Of Pupils and Politicians

Of Pupils and Politicians


On September 8, the start of a new school year, President Obama gave a TV speech to kids across the country in which he urged them to work hard and in that way realize their full potential as individuals and citizens. Nevertheless, despite its lack of political content, the speech, even before written and delivered, was damned by right-wing foes as the sort of propaganda once used by communists and Nazis in their ruthless campaigns to mind-control the impressionable children of the Soviet Union and Germany.
Whether impressionable or not, when I was a school kid at P.S.147 in Manhattan during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the city’s mayor was Fiorello H. LaGuardia, a Republican, and our president was Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat. Often, but especially at election time, party bosses would send their spokesmen to my school on the Lower East Side to spread their good tidings of the better days to come if our parents voted correctly.
To be sure, the appearance of political proxies at the school, in the immemorial form of an address to a captured audience in the assembly hall, was never overtly political. If it were, the Communist, Socialist and Socialist Workers parties would all have demanded equal time, which would have been awkward for Mr. Vogel, our principal, in the heyday of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Ostensibly, the Honorable Judge Julius Katz, let us call him, or the no less Honorable Councilman Mario Mancuso had torn themselves away from their all-important duties and come here to, for example, honor our beloved kindergarten teacher, Miss Edna Veitch, upon her thirty years of service to the school. They would assure us that, thanks to her and her former pupils, all model citizens with never a day in jail, the school was renowned throughout academia as the most illustrious not only in our own district but also throughout the city, even where kids had fountain pens, educated parents who could help with homework, and leather briefcases for their books instead of their mother’s outstretched garters or their father’s stained neckties.
But eventually, while still on the subject of public service, our esteemed visitors, after quoting Ben Franklin and Ralph Waldo Emerson, would slide skillfully, like radio comic Bob Hope from a golf joke to a commercial for Bromo Seltzer, to the forthcoming election, and of its importance to the students and their families, and, luckily, of the availability of candidates who were qualified to do for the city and country what Miss Veitch had done and would continue to do for P.S.147, the school they most enjoyed visiting because of its hospitality, dedication to learning and its reminder of their own humble background.
Never once, that I can recall, did the representative of any candidate, Democrat or Republican, ever say an unkind word about an opponent, who was always nameless if not nonexistent. Their modus operandi was to so extol their own candidate that it was unthinkable for anyone to have the chutzpah to be running against him. Sad to say, candidates were always male, and there were still diehards who questioned the right of women to so much as vote, even if it were, thank the Lord, for a man.
This high standard of deportment must seen incredible to young people who live in today’s political climate, when slander and invective have become a default style of discourse, as in the case of the president’s address to school kids. It may seem even more incredible than to learn that at Maxie’s Sanitary lunch wagon outside P.S. 147, a hot dog with all the trimmings once cost a nickel, and that for another nickel, if you were lucky enough to have one, you could wash it down with a bottle of Pepsi that, according to the jingle which still rings in my ears, contained “twelve full ounces.”