Nicholas Sammond's Babes
Comparing Nicholas Sammond’s Babes in Tomorrowland and Stephen Kline’s Out of the Garden: Alternative Takes on the Concept of the Child and Child History
At first glance, Nicholas Sammond’s Babes in Tomorrowland and Kline’s Out of the Garden appear to be works offering analogous, if not parallel, thematic perspectives and methodological approaches to the evolution of the concept of childhood in America up to the mid-twentieth century. However, a more in-depth examination of these two works reveals that while they bear similar themes, they diverge significantly in purpose, methodology and, to a lesser extent, in their temporality and geographical scope. While Sammond’s intention is to map out epistemic shifts in the notion of …show more content…
Sammond traces American “conceptions of the child across different discursive domains, charting continuities and discontinuities in the meanings and uses of the term over time.”4 Chapter 1 examines the relationship between the emerging anxiety concerning movies’ effects on children and the pragmatic timing of Disney’s disseminating hagiography. Initially celebrated as a symbol of true ‘Americanness’ – an average, self-created, middle-class, Fordist industrial thinker from the Mid-West, and later truncated as Walt the scientific and similarly anxious parent, Sammond demonstrates how Walt Disney Productions gained monetarily through fashioning his avuncular public persona to reflect the perpetually morphing social anxiety directed towards children. Sammond provides a reading of Pinocchio (1940), suggesting its condemnation of working class indulgence and promotion of middle-class values of deferred gratification effectively harnessed the anxiety associated with the questionable morals of immigrant Hollywood writers and producers, as seen in the Payne Fund Studies. Chapter 2 examines the “stabilization and professionalization of the study of childhood,”5 from Moore’s “The Mental Development of the Child” (1896) to the 1928 First Berkeley Growth Study, and how Disney benefited from the normalization and dissemination
At first glance, Nicholas Sammond’s Babes in Tomorrowland and Kline’s Out of the Garden appear to be works offering analogous, if not parallel, thematic perspectives and methodological approaches to the evolution of the concept of childhood in America up to the mid-twentieth century. However, a more in-depth examination of these two works reveals that while they bear similar themes, they diverge significantly in purpose, methodology and, to a lesser extent, in their temporality and geographical scope. While Sammond’s intention is to map out epistemic shifts in the notion of …show more content…
Sammond traces American “conceptions of the child across different discursive domains, charting continuities and discontinuities in the meanings and uses of the term over time.”4 Chapter 1 examines the relationship between the emerging anxiety concerning movies’ effects on children and the pragmatic timing of Disney’s disseminating hagiography. Initially celebrated as a symbol of true ‘Americanness’ – an average, self-created, middle-class, Fordist industrial thinker from the Mid-West, and later truncated as Walt the scientific and similarly anxious parent, Sammond demonstrates how Walt Disney Productions gained monetarily through fashioning his avuncular public persona to reflect the perpetually morphing social anxiety directed towards children. Sammond provides a reading of Pinocchio (1940), suggesting its condemnation of working class indulgence and promotion of middle-class values of deferred gratification effectively harnessed the anxiety associated with the questionable morals of immigrant Hollywood writers and producers, as seen in the Payne Fund Studies. Chapter 2 examines the “stabilization and professionalization of the study of childhood,”5 from Moore’s “The Mental Development of the Child” (1896) to the 1928 First Berkeley Growth Study, and how Disney benefited from the normalization and dissemination