A Social History of US Educational Documentary: The Travels

of Three Shorts, 1945–1958

Lisa M. Rabin

Film History: An International Journal, Volume 29, Number 3, 2017, pp. 1-24
(Article)

Published by Indiana University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/677592

Access provided by George Mason University & (Viva) (19 Nov 2017 19:44 GMT)
LISA M. RABIN

A Social History of US Educational Documentary:

The Travels of Three Shorts, 1945–1958

ABSTRACT: This essay studies three documentary shorts on schools in the United States,
France, and premandate Palestine that were made in the wake of World War II. Doc-
umentation from film archives, manuscript collections, newspapers, periodicals, and
educational curricula shows how the shorts were produced for postwar internationalism
and later repurposed by US film institutions within midcentury discourses of progressive
schooling. Local newspapers reveal how organizations adopted, negotiated, and ignored
distribution mandates when they screened the films. The history of the travels of these
shorts provides new contours on the expanding historiography of useful educational film.

KEYWORDS: educational film, nontheatrical film, useful film, sponsored documentary,

film reception

Between 1945 and 1948, three intriguing documentary shorts on children were
made for US sponsors. Alexander Hackenschmied’s A Better Tomorrow (1945),
which focused on New York City progressive public schools, was part of a series
of documentary shorts on American life and values that the US Office of War
Information produced during World War II and distributed, upon the allied
victory, around the world. La Petite République (The Children’s Republic, 1947),
which Victor Vicas directed for the private company Madeleine Carroll Produc-
tions, documented a village run by World War II orphans in Sèvres, France, and
became a fund-raising tool for UNICEF. And Tomorrow’s a Wonderful Day (1948),
which featured Holocaust refugee youth adapting to a kibbutz in premandate
Palestine, was edited by the American Zionist Women’s Organization Hadassah
from Helmar Lerski’s film Adamah (1947) and helped propel their successful US
Youth Aliyah (Youth to Palestine) campaign in the 1950s.
In the wake of a war that killed, injured, and displaced monumental
numbers of children, these three documentaries had a similar imperative.
Providing for children’s welfare and schooling was not only an urgent moral

Film History, 29.3, pp. 1–24. Copyright © 2017 Trustees of Indiana University. doi: 10.2979/filmhistory.29.3.01
2

responsibility but also the best hope for inoculating the world against fascism
and communism. Illuminating US interest in growing strong and cooperative
allied nations for the postwar order, the films were produced within the context
of twentieth-century internationalism that gave rise, as Zoë Druick has shown,
to the use of the documentary short as a significant educational tool after World
War II.1 In screenings that showcased their value for internationalism, A Better
Tomorrow (ABT) was shown at the first United Nations Conference on Interna-
tional Organization in May and June of 1945 in San Francisco, The Children’s
Republic (TCR) was a feature documentary at the Second Session of the General
Conference of UNESCO in Mexico City in November of 1947, and Tomorrow’s a
Wonderful Day (TWD) was the first Israeli film to premiere at the International
Film Festival of Locarno in 1948.2
Yet by 1950, the creative potential of the films had shifted to new pur-
poses. Prominent educational film institutions like New York University’s Edu-
cational Film Library, Columbia Teachers College, and the Museum of Modern
Art (MoMA) judged these documentaries as suitable for audiences interested
in teacher training, child care and development, and even the rehabilitation of
so-called delinquents.3 In a statement that perhaps embodies this repurposing,
Charles Siepmann, the chairman of the Department of Communications at
New York University and a leading expert in educational broadcasting, praised
Lerski’s “psychological insight” in TWD, stating that “[i]t would seem to me a
thousand pities if [the film’s] use were confined to a fund raising [sic] drive.”4
Siepmann’s statement illuminates an important turn for all three of the shorts.
Although they were created as historical documents in the context of inter-
nationalism, US institutions of educational film appropriated them as more
generalized portraits of modern American schooling and socialization.
In this essay, I examine a range of documentation from film archives,
organizational manuscripts, trade journals, newspapers, and periodicals to
trace the movement of these shorts from their internationalist purposes to new
ones in the United States. My study coincides with an expanding historiogra-
phy of US educational film. Although a traditional focus in film studies on film
analysis and auteurs has tended to dismiss the vast number of instructional
films created in the twentieth century as doctrinaire or obscure (or just plain
dull), new research situating this kind of film in its material history has located
its significance within twentieth-century educational mandates.5 As historians
have shown, the American infrastructure for educational film’s use in both for-
mal and informal education grew exponentially after World War II, galvanized
by the accessibility of 16mm and new structures of film education that con-
structed the screening and discussing of film as a performance of civic identity.6
My work in part maps the ways that documentary meaning could transform in

Film History  |  Volume 29.3

 3

this system, channeled from its internationalist roots into hegemonic American
discourses on children’s schooling and socialization.
Yet the production and distribution history of these shorts is only part
of their story. The existence of an enormous US infrastructure for educational
film—the proliferation of producers, distributors, councils, journals, pedago-
gies, and apparatuses across the national landscape—implicated the existence
of large numbers of Americans who engaged with this kind of film in and out-
side of the traditional classroom. Because of the difficulty of locating archival
evidence on these spectators’ experiences, historians of US educational film
have tended to focus on its industrial history.7 The availability of digitized local
US newspapers, which were a major source for this project, has opened up the
possibility for closer inquiry into the exhibition and reception of educational
film. When I examined local newspapers (as well as traditional archives) for
documentation on these shorts, I found that they were used across the United
States in a range of settings, from classrooms to PTA meetings to community
gatherings to even a twelve-step prison program. The documentation provided
little evidence on individual reception of these shorts, but it did yield insight
into their exhibition and what we might understand as a kind of “sponsored”
reception—or the work of local American groups in promoting the documen-
taries for viewers’ interest, arranging screenings, leading discussions, and
otherwise organizing audience engagement with the films at a local level.8 These
shorts’ appropriation as tracts of education played out differently in local con-
texts, as local groups sometimes reproduced, other times negotiated, and still
others ignored distribution mandates altogether.9
The history of the travels of three similarly themed shorts through sys-
tems of production, distribution, exhibition, and sponsored reception reveals
the limitations of aesthetic or representational approaches to educational film.
Taken together, these three films, far from being static or dull artifacts of the
film archive, emerge instead as the sites of historical interactions between
institutions, human actors, and the documentary film text. In tracing this story,
my study aligns with social history, as it also adds further dimensions to our
understandings of useful film in the US educational landscape.
THREE SHORTS IN THE ARCHIVE
My study of these three films began with an accidental archival discovery. In
2012, I was researching the use of film in the classrooms of the famous commu-
nity school, Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem. The manuscript
collection of the high school’s principal, Leonard Covello, at the Historical Soci-
ety of Pennsylvania (HSP) provided a major source of evidence for this project.10
In the collection, I came across a film that was catalogued under the title One

