Children's Literature

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE. Socialists and Communists produced children’s literature to transmit radical ideas to children. During the first half of the twentieth century, more than forty children’s books were published in English alone, with characters, plots, and settings intended to help children to identify with the radical movement and to absorb its ideology and culture. Exposing children to radical ideas would presumably predispose them to political radicalism as they grew older.

The first US socialist children’s book, Nicholas Klein’s Socialist Primer (1908), illustrated by Ryan Walker, was published by the Appeal to Reason newspaper and was modeled on the simple school reader. A British classic, The Child’s Socialist Reader, illustrated by the famed Walter Crane, appeared the next year. Socialist popular historian John Spargo’s Socialist Readings for Children (1909) included capsule biographies of Robert Owen and Karl Marx, descriptions of socialist meetings, and a “little talk on evolution.”

Caroline Nelson’s Nature Talks on Economics (1912) and Mary Marcy’s Stories of the Cave People (1912) and Rhymes of Early Jungle Folk (1922) all used science to explain the logic of socialism to children. In Nelson’s book the lessons of biological evolution and cooperation are used to show children why socialism is the necessary next step in social evolution. Mary Marcy, an editor of the International Socialist Review, used a kind of socialist anthropology, borrowed from Engels and Lewis Henry Morgan, to show how human society originated and evolved, and to make the point that further social evolution was necessary. The attention given to biological evolution was, finally, an expression of the socialist belief that evidence for evolutionary change in the natural world supported the possibility, and necessity, of social evolution. In only one Communist children’s book, Science and History for Boys and Girls (1932), by the former Episcopal archbishop-turned-Communist “Bad Bishop” William Montgomery Brown, did Darwinism play as important a role.

The Socialist Primer (1930), written and drawn by famed leftwing illustrator Art Young, was a pleasant reversion to pre-1920 socialist styles, illustrating excerpts from a pamphlet he had written for a New York state senatorial race of Scott Nearing in 1918.

Following the Russian Revolution, more children’s works came from abroad, made available in the United States by International Publishers. The first Communist children’s book, Fairy Tales for Worker’s Children (1925), by Herminia zur Muhlen, was originally published in German. It was followed by Battle in the Barnyard (1932), by Helen Kay, which contained stories of working-class children engaged in political struggle, as well as fables and fairy tales with socialist morals. Most notably, if two decades later, the book was banned from overseas sales—the first children’s books ever by an American writer—because the author refused to cooperate with HUAC in 1953.

American Communists republished or distributed several British Communist works, including two books by Geoffrey Trease, a British author who later went on to become quite well known for his mainstream historical fiction for young adults, the first among radical children’s books to move beyond the simplistic Sunday-school lesson or fairy tale. Bows against the Barons (1934), for example, is a radical retelling of the story of Robin Hood, while in Call to Arms (1935) three young people in a Central American country are drawn into a revolution. The ABC for Martin Mar (1935), released simultaneously in the United Kingdom and the United States by International Publishers by one M.Boland is highly didactic.

American Communist writers and artists during the 1930s and 1940s also created a wide range of materials for young adolescents, both in English and in Yiddish. The New Pioneer, a children’s magazine, could count on a small handful of brilliant artists, including William Gropper, a famous figure since the days of the Masses. Among the many illustrated stories, scholars have taken a special concern for several key contributions. Gropper’s “Pioneer Mother Goose” in the December, 1934, issue of the New Pioneer, was written by an otherwise unknown Ned Donn. “Sharecroppers” (December, 1937), written by Langston Hughes and illustrated by Fred Ellis, brought together two prodigious talents, in this case poetry by a master and fine drawings about Southern life. “American History Retold in Pictures” (New Pioneer issues, 1931-1932), written by Jack Hardy, Communist author of easy-to-read books on the American Revolution and labor movement, can be regarded as a first attempt to find radical heroes including Frances Wright and Gene Debs, hiding within the usual historical narratives. “Pickets and Slippery Sticks,” an intense interracial story in the New Pioneer Story Book (1935) had the distinction of being written by popular Communist novelist Myra Page Markey, and illustrated by Lydia Gibson, another veteran of the old Masses magazine.

