Oberholzer’s Rorschach II. What was learned at Cherry Lawn School

"The school was a surrealist combination of elements."
--Morris H. Philipson

The country was in its adolescence the way I was in mine. Things were just ripening to maturity as the country readied itself for accomplishments yet to be achieved. Col. Lindberg’s prize-winning Spirit of St. Louis hung suspended from the entrance of the old Smithsonian “castle,” but the anticipation of numerous further accomplishments to come justified the plan for a whole museum of its own for events in outer space.

A feeling of family characterized the attitudes of the citizens to one-another. For example, at about that time, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Mellon, behaved like a rich relative giving an enormous dowry when he built a museum for his personal collection of works of art as a gift for the nation’s front lawn. The modest tone of a family portrait album had been set by the founding fathers who had nurtured and publicly celebrated the national life down through the four or five generations.


The FBI had its role in creating this state of mind growing up in me. I became sensitive to the many institutions and organizations that made up the network of family-like connection that supported this interpretation. So I was ripe for the rhetoric of the representative of the Federal Bureau of Investigation when, taking the tour through J. Edgar Hoover’s current headquarters, a fine, upstanding officer on Hoover's staff gave my family the pitch that it would be a fine, upstanding, American thing to do to be fingerprinted then and there for the purpose of identification if, God forbid, some untoward event should make identification necessary from teeth or scars or deformities not yet available in order that people with such a need — for insurance policies, for example — would be able to identify their loved ones, solving an otherwise complicated mystery and averting the long suffering of family members.

My parents and my brother declined to press thumb to inkpad, but I went through the ritual, and as I saw the white lines on my hand turn to black, snakelike curves on the cardboard paper, I identified myself as a soon-to-be fully empowered voter in the national elections of this great republic. And my fingerprints on file at the Federal Bureau of Investigation would be, in part, my contribution toward keeping tabs on the national family for our mutual protection. It is to such lengths that the paternalistic benevolence of our government goes to contribute to the general well-being as well as our consideration for each other.

I am in awe to think I could have been so naïve. How was it that I somehow mistook this idea as reality — in spite of the environment in which I had been steeped at Cherry Lawn School?