I haven’t had this much fun with a book in quite some
time
I first heard about this book, which chronicles the many
hundreds of classroom educational films produced from the late 1940s through
about 1970, on a podcast about the evolution of the American teenager, and I
tracked down a copy at a used book sale. Used copies are readily available
online, and if you have even the slightest interest in independent filmmaking,
ephemeral films, or retro pop culture, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
You know these educational films from their endless parodies
on The Simpsons, usually starring Troy McClure, or featured appearances on Mystery
Science Theater 3000. But you probably don’t know the people
responsible for making these movies, the reasons they became so prevalent, and
the way in which, taken as a whole, they chronicle almost the entire postwar
American experiment.
Ken Smith profiles hundreds of these films, along with the
individuals and companies responsible for making them. But beyond that, Smith
weaves this information into a broader story told with a lot of insight and
humor. In fact, the longest section of the book is a catalogue of hundreds of
titles with blurbs about each of them. When I first got my copy, I figured I’d
read the narrative chapters and probably skip the catalogue, or just look
at it as a reference source. Instead, Smith’s descriptions were so entertaining
and in many cases the choices the films made were so bizarre that I found myself
reading the whole thing, and often subjecting my family to the
descriptions after I broke up laughing while reading on the couch.
At the time this book was written, these films were not
available to the public. Smith combed university archives and relied on the
assistance of icons in the film preservation field like Rick Prelinger to
screen these films privately and subsequently write about them. Thankfully for
big ol’ nerds like me, many of these films are now available on YouTube or
archive.org. I put together a playlist if you want to dive in.
Classroom Social Guidance Films
During World War II, the U.S. government relied heavily on
filmmaking for the first time to aid in the war effort. Famously, directors
like Frank Capra and William Wyler left Hollywood to create pro-Allied
propaganda films. Disney and Warner Bros. also contributed cartoons that had
some type of training angle or rallied viewers to the cause. The government
realized that you could train thousands of soldiers all at once, all
across the globe, by showing them a film. The military produced a ton of
films on different topics, and one of the most widely seen was Sex Hygiene,
directed by John Ford and starring George Reeves of the Superman TV show
fame, educating servicemen about how to not get syphilis.
 |
| 1943 Collier's cartoon |
Immediately after the war, progressive educators saw an
opportunity to use this same idea to benefit kids in school. My cursory
understanding of these films before reading the book was that they were a
method for enforcing conformity across society, but the truth is far more
complex.
Smith breaks up the bulk of Mental Hygiene into three
sections: The Genres, The Producers, and The Films.
The Genres include Fitting In, Cautionary Tales, Dating,
Girls Only, Drugs, Sex Education, Bloody Highways, and Sneaky Sponsors. Each
genre contains a spectrum from “kinda good” to “mostly ok” to “wow, that’s
cringe” to “oh no” to “what the hell did I just watch??”
The Drugs and Bloody Highways categories are the most likely
to make your skin crawl. Many of the anti-drug films, which really emerged in
the 1960s, rely on exploitative scare tactics and have almost no relation to
the reality of drug use. Seduction of the Innocent, for instance, claims
that marijuana is a powerful hallucinogenic. That movie’s 11 minutes of full-on
batshit crazy. The Bloody Highways collection, which famously scarred
generations of drivers-ed students by including real footage of mutilated bodies
at accident scenes, is worse. These films remain grisly and
disgusting – they are essentially snuff films – and Smith references other
reporting that suggests that the producers of these films were giving kickbacks
to police and ambulance companies to get out to accident scenes first, and that
larger bribery and corruption scandals arose out of those arrangements.
I expected the “Fitting In” and “Dating” categories to
be oppressive in their encouragement of rigid conformity, and some of that is
definitely there (Control Your Emotions essentially advocates
not having any emotions), but I found something else that I didn’t expect –
actual good advice.
Isolation, a lack of community, and difficulties making
meaningful connections plague our current moment, here in 2025. I have
heard countless people online and in person talk about the challenges of just
knowing what to do in social situations. What’s expected on a date? Should you
pay for your date, or no? Is sex expected, or no? How do you make friends? How
do you keep them? What do healthy
relationships look like? Check the YouTube comments on a number of these social
guidance films, and you’ll find modern viewers relating to the feelings of
these characters and taking comfort in the fact that people have always had
these social anxieties.
In Shy Guy, a young Dick York (later of Inherit
the Wind and Bewitched) plays a high school student in a new town
who loves tinkering with radios and doesn’t know how to make new friends. His father
suggests just going to where other students hang out, not making a big deal of
it or putting too much pressure on himself, but just putting himself out there
where it’s at least possible to meet people. So Dick heads to the hang out at
the malt shop or wherever, and watches how people interact. He notices that the
people who have the most friends seem to be good listeners, ask questions, and
take a sincere interest in other people. This is still good advice. If you meet
a new person, you’re much more likely to grow that relationship by asking
questions and listening to them than by plowing over them and talking about
yourself the whole time.