LISA M. RABIN  |  A So cial History of US Educational D o cumentary

4

Million Children, which was made in 1945 and apparently concerned the high
school itself. Inquiries about the film to reference librarians at the HSP, the
Library of Congress, and the National Archives and Records Administration
uncovered its provenance in the series of twenty-six documentary shorts about
the United States made by Hollywood director Robert Riskin for the Office of
War Information (OWI) from 1943 to 1945 called Projections of America. “Pro-
jecting” new stories on American icons, cities, and infrastructure to foreign
audiences, the series was launched to contravene popular myths dispersed by
Hollywood on America—new knowledge that presumably could then help pave
the way for strategic postwar alliances, particularly against the Soviet threat.
By the end of the war, OWI outposts would distribute the series to hundreds of
mobile and commercial cinemas all over the world.11 One Million Children had
been renamed A Better Tomorrow, was directed by Alexander Hackenschmied,
and concerned the public schools in New York City.12
This alternate title was very familiar. I remembered that ABT appeared
as a portrait of American schooling in the New York University Educational
Film Library in numerous educational film catalogues of the late 1940s and
early 1950s, including those of the American Jewish Committee, the national
teachers’ association Phi Delta Kappa, and Teachers College. When I returned
to the lists, I saw that several also promoted two other postwar documentary
shorts concerning schools: TCR, which focused on a school run by World War
II orphans in Sèvres, France; and TWD, which showcased a youth kibbutz for
Holocaust orphans in premandate Palestine.
These three shorts stood out in the catalogues. First, the films had been
created in the immediate postwar climate for very different purposes than
other nontheatrical films that had been made explicitly for teacher training
or child development education, like Margaret Thomson’s Children Learning
by Experience (1947) or the more formulaic Learning to Understand Children I:
A Diagnostic Approach (1947). Even more interesting, distributors treated the
shorts differently than contemporaneous postwar films about children in the
devastation of Europe like Seeds of Destiny (1946), Hungry Minds (1948), and
This Is Their Story (1949). Four and five years after the war, catalogues continued
to identify these other documentaries as humanitarian and internationalist
films. By contrast, although ABT, TCR, and TWD occasionally appeared as use-
ful for the teaching of international relations,13 distributors more commonly
repurposed them as generalized portraits of modern American schooling and
socialization. For example, in 1950 NYU’s Educational Film Library categorized
ABT under education, all three films under child care and development, and
TWD under rehabilitation problems.14 A 1950 Teachers College study on the use
of films for “international and human relations” in adult education categorized

Film History  |  Volume 29.3

 5

TCR not as a film about France but rather as one instructive on “General Social
Development and Emotional Stability of Individuals” and “Relationships Within
Functional Groups.”15 And the national teachers’ society Phi Delta Kappa rec-
ommended ABT and TCR as suitable for “Teacher Education.”16
Meanwhile, the presence of ABT, TCR, and TWD in national film educa-
tion catalogues and their endorsement by well-known education organizations
like Teachers College and Phi Delta Kappa suggested that the films had poten-
tially enjoyed wide distribution in the United States. A cursory search for their
presence in digitized local historical newspapers revealed numerous signs of
their screenings across the United States in the postwar period.
The three shorts seemed to offer comparative case studies on the deploy-
ment of documentary film in the US educational landscape. On further examina-
tion, their similar repurposing as tracts relevant to modern American education
suggested a determinative role for distributors. At the same time, comparing
their local exhibition and reception histories might yield new insight into the
limits of distributors for shaping and determining film meaning. How and why
had film educationalists sought to repurpose these shorts? And how did their
repurposing influence the access that schools and organizations across the
country had to these films, as well as the way that local groups put them to use?
These questions formed the basis for this study, which begins with these shorts’
production at the end of World War II.
THE INTERNATIONALIST CONTEXT OF
PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION
In the aftermath of World War II, documentary filmmaking became extremely
productive for internationalism. Harnessed to myriad aims, from documenting
the war’s devastations, to promoting relief and reconstruction efforts, to advo-
cating an expanded reach for the United Nations,17 documentary took a signal
role in structuring knowledge for the new world order. As Druick has shown,
global institutions like UNESCO began to promote the short documentary form
as a key vehicle of mass education.18 One of the most common topics of the
times, of course, was the vulnerability of children and youth emerging from
the trauma of war or challenged by socioeconomic conditions of third-world
nations. As instructional shorts made to educate international audiences on
postwar schooling and socialization, ABT, TCR, and TWD were located squarely
within documentary’s postwar context.
As described above, Alexander Hackenschmied’s A Better Tomorrow ( fig. 1)
was one of a series of twenty-six documentary shorts about the United States that
Robert Riskin produced for OWI called Projections of America. Launched to “proj-
ect” new narratives of American ingenuity, values, and institutions to spectators

LISA M. RABIN  |  A So cial History of US Educational D o cumentary

6

Fig. 1: Film still of Alexander Hackenschmied’s work on A Better Tomorrow in an elementary

public school classroom, New York City, 1945. (Courtesy Julia and Petra Hammid)

worn down by war and worn out by fascist ideologies on film, OWI distributed
the series all over the world immediately upon the allied victory. ABT, which ran
twenty-four minutes long, showcased New York City public schooling as a model
for nurturing democratic citizens in the new world order.19 More specifically, the
short, which is composed of three sequences addressing elementary, middle, and
high school education, spotlights child-centered schooling, one of the founda-
tional tenets in US progressive education of the first part of the twentieth century.
Child-centered schooling arose from the efforts of early twentieth-century educa-
tors, influenced by theories of child development and John Dewey’s philosophical
pragmatism, to move away from traditional and authoritarian forms of schooling
and toward a conception of children’s needs in relation to their social world.20 In
the first sequence, elementary schoolchildren draw pictures of the city and build
skyscrapers with blocks, accentuating Deweyan ideals of experiential learning. In
the second sequence, a middle-school principal steers a student, Bert—who day-
dreams in class of flying helicopters, driving boats, and riding motorcycles—toward

Film History  |  Volume 29.3

 7

an industrial high school, where his passion for motion and speed can presumably
be turned into meaningful work. And in the last sequence, African American and
Italian American teenagers at the identifiable Benjamin Franklin High School in
East Harlem connect classroom learning to a neighborhood housing campaign.21
In the epilogue, as elementary school children look expectantly upon the Statue
of Liberty, the narrator asserts the rightness of modern American schooling:
“[T]heir education gives the city to the kids,” he states, “[and] gives them the ability
to change it, to make it a better place to live.” By focusing on child-centered learn-
ing in New York City, ABT made explicit for overseas audiences a model of training
citizens for a democracy in which children were socialized to balance individual
freedom and civic responsibility. The short’s value as a projection of international-
ism was authenticated by its inclusion (along with the other Projections shorts) in
the documentary program at the first United Nations Conference on International
Organization, held in San Francisco in the spring of 1945.22
Underlying ABT was faith in modern schooling as a foundational struc-
ture of democracy in the postwar order. La Petite République (The Children’s
Republic), made two years later in the French school and orphanage La Maison
de Sèvres, had a similar mission (fig. 2). The short was produced by Hollywood
actress and humanitarian fund-raiser Madeleine Carroll, who later served as
an American member of the United Nations Appeal for Children (a fund that
managed private donations to UNICEF), with her husband, French director
and Resistance fighter Henri Lavorel. Victor Vicas, who had already worked on
a number of documentaries for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration, directed the film, the only surviving copy of which is held by
Les Documents Cinémathographiques in Paris.23 TCR, which runs seventeen
minutes and twenty-nine seconds long, follows two Holocaust victims, Renée
and François Dubois, who are picked up for vagrancy when they are found by a
policeman singing for money in the streets of Sèvres, a suburb of Paris. Social
workers deliver the children (whose experience is recreated by real-life students
at the school) to the Maison de Sèvres, which the narrators tell us is run “comme
une bonne démocracie” (like a good democracy) by the children themselves.
No adult teachers are present. The school’s founders, communist-syndicalists
Yvonne and Henri Hagnauer, established the school for child Holocaust victims
in 1941 and later expanded it to include other child victims of war. Modeling
their school primarily on the pedagogical theories of the Belgian Ovide Decroly,
which were closely associated with those of Dewey, the Hagnauers sought to
give children who had suffered severe emotional and physical deprivation the
opportunity to develop independence, to tap into their innate creativity, and
to bond again with others.24 As the newcomers acclimate to the school, we see
them interacting with what followers of Decroly called “centers of interest,” or

