Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (review)

The cover illustration for Julia Mickenberg's engaging and revealing study, Learning from the Left, is an illustration by Lydia Gibson for a story entitled, "Why?" Two young boys and a young girl—one standing, one seated, one kneeling—carefully read through a book opened on the center child's lap. One points to a page. Around them hover the printed questions, "WHY?"—all in uppercase letters. The story and its illustration were included in Herminia Zur Mühlen's Fairy Tales for Workers' Children, published in 1925 by the Daily Worker Publishing Company. The image is very suggestive of the story: the children are clearly questioning the world, eager to gain both insight and knowledge, looking for reliable sources to give them authentic answers, and open to trying to hear and understand those answers. Implied is a refusal to accept the status quo.

It is the perfect cover by which to judge this book, because the image encapsulates so well Mickenberg's central argument: that in the mid-twentieth century, Leftist-oriented writers found in the children's book field a powerful venue and opportunity for presenting progressive, radical, and even Marxist ideas about childhood, about the dialectical nature of the world, about justice and injustice, about racism and gender restrictions. They found this venue at a time when those ideas were perceived by many in American society to be dangerous, pro-Communist, anti-American, and worthy of censorship, a time when those who held such ideas were being silenced through threatened loss of income, through blacklisting, through intimidation by Senate committees. "Why certain cultural workers on the Left began to create books for children; how they were able to publish children's books, especially in an era marked by intense anxiety about radicalism and equally intense anxiety about children; and what they actually wrote, are the subject of this book" (5), writes Mickenberg early on in her introduction. Her subject is a "hidden history of the children's book field" (5), she argues—and with merit. Though she will be hard-pressed to prove that many of the texts she discusses really made it into the children's book field in a significant or lasting way (and she acknowledges that most do not), still, she is able to argue persuasively that writers from the Left were able to find in children's books a field and market within which to explore and project social ideas that were difficult—perhaps impossible—to project in other media, and that these writers correctly adapted to changing social and political climates to allow them to effectively create books which were not merely Soviet-style blunt-edged propaganda, but works of great subtlety and power that spoke well and engagingly to child readers and to what Mickenberg refers to as the guardians of children's books: parents, teachers, librarians, and publishers.

For the most part, this study is organized historically. Working within several disciplines, Mickenberg begins by pointing out that the 1920s and 1930s were a time when progressive educational theorists were arguing for the conversion of how childhood itself was envisioned, so that instead of being seen as a time of participation in a workforce (particularly for lower income families), childhood would be seen as a time of participation in education. The sense was that "all children had the right to childhood" (28), and that a denial of this was in fact a corruption of economic forces. This progressive notion Mickenberg connects to the growth of children's literature among Communist publishing sources, and as well in trade books. She locates what she calls progressive ideas that promoted childhood freedom and creativity in works as diverse as Wanda Gág's Millions...