Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 (review)

Nicholas Sammond concludes the introduction to this provocative new book on Walt Disney by invoking the image of both Disney the person and a hypothetical, idealized child. He writes, "Though each appears universal, each has a history, and it is by unraveling those histories that we may come to understand how it is that we assign to the chairman of a media enterprise, or to a child, significant responsibility for organizing how we live" (24). Exploring a vast and impressive array of popular and professional documents on child rearing during the years from the Depression up to the Second World War, Sammond examines the tension between these two abstract concepts of Disney and childhood, and in particular how one influenced the rise and institutionalization of the other. As methods of childrearing and national identity morphed in relation to the changing economic and political landscape of twentieth-century America, Disney, he argues, repeatedly operated as mediator of those concepts for American society and Disney's films provided for far wider circulation for these ideas than they might have otherwise received. Disney, Sammond suggests, did not create the prevailing ideas and attitudes, and his argument runs counter to the popular conceptions of Disney as a colonizer of American culture:

Although critics of Disney would argue that the corporation has, over the years, attempted to produce and distribute an American landscape that looks like Disneyland, it would be more accurate to say that Disney mapped Disneyland on an extant terrain. What Disney did in the 1950's (as well as in the 1930's and 1940's) was to remark on the landscape, to produce a map that middle-class Americans (and those aspiring to the middle class) could recognize as a valuable navigational tool. Constant in this equation was a common need to see children not simply as the precious wards of doting parents, but as repositories of a nascent American future.

(353)

Sammond isolates several major ideological shifts during this timeframe, each of which led to wholesale reconsiderations of how children were raised, and perhaps most importantly (given his focus), the degree to which the media were considered detrimental or essential to that rearing. His early chapters explore turn-of-the-century anxieties regarding the assimilation of the immigrant poor, particularly children. He notes, however, "What had changed between the turn of the century and the 1930s was that children in need of protection and uplift were no longer simply those of the poor; they were increasingly referred to generically" as idealized children, albeit white, middle-class children (82). Disney and his products were consequently positioned as a perfect resource for that assimilation. The company's most heavy-handed social tale, Pinocchio (1940), and Disney's public persona as the "down-to-earth patriarch of family-oriented firm embodied the very behaviors that parents of the 1930's were expected to engender in their children—industry, modesty, thrift—and spoke more of upright, middle America than of the morally questionable Hollywood" (30).

This national anxiety over assimilation resulted in several responses, the first being a gradual move to "regulate the home and family through distinctly scientific principles" (103). Sammond works his way through several popular and professional guides that celebrated Taylorist domestic scientific management principles "converting industrial time and motion study to the day-to-day business of running a home" (147). Undoubtedly the most interesting manifestation of this obsession over monitoring is the subject of his middle chapter, "In Middletown," referring to Helen and Robert Lynd's four-year chronicle of daily life in Muncie, Indiana, published in 1929. Later, after the war, child rearing shifted profoundly in reaction to fears that children, under this regime of scientific management, might become as fascist and conformist as those youth that...