American History Hit - A History of American Childhood

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

School, play and much less work: the idealised childhood is a very separate part of life. But how did it come to be so? And why is this perhaps more pronounced in American society than anywhere else?Don is joined by Todd Brewster to talk about the creation and possible demise of childhood in the United States, and how we can study it using photographs. Todd's book is ‘American Childhood: A Photographic History’.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Siobhan Dale. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribeYou can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Try and remember. The jungle gym, the slide.

The endless infinite swinging, kicking to the sky higher and higher. Then jumping, hands outstretched, realizing last second you called it wrong, landing face first in the sand. Laughter, freedom. Skinned knees and banged elbows. It's summer holidays, and we've been out all day. And now, as golden hour fades to dusk, there's just enough time to jump on bikes and race home for some.

supper before mom shout your name in the streets. And tomorrow, same thing again. Or maybe it's the lake, the creek, wherever, whatever. We'll make plans as we do it without worry, without care, and best of all, without adults to tell us how. We got this. We're children. This is our world. Greetings listeners, Don Wildman here, and this is American History Hit. Thanks for popping by. In my possession is a personal treasure, a well-lit, commercially shot, eight-by-10 black-and-white photograph with satin finish that is of me aged somewhere between one and two. In this picture, I'm wearing a spotless white diaper. I'm seated on a white cloth spread artfully across a tabletop, and I'm gazing up at some arresting distraction beyond the lens. It's the baby portrait from Sears,

circa 1963. Doesn't bear much resemblance to me, I must say. Looks more like a swarthy Italian, which I am definitely not. But the kid's cute, I'll give them that. And one fortunate child born into a stable family in a middle-class community where mothers cared about and could afford baby pictures. Well-fed, well-cared for, and well-dressed when it would finally come that he'd wear some clothes. You can tell a lot from a photograph. Emotionally, factually, sure, but way past that level, there's the greater life of the subject, the sociology of their world, even the psychology of the photographer. And if you collect and curate enough of these pictures of children, you'll have a completely unique perspective on a fundamental aspect of American life, where a whole

lot of pictures of kids have been taken over the last 100 years. And that's just what Todd Brewster did, drawing from the vast photographic archives of the Library of Congress, Metropolitan Art Museum. Well, it's a long list of resources. He found over 200 evocative images and compiled them into his recently released book, American Childhood of Photographic History. Pretty cool. And we have the man here. Todd Brewster, welcome to American History Hit. Let's discuss our lost innocence. Thank you, Dawn. And I'd love to see that picture at some point. Sounds terrific. Volume two, yes. You know, I'm going to jump right in.

You wrote a recent opinion piece that was fascinating that expressed something we have to lay out right away before we talk about the book itself and the images, which are amazing. But it was an idea that I think we need to hang our hat on right away. That childhood in America has, in the past, been a peculiarly unique chapter of the history of civilization, really, that American childhood has been protected in ways

that were different from past societies. How so and how has the nation benefited? The way to begin that, the answer to that question is I think to go back to the time of the Enlightenment, which of course begins at the 1600s and 1700s in Europe and then travels to the United States in particular as a political representation. The Enlightenment gave respect and dignity to the individual, to the growth of the individual, to the individual spirit, to the individual contribution, the important of the individual in political systems, in artistic expression.

And since America was the first nation to really be. built around that idea, we prized the notion of development. Now, in medieval times, children were considered to be more like adults in waiting. It was not considered to be a separate, protected period of life. But if you want human being to develop into something that is the unique contribution to the world, then you need to spend some time focusing your attention on how children develop. And so the idea of a protected period of childhood, separate from adulthood, protected from the worries, the concerns, the needs of an adult life, became an American fascination and focus. It didn't happen overnight, as I say, in that piece, the notion of children, first of all,

