So it was that by the mid-1960s, even Nancy and the Hardy Boys were slipping down from the juvenile Olympus atop which they had reigned for so long. Though Harriet’s royalties were still pouring in, it had more to do with the higher price of her books than actual sales numbers. In addition, there was the issue of content. As far back as 1948, concerned mothers and fathers had been writing in to Grosset & Dunlap about the prejudice and racism they saw scattered throughout the Syndicate’s books, in the form of uneducated dialect for all the foreign or non-Caucasian characters and villains who were invariably from these same two groups. Harriet had been infuriated by the charges at the time, writing to her latest editor at Grosset that she and her employees had gone over the Hardy Boys book in question, The Hidden Harbor Mystery, “very thoroughly, to see what kind of a case your ‘conscientious objector’ might have on the subject of race prejudice. As to the ‘Jewish’ angle, I am sure the woman has no case at all. The word ‘Jew’ is not mentioned on Page 156 nor anywhere else in the book. A ‘second-hand man’ who says ‘Vell’ instead of ‘Well’ could be a German, a Scandinavian, or a native of any of various other countries.” Oblivious as she was to new sensitivities following the Holocaust, Harriet was even more naive when it came to racial prejudice closer to home. “On the subject of Negroes, the woman has more of a case,” she admitted, “but the whole story idea revolves around ‘Can’t a Negro be an evil-doer in the story?’” Of course, The Hidden Harbor Mystery did much more than just use a black man as its villain. In an act of misguided self-defense, Harriet herself listed the instances that “might have a bearing on race prejudice, etc.,” in a memo she mailed off with her letter. They included a “mention of a burly, thick-set Negro who puts his feet up on seat of a train car”; “mention of a young negro, badly dressed”; “more about the same Negro, Luke Jones. He is described in unfavorable terms”; “More about the nefarious colored man” and “scheming by colored folks.” Still, she insisted, none of these things added up to “give any child reader the idea all colored folks are bad.”
This was clearly a matter of opinion, and it was not the first time that Harriet’s genteel manners failed to cover the racism so typical of her generation and class. That same year she had also hired a lawyer to prevent a vaudeville act from using the name Rover Boys in their show. While it was an issue of general infringement rather than who exactly was doing the infringing—as ever, she guarded the Syndicate properties fiercely—her letter to the lawyer that handled the case made plain the “soft racism” that passed for tolerance in her circles. “Thank you for your prompt and efficient handling of the case of ‘The Heirs of the Rover Boys vs. The Two Colored Vaudevillians,’” she wrote. “It is pleasant not to have to worry about the matter any longer. Although I have no desire to be allied with our Southern governors, I did come out boldly agin the negroes usurping white folks rights, didn’t I?”
Harriet’s reference was to the creation of the southern “Dixiecrat” party, a splinter group of the Democratic Party made up of southern delegates who opposed the adoption of new protections for minorities in Truman’s civil rights platform. The buildup to the civil rights movement had begun with Truman’s own 1946 Committee on Civil Rights, formed to ensure that black Americans did not lose the progress they had made during the Depression and World War II. In spite of the Dixiecrats’ efforts—they ran Strom Thurmond of South Carolina as their presidential candidate in 1948, and he won four southern states—by the mid-1950s the tide had turned. In 1954 the Supreme Court handed down the groundbreaking Brown v. the Board of Education decision. The following December in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat at the front of a bus.
When, in the fall of 1957, the Little Rock Nine integrated Central High School in their hometown, to the dismay of thousands and accompanied by the National Guard, the civil rights movement gained a public teenaged face that energized it even further. Sit-ins at lunch counters followed, as did the creation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Then in 1962 James Meredith became the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi, setting off riots that forced President Kennedy to send in federal troops. The center of the plush, postwar world was beginning to crumble, and America’s young men and women were helping it along. Harriet, meanwhile, was happy in East Orange with her safe and sane stories that also happened to be riddled with racism, guns, and outmoded clothing and cars. “The Syndicate is a challenge to me to spread happiness and good principles among the young people of the world,” she chirped, even as America’s restless youth roamed in search of something much more earth-shattering than a new mystery.
