Due to my fascination with the intersection of literature, history and politics (and with the Age of Containment in particular) I had great expectations for Julia Mickenberg’s text. Although I am mostly satisfied by her findings, and I found her readings of the primary texts particularly insightful, I was frustrated by her occasional one-dimensional treatments of history. I will thus use this post to explain why I believe Learning from the Left can be taken as an example of both good and bad interdisciplinary work.
Mickenberg does a great job in piecing together the information she draws from her massive and multifaceted corpus of sources. The all-embracing analysis of the primary material she selected is particularly impressive. She takes into consideration an extensive repertoire of books for children that differ broadly in terms of genre, settings, stock characters, ideologies, narrative techniques, tropes, origins (national VS transnational), distribution and reception. I also particularly appreciated her close readings, most of which literally prompted me to look up the primary texts online (ever before Prof. Hintz uploaded some of them in the Dropbox).
What’s even more stunning is the way she engages with material as diverse as periodicals, interviews, and archival records. The employment of those sources allows her to enrich her analysis on multiple levels. First, she retraces the personal histories of those who worked in the field in order to persuasively show how different people were moved by different motives in their perpetuation of a leftist ideology through children’s literature. Furthermore, they enable her to connect the dots and successfully delineate the interwovenness and synergies (among authors, publishers, political organizations, educators, and librarians) that made its emergence and diffusion possible, as well as to expose the importance of the gendered nature of the apparatus.
However, much to my displeasure, I found Learning from the Left occasionally subject to oversimplification and historical inaccuracies that illustrate some of the challenges that can emerge from engaging with interdisciplinary work. I will take the first chapter and her treatment of progressivism, which I personally found quite problematic, as an example of my critique.
Let me start by saying that the very way in which she uses the term “progressive” confuses me at times – throughout the book, it is unclear when she employs it as an adjective (as in “using or interested in new or modern ideas especially in politics and education”, vid Merriam Webster http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/progressive ) and when she is addressing the actual progressive movement that emerged in the United States early in the 20th century. When she refers to the latter, she is correct in pointing out that progressives, like Lyrical Leftists, also believed in the idea of “salvation by the child” and largely invested in programs intended to mold (especially urban) children, before they disappeared into “the anonymous mass” (as Jacob Riis put it in How the Other Half Lives). Their efforts ranged from environmental improvement programs (i.e. the construction of parks and playgrounds in heavily populated urban areas) to experimental education.
Mickenberg frames progressivism as a school of thought that
embraced what cultural historian Michael Denning has called the Popular Front “structure of feeling,” which included a commitment to challenging fascism, racism, and imperialism; to promoting democracy; and to forging international, working-class solidarity. As some readers probably already gather, progressive was often a code word for “Communist”. (10)
However, she fails to frame the context in which they operated, and to fully explain the nuances of a movement that was hardly homogeneous in its operations and ideologies. Regardless of their (apparent) antipathy for genteel society and capitalism, progressivism was hardly a leftist initiative. In fact, the term progressive eluded political ideologies, as the movement counted on individuals from across the political spectrum, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. According to New Leftist historians (such as William Williams and Gabriel Kolko), despite the large involvement of the middle-class, progressivism was indeed largely led by part of the new industrial ruling class who identified the corporation as the central institution of the system. From this perspective, public intervention on business regulation promoted by the progressive movement should not be considered a victory of the people against the power of private tycoons, but rather the beginning of the control of business over politics that eventually brought to the establishment of political capitalism. Now, one can clearly see how locating progressives in the same tradition as Lyrical Leftists, without at least mentioning its underlying contradictions, could be somehow misleading.
Moreover, Mickenberg posits that the “[the left] built upon progressive traditions- especially marked in the Settlement House Movement from the turn of the century – of celebrating the distinctive cultural contributions of the national’s immigrant groups.” (46) Such a claim represents yet another historical inaccuracy. The Settlement House Movement was composed of social workers who aimed at educating the poor by establishing settlement houses in poverty-stricken urban areas where they would also live. Settlement workers, predominantly young, white, middle-class, college-educated Protestants, hoped to relieve the poverty of their low-income neighbors by transmitting knowledge and culture, and by providing services such as daycare, education, and healthcare as well as recreational spaces (among which resourceful libraries). The Settlement House Movement emerged from the progressives’ deeply rooted beliefs in immigrant assimilation. In other words, they believed new-comers were to become Americanized by rejecting their native culture for the one of their new country, a process that did not entail only taking up new cultural mores, but also, as Robert Downling has pointed out, “the initiation […] into a democratic society increasingly consumer oriented and actuated by industrial growth.” (114) What is celebrated by Mickenberg as an early attempt to instill in children the importance of ethnic diversity reflects instead the will of progressives to assimilate immigrant children, the great majority of whom belong to the working class, to mainstream society – a goal in clear contrast with the leftist’s aims to foster independent thinking.
I will bring one more example to your attention. The nuances that characterized the progressive movement are once again ignored altogether when she points out that “the emphasis on self-directed activity among the children was characteristic of practices widely promoted by advocates of progressive or “experimental” education.” (31) Although most progressive educators agreed on the necessity of rethinking the role of educators in primary and secondary schools, different fringes of the movement were also in disagreement on the degree to which teachers should function as authoritative figures. This division went beyond the school context. I think for example of the dichotomy between the “park movement” and the “playground movement”, both of which placed a special emphasis on new generations to create for children an alternative environment to the vice-ridden city streets. Whereas the former encouraged unsupervised play, playground enthusiasts believed the presence of a trained supervisor was required on the premises, as in the lack of such control, “the playground community would degenerate into anarchy and chaos.” (Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 249)
Although these are only few among many passages in the text that I found problematic, all in all, I do not think Mickenberg’s general claims are undermined by her occasionally superficial analysis of politics and history. I attribute to the author great merits in illustrating how in the first half of the 20th century, leftist authors employed children’s literature as a mean to provide lessons to the nation’s youth by instilling their work with social significance. She accurately decodes the (more or less explicit) messages in the primary texts she examines, messages ranging from a critique of the status quo, to the promotion of causes such as the working class struggle and racial equality. However, from Learning from the Left we also learn that stepping in multiple fields can be challenging. I understand that the Progressive Era is not Mickenberg’s main concern, but considering she invested a whole chapter tracing the origins of several elements of leftist children’s literature in the practices of the progressive movement, I believe she should have provided her readers with the proper historical contextualization, rather than granting us only pieces of information that were instrumental to her thesis. I do not mean to bash the text, nor the author, but – as our field is increasingly embracing (and encouraging us to reach out to) other disciplines (vid last week’s class discussion and readings) – I thought I’d mention these dissonances as an example of problems that can possibly be encountered while conducting interdisciplinary research and I am hoping that more potential issues will be brought up during our class discussion.
