instead of supporting a cultural representation which seriously criticizes or openly scorns formal educa- tion, we support one which makes fun of it...

...He was still invoking a regard for history in what was probably his favorite retire-ment activity (aside from politics), talk- ing to groups of young people...

...Yet the long cultural laugh is not sim- ply at teachers, but at the whole she-hang, the process of formal education which is slow and deliberate, and the institution itself which is isolated and stratified, an institution which is, in point of fact, structurally and constitutionally undramatic and anti-Romantic...

...Whether we view the academy in Brother Rat or The Group, we are to associate what we see with the unreal life...

...Gary M. Mar- anell, "The Evaluation of Presidents" an Extension of the Schlesinger Polls," Journal of American Histo~, 17:104-113, June 1970...

...If hatred really is at the center of our feelings about schools, we show it in an interesting way...

...And they worried him little when they did come, even though some of them had worked at the Truman Li-brary...

...The student similarly doesn't exist without the teacher, who serves either as the authority in the way, the path-finder out of the slums, the target for a fisffull of chalk, the rival, lover, muse, or sometimes, death...

...I doubt if there has ever been a movie about the academy where someone hasn't complained in exasperation about the "fancy notions" some child has pick- ed up in school...

...Assuming that every pop cultural convention supports a gen-uine cultural idea, what is it in the genre that we find pleasant or reassuring...

...He was, in a sense, a history buff -- not an academic historian in any sense (the academicians with their esoteric language sometimes amused him...

...Where abso- lutism means power, it is funny to think relatively...

...Those who knew him well always speak of his thoughthdness, his graciousness, and his devotion to friends and family--qualities that went far to explain the loyalty that he inspired among his associates...

...Whether or not this picture is unfair is not important...

...He always wanted people around him, wine and talk flowing, incessant sharp argThe Alternative April 1973...

...It may be cheer- ful or perplexing, but it is not of this world, not of our sense of it, anyway...

...But he was con- suited by innumerable politicians, and every succeeding president came to see him at some time...

...In such ways do our movie teachers compensate for their intelli-gence, a compensation deemed neces-sary both by our association of education with uselessness and unmanliness as well...

...One dean, president, or headmaster, equally out of things, either because he stands for order in a madhouse (Horse Feathers ). or because he functions as a businessman in the world of ideas...

...The fancy notions are usually the progressive or liberal ones, the ones which, depending on whether they're addressed to Ray Milland or Walter Brennan, either urge a new way to treat people or bridle mules...

...His candor and his close affinity with the "'man on the street," plus a good deal of humor, often caused him to speak in a way that many people thought too casual, but which belied both his rather conservative personal character and his great respect for the presidency...

...Where a sense, of direction is admired, it is funny to appear in a daze...

...The unreal life is that which is not "useful...

...Judgments made of him often suffer from misunderstanding of a peculiarity of Missouri law in which county administrative officials were known as "'judges...

...once called the "principal living American theorist of freedom...

...The student will outlive the teacher, and this fact is cen- tral to their relationship...

...He is often thought to have been unprepared for that position, but events proved that he was unprepared only insofar as his current knowledge of Roosevelt's actions was concerned...

...And stu-dents, individually or in groups, also blunderers, but only insofar as they are The Alternative April 1973 located in school...

...Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, New York, 2 vol., 1955, 1956, Doubleday & Co...

...In the precisely what the settings will look like: case of high schools, the ivy is removed, a bird's eye view of a great lawned quad- the students walk faster, and the noise rangle, shot at a couple of hundred feet, is at a higher pitch...

...Nor was he concerned about the perennial and ever-changing game of "rating the presidents...

...This latter association is most blatant in westerns where the beige sterility of the schoolhouse (and schoolmarm) is always played against the glitter of life in the local saloon...

...Movies About Schools Every time a college or high school pace, elaborately toting different sized is to be depicted in the movies, we know books, and chattering furiously...

...I The following remarks concern Frank Meyer the teacher: what he taught, whiat he meant (and means) both for co~l-servatism and for general politic~l-15hilosophical thought in America...

...Study your history," he would advise them, saying that they should learn howAhe greateSt government in .the history of the world got to be that way...

...He Was that, and a man who wrestled with his conscience for decades, who only at the very last came to the Church, though some years before, having abandoned Communism and braved it through his long night of wand-ermg, he had come to God...

...He played active roles roles in the campaigns of 1952 and 1956...

...The atteildant supposition is that to stay in school is to go no place, and that hav- ing been to school is having been no place, that is, no place real...

...Glenn Ford survived The Blackboard Jungle because he was able to punch out the hoods, and when things got too tight for television's Mr...

...One glance at Ichabod Crane standing up against Brom Bones in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" says it all...

...We cannot abide in formal education what we cannot yet accept for ourselves: impracticality, the rejection of force, in- formed innovation, orderly criticism, and most of all, the rational activity which may show that we're available to failure...

...Where activity is essential, it is funny to be contemplative...

