Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss

by Philip Nel

  Late in 1948, Krauss got involved in one of the Bank Street Writers Laboratory’s projects, a series of Golden Books. The series had begun with Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s The New House in the Forest (1946, illustrated by Eloise Wilkin) and The Taxi That Hurried (1946), cowritten by Mitchell, Irma Simonton Black, and Bank Street nursery school director Jessie Stanton and illustrated by Tibor Gergely. To draw the pictures for Krauss’s new book, I Can Fly, Golden enlisted Mary Blair, then best known for her Disney work: the conceptual paintings for The Three Caballeros (1945) and the sets and costumes for Song of the South (1949). I Can Fly (1950) recalls Bears in its emphasis on sounds and imaginative play with language, as Krauss creates a series of scenes in which an unnamed little girl pretends to be animals: “A bird can fly. So can I” and “Swish! I’m a fish,” and “Bump bump bump I’m a camel with a hump.” The book concludes in an exuberant burst of neologisms: “Gubble gubble gubble I’m a mubble in a pubble. I can play I’m anything that’s anything. That’s MY way.”6

  Krauss was quite excited about both the quality of the book and the fact that it would have a large print run: “We get royalties…. Printings are enormous … and apparently writers get around two thousand or so within a two year span…. Writer and Bank St. share fifty-fifty. No other writers except Brownie get royalties from Golden Books. Mine, I think, is a pretty good book, and I feel good about it considering it’s the first time I’ve ever worked to order.” “Brownie” was Margaret Wise Brown, whose classic Goodnight Moon had been published the previous year. Bank Street’s most famous graduate, Brown and Krauss were acquainted but did not get along. They rarely saw each other socially, although they not only shared the Bank Street connection but also both worked with Ursula Nordstrom at Harper.7

  Ruth’s I Can Fly is one of the best-known and best-regarded books in the Bank Street Golden Books series, and in 1951, it “became the first Little Golden Book to receive an Honor distinction at the prestigious Herald Tribune Children’s Spring Book Festival.” Encouraging wider recognition of the character if not the book, Blair used a version of the book’s little girl protagonist in advertisements for Meadow Gold cottage cheese and Baker’s Instant chocolate milk mix.8

  In December 1948, Krauss finally got her chance to write a socially conscious children’s book. Henry Schuman commissioned her to write “a book for children” with “a ‘one world’ idea incorporated in it.” Earlier that year, Schuman had published In Henry’s Backyard: The Races of Mankind (1948), a children’s book version of the successful United Productions of America cartoon adapted from Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish’s 1943 pamphlet. Krauss was excited by this project, both because it would be “worthwhile financially” and because she believed in this message, although she worried about delivering that moral without being overly didactic: “This will be a tough job … to do it well without having the preaching stuff show. I don’t know if I can but am trying.”9

  The result was The Big World and the Little House (1949), in which one family’s restoration of a little house serves as a metaphor for rebuilding the world. As the family moves into and repairs the formerly abandoned house, Ruth weaves in several allusions to other countries: The house has a rug “made by a lady in Canada”; if you dial “the right number” on the telephone, “you could talk with somebody in China”; the radio and television enable “other parts of the world [to] come into the house; the big world could be a part of the little house, as well as the little house being a part of the big world.” After the family has turned the broken shell of a house into a warm and inviting home, the narrator notes, “Home is a way people feel about a place. These people feel that way about the little house. Some people feel that way about the whole world.”

  Marc Simont, cover of Ruth Krauss, The Big World and the Little House (New York: Schuman, 1949). Image courtesy of the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection, Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs. Reproduced courtesy of Marc Simont.

