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Nixon and Kennedy, Bonnie and Clyde: The G.I. Bill and the Arts  Adapted from Over Here: How the G.I. Bill Transformed the American Dream. By Edward Humes “Close-up,” Arthur Penn murmured into the control-room microphone. “Nice and tight.” The junior senator’s chiseled features filled the screen in response to Penn’s command, a handsome face, eyes unwavering on the camera, the politician’s words simple and direct, just as he had been coached. The senator finished his thought, then the television picture shifted to the other candidate in the debate: the far more seasoned and experienced of the two, probably smarter as well, but also pale, shifty-eyed, his clothes a poor fit, his five o’clock shadow plainly visible. The contrast couldn’t be plainer; it almost didn’t matter what either man said, Penn knew. Only one of them looked presidential. Just as Penn had planned. It was 1960, the Golden Era of live television, when giants of the stage, screen, and literature came together every night to invent and re-invent a new medium, never quite sure what would happen when they fired up those lumbering, balky video cameras, never quite sure what line would pop from an actor’s mouth, what glory or disaster would dance live across twenty-million black-and-white screens, then disappear into the ether. In those days, the men in the control room, the directors and producers, most of them World War II vets like Penn with a G.I. Bill degree behind them, had to have ice in their veins. There were no do-overs, no room for error, no filler material to populate the airwaves should disaster strike. The “On the Air” light came on and you were live, with the biggest audience in the world, in history, waiting to see what you were made of. Doing television in those days was exhilarating, adventurous, and merciless, and Penn was one of the pioneers and masters of that particular tightrope. And now the men vying to be leader of the free world had arrived in his shop to stage the first-ever televised presidential debate. The advance man for the Democratic candidate had come to Penn and his producer, two rising stars in the business, and said, We’ve never done this. No one’s ever done this. We need you to tell us about television. So Penn told them -- and thereby helped launch a new age of American politics, the modern era of image and sound bites and form over substance, though it seemed like so much more at the time. For the first time, a director of teleplays and theater and Hollywood films was called upon to instruct a political candidate on the nature of television -- how facial close-ups were critical and make-up a necessity, how short, punchy lines were far better than lengthy nuance, and how looking directly at the camera, rather than at the moderator or the panel of journalists who would be questioning the candidates, would create the illusion that you were staring every viewer in the eye and speaking directly to him or her. It was a trick, a bit of acting, this peering at the bulbous lens of a giant camera and pretending it was a person. But it was a great trick, Penn explained, not at all like mugging for the audience while onstage. It made you seem more real and less artificial, even as it went against a politician’s most basic instinct to always look the person addressing him in the eye. This proved to be good advice, good enough to persuade seven out of ten viewers of the debate that a shifty-eyed man who had not been coached, who had no make-up, who rambled in his answers and who never seemed to look viewers in the eye a fellow named Richard Nixon had lost the debate by a wide margin (even as radio listeners, unaware of the carefully constructed imagery, decided he won). And it was good enough advice to give just a bit of extra momentum to the other candidate, John F. Kennedy, who won the White House in one of the closest elections in history. “It was TV more than anything else that turned the tide,” Kennedy candidly admitted after the election. And if Kennedy was correct, if it was TV that did it, then much of the credit goes to director Arthur Penn, a television, stage and film pioneer who brought such diverse classics as The Miracle Worker and Bonnie and Clyde to life, one of the thousands of G.I. Bill veterans who flooded the postwar world of the arts in America and, along the way, changed most everything they touched. • • • The crop of artists, novelists, poets, actors, and other creative talents who returned from wartime service to be educated and trained through the G.I. Bill is so vast as to be impossible to catalogue beyond a simple highlight reel: Novelists and essayists Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Frank McCourt, Art Buchwald, Pete Hamill, Edward Abbey, Elmore Leonard, Mario Puzo. Poets James Dickey, James Wright, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Randall Jarrell, Frank O’Hara, Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, A.R. Ammons. Stage and screen writers Paddy Chayevsky, Rod Serling, Aaron Spelling, Terry Southern. Actors Walter Matthau, Robert Duvall, Tony Curtis, Harry Belafonte, Rod Steiger, Gene Hackman, Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine. Artists Robert Rauschenberg, Leo Krikorian, Dan Spiegle, Robert Miles Runyan, Kenneth Noland, LeRoy Nieman, Richard Callner, Ed Rossbach, Robert Perine. Schools for art, acting, photography, dance and design from coast to coast were sustained by veterans returning from war, and by the G.I. Bill dollars they brought with them, in some cases rescued from imminent closure. The men and women who graduated from them after the war launched a twentieth century renaissance in the arts in America, from new