From the November/December 2006 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Letters to the Editor

Having read Julia Mickenberg’s Learning from the Left, I am puzzled by Barbara Bader’s review of it (“Red, White, and Blue?” July/August 2006 Horn Book) — especially since I have long been an admirer of Ms. Bader’s American Picturebooks from Noah’s Ark to the Beast Within. Have we read the same book?

For example, discussing Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps’s Popo and Fifina, Bader writes, “Did the red star stand for the Red Army whose symbol it was? Mickenberg assumes so. In the new, 1993 edition of the book, Arnold Rampersad, Hughes’s biographer, says maybe. Is there evidence that anyone at the time saw it that way? No.” However, Mickenberg’s book does not assume that the red star stands for the Red Army. Here is what it says: “red . . . is associated with revolutionary strength, while yellow and green are associated with Pan-Africanism.” Further, Mickenberg notes that “the book’s politics are quite subtle,” pointing out that this is its sole scene with any “revolutionary imagery.” The second part of Bader’s claim — that there is no “evidence that anyone at the time” saw the “Red Army” symbolism — presumably derives its support from Mickenberg’s comment that “the scene apparently aroused no negative comment.” I say “presumably” because although Mickenberg is a likely source, the claim of “no evidence” allows the reader to infer that Bader is drawing from her own considerable knowledge or research.

Indeed, I am particularly struck by Ms. Bader’s tendency to take credit for Mickenberg’s research when she agrees with it and to dismiss it when she does not. For example, referring to Mickenberg’s discussion of the many leftists who in the 1950s wrote books on science, Bader writes, “Even some of Mickenberg’s science-writer interviewees, like Herman and Nina Schneider, Mary Elting, and Dorothy Sterling, scoffed at the suggestion that they had been writing Marxist science books.” The sentence suggests that Bader may well have contacted these people herself. Since Mickenberg in fact provided the information (see page 227 of her book), one might instead credit Learning from the Left for being evenhanded in its analysis. As Mickenberg writes, “The point is that political people did not always write political books,” but some political people who “consciously tried to keep their politics and their work separate could not always do so.” In other words, though she is exploring connections between authors’ works and political convictions, she acknowledges that such connections may be subtle or even elusive.

The opening of Bader’s review is similarly surprising. After telling us, “To those of us who were around during the Cold War period, it’s not news that there was a disconnect between the liberal tenor of children’s books generally and the repressive spirit of the times,” her next sentence is, “Men and women blacklisted by the mainstream media and the public schools, as Communists or suspected Communists, found a haven writing for children and young adults, with the encouragement of editors and the support of librarians.” Her first sentence is, as she says, “not news,” but the second sentence — the central claim of Mickenberg’s book — is news and ought to be treated as such.

Bader is of course quite right to express her disagreement, but I am mystified by her failure to credit Mickenberg with the considerable research she has undertaken. Although Katharine Capshaw Smith’s excellent Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (2004) covers a little of the same territory, there is no other book that does the historical scholarship that Learning from the Left undertakes. Furthermore, though Bader may know some of this history, an increasing number of people do not.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must add that I know and have worked with Julia Mickenberg. While our acquaintance may (naturally) color my response, my knowledge of the period in which she is working prompts me to raise these questions. Reasonable people may of course disagree with Mickenberg’s conclusions. For example, had readers examined these literary works through a different critical lens (say, twentieth- century artistic movements instead of the history of the left), they may well have arrived at a very different interpretation. But, as is true of Bader’s own work, Mickenberg’s book is both thoroughly researched and carefully written. Indeed, it’s one of the best pieces of scholarship I’ve read. In sum, Bader’s conclusion that Learning from the Left is “hit or miss” seems to miss the mark.

Philip Nel
Manhattan, Kansas

Barbara Bader responds:

Professor Nel has given me an opportunity to expand upon my views of Learning from the Left, for which I am grateful.

He does not challenge my basic, section-by-section criticisms of the book, that is, nor does he claim that anything I wrote was in error. What bothers him is how I said certain things and why I did not say others, so I’ll explain.

At the beginning, I say that contemporaries like myself were aware, during the Cold War period, that Communists and suspected Communists were writing children’s books.

I did not say, or so much as suggest, that everyone today knows this. The problem, as I write in the next sentence, is that, on the basis of this episode, Mickenberg “posits a significant, continuing leftist presence in the children’s book field from the 1920s into the 1970s, shaping the content of the books and potentially shaping young minds” (stresses added), and that “her evidence does not sustain that argument” — either, I might add, as regards the continuity or the influence.

Popo and Fifina (1932), the Arna Bontemps–Langston Hughes story of two Haitian children, which Mickenberg cites as an influential leftist book, is not unlike other stories of foreign childhoods, I point out, except for the red-star kite Popo’s father makes him. I call a red star the symbol of the Red Army, which it was, while the color red stood for Soviet Communism, as in the appellation Reds. Mickenberg, for her part, says the color red stood for “revolutionary strength,” which is factually inadequate, a virtual evasion. The question, in any case, is two-fold: Did Bontemps and Hughes intend the kite to have political significance? And for others at the time, did it?

Mickenberg, referring to the book as “a proud, true conqueror,” saying that the red star’s “symbolism is difficult to miss,” seems to be saying yes to both questions. As regards the first question, I rested with Arnold Rampersad’s maybe; as regards the second, I based my statement that there was no evidence anyone at the time saw it that way both on Mickenberg’s book, which refers to the lack of negative reaction, and, yes, on my own knowledge of the period, hardly unusual in a reviewer.

It should be noted, though, that the illustrations in Popo and Fifina are in black and white and the star-kite is nowhere clearly pictured. Had the kite actually been an unmistakable r/Red s/Star, in all likelihood Louise Seaman Bechtel, the politically astute editor at Macmillan, would have spotted it immediately. Would she have said this has to go, or would she have laughed? My guess, knowing her, is the latter; but someone may well disagree. From acquaintance with the correspondence between Bontemps and Hughes, published and unpublished, I also suspect that they knew full well what the star stood for and figured it would pass notice in a book about child life in a foreign land — which, virtually unseen, it did.

Professor Nel also questions, somewhat to my astonishment, whether or not I am speaking from independent knowledge when I write “even some of Mickenberg’s science-writer interviewees . . . scoffed at the suggestion that they had been writing Marxist science books.” In the context of a discussion of her research and findings, it should be apparent that her interviewees were responding to her suggestion.

It’s true that, after consideration, I said nothing about Mickenberg’s extensive research. To support 282 pages of text, there are seventy-six pages of notes, a good deal even by the standards of academic books. But no amount of research guarantees sound interpretations or valid conclusions, and I was loath to acknowledge her research only to undercut it. A superabundance of research, coupled with a neglect of the surrounding milieu (who else was writing, what other books were being published), can also lead an author astray. Those voluminous notes, however, will be a boon to future researchers, who will draw their own conclusions.

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