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MAKING AMERICANS
Children's Literature from 1930 to 1960
By GAR D. SCHMIDT UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS
Copyright © 2013 University of Iowa Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-192-9
CHAPTER 1
Imagining the American Democracy
Self-Reliance and Social Cooperation
In his study Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (2004), Steven Mintz describes the effects of the Great Depression on American families, which faced an unprecedented collapse. By the end of the Depression, 14 percent unemployment was common; in some cities, unemployment was over 50 percent. Average income was halved as jobs disappeared or became part-time. Homes that had seemed absolutely secure fell to banks as savings accounts disappeared and mortgages went unpaid. The accompanying stress brought family disintegration; as desertion increased, children were placed in custodial institutions or took to the rails—a quarter million children became drifters. Economic failure led to the diminished stature of fathers, and though mothers entered the workforce for some income, their hours were long and their pay was low. Jobs traditionally belonging to older children disappeared as adults took them up; the result was increasing high school enrollment and a new class that would eventually be called "teenagers." Yet still, in 1938 half of high school graduates could find no work. Lacking funds, many schools closed or shortened their school years, while the movement of children whose families were seeking a job disrupted educational opportunities. Mintz concludes: "For many children, the Depression meant a declining standard of living, heightened family tension, inconsistent parental discipline, and an unemployed father. Many children experienced severe psychological stress, insecurity, deprivation, and intense feelings of shame. Parents became more irritable, marital conflict increased, and parents disciplined their children more arbitrarily. The impact of family conflict may have been worst for young children, since they were not insulated by the buffer of peers or jobs outside the home" (237). How should America respond? The commercial culture, Mintz argues, decided to entertain the young. Thus were born the comic book, the child-centered film revolving around the Little Rascals or the Dead End Kids, and the teenage star—Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland.
But this was not the direction children's book publishers would take. Sally Allen McNall has called the children's literature of this time "a democratization of experience," a realism focused on the stuff of immediate life. Alfred Habegger suggests that American realism of the period depicts democratic action, "the primacy of what ordinary people, living under recognizable pressures, try to do" (111). Children's artists of the period and the "minders" affirmed this approach, but the gritty realism of the contemporary American experience would often—not always—be considerably tempered by the romantic vision of the American pioneer experience. The pioneer books offered a heightened vision of that experience, suggesting to families in despair an alternate way of life that was part of their own heritage. These books showed the young reader an America defined by both individual resourcefulness and communal awareness and connectivity.
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During the 1930s American children's literature linked the pioneer experience and the democratic experiment together again and again. That same 1936 issue of Horn Book in which Bertha Mahony had written "Children's Books in America Today" carried the Newbery Award acceptance speech of Carol Ryrie Brink for Caddie Woodlawn (1935), in which Brink identified the pioneer experience as a particularly American event whose potency and meanings needed to be passed on to later generations who were not themselves pioneers but who, through the arts, could participate in the experience vicariously. "The blood of these pioneers still flows in the veins of our children," Brink argued, and although the problems children of the Great Depression faced were distinct from those the pioneers faced, still, "the pioneer qualities of courage, willingness to go to meet the unknown, and steadfastness under difficulties are the things most needed today, as they were then." Here again is Bertha Mahony's sense of values flowing within the clear mountain brook; in children's books, America could produce valueladen stories about its own heritage so that the stories of the American experience—particularly the pioneering experience—could pass on the qualities necessary for young Americans to grow into the kind of citizens who might face the difficulties of the contemporary world.
The linking of the pioneer spirit and American democracy took this form: On the one hand, the pioneer experience expressed self-reliance and independence. The virtues are those of resolution, hard work, close connection to the spacious land, an established home and family, individual resourcefulness, and the independence which that resourcefulness makes possible. On the other hand, the pioneer stories also valued and celebrated the virtues of democracy and the community which that democracy makes possible. It is the common citizen who is celebrated, and to that citizen's independence is added social cooperation; to individual resourcefulness is added a dependence on community and its larger resources and skills; to valuing the family is added the valuing of the Other outside the family. Thus while the myth of the American pioneer certainly used an Emersonian sense of self-reliance as one of its stalwart elements—a quality strongly celebrated in the novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which use stocks of food as the concrete exemplification of self-reliance—the notion of living within a democracy did carry with it a social contract that was also part of the narrative of American pioneer life. From time to time, even Pa Ingalls negotiates with neighbors, suggesting a community that is built around mutual dependence and need, even as the virtue of self-reliance is preached.
