O, You Kid!

Wow! Steve Mintz and I were virtual colleagues in H-Net. At that time, Mintz edited (with others) an electronic discussion group for historians interested in the use of media in their classes. Currently, he is one of the editors of H-Slavery. I was the co-editor of H-Survey for 5 years, beginning in 1995. H-Survey was an e-mail discussion group for teachers of the beginning course in U.S. history, commonly known as the survey. Imagine seeing that Mintz has written a book published by Harvard University Press and the recipient of a rave review from Joyce Carol Oates. On top of that, Mintz uses The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to illustrate the myths about childhood in this country. If this is (fair & balanced) admiration, so be it.

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Childhood in America
Review by Joyce Carol Oates

Steven Mintz. Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. $29.95

Curious that, though we have all been children, we scarcely know what childhood “is”. A biological condition? A span of years? A social construct? An ever-evolving compendium of myths that represent society’s projections of its ideals and anxieties onto its youngest, most vulnerable members? As our personal recollections of childhood are likely to be highly unreliable, taken as much from family albums and photographs, family tales and obfuscations as from direct memory, so our collective history of childhood is likely to be sentimental and simplified, a kind of cartoon nostalgia for an idealized past that never was. As Steven Mintz argues in this often fascinating and massively documented exploration of four centuries of American childhood, “there has never been a time when the overwhelming majority of American children were well cared for and their experience idyllic. Nor has childhood ever been an age of innocence, for most children”.

Huck’s Raft is an inspired title for a book that deconstructs images, prejudices, “wisdom”. On the jacket is what appears to be an illustration of Huckleberry Finn alone and blissfully carefree on his raft on the fabled Mississippi, some time in the mid-nineteenth century; in fact, the photograph is of Charles Lindbergh as a boy rafting on the Mississippi c1912. It is Professor Mintz’s argument that American fantasies about childhood are most succinctly (and erroneously) bound up with such idyllic images: the romance of a neverland in which children and young adolescents enjoyed unlimited freedom and were not exploited and abused by their elders. It may have been that Mark Twain shared something of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idealization of childhood, as he valued nature over the hypocrisy of society, yet the painful evidence of Huckleberry Finn is that its boy-hero is “an abused child, whose father, the town drunk, beat him for going to school and learning to read”. In Hannibal, Missouri, in Huck’s time, before the Civil War destroyed Southern slavery, life for many Americans was likely to be nasty, brutish and short: even among the middle class, approximately one child in four died in infancy, and one individual in two before his or her twenty-first birthday. The notion of a lengthy childhood, “devoted to education and free from adult responsibilities, is a very recent invention, and one that became a reality for a majority of children only after World War II”.

The chimera of “family values” was an adroitly manipulated issue in the 2004 Presidential election, and nostalgia for a lost Eden remains an obsessive American theme. Each generation is convinced that life was better, and certainly more “moral”, in the past, no matter what the actual conditions of the past. Contemporary diatribes such as the best-selling Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American children feel good about themselves but can’t read, write or add sound alarms previously sounded in such 1950s best-sellers as Why Johnny Can’t Read, whose author Rudolf Flesch, an “authority on literacy”, argued that the failure on the part of public school teachers to teach phonics was “gradually destroying democracy” in the United States. Adult anxiety about youthful literacy is the social conservative’s favoured mode of anxiety about other, more alarming predilections of youth, as “A Letter to the Rising Generation” by Cornelia Comer, which originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, makes clear:

“The younger generation, she grumbled, couldn’t spell, and its English was “slipshod.” Today’s youth were selfish, discourteous, lazy, and self-indulgent. Lacking respect for their elders or for common decency, the young were hedonistic, “shallow, amusement-seeking creatures” whose tastes had been “formed by the colored supplements of the Sunday paper” and “the moving-picture shows.” The boys were feeble, flippant, and “soft” intellectually, spiritually, and physically. Even worse were the girls, who were brash, loud, and promiscuous with young men.”

All this, in 1911!

Except for its length and the density of its documentation – drawn abundantly from letters, journals, speeches, reports, publications – Huck’s Raft reads like a textbook, moving forward through the decades (from 1704 to 2004) like a very large, sometimes unwieldly but unfailingly earnest marching band. Mintz’s point is perhaps not original, but it is altogether plausible:

“Childhood and adolescence as biological phases of human development have always existed. But the ways in which childhood and adolescence are conceptualized and experienced are social and cultural constructions that have changed dramatically over time.”

Each of the seventeen chapters is a self-sustaining argument in support of Mintz’s thesis, that “a series of myths have clouded public thinking about the history of American childhood”. These are: the myth of the “happy childhood”; the myth of “home as a haven and bastion of stability in an ever-changing world”; the myth that childhood “is the same for all children, a status transcending class, ethnicity, and gender”; the myth that the United States is a “peculiarly child-friendly society, when in actuality Americans are deeply ambivalent about children”; and the most prevalent myth, “the myth of progress, and its inverse, a myth of decline”. Out of the historian’s teeming store of research notes, aAn outline of the history of American children emerges in three overlapping phases: “premodern childhood”, which coincides with the colonial era, a “period in which the young were viewed as adults in training”; “modern childhood” which emerges in the eighteenth century, when “a growing number of parents began to regard children as innocent, malleable, and fragile creatures who needed to be sheltered from contamination”; and our contemporary “postmodern childhood”, the consequence of an era of the “breakdown of dominant norms about the family, gender roles, age, and even reproduction”.