LISA M. RABIN  |  A So cial History of US Educational D o cumentary

8

Fig. 2: Film still from Victor Vicas’s French film, The Children’s Republic (1947). (Courtesy Les
Documents Cinématographiques)

workshops organized according to children’s needs and inclinations.25 Renée,

for example, takes immediately to singing with the school’s choir, and Francois
becomes immersed in an abacus. In the film’s dénouement, Madeleine Carroll
herself shows up to field questions from students about “l’Amérique.”
In this story of two Holocaust orphans, TCR staked a claim for modern,
child-centered schooling as fundamental to Europe’s reconstruction. That the
United States should take leadership in this effort was made plain in the film
by the presence of a Hollywood star praising America to young children who
have the potential to become future allies. The short’s alignment both materi-
ally and ideologically with UNESCO was made explicit when it was screened
at UNESCO’s conference in Mexico City in November 1947, joining other films
concerning the reconstruction of European schools.26
In 1947, the avant-garde German Jewish filmmaker Helmar Lerski shot
Adamah (Earth) in premandate Palestine. Adamah, a short semidocumentary,
recreated a young Holocaust victim’s acclimation to the youth-run kibbutz Ben
Shemen, which progressive educator and psychiatrist Siegfried Lehmann estab-
lished in the 1930s.27 Produced by the American Zionist Women’s Organization
Hadassah, Adamah was adapted and translated for US audiences in 1948 by its

Film History  |  Volume 29.3

 9

Fig. 3: Film still from Tomorrow’s a Wonderful Day (Helmar Lerski, Palestine, 1947; Hazel Green-
wald, Hadassah, USA, 1948). (Courtesy the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive)

national film chairman Hazel Greenwald as the short Tomorrow’s a Wonderful

Day, which is forty-five minutes and forty-six seconds long (fig. 3). The film
went on to become an important fund-raising tool for Hadassah’s Youth Aliyah
(Youth to Palestine) program, which the organization saw as strengthening
bonds between the United States and the nascent Jewish nation.28 Like both
Hackenschmied’s and Vicas’s shorts, TWD projected child-centered schooling
and socialization as a shorthand for the democratic state. The narrative arc
follows a teenager, Benjamin, from his traumatic first days at Ben Shemen,
where he is tormented by memories of Auschwitz, to his gradual rehabilitation
through the manual labor and camaraderie of the kibbutz. Real-life students at
Ben Shemen, who hailed from many different parts of the diaspora, recreated
their experiences for the film. Lerski lived at Ben Shemen for two years, where he
worked painstakingly with the students to achieve certain effects, particularly
in lighting.29 But Hadassah made marked changes to Adamah.30 While Lerski’s
film ended with Benjamin transforming himself as he also transformed the
land of the kibbutz, Greenwald had the short version of TWD conclude with

LISA M. RABIN  |  A So cial History of US Educational D o cumentary

10

youth celebrations of Jewish holidays, making, in Rachel Deblinger’s words,

the film’s “final redemption come not from the earth but a more American
conception of Judaism.” Greenwald also converted the third-person narration
of Adamah into Benjamin’s first-person point-of-view, thus calling on American
viewers to personally identify with his story. 31 These changes helped to solidify
Hadassah’s appropriation of TWD as a vehicle of Israeli-US foreign relations. In
1948, Hadassah’s version of the short became the first Israeli film to premiere
at the International Film Festival at Locarno. The Swiss paper Neue Bündner
Zeltung, laying bare the short’s meaning as a tract of nation building, praised
TWD as a “document of peaceful reconstruction for the future.”32
As I have shown, the production histories of the three shorts share
important commonalities. The US sponsors of ABT, TCR, and TWD all indexed
child-centered schooling—in the classroom, orphanage, and kibbutz—as
sites in which children could intrinsically become model democratic citizens.
Children’s development, that is, was yoked in each of these films to a common
allegory of international development.33 The shorts’ exhibition in international-
ist venues ratified the allegory, as did the use of the shorts for fund-raising in the
United States. The American Jewish Committee promoted ABT’s distribution as
a “useful contrast” to UNESCO’s Hungry Minds and This Is Their Story for groups
wishing to raise “public support” for the UN.34 Madeleine Carroll screened TCR
in the United States to raise money for both UNICEF and the French school
featured in her film. 35 And Hadassah distributed TWD to Jewish as well as
Christian groups across the United States as a source of fund-raising for Youth
Aliyah; these screenings became so frequent that Hadassah’s National Film
Department was compelled to remind members to take better care of the short
because copies were “becoming worn out.”36
The entrance of ABT, TCR, and TWD into the US educational film market
after the war occurred at a watershed moment in the industry. Buoyed by the
pedagogical success of the military training film in World War II, American
schools and organizations took quickly to using nontheatrical films as a vehi-
cle of instructional delivery both in and outside the formal classroom.37 As the
nontheatrical industry strove to meet this increased demand, several factors
abetted its efforts, including the widespread availability of 16mm by the end of
the war, which greatly expanded sites of distribution;38 rising state and federal
support for instructional technology and audiovisual education;39 and the work
of film councils and other institutions in leveraging and promoting audience
engagement with educational film as a civic responsibility of the postwar era.40
Within this environment, the history of these shorts’ repurposing gains
considerable dimension. Although ABT, TCR, and TWD could be used as tracts
on postwar reconstruction for only a limited time and by a limited number of

Film History  |  Volume 29.3

 11

groups after the war, institutions of educational film perceived their potential
for broader and longer use as more generalized portraits of modern American
schooling and socialization.41 In this way, distributors emptied the shorts of
their allegorical content and reappropriated them for myriad instructional
settings indicated in midcentury educational film catalogues: teacher training,
child care, child development, rehabilitation, and the rather vague category of
education itself. As I will show in the next sections, this repurposing in all three
cases was strongly conditioned by midcentury discourses of American progres-
sive education. These included older understandings of child-centered pedagogy
and citizenship education that had evolved in the early part of the century, as
well as newer ones emerging in the 1940s and 1950s on mental hygiene and
intercultural or intergroup education. As I will also show, the dominant post-
war notions of American schooling and socialization that drove distribution of
the shorts did not always correlate exactly with the meaning that local groups
drew from them.
A BETTER TOMORROW FOR CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION
The first distributor of A Better Tomorrow in the United States was the Film
Library at MoMA, which obtained the short in 1945 and screened it as part of a
film series entitled American Wartime Documentary in the spring of 1946.42 In
her promotional notes, the library’s director, Iris Barry, praised ABT’s “concern
with the children themselves, with what learning means to them as future
citizens.”43 Barry’s reading of the film adopted ABT’s allegory for the national
context. The film was now useful for promoting child-centered education not
only abroad but also in the United States. Haidee Wasson has demonstrated the
considerable influence the Film Library had on national distribution and exhi-
bition, including providing the public with explanatory notes on films, staging
these films’ debuts in the New York City area, and then distributing them to
educational organizations across the United States.44 In this context, Barry’s
interpretation of ABT can be seen to structure the short’s broader distribution.
By 1950, when the film had become more widely available through NYU’s Educa-
tional Film Library, Brandon Films, and United-World New Castle Films, ABT’s
utility for showcasing the virtues of a child-centered pedagogy had solidified.45
NYU’s Educational Film Library, for example, advertised ABT as a documentary
in which “children are taught that they have the duty to do something about the
conditions of their life and their security.”46 The American Jewish Committee
promoted ABT in its own educational film catalogue in 1950 as exemplary for
“correlating school with modern living and democratic principles.”47
My research on these shorts in local newspapers reveals that national
directives played out differently in local settings. Although MoMA holds no

