You know the old saw about attentive teachers learning from their students. True enough. But what can you learn by rereading a Senior Thesis you gave an A+ to fifty years ago? Much more than I ever expected ! I speak of Stephen J. Harmelin’s 90 page paper for me at Penn in May 1960 in American Civilization 300, “The Mass Society”. Steve just pdf-ed it to me in Germany, I guess in exasperation at my constantly bugging for another look when he was otherwise “pro-bono-ing” me about my tangled legal affairs.
(He very gracefully parlayed his IQ and energy first into Harvard followed by an internship at the White House capped by becoming managing partner at Dilworth Paxson.) I had forgotten how canny he was at 21! He cites in his senior paper a conversation with the then new Annenberg dean Gilbert Seldes--on Finley Peter Dunne’s ambivalent attitude toward a fame deriving from mere dialect humor when he would have rather been esteemed by using the King’s English in proper editorials!
He even conned Anthony N.B. Garvan (then chair of Penn’s AC Department) into revealing details from his family’s papers about the generous gift Dunne received in the 1920’s when he had been reduced to penury at the end of a very ad hoc career. Self-confidence was not a forte of this lad at the bottom of his high school class whose father refused to send him to college, forcing him to wangle one newspaper job after another until he scored for almost two decades with his Dooley shtick.
What struck me most in retrospect was the status anxiety of early American media aspiring upwards: they professed to be intellectually upset by dialect humor. However across the Atlantic, well-established literary magazines laughed at Mr. Dooley’s antics with abandon. And when our bartending wit “explained” Pragmatism to his foil Mr. Hennesy, the philosopher William wrote novelist brother Henry that his fortune was made! And when Henry made his first trip in twenty years back to America, there only one writer he asked to see: Finley Peter Dunne! Naturally Mark Twain and he were buds: they played billiards whenever Mark visited New York.
More surprising is his sizeable correspondence with Teddy Roosevelt, urging Dunne from both the Governor’s Mansion and the White House to come and visit. Mr. Dooley teased TR about his individualistic heroism over “his” war in Cuba. He mocked that book by dubbing it “Alone in Cuba”! He also teased William Jennings Bryan about his bombastic speaking style, but that politico made nice with many invitations to visit. Critics suggested that was maybe sweet talk, but the real truth seemed to be that our political rhetoric had not slipped down to the ranting that now prevails. Mr. Dooley also got friendly letters from Admiral Dewey in Manila, even though our hero thought we were avoiding the white man’s burden by shifting it to the “coon’s”!
Harmelin shrewdly extrapolates the history of our political rhetoric through McCarthyism to “the nadir” of the ‘60s. One wonders whether a Dooley could thrive in a world of radio ranters. How low we have slithered in a mere 50 years. In the health care congressional fracas, Paul Krugman sees us sliding deeper. “First, there’s the crazy right, the tea party and death panel people—a lunatic fringe that is no longer a fringe but has moved into the heart of the Republican Party.
In the past, there was a general understanding, a sort of implicit clause in the rules of American politics, that major parties would at least pretend to distance themselves from irrational extremists. But those rules of no longer operative.” (International Herald Tribune,12/26-27.) Let’s hope somewhere a bright comer is writing a senior paper on Al Franken and our other political wits.
It was LBJ, in whose White House Steve served, who foresaw that his bold acceptance of black voting would cripple the Southern Democrats for a generation. The mean spirits of the McConnells of our crippled Republic are, hopefully, the last gasp of a superceded world view. There is a ring of desperation in their Obamaphobia.
Sam Smith traces our crisis to a corruption of Populist politics in his daily blog of what he calls Undernews. In no way are Rush et al. populists in the tradition of pro-unionist William Jennings Bryan and Eugene Debs. United States of Amnesia!
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