Anne Thaxton Eaton, who five years earlier had begun to edit a biweekly page-long review of children's books for the New York Times Book Review, wrote in that magazine that Caddie Woodlawn was a testament to the American experience because the novel was marked by a "sense of the stirring qualities of frontier life"; she suggested as well that Kate Seredy's illustrations themselves offered "the space and freedom of a new country." Much of the novel is, indeed, a celebration of the space and freedom that the frontier offered in early Wisconsin, and one detects here the pleasure in space that Laura Ingalls Wilder also would celebrate in the 1930s in Pa's yearnings. But in Caddie Woodlawn, the pioneer experience is complicated in that the family could easily opt out of it. Buried in the first half of the novel is a mystery about Caddie's father, disinherited by Lord Woodlawn when he supposedly married beneath his station. Caddie's father defines America by opposing its democratic ideal to the Old World's social stratification: "You have grown up in a free country, children.... Whatever happens I want you to think of yourselves as young Americans, and I want you to be proud of that. It is difficult to tell you about England, because there all men are not free to pursue their own lives in their own ways" (88–89). While Caddie's mother laments the loss of her husband's aristocratic heritage and inherited wealth, the independent Mr. Woodlawn has no such qualms: "It was a hard struggle, but what I have in life I have earned with my own hands.... I want no lands and honors which I have not won by my own good sense and industry" (95). As she learns of her father's history, Caddie rejects the Old World out of familial loyalty—"because they were unkind to father in England" (106)—but she also uses this separation to define herself as an American. This definition is tested when the lordship is indeed offered to Caddie's father and the family must decide if they will abandon American citizenship and the hardships and equalities of the pioneer life and head to England to live in ease and wealth. Mr. Woodlawn suggests that the decision should be made in a very American way: they will vote democratically as a family, rejecting an aristocratic society even in their decision process. And though at first some of the family members are attracted to the prestige of the new life, they all vote to remain. "I never knew how much I loved it here until I had to choose" (262), notes Caddie's mother. The frontier and a life lived with democratic principles—with the possibility of choice—are here united.
"Good sense and industry" might be the central phrase of this novel, as the Woodlawns define what these are through what they do with their pioneer experience and American democratic idealism. Caddie, who leaves Boston to move to the frontier prairies of Wisconsin, is first given freedom from gendered expectations: she is permitted to grow up like a tomboy so that she will not be too sheltered; the frontier itself almost demands this latitude. But this particular freedom has boundaries defined by age and communal expectations. So when Caddie uses the skills acquired because of this latitude to humiliate her cousin Annabelle, Caddie's father, in a chapter called "Father Speaks," gives her a new alternative based on her crossing the boundaries of childhood:
A woman's work is something fine and noble to grow up to, and it is just as important as a man's. But no man could ever do it so well. I don't want you to be the silly, affected person with fine clothes and manners whom folks sometimes call a lady. No, that is not what I want for you, my little girl. I want you to be a woman with a wise and understanding heart, healthy in body and honest in mind. Do you think you would like to be growing up into that woman now? How about it, Caddie. Have we run with the colts long enough? (244–45)
Brinks has been severely criticized by later critics for this passage. Gail Schmunk Murray calls this a "lecture," a severe "reprimand" that "reifies the dying Victorian sentiment that supported such dichotomized gender distinctions and has Caddie acquiesce to her father's dictum" (151). Much as this speech may offend twenty-first-century sensibilities, these charges are distortions of the narrative; in the text, Caddie's father delivers this speech quietly and in darkness. He is distressed himself, and this is not a lecture or a reprimand. He is giving her a choice and hoping that she will choose to live as a mature and wise woman whose pioneer experience has given her the strength and independence that she will need to negotiate the gendered social expectations and tensions of a woman living in community. Caddie responds to this: she takes on a larger, firmer identity, one that is no longer afraid of growing up, and one that is affirmed by a telling and powerful image: "Her face was turned to the west. It was always to be turned westward now, for Caddie Woodlawn was a pioneer and an American" (270)—the very last words of the novel. For Caddie—and for Brinks—America is defined by the pioneer quest within which industry and good sense, embedded in the fairness of a democracy, can fuse to lead to prosperity and happiness and selfhood. Caddie Woodlawn is Brink's conscious statement of those qualities that she saw embedded in the pioneer experience and democratic sensibility.
The distinction between the Old and New Worlds is also at the center of Roger Duvoisin's And There Was America (1938), which he both authored and illustrated. The year marked his taking the oath of allegiance to the United States, and as if in celebration, Duvoisin's new citizenship was advertised on the book's dust jacket. The cover expresses Duvoisin's sense of the national story to which he had been grafted: half a dozen explorers—Portuguese, French, Spanish, English—stand anachronistically together on a new shore behind the bold figure of Columbus, whose left hand holds a flag and whose right hand holds a drawn sword. Behind the European conquerors stands the subdued, almost unobtrusive figure of a Pilgrim—whom Duvoisin will soon elevate. In the distance, made diminutive by the perspective, stand two Native Americans, dwarfed and ignored by their powerful conquerors.