Now complaints about prejudice in Syndicate books, laced with real anger, flowed in with greater frequency. In 1961 the very same Hardy Boys book that had prompted such a reaction in 1948 elicited another furious letter from a parent whose son had been assigned a book report on The Hidden Harbor Mystery. “It had never occurred to me that you might still be ingraining the old race-riot type of fear that was prevalent in the thirties,” the woman fumed. “We are trying to raise our children to appreciate Negroes for their contributions; not to fear them because of their color . . . Temporarily we will not be buying any more of your series books. If, however, you can suggest any point in the Hardy Boys series after which this sort of prejudice does not appear, your advice would be appreciated.”
Luckily for such parents, Grosset & Dunlap had already decided it was time to take matters into their own hands. In 1958 they instituted a huge revision program designed to overhaul and reissue the early books in the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series. Eventually the rewriting would extend to the first thirty-four Nancys and the first thirty-eight Hardys. The news sent Harriet into a tizzy. “All of a sudden Grosset & Dunlap decided that these books were to be instantly revised because the plates were worn out and the stories antiquated and not in line with acceptable reading material for today’s children (heros [sic] and heroines carrying guns, playing tricks on the police to outwit them, a drunken character, repetition of content, etc.),” she wrote to Edna. Though Harriet did not mention race in her letter, it was no doubt one of the biggest issues for Grosset & Dunlap. While girls might tolerate Nancy wearing a dress in situations where they would wear pants, if any more parents wrote in to say they would no longer buy series books, the financial ramifications would be enormous.
Though the Syndicate did eventually try to break out of its lily-white mold with a series about a black family named the Tollivers in the late 1960s, the effort failed, perhaps because like all the Syndicate series, it was designed to avoid reality altogether. “The series will be about a family of five Negro children who have fun and adventures,” explained Andy Svenson, who was writing it, to Edna (she was still marginally involved in the Syndicate’s activities) in a letter. “There will be no social problem involved, the chief idea being that Negro children will be able to identify with the story characters.” In the late 1960s, it was almost absurd to expect black children to be able identify with black characters who were not caught up in civil rights and the rise of black consciousness. Nevertheless, Andy Svenson would later chalk the failure up to the fact that “the publisher could find no profitable way to market the books. It is a pity but the majority of black people have not yet been educated to buy books in any great numbers.”
Obviously Grosset had been wise to count on revisions of old series with brand recognition, rather than the creation of new ones, to energize their sales numbers. The publisher wanted the first four manuscripts rewritten in two weeks each. Harriet, who was sixty-seven years old by this time, took on most of the revising herself, in addition to her regular work. The rewrites were extensive, involving everything from shortening the books from twenty-five to twenty chapters, gutting entire plots when there was no way to update them—such as in The Clue of the Broken Locket, a 1934 Nancy Drew in which the sleuth reunites a pair of adopted babies with their real parents, an implausible scenario that was replaced b
y a Civil War treasure hunt—to streamlining the language so that the stories, which now had more action and less atmosphere, read even faster than they once had. The results were snappy, but they were also devoid of much of the charm that had made the series so successful. As one critic writes, “The prolonged suspense of the early volumes, where stories started slowly and excitement built steadily, evaporated. Kids were hurled from one unrelated, action-packed mini-crisis to the next. Plots in the revised editions became mechanical, and soon it became difficult to differentiate one story from the next.” In order to deal with the racial aspect of the revisions, Harriet simply got rid of ethnic characters, including black ones. Though it was the easiest way to handle the situation, it was also the least appropriate, but even if Harriet had the inclination to do something else, there was simply no time.
