If George Bernard Shaw really said, “History is merely one damn thing after another,” he deserved both a chuckle and an argument. The argument is that history is anything but dull, anything but predictable, and anything but inconsequential. Evidence can be found in dozens of little known oral histories of NCTE leaders. My purpose here is to summarize the goals and methods of conducting these oral histories, and, through excerpts from eight of them, to share moments that are either humorous, touching, informative, thought-provoking, or still timely.

Broad Shoulders and Big Issues:
Council Leaders Tell Their Stories

JULIE M. JENSEN
English Journal
Our History, Ourselves

Why Look Back?

Should you need convincing that our professional past is an important part of your future, I offer testimonials from some of our NCTE colleagues:

• History does not provide answers, but a sense of our history will deepen insights into many contemporary problems. Knowing something of our past may enable us to face both the present and the future with greater confidence, with broadened perspectives, and with deeper appreciation for the profession to which we, like thousands before us, contribute. (England and Judy 6)

• Most English teachers are unaware of the history of English teaching. But our heritage is worth knowing about. More than just being aware of a mixture of fascinating historical tidbits, knowing our common background gives us a sense of direction, a way of knowing where we came from and how and why we got where we are, a way of gaining insights about where and how our current theories and practices arose, a way of giving credit to some unfairly forgotten writers and teachers who advanced our profession. (Donelson 78)

• If as a young teacher I had possessed more historical perspective, I might have been a more intelligent consumer of what I read in NCTE articles and books and what I heard at its conventions. I might in fact have been a better teacher, for I might then have more easily differentiated the genuinely new from the rehash, the tried from the trite, and the educationally lasting from the faddish. And if I had possessed such perspective when I became a writer and speaker on professional subjects and an officer of the Council itself, I might have avoided some asinine statements and mistaken judgments. (Hook xvii)

• [In an age of easily accessible paper tablets and pencils and of inexpensive tape recorders,] it is inexcusable that we should permit lives important to us or to our students to go mute to the grave. (Farrell 91)

• The history of English teaching is in part a history of ideas, trends, traditions, and changes. It is also a history of people who spawned those ideas, developed those trends and traditions, and effected those changes. (Monseau and Knox 51)

In oral histories we indeed see the human side of the past. Insights into people and into their professional association open a window on the history of the English teaching profession. The NCTE Oral History Project For years—decades, in fact—the idea of diligently chronicling NCTE’s history was brought up at Executive Committee meetings. But Executive Committee members come and go, and it was all to no avail until l97l. During that year the present Council headquarters in Urbana, Illinois, was dedicated, and past president Alfred Grommon was asked to present a rationale for the Council having a written history. Wilbur Hatfield, secretary-treasurer of the Council from 1919–1953, followed up with a letter in which he wrote, “Perhaps no history of NCTE will ever be a best seller, but if one is produced with insight and accuracy, it may well improve the judgement of future NCTE leaders” (Hook xi). In 1975 the NCTE Research Foundation voted to support the writing of a history and appointed a committee to develop a proposal, with Grommon as chair. Finally, in 1977 the Executive Committee established the Commission on the History of the Council, consisting of Arthur Applebee, Muriel Crosby, J. N. Hook, James Hocker Mason, Robert Pooley, James R. Squire, and Darwin Turner, with Grommon as Chair. With Research Foundation funds matched
by a gift from Robert Pooley, the new Commission undertook the long-term task of recording the Council’s history in three forms: a written history, a
companion volume of essays, and an oral history.

The first oral histories were conducted between 1977 and 1979, when Grommon interviewed twenty-three presidents who served the Council from 1936–1977, two second vice presidents, and two executive secretaries. The audiotapes were transcribed by NCTE staff, used in the development of the written history (A Long Way Together), and housed in the NCTE archives. In 1989 I proposed to the Executive Committee that the oral histories have a broader value than as source material for a written history, that they are significant in their own right. Specifically, I proposed that the collection be supplemented with interviews of presidents since 1978, presidents prior to 1978 who were not interviewed by Grommon, and executive directors Robert Hogan and John Maxwell. I conducted the interviews, produced the transcripts, and submitted sixteen interview portfolios to the NCTE archives. (See a complete inventory in the appendix.) Portfolios include the audiocassette(s) (one or two ninety minute tapes), a transcript edited by the subjects and revised, a signed permission from the subject for use of the materials, responses to a written questionnaire, and supplementary resources about topics within the interview. This phase of the project was supported by the NCTE Fund. Most recently, in a 1997 action, the Executive Committee voted to
bring the project up to date with interviews of presidents and executive directors serving since 1990.

In oral histories we indeed see the human side of the past. I attempted to maintain certain continuities with Grommon’s procedures. For example, I asked each interviewee to fill out a questionnaire, the same one used in the 1970s, consisting of four questions:

(1) What do you consider to be important achievements during your term as president and as a member of the Executive Committee and of other NCTE groups?

