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.
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