KANSAN COMMENT
History and/or today
(Editor's note: The following is a speech delivered last Thursday in acceptance of the Frank Luther Mott award of Kappa Tau Alpha honorary journalism society for "Ed Howe: Country Town Philosopher." The book was one of several cited for being an "outstanding piece of published research in the field of journalism and mass communication." Howe was for many years editor of the Atchison Globe.)
By CALDER M. PICKETT Professor of Journalism
It must have been almost four years ago that I delivered the manuscript of Ed Howe: Country Town Philosopher to the University Press of Kansas. I felt much as one reviewer of the book later felt: he wrote that once you had read the book you'd know all you needed to know about Ed Howe, and you'd never have to think about him again. I was exhausted, and quite tired of Ed Howe, and planned never to think about him again. But a number of people—became either interested or re-interested in the Atchison editor, and I found myself having to keep telling that same story.
At first, and for that matter through most of the writing, I did not care very much for the man. Only recently have I developed a kind of affection, and a kind of understanding, for Ed Howe. He was not a lovable type; I cannot imagine adorning his portrait with a Santa Claus cap and beard as someone at our school once adorned a portrait of William Allen White. I am sure that an Ed Howe would not obtain a pleasant reception at a University of Kansas student gathering today; he is poles apart from Abbie Hoffman, or even Paul Ehrlich. He did not think much about universities, especially those that offered education for journalism; hear him rant in an editorial of January 7, 1904:
"The class of journalism at the State university will result in only one thing: Making this world harder than ever for editors. When a Young Thing with long hair is graduated from this class, and returns home, he will at once begin the writing of impossible articles for his home paper. When they are refused he will abuse the editor. He will discover that the editor, never having been a member of the class in journalism, doesn't know enough to put a barrel right side up for catching rain."
And yet this self-made man, whose creed was the gospel of success as preached in Nineteenth Century America, seems to me, as I reflect upon him, to have had a great deal of good sense about the world, and I can't help thinking that the sense of history of this little-educated man was considerably better than that of some of his contemporaries, and some who followed him. And it is really history that I want to talk about tonight.
In recent years I have become concerned about the attitude of many people toward history, just as I have long wondered, as I have read Associated Press reports, whether many journalists have the historical sense they need: a story just the other night, referring to Horace Walpole, observing, for the unknowing reader, that "Walpole was an 18th Century writer." No more, no attempt to show why a Walpole award might be given to someone engaged in the task of writing horror stories.
I am sure that few of my students would like to be put in a class with Henry Ford, who often gets blamed for many of the ills of our technological civilization, but it seems interesting to me that some
Send your comments on S. C. & Ed to the Kansan Newsroom, 112 Flint Hall.
students, like Ford, believe that "history is bunk." History, like Ed Howe, committed for them the cardinal sin of not being relevant. History did not begin in 1970, that is. Many students recently, in a class I teach, appeared to credit John Lennon and Paul McCartney with creating popular music as a media—yes, media, naturally. One student recently, asked to identify "The Crime Against Kansas," said that it was "KU appointing Dr. Pickett to a job where he can ask stupid stuff like this."
There is a great student impatience with anyone who reminds them that there was a powerful pacifist movement in America just before World War II, or that great strides in civil rights took place in the administration of Harry Truman, or that eight years ago people were reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, or that William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass came along before the Los Angeles Free Press and The Berkeley Barb.
Perhaps the annoyance that students express when introduced to these items of trivia stems from a feeling that the sponsor of the facts appears to be using them to prove a point. I guess that I can understand that annoyance, for it is like a frequent comment I made to my mother in my high school days, "That was then, this is now."
Still I doubt that the Twentieth Century has seen a time in which so many intelligent, if not intellectual, young people were abusing history so much as being something that has no relation to them. Yet history should be one of the most relevant of our disciplines, for it tells us so much about ourselves.
Who, reading about Rousseau, cannot find ideas and incidents that call to mind many of the youth of today? Who, knowing what the Romantic movement was, cannot see countess parallels with the great individualistic thrust of today? (This seems almost too obvious to comment on, as I think of youthful veneration for Henry David Thoreau, but I find, even in a bright group of Western Civilization students, that the parallels have not occurred to them.)