(2) What are some other aspects of NCTE history you think must not be forgotten?

(3) What are some human interest and anecdotal features of Council affairs you think would contribute to the history and development of the Council and would help a reader get a “feel” of what being active in the Council was like then?

(4) Is there anything else you’d like to say that wasn’t elicited by the first three questions?

Like Grommon, I began my interviews by asking about early influences—people and experiences —that steered my subjects toward a career in this profession. I then used the following questions as a guide:

• What was life in the classroom like the first year you were a teacher (the year, the place, the students, the methods, the materials)?

• When did you first hear of NCTE?

• What were some milestones on your way to the presidency?

• What would you like listeners to know about your years as an officer, particularly your year as president?

• What was happening in society and in education during your involvement?

• What was your conference theme and why did you choose it?

• Would you choose that theme today?

• What can you recall about important issues, resolutions, achievements, and unsolved problems?

• What are your hopes for the Council and the profession?

I referred to these questions as a guide because the substance of each interview was built on research into each subject’s professional involvements and achievements. The result, in my view, is not “merely one damn thing after another,” but a collective treasury of jokes, poems, reminiscences, letters, teaching ideas, proverbs, hopes, and scandals. There are case studies in decision-making, deeply-felt opinions, curricular priorities, struggles with change, and tragedies. The interviews chronicle research projects, teaching conditions, and prevailing attitudes.  They are a commentary on American social, political, and economic history; on the profession; on the Council; and on the speakers as individuals. I excerpted the oral histories for a presentation at the 1996 NCTE convention, precasting volunteer audience members in the roles of various oral history subjects. (Ironically, some interview subjects were actually in the audience and played themselves.) While silently reading these excerpts may be no more satisfying than silently reading a poem, the real satisfaction comes in knowing that all of these voices live on.

An Oral History Sampler

Jensen: What more traditional place to begin than with a joke. My favorite was told by Alan Purves, 1980 President of NCTE. I sensed at the beginning of our 1993 interview that Alan had something to get off his chest.

Purves: [It is] a joke I heard last week about three people that went duck hunting: a mathematician, a physicist, and a statistician. They were out in a boat, and one solitary duck flew overhead. The mathematician calculated the flying speed of the duck and the muzzle velocity of his equipment, fired, and went a yard to the left. The physicist took those two things into consideration. He also calculated the baromentric pressure, the angle of the boat, and the wave motion, fired, and came out a yard to the right. At which point the statistician stood up in the rear of the boat, clapped his hands, and said, “We got him!”

Jensen: Like Al Grommon, my first request of interviewees was that they reminisce about their formative years, the possible roots of their interest in English. I especially like this heartwarming story told to Grommon by J. N. Hook, a former Executive Secretary of NCTE.

Hook: Most of what I have done in the field of English stems from an interest in writing that developed very early. I remember that when I was nine years old . . . I decided I was going to write a western novel. I’d been reading a lot of Zane Gray and other people who wrote westerns. . . . And so I decided I was going to write a western of my own. I came from a very poor family. My father had been bedridden for a year and a half, and that had eaten up the few savings that . . . my father and mother had. So we couldn’t afford even paper for me to write on. And so I did my writing on grocery bags. I wrote away during much of that summer, but I finally had to stop for two reasons. One, we ran out of grocery bags, and two, I found that by the time I had finished the twentyfourth or the twenty-fifth grocery bag, on both sides, that all of my characters had been killed off.

Jensen: Margaret Early, 1974 NCTE president, was asked by Grommon how she became interested in teaching. She explained that her ambition was to go into publishing, but, because she always hedged her bets, she prepared herself during her undergraduate years to teach as well. After college she, in fact, took a job with a publisher, became disillusioned, found a high school English teaching job, and at the end of the school year located a summer job with a publisher. This routine of teaching during the school year and publishing during the summer lasted about four years. Margaret explained her thinking about her two careers.

Early: I would sit down at the end of each summer at my typewriter and make a list of the pros and cons of whether I should stay in publishing or stay in teaching, and obviously teaching kept winning out. To encapsulate the difference for me: I would be clockwatching in both situations, but in publishing I’d be wanting the time to be moving faster, and in teaching I was trying to slow it down all the time. It was this that convinced me each time that teaching was the thing for me to be doing.

Jensen: Yetta Goodman mused with me about the 1950s, her years as a beginning teacher.

