Presidential Mock Election at SM: Interview with Mr. Lyons

By James Nichols-Worley ’23

It’s that most wonderful time of the year again– no, not Hanukkah– November. On Tuesday night after Halloween, the world stopped. Then, five days later, we found out who won America’s favorite quadrennial contest. 

Mr. Lyons and his Advanced Government class ran their mock election at St. Mark’s but luckily one with far less weight. We spoke with Mr. Lyons about his work and thoughts on this year’s mock election results.

What was the process of choosing the different questions on the ballot?

The ballot that went out is the same ballot largely that went out last winter. Obviously at that point it was a primary with the 20 Democratic nominees. They are largely the same repeated questions as when they were created in 2016. 

It’s not just what the St. Mark’s community is interested in, but what has national correlations. We carried them forward because we want to see change over time, like with marijuana legalization from 2016 to 2020. 

Every year though, we add in some questions. Like about mail-in voting, because that wasn’t an issue in 2016. The ones at the end are the more hot button questions.

Do you think anything’s changed about St. Mark’s since our mock primary in the spring?I haven’t sat down with the data, there’s so many ways you can slice it. Do the faculty feel differently about the carbon tax? Do third form girls feel differently about the wealth tax? The short answer is, I haven’t had time. 

What we had with the newsletter was, the [advanced gov] class sat down and asked questions about the data. How do we fit with gun control, how do we sit with America?

Were there any surprising results, or any surprising correlations?

A lot of them were what you expect, St. Mark’s is pretty liberal. The overwhelming vote for Biden wasn’t surprising. 

I was personally surprised there wasn’t broader acceptance for outlawing handguns. Maybe it was the word “outlaw” that scared people. Most people killed by guns are with handguns, even if AK-47s look scary, which is why we used that wording.

Students don’t feel strongly about lowering the drinking age. When I was growing up, they raised the drinking age. It's not just because they want to have a beer. If I can join the army, get married, vote, how come I can make those decisions but not have a beer?

A similar percentage of the school voted for independent candidates as did in the real election. Is this coincidence or something prescient about the school’s political makeup?

I think that unlike 2016, there were very few people who didn’t feel strongly about Trump. You either strongly embraced Trump or strongly rejected him, which made it very hard for 3rd party candidates. They might have been willing to vote for the Green Party in 2016, but they decided to vote against Trump for the person who has a chance.

Over half the school identifies as somewhat or very liberal, and less than ¼ identify as somewhat or very conservative. Do we do enough to encourage more diverse political discussion, or is it not a problem?

If you’re asking my personal opinion, one of the reasons we value diversity in education is because we want to learn from people who think differently than us. I want to have political speakers, I like [discussions about] government. 

We should have opportunities to hear people who disagree with us. If the school has a groupthink, you know where everyone thinks the same so nobody can speak out against the majority, we should be able to hear more from the minority ideology, both inside and outside the school. 

We don’t have a Republicans club, even though we have a Democrats club. I think we need to hear these opinions even if a lot of people disagree with them. I would want to.

Were there any instances of people voting who didn’t go to St. Mark’s, or people who voted more than once?

No, not that we can tell. People could have cheated, but did they? Probably not. Just because there’s a possibility something could have happened, it doesn’t mean it did. We definitely haven’t seen any evidence of it.

Mr. Jewell, the head of the St. Mark’s History and Social Sciences Department, commented on the mock election, “Well done. Isn’t it a great thing to track election results?”

While not all of the data from the mock election has been released (and probably will not be released publicly for privacy reasons, although the survey was anonymous), the St. Marker received exclusive data about the last thing you’d expect: the drinking age.

Out of all the faculty who had an opinion on lowering the drinking age, about ¾ (74%) were against lowering it.

The student body, however, was more broadly split. Just over half all students who expressed an opinion opposed lowering the drinking age. Yet, a much different story appears when analyzing the data form by form. The youngest grade, the 3rd form, opposed lowering the drinking age in similar percentages as the faculty. Yet the oldest grade, the 6th form (many of whom are 18 or are turning 18), supported in the majority (55%) lowering the drinking age to 18. In the mock election’s newsletter, it was noted that over 80% of Americans oppose lowering the drinking age.

If, by any chance (or by magic), the drinking age is lowered, would the school return to letting students drink on campus? Fat chance of that, but it does sound like a great plan for the seniors.  

So now, what does the future hold for St. Mark’s? Perhaps with Joe Biden’s victory in the actual U.S. election, political tensions can now cool down, at least at St. Mark’s, and we’ll be able to more openly debate our different beliefs. After the election, we likely won’t see as many spreadsheets and pie charts as we did during the election, but we certainly should continue to explore and discuss political thoughts and critical issues that shape America.

Mr. Dan Jones '38: The Oldest Living St. Mark’s Alumni

By grace lee ’23

We can never predict the changes to our school- and I’m sure that our current longest living alumni would feel the same. I got the opportunity to learn about Dan Jones ‘38, a St. Mark’s alumni who recently turned 101 . Mr. Jones wasn’t the oldest alumni ever: the prize actually goes to Hamilton Fish (Class of 1906), who lived to 102. Every day, we walk the same halls and rooms as Mr. Jones did. Our school carries his experiences, as well as the new memories we are creating today. 