It would be a truly fanciful professor of History of American Journalism who believed that his course rang big loud bells with many students. I got into the writing of "Ed Howe: Country Town Philosopher" originally because I had become the man on our faculty who teaches what the students now loosely refer to as HAJ. And I have known, since the day I began to teach the class, that many students took it only because it was required, and that it was not their favorite course.
I would think that history, by its very nature, need not be defended, that anyone entering journalism would simply want to know these things because they were facts, because they were things to know. Nor does history seem to work for many students on the level of providing the kind of background one ought to possess for the career he is about to enter.
It interested me when I figured out, all by myself, where the Kansas City Star headlines I had been writing came from—the old New York Sun of the days Dana. It even interested me to learn that Dagwood was the son of a rich man who disinherited him when he married the rather floozy Blondie, and it certainly interested me to learn that Thomas Nast gave us the elephant and the donkey. Yet these are not important facts, merely milestones that tell us where, in certain areas, we have been.
Here, at the University of Kansas, we—at least we on the faculty—get a rather large dose of journalistic history each year, some of it, admittedly, not as important as it might be. Each October we get one more editor added to the Kansas Newspaper Hall of Fame, and sometimes these editors, my research has told me,
spent most of their time trying to become Republican governors. Each February we pay homage to William Allen White, and decorate with laurels a national editor and a Kansas editor, telling ourselves, on that day at least, that these gentlemen (only one woman so far) are in the tradition of the fat and fighting little Santa Claus from Emporia.
But even when we pay false homage we are recognizing that something has gone before. And, despite the non-relevant label attached by many these days to history there undoubtedly is interest, in some quarters, at least, in the past. American Heritage magazine is going contemporary on us, with big editorial features about ecology, but it still shows in its articles that it recognizes the past, and it makes implicit, in its tirades about the environment, that NOW also is part of history, and that is why we must save the Everglades or the Redwoods or Lake Erie. And on a much smaller level there are such little things as the Atchison County Historical Society, which gave me a chicken dinner in March and bought a couple of my books so that I would drive that wild Highway 59 and talk to its members about Ed Howe and his times. Many of the people in the room were what some would call old-timers, and a number of them—quite a few of them, really—came up to me to tell me how they had known Ed Howe when he lived next door. But these people have bought an old house, and they are redecorating it, and they are filling it with items from the Atchison past. They are moving, perhaps too late, as all of us might be moving too late to rescue our past from the bulldozer and the iron ball, but they are moving.
They are doing it, too, in the town where young Ed Howe and his brother Jim established their Globe back in 1877. They are doing it in a town that has much fascinating history, for it was the town of Senators Ingalls and Pomeroy, the town whose name found its way into the name of a famous railroad (though Johnny Mercer's "Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe" no longer runs through Atchison), the town of the famous flier, Amelia Erhart. A river town, and a town famed in the slavery controversy, a town whose very name came from that senator from Missouri who came to Lawrence with his boys in 1856 and destroyed the offices of the Herald of Freedom and the Free State. A town not too well known nationally, but then who beyond our parts has heard much about Lecompton and who, if it were not for Matt Dillon and Doc and Kitty, would have heard much about Dodge?
I am making a plea, I suppose, a plea mainly to the students in this room whose presence here testifies to their interest in scholarship. My plea is that you, if you are of such a persuasion, reject the persistent nonsense of "relevance," that you recognize that something need not be solving the problem of the ghetto or the reservation or the polluted lake to be of value to the scholar. Facts—history, literature, the arts, take your pick—are of value by themselves.
They are of even greater value when they tell us something about ourselves, when we realize that the Beatles did not spring from the sea like Botticelli's Venus but were built on the music of the past (and are not necessarily superior to Beethoven); that the protest movements of 1970 relate not only to the Wobblies but to the romantics of the generation of Shelley; that our press, slow as it sometimes is to point to the abuses of society, had a movement—long before Ralph Nader—called the Muckrakers.
And I urge you, finally, to find for yourselves the excitement—and sometimes the drudgery—of scholarly research.