  Krauss asked Marc Simont to illustrate the story. Born in Paris in 1915, Simont settled in the United States in the mid-1930s and gained success illustrating children’s books. Krauss likely knew his work from several works he illustrated for Nordstrom: Leclaire Alger’s Dougal’s Wish (1942), Meindert DeJong’s Billy and the Unhappy Bull (1946), and Margaret Wise Brown’s The First Story (1947). According to Simont, Nordstrom was not pleased that “one of her authors [was] picking out one of her illustrators to do a book for … ‘that other publisher.’” But Harper had turned down all of Krauss’s political books, and she admired Simont’s work.10

  Though they let go of their sublet in March 1948, Ruth and Dave made frequent visits to Manhattan, often staying for the weekend and sometimes longer. When Dave’s friend Adolf Dehn traveled to Haiti in mid-January 1949, Dave and Ruth made his 230 East Fifteenth Street apartment their primary residence until he returned on 1 April. While staying at Dehn’s apartment, Dave attended the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The more than eighteen thousand others in attendance included Henry Wallace, Mary McCarthy, John Howard Lawson, Robert Lowell, I. F. Stone, Gene Weltfish, W. E. B. Du Bois, Aaron Copland, and Dmitri Shostakovich. The conference generated hostile press coverage, protests, and censure from the U.S. government, which labeled the forum part of the communist “peace offensive” and denied visas to attendees it suspected of being communists. More than two thousand people picketed the Waldorf-Astoria, carrying placards and shouting, “Down with the Russian skunks” and “Go back to Russia where you belong.” The newly formed Americans for Intellectual Freedom staged a rival meeting to condemn the Red Menace and to highlight the danger that the conference posed to the United States. As historian Robbie Lieberman writes, Popular Front liberals who hoped “for a lasting peace built on U.S.–Soviet cooperation” had their hopes dashed by the Cold War’s “very different view of peace and freedom—centered on anticommunism and military preparedness.” As a result, by the late 1940s and into the 1950s, members of the U.S. peace movement were often accused of being communists.11

  The House Un-American Activities Committee was also interested. The committee had already cited Lawson for contempt, and in January 1949, Johnson was one of more than a thousand people who signed a letter condemning Congress for abusing its authority in making “‘investigations’ … into the religious and political beliefs of private citizens.” In April, Johnson’s name appeared a dozen times in a committee report on the peace conference, which noted his backing of Henry Wallace, “open support” for “Communist candidates,” opposition to the Smith Act trials, participation in the 1946 May Day Parade, work for New Masses, praise of Wallace’s open letter to Stalin, and membership in the National Council of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions.12

  At the end of January 1949, the New York Star folded, and Barnaby moved to the city’s Daily Mirror. With Johnson’s politics under attack, he moved the strip further away from advocacy of particular causes and toward fantasy. A few strips in January and February make a case for national health care, but by early March, Barnaby begins an exploration of the themes that Johnson would later develop in his books. During an after-hours visit to the art museum, O’Malley and Barnaby witness a dissolution of the boundary between art and life. Myron’s Discobolus throws his discus, Rodin’s Thinker stops thinking to unwind with a murder mystery, Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and Barnaby swap hats, Whistler’s mother resumes her knitting, and a piece of abstract art complains that “NOBODY understands me.” Prefiguring Harold and his purple crayon, this Barnaby sequence finds power in the imagination, suggesting a permeable boundary between representation and reality.13

  Marc Simont, two-page spread from Ruth Krauss, The Happy Day (New York: Harper, 1949). Illustrations copyright © 1949 by Marc Simont. Copyright © renewed 1977 by marc simont. used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved
.

  Krauss’s ideas for children’s books were again finding favor with publishers. About ten days before the World Peace Conference, she received a contract for Flower in the Snow, which would ultimately be published as The Happy Day. The story certainly embodies the Bank Street idea that young children do not need fantasy because the everyday world is fantastic enough to them, but the combination of Bank Street’s influence and Nordstrom’s editorial judgment made the book work. Krauss’s original text for The Happy Day occasionally used “See?” at the end of a series of short sentences (“They sniff. They run. See?” and “They sniff. They run. They stop. See?). Nordstrom said, “Ruth, I don’t think you need the word see. The children will be looking, and they will see the pictures.” Krauss replied, “But I like the word see.” Nordstrom said, “But you don’t need it.” Krauss responded, “But I like it.” After further back-and-forth, Nordstrom finally said, “Ruth, for heaven’s sake. Give me the word see for Christmas!” Krauss said, “But Ursula, I was going to give you a pair of red galoshes.” And Nordstrom replied, “I would rather have the word see.” That’s how the word see left The Happy Day, published in the fall of 1949.14

