History of the Day: 10/20

Happy birthday to Tom Petty, the man who looks like he died twenty years ago, but makes better music each year. Kind of a reverse Dorian Gray. He's best known for songs like Freefallin' and Mary Jane's Last Dance, but he should be known for some of his more recent stuff, like It'll All Work Out, a (forgive me) heart breaking song.

Petty, like other musicians, is sick of people yelling "FREEEEEBIIIIIIIRD!" at his concerts. He can blame Ronnie Van Zant, patron saint of southern rock, who died on this day in 1977 when the plane carrying his band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, crashed.

John Dewey, founder of "progressive education," was born on this day in 1859. He is much maligned for bringing our educational system to its current state of ruin, although it's not certain how exactly he accomplished this. He posited three, equally bad, models of education: the Platonic (class-centered), the Individualist (based on Rosseau, where the Individual was the center) and the Institutional (where the nation-state is the center). It is unclear (to me) exactly what he meant, although his pragmatist leanings lead me to conclude he meant "whatever is best for society or humanity as a whole." This is borne out by this statement of his:

The conception of education as a social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind.

So, what kind of society to we want? Perhaps the problem with education is that we can't agree on that question. Speaking of education, today is the day Anne Sullivan died, a model to teachers and hero to the deaf and blind. Little known fact: her most famous student, Hellen Keller, was a socialist/communist. She described how she came to this political position:

I was appointed on a commission to investigate the conditions of the blind. For the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of employers. And the social evil contributed its share. I found that poverty drove women to a life of shame that ended in blindness.

Keller was friends with Mark Twain, who once said:

Who are the oppressors? The few: the King, the capitalist, and a handful of other overseers and superintendents. Who are the oppressed? The many: the nations of the earth; the valuable personages; the workers; they that make the bread that the soft-handed and idle eat.

All these communists ... sounds like a conspiracy! Which is why the House Un-American Activities Committee began its investigation into Communists in Hollywood on this day in 1947, a full three years before Sen. Joseph McCarthy had even gotten started. Ten members of the film industry refused to testify, citing the 1st Amendment. Here is John Henry Lawson, one of the ten, being questioned:

Interrogator: Are you a member of the Communist Party or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
Lawson: It's unfortunate and tragic that I have to teach this committee the basic principles of Americanism.
Interrogator: That's not the question. That's not the question. The question is—have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
Lawson: I am framing my answer in the only way in which any American citizen can frame...absolutely invades his privacy...
Interrogator: Then you deny it? You refuse to answer that question, is that correct?
Lawson: I have told you that I will offer my beliefs, my affiliations and everything else to the American public and they will know where I stand as they do from what I have written.
Interrogator: Stand away from the stand. Stand away from the stand. Officer, take this man away from the stand.

They were blackballed from the industry. Hundreds of others were to follow. Charlie Chaplain, another friend of Hellen Keller, probably would have been questioned as well, but the it was believed he would have made even more of a fool of the Senators than they were already making of themselves, promising to appear in his tramp clothing. He left the country for his native England and was barred re-entry for many years. Of this, he said:

Friends have asked how I came to engender this American antagonism. My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them. Secondly, I was opposed to the Committee on Un-American Activities — a dishonest phrase to begin with, elastic enough to wrap around the throat and strangle the voice of any American citizen whose honest opinion is a minority of one.

President Truman later agreed with him, calling HUAC the "most un-American thing in the country today."