by Helen Doss
Like other books that have made a mark on both children and adults, The Family Nobody Wanted walks a narrow line between cultural mainstream and margin. Thus one reader of the original edition described it as “a good, clean, and Christian book to have in any home,”28 words applicable to another book that has appealed to both children and adult readers, Alcott’s Little Women. Yet The Family Nobody Wanted advocates for the radical, democratic tradition of Christianity that shaped both the antislavery activism of the Alcotts and the antisegregation work of the Dosses. As Carl Doss tells a neighbor, “We Americans can’t keep one tenth of our population in an inferior position. . . . It isn’t Christian and it isn’t democratic, and most of us claim to be both” (187–188). Similarly, like Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, which moves quickly from humorous boyish pranks to horrifying images of women being burned at the stake, The Family Nobody Wanted contains episodes both charming and frightening.
For example, the chapter “Taro” describes in humorous detail the “wild and woolly times” (88) of four boys at play. Yet we also learn that Taro came to the Dosses as a foster child after his entire family, with the exception of his father, died in the internment camps in which Japanese Americans were imprisoned. The chapter concludes with a bitter Thanksgiving message when Taro’s father arrives for dinner, his face “battered, swollen, with a large bandage over one ear, his lip split in an ugly cut, and one eye almost closed” (90). Taro’s father, the victim of “patriotic” neighbors who punch and kick him nearly to death because “the only good Jap’s a dead one,” is saved by a white U.S. serviceman married to a Japanese American woman. The story takes another dramatic turn when the soldier describes how in Italy “a Nisei boy saved my life—my life, at the cost of his” (91). In a fashion typical of The Family Nobody Wanted, the episode shows us both the ugly face of American racism and the redeeming hope of a multiracial American democracy.
The Family Nobody Wanted was published four months before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, and the book’s appeal can be traced in part to the way in which it presents and views race relations. Published reviews and unpublished letters to Helen Doss from readers stress the impact of the book’s message of racial tolerance. One reader from the Sears, Roebuck Company’s “Peoples Jury” described The Family Nobody Wanted as “wonderful for the whole family to read—and for anyone who wants to have a better feeling toward the different races of people in our country.”29 A Library Journal review praised “the true spirit of brotherly love and tolerance which pervades the book.”30 A woman from Tennessee who read the book as a teenager credited it with “giving me the open mind and loving heart that I now have.”31 The book’s numerous examples of both racism and racial tolerance reinforce this message, as do the many overt statements contained in chapters such as “Taro,” “All God’s Children,” and “Little Beaver and the War Orphan.”
Like Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream, The Family Nobody Wanted gave readers a white woman’s personal view of race and family in America.32 Unlike Smith’s work, however, The Family Nobody Wanted was marketed to and read avidly by young people. Vivid scenes of family life and a writing style described by the New York Times as “the friendly simplicity of a woman talking over a back fence”33 made the book both compelling and accessible. For The Family Nobody Wanted does not make a merely theoretical argument for racial tolerance. Throughout the book, we see Helen Doss “walking the talk” in a particularly personal way. Helen and Carl Doss learn from and advocate for their children, even as they outspokenly preach for integration and tolerance from inside a multiracial family.
Life magazine featured the Doss family for reasons also related to racial tolerance, but with an important difference. To Life, the Doss family was good propaganda. When the Dosses balked at exposing their family to public scrutiny, Life’s reporter Dick Pollard exclaimed, “I wish you could realize how a general knowledge of your ‘United Nations’ family could help our country! Anti-American propaganda abroad emphasizes our intolerant side. If people in other countries could open a copy of Life and learn about your interracial family, they would see our better side, a glimpse of democracy in action.” Carl Doss himself suggests this view when he tells a neighbor who has accused him of being a radical, “Every time one of us steps on someone because of his color, we do as much harm to our country as if we were Communist saboteurs” (188). Pictures of this happy interracial family would show the Soviet Union and other cold war “anti-American” forces that Americans of different races do get along. A San Francisco Chronicle reviewer described “the Dosses’ experiment” as “more important than the work of the Atomic Energy Commission,” while the syndicated columnist Dolly Reitz contended, “I can’t think of a better book to be translated into foreign languages.”34
The Life article and reviews that link The Family Nobody Wanted to the United States’ image abroad offer provocative evidence of how mainstream American culture attempted to fit this transracial adoptive family into a world bordered internationally by World War II, the cold war, and Third World nationalism, and domestically by the internment of Japanese Americans, a nascent civil rights movement, and the elevation of the nuclear family. Even as Life labeled the Doss family “a one-family United Nations,” the magazine’s photographs and captions located this far-from-typical family within mainstream ideals of 1950s America. One photograph, for example, shows the children at school, reciting the pledge of allegiance. Another captures the five Doss girls, whose ethnic backgrounds include Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, and Native American Indian, dressed in identical “best white dresses” for a walk to church. Carl Doss is identified in the article’s subtitle as a Methodist minister, and photographs of the family attending church are prominently featured. The photograph that heads the article, which appears on this edition’s cover, offers the telling image of Helen and Carl Doss seated with the two youngest children on their laps while the other children climb a rope ladder.35
Life thus led readers to see the Doss family as a clear example of an American success story. To Life magazine and the dominant culture that labeled them a “one-family U.N.,” the Dosses were a symbol of racial tolerance and integration. Their assimilated, mixed-race children would be given opportunities to climb any ladder to social acceptance and economic mobility. And in many ways, Life’s view was correct. The family, and the children, did succeed within the American mainstream, offering proof of the potential of a color-blind society. This message, which Helen Doss recently rearticulated to me as “I hope my readers will realize that there is just one race; the human race,” is profoundly important, and it had special significance to its original audience. The Family Nobody Wanted helped readers of the fifties, sixties, and seventies have faith in what one reviewer called “the universal brotherhood of man.” As that reviewer went on to say, “I shall always feel better for having read this book. And so will you.”36 For readers confronted with racial violence, from a church in Birmingham exploding with its youngest worshipers inside, to white mothers in Boston throwing rocks at buses holding black children, Doss’s example and message were invaluable. As a Sears book club reader put it, the story of the Doss family “truly offers an example of what we could be.”37 The Family Nobody Wanted thus lent hope to a civil rights–era generation struggling to comprehend and overcome the failures of American democracy.
