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  • The Right Way to Read
  • Julia L. Mickenberg (bio)
Raising Your Kids Right: Children’s Literature and American Political Conservatism, by Michelle Ann Abate. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2010.

Raising Your Kids Right takes as its focus right-wing books for children—or ostensibly for children—published since the 1990s. It relates these texts to the growth and varieties of political conservatism that have become a fixture of American life in the past several decades. Abate devotes her chapters, respectively, to William Bennett and the development of “right-leaning” children’s books; Truax (an answer to Seuss’s environmentalist Lorax), the anti-green movement, and the corporate influence in children’s literature; the Left Behind series for kids and the political/educational agenda of the Christian Right; Lynne Cheney’s picturebooks and the influence of right-wing think tanks on education and children’s literature; The O’Reilly Factor for Kids and branding; and, finally, the Help! Mom! series, which Abate sees as a new breed of explicitly partisan books that threaten the very childhoods they supposedly aim to protect. She argues that although right-wing children’s literature has received very little critical attention, these books have been extremely popular and influential, and signal a significant new dimension of conservative effort to influence American politics and culture.

Raising Your Kids Right begins with a historical overview of conservative influence in American politics and in children’s literature. The rise of conservatism as a political force after World War II, culminating in the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, is reviewed briefly but effectively, and Abate recalls the arguments Jack Zipes, Jacqueline Rose, and others have made about the essentially conservative nature of children’s literature in general: that the genre has tended to function as an agent of embourgeoisement, and that mainstream children’s literature in the United States, from its beginnings (e.g., in the New England Primer), has tended to enforce the values of the dominant culture. What is new, according to Abate, are books that go beyond attempting to preserve the existing culture by promoting a right-wing agenda.

Kimberley Reynolds’s important study of radical children’s literature, which Abate cites, notes that conventions of the form as well as historical traditions limit its range of address. However, as Reynolds, [End Page 311] Alison Lurie, and others (including me) have pointed out, “children’s literature provides a curious and paradoxical cultural space: a space that is simultaneously highly regulated and overlooked, orthodox and radical, didactic and subversive” (Reynolds 3, qtd. in Abate 9). The degree to which Abate fails to heed her own observations (or observations borrowed from Reynolds) about such paradoxes in the form represents the chief weakness of the book. Even so, the rich historical context and careful, nuanced close readings of both texts and illustrations make Abate’s book well worth reading, and an important scholarly intervention.

Let me clarify. In reviewing the conservative tendency of children’s literature in general, Abate turns to the Little Golden Books and their “messages about maintaining the societal status quo and resisting impulses toward cultural change” (8), citing in particular Gertrude Crampton’s Tootle (misidentified as Tootle the Train), whose title character learns to “stay on the rails no matter what.” Sociologist David Riesman held up the same story in his influential study of social conformity, The Lonely Crowd (1950); but in Learning from the Left I argued that it is unclear whether that message is ultimately more powerful than that conveyed by Tootle’s visible pleasure in going off the tracks, as represented in the colorful illustrations by the communist artist Tibor Gergeley, one of many radicals who illustrated or wrote Golden Books and many other popular books as well. Also, Abate’s assertion that “narratives for children that were written by political radicals, cultural revolutionaries and social progressives from the 1910s through the 1970s” were “generally marginalized and largely niche narratives” (25), which is central to her claims about the influential nature of conservative children’s literature in the United States, is simply untrue. Historically, radicals have had a serious stake in the American mainstream, so that while socialists, communists, and other left...

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