LISA M. RABIN  |  A So cial History of US Educational D o cumentary

12

record of the short’s rental to other organizations,48 local newspapers show that
organizations in New York and Los Angeles, two areas in which the library had
a strong influence on local exhibition, did in fact interpret ABT in ways similar
to Iris Barry. In April 1946, for example, MoMA’s program of child-centered arts
education, the High School Museum Program, screened the short twice at the
New York City School Board as a platform for its program in the schools.49 In
October 1947, the PTA of the affluent suburb Mount Vernon, New York, screened
ABT for city parents and teachers interested in its depiction of “activities in the
modern school,” a shorthand for the short’s child-centered classrooms.50 These
New York screenings of the short by the High School Museum program (which
both museum and school educators eventually criticized as “elitist”) and the
PTA of Mount Vernon (called “Money Earnin’ Mt. Vernon” by rapper Dwight
Meyers) suggest that their focus on ABT as a representation of child-centered
classroom activities was strongly inflected by social class.51 Liberal parents,
educators, and community members could easily identify with the kind of ped-
agogical practices the short endorsed. Even when the short was used by more
politically progressive groups, such as when California’s left-leaning Citizens
Committee for Better Education (CCBE) screened it to accompany a panel dis-
cussion on the “essentials of modern education” at a March 1946 educators’
conference in Los Angeles, ABT’s ethos of child-centered education was likely
most relevant to the class orientations of CCBE’s leadership.52 The large urban
system of Los Angeles, where educational segregation, as Becky M. Nicholaides
has written, reached historically high proportions after World War II, faced
more fundamental issues of pervasive inequality.53
A year later, the short’s utility as a tract on child-centered and citizen-
ship education had become attenuated. Other local groups in the United States
became more interested in what ABT could tell them about school infrastructure
than the utopian mission of child-centered classroom activities. In December
1947, parents and residents of Astoria, Queens—where new public housing would
soon bring low-income minority families into the community—watched ABT
as a part of a presentation by the assistant superintendent of Queens schools,
Florence Beaumont, on school overcrowding, as well as New York City’s severe
underfunding of public schools in comparison to wealthier local suburbs.54 In
March 1948, George Weinberg, the chair of guidance counseling at Morris High
School in the South Bronx—a community facing rising educational and hous-
ing inequality in the 1940s and 1950s—used ABT to supplement his lecture on
school planning at Morrisania Library’s Community Problems film forum.55 And
in 1953, Kenneth McIntyre, the head of the Bureau of Audio-Visual Education at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, asserted in the High School Journal
that although Hackenschmied’s short had been made to “show education is the

Film History  |  Volume 29.3

 13

key to a better tomorrow,” the short could also be used to “discuss wiser school
planning.” McIntyre, who was known for his commitment to racial equality in
the schools, may have been talking about the black community in Chapel Hill
when he also noted that “local groups have been using the film as a yardstick for
the performance of their own schools.”56 As Sarah Caroline Thuesen points out,
Chapel Hill’s segregated black schools in the years before Brown v. Board of Educa-
tion (1954) focused on improving what she calls “School Facilities Equalization,”
or “material markers of equality: building conditions, school bus availability,
and access to current books and equipment.”57 If it was indeed African American
groups McIntyre was speaking about, then ABT may have served a strikingly
concrete and yet deeply significant purpose in Chapel Hill: projecting for African
Americans what they aspired to for their children in school.
This reading of ABT’s use in Chapel Hill is persuasive when we consider
evidence in the historical record that the black community in nearby Petersburg,
Virginia, screened the film in April 1956 at the segregated Peabody High School.
The film and its presentation by “Mr. H. L. Stafford,” as reported by the Progress-In-
dex News, “were well-received by the student body.”58 It was from Petersburg that
white residents spearheaded Virginia’s “Massive Resistance” to Brown v. Board of
Education, which led all schools in the state to remain segregated until 1959—and
which had a devastating effect on black students’ continued struggle to access an
equal education.59 In this context, it is possible to imagine how a film originally
made to “teach the world how Americans behave” could offer Peabody High
School students an image of their lawful guarantee to an equal education.
The history of the exhibition and sponsored reception of ABT in local com-
munities in the United States reveals the effect of race, ethnicity, and class on the
appropriation of educational film by local institutions.60 In New York City, Mount
Vernon, and Los Angeles, where MoMA likely facilitated the short’s screening,
ABT was tied to local liberals’ interest in child-centered educational practices
as an expression of their own class and professional identities. 61 In the case of
Astoria, the South Bronx, Chapel Hill, and Petersburg, the short became linked
to material concerns, helping local groups to bring into focus structural imped-
iments to education like school underfunding, poor infrastructure, and racism.
THE CHILDREN’S REPUBLIC AS A MENTAL-HYGIENE FILM
Because an English version of The Children’s Republic is unavailable in the
archives, it is impossible to know the exact changes that A. F. (Actualités
Françaises) Films introduced to Carroll’s short when it acquired the film in
1947. A. F. Films, the American distributor of TCR, was an office lauded by
the Educational Film Library Association (EFLA) for editing and translating
French shorts so as to be “acceptable but pleasant also, to the North American

LISA M. RABIN  |  A So cial History of US Educational D o cumentary

14

palate.”62 Making French shorts “pleasant” may have helped to remove TCR’s
precise World War II setting. In July 1948, the Motion Picture Daily described
Renée and Francois as “youthful vagrants” and classified the short as an “infor-
mative subject dealing with the problem of homeless children.”63 Mary Anne
Guitar, writing in The Nation in April 1950, described TCR as a “visit . . . (to) a
Parisian school where war-time delinquents learn how to cooperate and fit
into group activities.”64 This characterization of Renée and François as “young
vagrants” and “delinquents” was ratified in a 1950 research study by the Insti-
tute of Adult Education at the prominent progressive educational institution
Teachers College, which tested and recommended TCR as a film suitable for
educational screenings about “delinquency.”65 The institute thus appropriated
the film through the lens of mental hygiene, a movement strongly associated
with US progressive education. Channeling psychoanalytic theories of person-
ality development into schools through the use of child guidance clinics, teacher
training, and curricula geared toward children’s mental health, mental hygiene
had gained hegemonic influence in American schools by the mid-twentieth
century.66 Theresa Richardson points out that one of the fundamental beliefs
supporting the mental-hygiene movement was the idea that schools could help
prevent delinquency and other forms of child “maladjustment” by rigorously
attending to their mental health in and outside of the classroom.67 Repurposed
as a mental-hygiene film, TCR was thus separated from its historical backdrop.
The tale of two Holocaust orphans found wandering the streets for survival and
who are brought to a nurturing school that heals them of fear and deprivation
became, in the American context, a success story on so-called delinquents made
over by the school system.
This reading of TCR through the discipline of mental hygiene became
increasingly common in the 1950s. In Film World ’s 1951–52 directory, for exam-
ple, TCR was one of twenty-seven nontheatrical and dramatic films listed in the
category of juvenile delinquency.68 The four-volume publication Films in Psychi-
atry, meanwhile, described TCR as the portrait of a school’s effect on “delinquent
French children” through an emphasis on “understanding, love and the opportu-
nity to live without fear . . . [in which Renée and Francois] learn to become useful
citizens.”69 And at least one US jurisdiction leveraged this interpretation of the
short for local means. In Lacrosse, Wisconsin, in 1957, the county jail screened
TCR and other nontheatrical films on juvenile delinquency (as well as alcoholism
and marriage and divorce) for eight adult participants in a three-month-long
twelve-step program Adults Anonymous. The films, which the Wisconsin State
Board of Health furnished for the program, also included The Children’s Village
(1948) on the reform school in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and Hackenschmied’s
Angry Boy (1950) on a troubled boy who is healed in the mental-health system. It

