"Fame is Not Just for the Fellas" Design Sample Pages

Female Renown and the Childhood of Famous Americans Series

Gregory M. Pfitzer

“Fame Is Not Just for the Fellas”

A Volume in the Serie S Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book

e dited by Greg Barnhisel, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Winship

“Fame Is Not Just for the Fellas”

Female Renown and the Childhood of Famous Americans Series

Gregory M. Pfitzer

Copyright © 2022 by University of Massachusetts Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-62534-692-6 (paper); 693–3 (hardcover)

Designed by Deste Roosa

Set in Embury Text and Molde Compressed

Printed and bound by Books International, Inc.

Cover design by Deste Roosa

Cover art adapted from Helen Boyd Higgins, Juliette Low: Girl Scout (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1951), cover.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pfitzer, Gregory M., author.

Title: “Fame is not just for the fellas” : female renown and the Childhood of Famous Americans series / Gregory M. Pfitzer.

Description: Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, [2022] | Series: Studies in print culture and the history of the book | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022022505 (print) | LCCN 2022022506 (ebook) | ISBN 9781625346926 (paperback) | ISBN 9781625346933 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781613769737 (ebook) | ISBN 9781613769744 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Children—Books and reading—United States—History—20th century. | Girls—Books and reading—United States—History—20th century. | Childhood of famous Americans series | Children’s literature in series—History and criticism. | Children’s literature—Publishing—United States—History—20th century. | Bobbs-Merrill Company—History. | Women—United States—Biography. | Girls—United States—Biography.

Classification: LCC Z1037.A1 P49 2022 (print) | LCC Z1037.A1 (ebook) | DDC 181/.118—dc23/eng/20220723

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022505

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022506

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

For my nieces:

Meaghan, Mary Beth, Caroline, Seeley, and Katie

187 c h A pter Six

Miscegenation and the Sexual Exploitation of Indigenous Peoples

221 Part IV

Braving Enemy Fire: She-Warriors in Masculine Spaces

223 c h A pter Se V en “Filler Feminism” and Disputed Claims to Military Fame

259 c h A pter e ight

Civil War Heroines and “Vacillating Feminism”

293 Part V

The COFA Series Redux

295 c h A pter n ine “Meddling” Quaker Reformers as Agents of Change

333 c h A pter t en Radical Transformation and Reactionary Resistance

367 c onclu S ion Fame Is Fleeting

The National Women’s Hall of Fame

377 Notes

415 Index

Preface

First and foremost, I’d like to thank my fifth grade teacher, Miss Hazelrod, of the Colerain Elementary School in Colerain, Ohio. She, more than any other person, is responsible for this book. Here’s why: I was an average fifth-grade student with a propensity for daydreaming and a preference for recess over reading, sitting nervously at his desk on the first day of school when Miss Hazelrod, an intimidating teacher whose name alone terrified students in an age of corporal punishment in schools, announced that we would have a year-long reading competition to see who could report on the greatest number of “outside” reading books before the end of the school year. The rules were simple: the books had to be at or above a fifth-grade reading level, they had to be preapproved by the teacher, and a one-page synopsis of each work had to be submitted in order to receive reading credit. The prize, a small trophy and certificate, would be presented to the most prolific reader at the close of the school year.

Being the kind of boy who preferred playing baseball to reading, I wouldn’t ordinarily have risen to this kind of bait, but I was new to the school district and anxious to please. Later that week, when Miss Hazelrod took us to the school library to peruse the selections of age-appropriate books, I gravitated toward the section marked “History and Biography,” where I discovered dozens of “little orange biographies” with colorful dust jackets associated with the Childhood of Famous Americans (COFA) series, published by Bobbs-Merrill in nearby Indianapolis. I leafed through a work on Narcissa Whitman (about whom I knew nothing), skimmed the introductory chapters, and began reading closely. Before I was aware of it, the library period was over, and I had completed a third of the book. I checked the volume out and finished reading it over the weekend. The prose was simple but sufficient for a ten-year-old boy, and I was hooked. In the ensuing weeks and months, I began carrying home large numbers of these books, sometimes five or six a weekend, and in an age before backpacks, this took some juggling. I did not win the

“Fame

Is Not Just for the Fellas”