Other social guidance films, like More Dates for Kay,
take this too far. Kay basically knows everything about everybody and constantly
reminds every other student she sees about their upcoming tests or doctor’s
appointments and everything else, to the complete elimination of her own
personality, or any personal wants or needs. So don’t be like Kay. But Dick
York thinks everybody will laugh at him fixing radios, until he’s at a party
and overhears another kid talking about building a radio. The 1950s didn’t have
language for “finding your people,” but that’s basically what Dick does in Shy
Guy.
The moral of other films is sometimes totally inscrutable.
My daughters and I watched Are You Popular? in which all the boys have
gone out with Jenny and so they think she’s a tramp, but they’re all also going
out with Caroline every night, and she’s great. We were unable to determine a
difference between Jenny and Caroline, or why Caroline wound up at the dance
and Jenny wound up standing by a bus bench crying one perfect tear.
Before the rise of the anti-drug scare films, these social
guidance films were intended to be a progressive resource for kids, providing
them with a framework for understanding expectations in new situations. In the
postwar economic boom, millions of Americans were moving from rural to suburban
communities, many families had stable economic resources for the first time,
and the rise of the automobile and commuter culture were changing the fabric of
society. These films were an effort to help kids adapt to new environments, and
some actually managed to do so successfully. Some less so. Like Cindy Goes
to a Party, where little Cindy’s fairy godmother comes to her in a dream
with tips for how to behave at her first party at a friend’s house, including
the rock-solid advice, “Don’t Break Things,” which is optically printed onscreen
when Cindy looks at a lamp that she presumably would’ve been fine with breaking.
Recontextualizing Conformity
However much fun I had reading this book, though, I
don’t want to gloss over the actual, profound effect it had on me and my
broader understanding of America in the 20th century. I have
always had an appreciation for both educational and marketing films of the
1950s. Animated educational films from production companies such as John
Sutherland (Destination Earth, Rhapsody in Steel, A is for Atom) were
produced in partnership with commercial firms and industry groups, while
companies like General Motors (Design for Dreaming) made consumerist
fantasies designed to sell housewives on new kitchen technology and commuters
on the latest automobiles.
These films were stylistically adventurous,
especially the animated ones, and provide a truly unique time capsule of a
period where innovation was happening rapidly, and the American middle class
was exploding in size. Against the backdrop of the dawning Cold War, the films
equate the ideas of American patriotism with being a good consumer,
and promise a future of ease and contentment. But until Mental Hygiene,
I never fully realized that classroom social engineering films were a distinct
category, separate from the types of industrial/educational films I was already
familiar with. And it’s the story of these mental hygiene films that really
allowed me to recontextualize much of my understanding of the 1950s.
For many people, the prevailing impression of the 1950s that
lingers today is one of forced conformity. The image of the nuclear family – the
breadwinner father, the homemaker mother, the two clean-cut kids staying out of
trouble and getting good grades – is central to the iconography of the era. For
too many people, that iconography is the only thing they know of the time. This
leads to a misguided sense that “everything was better” in the 1950s – that it
was an ideal time we should harken back to and try to somehow recapture. That
misunderstanding (or willful misrepresentation) obscures several realities of
life at the time (off the top of my head):
- The
horrors of segregation and the Jim Crow South
- Polio
- The
Red Scare
- The
Lavender Scare
- The
forced exclusion of almost everyone but white men from the workforce
- The
extraordinary prevalence of alcoholism and emergence of medications in
pill form (and subsequent rise of both acceptable – “Mother’s Little Helper” (Valium) to help
women forced to stay in the home battle anxiety – and unacceptable – teen –
drug abuse)
- The
untold levels of trauma in World War II veterans who had returned home
- The
collapse of extended family support networks as large corporations began
relocating workers to brand new communities around the country
- The
unbelievable amount of death caused by motor vehicles that had yet to
implement safety protocols, and
- The
creeping cultural anxiety of the Cold War and possible nuclear holocaust.
But the successes of the New Deal and the defeat of global
fascism (…at the time) created a sense of open horizons and limitless
possibilities. Social guidance classroom films played a part in that and
presented an opportunity for educators to try to build a better educational
system that benefited the children and broader society, as well. The origin of
these social guidance films was rooted in progressive education, and an
anti-fascist focus on community. These films were largely good-faith efforts to
help kids and reinforce a community-centric worldview that had helped defeat the fascist threat in Europe.
But here’s the rub: without anyone realizing it, the world
had already moved on.
The people who were making the films – the writers,
directors, and educational consultants – had endured all of that history…but
the kids had not. These children, the Baby Boomers, were born into maybe the
greatest economic upswing in human history, but at school they were being
preached a wartime-rationing way of being in the world when it was no longer
necessary and General Motors was telling them that to be good
Americans they had to be good consumers.
Even the projectors themselves were products war. The
armed forces had pioneered the practice of using films to train thousands of
soldiers quickly. The projectors in school classrooms used to play these social
guidance films had been used first to train soldiers, and then given to
the schools as war surplus. This gave progressive educators what they thought
was a golden opportunity to teach kids using these same, industrialized
approaches.
