Abstract
On March 19, 1955, a new teacher, Richard Dadier, entered North Manual High School. With Dadier as the protagonist but the hoodlums he confronts making a far more vivid impression, the premiere of the movie Blackboard Jungle debuted now-familiar templates for American portrayals of teenagers and their schools. On the one hand, Blackboard Jungle’s portrayal of a new teacher restoring order to a chaotic urban school articulated adult concerns about social divisions and the control of youth. On the other, the movie celebrated the emergence of a distinct youth culture and the centrality of the high school to it. In the second narrative, the youthful pursuit of happiness trumps adult concerns.1
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Notes
Portions of this chapter appeared in Daniel Perlstein, “Imagined Authority: Blackboard Jungle and the Project of Educational Liberalism,” Paedagogica Historica 36 (2000): 409–425.
Ernest Smith, American Youth Culture; Group Life in Teenage Society (New York: Free Press, 1962).
Already in the 1920s, sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd observed that high school “with its athletics, clubs, sororities and fraternities, dances and parties, and other ‘extra curricular activities’ is a fairly complete social cosmos in itself.” Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1929), 211.
James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 182.
Penelope Eckert, Jock & Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School (New York: Teachers College Press, 1989).
Benjamin Fine, 1,000,000 Delinquents (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1957).
Agnes Meyer, “Schoolboy Racketeers,” 1954, 37, Juvenile Delinquency File, Richard Brooks Papers, Special Collections, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Hollywood, CA.
In response to the growing presence of black students in New York schools, principals would soon receive almost unfettered power to exclude children they deemed disruptive. Rachel Lissy, “‘Young Man, You Get Out of Here’: Producing the Discipline Gap in New York City, 1955–1970,” Ph.D. Diss., University of California Berkeley, 2014.
Peter Biskind, Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 205. Scholars debate whether delinquency rates actually changed or reporting rates increased.
Grace Palladino, Teenagers: An American History (New York: Basic, 1996), 161; Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage, 66–71;
William Graebner, Coming of Age in Buffalo: Youth and Authority in the Postwar Era (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 87.
United States Senate, Juvenile Delinquency (Motion Pictures): Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee of the Judiciary, June 15–18, 1955 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1955), 94.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949).
Sam Levenson, “Teachers and The Blackboard Jungle,” High Points 36 (June 1955): 32.
Ruth Goldstein, “The Blackboard Jungle,” High Points 37 (May 1955): 58.
Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
Daniel Perlstein, Justice, Justice: School Politics and the Eclipse of Liberalism (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 3.
Lissy, “Young Man, You Get Out of Here”; Christina Collins, “Ethnically Qualifed”: Race, Merit, and the Selection of Urban Teachers, 1920–1980 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011). Although a black character was Blackboard Jungle’s best-behaved student, Southern lawmakers invoked the movie to justify new juvenile delinquency laws used to combat civil rights activism. In Birmingham over one thousand black high school activists were suspended or expelled as delinquents.
Anders Walker, “‘Blackboard Jungle’: Delinquency, Desegregation, and the Cultural Politics of ‘Brown’,” Columbia Law Review 110 (2010): 1945;
Robin D. G. Kelly, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 90–91.
Evan Hunter, The Blackboard Jungle (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), 35.
Richard Brooks, Blackboard Jungle script, version of September 2, 1954, file 16, Brooks Papers.
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See Amy Stuart Wells and Todd Serman, “Education Against All Odds: What Films Teach Us About Schools,” in Imaging Education: The Media and Schools in America, ed. Gene Maeroff (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998), 181–194;
and William Ayers, “A Teacher Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hero: Teachers and Teaching in Film,” in Images of Schoolteachers in Twentieth-Century America, 2nd ed., eds. Pamela Joseph and Gail Burnaford (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2001), 201–210.
Denise Pope, Doing School (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).
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Jerold Simmons, “Violent Youth: The Censuring and Public Reception of ‘The Wild One’ and ‘The Blackboard Jungle’,” Film History 20 (2008): 390.
Amanda Klein, American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, and Defining Subcultures (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 116.
Leerom Medovoi, “Reading the Blackboard Jungle: Youth, Masculinity, and Racial Cross-Identification,” in Race and the Subject of Masculinities, eds. Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 139.
Nancy Hardin, “Blackboard Jungle Was Our Movie,” http://nancyhardin.hubpages.com/hub/blackboard-jungle-was-our-movie (accessed October 27, 2014).
See Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979);
Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991), xv.
Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (New York: Methuen, 1987), 30.
Perlstein, Justice, Justice, 20; David Angus and Jeffrey Mirel, The Failed Promise of the American High School, 1890–1995 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999), 203.
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Peter Demerath, Producing Success: The Culture of Personal Advancement in an American High School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
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© 2015 Sevan G. Terzian and Patrick A. Ryan
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Perlstein, D., Faw, L. (2015). Students without a Cause: Blackboard Jungle, High School Movies, and High School Life. In: Terzian, S.G., Ryan, P.A. (eds) American Education in Popular Media. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137410153_7
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