As for Nancy, she underwent a complete transformation, beginning with her age. In the revision of The Secret of the Old Clock, the first title in the series, she was established as eighteen instead of sixteen, because the driving age had gone up. A girl as reliant on her car as Nancy—who now drove a snazzy blue convertible in place of her trusty roadster—had to be able to get behind the wheel at a moment’s notice without worrying about her license. In fact, her whole attitude toward driving seemed to have changed along with her more mature age. Where she had gleefully zoomed away from the scene of the crime with a stolen clock in her backseat in the original story, she was now concerned about breaking the law. “The blue convertible sped along the country road. Nancy smiled grimly. ‘I’m afraid I’m exceeding the speed limit,’ she thought.” Her eyes “sparkle” and “twinkle pleasantly” several times in the span of a few pages, then continue to do so for the rest of the book, along with every other female character’s. Her run-in with the dreaded Topham sisters at the department store, once a scene in which she shrewdly assesses her enemies, is now reduced to a put-down (delivered only in her own mind, of course, since when she does talk to the girls, she does it “evenly”) as 1950s as the “tan cotton suit” she’s dressed in: “I pity any future husband of hers!” Poor Isabel Topham, once doomed because her mother was going to force her to marry rich, is reduced from a tragic figure being shackled in wedlock to a catty high-maintenance wife in a world where everyone gets married, some just more happily than others.
In addition to struggling with the revisions—“I think an editor should respect an author’s judgment and not try to inject his own likes, dislikes and opinions into a story,” she wrote sniffily to Anne Hagan, the series’ current editor, about the revamped Mystery at Lilac Inn— Harriet was also fighting constantly with Grosset & Dunlap about the new titles they were adding to the series at a rate of one per year. Nineteen fifty-nine’s title, the thirty-sixth, was The Secret of the Golden Pavilion, set in the new state of Hawaii, and like all the Nancys now, it was also written by Harriet. It was an enormous workload, and the strain showed. “You say Nancy is slipping just because she does not think the way you would have her,” she wrote angrily to Hagan, who had suggested that the stories might be more “taken from the police files” and that Nancy should be checking in at her local precinct more often to hash out the details of a given adventure.
Though Grosset started publishing the first revisions in 1959, putting out two that year, and another four by the end of 1962, Harriet’s battles began to have an effect on production. Grosset & Dunlap could not get out as many revamped books as quickly as they hoped to—none at all were published in 1963 and 1964—and as a result, people were still buying old text with new covers and becoming outraged at the outmoded stories. Harriet responded to the scheduling pressure by hiring more writers to work on revisions in-house, including one to vet all books for plots and details that needed to be changed, and generally failed to economize in spite of every indication that she should do so. “We are expanding all the time—closing our eyes to the slump-in-business reports and counting on Junior to have a dollar to spend on his favorite hero,” she wrote to one of the people she was trying to bring on board. But none of those writers would ever be given the job of writing a new Nancy Drew book. On the few occasions when someone else contributed to a volume in the series, it was done only under Harriet’s extremely watchful eye. Moreover, where she had once insisted that Syndicate books were a collaborative effort, she now saw herself as Nancy’s sole creator. “Our company rarely accepts plots from other writers and so far as Nancy Drew goes, I am afraid I guard her jealously as my own personal property,” she wrote to one interested party. As one of her editors at Grosset & Dunlap during that period recalled later on, “Harriet had her own little world—and it was a lovely one. She felt very close to Nancy.”
As such, Harriet kept a close watch on everything from Nancy’s clothes to her physical appearance. The books were being produced in a new format now, with bright yellow spines and up-to-date drawings of Nancy in action printed right on the board covers instead of dust jackets, and all the art was being redone to appeal to the current generation—a plan Harriet was sometimes in line with, and other times not. “My idea is to have Nancy wearing a dress with an Inca design and I am attaching some photographs from the July issue of Vogue magazine,” she wrote to Anne Hagan at one point; “I wish you would dress Nancy in a costume more appropriate to Spring or Fall,” she wrote to Grosset’s art director at another. For new cover art for The Hidden Staircase, she requested: “Though it is not the ‘new look’ could her bust be slightly more full and her legs slightly more shapely?” Even as Americans were snapping up copies of Sex and the Single Girl (1962) and experimenting with the birth control pill, which the FDA had approved in 1962, Harriet was fighting for Nancy’s modesty. “I do not like having Nancy’s legs accentuated,” she wrote to the art director. “I would prefer that both her knees be on the floor and her skirt a bit longer so that this feature will not date the book. I do not like Nancy’s mouth. Her upper lip is too short and having her mouth so far open gives her a dull appearance. Delete the line indicating the crotch of the man’s trousers which extends over the edge of the bed.” The double standard that American women were grappling with was alive and well in River Heights—sex was not for nice girls, and Nancy was nothing if not nice. She no longer talked back or spoke harshly to anyone. Even George, once so defiant about the unusual origins of her name, confessed in The Clue in the Old Stagecoach (1960) that it was really short for Georgia.