To the “children of the covenant” – the English Puritans who settled Massachusetts in the early 1600s – children were likely to seem bestial (since they crawled, like beasts) and riddled with the contamination of original sin: as a revered Puritan elder charged, babies were “filthy, guilty, odious, abominable . . . both by nature and practice”. The only cure for childhood was to prepare children for salvation and induct them into the world of work as quickly as possible. To more enlightened adults of the eighteenth century, children’s souls were far less significant than their capacity for work as indentured servants, cabin boys, even soldiers; parents sold children as young as eight or nine to well-to-do householders, and, of course the children of Negro slaves were the possessions of their parents’ masters, frequently taken from their parents to be sold. During the Civil War, approximately 5 per cent of soldiers were under eighteen and some were as young as ten; countless children were engaged in the war effort as drummers, messengers, hospital nurses and orderlies. The first textile mill in the United States opened in 1790 with “a workforce consisting of seven boys and two girls, ages seven to twelve, who operated the factory’s seventy-two spindles”. Well into the twentieth century, children were employed as farm labourers and factory workers.

In such chapters as “Save the Child” and “Children Under the Magnifying Glass”, Mintz examines the efforts of reform-minded Americans to ameliorate the living conditions of children and a subsequent focusing on children and adolescents as objects of psychological interest; the period from 1865 to 1910 was a “golden age” of American children’s fiction (Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Lucy Eleanor Porter’s Pollyanna, Booth Tarkington’s Penrod, Kate Douglas Wiggin’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm), as well as an age in which public education was extended. The “psychologizing” of youth seems to have begun in the 1920s, suggesting that parenting was a skill that had to be learned and that improper parenting could have disastrous psychological consequences. Above all, child psychologists tended to blame almost all of children’s misconduct on faulty mothering”.

It was during the Second World War that teen culture began to dominate, and to distract, the public’s attention: December 30, 1942, saw the birth of the screaming teenage “bobby-soxer” with the debut of a scrawny young singer from Hoboken, New Jersey, named Frank Sinatra at New York’s Paramount Theater. From this, the “youthquake” (as Mintz calls it) of the 1950s and 60s would seem to follow inevitably, culminating in the extraordinary youth consumer culture of the present. In his penultimate chapter, “Parental Panics and the Reshaping of Childhood”, Mintz examines the often hysterical reactions of adults to purported dangers threatening their children, from unfounded accusations of sexual molestation to a general fear of abduction, internet pornography, sexual promiscuity, drug taking, and the possible link between “grunge, hip-hop, and youth violence”. As American society has grown ever more conservative in the past several decades, it would seem that adults’ hostility towards youth – “rooted in fear of disorder, and loss of control; fear of ageing, and envy of life not yet squandered”, as the social critic Edgar Z. Friendenberg eloquently remarked – has been disguised as efforts to “help” the young.

The American physicist Steven Weinberg has famously remarked, “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless”. Whether human history is similarly pointless or whether, as historians occasionally propose, there is a “design” shaping what appears to be drift and chaos, is a matter of conjecture. Notoriously, those who see a purpose to history are likely to be arguing for the supremacy of one race, religion or nation-state over all others. o argue “evolution” in history is a risky proposition. Darwinists see evolution as the slow, random and indeed pointless consequence of natural selection, and contemporary historians are just as likely to see history as the consequence of myriad factors, all of them accidental and contingent. Huck’s Raft is a work of scholarly integrity and humanist zeal, clearly the work of a liberal-minded historian who sees American history as moving – not “evolving” – in the direction of ever more restriction and conformity. We live in a time, Mintz says, of a “deepening contradiction between the child as dependent juvenile and the child as an incipient adult”. Who would envy Huck Finn his battered childhood, Mintz asks; yet Huck enjoyed “something too many children are denied and which adults can provide: opportunities to undertake odysseys of self-discovery outside the goal-driven, over-structured realities of contemporary childhood”. Perhaps, after all, Steven Mintz shares some of the romantic yearnings of so many of his fellow Americans as if, at the conclusion of the exhausting saga of American childhood, he, too, has forgotten that Huck Finn is, and has always been, a fiction.

Steven Mintz is the John and Rebecca Moores Professor of History and Director of the American Cultures Program at the University of Houston. He is President-Elect of H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online and National Co-Chair of the Council on Contemporary Families.

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the United States most prolific and versatile contemporary writers. With a writing career that spans 25 years, Oates is the author of more than 70 books including novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, plays, literary criticism and essays. Her writing has earned her much praise and many awards including the National Book Award for her novel them (1969), the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy Institute of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the O'Henry Prize for Continued Achievement in the Short Story, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Lifetime Achievement Award in Fiction, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and in 1978, membership in the American Academy Institute. She also has been nominated twice for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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