  Simont’s illustrations for the book won him his first Caldecott Honor, but Krauss was very particular about where the pictures were placed. She sent him a copy of the manuscript on which she had marked the side of the page on which the text should be placed and in some cases was even more specific about wanting type to go near drawings of certain animals. Simont generally did not like sharing his work in progress, but Krauss insisted that she have the opportunity to comment on every rough drawing. Although unaccustomed to such authorial “interference,” Simont thought that her “remarks were very good.” The process resulted in a classic.15

  Susan Carr Hirschman, who ultimately had a half-century career in children’s book publishing, considers The Happy Day “one of the few perfect books for children that have ever been written.” Contemporary reviewers agreed. The Atlantic Monthly called it “far and away the best of this year’s picture books.” The New York Herald Tribune Book Review’s Louise S. Bechtel thought it “a lovely winter picture book for the nursery age.” And even Anne Carroll Moore, the New York Public Library’s children’s librarian, who disdained the Bank Street school of picture-book writing, was positive: “I think it a picture book children will love to own as a welcome change from activities to nature itself.”16

  Reviews of The Big World and the Little House, however, were mixed. Although Simont’s illustrations consistently won praise, reviewers disliked Krauss delivery of the text’s well-intentioned message and disagreed about what was appropriate for inclusion in a children’s book. Marcia Winn in the Chicago Tribune embraced the book’s innovations, suggesting that “everything about it is a departure from accepted methods of writing and drawing for children” and that “when the prize-winning awards for juveniles are handed out this year, The Big World and the Little House unquestionably will be a candidate.” But Library Journal “object[ed] to children being referred to as ‘kids,’” and the San Francisco Chronicle considered the book “slangy, ungrammatical,” and likely to lend “encouragement to such generally frowned upon habits as writing on the walls, putting feet in chairs, and rude yelling”—precisely the qualities that Winn cited as key to the book’s success.17

  Nina Wallace, ca. 1949. Photo by Agnes Goodman. Courtesy of Nina Landau Stagakis.

  Such hits and misses continued to characterize Krauss’s professional endeavors. In March 1949, Nordstrom turned down Krauss’s suggestion of “a ‘nonsense collection’” in which she “would write all the nonsense.” At around the same time, Golden offered Krauss $450 but no royalties (as was customary for Golden) for a revision of “Mr. Littleguy and the Laundry” that editors believed would work well for slightly older readers. Krauss considered the offer insulting and rejected it.18

  But Krauss had a creative breakthrough with The Bundle Book, her first work based directly on her observations of children. Previously, she had been imagining herself in the place of children and drawing on memories of her childhood. The Bundle Book, in contrast, was inspired by friends of Krauss’s, Nina Schneider and her daughter, Lucy, and Phyllis Rowand and her daughter, Nina. Each mother played a game in which she pretended that she did not recognize her child hiding under a blanket, and Krauss was fascinated by the little girls’ reactions, telling Nordstrom that they “seemed a little frightened.” Drawing on her study of psychology, Krauss believed that the game represented “one of a child’s first experiences playing with the excitement of danger—the danger being in this case the baby’s thinking maybe the parent won’t recognize him or her as him-or-her-self.” Krauss took the game and put it on paper, complete with reassuring ending:

  “Can it be a bundle of laundry? I don’t think I need any laundry.”

  “No,” the bundle replied. “I’m not a bundle of laundry.”

  “Can it be a bundle of carrots? I don’t think I need any carrots.”

  “No, no,” the bundle replied. “I’m not a bundle of carrots.”

