Since I will be teaching youth studies at the undergraduate level rather than English at the high school level I decided to broaden out the film adaptation assignment and do some thinking about critical media literacy.
Critical Media Literacy
The critical media literacy approach sees the audience as active in the process of meaning-making and promotes the production of counter-hegemonic media (Kellner & Share, 2007). In this case we can see our students as a potential audience. Kellner (2004) suggested that new technologies of communication are powerful tools that can liberate or dominate harkening back to Dewey’s moral measure of, “Does it liberate or suppress, ossify or render flexible, divide or unify interest?” (Dewey, 1922, p.326). Kellner (2004) has also suggested that educators must teach their students to use and critically analyze these media if students are to embrace civic participation and radical democracy. Critical media literacy enables people to evaluate, dissect, and investigate media content and forms and to cultivate skills in analyzing ideologies and the multiple meanings and messages embedded in media texts (Kellner & Share, 2005).
Youth, Credibility & Digital Media
The topic of how youth asses the objective and subjective components of messages on the internet has garnered much attention recently. Young people have access through digital technology to more available information than any other time in history. Metzger & Flanagin (2008) have suggested that teaching youth how to navigate the “ocean of information” available through digital technologies is important and necessary to critically assessing credibility. Flanagin and Metzger (2008) have also argued that youth are more likely than their parents or grandparents to turn to digital media when researching a topic for school or personal use. They have argued that the impact of “growing up digital” is that more information that ever is filtered through largely unknown sources and that “although youth are talented and comfortable users of technology, they may lack crucial tools and abilities that enable them to seek and consume information effectively”(p.7). One of the difficulties of assessing credible sources on the internet is that conventional methods may not work because of the fast pace, link structure, and lack of referencing (Metzger & Flanagin, 2008). However, these authors have suggested that it would be simplistic to say youth are inherently lacking compared to adults when it comes to credibility assessment. Although many educational efforts have taken the more “protectionist” approach towards shielding students from potentially incorrect information online, others have argued this type of sheltering inhibits the ability to think critically about digital information. Metzger and Flanagin (2008) have argued that collaborative filtering processes like Wikipedia with its unprecedented peer review can have the potential to solve many credibility issues raised by digital media. Encouraging youth to examine Wikipedia pages where collaborators discuss contested information, encouraging youth to become providers of information themselves, and making direct comparisons between competing news accounts may all be ways to gain skills in assessing credibility (Metzger & Flanagin, 2008).
Considering the incredible immersion of youth in digital technologies, more research to fill this void is needed. Most of the research exploring information people obtain through digital media has focused mainly on websites. More research could be done looking at different information resources like blogs, wikis, email and text messaging and although research on credibility and media is growing, very little is today is dedicated specifically to youth with the exception of college students. Metzger and Flanagin (2008) have argued that “credibility is a cornerstone of people’s interactions, personal representation, academic and professional performance, and democratic expression and choice” (p. 20). Understanding better how youth asses credibility is therefore of significant interest.
Some Conclusions
The research suggests that in this unprecedented time of media consumption, it is vitally important that parents, youth workers, teachers and all those who work with and on behalf of youth pay closer attention to how media informs and educates young people. Many authors have suggested that media messages are generally for profit and are constructed using their own special language. These authors have argued it is important to question the images portrayed by media and not take them for granted. Each person brings their own context and life history to interpret media messages and not everyone will interpret messages in the same way. Many may not be able to see positive representations of themselves in the popular media because of embedded values of the corporations that produce these messages. However, the literature also suggests that embracing critical thinking around these issues can bring us towards more informed communities and a more enlightened democracy.
Brown, Schaffer, Vargas, LaHoma & Romocki (2004) have noted that there is a growing body of case study evidence suggesting critical media literacy can positively impact the lives of young people. The goal of incorporating critical media literacy into the everyday lives of youth is about creating more aware, engaged, civically-minded youth who can make more informed choices not only as consumers (as we know vast amounts of energy and resources are spent on marketing to youth) but also as advocates for positive representations of themselves in media. Brown et. al. also wrote, “Our vision is that in the future, the media world would be a more diverse and civically engaged place in which young people could find and produce positive images of themselves. Raising a generation of media-literate citizens may help realize that vision”(p. 264).
Directions for Future Research
The body of literature connecting youth development and critical media literacy is growing. Hopefully projects like the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning spanning research, educational reforms and technology development will continue to be funded. Topics like youth, digital media and credibility have started to emerge and capture the public’s attention, but further research is needed. Other important research focusing on media, consumer, and digital culture is happening as well. The anthology Media/Cultural Studies: Critical Approaches came out in 2009 and dedicated 644 pages to a vast array of media–related topics many of which focused on youth and media usage. I would argue that there are many exciting places where youth development research and critical media research can intersect. Hopefully further research exploring these connections will support youth, their families, and communities by giving them tools to interpret and deconstruct media messages, challenge these messages and create new messages that better represent themselves.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Final Project: A Perfectly “Delightful” Way to Learn: An Exploration of Mental Hygiene Films
“We pledge…to produce only those films which will motivate constructive students thinking…to maintain maximum interest level through well-paced realism rather than unwarranted artifice…to regard as an honored privilege and a sacred trust our function in aiding in the development of finer men and women to the end that a better understanding may exist among all peoples of the world.”
-“pledge to the Educators of America,”
Mental Hygiene filmmaker ad, 1946
“Everybody keeps talking about teenagers as if we were a bunch of freaks or something”
-What About Juvenile Delinquency (1955)
Born out of the instructional film movement in the 1940’s, a segment of films dedicated to social guidance cropped up in classrooms around America. These social guidance films were dubbed “mental hygiene” films and they were created with the intent to adjust social behavior (Smith, 1999). Teens were expected to learn “proper” social behavior from these ten minute films with names like Are You Popular? and A Date with Your Family in the 1940’s, The Snob, What About Juvenile Delinquency and How to Be an American in the 1950’s and Keep off the Grass and Highways of Agony in the late 1960’s. Through these films, kids were asked to consider that being “…selfish, arrogant, undemocratic, or delinquent could make them unhappy or; depending on the producer, dead” (Smith, p. 12). In the world of mental hygiene, playing by the rules and maintaining the status quo were rewarded with popularity and happiness.
When looking at a range of these films it becomes clearly problematic that the film makers isolated issues from everyday life and put youth at the center of blame for many of society’s problems. For example, the particularly gory genre of highway safety films like Mechanized Death (1961) and Highways of Agony (1969) solely blamed teens for major accidents on America’s roads without consideration of the Detroit automaker’s lack of safety standards. For the mental hygiene film producers, the bottom line was to keep costs down and production cheap which meant keeping the storylines simple and characters stereotypical. Complex social problems were boiled down to simple solutions. In the majority of mental hygiene films as Smith (1999) argued, “…it was as impossible to be a little good or a little bad as it was to be a little dead” (14).
For the purposes and scope of this paper I will focus in particular on the mental hygiene films and not popular television at the time, but I think it is important to note that popular television especially in the 1950s was providing moral and ethical demonstrations about civil society as well. Laurie Oullettte and James Hay wrote, (2008) “A popular domestic comedy like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet represented problems and solutions in domestic family governance that were not entirely disconnected from mental hygiene classroom films shown during those years” (p. 27). The themes covered in the mental hygiene films were certainly part of the wider public’s imagination at the time.
I want to critically examine how these films were a response to what was happening in America as World War II ended, what was happening in American education at the time since the films were primarily shown in classrooms and explore some of the studios that produced mental hygiene films. Then I plan to explore two themes in the mental hygiene films – the idea of youth “as” trouble (juvenile delinquency) as well as the idea of youth “in” trouble (safety and morality) through several selected films. As I explore the mental hygiene films and their relationship to history, progressive education and the educational film industry, I hope to highlight along the way what I believe are some of the biggest problems with these films and what was really at stake for the youth represented in them.
The mental hygiene films are often overlooked for what seems like their completely straightforward and passé nature. Ironically, as bland as many of the films were, the histories of the film producers were entertaining and often quite dark – connections to pornography, suicide, alleged murder and a connection to start up capital from John Wayne are just a few of the interesting side notes to the mental hygiene history. My hope is a closer look at these films and their messages mostly long forgotten will prompt us to think more deeply about how youth were often problematically represented in and indoctrinated by the mental hygiene films and how some of these problems still live with us today. In the introduction to Residual Media Charles Acland (2007) reminds us, “…how surprising and unsettling figures from the past can be. They creep up to remind us of their existence and of the influence they wield in the present”(xiii).
