Preview of Henry Jenkins' New Book – Where the Wild Things Were: Boyhood and Permissive Parenting in Post-War America (Part Two)

The following passage is a continued excerpted from Henry Jenkins’ new book, Where the Wild Things Were: Boyhood and Permissive Parenting in Post-War America (New York: New York University Press). If you like what you read and want to read the rest of the book,

Use code NYUAU30 for 30% off when you order the book on nyupress.org. 

Here's the link: https://nyupress.org/9781479831890/where-the-wild-things-were/

“You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”: The Whiteness of Permissive Culture

These transitions in ideas about childcare can be traced back to the origins of the Child Study movement in the early twentieth century. Here, I consider one particular outgrowth of the Progressive Era—the ways that the permissive imagination was founded on certain assumptions surrounding whiteness that imperfectly fit the realities of Black America. The initial focus of Child Study was on reforming the conditions that impacted the lives of low-income, immigrant, and minority children, especially those living in urban environments. Increasingly, the focus shifted toward the raising of “normal” children, in other words, white, middle-class children. Normality was also defined through the norms of child development shaped by observational work. Since the early 1930s, Yale University’s Arnold Gesell had been a leading voice promoting scientifically grounded child management; he was to childhood what Masters and Johnson were to human sexuality. Returning to a tradition of surveys begun by his teacher, G. Stanley Hall, Gesell interviewed thousands of American parents, recording each stage of their children’s development and publishing encyclopedic works mapping children’s biological and cognitive development. Working with Francis Ilg, Gesell made this data more readily available to postwar parents, hoping to lower stress by helping them to understand their child’s individualized development in comparison with others in their cohort. Martha Weinman Lear, a critic of permissive parenting, wryly notes that many parents used such norms as competitive benchmarks. Black children were underrepresented in this research, which tended to fore- ground white, middle-class practices and perspectives. We might see this conflation of “normal” with whiteness as perhaps the original sin of the Child Study movement.

Advice writers had little to say directly about Black childhoods, sometimes expressing discomfort about knowing how to speak to the realities of Black lives. But they did sometimes address concerns about whether white children were being taught to hate people of different races and ethnicities. A book responding to parents’ questions about family life in wartime confronted this query:

Until recent events forced us into a horrible dilemma, my husband and I believed and taught our children that hate and war were the most destructive forces on earth. We taught them also to respect and believe in the reasonableness of human beings of all races and nationalities. Now there is an orgy of hate let loose. I believe my older children can keep their balance, but I dread the effect on the little ones. Must even the babies hate?

While some animosity toward the enemy was a consequence of the war, the Child Study Association of America advised: “The best thing we can do is to help our children to be fair to others of enemy alien descent with whom they come in contact and who are certainly not responsible for this war. If they really love justice they will not tolerate ostracizing the classmate whose parents come from Germany, or ridiculing Japanese children in their community, or stealing fruit from the corner grocer whose name and accent are Italian.”  As the war ended, the focus expanded to include not simply people of other nations but also people of diverse races living in the United States. The novelist Pearl S. Buck (1952) explained: “It is the duty of every parent and teacher to see that in our own community the children are made aware of the problem of race and to pass on, not prejudices, but freedom of choice for the new generation to deal with what in their time may be a choice that will result either in world harmony or the greatest and most horrible war the human race has yet seen.”

These wartime writers saw helping their own children to deal fairly with people of other races as part of their patriotic duty. As Buck reminds her readers, “Do not forget that Nazism had as twin doctrines the false ideas that one race is superior to another and that the male is superior to the female. Both of these notions are at the root of tyranny in society.” And both, Buck felt, need to be resolved to prevent future race wars.

In Glass House of Prejudice (1946), Dorothy W. Baruch challenged readers to confront their own prejudices to better prepare their children to live in a more diverse society. Baruch was the founder and director of the Gramercy Cooperative Nursery School. In the late 1920s, she directed the parent-education department at the National Council of Jewish Women. For much of her career, Baruch ran a private practice treating children with psychological issues. Between 1939 and 1953, she published eight books on child psychology, education, and family life. Baruch translated the wartime struggle against fascism into a model of democratic parenting.

In Glass House of Prejudice, Baruch notes that fascists encouraged American isolationism through tapping racial prejudices, dividing the population against itself and diminishing concerns for the plight of European Jews: “Why, as the hate messages flew across America, were they lifted in such eager hands? Unless they were in some fashion welcome, would they have been so closely embraced?” She asks: “Did we expect to rescue the people of other countries from intolerance and persecution and to disregard what is happening to millions in our own country? Why have we allowed the break between Americans of different races to widen so that whole masses of people have come to feel that they are unwanted and they do not essentially belong?”

Such attitudes, she concluded, had been taught, and so a concerted effort might ensure that the new generation were taught to embrace the richness of American culture. Racism took root as children worked through their anger and frustrations over ways they had been unfairly treated, directing rage outward against those different from themselves, rather than inward, toward family members who often sparked those feelings. As the 1949 musical South Pacific recounted:

“It’s not born in you.
It happens after you are born.
You’ve got to be carefully taught to hate and fear. . . . You’ve got to be taught to be afraid of people
whose eyes are oddly made
and people whose skin is a different shade.”

