How the Old Left Became the New Left and Then Almost Mainstream

When I learned from a 2003 article by Julia L. Mickenberg, "Of Funnybones and Steamshovels: Juvenile Publishing, Progressive Education, and the Lyrical Left" in the Children's Literature Association Quarterly (28.3) that she had a book forthcoming on the Left Wing in the U.S. and its impact on children and children's literature, I was delighted. For some time I had felt that this subject had been neglected, and it was clear to me that Mickenberg was the scholar to begin to do it justice.¹ Learning from the Left is a well-written, seminal book that belongs in every academic library; anyone who teaches or is seriously engaged with U.S. children's literature should own it. The black-and-white illustrations are clear, generous, and well-chosen. The footnotes are exhaustive, and often as interesting as the text itself, and the scholarship behind them unusually impressive. Mickenberg has not only covered many secondary sources, but has conducted extensive interviews, looked at correspondence and other papers, and even consulted FBI files on various children's authors and editors. I wish, though, that Oxford had seen fit to include a scholarly bibliography as well as a list of archives consulted, people interviewed, and a "Selected List of Children's Books"—the references have to be picked out of the notes. This is a nuisance because Learning from the Left provides a number of starting points for further investigation, and this set-up unnecessarily complicates that process.

Mickenberg's claim is that many Old Left writers, artists, and film makers who either belonged to the Communist Party (CP), or were left-leaning, found that after World War II their fight against fascism, militarism, and authoritarianism, and on behalf of labor unions, intellectual freedom, diversity, and civil rights, was no longer welcome. Nevertheless, they were still able "to leave a mark on American culture in the twentieth century, even during the era of McCarthyism, blacklisting, and a Cold War, anti-Communist 'consensus'" (4), by turning their talents to the writing of books for children. Sometimes self-publishing or writing under assumed names, but often under their own, they were largely ignored by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) because children's literature "operated below the radar of red-hunters" (4) and because so many writers, editors, teachers, and librarians were women, who were "undervalued" (15). Soon abandoning overt propaganda, which was not popular and judged unsaleable by often sympathetic trade publishers, they turned to writing books that promoted the dignity of work, diversity, tolerance, social justice, women, peace, and other liberal and progressive causes. Early examples of such works are Dr. Seuss's And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937), a popular book that celebrates diversity, or the black, homosexual, Countee Cullen's The Lost Zoo (1940), a product of the Harlem Renaissance and a coded protest against a racist, sexist society.

Mickenberg also claims that the "hidden history of the children's book field provides insights into how and why the turbulent youth rebellions of the 1960s emerged from the seemingly placid 1950s. . . . [C]hildren's literature became a kind of bridge between the Old Left and the New Left generations" (5). Here and elsewhere she seems to imply that children's books were at least in part responsible for the counter-cultural rebellions of the mid-1960s. Certainly many left-wing activists believed firmly that to liberalize society, it was essential to reach children. But any claim that children brought up on such books became the war protesters, civil-rights activists, flower children, and even urban terrorists such as the Weathermen may have only a limited application. Furthermore, an account of what went on for the most part among a group of largely middle- and upper-class intellectuals on the two coasts and in the northern Midwest is in danger of bracketing the experiences of children, parents, teachers...