Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights

4 The Black-and-Whiteness of Raggedy Ann

146 4 The Black-and-Whiteness of Raggedy Ann I love ’er ’n spank ’er ’z much ’z I can, But that never bothers my Raggedy Ann. —A. R. Quin, “My Raggedy Ann,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 21 October 1920 In September of 1915, a young commercial artist named Johnny Gruelle seemed headed for a sustained if undistinguished career as a cartoonist and illustrator. The son of Richard Buckner Gruelle, a member of the Hoosier Group of impressionist painters, Johnny Gruelle had contributed incidental cartoons to the Indianapolis Sun, the Indianapolis (Morning) Star, the Cleveland Press, and other midwestern newspapers.1 In 1910, while still in his twenties, he glimpsed fame when he bested 1,500 entries to win the New York Herald’s competition for a new comic strip. The Herald ran Gruelle’s eponymous strip about an elf, Mr. Twee Deedle, on the first page of the comics section, where it replaced Winsor McCay’s “Little Nemo in Slumberland,” when McCay absconded to a rival paper.2 Many readers liked “Mr. Twee Deedle,” but the strip inevitably suffered in comparison to its predecessor. The Herald manufactured and peddled a Mr. Twee Deedle doll, hoping for profits similar to those reaped by Rose O’Neill when she transformed her cartoon Kewpies into figurines, or by Palmer Cox when he plastered his cartoon Brownies on consumer goods ranging from dolls to soap advertisements to “Kodak Brownie Cameras.” But Mr. Twee Deedle failed, as a cartoon or a doll, to create a sensation, and the Herald dropped both in 1915.3 Gruelle then abandoned Mr. Twee Deedle but not the strategy of marketing characters simultaneously in print culture and dolls. In 1915 he trademarked several characters, each Figure 4.1. J[ohnny] B[arton] Gruelle, patent 47,789, U.S. Patent Office, 7 September 1915. 148 The Black-and-Whiteness of Raggedy Ann intended to bridge toys and books. These characters included a pair of ducks named Quacky Doodles and Danny Daddles, who were destined for obscurity, and a cloth doll named Raggedy Ann, who was not. Gruelle designed Raggedy Ann (figure 4.1) in part after a homemade doll that probably originally belonged to his mother, Alice Benton Gruelle , and he loaded the doll with references to American nostalgia and patriotism .4 Raggedy Ann’s red-striped stockings quoted the American flag, and her old-fashioned pinafore and homemade style gestured toward a pre-industrial past. Her name syncopated references to contemporary African American ragtime music with a portmanteau of two of midwestern poet James Whitcomb Riley’s beloved characters: the Raggedy Man and Little Orphant Annie.5 Raggedy Ann repackaged Riley’s characters’ references to rural America and piggybacked on the poems’ popularity (Riley’s were among the poems most often memorized and recited by American schoolchildren in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries).6 Gruelle’s homage to Riley, which was easily recognizable in 1915, was personal: Riley had been a close neighbor and friend of Gruelle’s parents when Johnny was growing up in the 1880s in Indianapolis (the Gruelles and Riley lived at 506 and 528 Lockerbie Street, respectively), and the boy had been entranced by the poet’s verse recitations.7 But the tribute was also a broader, nationalist one. Gruelle longed for the innocent American past imagined in Riley’s poems, and he manifested this longing by explicitly rooting Raggedy Ann in neither his 1915 present nor his own 1880s childhood, but instead in the 1850s childhood of his parents’ generation— the childhood of people like Alice Benton Gruelle, born in 1853, and Riley , born in 1849. Gruelle pointedly identified Raggedy Ann’s antebellum origins in the introduction to his first book featuring the doll character: Raggedy Ann enters the narrative when a girl named Marcella (drawn after Gruelle’s daughter of the same name) discovers Raggedy Ann in Grandma’s attic, where the woman had abandoned the doll fifty years earlier .8 With this introduction, Gruelle synchronized the timelines for his fictional character (a sentient doll owned by the grandmother of a character named Marcella) and material doll (a real toy owned in the 1850s by Alice Gruelle, grandmother of Marcella Gruelle), and he configured both as artifacts of the mid-nineteenth century.9 Raggedy Ann’s concatenation of ruralism, patriotism, and nostalgia for antebellum America resonated powerfully in 1915, the semicentenary of the end of the Civil War. As historian...