World War II & Mental Hygiene
The mental hygiene films emerged in the midst of a fearful and traumatized public following World War II. During World War II, films had been widely used to teach soldiers and women on the factory assembly line alike how to perform their tasks and “want to”(Smith, p. 21). The films were created to stir up pride and morale with names like Pride of Victory, Avenge December 7, and Farmer at War. Savage (2007) wrote, “The whole culture was full of propaganda that stressed excitement and thrills” (p. 393). What had been the standard practice during the depression—staying in school and out of the labor market, changed with World War II. Everyone was needed. Pre-enlistment age youth had newfound social and economic importance. Playing a part in the war effort gave many youth the incentive to drop out of school and work. The war effort had not only increased the number of women in factories but youth as well. From 1940-1943, the percentage of 14-17 year olds employed in factories increased 300%, as compared to a 30% increase of women. In 1942, some three million teenagers were in the labor force (Gilbert, 1988, p. 20). This work led to greater economic freedom and greater visibility of youth. This visibility however attracted adult criticism and reports of juvenile delinquency grew (Savage, 2007). For example, the 1943 Zoot-Suit Riots, where Mexican-American youth battled servicemen and then police on the streets of Los Angeles, were publicized nation-wide, and became symbolic of the potential for delinquent and anti-social behavior among youth (Gilbert, 1988, p. 33). The complex cultural politics of Los Angeles and fact that it was off-duty servicemen that started the riots by attacking young men wearing zoot suits escaped public attention.
As World War II came to a close, fear of communists and nuclear annihilation caused a great deal of anxiety in American life. There were also fears that because youth had enjoyed great freedoms during the war while fathers fought overseas and mothers worked in the factories that the country was witnessing the destruction of the traditional family and the existing social order. According to this problematic discourse, the war, women, and a new youth culture were responsible for the coming social chaos.
Lewis Hine, head of the American Federation of Labor argued that women should leave the factories and return home, thereby fulfilling their patriotic duties “to see that their children ... have the care and protection that will enable them to develop into persons who will live good and responsible lives” (Gilbert, 1988, p. 33). National security depended on the stability of the “traditional family” and the containment of women in their “rightful” place in the home.
What is considered the very first mental hygiene film –You and Your Family (1946) became a response to the growing fears of a society afraid of juvenile delinquents and was meant to fix what was fast becoming known as the “youth problem.” In the film, Mary the main character is called up and asked to go to a dance. She proceeds to ask her parents who say no and then we are introduced to different scenarios of how Mary “could” act in response. It’s strangely robotic, but the film gets the point across that Mary above all else should respect the authority of her father…and mother and that their decisions are best for her. Smith (1999) argued that films such as You and Your Family were meant to “turn back the clock and train American kids how to be kids again” (p. 22). In this discourse apparently learning to be kids again meant learning to not question parental authority. Mental hygiene films reinforced the narrative that stressed the importance of the traditional family.
Take the film, The Snob (1958) for example which instructed students on the social condemnation and exile that faced young women who veered from society’s definition of what it meant to be female. The central character Sarah is ostracized and labeled deviant for wanting to stay home on a Friday night to do her algebra work (traditionally a male subject and also reminds us of textbooks since the film is produced for McGraw-Hill Books), rather than go to her neighbor Rob’s party with the other kids. When Sarah relents and attends the party, she is lambasted by her peers for her non-conformity and for emasculating a male peer by refusing to be his dance partner. She is told that she “really froze him out” implying a stereotypically unfortunate discourse about women who don’t give in to men as being “frigid.” Her father is not much help when he asks “Pumpkin. Aren’t all those kids who you think you’re better than having more fun than you?” The problematic and dominant narrative that was playing out post World War II explained that deformed families produced antisocial youth, in which case, society needed to step in, and be the better parent.
Tina Besley in her article on Foucault, disciplinary technologies and mental hygiene (2002) wrote, “…because we tend to see young people as our hope for the future, society has continued to be concerned with the moral constitution of young people…by devising and harnessing technologies that teach, encourage control and enable the mastery of governance of self”(p. 423). I would argue that these ‘disciplinary technologies’ of film meant to guide and control the morality of young people were a morally panicked response and in a sense these technologies were meant to be a substitute for “better parents.” Grossberg (2010) echoes this fundamental idea that youth are inevitably tied to our hope and struggle over our relation to the future. He argues, “While I think kids are caught at the intersection of a number of struggles, the most powerful of these is a struggle over ‘the question of the future’—over our assumptions about the relation between the present and the future”(p. 63).
After the war, progressive educators took note of how effective films had been in training soldiers and women in the factories and began to demand methods like film for use in the classroom to help “inculcate attitudes and ideals that will enable boys and girls to make their places as efficient and effective members of a democratic society” (Smith, p. 21). Of course it’s hard to know if their ideals truly affected students the way they wanted them to. Stuart Hall (1994) wrote about how those wanting to control preferred readings of texts (which can be films) cannot predict how others will read them. He noted that “…they cannot contain every possible reading of the text. The very text which they encode slips from their grasp. You can always read it another way”(p. 262). Anna McCarthy echoed this sentiment in a different way talking about the rise in governing through television in the 1950s. McCarthy (2010) argued when corporations, philanthropic institutes, private agencies (and I’ll add mental hygiene film producers) tried to educate the public about the “responsibilities of freedom” in a capitalist democracy they, “often discovered a profound discrepancy between the effects they hoped to achieve and the responses of their viewers”(p. 7).
Disdained before the war, film as a tool of education was now recast as a “perfectly delightful way to learn” (Green, quoted in Smith, p. 22). I would argue that this connection (maybe even conjuncture) is vitally important to the rise of the mental hygiene films because before World War II film was not highly regarded as a tool of education. Grossberg (2010) notes that the unity of a conjuncture usually deals with a social crisis of sorts. If it had not been for crisis of World War II and the necessity of training hundreds of thousands of young men and women during the war very quickly, film as a method of educating may not have come to prominence. Without the educational/”attitude building” films being shown widely during the war, the mental hygiene film movement which was the intersection of a method (film) and curriculum (social guidance) may not have come together.
Progressive Education?
In 1944 the United States Office of Education commissioned a study called Vocational Education in the Years Ahead and it took a year and a half to complete with the results presented in May of 1945 at a conference on education in Washington D.C. (Kliebard, 2004). Born out of this study was the agreement the youth in the United States were being underserved by high schools, but the direction that reform should take was not abundantly clear. Charles Prosser, the director of the Dunwoody Institute in Minneapolis came to the forefront of the proceedings and delivered what became known as the Prosser resolution. The resolution called for a new theme in education—life adjustment. This new curriculum would be “attuned to the actual life functions of youth as a preparation for adulthood”(Kliebard, 2004, p. 252). This new curriculum would have an unprecedented scope (Pinar, 2004).
Achievements of the popularity of this movement were embodied in the mental hygiene films. Kliebard (2004) wrote, “Much of the popularity of these films derived from fears that, without proper guidance, the rebelliousness of youth would ultimately threaten the foundations of society, and schools were seen as the place where menace could be minimized”(Kliebard, p. 258). The “rules” for social guidance in the films became overwhelmingly clear with proper behavior in regards to meeting people, eating in restaurants, going on dates, and attending school dances amongst many other topics. Kliebard (2004) argued that the fact that the films reached their height of popularity during the life adjustment era was no coincidence. In some ways these films were “adjunct to the curriculum…they conveyed precisely the messages that life adjustment advocates thought to be the most salient”(p. 259). These advocates of the life adjustment curriculum were very concerned about the dropout rate and felt that the current curriculum “rooted in the ideal of scholarship” was far from the general interests of the current high school population. The desire to reform the curriculum to functional areas of living versus the traditional “elements of the cultural heritage” that were the hallmark of education at the turn of the century became a lightning rod for criticism. Wrath from academicians was aroused when they understood that the life adjustment curriculum “promoted programs like basic living not merely as an addendum to the traditional curriculum, but as a substitute for it” (Kliebard, p. 260). Interestingly, as the life adjustment curriculum came and went, the mental hygiene films still held sway in classrooms through the 1960s although their popularity was never the same after the 1950s.
It’s important to note that the life adjustment curriculum came out of the greater movement of progressive education. By the time mental hygiene films arrived on the scene progressive education with its Deweyan tenants of child-centeredness and experiential learning had been well underway since the turn of the century. Dewey (1917) wrote in Democracy and Education, “…schools remain, of course, the typical instance of environments framed with express reference to influencing the mental and moral disposition of their members”(p. 22). It should be noted that Dewey believed (and this is often lost in how other progressive educators talked about schools) that in the transmitting of this kind of mental and moral knowledge that the school was only one means “…and compared with other agencies, a relatively superficial means”(p. 5). So if we (like many educators then and now) read Dewey and think about progressive education bracketing the complexities of the school in relation to families and communities, showing the mental hygiene films in American classrooms would certainly seem to follow from this ideal of inculcating youth with positive moral behavior. Besey (2002) wrote, “Broadly speaking, progressive education’s aims were for all boys and girls to be inculcated with ideals and attitudes to enable them to meet the complexities of modern life and to take their place as effective members of a modern democratic society”(p. 426). The mental hygiene films were a response in part to the added element of a fearful and traumatized public that had endured a second world war. Something new was needed in education to help ensure there would be no future disasters. Smith (1999) wrote, “That ‘something’ was the mental hygiene classroom film, a uniquely American experiment in social engineering, the marriage of a philosophy—progressive education—and a technology—the instructional film”(19).