ways of using color on canvas to the groundbreaking literary nonfiction of New Journalism to Beat Poetry to entirely new and even shocking ways of telling a story on screens large and small. The fifties are often remembered for their bland conformity, but the postwar period in the arts heralded a time of enormous experimentation, advance and daring. Arthur Penn had not entered the war expecting to be part of any such moment or movement. His main hope at the outset had been typical and basic -- to come home in one piece and not in a coffin and, perhaps, to find something other than the family watch-making business to sustain him once the shooting stopped. That chance came in the form of the G.I. Bill, and a free ride to a the experimental Black Mountain College, a legendary hotspot for groundbreaking art and philosophy, where such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Anais Nin, Henry Miller and William Carlos Williams could be found roaming the campus and staging spontaneous lectures and debates. Although he had no idea at the time, Penn’s journey to the pinnacle of television and filmmaking began on January 11, 1944, when two very distinct roadmaps for rebuilding post-war America landed on Congress’s doorstep. One vision for “winning the peace” came wrapped in the pomp and ritual of the president’s annual State of the Union address. The other was scrawled by lobbyists a mile from the Capitol on hotel stationary, then hastily typed up for public consumption. One represented nothing less than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s plan to expand the Founding Fathers’ original vision of a just America: giving every citizen the right to a rewarding job, a living wage, a decent home, health care, education, and a pension not as opportunities, not as privileges, not as goods to which everyone (who could afford them) had access, but rights, guaranteed every American, cradle to grave. He called it a “Second Bill of Rights.” The other plan, courtesy of the era’s most powerful veterans organization, the American Legion, advanced a more modest goal, or so it seemed: to compensate the servicemen of World War II for their lost time and opportunities, offering sixteen million veterans a small array of government-subsidized loans, unemployment benefits, and a year of school or technical training for those whose education had been interrupted by the draft or enlistment. The Legion called this a “Bill of Rights for G.I. Joe and Jane.” The first plan promised to reinvent America after the war. The second offered to put things back to where they were before the war. As it turned out, neither plan’s promise would be kept. FDR never got the chance to remake America. Instead, the G.I. Bill did. This was not by grand design, but quite by accident, as much a creation of petty partisans as of political visionaries. And yet the forces set in motion that day in January 1944 would power an unprecedented and far-reaching transformation of education, of cities and a new suburbia, of the social, cultural and physical geography of America, of science, medicine, and the arts and, just as importantly, it would alter both the aspirations and the expectations of all Americans, veterans and non-veterans alike. A nation of renters would become a nation of homeowners. College would be transformed from an elite bastion to a middle class entitlement. Suburbia would be born amid the clatter of bulldozers and the smell of new asphalt linking it all together. Inner cities would collapse. The Cold War would find its warriors not in the trenches or the barracks, but at the laboratory and the wind tunnel and the drafting board. Educations would be made possible for fourteen future Nobel Prize winners, three Supreme Court justices, three presidents, a dozen senators, two dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 450,000 engineers, 240,000 accountants, 17,000 journalists, 22,000 dentists along with a million lawyers, nurses, businessmen, artists, actors, writers, pilots and others. All would owe their careers not to FDR’s grand vision, but to that one modest proposal that was supposed to put the country back to where it was. There was never anything like it before. There is nothing like it on the horizon. It began with a simple question: Now what? Adapted with the author's permission from Over Here: How the G.I. Bill Transformed the American Dream (Harcourt, October 2006)
The book: Imagine telling an entire generation they could receive a free college education at any school that would accept them — Texas A&M, Harvard University, the Sorbonne — anywhere. Throw in a monthly stipend for living expenses, plus money for books. And when you graduate, there's a government-backed home loan waiting, no money down and no credit checks. Throw in subsidized farm loans, business loans, free job training, free medical care, free job placement, and up to a year’s worth of weekly paychecks until you find work. What insane congressman, senator or president would ever approve such a costly boondoggle? It could never pass today, for it would be the most enormous, far-reaching, life-changing government program in the history of the world. In Over Here, Edward Humes chronicles the story of the post-World War II G.I. Bill and how it revolutionized higher education, created suburbia, and brought us the scientists, engineers, doctors, artists and teachers who reinvented the nation. Buy
the book: Over Here: How the G.I. Bill Transformed
the American Dream |
The
writer: A journalist and author of eight narrative nonfiction
books, Edward Humes received the Pulitzer Prize for his newspaper
coverage of the military and a PEN Center USA Award for
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