  “Let me think again,” the mother said to herself. She stopped to think

  again. “Maybe it’s a monkey? I think I’m sure I don’t need a monkey.”

  The guessing game goes on until the child reveals itself: “It’s ME!” The mother says, “You! Well, so it is! so you are. It’s you. And—you’re just what I need.”19 The book was not released until 1951 and then generated only tepid reviews and sales, but Krauss had hit on the formula that would bring her acclaim. When she saw the world from the perspective of a child, Krauss produced her best children’s books.

  Still hoping that Barnaby would find mainstream success, Johnson had buried the failed and abandoned adaptations, regained control of the rights to the strip, and again sought to make a movie. He talked with successful screenwriter Sidney Buchman, who declined to become involved. Johnson turned to his friends Lew Amster, who had worked on the radio version, and Lou Bunin, an artist, puppeteer, and animation pioneer. In their darker vision of Barnaby, the topical satire centers on the stock market, with Mr. Baxter preoccupied with Wall Street finance, “a world in which any myth if it is big enough is believed in.” According to a two-page outline for the movie, “It is not too surprising that Barnaby, exposed to his father’s glib financial jargon, entertains a fantastic creature with the attitudes and vocabulary of O’Malley.” The fairy godfather creates a financial crash that both shatters Mr. Baxter’s dream and ends “O’Malley’s own reason for being.” O’Malley’s departure draws Barnaby and his dad closer but effectively ends the fantasy.20

  This conclusion may have reflected Johnson’s declining interest in writing the comic strip and hints at his broader disillusionment. In October 1949, eleven of the New York Twelve were convicted of conspiring to violate the Smith Act. By that time, Barnaby was largely avoiding current events in favor of lampooning the growing world of television entertainment. But Johnson was not ignoring the increasingly oppressive political environment, and it was not ignoring him.

  14

  ARTISTS ARE TO WATCH

  When a thing seems to be so, kangaroos usually hop to the conclusion that it is so.

  —CROCKETT JOHNSON, Who’s Upside Down? (1952)

  On 6 February 1950, Crockett Johnson signed a friend of the court brief supporting the American Communist Party in United States v. William Z. Foster et al., the trial of the final member of the New York Twelve. Three days later, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy claimed to have a list of fifty-seven State Department employees who were members of the American Communist Party. By the end of April, the FBI’s New York Division identified Crockett Johnson as one of “400 concealed Communists” and began compiling a file on him.1

  According to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, communists sought to influence the United States through “five principal areas” of “thought control”: “open” party members, concealed party members, fellow travelers, opportunists (who support
ed the party for personal gain), and dupes. A concealed party member such as Crockett Johnson was as dangerous as an open party member, “if not more so.” The “concealed communist, because he is not known as a communist, can often advance the Party’s cause among people and in organizations where an open member would be scorned.”2

  Though Crockett Johnson was not a “concealed communist” in the 1950s, his FBI file noted his work for New Masses and his support for both Ben Davis and radical politician Vito Marcantonio, who represented East Harlem in the U.S. Congress for fourteen years between 1935 and 1951. But Johnson had drifted away from his close communist ties of the 1930s and had become more of a socialist. The FBI file mentioned that Johnson had spoken at a February 1944 program sponsored by the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship but neglected the fact that the two countries were allies at the time. Other “subversive” activities included supporting civil rights for African Americans and the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. On 4 August, an FBI agent knocked on Krauss and Johnson’s front door. When Johnson opened it and began talking to the man, a second agent covertly took Johnson’s photograph.3

  Dave Johnson and Ruth Krauss’s social circle included several people targeted for their alleged political beliefs. Dr. Shelley Trubowitz, who became a friend and neighbor when he moved to Rowayton in 1951, recalled seeing the couple at parties with John Howard Lawson, who along with the other members of the Hollywood Ten served a one-year prison sentence in 1950–51 for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Howard Fast, an unapologetically leftist writer, was another acquaintance of Dave and Ruth’s who served three months in prison for contempt of Congress.4