as candidates for the workplace, and childhood as a period where, as often said about idleness, is the devil's playground. I mean, religion and certainly the work life tended to view childhood a little differently. But in America, you start seeing the development of this particular focus on childhood as a time of nurture and development to be protected from adult worries. and concerns. And it takes really over 100 years for us to really begin to embrace that fully. You see it in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when there's a greater focus on the children of the workplace and laws are enacted in order to protect them from the dangers of the workplace. You know, in 1890s, only 7% of children went past the 8th grade. They graduated from the 8th grade

would go right into the farms or to factories. By the early 20th century, the notion of a teenager had been established and the notion of a teenage life needing to be an extension of their education from the high school emerged you see a separate attention on children's clothing children's literature children's games things that didn't exist before the late part of the 19th century and then you have a childhood culture a child sort of focus culture and a child-centered nation developed in the 20th century in America and i think that that's our demonstration here of our attention to that was very much attached to our founding values. And that was not the case in Europe prior to that.

I think of the French as particularly attuned to childhood. Well, the two great thinkers about childhood were one British, one French, John Locke, and Rousseau on the French side, right? And they offered different visions of what childhood should be. Locke was very much a sort of Protestant word-centered focus on the child needs to be sort of developed properly to become a good citizen, a good adult, contributing in an adult manner. The French one was more that the child was like a perfect state of nature needs to be watered and nurtured. I'm not saying these ideas were exclusive to America.

Clearly, the focus that we put our attention on borrowed from both of those great thinkers. But it was in America where the world was starting over again at that time. And so it gave a great opportunity for these ideas to be melded into the larger society. The metaphor for me is a greenhouse. And you treat children as plants in a way that are being watered and fertilized and kept apart from the farm, if you will. And there's a time that benefits that plant because those roots systems grow more stably and so forth. And so when you finally do put that plant in the ground with the other big plants, it's ready for the elements of nature and can fight for its own sake that much better. Well, that's actually very much the Russoian idea, right? And so the idea would be that children's very specialness needs to be something they discover on their own.

The sort of sense of wonder needs to be untarnished by adult hands. And the locking idea would be, no, the child needs to be instructed into the ways of a good, strong adult life. And so they're both focusing attention on the child, but from different points of view. And we borrow from both of them. And one of the points in my book is that in particular, this Russoian notion, that children have a particular sense of wonderment and experimentation and that if we interrupt it, if we stick our fingers into the pie, so to speak, we will disturb the opportunity for the imagination to sort of run free. And it's the imagination running free that has led to so many incredible moments in American history, both in business and

popular culture, in higher culture, and in innovation and invention and in science. The fact that we embraced childhood as a separate sphere of life and incorporated both the Lachian and the Russoian visions, has meant that we've thrived as a country, but that's under a threat now. But that's what's fascinating is there's a direct line between this new concept, this invention of childhood, if you will, or at least this sort of institutionalization of it, whereas as a society, Americans pass laws and create a structure to protect this chapter of life, which really takes hold in the late 19th century, as you point out. And therefore, those generations grow up in the tens, 20s, 30s of America. And those are the people who come of age at the time of

the great leap forward in American society where incredible inventions are happening. Technology is being married to life in new and unique ways. Marketing happens. I mean, there's just all kinds of new ideas that are taking hold in American life that are indeed the outgrowth of what had come before in Europe, but it's sort of designed more intentionally and so is childhood. Exactly. You know, it's interesting. I think it's 1875 that the first society for the prevention of cruelty to children is established. By the way, I think around 10 years after the prevention of cruelty to animal society was established, but nonetheless, the notion that childhood children need to be protected from, of course, from cruelty, but also that they need to let their minds wander. There was a society

for the study of child nature that was established in 1890. And one of the key ingredients to their philosophy was that should we let children fear from the truth? Should we let them explore things that we know are not true. And of course, there's great benefit to letting the imagination run to things that we may think we know are impossible, but a child may find new ways to the impossible thing that we say we can't get to. Right. It's the imagination workshop of childhood. People of our age are so familiar. We just take this for granted because we were raised in a society where that was the priority. And you don't damage childhood by expecting too much of children. Indeed, you feed it by getting on that level and understanding its value and toys and all the things that go into childhood are all about feeding that machine.

