Communist in a Coonskin Cap? Meridel Le Sueur's Books for Children and Reformulation of America's Cold War Frontier Epic

It might come as a surprise to learn that in the early years of the Cold War, at the height of McCarthyism, left-wing authors in the United States wrote and published radical books for children. These writers, many of them blacklisted from other publishing venues, rejected the Cold War’s “victory culture”—the violent and exclusionary rhetoric of American superiority—and instead attempted in their children’s books to recover the egalitarian, diverse, and cooperative elements of American history and folklore. ¹ In particular, I want to bring attention to Meridel Le Sueur, an author who wrote books for children during the 1940s and 1950s, a period in children’s literature which has been neglected in scholarship, perhaps on the assumption that children’s literature produced in this “conformist” era merely served the status quo. In Le Sueur’s children’s books on Abe Lincoln, Nancy Hanks (Lincoln’s mother), Davy Crockett, Johnny Appleseed, and an adopted son of Black Hawk, Sparrow Hawk, Le Sueur paid tribute to America’s democratic folk heritage and to heroes of the working class. Her celebration of the nation’s past took place at a time when she herself was under intense public scrutiny for her political involvements and was unable to publish most of her writings. Infused with hope and a fundamental belief in American “promise,” Le Sueur’s children’s books reutilize American national folk heritage in an attempt to discredit capitalism. The books therefore indicate cracks in the so-called capitalist consensus of the postwar period, and for this and many other reasons, they are worth remembering.

Any attempt to reutilize aspects of a complex and contradictory national heritage, a heritage of slave-owners and freedom fighters, westward expansion, Indian wars and the Bill of Rights, is inevitably going to be flawed. No recovery of Lincoln can entirely come to terms with a society that commerced in human bondage. No story of Johnny Appleseed can escape the imperialist subtext of western expansion. Even telling a story of Nancy Hanks, Lincoln’s often forgotten mother, seems to bolster the notion that only as a mother, a wife or a sister can a woman enter the national panoply of folk heroes. ² Even so, these books, published during one of the most repressive periods in American history, are important and were a radical intervention when they were first published. Le Sueur’s children’s books questioned the triumphalist frontier epic that played on television screens and in movie theaters in 1950s westerns. Moreover, Le Sueur’s and other children’s books by left-wing authors subverted the Cold War’s capitalist co-optation of “the folk” in Davy Crockett lunch boxes and coonskin caps, in Abe Lincoln insurance and bibles, in cigar-store Indians. Finally, these books begin, if only in a limited fashion, to offer children a model for heroism that goes beyond the Anglo-American, masculine norm of our national heroes.

Left out of almost every study of twentieth-century children’s literature, her books, like Le Sueur herself, were until quite recently, “forgotten,” as were their important messages. Forgotten also was the significant effort these books represent as attempts to put together democratic and often radical stories of the nation, to change the words to a familiar tune. Davy Crockett’s legend might be retold as a battle of “the people” against capitalists rather than as an Anglo-American battle against Indians and Mexicans. If Joseph McCarthy could claim to be a son of Lincoln, so could the American working class, and his story might be told in service of the burgeoning civil rights movement. Nancy Hanks might be remembered as one of the nation’s forgotten founding mothers, and a tale of Indian-white friendship might counter the repeated killings of savage Indians that children read about and witnessed on television. With such promising messages, why were these books, like their author, “forgotten”? Le Sueur’s early work was “recovered” by feminists in the 1970s, but her children’s books...