Film History  |  Volume 29.3

 15

is not clear what the leaders of the twelve-step program in Lacrosse wanted adult
participants to do with TCR or any of the films on delinquency, other than, as the
reporter at the Lacrosse Sunday Times noted, to help facilitators “pry . . . into the
men’s lives.” It is also not clear whether the participants viewed screenings (not
to mention the entire program) as anything other than coercion. As the reporter,
James O. Holmlund, wryly pointed out, everyone else at the jail slept through
sessions or “refused to come out of their cells.”70
TOMORROW’S A WONDERFUL DAY 
FOR INTERGROUP EDUCATION
The repurposing of Tomorrow’s a Wonderful Day through discourses of progres-
sive education is situated in Hadassah’s outreach to other American church
and civic groups for liberal causes. Rebecca Boim Wolf has noted that Hadassah
took a “two-pronged approach” in its organization after the foundation of Israel
in 1948, continuing to commit itself to projects in Israel like education and
health care and also to antipoverty, antibigotry, desegregation, and interna-
tional peace and human rights campaigns in the United States.71 Hadassah’s
American Affairs Department encouraged local chapters to engage directly
with other local organizations in civic projects, which in addition to expressing
Hadassah’s community spirit could also raise Hadassah’s standing in the com-
munity, and by extension Israel’s.72 One of Hadassah’s most successful American
Affairs programs was in Boston,73 where local Protestant elites, captivated by
the Youth Aliyah program, founded the Christian interdenominational orga-
nization Children to Palestine (CTP) in 1943. CTP raised millions of dollars for
Youth Aliyah and successfully recruited Americans of different faiths to work
in Europe’s reconstruction.74 In 1949, CTP obtained permission from Hadassah
to distribute TWD and began a campaign, according to an early circular, to
promote the short to “Junior and Senior High School students and adults in
schools, churches, and other community organizations.” CTP suggested that
these screenings include discussion on the experience of concentration camps
that influenced Benjamin’s early behavior at the kibbutz, as well as “[t]he impor-
tance of religious traditions to any people.”75
Although Children to Palestine’s distribution directive referenced a stipu-
lation by Hadassah that the film only be shown to Christian-sponsored groups,76
CTP’s circulars on the film held at the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive
reveal that the Christian organization promoted TWD not only for the child
rescue effort but also for purposes that hewed closely to midcentury under-
standings of mental hygiene and intercultural or intergroup education. Included
in these documents is an endorsement from the director of the well-known
progressive Shady Hill School in Boston, Katherine Taylor, who recommended

LISA M. RABIN  |  A So cial History of US Educational D o cumentary

16

TWD to “individuals or organizations interested in child care and guidance . . .

[and] . . . in group therapy,” activities commonly associated with mental hygiene.
Taylor also suggested TWD be used for teaching “international and interracial
understanding,” code words for the tolerance teaching that had come to domi-
nate discourses of postwar intercultural or intergroup education. Like the men-
tal-hygiene movement in schools, midcentury intergroup education—which
posited that students could develop “democratic personalities” by learning
tolerance for diverse social groups—was strongly inflected by psychodynamic
theories of personality.77
In Taylor’s recommendations, we thus see how a film made to support
efforts to repatriate child Holocaust victims could become relevant in American
education circles as a film about individual and group psychology. This repurpos-
ing was further set in motion when Children to Palestine’s New York represen-
tative, Olivia Terrell, invited Charles Siepmann, the chair of NYU’s Department
of Communications and the director of the school’s Educational Film Library,
to view the film in the spring of 1949. “It seemed to me a film of great beauty,”
Siepmann wrote to Terrell in May of that year, “and also of great educational
importance. It would seem to me a thousand pities if its use were confined to a
fund raising [sic] drive. This film has a story to tell which everyone should know.
Beyond the story is its psychological insight. If it were in my power I would secure
that it was seen in every school, college and university throughout this country.
This is a goal which the New York University Film Library would be only too happy
to help you reach as far as lies within its power.”78
In this letter, Siepmann struck a substantial claim for decoupling TWD
from the Youth Aliyah rescue effort. And in 1950, the Educational Film Library
catalogue indeed listed TWD under the categories of child care and rehabili-
tation problems (as well as international relations: Israel).79 In the catalogue,
TWD is described as portraying a Holocaust victim’s “gradual rehabilitation and
release from suspicion, fear, and loneliness as he adapts to his new environment
and finds friendliness, trust, and cooperation.”80 This repurposing found its way
to Educational Screen, where William H. Hockman, the review editor of new
films in the Church Department, recommended TWD for religious and secular
settings, where viewers could see how “[h]uman understanding and love work
a miracle before our eyes in the day-to-day life of this lad, and he becomes a
cooperative and enthusiastic citizen of the village.”81
These national directives on TWD show the film transformed into a tract
on mental health, intergroup, and religious education. A rare piece of evidence
of schoolchildren’s reception of the short, which is also held in the Stephen Spiel-
berg Jewish Film Archive, provides an ethnographic dimension to this transfor-
mation. Although it is not stated, the comments together suggest that they were

Film History  |  Volume 29.3

 17

taken from one classroom after a screening, and that they were motivated (if not
prompted by) a Children to Palestine facilitator. Several students interpreted
Benjamin’s healing through a Christian lens, calling attention to the “charity”
of his fellow kibbutz members. As one student wrote, “only through charity did
the Jewish boy learn of his mistakes and only through cooperation could he get
along.” Another student used more secular language that betrayed, perhaps, his or
her instruction in intergroup relations: “It’s the first movie I’ve seen that showed
how a person reformed like that. I think it set a very good example of how to
get along together.”82 Several students in this classroom, meanwhile, inelegantly
read in the film a link between the racialized ideology of the Holocaust and the
racialization of Jews and African Americans in the United States. One student
asserted that the film “taught me a lesson, not to make fun of other races; after
all, we could have been a Jew or a Negro.” Another said that the film “taught me
to be friendly with everyone and not shun them because of their race or religion.”
Here, TWD was successful at encouraging what Katherine Taylor called “interra-
cial” understanding. But the children’s comments underscore how educational
film could reify the distance between them and the life experiences of minority
groups.83 If Hadassah had unsettled Lerski’s original intentions by adapting TWD
for Jewish American audiences, CTP took this one step further, recasting Benja-
min’s historical narrative as a psychological experience.
CONCLUSION
A Better Tomorrow, The Children’s Republic, and Tomorrow’s a Wonderful Day
shared commonalities in content and form that would condition their similar
histories of production and distribution. Made in the wake of World War II by
US sponsors, all three shorts indexed child-centered schooling and socialization
as an allegory of international development, drawing spectators’ attention to
education as the key mission for nations developing in the postwar order. US
educational institutions that obtained these shorts for American distribution
appropriated their focus on children within prevailing discourses of US progres-
sive education, including older ones on child-centered and citizenship education
and more contemporary ones on mental hygiene and intergroup education.
Yet, as my research in digitized local newspapers and film archives sug-
gests, these distribution mandates played out differently for different social
groups who screened and discussed the films. In all three cases, local organi-
zations who identified with progressive education—from MoMA’s High School
Museum Program to the parents and teachers of Mount Vernon to the Los
Angeles CCBE to the twelve-step facilitators in the Lacrosse jail to the classroom
teacher of intergroup learning—screened the shorts in close conformity with
national distribution directives as a performance of their class or professional