One of the insidious problems with the films being tied to progressive education was that progressive educators who touted critical thinking and critical pedagogy essentially sold their students a big bucket of indoctrination when they flipped off the lights and turned on the newest mental hygiene film. While movies like The Snob (1958) and What About the Juvenile Delinquency (1955) ended with a question mark asking “What would you do?” they presumably had already clearly told youth what to think. For example again in The Snob the audience is told over and over how the main character Sarah’s behavior is “snobbish” and “alienating” by the narrator of the film. It is hard to believe when he asks “have we judged Sarah’s snobbery too harshly?” that it would be possible to judge her in any other way. Indoctrination came from very savvy film producers who “as experts in manipulative sales, advertising and magazine publishing, adapted these psychologically manipulative techniques to education”(Besley, p. 431).
A Little Hollywood in the Midwest
“Coronet Films is proud to be a vital part of modern American education. The responsibility for providing teachers with films to train the youth of this nation is not taken lightly.”
-Coronet Promotional Literature (1947)
Coronet films under the direction of David Smart a millionaire publisher of Apparel Arts (later GQ) and Esquire began producing mental hygiene films starting in 1945. Smart was ambitious and well funded. He built a studio in Glenville, IL which became the largest privately owned film studio east of Hollywood. He had specifically built it to overlook Glenville Country Club which had barred him from membership because he was Jewish. It was a gamble, but Smart recognized that social guidance films had a bankable formula and it was actually because of his Hollywood style (actors with actual lines rather than narration dubbed over the film) that educators wanted the films thinking they would have greater appeal for youth. His closest competitors of the time Encyclopedia Britannica films and Simmel-Meservey were still silent with dry overdubbed narration. Smart wanted emotional impact and “real” characters (white, middle-class, clean-cut) so he created character storylines and used techniques of Hollywood filmmaking—dramatic lighting, fades, dissolves etc (Smith, 1999). At the height of production, Smart was putting out an educational film every 4 days and his studio became known as the “social guidance studio.”
It wasn’t long before other filmmakers caught on to the success of Coronet. Soon what were supposed to be thought-provoking films dedicated to progressive education principles became mass-produced and homogenized “consistent…and often unrecognizable from each other”(Smart, p. 95). What’s problematic here is that Coronet was really selling films not education. The films portrayed a perfect world where problems were easily solved. Not unlike the sitcoms of the time, all problems were neatly solved in the matter of ten to twenty minutes. Coronet was selling simple solutions to complex problems. Coronet’s collaboration with Chicago progressive educators was suspect. Although each film theoretically had an “educational collaborator” whose job it was to uphold scholastic standards, they were often relegated to benign tasks like making sure napkins and silverware were placed correctly in scenes about manners (Smith, 1999). The film producers in the Midwest didn’t operate completely outside the purview of progressive educators especially because of their proximity to the University of Chicago which was a major advocate for using visual resources in education and a hub for progressive thinkers. It’s important to note that at one time William Benton a wealthy advertising executive that produced films for Encyclopedia Britannica (right down the road from Coronet in Glenville, IL) was also at one time the vice-president of the University of Chicago.
Coronet’s time was short-lived however, not long after his sixtieth birthday in 1952 David Smart died on the operating table after an operation to inspect his colon went wrong. The chief surgeon ironically diagnosed Smart’s death as “mental suicide” since he had ordered the surgery himself—he had long suffered from pathophobia—the fear of disease (Smith, 1999).
Centron, another of the largest educational film producers hailed from Lawrence, KS. The studio which began in the back of a camera shop was created by two friends Arthur Wolf and Russell Mosser. Where Coronet had claimed the market on films with neat and tidy endings, Centron made films that actually addressed the messy-ness of being a teenager. Wolf and a young housewife Trudy Travis became the scriptwriting team with a shared vision that mental hygiene films should “stimulate discussion and that showcasing human emotions was the best way to do that”(Smith, p. 109). From 1951 to 1959 they produced the Discussion Problems in Group Living series with titles like The Trouble Maker, The Griper, and What About Prejudice? Smith (1999) noted that they also produced films not exclusively for education like Operation Grass Killer (Monsanto) and Tomorrow’s Spark Plug Today (AC Delco). Not surprisingly these business side projects helped to fund Centron so unlike Coronet they could make less mental hygiene films because of their financial support by their industrial clients. The lines blurred between the business and education films and it wasn’t long before Centron was making films “that aped mental hygiene so that corporate sponsors could weasel their way into the classroom”(Smart, p. 111).
Centron was certainly not alone in this problematic mixture of mental hygiene and product placement. If educators were trying to indoctrinate by social guidance, big corporations were trying to indoctrinate under the guise of freedom to consume. The sub-genre of business mental hygiene films were particularly insidious for their product placement. It’s hard to imagine educators who bought and showed the films in their school districts didn’t notice the propaganda in these films, but producers had become more savvy “deftly placing products in familiar everyday scenarios”(Smtih, p. 84). Some of the titles produced included Mr. B Natural (1957)which linked band instruments to popularity and A Date for Dinner (1960) shilling Kimberly Clark paper products. Developing future brand loyalty in young people did not escape the mental hygiene films.
The majority of all mental hygiene films were produced by the few Midwestern studios like Coronet, Centron (who often produced for MgGraw-Hill Book Co.,) and Encyclopedia Britannica, however one rogue filmmaker is worth mentioning since he made some of the most famous and disturbing films in the genre. Sid Davis grew up in Hollywood working on and off in the film industry, his main source of income working as a stand in for John Wayne. When a little girl in Los Angeles was molested in 1949 Davis became deeply worried as he was the father of a little girl himself. He decided that a film should be made warning about the dangers of child molesters. With a thousand dollar loan from John Wayne himself, Davis shot The Dangerous Stranger (1950). He used the profits to continue making movies the other studios would not make because of their darker subject matter—drug use, social anarchy and prejudice.
What is problematic to begin with is that even though these films were shown alongside other mental hygiene films of the time, no educators ever contributed or oversaw his work. He had no peers to judge him leaving him free to make assertions in his films such as The Terrible Truth (1951) where he accused the Soviet Union of promoting drug use in the United States. Since he made most of his 150 films for less than a thousand dollars a piece they were bizarrely much like the dry Encyclopedia Britannica education films in style. A monotone judgmental narrator accompanied the silent films with lines like “You youngsters can save yourselves a lot of pain if you just stop and think” (Live and Learn, 1951). Davis sought to keep youth out of trouble by exposing them to a cruel world. Davis was once quoted saying, “…having been somewhat of a delinquent myself as a younger kid, I understood their thinking. So it was right up my alley.”
Youth In Trouble
Davis is the right place to start when thinking about some of the films that viewed youth in trouble. One of his most famous films Boys Beware (1961) warns of the dangers of the “sick homosexual.” The film begins with Jimmy, a young teenage boy needing a ride. He takes a ride from an older man, a “stranger” in dark sunglasses named Ralph. That leads to a series of encounters that the narrator suggests are being orchestrated by Ralph. The two go to a burger joint one day and fishing the next. While fishing Ralph pulls out a pack of pornographic pictures and Jimmy looks at them “not wanting to offend his new friend.” Ralph is portrayed as a manipulative, deceitful pedophile and Jimmy as an innocent victim. The narrator informs us, “What Jimmy didn't know was that Ralph was sick. A sickness that was not physical like small pox, but no less dangerous and contagious. A sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was a homosexual, a person who demands an intimate relationship with members of their own sex." The last scene of Jimmy and Ralph suggests they are walking into a motel together and cuts quickly to Jimmy walking out of a courthouse with his parents. Jimmy had told his parents about Ralph and Ralph arrested. The next scene involves a boy Mike shooting hoops with a man in a suit and bow tie who offers a ride home. We are told that the homosexual can be violent and Mike is apparently killed, which we are supposed to infer by the narrator informing us that he didn’t know that he was “riding in the shadow of death.” The last scene cautions that public restrooms are “often a hangout for the homosexual” and that “one never knows” when the homosexual is about. The film ends with the narrator telling us, “So, no matter where you meet a stranger, be careful if they are too friendly, if they try to win your confidence too quickly, and if they become too personal. They may appear normal, and it may be too late when you discover he is mentally ill. So keep with your group and don’t go off alone with strangers unless you have permission of your parents or teacher.”
