by Philip Nel
Ruth appreciated Dave’s thoughtfulness and willingness to assuage her fears. Because she sometimes got the idea that “people are about to attack me in the middle of the night,” Dave got in the habit of “locking the front door when he goes to bed” and was quite “conscientious about this.” However, he never thought to lock the house’s other doors. When fire became her main phobia, she began to feel that she would prefer to have the door unlocked, but she believed that she could not “simply turn around and claim on the same grounds—fear—that I want it open.” So she said nothing.8
Because they kept such different hours, Ruth and Dave slept in separate beds, both of which Dave designed and built, customizing them to suit their individual needs. Dave slept easily and never made his bed unless company were coming to visit. Ruth, however, could only sleep if she had first made her bed. In the mornings, she lacked the energy to make the bed properly, instead arranging the bedspread so it resembled a made- up bed. At the end of the same day, exhausted, she would, as she put it, “have to start all over again and make my bed, first kind of tossing up the mattress to see that it isn’t too harsh or lumpy. By the time I get through I am usually very much awake again.”9
One day each week, however, Ruth simply went upstairs and straight to sleep: the day Ethel Lerner cleaned the house and made the beds. Lerner began working for Dave and Ruth when they first moved to Connecticut, but even six years later, Lerner’s presence made Ruth feel self-conscious and even slightly guilty, especially if she were “sitting idly doing nothing like lying in the sun on the grass in summer, or even sitting thinking which to me is an essential.” To counter any impression of laziness, Ruth would “clatter away at the typewriter” or do some washing, a compulsion she recognized as “rather silly.” One source of Ruth’s anxiety was race: Lerner was black. Ruth consciously sought to treat the cleaning woman the same way she treated everyone else: “I always introduce her to my friends as Mrs. Lerner or, if I use her first name, I use theirs too. I always call myself by my first name when writing a note or phoning or anything, and the same with my husband. But she still calls me Mrs.—and I’m such a sissy that I’ve never got around to asking her not to.” In March 1948, an accusation leveled at a different black maid brought Ruth’s racial consciousness into sharper relief. One of Ruth’s white neighbors accused her maid of stealing two cups and two forks. Ruth believed that the white woman should have overlooked the theft because the accusation would make it difficult for the maid to find work and could damage race relations in the area: “If I personally were in a situation where I absolutely knew that a Negro had taken something from me, I wouldn’t mention it. Too much else is at stake in attempting to build up and keep good relations between peoples of all skin-colors, nationalities, religions, etc. Nothing is accomplished by accusation.”10
Another unfolding drama that winter starred their dog, Gonsul, named for a character (usually spelled gunsel) in the detective novels and true crime stories that Dave enjoyed. Gonsul enjoyed visiting his old friends, jogging across the iced-over Five Mile River to Darien, heedless of the fact that the ice was starting to melt. One day, after pacing up and down on a cake of ice, he made a jump for the next slab of ice and missed. He managed to scramble out of the icy waters and swam safely to shore but drew no lesson from his narrow escape and continued his perilous journeys. Worried that Gonsul might drown, Ruth told Dave. Dave replied, “He’s such a goof. He probably doesn’t know what’s going on but just saw a lot of dogs standing around there one day and he started to stand there too. He probably thinks they’re all standing in line to get samples of horsemeat.” Another day, a neighbor, Mr. Bates, phoned to report that Gonsul had fallen through the ice and was trying to reach the Darien side. Dave dashed to his car and drove over the bridge and around to the Darien side, where he found Gonsul playing his dog friends. Gonsul’s ill judgment amused Dave but worried Ruth and distracted her from writing.11
If slightly bemused by Ruth’s creative approach, Dave fully supported her experiment. One morning, Ruth mentioned that she was writing a book. He asked, “What is it about?” Ruth replied, “Oh, you just sit down and write.” Dave paused before asking, “No idea?” Ruth answered, “No. No idea.” Ruth and Dave both laughed.12