The Family Nobody Wanted tells us that we are capable of overcoming those failures, but it does not gloss over them. Helen Doss’s pointed comments on the effects of internment on Japanese Americans, on misguided race-matching adoption policies, and on the racial name-calling that hurt her children, graphically illustrate racism’s presence and dangers. As Doss tells her readers, “Carl and I must prepare our children to stand up in the face of prejudice. We know they will someday share the fate of many Americans who, like Taro’s father, are sometimes forced to live on the edge of danger because their skins are dark or their eyes ‘slant’” (170). At the same t
ime, Helen and Carl Doss recognize and reject the privilege conferred by their white skin. To a social worker who warns them that adopting a child of another race will “drag” them “down to the level of the subjugated minority,” the Dosses respond that “skin color . . . should not give us the right to lord it over those who are born with darker skin” (31).
Helen Doss also critiques the racial matching in adoption practice. When they attempt to adopt a biracial German child, the Dosses are greeted with suspicion by neighbors and relatives and with red tape from adoption agencies. As Carl says to Helen, “Some of the intermediaries probably object to placing a Negro child in a so-called ‘white’ home, and just haven’t the courage to come out and say so” (190). Earlier, a social worker angrily rejects the Dosses’ request for a mixed-race child: “Crossing racial lines is against all our principles of good social-work practice” (30). Figures on transracial adoption indicate that these principles of good social work practice were seldom violated. In 1953 statistics gathered by the U.S. Children’s Bureau and the Child Welfare League of America showed only 32,872 nonrelated adoptions, and during this period only 7 percent of all adoptions were transracial.38 Even though they were in 1951 celebrated as the “Christmas Family of the Year,” as an international and multiracial family the Dosses were still a cultural rarity and very much “the family nobody wanted.”
As a member of a transracial family, Doss also raises questions relevant to the 1950s liberal racial ideology of “colorblindness.” For example, the story of biracial Gretchen ends when the Dosses find an African American couple to adopt the little girl. Helen Doss concludes the chapter with an acknowledgment of the difficult identity issues facing black children with white parents. Doss reminds us that Gretchen has found a home with “a father and a mother and a brother, all the same warm toast shade that she was, and she would know that her own color was just right for her” (191). Gretchen finds her permanent family in an African American family, and Taro is reunited with his Japanese American birth father. When Teddy comes home in tears after a playground episode of racial name-calling, his mother reminds him that “God made more dark-skinned people than any other kind! . . . So I think God must especially love little brown children” (173). Shortly after this, Donny tells Teddy a Filipino legend about the creation of human beings. In the legend, which Donny learned from Taro’s father, God finally gets human beings right when he creates “a beautiful, warm-toned brown” person, “just exactly the way a man should be” (87).
Thus, The Family Nobody Wanted suggests the ways in which people of different races and cultures are both the same and different. Even as Doss reminds us that we are all part of the human race, she also celebrates her children’s individual cultures and differences. A similar pattern is found in two of many children’s books Doss published after The Family Nobody Wanted. One, All the Children of the World, highlights cultural differences in children’s lives. Another, Friends around the World, shows how children around the world share similar tastes and interests.39 Doss neither denies the importance of race and culture in a person’s life nor reduces those aspects of identity to an essentialist foundation. Her eye as a mother, writer, and social observer is too sharp for color-blindness and too sensitive to individual differences to see nothing but race or color.
This balance, important for readers of the 1950s, is equally crucial today. As Cornell West wrote in Race Matters, “To establish a new framework, we need to begin with a frank acknowledgment of the basic humanness and Americanness of each of us.”40 Whether poking fun at a teacher who believes that Rita’s Mexican heritage makes her genetically disposed to like chili peppers (166), or reminding us of the institutionalized racism that brought “discrimination in jobs and housing, an Orientals Exclusion Act, and the ‘relocation centers’ of World War II” (170), Helen Doss helps us to see how the “Americanness of each of us” is undercut in both small and large ways by racial intolerance and racial essentialism. In writing the story of our multiracial society through one multiracial family, Helen Doss makes race matter in an intimate, familial, and believable context.