Beyond the entirely problematic discourse around homosexuality as being a “disease” and being equated with pedophilia I would argue that Boys Beware plays out almost as a cautionary tale like a Little Red Riding Hood whereby Jimmy trusting a stranger and straying from the straight and narrow path of safety courts danger. One wonders about the fragility of heterosexuality when it is being threatened at every turn. The narrator reminds us, “The decision is always yours and your whole future may depend on making the right one.” Sid Davis produced the film in conjunction with the Inglewood Police Department which makes some sense out of the parts of the movie where the kids seem oddly concerned with writing down license plate numbers. The film suggests that youth are innocent and hapless victims who need the “expert” advice of adults—parents, teachers, and policemen. Other films like The Terrible Truth (1951) and Six Murderous Beliefs (1955) also viewed youth as victims awaiting calamity. For youth who had to grow up fast during World War II taking on many adult tasks and often fending for themselves I wonder how they wrestled with being portrayed as innocent hapless victims?
Youth As Trouble
As much as youth were portrayed as hapless victims in the mental hygiene films, the flip side was youth represented as morally corrupt juvenile delinquents. In the film, What About Juvenile Delinquency (1955) a gang of boys roughs up a white middle class man driving a new Buick when doesn’t move his car fast enough. When the main character Jamie meets up with his gang at the malt shop he discovers it was his own poor father who was the victim of his own crowd. He rips the badly stitched gang insignia off his coat relinquishing it to the gang and runs out of the malt shop. Cut to the next day at school and the student council president along with the football captain are begging Jamie to accompany them to city hall. There are new curfew laws on the table for the city because of the recent juvenile delinquency problem (Jamie’s former gang). They also might have to forgo the prom and the big game! After much sinister griping from his former gang members Jamie decides to go with the group to city hall. They walk in on a meeting in progress of men yelling about the problem of juvenile delinquency. There is some cajoling from the principle who tells the angry councilmen that these youth “who represent all youth” should be allowed to speak because a few juvenile delinquents should not ruin things for everyone. We don’t actually get to hear any solutions from the youth since the film just ends with a question posed to the audience – “What would you do?” Roman (1996) writes about youth having an inaudible voice in public debate over concerns (like the curfew laws in What About Juvenile Delinquency) that crucially affect them. “The missing presence of youth themselves as speakers with political legitimacy and unique epistemic standpoints from most forums in which they are the literal, metaphorical, and political subjects should not go unremarked”(p. 1).
I would argue that the film wants us to recognize that EVEN white middle class fathers can fall victim to juvenile delinquency so it must be a pretty big problem. It’s certainly problematic that the principle refers to the youth as “these youth who represent all youth” if this is really supposed to be a film used for critical thinking in education. I would argue that those youth that are supposed to represent everyone are perfectly chosen for their conformist roles. We have the football team captain, the student council president, the student body president and Jamie who represents his white middle class father. The film isn’t asking for students to consider the complexity of juvenile delinquency rather to associate with prescribed roles of clean cut middle class white youth. It’s not necessarily problematic that there is a football captain and a student council president represented in the film, but it is problematic that they are naturally portrayed as ordinary kids who represent all youth.
Another group of mental hygiene films that problematically put youth at the center of blame was the gory genre of highway safety films. Films like What Made Sammy Speed (1957) Mechanized Death (1961) and Highways of Agony (1969) were made to scare the living daylights out of youth and blame them for death on America’s highways. At the time no American automobile manufacturer had a safety department and minor auto accidents were often fatal because there were no shoulder belts, air bags, headrests, antilock brakes or child safety seats. In 1949 the V-8 engine debuted and many teenage boys re-worked old cars putting the new powerful engines in them. Fatalities on America’s highways jumped 20% in 1950. What had been thought of vaguely as “reckless drivers” became more specifically the “thoughtlessness of youth” (Smith, p. 76). Last Date (1950) for example, portrayed a young Dick York as an uncooperative driver who meets a bloody end. Smith (1999) argued that “by portraying teenagers as thrill-crazed maniacs, the film offered the public a familiar and acceptable scapegoat…however these films did little or nothing to stem the carnage on the roads”(p. 76). The relationship between higher engine horsepower, unsafe vehicles and death tolls was ignored in favor of storylines that blamed teenagers. The overarching discourse of the time was that since accidents continued, teenagers needed even stronger lessons so the films only got worse.
Budge Crawley, an independent mental hygiene filmmaker from Canada began using actual footage of accident scenes in his movies like Safety or Slaughter (1958). In this particular film we hear a narrator explain over the footage of dead bodies, “That man is a statistic. So is that girl.” Another independent filmmaker named Richard Wayman in Ohio took note of these films after a friend died in an accident and began making his own version of the gory films. Independently wealthy from his prestigious accounting job at Ernst & Ernst (later Ernst & Young) he was able to combine pictures he had taken of accidents along with police footage of bloody Ohio Turnpike accidents to make Signal 30 in 1959. The brochure for the film noted it was shot “in living (and dying) color” (Smith, p. 80). Wayman had good timing as the 1960s ushered in America’s bloodiest decade of highway accidents. In 1964, Detroit automakers like Chevrolet were putting out compact cars with 400 horsepower engines dubbing them “muscle” cars.
In 1965, Ralph Nader published Unsafe at any Speed calling the Detroit automakers in to question by exposing the deadly designs of many of their cars being sold at the time. Nader (1965) attacked the industry charging that billions of dollars had been wasted on property damage, lost wages, legal fees, insurance costs and funeral costs due to the lack of safety standards. His book prompted congress to pass the Traffic and Motor Safety Vehicle act in 1966. Teenagers needed safer cars not a heaping of blame in horrifying highway safety films. Of all the mental hygiene genres the highway safety films are possibly the most visible still today. Youth are still shown gory car wreck footage in driver’s education courses around America. We are still left with a problematic discourse that assumes teenagers are a menace to our roads.
I would argue that the films portraying youth as trouble may have had a more damaging impact on teenagers. Youth were being represented as horrible accident causing delinquents, scapegoats for morally panicked society. The films that portrayed youth in trouble were certainly dark like the Sid Davis cautionary tales, but youth were usually portrayed as innocent victims not perpetrators of violence and mayhem. Of course some teens did drive recklessly and some were delinquent, but the mental hygiene films with their simple storylines told by “expert” narrators effectively silenced real youth voices and ultimately curtailed any meaningful conversation about these problems.
Conclusion
Sometimes when I’ve shown these films to people who grew up watching them, at first they snicker, but also often lament that it was a “simpler” time where everyone “shared the same values” which if course was not true then and it is not true now. If life had been like Ozzie and Harriet or Leave it to Beaver, mental hygiene films would not have needed to exist. Life probably didn’t look much like a sitcom or a mental hygiene film at all after World War II when terrified American families were trying to pick up the pieces and rebuild themselves. Grossberg (2010) writes, “…I do not think any sustainable hegemonic position, any stable balance in the field of forces, has been reached in the United States since the 1950s. (perhaps that is why it is still a site of nostalgic investment?), and struggles have since become integrated into the everyday life of the nation”(p. 70).
In some ways I would argue that the films existed (to borrow a war term) in a “no man’s land” because they were simultaneously trying to get kids “to be kids again” looking backward as well as trying to create future democratic citizens, youth who would never let anything bad happen to America again. It’s almost like there was never a “present” for the mental hygiene films because they never accurately portrayed what was happening at the time. However, even if they didn’t ever quite accurately portray the “present” at the time, they were certainly an important response to (loosely borrow a phrase) the “structure of feeling” in America as World War II ended. I would argue that attempting to understand this conjuncture when the films were created does give us deeper insight and a “better story” as Grossberg (2010) might say of what life may have been like for many youth and their families in post war America. The films themselves require us to look beyond them for answers.
In his own work on youth history in the United States Grossberg (2010) tells us, “But the story I was telling could not begin in the 1970s, for it mapped out developments that took the story back into the postwar decades…and the same story—albeit with important differences –continues into the present decade”(p. 64). So it is with mental hygiene. Its darker roots trace backwards in time to mid-nineteenth century America replete with ties to eugenics. Fast forward slightly and you’ll find whole books being written on the subject. For example in 1917 W.A White wrote in his book The Principles of Mental Hygiene, “Mental hygiene has come to stay. There is not a shadow of a doubt about that, but its principles remain to be formulated because its activities have been scattered over so many fields which, while not really, still are practically disconnected”(vi). Following the path after the last films were shown in the late 1960s we find mental hygiene weaving its way into the ABC afterschool specials of the 1970s through the 1990s. Take for example, 1977’s The Horrible Honchos which depicts a juvenile gang tormenting a young boy (evoking What About Juvenile Delinquency) or 1983’s Andrea’s Story: A Hitchhiking Tragedy (harkening back to Boys Beware). Some of the films still blame youth for tragedy on America’s roads like 1990’s Over the Limit. Residual effects of the corporate sponsored mental hygiene films like A Date for Dinner or Mr. B Natural can be seen in classrooms where sex education videos suggest feminine products made by the producers of the film like Johnson and Johnson.