Let’s first take a dive into what Mr. Jones accomplished during his time at St. Mark’s. Mr. Jones was on the football team during his VIth form year. In his V and VI form years, he was part of choir and the Glee club, a group for singing non-religious songs. Since St. Mark’s was an all-boys school at that time, the Glee club had only male TTBB voice arrangements - while the choir often recruited younger boys for higher voice ranges. Mr. Jones was also on the editorial board of The Lion, which is the present-day St. Marker. He volunteered at the Brantwood camp, when the camp’s partnership with our school had just started. He was also president of the St. Mark’s Missionary society. Outside of school, he enjoyed bird-watching and photography. Many of his experiences sound extremely familiar and common to us, like choir and Brantwood, but many of his interests are extremely different from ours today, like the Glee club and the Missionary society. His experiences may be different from many of us, but at the core of it all, it’s not that we as people have changed - the culture and life around us did.

Life at St. Mark’s, for most people, is convenient. We can travel anywhere we’d like to on the weekends. We can order whatever food we crave. Yet, back in the 1930’s, most St. Markers didn’t get chances to leave campus at all, with the exceptions of school vacations and special requests like a family’s wedding or funeral. On the days when they would leave campus to go home, the students who lived farther away (Pennsylvania, Chicago) would take train trips that would last about two days. Furthermore, on campus, there were small clubs of banjo playing, stamp collecting, and jazz music. If you think about the clubs we have today, St. Mark’s has expanded to almost every kind of club you can think of from academic clubs and fashion clubs to exchange/traveling clubs.

We attend evening chapel once a month and morning chapel twice a week, while St. Markers back then had to attend chapel every single day. Students in the 1930s had to wear chapel dress during all seated meals and during the daily chapel service. They had mandatory evening service every Sunday (unless some were exonerated by attending a Catholic service in the mornings). Furthermore, back in the 1930s, the student population at St. Mark’s was not diverse. Most students were from the Boston area and were wealthy and white males. Headmasters at the time actually wanted to integrate the school, but they were denied multiple times by the Board of Trustees. Despite their initial struggles, the first Asian student joined St. Mark’s in the 1950s, and black students as well as female students joined around the 60s. 

St. Mark’s has also changed the admission process as well, as admission was much simpler than it is today. Children of alumni were given a simplified application of a very basic test. Most graduating classes had around 30 students, and they didn’t have the high-tech facilities we have implemented in our school today, so the tuition was only $1400 which today would be around $25,000. However, little financial support was given out, as financial aid was only given to children of alumni who had chosen less lucrative careers. After WWII, as college admissions began to slim, so did admission to St. Mark’s. 

In our lives at our school, there has always been a strong connection to the real world: we hold mock elections, drive students to protests, and give the option of attending political events. Back in the late 1930s, 95% of St. Markers had enlisted to fight in WWII - as did Mr. Jones, who served in the US navy. A fun fact: many St. Markers after Mr. Jones’ time actually graduated in the fifth form in order to serve in WWII. After WWI, St. Mark’s had written a new mission statement, which encouraged St. Markers to be committed to serving others and to being leaders. Because of the mission statement, there were little to no students at our school in the time who had not performed service in Brantwood or the military. Nowadays, our mission statement has changed to focus on leading lives of consequence, since our school has expanded to include many more opportunities regarding individual talents… yet, the bravery that St. Markers demonstrated during the war times showed that students believed that a life at St. Mark’s was equivalent to a life of leadership. That same message still resonates in the hearts of all our students.

When we think about the global pandemic that is currently happening, we may wonder how Mr. Jones is dealing with it as of right now. How is he handling such a difficult period in time? As it turns out, he lived through a pandemic of polio in 1936, and had to quarantine just like us. Polio tragically infected ⅓ of the student body at the time, as they had not the medical advancements we do today, and one student had even passed away due to the crippling disease. Polio is not a commonly heard word nowadays since (hopefully) everybody has received a vaccine for it. Even so, Mr. Jones has already experienced what we are currently experiencing worldwide. Furthermore, he attended St. Mark’s at the height of the great depression. The economic failure affected affluent families more than it did poor families, which meant that the students of St. Mark’s were the ones who got struck the hardest with the effects of the great depression. Students in Mr. Jones’ time period had definitely suffered more tragedy and disaster than any other generation at St. Mark’s ever had. 

Today, as we walk down the historic hallways and look back upon the wooden plaques with the names of all the recognized alumni, we must realize that we are all subconsciously carrying their experiences and impacts along with the legacy we are creating today. They lived through an extremely devastating period of our American history, and we are extremely grateful to be able to look back on those historical events today with a confident feeling that we have overcome it all as a society. However, as they say, we all bleed the same color, and what unites us at the core despite the differences in our lives and culture is that we are all St. Markers. We go to club meetings, eat in the same cafeteria, and reside in the same dorms. In the end of the day, we are not dragged down by the setbacks Mr. Jones and his class went through, and our school and mission: “lives of consequence”, are built upon and will continue to be built upon the perseverance of our alumni.