Goodman: [I began teaching during] the McCarthy era—very scary in California to be part of the McCarthy era. That had a big influence on my life. During the fifties people were very quiet about what was happening to them because we were afraid . . . Teachers were losing their jobs, and nobody knew about it. Those of us who did know about it kept it quiet. I had a number of experiences [which taught me that] the whole political nature of the whole country impacts education and educational curriculum. We couldn’t teach about the United Nations, for  example—or, we weren’t supposed to, and I did. I can remember being reported on the day Stalin died, it must have been ’52 or ’53. I had a bulletin board that was current events, and my kids kept up the bulletin board. The kids brought in pictures of Stalin, and it was all over my bulletin board. I got in trouble because I had pictures of Stalin on my bulletin board. A teacher got in trouble because she had a pamphlet in her room called, “Studying about Communism.” This pamphlet included all the things that were wrong with Communism. The joke at the time was if you said to somebody, “I am anti-Communist,” they would say, “I don’t care what kind of Communist you are” . . . I think the ’50s had a terrible impact on education.

Jensen: Janet Emig, 1989 president, grew up to be a teacher of writing and a writer about writing. In these excerpts she tells me about the role writing played in her childhood years and about how her school experiences in English classrooms shaped her views about the teaching of writing. 

Emig: I lived in a crowded household because we were poor during the Depression, and writing was a way for me to be private. Second, as an only child, I felt only I represented my point of view in certain circumstances,  and it is very useful to me to have the text. The text became a kind of sibling with which I could have a conversation, and it gave me a way to talk through what I was feeling because there were no other people anywhere near my age in my environment. I couldn’t get over my shock when I was first introduced to the handbooks in high school, which was the first time I met them, because they had absolutely nothing to do with the way I achieved what I wrote. And yet I regularly did extremely well in writing. I’m a lucky person. I tend to doubt what they say rather than to doubt myself. Unfortunately, students who don’t do as well or aren’t encouraged in schools doubt themselves rather than doubt what they are told. Rather early it occurred to me that what was going on in schools was not the teaching of writing; it was rather the assigning of writing and then the grading of writing, with this Grand Canyon between. No one was exploring how we got from here to there, and so the only people who fared well in this were those who already could write. This is a bizarre way of proceeding.

Jensen: Marjorie Farmer was president of NCTE in 1978. When I interviewed her in 1990 she talked about being an African American schoolgirl and later an African American teacher. A self-described “bookish” little girl, Marjorie went on to attend Temple University as an English major, but her parents, a Methodist pastor and a teacher of elocution and Latin, encouraged her to take education courses so she could teach. In the Philadelphia of 1939 there were separate “lists” for teachers. So called “colored” teachers could teach in elementary schools that were located in communities that were primarily “colored.” No persons of color taught in secondary schools. During the ’40s, Marjorie began a graduate degree, also at Temple. The University’s administrators wondered what to do with her because there was no available career track for black teachers. They created a position in which she taught two sections of freshman English and took classes.

Farmer: The first class that I taught had a black student who came to me at the beginning of the year and deeply apologized and explained to me that he wanted to be transferred from my class to a class that was taught by one of my  colleagues, whom I knew to be a person of some limitations in understanding of persons of color. He said “I hope you understand Mrs. Farmer. I don’t mean any offense, but I have worked and saved so long to go to college and learn to be an English teacher that I must be taught by a white person.” It was such a startling experience. He was so apologetic. He waited two or three sessions before I could see that he was holding back. He was absolutely persuaded that this was too important. He knew the other person’s reputation, but he thought he would at least learn to speak right. Some people for whom I have great affection and respect were offended and amazed at the notion of a black person as an English teacher.

Jensen: Many past presidents spoke about literature —its teaching and its meaning in their own lives—but none more eloquently than James E. Miller Jr., 1970 NCTE president. First, my question, then Jim’s response. I have a couple of favorite quotes from your presidential address. You wrote, “In the face of all the current and increasing pressures to dehumanize life it is especially urgent for some segments of the society to proclaim the responsibility for preservation of those fragile but precious qualities, the personal, the human, and the humane.” And then later, “It is no exaggeration to suggest that the English classroom is the last free place in the curriculum for the play of the mind, the growth of the imagination, and the discovery and exploration of human and humane values.” Please talk about the role of language and literacy in preserving humanness.

Miller: I came across a statement recently in Emerson, which I like very much. In his essay called “Fate,” Emerson explained at the beginning his purpose in writing the essay, saying, in effect, “I am trying to discover how to live life.” It struck me that one of the reasons I became a reader to begin with, and then a teacher of literature, was that I was getting something vital out of it. This was not just an emotional bang, but my curiosity was leading me on from book to book trying to discover how to live life. And whether you call it education of the imagination, development of curiosity, or whatever, I think Emerson put it pretty well. What is the value of literature? Why do we read it? We read it in order to learn something, and that something is how to live life. I am also fond of saying that we never learn to live life in one permanently fixed way. We don’t learn an answer to the question, “How to live?” and then stop reading because we have “the answer.” The complex and bewildering flux of experience compels us to become lifetime seekers. So
we are constantly searching. What is driving us on in our search is our enduring need to discover how to live life. We live by the question and not by a fixed answer.

