The Educational screen (c1922-c1956])

Page 3 36 The Educational Screen have distributed a grand total of 400,000 copies—unprecedented in the line. In the broad policy of utilizing all possible forces to open the field, the col- umns generously commended many com- petitive enterprises. Authoritative articles about new developments were featured; uses of films in industry were illustrated and described; helpful notes informed the reader of non-theatrical subjects in work or recently completed; subscribers everywhere were encouraged to make the publication a medium for the exchange of worthwhile ideas. It is an interesting commentary on the little magazine that the great public libraries, dismissing it at first as just another commercial "house organ" with an ax to grind, were suffi- ciently puzzled by the evident educational importance of its content to preserve a few odd numbers tentatively for their reference book-stacks. They might well have saved them all. The executive viewpoint of Harley Clarke, and the pedagogical one of For- est Moulton, naturally accounted for the pervading policy; but no small meed of credit should go to the editor who inter- preted the policy in terms of such un- deniably constructive service. His name was Nelson L. Greene, his age still in the thirties. He could write. He could champion and condemn vigorously upon occasion; but he also was of that rare temperament which could view tolerantly the clumsy efforts of superficial workers in the line as long as they were headed in the right direction. He was keenly alive to the shining potentialities of the field, unrealized or not; but, unambitious for personal glory, he saw his duty mod- estly and efficiently as to coordinate and to encourage. He was a graduate of Colgate University, where his father had been professor of Latin for years—a scholar beloved by the alumni as by the student body and the other members of the faculty. Ask any Colgate man you ever knew if he ever heard of Professor "Johnny" Greene. Well—anyway—Nel- son L. Greene is one of his five sons. Nelson Greene had been teaching lan- guages and literature for fifteen years in Eastern schools and colleges when the First World War began. What happened then is best told in his own words as given in an address before the Indiana State Teachers Association at Indian- apolis, October 17, 1935: "I found my.self with the French Army. There was great need of mental distraction for the troops during their rest periods back from the front. It was a critical time for the morale. I proposed to French Army Headquarters in Paris that I be allowed to get together what films and slides I could find and talk to the soldiers in their bar- racks about American life, avoid- ing all reference to the war. The chiefs groaned. 'Another lecture, they have been bored to death with lectures.' But I insisted. Finally they grudgingly said I might try it at a few points near where I was stationed; they named the points; and specified that on no ac- count should I talk more than twenty minutes. "I ran.sacked Paris for such pic- tures as I could find, got projectors and a soldier to run them, and we went at it. We got from place to place as we could—by train or auto if there was such, by horses, ox-carts, wheelbarrows, or on foot with our bulky paraphernalia on our backs—half freezing for days at a time, thanks to the quaint French war-time custom of fireless stoves. But it was fun, for I was learning something of great im- portance that I had never even thought about before. "The skeptics at Headquarters in Paris were careful to check up on results. In two weeks I was or- dered to talk an hour, then two hours: then the time limit was re- moved. Once I had to go on for three and one-half hours by re- quest, till my voice gave out. (If you ever tried to make your whole audience hear you in one of those long French baraques, with five or six hundred of those dear, dirty little old fighting Poilus sardined into it, midwinter and windows closed, half of them smoking the worst tobacco ever grown on earth, you would forgive your voice for giving out. "After a month, Paris ordered me to visit all sixty-flve centers in that Army zone. After two months they gave me an auto, an operator, better equipment, and told me to drop everything and cover every Army zone in France. And so, from three months before the Armistice to six months after It, we traveled over most of that little country, spoke to more than 100,- 000, and between times had helped train fourteen other .Americans to doing the same thing." Nelson L. Greene learned about vis- ual education the hard way, teach- ing French soldiers at war how the Yankee doughboys lived back home Amplifying the story later for me, he said: "I carried about eighty slides, six or eight reels of silent film on Ameri- can cities and industries, a stereopticon and small French movie projector. "When I got back home I was very ready to Join up with S.V.E. to edit their new magazine Visual Education. It was pure accident that I even learned of the S.V.E. plans. I was about all set to go into advertising agency work in New York, but before making my final decision, I went up home to Colgate for the Centennial in October, 1919, for one week to make up my mind. Professor H. E. Slaught, of the University of Chicago, a lifelong friend of my father, was staying at the house for the occasion. Slaught was also an intimate associate of Dr. F. R. Moulton, in Chicgao, one of the chief promoters of S.V.E. Moulton had asked Slaught to find an editor if he could on the trip East. When Slaught heard I was going to stop teaching he proposed the Chicago Job and I Jumped at it. All was fixed up in short order." While the motion picture industry was still in its knee pants, so to speak, edu- cators interested in visual instruction had discovered many articles of specialized appeal in a magazine called Reel and Slide, founded about 1913. Some five years later, commercial interests con- trolling Reel and Slide persuaded certain schoolmen to join the governing board and changed the name to Moving Picture Age. In this new form the publication won another reputation for honest serv- ice. However, the trade factor in its sup- port made educators generally accept its findings with reservations, a misfortune suffered proportionately also by Harley Clarke's Visual Education. The objection was met late in 1921, when a wholly pro- fessorial group, headed by Herbert E. Slaught, of the University of Chicago, joined to establish the Educational Screen. General offices were opened on Wabash .^Kvenue, Chicago, the first num- ber appeared January, 1922, and by happy circumstance already detailed the editor then, as today, was Nelson L. Greene. In the nearly two decades since, under his balanced and indefatigable leadership, the broad, consistent stimulus to non- theatrical development exerted by the Educational Screen has won it an hon- ored place in motion picture history. At the end of its first year it absorbed Moving Picture Age; in its second year several other magazine efforts in the field were discontinued; at the close of its third, it announced the purchase of Visual Education. leaving the Educational Screen the only magazine exclusively devoted to the visual field. That last ac- quisition enabled the Educational .Screen to expand its pages and to add to its departments. On the side it undertook the separate publication of a few books and pamphlets believed to be useful contri- butions to the growing store of knowledge about visual methods. And, preeminent among these supplemental items, it con- tinued the annual, annotated catalogue of available non-theatrical pictures first pub- lished in 1920 by Moving Picture Age, under its original and present title, "1001 Films." One observation remains to be made about Clarke's remarkable first venture in nationwide visual education. The sup- posed "industrial taint" clinging to mon- eyed patrons outside the teaching pro- fession, was rarely discussed at formal gatherings of the schoolmen; but it was an obstacle, nevertheless, to the spread of the visual movement. Occasionally an educator would arise to proclaim that, as dangerous as the finger of Commerce in the educational pudding might be, it was a useful expedient for the present; but he was usually unanswered and, in the ensuing stony silence, was left to conclude for himself that he had spoken out of turn. James Newell Emery, of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, stated the case very frankly, however, in a well-rea- soned article in the Educational Screen when he said: "As educators we are in- terested only in the educational results .secured. We can no more allow the com- mercial houses to dominate the policies of visual instruction than we could al- low the textbook firms to dominate the educational policies of the country." (To he continued)