The Negotiated Past

Broadly speaking, this is a book about how children develop historical imaginations and the ways in which they carry perceptions of the past into their adult lives. More specifically, it is the story of how a series of children’s books on the girlhoods of famous women—volumes in Bobbs-Merrill’s Childhood of Famous Americans series, published between 1932 and 1958—influenced several generations of mid-twentieth-century American children in their understandings of how fame is ascribed as a trait and how that label influences the way history is remembered. Still more particularly, it is a book that chronicles the production history of the COFA series, focusing on how editorial decisions were made by the “people behind the curtain,” so to speak, who impacted the manner in which young readers were influenced by models of girlhood and womanhood.1 In these pages I concentrate on how the authors in the series, in collaboration with editors, readers, reviewers, and sales agents at Bobbs-Merrill, told the stories of the childhoods of famous American women and the historical conclusions they wished young readers to draw from the lives and times of such subjects. Finally, it is a book about the reading habits and historical literacy of American children in the mid-twentieth century, focusing on the educational philosophies of the series’ authors and editors, as well as on the marketing, distribution, and purchasing history of the volumes. I am interested in what inspired the series, who nurtured it, what challenges its promoters encountered in advancing works on the childhoods of famous women, and what impact it had and continues to have on young readers’ impressions of what fame could and should be.

What sorts of works were these? The more than one hundred fictionalized biographies in the Childhood of Famous Americans series purported to tell the stories of the boyhoods and girlhoods of famous Americans before they became prominent. They were not “biographical histories” in the conventional sense of the

Part I The Birth of a Series

c h A pter o ne

Female Renown and the Politics of Commemoration

the hall of faMe for Great aMericans

In 1900, at the dawn of a new century, the chancellor of New York University, Henry Mitchell MacCracken, issued a provocative challenge to the American people. Concerned by the fact that the United States “had no pantheon, no shrine to those whose achievements and contributions would forever touch the nation and even the world,” MacCracken urged his fellow citizens to commemorate the country’s most celebrated figures by inducting them into a “Hall of Fame for Great Americans.” The chancellor proposed that the public nominate worthy individuals whose names would be submitted to a panel of one hundred judges chosen from a list of university or college presidents and educators, professors of history, scientists, publicists, editors, authors, and justices of the national and state supreme courts. The first 150 nominees who earned an endorsement from more than half of this group of judges (a minimum of 51 votes) would then be inducted into the shrine. The only stipulations were that the nominees had to have been born in the United States or in territory that later became part of the United States and that they had to have been deceased for at least ten years. Fifteen vocational categories were enumerated from which selections were to be made, including authors and editors, businessmen, educators, inventors, missionaries and explorers, philanthropists and reformers, preachers and theologians, scientists, engineers and architects, lawyers and judges, musicians, painters and sculptors, physicians and surgeons, rulers and statesmen, soldiers and sailors, and “distinguished men and women outside the above classes.”1

MacCracken pledged to create a physical space to immortalize the designees, a promise on which he delivered when he commissioned the architect Stanford White to design “a 630-foot open-air Beaux Arts colonnade with niches for busts and tablets” of America’s most famous figures to be built “on the crest of a hill overlooking Washington Heights and the Palisades” in New York City. Although the structure was modeled after the Pantheon in Rome and “dedicated to all the gods, and goddesses, and deities of Roman mythology,” MacCracken insisted that this American Hall of Fame would surpass the original in terms of usefulness because it commemorated dignitaries who were real, flesh-andblood human beings rather than mere divinities.2 The chancellor also hoped that the selection process for choosing candidates would model the kinds of democratic practices that had distinguished the careers of many of the nominees to be enshrined in the facility. Emblazoned on the cover of the Handbook of the Hall of Fame was the phrase “Every American is a Shareholder in the Hall of Fame,” a slogan that reaffirmed MacCracken’s assertion that the institution was a “truly democratic” one.3 The openended selection process confirmed the value of free choice, as those putting forward names shared in the democratic accomplishments of the citizens they had singled out for recognition by doing so. The American Pantheon would be open to citizens from every walk of life whose donations would underwrite its construction. “Standing on the banks of the noble Hudson and the gateway of the New World,” the Hall of Fame must be an egalitarian monument, insisted Reverend Louis Albert Banks, later historian of the enterprise, one that would welcome “from every section of the country all who are worthy to sit as peers in the company of the immortals, who form its first parliament.”4

