Ok, the answer is...
I had forgotten to include:
<script src="http://kendo.cdn.telerik.com/2016.2.607/js/kendo.aspnetmvc.min.js"></script>And the second thing is my User object is an Entity from EntityFrameworks. I created a UserViewModel and populated it from the results of my SelectAll(), which returned IEnumerable<User>. Using the ViewModel, it now populates correctly.
Was a turbulent experience for something that should be easy, and something that may have helped was better examples to learn from.