Indeed, the enduring appeal of The Family Nobody Wanted lies in part in its ability to take on such large social issues while never losing sight of the particular. Every chapter of The Family Nobody Wanted contains moments of trenchant social commentary, but Doss’s insights are delivered in the very specific context of her family and their vividly rendered lives. As one reader said, “I liked the details about their everyday life and I felt as if I could have been right there in their home.”41 This balanced attention to both household and world affairs is a unique and important quality of The Family Nobody Wanted. A scene in which Helen Doss pulls out a map to show six-year-old Teddy the Philippines is emblematic of the family’s relationship to the world. Doss tells Teddy, who is of Filipino and Malay heritage, about “where some of your ancestors came from” (173). She promises her son that if possible, the whole family will visit the Philippines some day. The geography lesson is followed with practical advice about how to cope with the cruel and racist taunts of some of his schoolmates. Clearly, the Doss home is no protected, isolationist haven. The world is part of this household, from the rich culture of the Philippines to the distressing realities of young children’s prejudice.
Reviews of the book all praised the warm stories of family life, and the New York Times entitled its review of The Family Nobody Wanted “A World Inside One Household.”42 However, as the mother of Asian, Native American, Hispanic, and mixed-race children, and a member of a socially rather than biologically constructed family, Doss necessarily confronts and writes about public attitudes and institutions. Family, considered by American culture as a separate and private sphere, is visibly public for a transracial family such as the Dosses, who cannot pretend a biological link to their Asian, Hispanic, and Native American children. The family’s celebrity, generated by the Life article, the national radio program, and the book itself, further breaks down the idea of family as a privileged private space.
For while The Family Nobody Wanted happily celebrates family life, it also offers a radical revision of the American family of the postwar era. The first two sentences, “I didn’t yearn for a career, or maids and a fur coat, or a trip to Europe. All in the world I wanted was a happy, normal little family,” place Helen Doss’s story and longings for children within dominant cultural ideals for women and families in the 1950s. Postwar America, as Elaine Tyler May has argued, needed and wanted large families, and encouraged women to find their identity in motherhood. Through these large families, America could demonstrate “optimism and abundance, a sign of faith in a better future.”43 Helen Doss, however, struggles with infertility and with adoption bureaucracies before finally attaining her large baby boom family. She reminds us after another unsuccessful attempt to adopt a second child that “I felt tired and discouraged, but so did the whole world” (32).
Moreover, Doss’s discouragement does not end until she takes on the whole world, in the form of public attitudes and regulations about adoption and race. We first see the public nature of Doss’s path to motherhood as she types letters to hundreds of adoption agencies in search of “unwanted” mixed-race children. Whether knocking on adoption agency doors, writing letters to social workers across the country, traveling to bring her children to their new home, or standing in a judge’s chambers to finalize an adoption, Helen Doss becomes a mother in a visible and public way. The public sphere intrudes into her home once she becomes a mother as well. For example, Doss describes an encounter with a state social worker in terms that make readers aware of the public links to her family life. “‘I don’t like the reports on this latest one you’ve taken,’ she [the social worker] said, as she sat in our living room” (60). Thus, while much of the action of The Family Nobody Wanted takes places in the Doss home, that home is far from a private world. In addition, Helen Doss’s desire to have children and, later, to support her children leads her to make many forays i
nto the world outside the home.
Such facts enable readers to understand that while the mother/narrator of The Family Nobody Wanted is fulfilled by marriage and children, she is not “only” a wife and mother. In addition to being a persistent and outspoken advocate for adoption, Helen Doss is a writer throughout her marriage. She also contributes greatly to the family “kitty” through such work as planting a garden and painting houses. Halfway through the book, Doss leaves her family to go to college, and she graduates shortly before the publication of The Family Nobody Wanted. In an article written for the Sears Peoples Book Club, Doss defines herself as above all an author. “As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a writer,” Doss begins.44 As the biographer and mother of the very public “family nobody wanted,” Doss implicitly challenges the postwar relegation of women to a protected and privatized home.
Moreover, in writing as a mother, Doss challenged the cultural authority of educated, often male professionals to speak for and about American women. Touted in publicity as a “true story,” The Family Nobody Wanted gained credibility and popular acclaim in part because Helen Doss used her status as an adoptive mother to reply to the social workers, doctors, scientists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and other professionals whose “expert” advice in the 1950s focused largely on the problems, rather than the promise, of adoption.45 In offering American culture the clear, warm, and unapologetic voice of a parent who loves her children and is a proud advocate for adoption, Doss countered psychoanalysts such as Barbara Kohlsaat and Adelaide M. Johnson, who in a March 1954 article warned of “neurotic character traits” in adoptive parents, as well as child psychologists such as Marshall Schecter, who asserted, with little evidence, that adopted children were highly likely to exhibit “neurotic and psychotic states.”46 Against the “science” of social workers and psychologists, Doss placed her own experience.