...Teachers are made to achieve heroic stature in various situations, not by force of their learning or devotion to it, but by other statements of force, such as earning black belts in karate, or having their war records displayed (usually by a wound revealed), or by galloping over the, female staff like the world's last Renaissance lover...

...His quick comments "'from the hip" were usually grounded in deep-set beliefs and principles, and his decisions on firm convictions about what he felt was the right thing to do...

...What we cannot abide, we set in stereo- type...

...He once wrote that if the "Library had been con- ceived as a memorial to me personally, I would have done everything I could to prevent its establishment during my life- time...I encouraged the building of the Library only because it was to be a cen- ter for the study of all the Presidents and the Presidency as well as the history of the UnRed States...

...He did not seek to influence the priority of persons whose papers would be sought, nor the equality of ac- cess by all scholars to the Library's holdings...

...Truman spent nine years at the Library, longer than he was in the White House by nearly two years...

...Citizen, New York, 1953, Bernard Gels Associates, 239 p.) Once the institution was extablished, however, he showed the same ability to depend on specialists for operations that had marked his terms as president...

...His experience in World War I combat, on the farm, and in the rough-and-lmnble of local politics contributed to another misunderstanding that was partly of his own making...

...the Library beiongs to the Government," he told the Director, "and it's all up to you to run it...

...The fan- cy notions may eventually win out in the plot (usually some coml~romise meas- ure is hit upon wherein all Ancients and MOderns are reconciled), but they are always judged basically dangerous be-cause they are bred out of inteilection, rather than intuition or convention...

...As a dramatic situation, leaving reali- ties aside for a moment, all of this makes for an interesting conclusion on the part of the observer...

...Tru- man enjoyed belittling, in retirement as before, was that strange myopia that causes some people to regard any Mid-dlewesterner--who has not disavowed it--as ipso lacto "average" (used as a...

...His interest in the Library continued to demonstrate his lifelong historical bent...

...Realizing our sense, movie-makers, and tv series makers too, often make adjustments in their school characters which will supposedly allay public pre-judice...

...One football coach, ordin- arily Jim Backus, obsessed, gruff, loud but lovable, another blunderer...

...Arthur M. Schlesinger, "Our Presidents: a Rating by Seventy-Five Historians," New York Times Magazine, July 29, 19...

...would admonish them that it was the re- sponsibility of their generation to keep it that way...

...Like many other former presidents he wrote memoirs explaining and justify- ing his actions, and later quite a differ-ent kind of book about his first few years years in retirement...

...Among the viewpoints that Mr...

...Novak, he could always toss some student-gangster through a transom...

...Trinians) or pathetically (Who's Alraid of Virginia Wolff...

...Truman in retirement showed none of the pomposity often associated with "'elder statesmen...

...The action of these movies is almost always guided by the opposition of teach- er and student, who are placed in an adversary relationship at the outset, and proceed throughout the plot to delineate themselves in terms of their frictions, eased or increased, with each other...

...Where clothes make the man, it is funny not to care what you Iook like...

...His early extensive reading of history-- especially biographies of the presi-dents --has often been noted...

...Roosevelt had hoped for: an institution built to house the papers and other historical materials of himself and his contemporaries, which would become an important research center...

...He enjoyed what Mr...

...but it is also part of'a more general conception...

...Actually it is less unfair than oversimplified, the greenery and bafflement which characterize movies a- bout schools being largely true to the models...

...That article was based on a poll of more than five hundred histor- ians, as against the seventy-five of the poll by Professor Arthur Schlesinger in 1962, which had placed him ninth in greatness...

...Harry S. Truman, Mr...

...Truman knew that the "revisionists" would come, from both the Right and the Left, as they do after every historical period...

...The other merely uses part of his life, the youngest and least experienced part, involved with the first...

...whereas the student, be he inarticulate, insensitive, a lout or buffoon, is, because of his verti- cal climb, his graduation, going places...

...Having pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, his manhood has virtually been defined by his self-educa- tion, which in turn implies that his man- hood would have been threatened or weakened by schooling, and syllogisti-cally, that schooling is an unmanly in- fluence...

...I"l of Ivy," an anagram of it...

...He was pleased but not boast~l when his attention was called to an article that rated him sev- enth among all the presidents in general prestige, and sixth in "accomplishments of their administrations...

...He had himself shown qualities of leadership as early as World War I that made him other than average...

...The unreal life, put baldly, is that which is not encumbered by the need David Brudnoy for cash...

...The Living Legacy of Frank S. Meyer He's been dead a year now, the man William F. Buckley, Jr...

...Trustees, blunderers all, too crass to understand what education is all about...

...Although the policies which gained him broad support as president largely con, cerned foreign affairs, his own program dwelt heavily on the needs of the common man...

...The figures who populate these settings are also foreknown to us...

...When such pictures descending carefully towards ivy-covered snapped on the screen twenty years ago, neo-Georgian buildings, finally settling at they were accompanied by a massive ground level to catch students in clus- male chorus humming "Gaudeamus Igi- ters, all walking at the same ceremonial tur," or, as in the radio program, "Halls term of opprobrium) and dull...

...Citizen, op...