And it's such an interesting thing that we have grown up with, understanding that as totally normal, where indeed it is a complete exception to the rule. And can be one of the many things that people who say that tired phrase to American exceptionalism, they don't know they are reacting to these kinds of new developments in sociology, really, of America and how different that really was as this was made the norm. I'll be back with more American history after this short point. break. Join me, Alice Campbell on Patented, a podcast by History Hit, where we bring you the fascinating histories of the world's most impactful inventions. We uncover the exceptional

stories behind everyday objects. Snakes and Ladders is really a game about a karmic journey through stages of existence towards liberation. Look back in time to understand technologies of the future. One of the really interesting things about it is that it showed just how hard AI in the real world really is. And we examine unexpected origins. Who or what invented sex? Yeah, fish. Fish for the ones that invented copulation and made sex intimate for the first time. For the answer to those questions and a whole lot more, subscribe to patented on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. Join me for new episodes every Wednesday and Sunday. So in the 1800s, as these new ideas of childhood are being sort of instated in our laws, literally, at the same time you have the rise of photography.

Mid-1800s start to happen. That too is a European invention and comes over via France, really. But it becomes a very, very popular thing in America. So children obviously are the subject matter of so many of these photographs. How did you frame this project? How did you decide to approach this from a photographic perspective? Well, the idea of a book on seeing history through the eyes of children was suggest to me by an editor from a different publishing company, as a matter of fact. And I didn't actually think that I was the right writer for that. I've written, you know, a history of the 20th century and a book about Lincoln and a book about American founding values. And it just didn't seem like the right match to me. But I do have a fascination for photography and love of photography, not only the beauty of a photograph and things you can find out when you mind a photograph, but also its role in American history.

And I began looking through the Library of Congress's archives and discovered this wealth of incredible images and how you could really tell the story of American history through the photography that's present in those archives. And in particular, you can see the emergence of this theme that we've just been discussing, childhood and America becoming a child-centered nation. And you pointed out correctly, the photography started in France, the Daguerre types, and then it came to the United States. And we think of the sort of portraits of the 19th century of Frederick Douglos and Abraham Lincoln and all the great political figures at the time. But as you also point out, it became a favorite item in the late 19th, 30th, 20th centuries to go for the family portrait or the portrait of the child. So you had a record of this for your family album. And as you also know, I'm sure that, you know, photography at that time was really in its early stages. And it required, the slow film speeds required that you sit for long periods of time, which is why most of those pictures, people are not smiling in that.

right, in order for an image to be recorded. But as photography grows, so do we see childhood in a completely different way. First, it is these formal portraits where you put on your Sunday best and you strike your face for posterity and children are often dressed up in these pictures in ways that are signals to the parents want children to be remembered, right? But then as it moves forward and photography film speeds are increased and we're able to see now children moving children in action, children at play, children, particularly in 1920s, 1930s, you start to see, it's as if we've been looking at a stage scene where everyone is frozen in place and all of a sudden there's a snap of the finger and they start moving, right? And as they move, we see this whole new

range of personality come out from the child. And so you see them at play and you see them at work, as Lewis Hines' pictures pointed out. The reason that we addressed ourselves to the evils of child labor was because there was a photographer who went around. and took pictures of children in workplaces where they had lost limbs and where they were working under terrible conditions with machines that were extremely dangerous. And those pictures ended up sparking the movement for laws on child labor. Just as photography aided our understanding of race in America, so it aided our understanding of childhood. And so when you say that, you can see a collection of photographs will tell the story of the child again, as if there's

