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5. Thrills for Children: The Youth’s Companion, the Civil War, and the Commercialization of American Youth
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| 77 5 Thrills for Children The Youth’s Companion, the Civil War, and the Commercialization of American Youth Paul B. Ringel The week after the Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter, the Boston children’s weekly the Youth’s Companion opened its issue with a didactic tale called “The Counterfeit Quarter,” and its editorial column discussed “Good Friday in Brazil.”1 After the first battle at Bull Run, the paper led with a story called “The Suicide,” and the editorial considered “The Notches in the Osiers.”2 Finally, on December 19, 1861, the Companion acknowledged the existence of the conflict when “William Walker, a Story of the War” appeared on the front page. The story recounts the internal struggles of the fatherless title character regarding whether to enlist in the Union army or stay home and attend to his mother and sisters. Eventually, he determines that his duty is to join the army, and he dies in his first battle. At the conclusion of the story, the narrator ruminates over the reasons for and consequences of war: The great hearts o’ all times are those which rise above the thoughts of personal interests,andfeelthatwrongmustbeputdownandrightvindicatedatanycost. But why not do it some other way? Why must men maim and murder each other like wild beasts? Why not settle their differences like rational beings? These are hard questions, too. We only know that every war and every change among the nations is helping to work out God’s great plan for the redemption of the world. And is it worth all this? . . . Yes it is worth it, and the mother felt so, in all her grief and desolation, or rather she felt that this is a time when we must not stop to count the cost; when we have nothing to do but go straight forward and leave everything to God.3 Thus even as the Companion turned toward the war, its concerns were neither public nor political. Instead, the paper’s editor, Daniel Sharp Ford, 78 | Paul B. Ringel used stories such as “William Walker, A Story of the War” to turn his audience ’s attention inward to the intensely personal and spiritual question of where an individual’s primary responsibility lay during this time of crisis. Within fifteen months, however, the Companion’s approach to the war had shifted dramatically. By early 1863, Ford began to insert stories on the inside pages of the paper that not only presented an overtly pro-Union political stance but also offered explicit and sensational violent details about the war and its effects, the likes of which had rarely appeared in the paper. Some of these stories celebrated Union soldiers as brave and intelligent individuals who could regularly trick Southerners into surrender or death. In “Vermont’s Strategy,” for example, a “crafty, hard-working, rough-sinewed” young soldier created a device that allowed him to fire a gun from a distance; when the Confederate sentry stood up to fire at the position from which the gun discharged, the Vermonter shot him in the side of the head.4 Others detailed the moral depravity of slaveholders who tied up slaves so rats could eat their feet or whipped a woman and then soaked her cuts in brine in order to prevent scarring.5 Thus over the course of the war, the Companion moved from ignoring the conflict to using it as an instrument to inspire moral introspection , and finally to presenting it as a moralistic drama suitable for both the instruction and entertainment of its young audience. This wartime shift was a pivotal stage in Ford’s longer struggle to transform the Companion into a more widely marketable publication without sacrificing its reputation as a respectable conveyor of conservative Protestant values. Ford and a partner had purchased the Companion in late 1856, at a time when the paper was a struggling publication with a circulation of approximately 4,800 subscribers, most of whom resided in or near Boston or Portland, Maine. Before the war, the new owners’ commercializing campaigns had confronted resistance, uncertainty, and outright failure. The Companion’s antebellum audience, which was mostly affiliated with Congregationalist and other churches still deeply influenced by Puritan theology, proved unwilling to embrace fully Ford’s attempts to integrate their children into the nation’s emerging culture of consumption and leisure. The conflict itself initially drove Ford even further from his original agenda. Yet wartime circumstances, including displacement of families and a consequent intensification of fears of juvenile delinquency...