As MacCracken expected, the prospect of a Hall of Fame became “a focal point for national pride” among citizens of the United States. It “promised, for the first time, to launch Americans into the orbit of universal immortality,” journalist Richard Rubin argued, and therefore “people took it very, very seriously” as a “vehicle of our validation.” The cultural significance of the experiment was evident from the widespread participation in the selection contest: “Newspaper publishers

used their editorial pages to lobby for or against nominees, and groups like the American Bar Association and the United Daughters of the Confederacy waged extensive, expensive campaigns to get ‘their’ candidates elected.”5 The Brooklyn Daily Eagle offered a one-hundred-dollar prize to the person who could come nearest to guessing the names of the top fifty votegetters, while magazine editors provided citizens with short accounts of the life stories of nominated figures so that they might be better informed in making their decisions.6 Voters were encouraged to scrutinize carefully these biographical materials not only for what they might reveal about the worthiness of candidates for the Hall of Fame but for the guidance they could provide in encouraging visitors to emulate the behaviors of the elect. MacCracken and his backers at New York University

f i GU re 1. The Hall of Fame for Great Americans. Photo courtesy of Bronx Community College.

Young girl readers of Seymour’s book seem not to have been too disappointed by the deemphasis of feminist themes; indeed, they sometimes argued for a less politicized approach. Frances Lee Morton, an eight-year-old student who was asked to critique the COFA volume, implied that it was not necessary for the author to get too caught up in ideological matters. Simplicity was her preference. “I both liked and disliked this book,” she wrote. “I liked it because the story was good and the people were natural. I disliked it because the author kept on going in some places when she should have stopped. The words and writing were just about right for my age but it was too long,” she added. “A girl of eight likes to play more than sit down for a long time. I think it would [be] better for ten-year olds. I wouldn’t want to read it again right now, or buy it, because it is too long and slow.” Anticipating that at an older age she might care more for other aspects of the work—“I might change my mind in a few years,” she acknowledged—at present she was focused on visual rather than ideological presentation. “I think the book would be better if it had some nice pictures. They could be very pretty with woods and Indian villages,” she concluded.91 Nor was young Kim Frey concerned with parsing out the philosophical distinctions between reality and unreality in the “orange hardback” books on Native American women toward which she gravitated. “My life goal at age 8 was to be an Indian,” she noted, so COFA volumes on Sacagawea and Pocahontas, despite being “almost completely historical fiction,” served her purposes nicely.92

Part IV

Braving Enemy Fire: She-Warriors in Masculine Spaces

c h A pter Se V en

“Filler Feminism” and Disputed Claims to Military Fame

“the Girls neeD to coMe to the fore aGain”

The extended discussions at Bobbs-Merrill regarding the proper way to introduce female subjects into the Childhood of Famous Americans series took place against the backdrop of World War II and the Korean conflict. Those struggles encouraged the submission of numerous manuscripts about war heroes and military history, including volumes on George Washington, Stonewall Jackson, and Ulysses S. Grant. Naval figures were featured prominently as well, such as John Paul Jones, Stephen Decatur, Oliver Perry, David Farragut, Raphael Semmes, Matthew Calbraith Perry, and George Dewey. Ironically, given that most of the authors of these military COFA works were women, war was a topic presumed by some at Bobbs-Merrill to be of interest only to boys. Many of the advertising campaigns for the volumes on war heroes in the COFA series were directed at male youths, especially those whose fathers were fighting in World War II. “At a time when so many fathers are away from home serving in the Navy,” a Bobbs-Merrill circular noted for the volume on Admiral George Dewey, “little boys still have a common interest” in being the type of “admiral’s son” “who shared his father’s victories and defeats,” and who “looked forward to the day when his father’s ship would bring him home again.”1 Little girls presumably were exempt from such sentimental attachments. This gendered approach to military history was evident in the comments of COFA author Laura Long, who wrote volumes for the Bobbs-Merrill series on naval war figures such as Oliver Perry, David Farragut, and George Dewey but who did not expect girls to flock to them. The devoted secretary of the Columbus, Ohio, Culture Club, a lyceum-style organization founded by a group

“the female history of our country.” Nor was she bothered by the fictionalized elements in the series. “There is no better story of feminism than feminism that actually happened, and all of these women defined our country and our futures by being incredible in completely separate ways,” Phinney writes.14

