Making Americans: Children's Literature from 1930 to 1960

1. Imagining the American Democracy: Self-Reliance and Social Cooperation

3 1 Self-Reliance and Social Cooperation Imagining the American Democracy In his study Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (2004), Steven Mintz describes the effects of the Great Depression on American families, which faced an unprecedented collapse. By the end of the Depression, 14 percent unemployment was common; in some cities , unemployment was over 50 percent. Average income was halved as jobs disappeared or became part-time. Homes that had seemed absolutely secure fell to banks as savings accounts disappeared and mortgages went unpaid. The accompanying stress brought family disintegration ; as desertion increased, children were placed in custodial institutions or took to the rails—a quarter million children became drifters. Economic failure led to the diminished stature of fathers, and though mothers entered the workforce for some income, their hours were long and their pay was low. Jobs traditionally belonging to older children disappeared as adults took them up; the result was increasing high school enrollment and a new class that would eventually be called “teenagers.” Yet still, in 1938 half of high school graduates could find no work. Lacking funds, many schools closed or shortened their school years, while the movement of children whose families were seeking a job disrupted educational opportunities. Mintz concludes: “For many children, the Depression meant a declining standard of living, heightened family tension, inconsistent parental discipline, and an unemployed father. Many children experienced severe psychological stress, insecurity, deprivation, and intense feelings of shame. Parents became more irritable, marital conflict increased, and parents disciplined their children more arbitrarily. The impact of family conflict may have been worst for young children, since they were not insulated by the buffer of peers or jobs outside the home” (237). How should America respond? The commercial culture, Mintz argues, decided to entertain the young. Thus were born the comic book, the child-centered film re- 4 p a r t o n e volving around the Little Rascals or the Dead End Kids, and the teenage star—Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland.1 But this was not the direction children’s book publishers would take. Sally Allen McNall has called the children’s literature of this time “a democratization of experience,” a realism focused on the stuff of immediate life. Alfred Habegger suggests that American realism of the period depicts democratic action, “the primacy of what ordinary people, living under recognizable pressures, try to do” (111). Children’s artists of the period and the “minders” affirmed this approach, but the gritty realism of the contemporary American experience would often—not always—be considerably tempered by the romantic vision of the American pioneer experience. The pioneer books offered a heightened vision of that experience, suggesting to families in despair an alternate way of life that was part of their own heritage. These books showed the young reader an America defined by both individual resourcefulness and communal awareness and connectivity. R R R During the 1930s American children’s literature linked the pioneer experience and the democratic experiment together again and again. That same 1936 issue of Horn Book in which Bertha Mahony had written “Children’s Books in America Today” carried the Newbery Award acceptance speech of Carol Ryrie Brink for Caddie Woodlawn (1935), in which Brink identified the pioneer experience as a particularly American event whose potency and meanings needed to be passed on to later generations who were not themselves pioneers but who, through the arts, could participate in the experience vicariously. “The blood of these pioneers still flows in the veins of our children,” Brink argued, and although the problems children of the Great Depression faced were distinct from those the pioneers faced, still, “the pioneer qualities of courage, willingness to go to meet the unknown, and steadfastness under difficulties are the things most needed today, as they were then.” Here again is Bertha Mahony’s sense of values flowing within the clear mountain brook; in children’s books, America could produce valueladen stories about its own heritage so that the stories of the American experience—particularly the pioneering experience—could pass on the qualities necessary for young Americans to grow into the kind of citizens who might face the difficulties of the contemporary world. The linking of the pioneer spirit and American democracy took this form: On the one hand, the pioneer experience expressed selfreliance and independence. The virtues are those of resolution, hard c h a p t e r o...