TV Defends Historical Accuracy and Free Speech

I woke up this morning and eventually tuned my television to the Hero and Icons network (H&I) which was showing the American television half-hour western Have-Gun Will Travel. Have Gun-Will Travel, which I have long enjoyed, was created by Sam Rolfe and Herb Meadow and ran on the CBS television network from 1957 to 1963 during the era when westerns and situation comedies dominated American network television schedules.  

Have Gun-Will Travel has always been an anomaly among the American television westerns and television shows of the era for me thanks to the fact that its hired gunman, Paladin (played by method actor Richard Boone), was not only a deadly gunfighter for hire but a genteel knight clad in black who could quote philosophy, literary works, case law, and speak a host of languages other than English and who lived in cultured San Francisco circles when he wasn't plying his chosen trade of gun for hire. Paladin, in other words, was not your normal American television or radio gunfighter. Despite being an anomaly Have-Gun Will Travel seemed to work with the all important American TV audience since the show finished among the top four American television programmes in its first four television seasons according to the Nielsen ratings.

As a social scientist and historian I found the second of today's Have Gun-Will Travel offerings on H&I, "The Teacher", episode 27 from the first season of the show and broadcast on 15 May 1958 and written by series co-creator Sam Rolfe, who co-wrote Anthony Mann's typically brilliant The Naked Spur from 1953 with Harold Jack Bloom, and who went on to create the NBC spy drama The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968), particularly interesting. "The Teacher" begins with Paladin arriving in a small town after a long ride, presumably after doing one of his every episode gun for hire jobs. After entering the general store Paladin hears the school bell ring but notices that the school age daughter of the general store owner Jason Coldwell (Jack Albertson), Becky (Lana Wood) does not get up and go to school. Wondering why Paladin asks her father who tells him that the teacher, Molly Stanton (Marian Seldes), has been threatened with death by Peter Breck (Frank Weaver) and his gang if she doesn't stop teaching about the atrocities committed by Quantrill's Raiders, Confederate sympathisers, to her class, something she refuses to do. Learning, after asking Stanton about Kansas's Jayhawks, Northern sympathisers, that Stanton notes that they too committed acts of terror, Paladin, like the chilvarous knight he is, vows to protect the school teacher from breck and his gang. Paladin realises, however, that he needs help to protect Stanton from Breck's gang of thugs so like like Marshall Will Kane (Gary Cooper) in 1952's High Noon, Paladin goes to the fathers of those attending Stanton's class for help. He finds none from those like Daniel Weaver (Andrew Duggan) and his sons who fought for the Confederacy during the war who rationalise not helping Stanton by claiming that she isn't teaching history fairly despite Weaver's youngest son telling his father that the teacher noted that Sherman committed acts of terror during his military campaign in Weaver's fomer home of Georgia. The next day the showdown begins as Paladin faces Breck and his gang who surround him and beat him up. Just as they confront Stanton, however, Coldwell and then the Weaver's come to Paladin's aid. Breck and his gang are defeated and told to leave town and leave the school marm alone. Another network television happy ending complete.

I don't know the precise reason Rolfe wrote this episode. I don't have access to his papers or the papers associated with Have Gun-Will Travel and can't even find any information on where they might be housed. Was it because of the United States's long anti-intellectual tradition, one that often turned on teachers because those attacking teachers wanted history taught in their politically and ideologically correct way? Was it because of McCarthyism, a variant of American manichean anti-intellectualism, a variant that was still very much on the minds of American intellectuals in 1958? Was it because of a specific attack on school teachers or the burning of books, another not infrequent occurrence in American history, somewhere in the US at the time Rolfe wrote the episode? Was it because there was still latent and often manifest animosity between American North and American South in 1958, an animosity that manifested itself often in the American federal legislative branches as racist Southern Democrats and their Republican and Western American allies battled with New Deal Democrats and more liberal Republicans? Was "The Teacher" a plea for Northern and Southern unity against thuggish rageoholic types like the Breck Gang of implied radical right Southern or Southern sympathising racists? Whatever the social, cultural, and historical context, "The Teacher" is a very interesting episode of Have Gun-Will Travel.