In another instance, when Ruth wondered aloud how she might end her narrative, Dave told her that Mark Twain, having got stuck at a certain point in Puddn’head Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins (1894), just “finished off his characters by something like the following: ‘Rowena went out in the back yard after supper to see the fireworks and fell in the well and was drowned.’” Deciding that this “seemed a prompt good way of weeding out people that had got stalled,” Twain drowned several other characters. Dave used this plot device in a December 1948 Barnaby sequence: Reciting some allegedly magic words learned from phony exorcists, the curmudgeonly Mr. Merrie makes himself disappear rather than ridding his house of Gus the ghost. Mr. O’Malley then observes, “Mark Twain had a method for getting rid of characters he no longer had a use for. They all happened to fall in the well and drown.” O’Malley adds, “That exit of Mr. Merrie’s isn’t as plausible from a literary point of view, perhaps.”13
In late February 1948, Johnson and Krauss signed a petition supporting Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential bid. The preceding November, Johnson had joined five hundred others who signed “A Message of Greeting and Support” for Wallace when he arrived at LaGuardia Airport after two-week tour of Palestine. The document praised Wallace as the “true spokesman for the millions of liberals who are now uniting to demand a return to the program of the late Franklin D. Roosevelt.” On 23 December, Johnson, Mischa Richter, and other Connecticut progressives met with Wallace, urging him to run for president as an independent candidate. Wallace formally declared his candidacy six days later. He attracted strong support from Popular Front liberals, including many who wrote for children (Eve Merriam, Louis Slobodkin, and Lynd Ward) and current and former New Masses contributors (Richter, Adolf Dehn, William Gropper, Rockwell Kent). Wallace sought to create a “people’s peace [that] will usher in the century of the common man,” declaring, “I have fought and shall continue to fight programs which give guns to people when they want plows.” He also called for a fight “to end racial discrimination” and for “free labor unions, for jobs, and for homes in which we can decently live.”14
Though Krauss was less politically active, she too worked on behalf of social justice. In March 1948, she and Phyllis Rowand attended a Bank Street subcommittee conference in preparation the National Conference on Family Life to be held the following May. The conference sought to address some of the problems families were facing, among them housing, divorce, juvenile delinquency, education, health, medical care, recreation, home management, and social and economic welfare. Attendees included nine hundred delegates from twenty-nine professions and representing all forty-eight states, plus observers from thirty other countries.15
At a Bank Street Laboratory meeting earlier that winter, Krauss, Rowand, and several others had volunteered to analyze sexism in magazines for young people. Krauss offered to read through issues Boy’s Life and soon regretted having done so, fearing that the task would prevent her from finishing the book she was writing. However, she became both engrossed in the task and appalled by the sexism she discovered: The stories never showed men as involved in child rearing, always depicted boys at a distance from the family, and emphasized danger as manly. In contrast, the rare depictions of girls showed them as petty, foolish, or cruel. Krauss also found the magazine’s colonial politics distasteful—for example, its depictions of “simpler societies” as “savages”—and its glorification of capitalism. She concluded, “There needs to be an almost complete changing of ideal goals, goals that are strongly defined by our culture and in to which we are all born and in which brought up.” “Better general education for all” and mass media could help create change, she concluded, “because these are a great means of the perpetuation of tra
ditional themes.”16
The coming of spring brought another stage adaptation of Barnaby, this time at Indiana’s Terre Haute Children’s Theatre. Adapted and directed by Robert and Lillian Masters, the production had Barnaby’s father running for mayor against the corrupt Boss Snagg. The play borrows dialogue from Johnson’s comic and focuses on characters rather than special effects or scenery. The Terre Haute Tribune predicted that the two-act adaptation “bids fair to be a favorite with Children’s Theatre producers all over the country.” Johnson had sold the rights to the Masterses for one dollar plus the promise of 50 percent of any profits from sales or performances of the play.17
Phyllis Rowand, 1946 or 1947. Image courtesy of Nina Landau Stagakis.