Separately published and possibly a book for adults satirically designed as a children’s book, Mr.His (1939), is subtitled “A Children’s Story for Anybody,” a satire on the rich. Its writer and artist, the highly popular New Masses illustrator Syd Hoff (his nom de plume: A. Redfield), later attained a successful career in the mainstream, thanks to Danny and the Dinosaur (1958) among his many other works for children.

The 1940s brought inevitably wartime fiction to a new peak. Eric Lucas’s Voyage Thirteen (1946) describes the adventures of two boys serving on a merchant marine ship in the closing days of World War II. Its form is similar to many boys’ stories of ship life, except that the seamen include a Spanish republican, a militant African American, and a Communist, who teach the boys about life from a class-conscious, antifascist perspective. Jean Karsavina’s Tree by the Waters (1948) is about the ethnic and class conflict between Polish American workers and Yankees in a New England mill village. The Story of Your Coat (1946) by Clara Hollos, illustrated by Herbert Kruckman, came out of a class at the Jefferson School in New York, offering the extended saga of how clothes are made, with emphasis on the human element. Kruckman himself taught art at Camp Kinderland, illustrated Edith Segal’s Be My Friend (1950) and did illustration work for the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order.

The richly illustrated children’s works used as curriculum for the teaching of Yiddish at Camp Kinderland and elsewhere may be said to have reached an artistic peak in Labzig (1937, reprinted in 1947) by the popular Yiddish writer known as “Chaver Paver” (from a children’s song, real name Gershon Einbinder), because it is illustrated by the famed painter Moses Soyer. The “Depression Dog” went everywhere with his companion, a Jewish proletarian boy in the Bronx. The JPFO had earlier published a small volume by one of the greatest of all Yiddish writers, Moshe Nadir, whose Kind un Keit (1936), offers a series of whimsical poems.

No less extraordinary is North Star Shining, a Pictorial History of the American Negro (1947) by Hildegarde Hoyt Swift, because it is illustrated by the acclaimed woodcut artist Lynd Ward. Close in time to his Caldecott Award-winning The Biggest Bear (1953), Ward drew the North Star material with fascism in the near background and stressed the Black soldiers’ role in the War. A late entry in the old left style, The Little Tailor (1955) written and drawn by William Gropper, appeared only two years after Gropper refused to answer the questions of a Senate committee investigating Communists.
A handful of Communist and former popularists, faced with the blacklist but also with the boom in children’s books, found their way toward writing careers in the popularization of science, mostly without any direct political suggestions. But a handful of these writers devoted themselves to US history and to Black history in particular. The short-lived Freedom (1950-1955) tabloid-sized magazine published by W.E.B. Du Bois had a great deal of African American history, offered as vignettes for young people, illustrated by Linda Lewis and Elsie Robbins. Among individual authors, Eve Merriam, one of the most successful, was eventually to win a National Council of Teachers Excellence Award in 1981 for her children’s poetry, but her Independent Voices (1968) carries a strong pitch for women in the Abolitionist movement.

The introduction of Black history as a central concern of Left work for children signaled that the messages from the wilderness of the Marxists had become very much mainstream, at least by the 1960s. Subjects such as women’s history, labor history and ecology would find writers and artists for children’s book well within the mainstream. Among the authors of these books, Dorothy Sterling would rank high. Active in the Federal Writers Project of the 1930s, Sterling went on to write more than thirty-five books for children. She appeared on the William Allen White Children’s Book “Masterlist” of authors in 1960-1961and was given the Carter G. Woodson Book Award in 1977 for The Trouble They Seen: Story of Reconstruction in the Words of African Americans. Her other works include Freedom Train: The Story of Harriet Tubman (1954), Lucretia Mott (1964) and Tear Down the Walls! A History of the American Civil Rights Movement (1969).

Micklenberg, Julie L. “Jews in American Children’s Literature,” in Paul Buhle, ed., Jews and American Popular Culture: II, Music, Theater, Popular Art and Literature. Westport: Praeger, 2007, pp. 271-86.

Micklenberg, Julia L. and Philip Nel, eds. Tales for Little Rebels. New York: New York University Press, 2008.

Mishler, Paul C. “The Littlest Proletariat: American Communists and Their Children, 1922–1950.” Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1988.

Miegs, Cornelia, et al. A Critical History of Children’s Literature. New York: Macmillan, 1969.