The Appeal of the Underdog: Mr. Lunch and Leftist Politics as Entertainment

Bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs.

—The Communist Manifesto

Activist Henry Spira explains political leftism¹ as being "on the side of the weak, not powerful; of the oppressed, not the oppressor; of the ridden, not the rider" (Singer 8). This is the logic of the underdog, a logic that this article will trace across a number of contemporary cultural formats, culminating in a reading of three picture books about a small white dog called Mr. Lunch. That children, as the intended audience of these texts, are themselves underdogs in terms of their subjugation in a world dominated by adult cultural power is a matter that will necessarily come to the fore. At the crux of this examination, however, is an ideological confusion arising from the way in which both the left and the right employ the underdog as a metaphor for their own (theoretically opposed) agendas.

To position this debate within the discipline of children's literature is to significantly politicize child audiences, at least in terms of understanding them as open to ideological manipulation. Such an agenda rests on the pervasive (adult) belief in children as unformed political subjects who are at a stage in their intellectual development in which they can be taught good from bad, right from wrong, and left from right. A case in point is the Marxist Internet Archive (www.Marxists.org), which is candid about its motives in this regard. Its children's literature section begins with a statement from the Russian revolutionary writer Nadezhada K. Krupskaya: "The children's book is one of the most powerful weapons of the socialist character-education of the growing generation." Further, the site unequivocally claims, "It is the aim of these pages to contribute to a contemporary communist theory of teaching and child-rearing" (Ryan).

In terms of the historical background of the Left's use of children's texts, it is significant that the Marxist Internet Archive positions such doctrinal agendas as most prominent during revolutionary pushes. The site lists the United States among countries where "[m]ajor radical publishers had children's departments and heated debates over expectations and development of socialist character traits raged within parties and in radical newspapers" (Ryan). In the United States the Communist Party was strongest during the 1930s (Hodgson 94); while children's literature occupied something of a peripheral position in left-right debates, the communist interest in "raising future generations" with appropriate reading material did attract some backlash during the Cold War. Amid the excessive anticommunist rhetoric of the 1950s and 1960s, Dr. Fred Schwarz addressed the role of children's literature in the vehement You Can Trust the Communists (to be Communists) (1960), in which he claimed that a terrifying literary crusade was underway. Schwarz, however, appears somewhat baffled by the content of these books: "An examination of some of the children's literature produced by the Communists induces bewilderment in most loyal Americans, for they can discover nothing wrong with these books. The stories are well told, beautifully illustrated, and do not teach Communism in any way. The trouble with these books is that there is nothing wrong with them" (112). Schwarz's strange sense that these stories are ideologically innocent is only tempered by his fear that because books themselves are desirable objects, they can be used to ensnare the children of unsuspecting capitalists. He goes on to describe this seduction in lurid metaphors implying child molestation. Perhaps he is missing the subtext, or—and this is more interesting in relation to my contention—perhaps the narrative rewards for values and behaviors in these stories are not so divergent in terms of left and right worldviews. When ideology is reduced to the metaphoric modes typically required by children's literature formats, it seems to encompass a good deal of shared as well as contested territory—territory that is marked by the scents of both communist and capitalist underdogs.

Written and illustrated by J. Otto Seibold and Vivian Walsh, Mr. Lunch Takes a Plane Ride (1993), Mr. Lunch Borrows a Canoe (1994...