Musings on Aesthetics and Social Science

 

As other commentators before me have noted, some cartoon shows capture real life better than the television dramas or comedies starring real people. Take Beavis and Butthead, the title characters in Mike Judge's famous cartoon show Beavis and Butthead which ran on the music network turned drama and comedy network MTV. Beavis and Butthead represent a common "school" of "criticism" in the real world, the I like it or I don't like it "school" of "criticism". It is their type of "criticism" that dominates contemporary aesthetic discourse as one can see by taking a cursory glance at the "criticism" one finds on social media and on sites like Amazon about a host of phenomena including politics, economics, and culture. As Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butthead points up again and again in the early years of the show, the characters Beavis and Butthead represent the lowest common denominator form of "criticism", a form of "criticism" that isn't refective, that doesn't ask why, economically, politically, culturally, demographically, and geographically, certain people like or value certain things. 

There is, of course, an entire intellectual and academic domain specialising in this question of beauty and value, aesthetics. Typically, as one is taught in introductory aesthetics classes, there have been and are two dominant schools in aesthetics; the beauty and value of something or someone is inherent in that something or someone and the beauty and value are in the eyes of the beholder school of aesthetics. The former school argues that the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Budweiser beer, or a painting by Van Gogh, for instance, are inherently beautiful or valuable. The latter school, on the other hand, argues that the beauty and value of Buffy, Bud, or Van Gogh are variably valued or considered beautiful.

I subscribe to the beauty and value is in the eyes of the beholder school because, empirically speaking, it is clear to the scientific observer that some people like Buffy, some people don't, that some people like Bud, others don't, and that some people like the paintings of Van Gogh, some of them with economic and cultural power and authority, some don't, and they, at least at the moment, have limited economic and cultural power to impact broader views about the beauty and value of the work of Van Gogh. It should be noted here that when Van Gogh was alive the opposite was true, most of the art establishment and most of the money men did not find the work of Van Gogh beautiful and did not see it as valuable.

This fact, that, empirically speaking, some people value and find beauty in some object or some person, points up the fact that the eye of the beholder, a title of a Twilight Zone episode on the very subject of nature of beauty, school of aesthetics is descriptively right. Value and beauty are in the eye of the beholder. That most people, such as Beavis and Butthead, don't think reflectively about the nature of beauty (and the beast), points up, just as Mike Judge intended, how limited the examined life is among the lowest common denominator masses. That most of the lowest common denominator masses, and some elites though for different reasons, still maintain that beauty and value are inherent in objects and people in spite of the clear empirical evidence that it isn't, points up the role ethnocentrism plays in human society and culture. Humans like to think that what they find beaufiful and value is what everybody should find beautiful and value. For them the normative determines the descriptive. That is not science and is not scientific, however.

Musings on the Human Condition

Humans. You gotta love them. Many of them believe that that there are different races of humans on the planet when biology, genetics, and evolutionary anthropology show that there is only one. Many of them believe that their human group, whether their human group is a clique, a political party, a nation, a religious group, an ethnic group, or some other of the many identity groups out there, is the greatest thing since Haagen-Dazs Coffee Ice Cream. Note the ethnocentritic holier than thou better than you arrogance here. Of course, not every one of those groups can be the greatest since the notion that our group is the height of evolutionary achievement logically cancels out all the others. Again, I give arrogance and ethnocentrism.

Take the clique of Gibney and the Cult of the Orange One. Both of these groups believe that their group is superior to all others, particularly their evil others such as, in the case of the former, the right wing Republicans who they almost constantly belittle because they look down upon them as a subspecies, and dissidents like socialists and conservatives, who they knee jerkingly belittle thanks to a regimen of brainwashing socialisation. The Cult of the Orange one likewise believes in the superiority of their little identity group and they likewise believe that their nasty other, in this case the Democrats, and their other nasty evil other, socialist/commie/nazi/anarcist/dissidents, are little better than vermin. Note the manicheanism present in both of these identity groups. 