LISA M. RABIN  |  A So cial History of US Educational D o cumentary

18

alignment with modern educational methods. These types of screenings, of

course, tended to make the shorts rather abstract for their audiences. The CCBE,
for example, asked Los Angeles educators to project what they saw in ABT as an
allegory of democracy, much like the OWI originally did for overseas audiences.
The discussions of schoolchildren on TWD as a parable of tolerance revealed
their coaching in intergroup platitudes. And the twelve-step facilitators’ effort
to get the men in the Lacrosse jail to revisit their childhoods through TCR’s tale
of delinquency failed altogether.
In contrast, the screening of ABT by local organizations not identified
with progressive educational approaches played out differently. In Astoria, the
South Bronx, Chapel Hill, and Petersburg, Hackenschmied’s short helped to
contextualize local experiences with school underfunding, poor infrastructure,
and segregation. In these screenings, the representation of schooling on film
was decidedly not abstract. When audiences in these instances were invited
to focus not on pedagogical methods but the basics—buildings, resources, and
qualified teachers—watching and discussing ABT was understood to be a plat-
form for concrete social action.84
The sponsored reception history of the three shorts thus demonstrates
two diverse ways in which an educational documentary could be locally useful.
In the first, local organizers hewed closely to national directives, using docu-
mentary screenings as a validation of their class or professional attachments. In
the other, local groups can be said to have interpreted an educational documen-
tary from the ground up, repurposing ABT yet again, but this time according to
their own social needs.
The historiography of US educational film has been enriched in recent
years by the scholarly turn to the role of institutions on the remarkable flow of the
instructional film both inside and outside of the twentieth-century classroom.
For the most part, these studies have focused on educational film’s industrial
history. But as historian John Breuilly points out, understanding the thinking
of human actors in regard to their institutions is crucial to understanding how
those institutions perform.85 In mapping not only the effect of national institu-
tions on the repurposing of educational documentary in the postwar context
but also, when possible, the ways in which local organizations engaged with,
negotiated, or outright ignored distribution mandates, I have hoped to histori-
cize educational film as the site of an interaction between larger institutions
and local social actors. As we seek to inquire further into the wide net that the
educational film industry cast over the United States in the twentieth century,
looking closely at how local organizations used educational film can provide an
important—and occasionally surprising—dimension to our understandings of
the useful nature of educational film.

Film History  |  Volume 29.3

 19

Notes

I am particularly grateful to Lewis Grossman, Gregory Waller, Craig Kridel, Joshua Sheppard, Daniel
Marcus, David Weinstein, Jonathan Kahana, Zoë Druick, and my anonymous readers for their historical
insight as I developed this essay. Lewis as ever provided a keen editor’s eye. Thank you also to librarians and
archivists at the American Friends Service Committee archives, the American Jewish Historical Society, Les
Documents Cinématographiques, George Mason University, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the
Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Archives, the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film
Archive, and the Cinematic Arts Collection at the University of Southern California—and especially Laura
Jenemann—for their help in obtaining films and other documentation. Finally, this essay is indebted to
Julia, Petra, and the late Tino Hammid for their generosity in the sharing of memories and photographic
documents from Alexander Hackenschmied’s brilliant career.
1. Zoë Druick, “Reaching the Multimillions: Liberal Internationalism and the Establishment of Docu-
mentary Film,” in Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2008), 66–92; and Druick, “UNESCO, Film, and Education,” in Useful Cinema, ed.
Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 81–102. See also
Suzanne Langlois, “And Action! UN and UNESCO Coordinating Information Films, 1945–1951,” in
A History of UNESCO: Global Actions and Impacts, ed. Poul Duedahl (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2016), 73–96.
2. Mary Losey, “Films at San Francisco,” New Movies: The National Board of Review 20, no. 6
(September 1945): 8, Internet Archive, accessed June 29, 2016, http://www.archive.org/stream
/newmoviesnationa1920nati#page/n233/mode/2up/search/Mary+Losey; “UNESCO Month 1947:
International Exhibitions and Films,” June 2, 1947, UNESCO document 143833, UNESCO Doc Database,
accessed June 29, 2016, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/Ulis/cgi-bin/ulis.pl?catno=143833&gp=0&ll=s;
and Rachel Deblinger, “Memories/Motifs: Fundraising Films,” Scalar, accessed June 29, 2016, http://
scalar.usc.edu/hc/memoriesmotifs/media-film.
3. New York University Educational Film Library, “A Catalogue of Selected 16mm Motion Pictures,”
1950, 37–38, 50, and 145, Prelinger Library, accessed June 29, 2016, https://archive.org/stream/film
librarycatalo00anderich#page/20/mode/2up (hereafter EFL); Robertson Sillars et. al., “Audio-Visual
Education in International and Human Relations: Report of a Study Conducted by Staff Members
of the Audio-Visual Laboratory of the Institute of Adult Education, Teachers College, Columbia
University” (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1950), 20–21,
HathiTrust, accessed June 29, 2016, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015011445353;vie
w=1up;seq=5; and Iris Barry, “The Documentary Film: Prospect and Retrospect,” in “The Documen-
tary Film, 1922–1945,” special issue, Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 13, no. 2 (1945): 22–23.
4. C. A. Siepmann, “Correspondence from NYU School of Education,” Children to Palestine, Inc.,
Terrell Olivia, Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive (hereafter SSJFA), file “Tomorrow Is A Won-
derful Day,” box 5, document cluster #1005089, accessed October 1, 2015, http://hudd.huji.ac.il
/ArtlidHomepage.aspx.
5. Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible, eds., Learning with the Lights Off: Educational
Film in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies:
The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2006); Zoë Druick, “The Myth of Media Literacy,” International Journal of Communication 10 (2016):
1129–31.
6. Charles Acland, “Curtains, Carts and the Mobile Screen,” Screen 50, no. 1 (2009): 148–66; Acland,
“Classrooms, Clubs, and Community,” in Grieveson and Wasson, Inventing Film Studies, 145–81;
and Gregory A. Waller, “Projecting the Promise of 16mm, 1935–45,” in Acland and Wasson, Useful
Cinema, 125–48.

LISA M. RABIN  |  A So cial History of US Educational D o cumentary

20

7. But see Eric Smoodin, “Film Education and Quality Entertainment for Children and Adolescents,”
in Regarding Frank Capra: Audience, Celebrity, and American Film Studies, 1930–1960 (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2004), 76–118; Smoodin, “ ‘What a Power for Education!’ The Cinema and
Sites of Learning in the 1930s,” in Acland and Wasson, Useful Cinema, 17–33; Gregory A. Waller,
“Cornering the Wheat Farmer,” in Orgeron, Orgeron, and Streible, Learning with the Lights Off,
249–70; and Lisa Rabin, “The Social Uses of Classroom Cinema: A History of the Human Relations
Film Series at Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem, New York City, 1936–1955,” Velvet
Light Trap 72 (2013): 58–71.
8. Gregory Waller helped me to articulate the distinction between reception and sponsored reception.
9. In developing my perspective on this process, I was helped by Lucie Česálková’s “Film as Diplomat:
The Politics of Postwar Screenings at Czechoslovak Foreign Embassies,” Film History 27, no. 1 (2015):
85–110.
10. See Rabin, “The Social Uses of Classroom Cinema.”
11. Ian Scott, In Capra’s Shadow: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Robert Riskin (Lexington: University
of Kentucky Press, 2006), 155–90.
12. Copies of the short are held at HSP, the National Archives and Records Association, the Library of
Congress, and the Fay Wray Collection at the University of Southern California’s Cinematic Arts
Collection.
13. The EFL listed TCR under France and TWD under Israel as examples of films on “international rela-
tions.” EFL, “A Catalogue of Selected 16mm Motion Pictures,” 23 and 24.
14. EFL, “A Catalogue of Selected 16mm Motion Pictures,” 17–18, 20, 27.
15. Sillars et. al., “Audio-Visual Education,” 20–21.
16. H. R. Hansen, “Teacher Education Films,” Phi Delta Kappa 31, no. 8 (1950): 369.
17. Betsy McLane, A New History of Documentary Film (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 173.
18. Druick, “UNESCO, Film, and Education.”
19. Helpful to me here was Paola Bonifazio’s analysis of the documentary Antioch College (Harmon
Foundation, 1940–1945) advertised by the Cineteca Scolastica Italiana in its 1950s catalogues. Paola
Bonifazio, Schooling in Modernity: The Politics of Sponsored Film in Post-War Italy (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2014), 159.
20. The movement of American progressive education, which in broad terms sought to modernize
American schooling, included a diverse array of theories and practices, some of which are detailed
below in this essay. For a study on the nuances of child-centered pedagogy in the larger context of
progressive education, see Andrew Hartman, “John Dewey and the Invention of Childhood: Pro-
gressive Education in the Beginning,” in Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American
School (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 7–28.
21. The school is the community high school Benjamin Franklin in East Harlem, whose principal was
the well-known progressive educator Leonard Covello. The students are recreating the school’s
participation in Vito Marcantonio’s housing campaign of the later 1930s. On Franklin’s ethos, see
Michael C. Johanek and John Puckett, Covello and the Making of Benjamin Franklin High School:
Education as If Citizenship Mattered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).
22. Losey, “Films at San Francisco.”
23. Emilie Tavel, “Madeleine Carroll Films ‘Little Republic’ While Furthering Child Rehabilitation,”
Christian Science Monitor, February 4, 1948, 12, ProQuest Historical Newspapers (516157930); “Vic-
tor Vicas,” filmportal.de, accessed March 11, 2016, http://www.filmportal.de/person/victor-vicas