The next task of this project would be to walk those paths backwards into the mid-19th century, to the cities, the slums, where mental hygiene found its roots and then to walk forwards into the later 20th century following the traces of sometimes obvious, sometimes subverted messages in afterschool specials, sex education films, and public service announcements. This way the conjuncture, the moment the films were at the height of their popularity and our understanding of them and what they were responding to could be more fully developed and strengthened.
References
Acland, C. R. (Ed.) (2007). Residual Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Besley, T. (2002). Social education and mental hygiene: Foucault, disciplinary technologies and the moral constitution of youth. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 34(4), 419.
Blake, G. (1946). You and Your Family. B.K. Blake, Inc.
Collins, L. (1950). Last Date. CA: Wilding Picture Company.
Davis, Sid. (1961). Boys Beware. Hollywood, CA: Sid Davis Films.
Hall, S. (1994). Reflections upon the Encoding/Decoding Model: An Interview with Stuart Hall. In Cruz, J. & Lewis, J. (eds.), Viewing, reading, listening: Audiences and critical reception. (pp. 253-274). Boulder, CO: Westview.
Harvey, Harold. (1955). What About Juvenile Delinquency? Lawrence, KS: Centron Films.
Harvey, Harold. (1958). The Snob. Lawrence, KS: Centron Films for McGraw-Hill Books.
Gilbert, J. (1988). A Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s. NY: Oxford University Press.
Grossman, L. (2010). Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kliebard, H. M. (2004). The Struggle for the American Curriculum: 1893-1958. London: RoutledgeFalmer.
McCarthy, A. (2010). The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America. NY: The New Press.
Nader, R. (1965). Unsafe at Any Speed. NY: Grossman Publishers.
Ouellette, L. & Hay, J. (2008). Better Living Through Reality TV: Television. MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Pinar, W. F. (2004). Understanding Curriculum. NY: Lang Publishing.
Roman, L. G. (1996). Spectacle in the dark: Youth as transgression, display, and repression. Educational Theory, 46(1), 1.
Savage, J. (2007). Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture 1875-1945. NY: Penguin.
Smith, K. (1999). Mental Hygiene Classroom Films 1945-1970. NY: Blast Books.
White, W.A. (1917) The Principles of Mental Hygiene. NY: Macmillan.
-“pledge to the Educators of America,”
Mental Hygiene filmmaker ad, 1946
“Everybody keeps talking about teenagers as if we were a bunch of freaks or something”
-What About Juvenile Delinquency (1955)
Born out of the instructional film movement in the 1940’s, a segment of films dedicated to social guidance cropped up in classrooms around America. These social guidance films were dubbed “mental hygiene” films and they were created with the intent to adjust social behavior (Smith, 1999). Teens were expected to learn “proper” social behavior from these ten minute films with names like Are You Popular? and A Date with Your Family in the 1940’s, The Snob, What About Juvenile Delinquency and How to Be an American in the 1950’s and Keep off the Grass and Highways of Agony in the late 1960’s. Through these films, kids were asked to consider that being “…selfish, arrogant, undemocratic, or delinquent could make them unhappy or; depending on the producer, dead” (Smith, p. 12). In the world of mental hygiene, playing by the rules and maintaining the status quo were rewarded with popularity and happiness.
When looking at a range of these films it becomes clearly problematic that the film makers isolated issues from everyday life and put youth at the center of blame for many of society’s problems. For example, the particularly gory genre of highway safety films like Mechanized Death (1961) and Highways of Agony (1969) solely blamed teens for major accidents on America’s roads without consideration of the Detroit automaker’s lack of safety standards. For the mental hygiene film producers, the bottom line was to keep costs down and production cheap which meant keeping the storylines simple and characters stereotypical. Complex social problems were boiled down to simple solutions. In the majority of mental hygiene films as Smith (1999) argued, “…it was as impossible to be a little good or a little bad as it was to be a little dead” (14).
For the purposes and scope of this paper I will focus in particular on the mental hygiene films and not popular television at the time, but I think it is important to note that popular television especially in the 1950s was providing moral and ethical demonstrations about civil society as well. Laurie Oullettte and James Hay wrote, (2008) “A popular domestic comedy like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet represented problems and solutions in domestic family governance that were not entirely disconnected from mental hygiene classroom films shown during those years” (p. 27). The themes covered in the mental hygiene films were certainly part of the wider public’s imagination at the time.
I want to critically examine how these films were a response to what was happening in America as World War II ended, what was happening in American education at the time since the films were primarily shown in classrooms and explore some of the studios that produced mental hygiene films. Then I plan to explore two themes in the mental hygiene films – the idea of youth “as” trouble (juvenile delinquency) as well as the idea of youth “in” trouble (safety and morality) through several selected films. As I explore the mental hygiene films and their relationship to history, progressive education and the educational film industry, I hope to highlight along the way what I believe are some of the biggest problems with these films and what was really at stake for the youth represented in them.
The mental hygiene films are often overlooked for what seems like their completely straightforward and passé nature. Ironically, as bland as many of the films were, the histories of the film producers were entertaining and often quite dark – connections to pornography, suicide, alleged murder and a connection to start up capital from John Wayne are just a few of the interesting side notes to the mental hygiene history. My hope is a closer look at these films and their messages mostly long forgotten will prompt us to think more deeply about how youth were often problematically represented in and indoctrinated by the mental hygiene films and how some of these problems still live with us today. In the introduction to Residual Media Charles Acland (2007) reminds us, “…how surprising and unsettling figures from the past can be. They creep up to remind us of their existence and of the influence they wield in the present”(xiii).
World War II & Mental Hygiene
The mental hygiene films emerged in the midst of a fearful and traumatized public following World War II. During World War II, films had been widely used to teach soldiers and women on the factory assembly line alike how to perform their tasks and “want to”(Smith, p. 21). The films were created to stir up pride and morale with names like Pride of Victory, Avenge December 7, and Farmer at War. Savage (2007) wrote, “The whole culture was full of propaganda that stressed excitement and thrills” (p. 393). What had been the standard practice during the depression—staying in school and out of the labor market, changed with World War II. Everyone was needed. Pre-enlistment age youth had newfound social and economic importance. Playing a part in the war effort gave many youth the incentive to drop out of school and work. The war effort had not only increased the number of women in factories but youth as well. From 1940-1943, the percentage of 14-17 year olds employed in factories increased 300%, as compared to a 30% increase of women. In 1942, some three million teenagers were in the labor force (Gilbert, 1988, p. 20). This work led to greater economic freedom and greater visibility of youth. This visibility however attracted adult criticism and reports of juvenile delinquency grew (Savage, 2007). For example, the 1943 Zoot-Suit Riots, where Mexican-American youth battled servicemen and then police on the streets of Los Angeles, were publicized nation-wide, and became symbolic of the potential for delinquent and anti-social behavior among youth (Gilbert, 1988, p. 33). The complex cultural politics of Los Angeles and fact that it was off-duty servicemen that started the riots by attacking young men wearing zoot suits escaped public attention.
As World War II came to a close, fear of communists and nuclear annihilation caused a great deal of anxiety in American life. There were also fears that because youth had enjoyed great freedoms during the war while fathers fought overseas and mothers worked in the factories that the country was witnessing the destruction of the traditional family and the existing social order. According to this problematic discourse, the war, women, and a new youth culture were responsible for the coming social chaos.
Lewis Hine, head of the American Federation of Labor argued that women should leave the factories and return home, thereby fulfilling their patriotic duties “to see that their children ... have the care and protection that will enable them to develop into persons who will live good and responsible lives” (Gilbert, 1988, p. 33). National security depended on the stability of the “traditional family” and the containment of women in their “rightful” place in the home.
What is considered the very first mental hygiene film –You and Your Family (1946) became a response to the growing fears of a society afraid of juvenile delinquents and was meant to fix what was fast becoming known as the “youth problem.” In the film, Mary the main character is called up and asked to go to a dance. She proceeds to ask her parents who say no and then we are introduced to different scenarios of how Mary “could” act in response. It’s strangely robotic, but the film gets the point across that Mary above all else should respect the authority of her father…and mother and that their decisions are best for her. Smith (1999) argued that films such as You and Your Family were meant to “turn back the clock and train American kids how to be kids again” (p. 22). In this discourse apparently learning to be kids again meant learning to not question parental authority. Mental hygiene films reinforced the narrative that stressed the importance of the traditional family.