Radio also took another stab at Barnaby in 1948, with Lew Amster, Sidney Rumin, and Helen Mack in charge and veteran radio actor John Brown as Mr. O’Malley. Making his radio debut as Barnaby was John Brown’s son, Jared. The first episode of the half-hour program was performed and broadcast twice before a live Hollywood audience, once for the East Coast and once for the West Coast. Brown-Elliott Productions recorded the episode in hopes of finding a sponsor for the program, but although the project generated enough interest to record a second episode, no sponsor came forward, and the project fizzled.18
The color Sunday Barnaby strip, which had begun in 1946, came to an end on 30 May 1948. Drawn by Jack Morley and written by Johnson, the Sunday comic, which followed a narrative independent of the daily strips, disappeared because its distributor, PM, was foundering. Having lost more than four million dollars on his investment, the paper’s backer, Marshall Field III, sold PM to liberal San Francisco lawyer Bartley Crum. On 23 June, the former New Deal tabloid reemerged as the New York Star, with Walt Kelly as its new art director. Kelly also contributed editorial cartoons, and in October, his comic strip Pogo made its debut, running right next to Barnaby.19
The daily strip continued to register Johnson’s dissatisfaction with the country’s turn to the right and away from the concerns of working people. In late May 1948, Mrs. Baxter complains about rising prices, and O’Malley tells Barnaby, “Your Fairy Godfather will take over the management of the household in person! I’m moving in with you!” To economize, he proposes “buying the less expensive cuts of filet mignon” and slightly cheaper bottles of fine wine; firing Barnaby’s dog; and letting go of the butler, secretary, chef, chauffeur, footman, gardener, and caretaker (none of which the Baxters actually employed). O’Malley’s cost-cutting plans are ludicrous, but the narrative underscores the difficulties people face when prices rise faster than wages and alludes to Wallace’s proposal for price controls on the basic necessities. Most of Barnaby’s commentary is subtle, but Johnson occasionally was more direct. Just before proposing to run the household, O’Malley returns from a planned job as a research scientist, having “given up science” because it has become politicized. “Army and Navy investigators! State troopers! Loyalty oath administrators! City police! FBI men!,” he says. Finally, “when a visiting congressman saw my pinkish wings and subpoenaed me to Washington, I left science to its own resources.”20
Such comments reflect Johnson’s opposition to U.S. policy toward communism at home and abroad. In the same month that those strips appeared, Johnson, along with Aaron Copland, W. E. B. Du Bois, Howard Fast, E. Y. Harburg, Rockwell Kent, John Howard Lawson, Donald Ogden Stewart, Dalton Trumbo, and others, signed a statement praising Wallace’s open letter to Stalin, which called for an end to the Cold War, a “reduction of armaments” on both sides, “free movement” of citizens “within and between the two countries,” “unrestricted trade (except for goods related to war),” and the “free exchange of scientific information.” Wallace argued that “there is no difference” between the United States and the Soviet Union that could not “be settled by peaceful, hopeful negotiation.” Wallace’s proposal gained no traction with the Truman administration and met criticism from the press. For those on the left, the open letter was but a minor setback compared to what they would soon face.21
13
THE BIG WORLD AND THE LITTLE HOUSE
“Home” is a way people feel about a place. These people felt that way
about the little house.
Some people feel that way about room, which is just part of a house.
Some people feel that way about a corner—
—which is just part of a room that is part of a house.