ALL THE WHILE, the first ghostwriter of the series was paying careful attention out in Ohio. Though she had not written for the Syndicate since the early 1950s, Mildred had not left her work for Edward and Harriet entirely in the past. As the revised Nancy Drews began appearing on the market, Mildred’s alma mater, the University of Iowa, decided to include her in its Iowa Authors Collection. Begun in 1945 at the university library, the collection endeavored to gather in one place all the books of authors who were either native to the state or had some long-term connection with it. Writing back to Frank Paluka, the librarian currently in charge of the project, Mildred expressed her gratitude at being included and filled him in on her recent biography: “I presently am employed as a reporter for the Toledo Times . . . My interests, aside from sports on which I did a great deal of writing, include archeology. In recent years, I have enjoyed numerous trips to archeological centers in Central America.”
Though she did not mention it, Mildred had made each of these trips, which she then reported on for the Toledo Blade, by herself. She had been widowed once again in 1959, when George Benson died suddenly of a stroke just before the couple was to leave on a vacation for Puerto Rico. With Peggy long grown up, Mildred had busied herself more than ever with her newspaper work, covering everything she could in addition to her regular courthouse beat. Richard and Pat Nixon’s visit to Toledo during the 1960 election campaign elicited one of her favorite pieces, which ran under the headline: “PAT WORTH WAITING FOR, STATION CROWD INDICATES.” The entire article, with the exception of a few sentences, was about the vice president
’s wife, “vibrant, serene, a confident 115 pounds of energy.” Though Nixon was in the picture that ran alongside the article, he was clearly second fiddle to this reporter. In another equally timely piece of investigative journalism of the day, the Blade dispatched its least kitchen-friendly employee to her home to make a meal from an emergency rations kit of the kind that were being stowed away in bomb shelters everywhere. “Radiation shelters now being in style,” Mildred began jauntily, “it behooved me, I thought, to learn through trial and plenty of error how to live the simple life on dehydrated, fortified food.” Like most of her adventures in cooking, the experiment had mixed results. While the cocoa and mashed potatoes were delicious, “scrambled eggs were less of a success . . . My hope is that if war does come, a strenuous effort will be made to spare the hens.”
But in spite of all the distractions, pleasant and otherwise, she had not lost track of Nancy Drew. Frank Paluka at Iowa had sent her a book list, asking her to confirm that she had written all the titles on it. After identifying the various books she had published without the help of the Syndicate, she explained, “Much of my early work, including the Nancy Drew books, which had such wide sale, was written for the Stratemeyer Syndicate, East Orange, N.J. I note many translations. I had no part in these whatsoever. Also, the books now have gone into many revised and simplified editions, and I had no part whatsoever in the rewriting.” She clearly did not approve of what had been done to the character she had pioneered, and she did not want to be associated with what she saw as inferior writing that pandered to the lowest common denominator. “When I was very young,” she told Paluka, “they induced me to sign a release of all right to the pen name, title, etc. As a result, there is today no published list of authors.” Irritated as she was, however, and as long as it had been since she’d written for Harriet, she kept her promise of confidentiality. “I include this for informational purposes only,” she warned Paluka, “not to be used as a published statement.” She then further listed which pen names were the property of the Syndicate, as opposed to her own, and signed off. Paluka promised to keep her secret, but the fact remained that Mildred had confessed her past to a someone who had reason to care—after all, she was one of Iowa’s own—and who was not about to forget it.
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