Take the film, The Snob (1958) for example which instructed students on the social condemnation and exile that faced young women who veered from society’s definition of what it meant to be female. The central character Sarah is ostracized and labeled deviant for wanting to stay home on a Friday night to do her algebra work (traditionally a male subject and also reminds us of textbooks since the film is produced for McGraw-Hill Books), rather than go to her neighbor Rob’s party with the other kids. When Sarah relents and attends the party, she is lambasted by her peers for her non-conformity and for emasculating a male peer by refusing to be his dance partner. She is told that she “really froze him out” implying a stereotypically unfortunate discourse about women who don’t give in to men as being “frigid.” Her father is not much help when he asks “Pumpkin. Aren’t all those kids who you think you’re better than having more fun than you?” The problematic and dominant narrative that was playing out post World War II explained that deformed families produced antisocial youth, in which case, society needed to step in, and be the better parent.
Tina Besley in her article on Foucault, disciplinary technologies and mental hygiene (2002) wrote, “…because we tend to see young people as our hope for the future, society has continued to be concerned with the moral constitution of young people…by devising and harnessing technologies that teach, encourage control and enable the mastery of governance of self”(p. 423). I would argue that these ‘disciplinary technologies’ of film meant to guide and control the morality of young people were a morally panicked response and in a sense these technologies were meant to be a substitute for “better parents.” Grossberg (2010) echoes this fundamental idea that youth are inevitably tied to our hope and struggle over our relation to the future. He argues, “While I think kids are caught at the intersection of a number of struggles, the most powerful of these is a struggle over ‘the question of the future’—over our assumptions about the relation between the present and the future”(p. 63).
After the war, progressive educators took note of how effective films had been in training soldiers and women in the factories and began to demand methods like film for use in the classroom to help “inculcate attitudes and ideals that will enable boys and girls to make their places as efficient and effective members of a democratic society” (Smith, p. 21). Of course it’s hard to know if their ideals truly affected students the way they wanted them to. Stuart Hall (1994) wrote about how those wanting to control preferred readings of texts (which can be films) cannot predict how others will read them. He noted that “…they cannot contain every possible reading of the text. The very text which they encode slips from their grasp. You can always read it another way”(p. 262). Anna McCarthy echoed this sentiment in a different way talking about the rise in governing through television in the 1950s. McCarthy (2010) argued when corporations, philanthropic institutes, private agencies (and I’ll add mental hygiene film producers) tried to educate the public about the “responsibilities of freedom” in a capitalist democracy they, “often discovered a profound discrepancy between the effects they hoped to achieve and the responses of their viewers”(p. 7).
Disdained before the war, film as a tool of education was now recast as a “perfectly delightful way to learn” (Green, quoted in Smith, p. 22). I would argue that this connection (maybe even conjuncture) is vitally important to the rise of the mental hygiene films because before World War II film was not highly regarded as a tool of education. Grossberg (2010) notes that the unity of a conjuncture usually deals with a social crisis of sorts. If it had not been for crisis of World War II and the necessity of training hundreds of thousands of young men and women during the war very quickly, film as a method of educating may not have come to prominence. Without the educational/”attitude building” films being shown widely during the war, the mental hygiene film movement which was the intersection of a method (film) and curriculum (social guidance) may not have come together.
Progressive Education?
In 1944 the United States Office of Education commissioned a study called Vocational Education in the Years Ahead and it took a year and a half to complete with the results presented in May of 1945 at a conference on education in Washington D.C. (Kliebard, 2004). Born out of this study was the agreement the youth in the United States were being underserved by high schools, but the direction that reform should take was not abundantly clear. Charles Prosser, the director of the Dunwoody Institute in Minneapolis came to the forefront of the proceedings and delivered what became known as the Prosser resolution. The resolution called for a new theme in education—life adjustment. This new curriculum would be “attuned to the actual life functions of youth as a preparation for adulthood”(Kliebard, 2004, p. 252). This new curriculum would have an unprecedented scope (Pinar, 2004).
Achievements of the popularity of this movement were embodied in the mental hygiene films. Kliebard (2004) wrote, “Much of the popularity of these films derived from fears that, without proper guidance, the rebelliousness of youth would ultimately threaten the foundations of society, and schools were seen as the place where menace could be minimized”(Kliebard, p. 258). The “rules” for social guidance in the films became overwhelmingly clear with proper behavior in regards to meeting people, eating in restaurants, going on dates, and attending school dances amongst many other topics. Kliebard (2004) argued that the fact that the films reached their height of popularity during the life adjustment era was no coincidence. In some ways these films were “adjunct to the curriculum…they conveyed precisely the messages that life adjustment advocates thought to be the most salient”(p. 259). These advocates of the life adjustment curriculum were very concerned about the dropout rate and felt that the current curriculum “rooted in the ideal of scholarship” was far from the general interests of the current high school population. The desire to reform the curriculum to functional areas of living versus the traditional “elements of the cultural heritage” that were the hallmark of education at the turn of the century became a lightning rod for criticism. Wrath from academicians was aroused when they understood that the life adjustment curriculum “promoted programs like basic living not merely as an addendum to the traditional curriculum, but as a substitute for it” (Kliebard, p. 260). Interestingly, as the life adjustment curriculum came and went, the mental hygiene films still held sway in classrooms through the 1960s although their popularity was never the same after the 1950s.
It’s important to note that the life adjustment curriculum came out of the greater movement of progressive education. By the time mental hygiene films arrived on the scene progressive education with its Deweyan tenants of child-centeredness and experiential learning had been well underway since the turn of the century. Dewey (1917) wrote in Democracy and Education, “…schools remain, of course, the typical instance of environments framed with express reference to influencing the mental and moral disposition of their members”(p. 22). It should be noted that Dewey believed (and this is often lost in how other progressive educators talked about schools) that in the transmitting of this kind of mental and moral knowledge that the school was only one means “…and compared with other agencies, a relatively superficial means”(p. 5). So if we (like many educators then and now) read Dewey and think about progressive education bracketing the complexities of the school in relation to families and communities, showing the mental hygiene films in American classrooms would certainly seem to follow from this ideal of inculcating youth with positive moral behavior. Besey (2002) wrote, “Broadly speaking, progressive education’s aims were for all boys and girls to be inculcated with ideals and attitudes to enable them to meet the complexities of modern life and to take their place as effective members of a modern democratic society”(p. 426). The mental hygiene films were a response in part to the added element of a fearful and traumatized public that had endured a second world war. Something new was needed in education to help ensure there would be no future disasters. Smith (1999) wrote, “That ‘something’ was the mental hygiene classroom film, a uniquely American experiment in social engineering, the marriage of a philosophy—progressive education—and a technology—the instructional film”(19).
One of the insidious problems with the films being tied to progressive education was that progressive educators who touted critical thinking and critical pedagogy essentially sold their students a big bucket of indoctrination when they flipped off the lights and turned on the newest mental hygiene film. While movies like The Snob (1958) and What About the Juvenile Delinquency (1955) ended with a question mark asking “What would you do?” they presumably had already clearly told youth what to think. For example again in The Snob the audience is told over and over how the main character Sarah’s behavior is “snobbish” and “alienating” by the narrator of the film. It is hard to believe when he asks “have we judged Sarah’s snobbery too harshly?” that it would be possible to judge her in any other way. Indoctrination came from very savvy film producers who “as experts in manipulative sales, advertising and magazine publishing, adapted these psychologically manipulative techniques to education”(Besley, p. 431).
A Little Hollywood in the Midwest
“Coronet Films is proud to be a vital part of modern American education. The responsibility for providing teachers with films to train the youth of this nation is not taken lightly.”
-Coronet Promotional Literature (1947)
Coronet films under the direction of David Smart a millionaire publisher of Apparel Arts (later GQ) and Esquire began producing mental hygiene films starting in 1945. Smart was ambitious and well funded. He built a studio in Glenville, IL which became the largest privately owned film studio east of Hollywood. He had specifically built it to overlook Glenville Country Club which had barred him from membership because he was Jewish. It was a gamble, but Smart recognized that social guidance films had a bankable formula and it was actually because of his Hollywood style (actors with actual lines rather than narration dubbed over the film) that educators wanted the films thinking they would have greater appeal for youth. His closest competitors of the time Encyclopedia Britannica films and Simmel-Meservey were still silent with dry overdubbed narration. Smart wanted emotional impact and “real” characters (white, middle-class, clean-cut) so he created character storylines and used techniques of Hollywood filmmaking—dramatic lighting, fades, dissolves etc (Smith, 1999). At the height of production, Smart was putting out an educational film every 4 days and his studio became known as the “social guidance studio.”
