Book Reviews

Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and theMaking of the American Child, 1930-1960.Nicholas Sammond. Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press. 2005. 488 pp. ISBN0-8223-3463-1. $24.95 (paperback).

Drawing on a wealth of secondary sources aswell as the Disney Archives, Nicholas Sammond’swide-ranging and erudite study places the famil-iar story of the early Disney enterprise in thecontext of American culture and childrearingadvice. He insists that Disney creations havebecome one with mainstream American culturebecause they not only have adapted the senti-mental, optimistic perspective of the Americanmiddle class but have provided, in a contextof public concern about the effects of media, aseemingly positive commercial expression ofthe ‘‘normal child.’’ Although this may havebeen good for business, Sammond, employingFoucaultian theory, does not argue that Disneyor his company ‘‘co-opted’’ these standards ofnormality but that Disney’s image ‘‘was discur-sively produced’’ (p. 13). In the 1930s, whenleading child development authorities employedthe language of scientific management to iden-tify the generic child’s development, Disneyportrayed himself as an average American who,as master of industrial efficiency in his cartoon‘‘factory,’’ produced media ‘‘good’’ for ‘‘nor-mal’’ children. After World War II, when influ-ential public intellectuals decried the totalitarianthreat of the overmanaged society (and child),Disney emphasized his role as an avuncularpopularizer of science and history and stressed

in his Life Adventure films a benign view ofnature that served as a counter to the manipula-tions of culture.

Sammond’s book is dense, rich, and insight-ful, but oddly selective, in its treatment of theDisney phenomenon and thus a better historyof the culture of childrearing than of Disney.Guided as it is by discursive analysis, readersunfamiliar with or unfriendly to this approachwill find the text sometimes labored and theconclusion difficult (despite its insights intowhy Americans resist thinking of children ascommodities and instead insist that commodi-ties, especially the media, manipulate children).I admire the author’s scholarship and frequentbrilliance (from his discussion of the managerialstyle of childrearing in the 1920s and the impactof Freudian thought on the theory of‘‘momism’’ in the 1950s to his take on the link-ages between Disney’s documentary featuringthe mass suicide of lemmings and the anxietiesof 1950s’ suburbanites). Although his idea that‘‘the efficiently managed child of the 1920s and1930s . acted as a prophylactic against uncer-tainty and instability during the Depression’’may not fit the historical evidence well, hisclaim that the ‘‘new natural child would servea similar function, moderating the conformistexcesses of postwar American mass culture andsociety,’’ is an insightful contribution (p. 252).

Still, I find that the argument is unpersuasiveat several key points largely because of the intel-lectual leaps that Sammond takes from his solidanalyses of the childrearing culture to Disney.I am not sure that Disney’s vaunted business

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success is really related to the management styleof childrearing in the 1930s, nor does Disney’sfascination with the naturalist film (with all itsanthropomorphisms) in the 1950s reaffirm thechildrearing expert’s struggle with balancingchildren’s autonomy with necessary social con-formity (as Sammond seems to suggest). Disneywas too complex a man to fit neatly into thisthesis, and the book has the virtue of burstingout of its theoretical straitjacket to reveal this.Disney was as much at odds as in harmonywith the cultural strains Sammond documents.Though Disney was sometimes praised in Pa-rents for providing harmless entertainment, thisand most authorities continued to promotedevelopmental play and playthings that had lit-tle to do with Disney’s commercial fantasies.Disney may have been efficient, but his earlyproducts came out of a world of Victorian fairytales, boys’ magazines, and early 20th centurycomic strips (albeit adapted to the protectiveand sentimental middle-class parent), and thisworld was often in conflict with or irrelevant tothe goals of the Gilbreths and other rationalizingintellectuals. Disney sold the ‘‘cute’’ (even inhis nature movies) and in doing so appealed toparental feelings that the experts were trying toreduce and control (even if by the 1940s theywere ‘‘giving in’’ to these parental longings).The author may overestimate Disney’s accep-tance as a model of good children’s media (e.g.,the press criticized the Mickey Mouse Club forits overcommercialism), and links between Dis-ney and the middlebrow popular culture werestronger than with the public intellectuals ofMargaret Mead and even Benjamin Spock thathe stresses. Still, Sammond does us great ser-vice by showing how Disney products becameby 1960 obligatory in American childrearingbecause Disney defined the normal childhood,and in so doing obscured differences betweenchildren and the contradictions of modernAmerican society.

GARY CROSS

The Pennsylvania State University

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