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196 Virginia Lee Burton and Robert McCloskey (In) Security in America 8 The Caldecott Medal for 1943 was awarded to Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House (1942). Since travel restrictions on civilians were in place, the American Library Association canceled its annual convention and offered the awards instead at the Hotel Roosevelt in New York City on Flag Day, June 14. There, Anne Carroll Moore called The Little House “an honest-to-goodness American picture book,” presumably suggesting that there was something distinctly American in either its themes or their portrayal. In her acceptance that night, Burton asserted that the medium of the picture book “is without doubt one of the best possible ways of giving children a true conception of the world they live in,” but it was only later that she seemed to articulate what the “true conception” might be. Asked if the theme of the book was our dependence upon the natural world and the simple life for real happiness, Burton replied that she was “quite willing to let this be its message.”1 Certainly this myth of the rural world is a distinctly American message . Since James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, American writers have found this a compelling theme, picturing the city as a world of conformity, duress, and debilitation of the soul and body and the world of the forest as that of freedom, individuality, and true and unfettered expression. James Daugherty had used the same themes. But Burton’s equivocal reply—not that this elevation of the pastoral was the book’s theme but that she was “quite willing to let this be its message”—suggests some complexity, or at least hesitation, about her own sense of the role of the natural world and the simple, happy life in America. It is certainly the case that the urban, complex, fast-paced world of the city in The Little House is pictured as dingy and overbearing, blotting out the stars, stultifying and destructive in its effects upon the Little House; the natural world, on the other hand, is pictured as light, happy, filled with play and leisured chores rather than the frenetic and seemingly pointless c h a p t e r e i g h t 197 energy of the city. But it is not the case that Burton wanted in this book to make a statement about the urbanization of America, and if Anne Carroll Moore meant that Burton was crafting a book that participated in the American tradition of distinguishing city and country—to the detriment of the first and elevation of the second—she was wrong, at least in terms of understanding the larger thematic interest that Burton showed in the body of her works. There she did not condemn the progress of new technology; rather, she examined the adaptability of American culture and society in the face of extraordinarily rapid technological progress.2 R R R For Robert McCloskey, screwing up one’s courage to confront societal issues was not the stuff of children’s books. Just the opposite. All of his work suggests a refusal to see children’s books as dealing explicitly with the immediate contemporary world in the sense that the literature must somehow critique that immediate world—or confront a child with its larger cultural tensions. McCloskey’s books are always celebratory of childhood, and celebratory, implicitly, of the nation that allowed children the freedom and space and creativity to play, to wonder, to have childhood adventures while secure in the safety of the family. He would take on neither the Cold War nor the social questions confronting American society in the 1950s. He would instead narrow his perspective to the family by isolating it on islands and in small, supportive communities, suggesting by that isolation its vast strengths; and that would be his answer to the question of the role of children’s literature during times of crisis. If James Daugherty wanted to be the poet of the frontiersman, Robert McCloskey would be the poet of the settled family. If Robert Lawson wanted to acclaim American freedom with high historical drama, Robert McCloskey would evoke small, peaceful towns, seemingly apart from social ills, without reference to war. These are the kinds of books (and Make Way for Ducklings is a good example), he argued implicitly, that responded to the needs of children. Together, these two writers and illustrators would create their own small...

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