Jensen: Muriel Crosby was NCTE’s 1966 president. When I located her file in the NCTE archives, it contained no tapes, no transcript—only a two-page memo requesting that the transcript and tapes be destroyed, since she felt she wasn’t at her best when giving the interview.  At the end of the memo she wrote, Incidentally, after reading this atrocious stuff of mine [and] some of the responses of others in the questionnaire sent out to past presidents, I am more than convinced that:

1. Past-Presidents generally suffer more than others from ego enhancement.
2. More often than not, the leadership qualities of Past-Presidents are an illusion. On this happy note I conclude it is the better part of wisdom to let Past-Presidents rest in peace! I like Muriel’s spunk, but thanks to these oral histories, we can decide for ourselves who is best qualified to rest in peace. Oral and printed histories make it possible for us to examine our professional past.

They represent

• a way to be an informed thinker about the present and the future. They are a lens for viewing contemporary problems.
• a way to ward off discouragement and to develop perspective. One constant is new challenges and new growth.
• a way to solidify our own professional identity, to understand ourselves as professionals.
• a way to gain pride. Dedicated, creative, and beloved professionals preceded us.
• a way to make sense of what we are and where we are as a profession.
• a way to learn what has united us over time.
• a way to be astounded at how old “new” ideas are.
• a way to conduct a continuing selfexamination. The past merges seamlessly into the present and the future.
• a way to have a good time. History is much more fun than “merely one damn thing after another.”

Taped for history are more than forty interviews with people whose lives were dedicated to this profession we share. That in itself is an achievement.
But the dozens of tapes and transcripts in the NCTE archives take on importance only if we know of their existence. I am happy to tell you of the availability of this resource, and my hope is that our past will be a part of your future.

Vice Presidents: Hardy Finch (1960) and Alvina Burrows (1967).

Chief Executive Officers: Wilbur Hatfield (1920–1953), J. N. Hook (1953–1960), James R. Squire (1960–1967), Robert F. Hogan (1968–1981), and John C. Maxwell, (1981–1989).

Works Cited

Donelson, Ken. “Ten Teachers and Scholars Who Influenced the Secondary English Curriculum, 1880–1970.” English Journal 73.3 (1984): 78–80.

England, David, and Stephen Judy. “An Historical Primer: Editors’ Introduction.” English Journal 68.4 (1979): 6.

Farrell, Edmund J. “Oral Histories as Living Literature.” English Journal 71.4 (1982): 87–92.

Hook, J. N. A Long Way Together: A Personal View of NCTE’s First Sixty-Seven Years. Urbana: NCTE, 1979.

Monseau, Virginia, and William L. Knox. “Looking Back to the Future through Oral History.” English Journal 73.3 (1984): 49–51.

A Beginning Historical Bibliography of NCTE and the Profession Applebee, Arthur N. Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English: A History. Urbana: NCTE, 1974.

Dillon, David, ed. “Elementary Language Arts.” Historical Perspectives. Language Arts 63 (1986): 521–648.

Donelson, Ken, and Alleen Pace Nilsen, eds. “History of English Education.” English Journal 73.3 (1984): 1–128.

Gerlach, Jeanne Marcum, and Virginia R. Monseau. Missing Chapters: Ten Pioneering Women in NCTE and English Education. Urbana: NCTE, 1991.

Hook, J. N. A Long Way Together: A Personal View of NCTE’s First Sixty-Seven Years. Urbana: NCTE, 1979.

Hosic, James Fleming. “The National Council after Twenty Years.” English Journal 21.2 (1932): 107–15.

Jensen, Julie M., ed “Language Arts at Sixty: A Retrospective.” Language Arts 60 (1983): 1–160.

Judy, Stephen N., ed. “English Since Sputnik.” English Journal 68.6 (1979): 1–112.

Judy, Stephen N., and David A. England, eds. “An Historical Primer on the Teaching of English.” English Journal 68.4 (1979): 1–112.

National Council of Teachers of English. Golden Anniversary 1960. Champaign: NCTE, 1960.

Petty, Walter T. A History of the National Conference on Research in English. Urbana: NCTE for the National Conference on Research in English, 1983.

Schaafsma, David, and Ruth Vinz, eds. “27th Anniversary Issue.” English Education 28 (1996): 169–260.

A past president of NCTE, JULIE M. JENSEN is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at The University of Texas at Austin.

These remarks were first delivered on November 22, 1996, in Chicago, Illinois, at the NCTE Annual Convention.

Copyright © 2000 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

 Link to Table of Contents:  http://www.ncte.org/pubs/journals/ej/contents/106433.htm