Apart from the fact that both of these groups are the same--they believe they are the greatest thing since sliced bread and they believe that their evil opposite is conspiring to take over the US--what is also humourous is their feigned innocence. Daily they belittle their evil other putting them down for their idiocy, vanity, stupidity, moronicity, and just plain Blue and Red Meany meaness. When the same is done to them or when their hypocrisy is empirically noted, however, they feign innocence playing the Sgt. Schultz card. Hypocrites, pots, and kettles they all be.

The Books of My Life: The Illustrated History of Canada

General histories of nation-states are always kind of hit or miss. They are also probably never completely satisfying to those who teach introductory classes on some particular nation-state. Most of them do the job of introducing students to the broad economic (including class), political, cultural (including race, ethnicity, and gender), demographic, and geographic outlines of the history of a nation-state. At the same time, however, they are selective because they have to be since there is simply too much terrain to cover and too short a compass to cover it in and some scholars and perhaps even some students will likely note that this selectivity often means that important economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic information are missing from these selective introductory histories. Most of the textbooks on US history I used in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, for instance, did not pay as much attention to religion, a cultural phenomenon that is central to the understanding a nation like the United States and even Canada and Russia, as it, in my opinion, deserved given its centrality to the history of the modern nation-state. Additionally, I was never enamoured of the extensive colour illustrations that typified many introductory textbooks, something that drove up the cost of these already uber costly commodities. Nor was I or am I a fan of the anecdotal tales that one often finds at the beginning of contemporary introductory textbooks, something clearly designed to capture the imagination of the student but which rarely does because college textbooks (and the similar stuff produced for online courses) simply cannot compete with the fantasy magic of television and the social media of days past and present.

Editor Craig Brown's The Illustrated History of Canada (Montreal and Kingston, Ont: McGill-Queens University Press, revised edition, 2012) does a very good job of introducing the history of what became the nation-state of Canada. The text very capably takes readers from the era when First Peoples occupied what is today Canada, through to the French settlement of Canada, the English settlement of Canada, (the two founding nations of what is today Canada), the interactions between First Peoples and the French and the English, the development of the fur and cod trades which were central to the economies of the early French and English settlers, the conquest of New France by the British, Dominion status, Confederation, World War I, World War II, the postwar Canadian economic boom, Pierre Trudeau and  the Canadian constitution, and finally to Steven Harper, the prime minister of Canada at the time this revision of the Illustrated History of Canada was published.  

The Illustrated History of Canada touches, if sometimes too briefly but again it is an introductory text aimed, one assumes, at college students and the educated reader who want to know the broad and basic outlines of Canadian history, on key economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic events in Canadian history. It is nicely illustrated with material culture documents that add much, particularly to the cultural and artistic history of Canada. It largely avoids the ethnocentric pat on the back aren't we so wonderful aspects of national mythhistories (and denominational histories) written before the decline (though not disappearance) of nationalist mythhistory after the 1960s.

I highly recommend The Illustrated History of Canada for anyone interested in the broad and basic outlines of Canadian history. Brown has chosen an excellent set of scholars on Canadian history to write on the various periods in Canadian history they are expert in and which comprise the individual chapters of this collection. It is a book that will be useful to those studying Canadian history in college, those interested in the history of Canada in general, and those interested in European settler societies. Like any introductory textbooks it has its limits, as I noted earlier. I, for instance, would like to have seen more on Canadian religion but that said, it does what it sets out to do quite admirably.
 

Musings on History, Mythhistory, and the Teaching of History

As a professional historian and social scientist I have occasionally had the opportunity to interact with amateur historians and social scientists over the years. For many years the only amateurs I knew who were interested in and who wrote about history were several Mormons I had the opportunity to meet when I lived in Utah. Most of the amateur Mormon historians I encountered and read were quite good historians. Most of them were aware of the importance of primary source material. Most of them were cognizant of the importance of literature reviews (historiography and theoretical approaches). Most of them recognised the importance of context (economic, political, cultural, demographic, geographic). Despite their excellent understanding of history and the historical method, however, many of them were also parochial and partisan in their approach to history and to their Mormon subject matter both of which are always problematic for the professional historian and social scientist who strives to be as objective and as dispassionate as possible in order to present a fair and balanced reconstruction of the past and a fair and balanced interpretation of the present.

