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ix i n t r O D u C t i O n O b j e C t l e s s O n s A R n o L D G E S E L L , the influential twentieth-century pediatrician and childdevelopment psychologist, believed that “by nature” the child was “a creative artist of sorts. . . . We may well be amazed at his resourcefulness, his extraordinary capacity for original activity, inventions, and discovery.”1 Such awe at the child’s apparently innate creativity has its roots in the romantic era, and has not only persisted but also expanded in our own age. Indeed, authentic creativity has become an unquestioned “truth” about children and childhood . At large retailers, as in small toy stores and online merchants, there are entire aisles or sections of “creativity toys.” But why do we view children as having unusual insight or creative ability? Why do parents believe that taking classes and purchasing special toys, books, or furniture might help to stimulate this particular quality? Furthermore, why has creativity itself become so important to a sense of national pride and positive future gains? This book explores how a perception of children as imaginative and “naturally ” creative was constructed, disseminated, and consumed in the United States in the years after World War II. I argue that educational toys, public amusements, and the plan and decoration of the smaller middle-class house and thousands of postwar schools, along with special museums across the country, were designed to cultivate an idealized imaginative child. These objects and spaces are at once the material embodiment of this abstract social and educational discourse and also actors whose material properties transformed popular understanding of creativity during a crucial period of educational reform, economic expansion, and Cold War anxiety. Gesell’s observation that children are naturally creative is, I contend, indebted to a modern discourse on creativity and childhood that is complex and historically specific. His comment, from a 1943 handbook on children in contemporary culture, seems aphoristic and ageless. Yet when it appeared, IntroductIon x the belief in children’s capacity for imagination and independent thinking was still a relatively new idea in the United States. I describe how this notion mushroomed from the province of elite psychologists and progressive preschools of the interwar era to become a widespread and cohesive national value by the mid-1970s. The dramatic rise in the U.S. birthrate from 1946 to 1964 thrust debates about raising and educating children into the public eye. Once specialized professional conversations on play, child psychology, school building, and teaching art and science now warranted coverage in mass-media publications, and as the concerns of middle-class parents came to dominate the popular discussion, questions about nurturing creativity acquired broad political significance. If the striking increase in numbers of American children appeared outwardly to suggest optimism after World War II, its impact affected debates on education, science, and art, revealing a deep sense of self-doubt and anxiety over the future of American culture. The discourse on creativity is central to this historical moment and to the particular role children played in the Cold War imaginary. These years coincided with U.S. policy on containment, an anticommunist political doctrine that had wide-reaching effects on daily life. Theorized in 1946 as a key foreign policy for “containing” a Soviet threat, containment also had domestic applications that envisioned atomic technology for peacetime use. Scholars have also argued that containment acted socially to construct a vision of normative family life. As Cold War enmity and anxiety seeped into postwar narratives of domesticity, it affected the selling of both everyday goods and high culture, as well as the experiences of individuals.2 Children in this Cold War domestic drama were both vulnerable and in need of protection yet at the same time a positive force whose promise appeared to answer the most pressing worries of the age. The image of the authentically creative child as a homegrown weapon of the Cold War is difficult to reconcile with popularly held notions about postwar America. A landscape of suburban sameness, a return to traditional gender roles, and the expansion of political suspicion give the postwar era, especially viewed retrospectively, an ominous cast and make these years an unlikely moment for a resurgent interest in imagination and divergent thinking. Indeed, a renewed faith in the creative potential of children (and adults) appears paradoxical in an era of restrictive conformity. Even the more celebratory perception of postwar...

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