a snap of the finger and they become animated. And that to our eyes, as historians, that happens really in the early part of the 20th century and grows with the story of photojournalism to where we have a pretty vivid sense of children going forward from there. And often, by the way, and this is key, not just dressed and posed as their parents want them to be, but now emerging in the full flavor of fun and wonderment and excitement. And since children are sort of guileless, we get to see a particularly vivid kind of real image of children in a way that adults are much more. are likely to have themselves photographed in ways that are more self-conscious. It's funny, you know, all these different kinds of technologies all create an inevitable chicken and egg scenario with everything. So you end up with photography being guided by the technology. I mean, the idea of photography, as much as the desire to use it. We have the Kodak, the development of the early cameras that are so easy to use where you send

away your film and suddenly it's cheap and easy to snap a lot of pictures and know how you're going to get it back again. And then the development of this becomes the reason that people become very casual about shooting pictures anywhere, anyhow. My dad was, boy, right in the sweet spot of this. He came back from World War II. There is literally a camera around his neck when he's on the Liberty Ship, the picture we have of him on the Liberyship coming home. He was such a photo nut after the war. And he was just joining the movement.

That's what happened. People just started taking pictures everywhere. And it was one of the greatest little rituals that this present generation has no idea existed, where you'd send away your film in a little pre-addressed envelope and you'd get this magic package in the mail. And oh my God, it was great. Everybody would crowd around and trade the photographs around and look at themselves. You know, the delay factor made it so much more delicious to get these pictures than we have now. But we do the same thing.

I mean, now you have the phones and the phones are doing the same deal where now there's the obligatory selfie. And every time we take pictures of each other, it's like, let's get the group shot and the individual shots. And now I have to get the selfie. And it's always this sort of ritual that happens. It's really fascinating. And that's what I mean about chicken and egg that one thing leads to the other and they sort of play off each other. Just like the cell phone has led to the democratization of reporting, right? I mean, we wouldn't have known about George Floyd if Darnela Fraser hadn't been walking by a teenager with a cell phone.

So the early cameras democratized history telling, you know, because now, as you say, you would refer to a picture of your father coming back for World War II with a camera around his neck. Well, there aren't pictures of soldiers coming back from revolution. war because there were no picture-taking capabilities. And then you have this emergence of pictures as telling the family story, which was not the case in previous generations. And everyone now has a wall that covered with photographs of their family and grandma and grandpa and dad and mom and the brother, the sister, and now we have this fascination with ancestry that also takes us into the realm of photography. So we tell our own personal stories on the walls of our homes. But yes, technology has a direct line from the early days of photography straight up to the cell phone camera.

Tell me about how the books organized. Yeah, I mean, you know, it was an interesting question and one that I have to say my editors were perplexed by when I suggested that no, we didn't need to tell the story chronologically. And no, we didn't need to tell the story subject-wise. I mean, you know, we consider these things. Like, we want a formal history where we do our best to cobble together some images of the early years of childhood, pre-photography images of childhood, then march our way through the 19th century as the pictures become more available and into the 20th. But that felt too dutiful to me. This is a very

subjective history. It's not the definitive word on the story of childhood in America. It's not an academic treatise. This is very much my vision of images that I found intriguing, interesting. And so I actually decided that I wanted to do it instead like a scrapbook, that the images are matched up sort of randomly, but not really randomly, randomly, randomly in the sense that they don't follow any sort of predetermined historical, chronological grid or subject grid, but they do interact with each other, so that you have images that make sense when you put them together. Sometimes it's a visual interaction that, you know, there's a certain graphic design quality to one image that marries it nicely with another one, but often it's also a subject. For instance, there's a juxtaposition

of two photographs facing each other on a spread in the book, one of a family, a Japanese Japanese-American family on their way to the internment camps during World War II. And on the opposite page is a very young Robert Taft. Robert Taft was a member of the Taft political family and went on to become a senator from Ohio and eventually a Republican presidential candidate did not earn the nomination, but was a competitor to the Eisenhower wing of the Republican Party in the 1950s. But the Tafts go way, way back in American history, solid Yale attendees and very pretty privileged family. So in the one hand, you have the privileged Robert Taft as a child looking