Film History  |  Volume 29.3

 21

_54401c55f5c14ca79c201395802ab7fc. This team also produced The Eternal Fight (1948) for the
World Health Organization. Kirsten Ostherr, Medical Visions: Producing the Patient through Film,
Television, and Imaging Technologies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 242n27.
24. Céline Marrot-Fellag Ariouet, “Les enfants cachés pendant la seconde guerre mondiale aux sources
d’une histoire clandestine,” La Maison de Sèvres, accessed June 30, 2016, http://www.lamaisondesevres.
org/cel/cel6.html; Concise Encyclopedia of Special Education: A Reference Encyclopedia for the Educa-
tion of the Handicapped and Other Exceptional Children and Adults, ed. Cecil R. Reynolds and Elaine
Fletcher-Janzen (New York: Wiley, 2004), s.v., “Decroly, Ovide (1871–1932).”
25. Ariouet, “Les enfants cachés”; and Concise Encyclopedia of Special Education, “Decroly, Ovide.”
26. “UNESCO Month 1947.”
27. Jan-Christopher Horak, “Helmar Lerski in Israel,” in Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion, ed. Miri
Talmon and Yaron Peleg (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 23–28. On Lehmann and Youth
Aliyah, see Brian Amkraut, “1932—The Decisive Year,” in Between Home and Homeland: Youth Aliyah
from Nazi Germany (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 17–31.
28. “The Spielberg Jewish Film Archive—Tomorrow’s a Wonderful Day,” YouTube video, 45:46,
1948, posted by Hebrew University of Jerusalem, March 28, 2010, https://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=9iXkhML3MHk; Rachel B. Deblinger, “ ‘In a World Still Trembling’: American Jewish Philan-
thropy and the Shaping of Holocaust Survivor Narratives in Postwar America (1945–1953)” (PhD diss.,
UCLA, 2014), 121–29, accessed July 6, 2016, http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2v08154g; and Erica
B. Simmons, Hadassah and the Zionist Project (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).
29. “Invite Public to Israel State Movie,” Chronicle-Express (Penn Yan, New York), February 24, 1949, 1,
Newspapers.com, accessed June 24, 2015, http://www.newspapers.com/image/16635246.
30. Horak, “Helmar Lerski”; and Deblinger, “ ‘In a World Still Trembling.’ ” There were actually three films:
Lerski’s original of eight reels, Hadassah’s long version of the original, and Hadassah’s five-reel short.
Hillel Tryster, Adamah: A Vanished Film (Jerusalem: Stephen Spielberg Film Library, 1998); “News in
Brief: Adamah,” SSJFA, Winter 2010/11, accessed July 6, 2016, http://www.spielbergfilmarchive.org.il
/news-winter10-11/newsWinter10.asp.
31. Deblinger, “ ‘In a World Still Trembling,’ ” 126–27.
32. “Adamah The Israelian Film: Produced By The Children’s Village Ben-Shemen, Press Comments
after the world première at the Film Festival at Locarno (Switzerland),” document 1004481, file
“Adamah: Reaction to the Film,” box 4, SSJFA, accessed October 1, 2015, http://hudd.huji.ac.il
/ArtlidHomepage.aspx.
33. I am indebted here to Jonathan Kahana’s reading of allegory’s relevance to documentary filmmak-
ing and interpretation. Jonathan Kahana, “Introduction: The Intelligence Work of Documentary,”
in Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary (New York: Columbia University Press,
2008), 6–8.
34. The American Jewish Committee, Film Division, “Selected List of Human Relations Films” (New York:
American Jewish Committee, 1950), 4–5, 8, 15, 16, Berman Jewish Policy Archive, accessed June 6, 2016,
http://www.bjpa.org/Publications/details.cfm?PublicationID=22297 (hereafter AJC).
35. “Europe’s Young DP’s Subject of Picture,” New York Times (1923–Current File), February 28, 1948, 9,
ProQuest Historical Newspapers (108324001). The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)
sponsored Carroll’s fund-raising screenings of TCR for the school itself. AFSC, “Minutes of the Staff
Council,” 16 May 1949, 2, file France Subcommittee 49, archives of the American Friends Service
Committee; AFSC, “Minutes, Finance Committee,” 30 March 1950, file France Committee 50, archives
of the American Friends Service Committee.

LISA M. RABIN  |  A So cial History of US Educational D o cumentary

22

36. Deblinger, “ ‘In a World Still Trembling,” 126–27; “Correction, Please: Film Library Has a Few Com-
plaints,” Hadassah Headlines, March 1949, 5, box 1, record group 15, Hadassah Archives, American
Jewish Historical Society. Hadassah distributed TWD through twenty regional chapters, the Bureau
of Communications Research, and Jewish Film Distributors. Lillian Wachtel, “We Use Films in Our
Program,” Film News 11, no. 6 (1949): 9, box 1, record group 15, Hadassah Archives, American Jewish
Historical Society; “Of Local Origin,” New York Times (1923–Current File), February 26, 1949, 11,
ProQuest Historical Newspapers (105751072).
37. Charles Acland, “Celluloid Classrooms and Everyday Projectionists,” in Orgeron, Orgeron, and
Streible, Learning with the Lights Off, 379.
38. Waller, “Projecting the Promise of 16mm.”
39. Orgeron, Orgeron, and Streible, “A History of Learning with the Lights Off,” in Learning with the
Lights Off, 15–66; and Paul Saettler, “The Audiovisual Movement: Development,” in A History of
Instructional Technology (New York: McGraw Hill, 1968), 181–94.
40. Acland, “Curtains” and “Classrooms.”
41. Česálková’s study of the nontheatrical distribution of Czechoslovak state films was helpful to me
here. Česálková, “Film as Diplomat,” 108.
42. As Haidee Wasson shows, the institution gained early access to OWI films not available outside of
the military sphere. Wasson, Museum Movies, 162.
43. Barry, “The Documentary Film,” 22–23.
44. Wasson, Museum Movies, 150–56.
45. AJC, “Selected List of Human Relations Films,” 8.
46. EFL, “A Catalogue of Selected 16mm Motion Pictures,” 38.
47. AJC, “Selected List of Human Relations Films,” 8. On the AJC’s commitment to intergroup education,
see Stuart Svonkin, Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1997).
48. The Projections shorts do not appear in MoMA’s record of traveling film exhibitions. Museum of
Modern Art, Department of Circulating Exhibitions Records, accessed June 6, 2016, http://www
.moma.org/learn/resources/archives/EAD/CEf. MoMA archivist Michelle Hardy informed me that
the museum did not keep records of film rentals to other organizations. Michelle Harvey, email
message to author, November 3, 2015.
49. New York Sun, March 1946, 20, Fultonhistory.com, accessed July 7, 2015, www.fultonhistory.com.
The High School Museum Program was led by progressive educator Victor D’Amico in the 1940s
and 1950s. Aidan O’Connor, “Developing Creativeness in Children: Victor D’Amico at MoMA,” in
Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000, ed. Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O’Connor (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 180–82.
50. A second, unnamed film of similar theme was also shown at this screening. “Woman’s News,”
Daily Argus (Mount Vernon, NY), October 1, 1947, Fultonhistory.com, accessed May 18, 2015,
www.fultonhistory.com. On the history of Mount Vernon, see Larry H. Spruill, Mount Vernon
(Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2009).
51. “The Educational Mission of the Museum of Modern Art,” in The Art Museum as Educator: A Collec-
tion of Studies as Guides to Practice and Policy, ed. Barbara Y. Newsom and Adele Z. Silver (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1978), 61; Spruill, Mount Vernon, 126.
52. “Education Unit Sponsors Film Friday,” California Daily Eagle, March 7, 1946, 8, Fultonhistory.com,
accessed July 15, 2016, http://fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html.

