Making Americans: Children’s Literature from 1930 to 1960 by Gary D. Schmidt (review)

Scholarship written about US children’s literature has tended to focus on two periods: “the formative years” from 1865 to 1930, in which authors such as Alcott, Twain, and Baum established precedents for the genres of children’s realism and fantasy, and “the contemporary years” from 1960 to the present day, where the critical emphasis has been on canon expansion and generic experimentation. Scholars who focus on the formative and the contemporary eras will often forecast ahead or look back to the decades between 1930 and 1960, but very few critics have made this period their primary topic; thus, the appearance of Schmidt’s Making Americans: Children’s Literature from 1930 to 1960 provides a welcome addition to scholarship in the field. Noting that “midcentury children’s literature would simultaneously posit America as pioneer nation and America as democratic experiment,” Schmidt observes that midcentury mainstream children’s authors treated a wide array of subject matter, including “concerns about the treatment of the immigrant, the place of the “Other” in society, issues of racism, issues of pacifism and violence, issues of the just war, [and] issues of progress and modernization” (xxi; xxvi). However, while critics such as Gillian Avery and Nathalie op de Beeck have emphasized that these topics were handled “in ways that affirmed, if not an ideal world, a world of certainty and security,” Schmidt departs from this assumption, arguing that “it is the contention of this study that one large purpose of children’s literature at midcentury was to ‘acknowledge cultural anxieties’ quite directly and to posit a vision of America that was meant as a corrective to those anxieties” (xxvi–xxvii), especially as the US moved from inwardly debating what it meant to be a citizen within a capitalist democracy to what it meant to export that vision of democracy onto the international stage during the cold war era.

Schmidt’s study is divided into four parts, each demonstrating how authors of children’s literature defined and adapted the concept of “American Democracy” to fit a particular cultural moment. Part 1, “Defining America as the Pioneer Nation, 1930–1940,” concerns the ways authors such as Carol Ryrie Brink, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and James Daugherty reconciled the dueling values of self-reliance and social cooperation that often characterized collective memories of the pioneer experience. Part 2, “Otherness within a Democracy, 1930–1955,” features the work of children’s authors such as Eleanor Weakley Nolen and Eleanor Frances Lattimore who would attempt to answer many of the questions that faced authors and publishers in the years prior to the Civil Rights Movement, though their import continues to have resonance today: “Could an author write authentically about a character whose ethnicity he or she did not share? Was it possible to affirm cultural distinctiveness without assuming a perspective of cultural dominance? Was it possible to affirm cultural distinctiveness within a democracy whose dominant metaphor was a melting pot? Would a work for young readers in which the protagonist was a minority character be publishable?” (66–67). Additionally, Schmidt considers the work of pioneering African American librarians Charlemae Rollins and Augusta Baker, both tireless advocates for a literature that would, in Schmidt’s assessment, depict underrepresented groups in ways “that educated and enlarged their readers by abandoning stereotypes” (94). Rounding out Part II is a detailed treatment of The Bobbs-Merrill Childhood of Famous Americans Series, a publishing phenomenon that managed to laud the lives of well-known figures such as Washington, Franklin, and Lincoln while at the same time bringing to bear questions regarding the way that social mores and economic inequality barred many children from following in the paths of acclaimed American leaders and innovators.

Part 3, “American Children’s Literature and World War II, 1940–1945,” considers the plethora of texts, including Munro Leaf’s A War-Time Handbook for Young Americans (1942), that encouraged young people’s participation in and support of the war effort...