The cover suggests Duvoisin's sense of America as a pioneer narrative that begins with greedy conquest and moves toward the establishment of a home: the story of a people displaced, the story of one conqueror after another who comes to exploit, the story of a people who finally come to settle. Duvoisin chronicles the coming of European influence beginning with the Vikings, then the Spanish and Portuguese with Christopher Columbus, the English with John Cabot, the French with Jacques Cartier, the Dutch with Henry Hudson, and finally the English again with Sir Walter Raleigh and the Pilgrims. Up until the English influence, Duvoisin's narrative depicts greedy conquerors eager only for wealth, as in this fabricated exchange:
"Oh! Really," the King of France was saying to his admiral. "Really, the King of Spain thinks the whole world is his. He is setting up his flag all over these new lands which Columbus had found."
"True," his admiral answered. "Soon there won't be a big enough space left for you to put up the flag of France. Why don't you send Jacques Cartier over there? He is a fine French captain. He knows the sea near these new lands. He has been fishing for cod there."
"That is a good idea, Admiral! Tell him to find these mysterious cities of China. And tell him to bring back gold, too." (25)
But Duvoisin makes clear in his stories that people searching only for money have little chance to fully appropriate a land they only wish to exploit. That is not America's true story. America's story is one about settling deeply into a land and about grasping for freedom through democracy.
Thus when Duvoisin writes of the Pilgrims, he takes an utterly different tone: "Their faces looked serious as they sailed away. They were not crossing the sea for gold, as the Spanish had done. They were not going for furs or fish, as the Dutch and French had done. They were going to build homes and to be free" (60). Nothing could be more opposed to the former European policies, Duvoisin suggests. There is the drive for wealth, and the drive for a home; there is the drive for exploitation, and the drive for freedom. And it is these latter drives that enable settlers to survive and to endure the first winter, the loss of half their number, and the dreadful situation of being fixed between an endless ocean and a wilderness. "We came here to be free," Miles Standish exclaims. "Let's stay" (62). And thus, Duvoisin concludes, "Englishmen gained the most, for they came to build their homes and in this way they kept the land" (75). This final line of the narrative is illustrated by a small image of a rough-hewn house, its domestic tranquility represented by a cow, a clothesline, a woodpile, children, and a returning hunter; a field of stumps suggests the new dominance over the land by the pioneer family.
In Duvoisin's work, the story of America is a narrative of the drive for home and land, the drive toward freedom, the drive from dominance derived from inherited power and wealth toward a democracy that fulfilled and satisfied the citizen. As with Mahony, America—the land itself—was both the story and the setting that made all other stories possible, the clear mountain brook in which one saw reflected an entirely new vision of life where a people, free and equal, governed themselves. They had endured as pioneers and homesteaders and learned to see themselves as interdependent, and so they defined their nation as a democracy and earned their way to the country's large and fulsome rewards.
And the pioneer books for children often showed America's physical landscape as formative. In books that celebrated self-reliance, the nature of the land itself often insisted upon a narrative that extolled the common man and woman, that spoke to the equalizing effects of the pioneer life, that valued cooperation as well as self-reliance—all elements of a democratic ideal, and all elements linked to the land. Thus Hendrik Willem van Loon and Grace Castagnetta's The Songs America Sings (1939) celebrated America's pioneer experience by carrying implicitly in its illustrations a sense of the equalizing effects of the country's vastness. The illustrations for the twenty-one folksongs of The Songs America Sings stress the spaciousness of the country that is being settled, re-creating, the New York Times Book Review noted, "our American scene in arresting and suggestive pictures.... Here is the New England that the author of 'America' knew, the West that moved Katherine Lee Bates to the writing of 'America, the Beautiful.' The broad Mississippi, the Kentucky cabin, the proud clipper ship, the lighthouse above the waves, the frigates at war. The mesa rises against a yellow sky, and the red shell-burst is over Fort McHenry."
The reviewer—who begins with the songs but moves quickly to the wide American landscape—correctly notes that the illustrations are dominated by large spaces. But what is equally important are the signs of settlers, who are dwarfed by the magnitude of the natural features that dominate the landscape. Yet they all stubbornly hold on: the New England farm huddles beneath high mountains that dwarf the skaters on the pond; the illustration for "Massa's in de Cold, Cold Ground" pictures a huge starry sky with a bent horizon of flat mountains and, again, a tiny figure below; "Dixie" is accompanied by a vast image of the Mississippi River, whose water and sky dominate the small steamboat; and the illustration for "Darling Nelly Gray" is two-thirds blank sky, with a tiny cottage almost hidden in the high grass beneath it. Here is America as a huge and vast land, ready to be settled and remade by anonymous Americans bound together by their pioneer experience.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from MAKING AMERICANS by GAR D. SCHMIDT. Copyright © 2013 University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS.
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