It wasn’t long before other filmmakers caught on to the success of Coronet. Soon what were supposed to be thought-provoking films dedicated to progressive education principles became mass-produced and homogenized “consistent…and often unrecognizable from each other”(Smart, p. 95). What’s problematic here is that Coronet was really selling films not education. The films portrayed a perfect world where problems were easily solved. Not unlike the sitcoms of the time, all problems were neatly solved in the matter of ten to twenty minutes. Coronet was selling simple solutions to complex problems. Coronet’s collaboration with Chicago progressive educators was suspect. Although each film theoretically had an “educational collaborator” whose job it was to uphold scholastic standards, they were often relegated to benign tasks like making sure napkins and silverware were placed correctly in scenes about manners (Smith, 1999). The film producers in the Midwest didn’t operate completely outside the purview of progressive educators especially because of their proximity to the University of Chicago which was a major advocate for using visual resources in education and a hub for progressive thinkers. It’s important to note that at one time William Benton a wealthy advertising executive that produced films for Encyclopedia Britannica (right down the road from Coronet in Glenville, IL) was also at one time the vice-president of the University of Chicago.
Coronet’s time was short-lived however, not long after his sixtieth birthday in 1952 David Smart died on the operating table after an operation to inspect his colon went wrong. The chief surgeon ironically diagnosed Smart’s death as “mental suicide” since he had ordered the surgery himself—he had long suffered from pathophobia—the fear of disease (Smith, 1999).
Centron, another of the largest educational film producers hailed from Lawrence, KS. The studio which began in the back of a camera shop was created by two friends Arthur Wolf and Russell Mosser. Where Coronet had claimed the market on films with neat and tidy endings, Centron made films that actually addressed the messy-ness of being a teenager. Wolf and a young housewife Trudy Travis became the scriptwriting team with a shared vision that mental hygiene films should “stimulate discussion and that showcasing human emotions was the best way to do that”(Smith, p. 109). From 1951 to 1959 they produced the Discussion Problems in Group Living series with titles like The Trouble Maker, The Griper, and What About Prejudice? Smith (1999) noted that they also produced films not exclusively for education like Operation Grass Killer (Monsanto) and Tomorrow’s Spark Plug Today (AC Delco). Not surprisingly these business side projects helped to fund Centron so unlike Coronet they could make less mental hygiene films because of their financial support by their industrial clients. The lines blurred between the business and education films and it wasn’t long before Centron was making films “that aped mental hygiene so that corporate sponsors could weasel their way into the classroom”(Smart, p. 111).
Centron was certainly not alone in this problematic mixture of mental hygiene and product placement. If educators were trying to indoctrinate by social guidance, big corporations were trying to indoctrinate under the guise of freedom to consume. The sub-genre of business mental hygiene films were particularly insidious for their product placement. It’s hard to imagine educators who bought and showed the films in their school districts didn’t notice the propaganda in these films, but producers had become more savvy “deftly placing products in familiar everyday scenarios”(Smtih, p. 84). Some of the titles produced included Mr. B Natural (1957)which linked band instruments to popularity and A Date for Dinner (1960) shilling Kimberly Clark paper products. Developing future brand loyalty in young people did not escape the mental hygiene films.
The majority of all mental hygiene films were produced by the few Midwestern studios like Coronet, Centron (who often produced for MgGraw-Hill Book Co.,) and Encyclopedia Britannica, however one rogue filmmaker is worth mentioning since he made some of the most famous and disturbing films in the genre. Sid Davis grew up in Hollywood working on and off in the film industry, his main source of income working as a stand in for John Wayne. When a little girl in Los Angeles was molested in 1949 Davis became deeply worried as he was the father of a little girl himself. He decided that a film should be made warning about the dangers of child molesters. With a thousand dollar loan from John Wayne himself, Davis shot The Dangerous Stranger (1950). He used the profits to continue making movies the other studios would not make because of their darker subject matter—drug use, social anarchy and prejudice.
What is problematic to begin with is that even though these films were shown alongside other mental hygiene films of the time, no educators ever contributed or oversaw his work. He had no peers to judge him leaving him free to make assertions in his films such as The Terrible Truth (1951) where he accused the Soviet Union of promoting drug use in the United States. Since he made most of his 150 films for less than a thousand dollars a piece they were bizarrely much like the dry Encyclopedia Britannica education films in style. A monotone judgmental narrator accompanied the silent films with lines like “You youngsters can save yourselves a lot of pain if you just stop and think” (Live and Learn, 1951). Davis sought to keep youth out of trouble by exposing them to a cruel world. Davis was once quoted saying, “…having been somewhat of a delinquent myself as a younger kid, I understood their thinking. So it was right up my alley.”
Youth In Trouble
Davis is the right place to start when thinking about some of the films that viewed youth in trouble. One of his most famous films Boys Beware (1961) warns of the dangers of the “sick homosexual.” The film begins with Jimmy, a young teenage boy needing a ride. He takes a ride from an older man, a “stranger” in dark sunglasses named Ralph. That leads to a series of encounters that the narrator suggests are being orchestrated by Ralph. The two go to a burger joint one day and fishing the next. While fishing Ralph pulls out a pack of pornographic pictures and Jimmy looks at them “not wanting to offend his new friend.” Ralph is portrayed as a manipulative, deceitful pedophile and Jimmy as an innocent victim. The narrator informs us, “What Jimmy didn't know was that Ralph was sick. A sickness that was not physical like small pox, but no less dangerous and contagious. A sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was a homosexual, a person who demands an intimate relationship with members of their own sex." The last scene of Jimmy and Ralph suggests they are walking into a motel together and cuts quickly to Jimmy walking out of a courthouse with his parents. Jimmy had told his parents about Ralph and Ralph arrested. The next scene involves a boy Mike shooting hoops with a man in a suit and bow tie who offers a ride home. We are told that the homosexual can be violent and Mike is apparently killed, which we are supposed to infer by the narrator informing us that he didn’t know that he was “riding in the shadow of death.” The last scene cautions that public restrooms are “often a hangout for the homosexual” and that “one never knows” when the homosexual is about. The film ends with the narrator telling us, “So, no matter where you meet a stranger, be careful if they are too friendly, if they try to win your confidence too quickly, and if they become too personal. They may appear normal, and it may be too late when you discover he is mentally ill. So keep with your group and don’t go off alone with strangers unless you have permission of your parents or teacher.”
Beyond the entirely problematic discourse around homosexuality as being a “disease” and being equated with pedophilia I would argue that Boys Beware plays out almost as a cautionary tale like a Little Red Riding Hood whereby Jimmy trusting a stranger and straying from the straight and narrow path of safety courts danger. One wonders about the fragility of heterosexuality when it is being threatened at every turn. The narrator reminds us, “The decision is always yours and your whole future may depend on making the right one.” Sid Davis produced the film in conjunction with the Inglewood Police Department which makes some sense out of the parts of the movie where the kids seem oddly concerned with writing down license plate numbers. The film suggests that youth are innocent and hapless victims who need the “expert” advice of adults—parents, teachers, and policemen. Other films like The Terrible Truth (1951) and Six Murderous Beliefs (1955) also viewed youth as victims awaiting calamity. For youth who had to grow up fast during World War II taking on many adult tasks and often fending for themselves I wonder how they wrestled with being portrayed as innocent hapless victims?
Youth As Trouble
As much as youth were portrayed as hapless victims in the mental hygiene films, the flip side was youth represented as morally corrupt juvenile delinquents. In the film, What About Juvenile Delinquency (1955) a gang of boys roughs up a white middle class man driving a new Buick when doesn’t move his car fast enough. When the main character Jamie meets up with his gang at the malt shop he discovers it was his own poor father who was the victim of his own crowd. He rips the badly stitched gang insignia off his coat relinquishing it to the gang and runs out of the malt shop. Cut to the next day at school and the student council president along with the football captain are begging Jamie to accompany them to city hall. There are new curfew laws on the table for the city because of the recent juvenile delinquency problem (Jamie’s former gang). They also might have to forgo the prom and the big game! After much sinister griping from his former gang members Jamie decides to go with the group to city hall. They walk in on a meeting in progress of men yelling about the problem of juvenile delinquency. There is some cajoling from the principle who tells the angry councilmen that these youth “who represent all youth” should be allowed to speak because a few juvenile delinquents should not ruin things for everyone. We don’t actually get to hear any solutions from the youth since the film just ends with a question posed to the audience – “What would you do?” Roman (1996) writes about youth having an inaudible voice in public debate over concerns (like the curfew laws in What About Juvenile Delinquency) that crucially affect them. “The missing presence of youth themselves as speakers with political legitimacy and unique epistemic standpoints from most forums in which they are the literal, metaphorical, and political subjects should not go unremarked”(p. 1).