Though they are not part of the networks I am embedded in--typically I interact with academics and intellectuals--I was and am somewhat aware that many in the past and many in the present conceptualise history as a passion play or a morality play starring celebrity good guys and bad guys, who believe that it was and is the good guys and bad guys who made and make history, and that history was and is about good guys standing up to bad guys. I was, however unaware of how prevalent this decontextualised good guys versus bad guys Hollywood style history, a style of history that is heavily melodramatic and moralistic and as a consequence often interested in assigning blame for wars like the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II, though I should have been aware of this given my professional background as a historian and social scientist and my interest in culture, culture wars, and the culture war between mythhistory and real history. The things you learn on social media.

As a historian and social scientist I am, of course, interested in trying to isolate the long term and short term political, economic, cultural factors that impact any significant moment in history just as they impact everyday life. In regards to the US Civil War there is a consensus among historians and social scientists that the long term factors that contributed to the coming of the Civil War include include slavery, the economics of cheap labour in both the North and the South, the Northern control of the Southern cotton economy and the Northern dominance America's financial institutions, Whites not wanting to do back breaking work associated with cotton, tobacco, rice, and sugar (the last the most deadly for slaves), White ethnocentrism, political tensions between the North and the South over slavery, American manifest destiny (the issue of what to do about territories and areas "incorporated" into the US), and states rights (including tensions over nullification). The short term or immediate factor that led to the American Civil War was obviously Fort Sumter. In regards to World War, I long term factors contributing to the coming of the Great War include great power rivalries and how these played out in economic, political, cultural, geographical, and demographic (population size matters, just ask Canada) ways. The short term spark, of course, was the assasination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria Hungary by a Serbian nationalist revved up or doped up on the Serbian civil religious faith. The US Civil War and World War I, in other words, didn't come out of nowhere.

Now don't get me wrong. If one wants to explore human history from a theological, dogmatic, doctrinal, or social ethical perspective and assign blame for wars, well to each his own, I suppose. For me, however, such approaches have to be grounded in empirical reality and in the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic factors that are the motors of history, society, and culture. And while one interested in assigning blame for wars can, I suppose, assign blame, there is nothing like real wars for bringing out the ambiguity and muddiness or murkiness of real life, something the excellent television show Da Vinci's Inquest does for Canadian politics and policing in every episode. In World War II, for instance, the US began the war after it entered into it with the policy of not bombing civilians. Very soon, however, the US, like Britain and Germany before it, was bombing civilian targets for a variety of reasons. Welcome to the ambiguity of real war and real life where there is generally enough blame to go around.

But back to mythhistory, my realisation that the mass of individuals prefer their history to be manichean and melodramatic and ultimately civics oriented has made me reflect on and rethink my past experiences teaching history. When I taught history I found most of the students I taught to be thoroughly uninterested in history. Why, I was not sure. Was it the focus on dates and great men of secondary school history? Was it the civics nature of secondary schoo history? The major reason most students took my history courses, and take history courses in general in college, was not because they wanted to but because they had to. The courses I taught at the time allowed students to fulfill the elective requirements they needed in order to graduate. Eventually the fact that most of the students in my history classes had no interest in real history--I am not even sure they had an interest in mythhistory or the mythic great men version of history--led me to trade in the teaching of history for the teaching of sociology. I found it much easier to teach sociology to students because I could convince them that sociology was relevant to their lives and I could, by emphasising the processes by which we humans became who we were--socialisation, identity, power, knowledge, and sexuality, for example--convince students, or at least some or most students some or most of the time, that sociology was relevant to understanding who they were and how they became the way they were. So was the reason students were uninterested in history because it wasn't relevant to their lives? Only Memorex knows for sure.