Finally, although it probably doesn’t need to be said, I’ll say it anyway: young boys were impacted profoundly by the feminist turn in COFA volumes as well. I can speak from personal experience here by returning to the image of my former fifth-grade self that I presented in the preface to this work. When I first discovered the Childhood of Famous Americans series while thumbing through Ann Warner’s Narcissa Whitman: Pioneer Girl, I had no idea who Whitman was or what her claim to fame might be. As I began to read Warner’s text, however, I became aware of a whole new enterprise of which I knew little—missionary work among Native Americans in the West—as well as of the leadership role that women played in the movement. I’m not sure I understood at the time how much of Warner’s depictions of Narcissa’s childhood had been fictionalized, but I remember being transfixed by the story. From that moment on, I can assure you that if the old adage “little boys won’t read about girls” had ever applied to me, it no longer did. Other volumes in the COFA series probably had a little something to do with that as well. My standard history textbooks had largely ignored the roles of women in the American past, so the COFA books on girlhood offered me a fresh way of thinking about fame as a category of analysis. Given that “women have long required substantially greater achievement levels . . . than men to get equally noted for posterity,” as quantitative analysts Steven Skiena and Charles B. Ward note, these Bobbs-Merrill stories of remarkable girls were even more powerful and important to me.15 By the time I had worked my way through most of the volumes on women in the series, to put it simply, I had become convinced that fame was definitely not “just for the fellas.”

Notes

Abbreviations

BMS Bobbs-Merrill Manuscripts, Courtesy of Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington

DGC de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection, Special Collections, University of Southern Mississippi Libraries, Hattiesburg

DLC David Laurance Chambers

MCWP Mabel Cleland Widdemer Papers, Libraries, Special Collections, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York

Preface

1 Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (New York: Ballantine, 1988), 21.

Introduction: The Negotiated Past

1 See Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 8.

2 Elizabeth Bird, “History Has Its Eyes on Her: Biographies of Women Are a Hot Trend in Children’s Publishing,” School Library Journal, 20 January 2018, https://www.slj.com.

3 Julia Mickenberg, “Civil Rights, History, and the Left: Inventing the Juvenile Black Biography,” MELUS 27, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 65–66.

4 Susan Gardner, “My First Rhetoric of Domination: The Columbian Encounter in Children’s Biographies,” Children’s Literature in Education 22, no. 4 (December 1991): 275–81.

5 Anne Commire, Something about the Author: Facts and Pictures about Contemporary Authors and Illustrators of Books for Young People (Detroit: Gale Research, 1971), 2:235–36, as cited in Marie T. Wright, “Augusta Stevenson and the Bobbs-Merrill Childhood of Famous Americans Biographies,” Indiana Libraries 12, no. 1 (1993): 11.

6 Cheryl Bastian, “Childhood of Famous Americans,” Celebrate Simple: Using the Simple to Teach the Profound, 5 December 2012, http://cherylbastian .blogspot.com.

7 Anna Bedsole Stone, “From the Recesses of a Small Town Library: Famous (Exclusively Female) Americans,” Anna Ventures, 12 January 2017, https:// annabedsole.com.

Chapter One: Female Renown and the Politics of Commemoration

1 Louis Albert Banks, The Story of the Hall of Fame: Including the Lives and Portraits of the Elect and of Those Who Barely Missed Election. Also a List of America’s Most Eligible Women (New York: Christian Herald, 1902), 16.

2 Banks, The Story of the Hall of Fame, 14.

3 Handbook of the Hall of Fame, 7th edition (New York: The Hall of Fame, 1933), front cover.

4 Banks, The Story of the Hall of Fame, 27.

5 Richard Rubin, “The Mall of Fame,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1997, 14–18.

6 Banks, The Story of the Hall of Fame, 355. The contest was won by a schoolgirl whose list of fifty names included twenty-seven of the twenty-nine inducted in the first class of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans.

Index

Page references in italics refer to figures and photos.