Consider how the song sees racism as a set of “learned” cultural prejudices mapped onto biological differences. Following this same logic, Baruch concludes, “If children could grow up learning to handle their hostile emotions and having guidance in doing so all along the way, the vicious circle of hatred could be diminished even in one generation.”

Baruch shares the story of a classroom of ten-year-olds that “suddenly went wild” when the teacher left the room, chanting that one little boy, Jerry, was a “dirty jew.” Confronting the class, the teacher suggests that the children seemed to be feeling “very, very mean” and needed to find a way to share those feelings:

They decided they wanted to draw about it. Before they started, the teacher assured them that they could make their pictures show mean feelings coming out in any way they liked. Some drew pictures of cannons shooting men to pieces. Others drew pictures of people setting fire to houses. One boy drew a man and a woman and a baby with nooses around their necks. . . . When they were through with the drawings, the children crowded into small groups, looking at the different pictures. The teacher smiled to herself when she noticed two of the boys who had been among Jerry’s worst persecutors. Their arms were now around his shoulders. They were intimately pursuing the friendship that they had denied before.

Baruch’s account expresses the support, at least among progressive educators, for the project of promoting “racial harmony,” a phrase blurring racial and ethnic distinctions in its application.

Children’s book writers in the immediate postwar era similarly sought a more accepting society. Consider, for example, In Henry’s Backyard. Columbia University anthropologists Ruth Benedict (Mead’s mentor) and Gene Weltfish had written a pamphlet, The Races of Mankind (1943), to help debunk myths that had been spread by fascists overseas and racists at home. In 1945, United Productions of America (UPA) produced an animated short based on the pamphlet, and in 1948 a children’s book based on the original text and illustrated with pictures from the film was released. Henry, the story’s protagonist, dreams that “the whole world became so small that it fit nicely into his own backyard and all sorts of odd people had become his neighbors.” Henry needs to overcome his fears as he confronts such cultural and racial differences: “Then suddenly he felt...an ugly sort of tug...that stopped him. It was his Green Devil, who lived inside him. It had slithered . . . out . . . of him. And it whispered, ‘don’t speak to these people, Henry! You won’t like them. They’re DIFFERENT!’” The book helps Henry—and the reader— overcome their prejudices: “We’re not born haters. . . . We’ve only got one world and we’re all in it.”

Such direct representations of racism, or for that matter, racial difference would become less and less common the deeper we move into the 1950s. Postwar storytellers generally avoided the negative racial stereotypes found all too commonly in the 1930s and 1940s. But they frequently responded by constructing an all-white world or by moving into the realm of allegory. In a nuanced, multilayered analysis, Philip Nel argues that children’s book authors had minds like sponges, which absorbed, sometimes unconsciously, influences from all directions. He argues that The Cat in the Hat, for example, might be described as “mixed race” because its origins lay in both white and Black culture (including Black-faced minstrelsy), that as a consequence it may be hard to see some of the stereotypical representations upon which it was built, and it may generate contradictory or ambivalent feelings about race as we contemplate the presence of this trickster character in a white household.

It was easier to avoid representing minoritized children than to construct alternative framings. Consider, for example, the case of P. D. Eastman, one of the animators who worked on The Races of Man. Eastman had served in the US Signal Corps during the war, working on the Private Snafu training films under Theodor Geisel, better known today as Dr. Seuss. Eastman also collaborated with Geisel as a scriptwriter and storyboard artist on Gerald McBoing-Boing. And in the early 1960s, Geisel invited Eastman to contribute to his Beginner Books series. East- man is today best known for his picture books, Go Dog Go (1961) and Are You My Mother? (1960).

At the risk of overreading a simple fable, Are You My Mother? depicts a baby bird’s first encounter with difference, not the racial difference In Henry’s Backyard depicted, but rather the differences between species. As the baby bird is about to hatch, its mother departs in search of food, leaving the infant to confront the world on his own. The newborn asks each new creature he encounters whether they are its mother. Across the book, the baby bird again and again discovers places where he does not belong: “The kitten was not his mother. The hen was not his mother. The dog was not his mother. . . .” In the end, a giant steam shovel—the SNORT!—returns him to the loving care of his own mother. The book is a reassuring story suggesting that everyone has a loving mother and that children do not necessarily notice the differences that matter to adults. But it is also a story where birds of a feather flock together. I do not mean to suggest that Are You My Mother? is a racist work. If anything, it tries to be “color-blind” by removing the story from the human realm altogether, but in the context of a society struggling with segregation, it stresses hominess, comfort, and familiarity. In shifting from cultural categories such as race to biological categories such as those distinguishing animal species, Eastman made such distinctions seem more natural and logical.

For most of the period, children’s fictions were segregated just as decisively as children’s lives were, the majority of the child-rearing advice books assumed a white middle-class reader, and the majority of children’s films and programs had an all-white cast. Fewer Black parents were raising their children according to Dr. Spock. They could not afford the risks—misbehaving Black boys might have lethal encounters with cops. Permissiveness constituted a form of white privilege, no matter how much these authors might have wished otherwise. Their normalization of whiteness, their silence about racism, made children’s fictions complicit in America’s inequalities.

Biography

Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era.  He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.