Some people feel that way about the whole world
—RUTH KRAUSS, The Big World and the Little House (1949)
On 20 July 1948, a federal grand jury indicted twelve Communist Party leaders under the Smith Act (the Alien and Registration Act of 1940). Crockett Johnson personally knew at least one of the “New York Twelve,” having campaigned for New York City councilman Ben Davis. The Smith Act imposed fines and/or up to twenty years imprisonment on anyone who “advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability or propriety of overthrowing” the U.S. government. As Michael Steven Smith notes, this was “the first statute since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to make mere advocacy of ideas a federal crime.” In endorsing Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover’s suggestion that the Smith Act be deployed against communists, President Harry S. Truman hoped to challenge Republicans who accused Democrats of being soft on communism.1
Unlike four years earlier, Barnaby in 1948 offers no direct commentary on the presidential candidates. Indeed, at least one sequence focuses on the limitations of art as a means of social critique. Johnson’s comic comes closest to social critique in its advocacy of better schools. Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party platform proposed a “Federal grant-in-aid program to build new schools, libraries, raise teachers’ and librarians’ salaries, improve primary and secondary schools.” From 21 September through 10 November, the need to build more classroom space motivated the plot of Barnaby. Mrs. Baxter joins the PTA, whose leader discusses the need “to arouse community interest and force the city to build the proposed annex to this school. There just isn’t any other solution to this overcrowdedness.” Mrs. Baxter agrees, but O’Malley has loopier solutions to the problem: “Adopt the efficient and budget-cutting O’Malley Plan of ’round-the-clock education! Little nippers who hate to go to bed at night can attend school on the graveyard shift.” When O’Malley pushes a button that turns out to be the fire alarm, he leads the kids safely out of the school, but the incident raises concerns that if the fire had been real, overcrowding would have been a problem, and the “wonderful publicity” helps the town realize that it needs to buy land for an annex. This strip’s narrative advances Wallace’s platform but presses its message subtly, never mentioning the Progressive Party or its candidate.2
The press and the polls predicted a victory for the 1948 Republican presidential candidate, Thomas Dewey, but Truman won reelection. Wallace came in fourth, just behind Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. Johnson nevertheless remained unwavering in his support of Wallace’s vision, sharing the candidate’s belief that the United States should seek peace with the Soviet Union and opposing Truman’s crackdown on “subversives.” The same day that Truman won, Johnson signed a statement “protesting the New York indictment of the twelve Communist Party functionaries by a Federal Grand Jury, claiming such as ‘an attack on the civil and political liberties of all Americans.’”3
In the wake of the Progressives’ defeat at the polls, Barnaby steered toward lighter subjects. When O’Malley accidentally makes himself vanish, Johnson brings in Sergeant Ausdauer, a fairy-godfather-sized policeman. The sequence gives Johnson a chance to poke fun at detective fiction, a genre he loved. Explaining why it has taken him so long to find O’Malley, Ausdauer says, “No well-read person expects the police to solve a case so quick.” He explains, “It’s a handicap, not having a tough shamus who drives 90 miles an hour, drinks several quarts of Arak for breakfast, moves all the bodies, slugs everybody, hides the clues.” After Ausdauer departs, the strip offers
a more child-focused narrative, centering on Barnaby’s wish for snow. O’Malley brings in Jack Frost as a consultant because, as the fairy godfather says, “I don’t want to over do it, you know, like last year…. And there was 1888 too, when I intended to bring on a flurry or so, and, er—But never mind.”4
That winter brought better weather as well as good news for Ruth Krauss’s career when strong reviews greeted Bears, her second book illustrated by Phyllis Rowand. In Bears, Krauss returned to a child’s perspective she had in The Growing Story, The Great Duffy, and The Carrot Seed. This time, however, she strived not only to see the world as a child might but also to emulate children’s language. In its entirety, the text reads, The playful verse, rhyming bears with millionaires, and the neologism everywheres exemplify the Bank Street notion that, to children, the sound of words is often more important than their meaning.
Bears, bears, bears, bears, bears
on the stairs
under chairs
washing hairs
giving stares
collecting fares
stepping in squares
millionaires
everywheres.
Reviewers praised the book. In the New York Herald Tribune, Louise Seaman Bechtel thought Bears “very funny and surprising,” a “merry little book which I find delights small children.” The Christian Science Monitor’s Anne Thaxter Eaton concurred: “The pleasant absurdity of the idea and the rhyming words … will please children from three to seven. An amusing picture book made in a spirit of gayety and frolic.” Only the Horn Book’s Alice M. Jordan was less than enthusiastic, describing Krauss’s text as “slight” and crediting Rowand’s “funny pictures [as] the main feature of this nonsense book for the youngest.”5