GOLDEN MEAN: COMMERCIAL CULTURE, MIDDLE-CLASS IDEALS, AND THE LITTLE GOLDEN BOOKS By JULIE SINN CASSIDY A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2008 1 © 2008 Julie Sinn Cassidy 2 To all the Sinns and Scheitlins 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Before all else and for so many reasons, I thank my husband David J. Cassidy, a documentary film producer who will forever be plagued by a Partridge family pop star. This project on Little Golden Books came to fruition under the guidance of Dr. John Cech, to whom I am deeply grateful. Moreover, I want to thank my dissertation committee—Dr. Kenneth Kidd, Dr. Marsha Bryant, and Dr. Linda Lamme—for providing excellent insight, feedback, and encouragement throughout this process. They have all challenged and shaped me as a writer and scholar. For her editorial eye, I would also like to thank Miriam Downey, who read every word of this dissertation multiple times. This project would not have been possible without two specific Little Golden Book collectors, Steve Santi and Holly Everson, who provided me with access to their collections and answered my numerous questions. Diane Muldrow, the current editor of the Little Golden Books at Random House, graciously filed in any information gaps. The generous Children’s Literature Association’s Hannah Beiter Graduate Student Scholarship and the University of Florida’s O. Ruth McQuown Supplemental Scholarship for Graduate Women provided me with the funds to travel across the country, dig through archives, and present at conferences. I am especially indebted, though, to Rita Smith, Curator of the University of Florida’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature. Under Rita’s watchful eye, I returned to the Little Golden Books of my childhood by reading and cataloging over 300 of them for the Baldwin’s Collection. Today, I truly appreciate how an abundance of friends, family members, friends’ family members, and former professors have rallied behind me over the years. My friend and fellow graduate student, Lisa Hager, certainly deserves her own line of thanks considering how often she has had to help me find just the right word or listen to me ramble through a chapter’s main point. Another dear friend from graduate school, Kirsten Bartholomew Ortega, not only read and 4 commented on the occasional rough draft, but also gave me innumerable pep talks on-demand over margaritas or while quilting on a Saturday afternoon. Despite the physical distances between us now, the friends I grew up with in Fort Scott still encourage me to live each day with much happiness. Between swimming in defunct strip pits, rounds of birthday croquet, day trips to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, nights on haunted bridges, and public protests for skateboarding space, being stagnant or apathetic was never an option. Last, but certainly not least, I thank my mother, who instilled the value of an education in me at an early age and granted me the freedom to follow my dreams. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................4 ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................................8 CHAPTER 1 AN INTRODUCTION: WHY THE LITTLE GOLDEN BOOKS ........................................10 Emergence in Middlebrow Culture ........................................................................................16 Project Overview ....................................................................................................................30 2 FROM THE 1940S TO THE 2000S: DECADES OF LITTLE GOLDEN BOOKS .............33 3 THE GOLD STANDARD: GOLDEN AGES AND THE LITTLE GOLDEN BOOKS .......57 The First Golden Age of Children’s Literature ......................................................................61 A Second Golden Age ............................................................................................................67 4 IMAGES OF INNOCENCE: CHILDREN IN THE LITTLE GOLDEN BOOKS ................85 The Romantic Child and the Knowing Child .........................................................................86 Innocence and Children in the Little Golden Books ..............................................................87 American Innocence .............................................................................................................102 Changing Faces and Racial Diversity ...................................................................................104 5 THE HAPPY FAMILY: GENDER DIVIDES AND THE LITTLE GOLDEN BOOKS ....113 Educating Parents And Educating Children .........................................................................114 Mothers and Fathers in the 1940s and 1950s ........................................................................118 Mommies and Daddies in the Little Golden Books ..............................................................122 1960s and Beyond .................................................................................................................135 6 TRANSPORTING NOSTALGIA: Souvenirs of childhood and THE LITTLE GOLDEN BOOKS .................................................................................................................................141 Nostalgia, Souvenirs, and Little Golden Books ....................................................................142 Acquisition of Little Golden Books ......................................................................................147 Collecting and Little Golden Books .....................................................................................150 Recycling Little Golden Book Images .................................................................................156 7 “FOR THE MASSES, NOT THE CLASSES”: AN EPILOGUE ........................................162 APPENDIX A LITTLE GOLDEN BOOK ADVERTISEMENTS ..............................................................169 6 B LITTLE GOLDEN BOOK FABRICS .................................................................................172 LIST OF REFERENCES .............................................................................................................174 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................184 7 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy GOLDEN MEAN: COMMERCIAL CULTURE, MIDDLE-CLASS IDEALS, AND THE LITTLE GOLDEN BOOKS By Julie Sinn Cassidy May 2008 Chair: John Cech Major: English In 1942, the first twelve Little Golden Books published by Simon and Schuster marked the beginning of the longest-running series of picture books in the United States. The Little Golden Books quickly gained popularity in the 1940s during the rise of middlebrow culture through a confluence of writing, illustrating, printing, and marketing techniques that paralleled the first Golden Age of Children’s Literature in the late 19th Century. During both of these periods in children’s literature, publishers, authors, and illustrators joined in their commitment to higher quality writing and illustrations, which further revolutionized the design of books designated primarily for children. Since 1942, over 1,200 unique Little Golden Books titles have been published as part of their catalogue. Purposefully or not, the majority of Little Golden Books feature children whose physical features document America’s continuing idealization of innocence in children’s picture books. By coupling the marginalization of ethnically diverse children with the depiction of white children in stable families, the Little Golden Books help maintain the 1940s and 1950s version of the patriarchal, nuclear family. Unlike Dr. Seuss or Maurice Sendak, whose illustrations of children often defied convention and were sometimes even thought of as ugly when they were 8 first published, the illustrators for the Little Golden Books did nothing new that might work against the status quo of the symbolic innocent child as already established in children’s picture books. By focusing primarily on the image of the white, innocent child and marginalizing ethnic diversity, the Little Golden Books both reinforce and preserve the patriarchal nuclear family values that dominated white suburban America in the 1940s and 1950s. The movement of white Americans into the suburbs also facilitated the polarization of gender roles since women were more likely to stay home while men traveled farther distances to work. These aspects of white middle-class suburban American life were mirrored by the children in the Little Golden Books who playacted the bread-winning male (boys only) and the homemaking female (girls only). Even though they started as a series of affordable picture books and continue to flourish in the publishing industry, the Little Golden Books have also explored other marketing avenues for their well-known characters such as toys, domestic goods, computer games, and children’s videos. The marketing, collecting, and recycling of today’s Little Golden Books constitutes a prime example of the nostalgia-infused repackaging of children’s books as “classics”. Yet, critics and academics continue to summarily ignore the impact of these