very privileged. And opposite, you have this Japanese-American family on their way to an internment camp. So the juxtaposition being that there's a wide experience for the American child across different historical experiences. Another juxtaposition, there is a photograph of a preemie ward in Los Angeles, a hospital ward where the doctors and nurses have fixed on a bulletin board above these babies and incubator boxes. pictures of their success stories. And so there's all these little snapshots. And opposite, it is a active shooter drill at a high school in Minneapolis. So you have this sense of both the fragility of life in one circumstance, and the fragility of life in another circumstance. And one is basically

the child as delivered in a state of nature, although encouraged by the brilliance of our medicine. And the other one is fragility that's informed by our increasingly violent culture. Fragility of life is a great phrase for that period of time of understanding the importance of protecting childhood. I mean, so much, just to get back to this briefly, so much changed. You had child labor laws. You had differences of schooling, obviously, health care changes, vaccinations. You name it. It came from a general movement of this is a period of time that needs to be attended to in a unique and important way. And I was the great beneficiary. I mean, I'm the late wave of that whole movement. And I, for one, am very grateful.

You know, that was an amazing time in life. We are now on the cusp, if not further than the cusp, of a complete change in the opposite direction. Due to, again, technology, this has become a new age. And the idea of a protected childhood is completely threatened, if not destroyed already. Tell me about that and how we're clumsily dealing with the advent of the Internet and the social media factor. Well, I have long been intrigued by a fascinating media floss for a name Neil Postman, who wrote in the late 20th century. He wrote a book a few decades ago called The Disappearance of Childhood. And I must say, I read it way back when it came out. As I did this early deep dive into the

study of children and the photography of children, I found myself always thinking about Neil Postman. The reason is that Postman was saying that childhood was disappearing way back before the internet had taken hold and certainly before social media had emerged. And Postman's idea was really that through television, through technology, but particularly through television, we had broken that barrier, that protected barrier that, whether you believed in Locke's viewpoint or Rousseauze, or your point, protected children from that adult world, from the intrusion of the adult hand, and such that, you know, children were witnessed to scenes of violence. They were witness to the badgering nature of marketing. They were witnessed to early, to images of sexuality, to aspects of

the adult culture that are appropriately shielded from children so that children could have this period of wonder and sort of development. As I was doing this project, I kept thinking back to what Post would think of our own time, in particular about social media. I know a lot of people have long before me have referenced the dangers of social media, but they are referencing the dangers of social media on children using some of the same themes that Postman described. The comparison to our own time with the rise of social media is that while Postman was

worried about the intrusion of television, worried about the intrusion. of the internet. And while they're both methods of technology, the intrusion that comes with the social media is much more insidious. In the case of the postman argument, what he was really seeing was the intrusion of the adult world into the life of the child. But with social media, we not, don't have just the parental hand coming in. What we have now is peer pressure emerging through social media and how their children represent themselves in social media and the sort of competitive notion of trying to out impress each other with what. what they say, what they show, how they appear to be saying their lives are going, but also the

intrusion of bots, the intrusion of algorithms, the intrusion of salivating marketers who were looking very silently not only to clean information through these apps for their own profit-driven motives, but also to change behaviors. And that, you know, was really not the fear of, in the earlier days about the nature of technology, but actually to change behavior by manipulating behavior. In other words, to direct children to do certain things and act certain ways that will actually improve profits or improve them in a direction that makes them more profit centers. So technology is both a wonderful thing. It allows us to see children in ways that we never got to see them before back in the early 19th century or the 18th century or anything in the time

before that. But it also carries with it the other side of the sword, which is these kinds of dangers. And so we not only have to worry about the disappearance of childhood, but we have to worry increasingly about the dangers of childhood that are exhibited in our own time. It's at least one of the nonpartisan issues that all children deserve to have their childhoods. So my great hope is that this society we're in now can absorb this new technology as fast as possible and therefore get back to what needs to be the case, which is children need to be given their chance to be children. Todd Brewster is a journalist who's worked for Time, Life, ABC News, and his new book is called American Childhood, a photographic history. Thank you so much for joining us, Todd. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Don. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.