Abbot, Mary Squire, 337

“ABC’s of Computers” (Sams), 347 Abe Lincoln: Frontier Boy (A. Stevenson), 26, 29, 120, 121, 295, 334, 343

Abigail Adams: A Girl of Colonial Days (Wagoner), 82–93; childhood portrayed in, 82–93; fame in association to husband, 88; gender roles and nonconformity of Abigail Adams, 91–93, 259–60; Wagoner’s proposal for book, 72. See also Adams, Abigail abolitionist movement. See slavery Abrams, Ann Uhry, 208

Acevedo, Sylvia, 273–74, 321

Adams, Abigail: Abigail Adams: A Girl of Colonial Days (Wagoner), 72, 82–93, 259–60; and Hall of Fame for Great Americans, 13; husband excluded from COFA series, 141; as National Women’s Hall of Fame honoree, 373

Adams, John, 12, 88, 373

Adams, John Quincy, 82, 123, 230

Addams, Jane: on Clara Barton, 262–63; Jane Addams: Little Lame Girl (Wagoner), 52–57, 65; Jane Addams of Hull-House (Wise), 55

advertising and publicity: advertising investment by Sams, 343; advertising of Clara Barton: Girl Nurse (A. Stevenson), 274; book subtitle decisions, 55–56, 138–39, 214–15, 254–55; COFA artwork criticized, 339; COFA book cover and dust jacket designs, 51, 83, 134, 166, 219, 243, 258, 275, 312, 320; COFA growth from inception through post–World War II, 333–35; dust jacket endorsements, 202; fame criteria and marketability of books, 144, 368–69; Patria Press cover designs,

356; publicity for Nancy Hanks: Kentucky Girl (A. Stevenson), 120

Aladdin Books (Simon and Schuster), 348–53

Alcott, Abigail May, 42 Alcott, Bronson, 42, 46

Alcott, Louisa May: and Hall of Fame for Great Americans, 13; “Life, Letters and Journals,” 45; Little Women, 41, 43, 46, 52; Louisa Alcott: Girl of Old Boston (Wagoner), 34, 40–50, 51, 65

Allen, Ethan, 231

Amelia Earhart: Kansas Girl (J. M. Howe), 60–63, 355–58

Amelia Earhart: Young Air Pioneer (J. M. Howe), 356–58, 365

American Bar Association, 11

American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions, 148 American Booksellers Association, 333

American Flag House, 232 “American History and the Structures of Collective Memory” (Frisch), 72–74

American History Makers series, 17 American Library Association, 21 American Red Cross, 262, 271, 273 American Revolution: Battle of Bennington, 228; Battle of Fort Washington, 248; Battle of Monmouth, 246–48, 255–56; Betsy Ross’s flag as legend of, 237–46 (see also Betsy Ross: Old Girl of Philadelphia). See also Washington, George

Andrew Jackson: Boy Soldier (A. Stevenson), 124, 349

Andrew Jackson: Young Patriot (Stanley), 349

Anne Bradstreet: Young Poet (Dunham), 346

Annie Get Your Gun (Rodgers and Hammerstein), 171, 172, 182, 186

Between 1932 and 1958, thousands of children read volumes in the Childhood of Famous Americans book series. With colorful cover art and compelling—and often highly fictionalized— narrative storylines, these biographies celebrated the national virtues and achievements of famous women like Betsy Ross, Louisa May Alcott, and Amelia Earhart. Employing deep archival research, Gregory M. Pfitzer examines the editorial and production choices of the publisher and considers the influence of the series on readers and American culture more broadly.

In telling the story of how female subjects were chosen and what went into writing these histories for young female readers of the time, Pfitzer illustrates how these books shaped children’s thinking and historical imaginations around girlhood using tales from the past. Utilizing documented conversations and disagreements among authors, editors, readers, reviewers, and sales agents at Bobbs-Merrill, “Fame Is Not Just for the Fellas” places the series in the context of national debates around fame, gender, historical memory, and portrayals of children and childhood for a young reading public—charged debates that continue to this day.

“In our current ideological wars over history, Pfitzer’s subject could not be more central to understanding our present. This beautifully written and researched text makes a valuable contribution to both the history of juvenile publishing and the construction of historic nationalism.”

—renée m. sentilles, author of American Tomboys, 1850–1915

gregory m. pfitzer is professor of American studies at Skidmore College and author of History Repeating Itself: The Republication of Children’s Historical Literature and the Christian Right.

A volume in the series Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book

Cover art

from

UNIVERSITY OF

AMHERST

www.umasspress.com

Juliette Low: Girl Scout (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1951), cover

Cover design by Deste Roosa

adapted

Helen Boyd Higgins,