I would argue that the film wants us to recognize that EVEN white middle class fathers can fall victim to juvenile delinquency so it must be a pretty big problem. It’s certainly problematic that the principle refers to the youth as “these youth who represent all youth” if this is really supposed to be a film used for critical thinking in education. I would argue that those youth that are supposed to represent everyone are perfectly chosen for their conformist roles. We have the football team captain, the student council president, the student body president and Jamie who represents his white middle class father. The film isn’t asking for students to consider the complexity of juvenile delinquency rather to associate with prescribed roles of clean cut middle class white youth. It’s not necessarily problematic that there is a football captain and a student council president represented in the film, but it is problematic that they are naturally portrayed as ordinary kids who represent all youth.
Another group of mental hygiene films that problematically put youth at the center of blame was the gory genre of highway safety films. Films like What Made Sammy Speed (1957) Mechanized Death (1961) and Highways of Agony (1969) were made to scare the living daylights out of youth and blame them for death on America’s highways. At the time no American automobile manufacturer had a safety department and minor auto accidents were often fatal because there were no shoulder belts, air bags, headrests, antilock brakes or child safety seats. In 1949 the V-8 engine debuted and many teenage boys re-worked old cars putting the new powerful engines in them. Fatalities on America’s highways jumped 20% in 1950. What had been thought of vaguely as “reckless drivers” became more specifically the “thoughtlessness of youth” (Smith, p. 76). Last Date (1950) for example, portrayed a young Dick York as an uncooperative driver who meets a bloody end. Smith (1999) argued that “by portraying teenagers as thrill-crazed maniacs, the film offered the public a familiar and acceptable scapegoat…however these films did little or nothing to stem the carnage on the roads”(p. 76). The relationship between higher engine horsepower, unsafe vehicles and death tolls was ignored in favor of storylines that blamed teenagers. The overarching discourse of the time was that since accidents continued, teenagers needed even stronger lessons so the films only got worse.
Budge Crawley, an independent mental hygiene filmmaker from Canada began using actual footage of accident scenes in his movies like Safety or Slaughter (1958). In this particular film we hear a narrator explain over the footage of dead bodies, “That man is a statistic. So is that girl.” Another independent filmmaker named Richard Wayman in Ohio took note of these films after a friend died in an accident and began making his own version of the gory films. Independently wealthy from his prestigious accounting job at Ernst & Ernst (later Ernst & Young) he was able to combine pictures he had taken of accidents along with police footage of bloody Ohio Turnpike accidents to make Signal 30 in 1959. The brochure for the film noted it was shot “in living (and dying) color” (Smith, p. 80). Wayman had good timing as the 1960s ushered in America’s bloodiest decade of highway accidents. In 1964, Detroit automakers like Chevrolet were putting out compact cars with 400 horsepower engines dubbing them “muscle” cars.
In 1965, Ralph Nader published Unsafe at any Speed calling the Detroit automakers in to question by exposing the deadly designs of many of their cars being sold at the time. Nader (1965) attacked the industry charging that billions of dollars had been wasted on property damage, lost wages, legal fees, insurance costs and funeral costs due to the lack of safety standards. His book prompted congress to pass the Traffic and Motor Safety Vehicle act in 1966. Teenagers needed safer cars not a heaping of blame in horrifying highway safety films. Of all the mental hygiene genres the highway safety films are possibly the most visible still today. Youth are still shown gory car wreck footage in driver’s education courses around America. We are still left with a problematic discourse that assumes teenagers are a menace to our roads.
I would argue that the films portraying youth as trouble may have had a more damaging impact on teenagers. Youth were being represented as horrible accident causing delinquents, scapegoats for morally panicked society. The films that portrayed youth in trouble were certainly dark like the Sid Davis cautionary tales, but youth were usually portrayed as innocent victims not perpetrators of violence and mayhem. Of course some teens did drive recklessly and some were delinquent, but the mental hygiene films with their simple storylines told by “expert” narrators effectively silenced real youth voices and ultimately curtailed any meaningful conversation about these problems.
Conclusion
Sometimes when I’ve shown these films to people who grew up watching them, at first they snicker, but also often lament that it was a “simpler” time where everyone “shared the same values” which if course was not true then and it is not true now. If life had been like Ozzie and Harriet or Leave it to Beaver, mental hygiene films would not have needed to exist. Life probably didn’t look much like a sitcom or a mental hygiene film at all after World War II when terrified American families were trying to pick up the pieces and rebuild themselves. Grossberg (2010) writes, “…I do not think any sustainable hegemonic position, any stable balance in the field of forces, has been reached in the United States since the 1950s. (perhaps that is why it is still a site of nostalgic investment?), and struggles have since become integrated into the everyday life of the nation”(p. 70).
In some ways I would argue that the films existed (to borrow a war term) in a “no man’s land” because they were simultaneously trying to get kids “to be kids again” looking backward as well as trying to create future democratic citizens, youth who would never let anything bad happen to America again. It’s almost like there was never a “present” for the mental hygiene films because they never accurately portrayed what was happening at the time. However, even if they didn’t ever quite accurately portray the “present” at the time, they were certainly an important response to (loosely borrow a phrase) the “structure of feeling” in America as World War II ended. I would argue that attempting to understand this conjuncture when the films were created does give us deeper insight and a “better story” as Grossberg (2010) might say of what life may have been like for many youth and their families in post war America. The films themselves require us to look beyond them for answers.
In his own work on youth history in the United States Grossberg (2010) tells us, “But the story I was telling could not begin in the 1970s, for it mapped out developments that took the story back into the postwar decades…and the same story—albeit with important differences –continues into the present decade”(p. 64). So it is with mental hygiene. Its darker roots trace backwards in time to mid-nineteenth century America replete with ties to eugenics. Fast forward slightly and you’ll find whole books being written on the subject. For example in 1917 W.A White wrote in his book The Principles of Mental Hygiene, “Mental hygiene has come to stay. There is not a shadow of a doubt about that, but its principles remain to be formulated because its activities have been scattered over so many fields which, while not really, still are practically disconnected”(vi). Following the path after the last films were shown in the late 1960s we find mental hygiene weaving its way into the ABC afterschool specials of the 1970s through the 1990s. Take for example, 1977’s The Horrible Honchos which depicts a juvenile gang tormenting a young boy (evoking What About Juvenile Delinquency) or 1983’s Andrea’s Story: A Hitchhiking Tragedy (harkening back to Boys Beware). Some of the films still blame youth for tragedy on America’s roads like 1990’s Over the Limit. Residual effects of the corporate sponsored mental hygiene films like A Date for Dinner or Mr. B Natural can be seen in classrooms where sex education videos suggest feminine products made by the producers of the film like Johnson and Johnson.
The next task of this project would be to walk those paths backwards into the mid-19th century, to the cities, the slums, where mental hygiene found its roots and then to walk forwards into the later 20th century following the traces of sometimes obvious, sometimes subverted messages in afterschool specials, sex education films, and public service announcements. This way the conjuncture, the moment the films were at the height of their popularity and our understanding of them and what they were responding to could be more fully developed and strengthened.
References
Acland, C. R. (Ed.) (2007). Residual Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Besley, T. (2002). Social education and mental hygiene: Foucault, disciplinary technologies and the moral constitution of youth. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 34(4), 419.
Blake, G. (1946). You and Your Family. B.K. Blake, Inc.
Collins, L. (1950). Last Date. CA: Wilding Picture Company.
Davis, Sid. (1961). Boys Beware. Hollywood, CA: Sid Davis Films.
Hall, S. (1994). Reflections upon the Encoding/Decoding Model: An Interview with Stuart Hall. In Cruz, J. & Lewis, J. (eds.), Viewing, reading, listening: Audiences and critical reception. (pp. 253-274). Boulder, CO: Westview.
Harvey, Harold. (1955). What About Juvenile Delinquency? Lawrence, KS: Centron Films.
Harvey, Harold. (1958). The Snob. Lawrence, KS: Centron Films for McGraw-Hill Books.
Gilbert, J. (1988). A Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s. NY: Oxford University Press.
Grossman, L. (2010). Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kliebard, H. M. (2004). The Struggle for the American Curriculum: 1893-1958. London: RoutledgeFalmer.
McCarthy, A. (2010). The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America. NY: The New Press.
Nader, R. (1965). Unsafe at Any Speed. NY: Grossman Publishers.
Ouellette, L. & Hay, J. (2008). Better Living Through Reality TV: Television. MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Pinar, W. F. (2004). Understanding Curriculum. NY: Lang Publishing.
Roman, L. G. (1996). Spectacle in the dark: Youth as transgression, display, and repression. Educational Theory, 46(1), 1.
Savage, J. (2007). Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture 1875-1945. NY: Penguin.
Smith, K. (1999). Mental Hygiene Classroom Films 1945-1970. NY: Blast Books.
White, W.A. (1917) The Principles of Mental Hygiene. NY: Macmillan.
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