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  • The Child as Father of the Man: American Childhood and Walt Disney
  • Martha Hixon (bio)
Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960, by Nicholas Sammond . Chapel Hill: Duke UP, 2005.

Marvelously rich in source material and thoughtful in approach, Nicholas Sammond's Babes in Tomorrowland is a history of American child-rearing practices in the mid-twentieth century, in particular how the interplay between the burgeoning popular media, predominant social theories of childhood, and everyday fears and concerns of the American parent worked together to produce what came to be considered a "typical" American child during the years between the Great Depression and the births of the post-war baby boomers.

Two overall purposes drive Sammond's dense study. One is to examine a debate that is still ongoing, regarding the influence of the media on children for good and for ill, and how Walt Disney Productions in particular benefited from this debate during its rise to fame. The other is to ponder the origins of the concept of the generic American child in the twentieth century, as constructed by developmental science as well as in the media—a concept to which parents turn in raising their own children, which marketing strategists use to sell educational products, and which social critics use in criticizing the excesses of American culture overall (2). Thus Sammond's book is not simply a consideration of the Disney company's rise to fame and power, as some might think, given the cover image and the title. More than that, it is an informed and informing study of the roots of the culture of contemporary American childhood.

In conjunction with the dual focuses of the book, the chapters alternate between scrutinizing the development of early twentieth-century social constructs of childhood and the development of the Disney corporation as it responded to those shifting theories. Chapter one, "Disney Makes Disney," covers fairly familiar ground. It reflects on how the persona of the man Walt Disney was created in the 1930s and 1940s by the corporation in collusion with the American public, who, Sammond argues, wanted to believe in the American Dream of self-made manhood and so embraced the embodiment of this dream—as promulgated by the corporation—in the persona of Walt, [End Page 239] self-made entrepreneur and small-town boy. Sammond's intent in this deconstruction is not to valorize or demonize either the man or the company, but rather to shed light upon how this public persona affected early twentieth-century practices of child rearing and interacted with the growing power of consumerism. He concludes, not surprisingly, that the Disney myth reinforced "the middle-class American fantasy of personal development" (26) and assuaged parental fears for American children and America's future after the Great Depression. Sammond in particular looks at how Disney's Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Cinderella (1950) reflected the nation's concerns about the future of its children and offered possibilities for negotiating that future. More to the point, Sammond argues, as a result of marketing strategies, the American public began equating Disney the man with the products his company produced: parents in particular and the public in general believed that "children who consumed Disney products were consuming the embodied life of Walt Disney, and in doing so, were increasing the odds that their lives might follow a trajectory similar to his" (79). Sammond notes how the Disney corporation responded to the belief that "consumption was itself productive" (130) by extending its products beyond films into everyday items—watches, toys, school supplies, and clothing—that would insure its presence in everyday life. At the end of this chapter, and even more so in the next, Sammond sets the mythic Walt as proffered to the public and reflected in his products against the concerns of social scientists of the1930s that movies were a negative influence on children; he concludes that the Disney myth was presented by the corporation and accepted by the American public as a reassuring counterbalance to these alarmist notions.

Chapter two, "Making a Manageable Child," moves from a focus on the emergent Disney corporation to the emerging social science...

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