Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States

Abstract

At the height of the Cold War, dozens of radical and progressive writers, illustrators, editors, librarians, booksellers, and teachers cooperated to create and disseminate children's books that challenged the status quo. This book provides the first historic overview of their work. Spanning from the 1920s, when both children's book publishing and American Communism were becoming significant on the American scene, to the late 1960s, when youth who had been raised on many of the books in this study unequivocally rejected the values of the Cold War, this book shows how "radical" values and ideas that have now become mainstream (including cooperation, interracial friendship, critical thinking, the dignity of labor, feminism, and the history of marginalized people), were communicated to children in repressive times. A range of popular and critically acclaimed children's books, many by former teachers and others who had been blacklisted because of their political beliefs, made commonplace the ideas that McCarthyism tended to call "subversive". These books, about history, science, and contemporary social conditions as well as imaginative works like Harold and the Purple Crayon, Danny and the Dinosaur, and Millions of Cats; science fiction such as the Danny Dunn books, and popular girls' mystery series like the Kathy Martin books were readily available to children: most could be found in public and school libraries, and some could even be purchased in classrooms through book clubs that catered to educational audiences. Drawing upon interviews, archival research, and hundreds of children's books published from the 1920s through the 1970s, the book offers a history of the children's book in light of the history of the Left, and a new perspective on the links between the Old Left of the 1930s and the New Left of the 1960s.