Columbia University philosopher John Dewey is remembered as a pragmatist philosopher and influential educator. But the curator of the University of South Carolina’s Museum of Education can show Dewey’s human side.

After all, many Americans may know that Dewey contributed to pragmatism, but how many can boast of having seen him make a snowman?

USC professor of education Craig Kridel discussed several film clips featuring Dewey at rest on Saturday morning at the Orphan Film Symposium, a showing of industrial, educational, and scientific films held in Columbia, S.C. Dewey spent most of his career at Columbia University, after teaching in Michigan and Chicago.

“To discuss American education in the 20th century is ultimately and inevitably to examine the work of John Dewey,” Mr. Kridel, curator of the university’s Museum of Education, said. “Join me as we laugh with John Dewey, as he displays (oh so painfully) his discomfort as well as his good-naturedness at being filmed. Be assured, though it may not be apparent in these clips, that you are seeing one of the most important American intellectuals of the 20th century.”

Before showing home movie footage of Dewey, who was born in 1859, Mr. Kridel began with a Movietone newsreel of the famed educator filmed in November 1929.The footage is the only known film of Dewey with recorded sound. The professor, who was naturally shy, sits in a chair, and “takes on the role of public spokesman,” Mr. Kridel said. Dewey was at the height of his popularity at the time, and it was filmed a month after Dewey’s 70th birthday, at which 2,500 people were in attendance. It would have swelled to four times that size had it not been limited.

The newsreel shows Dewey – more accustomed to a classroom chalkboard than a movie clapboard – stating that if a young person has the opportunity to go to college and has the character and intelligence to take advantage of the opportunity, it’s a good thing.

He continues by saying that “going to college is not the same thing as getting an education, though the two are often confused. A boy or a girl can go to college and get a degree and not much else. On the other hand, a boy or a girl in a factory, shop, or store can get an education without a degree, if they have the ambition.

Mr. Kridel showed 1939 footage of Dewey strolling along the waterfront in Miami Beach, Fla. His companion in the film is Roberta Grant, whom he married seven years later.”

Ten years after this clip, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover – who saw a letter of greeting from President Truman to Dewey calling him one of the greatest Americans – wrote, “It seems wise to cease investigating him as a subversive.”

“They continued investigating him, though,” Mr. Kridel said, “but I guess just not as a subversive.” Mr. Kridel said the FBI in its files had described Dewey as having “carelessly combed gray hair,” “disheveled attire,” and a “monotonous drawl.”

In the catalog for an exhibition that Mr. Kridel curated at the Museum of Education, Oliver Wendell Holmes is quoted as describing Dewey’s prose as what “God would have spoken had He been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was.” The catalog also notes that Holmes gave Dewey praise after reading “Experience and Nature,” saying it made him feel like he had seen the universe “from the inside.”

In the audience at the screening was New York based documentary filmmaker George Stoney, whose “Booked for Safekeeping,” a training film to help police recognize and handle the mentally ill, was shown the previous night. Mr. Stoney recalled the time he hitchhiked to New York in 1936, where he enjoyed an afternoon talking with Dewey at his home. Mr. Stoney met him through a letter of introduction. That letter was written by a customer on Mr. Stoney’s paper route in Chapel Hill, N.C., named Frank Manny, who had retired as principal of the Ethical Culture School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

The co-founder and chief organizer of the Orphan Film Symposium is Dan Streible, who will teach at New York University. The term “orphan film,” as explained on the conference Web site, refers to “all manner of films outside of the commercial mainstream,” including amateur films and home movies, outtakes, unreleased films, industrial, educational and scientific films, and other found footage and ephemeral works.

gshapiro@nysun.com