Then many of these kids came of age into a draft and
multiple, new foreign wars. They'd grown up told by a cartoon turtle to hide under their desks
in case the Soviets dropped a nuclear bomb on their town. They were being taught pro-social messages and told
that if they followed these rules, they’d be happy, well-adjusted, and they’d
fit in. But why? To grow up a drunk like dad, or take Valium like mom, or go
fight Koreans and Vietnamese who never did anything to them?
Traffic Safety films blamed teenagers for the massive
fatalities on the road, when it had far more to do with a lack of basic safety
features in cars, paired with increasingly powerful engines in vehicles built
by manufacturers that didn’t - any of them - have a safety department. Ralph
Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed did what no scare-all classroom film
could do – it got Congress to mandate safety features in cars. Only then did
traffic fatalities begin to decline. In 1951, the rate of vehicle fatalities per 100 million miles driven was over 7. Since 1991, it's never been above 2. Yet teens had to watch films like Last
Date (another Dick York role) that shared the concept of “teenicide,” where
kids kill themselves before they can turn twenty by driving recklessly. It’s
all your fault, kids!
Sponsored films were sneaky, although sometimes playing an
important role. Tampon manufacturers were the only ones willing to make
menstruation films, which was a positive, but they did so while promoting their
own branded products. Many other companies produced pro-consumer propaganda
films hoping schools would show them as educational films and not notice or not
mind the product placements. Jam Handy, who was possibly the most prolific
producer of these kinds of films, said they were intended “for people whose
minds are to be reconditioned.” Oof.
I have to believe that the teenagers of the 1950s and
60s saw through this. The counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s seems
inevitable as a reaction to the forced conformity of the 1950s that definitely was emphasized. But learning about these films showed me it’s also possible
that the rebellion stemmed also from a generational divide, with parents and
children talking past each other against the backdrop of unprecedented economic
abundance and ever-intensifying cultural inequality and uncertainty.
The 1950s Indict the 1950s
With all this longing for the halcyon 1950s being so popular
these days, it’s valuable to ask what folks in the 1950s thought about all
that.
Two films stand out. The first is 1955's The Sound of a Stone,
directed by Herk Harvey for Centron Pictures in Lawrence, Kansas. Harvey made
hundreds of films for Centron, but is best remembered for directing the ghost
story film Carnival of Souls. A careful reading of Carnival of Souls
reveals a male director and male screenwriter working in 1962 acutely aware of the hazards
young women faced. In the film, Mary begins to experience frightening visions,
but they are in some ways depicted as less menacing than the reckless challenges of drag-racing boys on the road, the advances of her aggressive male neighbor,
or the powerlessness she experiences as a church organist under the gaze of the
pastor, who can throw her out of the congregation and rob her of her livelihood
simply for playing the wrong music. I think Harvey picked up this sensitivity
by making films for young people in a deeply troubled time.
In The Sound of a Stone, a young English teacher
assigns a book to his class, but when a student’s father discovers
the name of the book on a list of “subversive titles,” the English teacher and
his wife begin suffering under a reign of terror from the community. Soon, even
students who worked with the teacher on the school paper are also swept up, and
they begin receiving threats. It isn’t commented on, but one of the actors has
a severe limp in the film – most likely the result of Polio (see above). Soon
the boy’s father actually reads the book he was so quick to condemn, and stands
up at a school board meeting and recants. He does the right thing, and
everybody learns their lesson about blind censorship the Un=American
Activities Committee the McCarthy hearings jumping to conclusions.
Or so it seems, until the final scene in the movie when somebody else throws a
brick through the teacher’s window, almost hitting his infant son, and letting
them know that they’d still better leave town. It remains a genuinely
compelling film today, but it’s not uplifting.
Then there’s 1959's What About Prejudice? In this film, none of the other students like
the new kid – Bruce Jones. They accuse him of stealing things they misplace, or
of starting fights, and attribute his behavior to “his kind,” an idea their
parents all reinforce. But then two of the gang crash their car into a bridge,
and the only witness to the accident is Bruce, who receives horrible burns all
over his body while rescuing the two other kids. This causes the gang to
rethink their blind hatred of Bruce, and reflect on how maybe they should’ve
looked at Bruce as a person first, and not just as a member of a group they
didn’t like. Here’s the conceit of the film, though – as much as Bruce is clearly
presumed to be Black, the filmmakers intentionally never show him, so that the
audience can insert Bruce into their own personally disfavored group. Maybe
Bruce isn’t Black. Maybe he’s Jewish. Or Catholic. Or Hispanic. Or any kind of
immigrant. Hell, maybe Bruce just has long hair. The film chooses not to say. The
fact that in 1959 the producers of an educational film about prejudice for high
schools intentionally didn’t show the object of that prejudice so the audience
could fill up that mental space with any number of widespread societal hatreds
is itself a horrible indictment of the society that produced it.
Mental Hygiene? Five stars, good book, very fun,
thought-provoking.
The 1950s? One-star, would not go back.
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Posted by Vance K - co-founder and cult film reviewer for nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012. Sometime public service announcement and educational film professional.
