[February 7th
marks the 150th birthday of Laura Ingalls Wilder, one of
America’s most famous writers and a cultural voice who provided entry points
into American history for many many young readers (and then TV viewers). So this
week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of texts and contexts of histories for kids,
leading up to a crowd-sourced post on where and how you got your childhood
history (or where your kids are getting it)!]
How an American
Studies approach can help us dig into the many layers of one of our most
enduring children’s books.
When you have
two young AmericanStudiers like I do, you spend a lot of time reading
children’s books. (Much less time now that they can and do read to themselves a
great deal, and even have started reading to each other; but this post is
purposefully and very relevantly nostalgic for my life of a few years ago!) Often
the same books over and over again, in fact. While there are few things I would
rather do, it’s nonetheless fair to say that an adult AmericanStudier’s mind
occasionally wanders during the 234th reading of a particular book;
hence my thoughts on The Cat in the Hat
and single motherhood in this
post, for example. One of the boys’ young childhood favorites, for its
construction-vehicle-focus, for its beautiful illustrations, and for its
pitch-perfect narrative voice and storytelling, was Virginia Lee Burton’s Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (1939). And luckily for the
American Studier who got to read Mike
at least once a week for a good couple years, the book also reveals, reflects,
and carries forward a number of complex and significant American narratives and
histories.
Burton’s book
was written and published during the Great Depression, and it certainly engages
with that central historical context in interesting if somewhat conflicted
ways. The nation-building work on public/infrastructure projects that Mike and
Mary Ann do in the opening pages echoes the Works
Progress Administration’s and other New Deal-era efforts, such as the
Tennessee Valley Authority and the Hoover Dam, and
makes a case for the importance of labor and work more broadly; yet in Burton’s
book those projects are apparently quickly forgotten, and Mike and Mary Ann
find themselves unemployed, their own depression (in every sense, as they cry
together over a landfill of discarded steam shovels) the text’s real starting
point. Similarly, when they journey to the small town of Poppersville to bid on
its city hall project, they encounter some of the worst as well as the best of
communal relationships during an economic downturn—the penny-pinching,
dog-eat-dog mentality of councilman Henry B. Swap is what gets Mike and Mary
Ann the job in the first place and motivates at least some of the intense
interest in their efforts, even if the community members do seem eventually to
bond together in support of those (successful) efforts.
Those conflicted
themes are not only relevant to the Depression, however—they also reflect a
couple of distinct but interconnected dualities out of which much of American
populism, at least since the late 19th century Populist movement and
party, has arisen. For one, American populism has vacillated
significantly between a nostalgic embrace of idealized, seemingly lost
historical communities and identities and a progressive push for future change;
Burton’s book, with both the villain’s role played by new technologies and Mike
and Mary Ann’s Popperville endpoint, seems to side with nostalgia and the past,
although I might argue that Mike and Mary Ann have helped moved Popperville a
bit more fully into the future in the process. Even if they have, though, they
have done so in an explicitly rural, or at least small-town, setting, a world
which has likewise been in complicated and often conflicted relationship with
the urban throughout the history of
America populism. But Mike and Mary Ann’s early identities and works
certainly resonate with the urban contexts of the labor movement, and perhaps
their arc in the book suggests that the worlds of urban and rural America could
no longer afford, in the depression or in the 20th century more
broadly, to remain separate in perspective or reality.
Next childish
history tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Kids’ histories you’d remember and share for the weekend post?
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