Film History  |  Volume 29.3

 23

53. Becky M. Nicholaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles,
1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 287–88.
54. “Jam in P.S. 122 Feared from New Housing: District Head Warns Astoria Parents of Problem,” Long
Island Star Journal, December 19, 1947, Fultonhistory.com, accessed September 3, 2015, http://
fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html.
55. Encyclopedia of African-American History 1896–Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-
First Century, vol. 1, ed. Paul Finkelman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), s.v., “New York City.”
This screening was announced in “School Notes,” New York Post and the Home News, March 7, 1948,
214, FultonHistory.com, accessed May 22, 2015, http://fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html. The New York
Age announced the entire film series in “Community Problems Forums at Library,” New York Age,
March 8, 1948, 6, FultonHistory.com, accessed July 8, 2016, http://fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html.
56. Kenneth M. McIntyre, “Films Dealing with Problems of Instruction in Secondary Schools,” High
School Journal 36, no. 8 (1953): 251; and “Kenneth Murchison McIntyre, Obituary,” Rocky Mount
Telegram, April 24, 2009, Legacy.com, accessed July 8, 2016, http://www.legacy.com/obituaries
/rockymounttelegram/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=126542770.
57. Sarah Caroline Thuesen, Greater Than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship
in North Carolina, 1919–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 159–61.
58. “Petersburg High School News,” Progress-Index (Petersburg/Colonial Heights, VA), April 29, 1956,
33, Newspapers.com, accessed June 23, 2015, http://www.newspapers.com/image/40958463/
59. Carl Tobias, “Public School Desegregation in Virginia during the Post-Brown Decade,” William
& Mary Law Review 37, no. 4 (1996): 1266, accessed November 11, 2015, http://scholarship.law
.wm.edu/wmlr/vol37/iss4/3.
60. I have been helped here by Eric Smoodin’s articulation of the role of social factors on film reception.
Smoodin, introduction to Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method,
ed. Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 4.
61. Jonna Perrillo’s history of New York City unionized teachers has been helpful to me here. Jonna
Perrillo, Uncivil Rights: Teachers, Unions, and Race in the Battle for School Equity (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2012), esp. chap. 2, “Muscular Democracy: Teachers in the War on Prejudice,
1940–1950,” 47–81.
62. Rahama Lee, “Artistic Films: The Story of A.F.,” Film News 10, no. 7 (1950): 12–13.
63. “Short Subject: TCR,” Motion Picture Daily, July 16, 1948, 6, Internet Archive, accessed July 9, 2016,
https://archive.org/stream/motionpicturedai64unse#page/n87/mode/2up/search/%22Children’s
+Republic%22+.
64. Mary Anne Guitar, “Facts on Film,” Nation, April 29, 1950, 410.
65. Sillars et. al., “Audio-Visual Education,” 20–21.
66. Sol Cohen, “The Mental Hygiene Movement, the Development of Personality and the School: The
Medicalization of American Education,” History of Education Quarterly 23 (1983): 136–73; and
Theresa Richardson, The Century of the Child: The Mental Hygiene Movement and Social Policy in the
United States and Canada (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989).
67. Richardson, The Century of the Child, 86–87.
68. Harry C. Simonson et al., Film World and Industry Directory, 1951–1952 (Hollywood: Telefilm, 1952),
421–22.
69. Marie L. Coleman, Adolf Nichtenhauser, and David S. Ruhe, “Part III: Reviews of Films in Psychiatry,”
in Films in Psychiatry (New York: Health Education Council, 1953), 259.

LISA M. RABIN  |  A So cial History of US Educational D o cumentary

24

70. James O. Holmlund, “Adults Anonymous Seeks to Help Jail Inmates,” Lacrosse (WI) Sunday Tri-
bune, June 16, 1957, 2, Newspapers.com, accessed December 9, 2015, https://www.newspapers.com
/image/83937131/.
71. Rebecca Boim Wolf, “ ‘It’s Good Americanism to Join Hadassah,’ ” in A Jewish Feminine Mystique?
Jewish Women in Postwar America, ed. Hasia R. Diner, Shira Kohn, and Rachel Kranson (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 66–71.
72. Wolf, “ ‘It’s Good Americanism,’ ” 68.
73. Wolf, “ ‘It’s Good Americanism,’ ” 71.
74. Susan Elizabeth Subak, Rescue and Flight: American Relief Workers Who Defied the Nazis (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 178.
75. Children to Palestine, Inc., “Tomorrow’s A Wonderful Day,” n.d., document 1005045, file “Tomorrow
Is A Wonderful Day,” box 5, SSJFA, accessed July 10, 2015, http://hudd.huji.ac.il/ArtlidHomepage
.aspx.
76. Children to Palestine, Inc., “Conditions Governing the Borrowing of TWD (50 Minute—16mm Film),”
n.d., document 1005022, file “Adamah Turned Into Tomorrow Is A Wonderful Day,” box 5, SSJFA,
accessed July 9, 2015, http://hudd.huji.ac.il/ArtlidHomepage.aspx.
77. Diana Selig, “Pluralism in the Shadow of War,” and epilogue, in Americans All: The Cultural Gifts
Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 235–78.
78. C. A. Siepmann to Olivia Terrell, 10 May 1949, “Correspondence from NYU School of Education.”
79. EFL, “A Catalogue of Selected 16mm Motion Pictures,” 34.
80. EFL, “A Catalogue of Selected 16mm Motion Pictures,” 145.
81. William S. Hockman, “Church Department: New Films Announced: ‘Tomorrow’s A Wonderful Day,’ ”
Educational Screen 28, no. 7 (1949): 315, Internet Archive, accessed July 13, 2016, https://archive.
org/stream/educationalscree27chicrich#page/314/mode/2up/search/september+1949.
82. Children to Palestine, Inc., “Children’s Comments on Film ‘Tomorrow’s A Wonderful Day,’ ” document
1005017, file “Tomorrow Is A Wonderful Day,” box 5, SSJFA, accessed October 1, 2015, http://hudd
.huji.ac.il/ArtlidHomepage.aspx.
83. Helpful to me here is Anna McCarthy’s “Screen Culture and Group Discussion in Postwar Race
Relations,” in Orgeron, Orgeron, and Streible, Learning with the Lights Off, 397–423.
84. In making this point I am grateful to Ansley Erickson.
85. John Breuilly, “What Is Social History?,” ed. Raphael Samuel, History Today 35, no.3 (December 1985): 40.

Lisa M. Rabin is associate professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern

and Classical Languages at George Mason University, where she teaches film
and media studies. Her work on film history includes articles published in The
Velvet Light Trap and Illuminace: The Journal of Film Theory, History and Aesthet-
ics, and a coauthored chapter with Craig Kridel on the New York City Teach-
ers Union’s film practices, forthcoming in Educating Harlem: Schools and the
Referendum on the American Dream, ed. Ansley Erickson and Ernest Morrell
(New York: Columbia University Press).

Film History  |  Volume 29.3