Childhood Bonds

**This transcript comes from an earlier broadcast of this episode. There may be small differences between the text and the audio you hear above.**

ED: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. Today on the show, we’re looking at the history of children starting over in America.

ED: If these real-life stories of family separations seem familiar to you, that’s because you’ve been reading fictional accounts of them for years. In a book called Audacious Kids, Jerry Griswold points out that family separation is a central theme in virtually all of the classic American children’s books written in the years between the Civil War and World War I. Think Wizard of Oz, Huck Finn, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Tarzan of the Apes. All of those novels, says Griswold, follow a basic storyline.

Child is orphaned or separated from his or her parents. Child goes on a daring journey. Child is adopted into a new family, overcomes adult adversary, and gains the respect and recognition he or she deserves. This basic plot, says Griswold, was not invented in America, but it does get used by scores of American authors to tell stories to American children about American values. When I asked him which novel provided the best example of this plot, he offered a surprising answer.

JERRY GRISWOLD: Well, oddly enough, I would choose Pollyanna. The vision you get of Pollyanna in the Disney film is that she’s a sort of saccharine person who’s happy about everything and always searching for something to be glad about. When you actually read the novel, you can see that this girl is one of the most cunning children in all of children’s literature, who manipulates the adults this way and that, to get her way essentially for the good.

When it was published in 1913, it was immensely popular all over the country. The story that it tells is of a little girl whose father is a missionary out in the west. Her mother has already passed on. And then the father dies, leaving this girl bereft, out there in the wilderness, out there in the frontier. And she’s shipped back to her aunt’s home in Beldingsville, Vermont. And her aunt is a termagant, grouchy person who didn’t want this child at all.

So what we’re dealing with is a story of an immigrant-like child, orphan child, who arrives in this strange place. And the whole community, as it were, takes over caring for her. And she heals the whole community and eventually turns her hard-hearted aunt into a lovable woman. So this is in a way a kind of representative American story.

ED: What does it say about Americans, generations of us, that we turn to these stories to tell us about ourselves? What does it say about the United States that this is a story that we like to tell?

JERRY GRISWOLD: This story, this ur-plot that I’ve identified as being a part of the American thing is not only or exclusively American. It’s one of many plots available in children’s stories. It’s curious that the American children’s book writer, out of a number of arrows in the quiver, would choose this particular one over and over again.

And I think, from an historical point of view, it’s because it reflects our national history. That is, the way the American Revolution, for example, was portrayed was a story of rebellious sons breaking with our father George III in England. So it was all framed in this kind of oedipal way, if you want to use the psychological term, that our national history is the story of breaking away from parents and coming into our own.

ED: Is that story also why separation and that sort of longing that we can all remember from watching Wizard of Oz or reading these books early on, that sense of isolation from our parents and loneliness, being adrift, is that also American?

JERRY GRISWOLD: Absolutely. By the middle of the 19th century, Americans who had been broken with the past, who had busted up the sod and created an entirely new world without precedent. What was missing was that sense of patrimony, that sense of tradition, that sense of connection. And all of a sudden, those rebellious sons of the American Revolution become founding fathers.

ED: In your really interesting overview of the popular literature of Gilded Age America, you point out that so many of the books are books we now consider children’s literature. What would that have meant at the time, and what do you think we should take from the fact that so many of these books do seem to feature children and maybe to have had children as audiences?

JERRY GRISWOLD: Well, the unique thing about this period– the late 1800s and the early 1900s– was this was a time when books written for children as the main audience were largely and often read by adults and appeared on adult bestseller lists. You take a look at the bestseller lists during this period, and you see like Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Pollyanna, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and maybe like War and Peace. But the great authors of the time were writing for children.

I think what’s curious now these days is the great controversy that’s swirling around in our culture just this last month or two is whether adults should read children’s books. So what you might argue is this thing we call children’s literature is not really the exception. It wasn’t an exceptional period between the two wars– between the Civil War and World War I where this emerged as a popular kind of literature. Rather, you can argue that is the norm, and the exceptional period has been the relatively recent years, where something like adult literature has risen up as a alternative and is apparently shrinking back down into a more diminished state where we share a kind of literature, young and old, together.

ED: Jerry Griswold is the author of Audacious Kids: The Classic American Children’s Story, which is being re-released in a revised edition this fall.

[MUSIC – CAPTAIN BEEFHEART & HIS MAGIC BAND, “YELLOW BRICK ROAD”]

PETER: In the early 1600s, the city of London had a problem– children, hundreds of them, destitute and living on the streets. The city didn’t have the means to house or employ them. And the upper classes were nervous that youths with nothing to do would turn to lives of crime.

ED: So the enterprising Virginia Company joined forces with city authorities to round up poor kids and send them to the colonies as indentured servants. They were legally contracted to work for masters, usually on plantations, until they were at least 21. Because disease was rampant and the labor was hard, many of them would not live to see the end of their contracts. But in the old world, indentured servitude in the New World was actually considered a form of child welfare.

PETER: But a new problem arose in the middle of the century when the English government discovered that children were being shipped to the colonies illegally, without proper paperwork or the consent of children and their parents. Historian Kristen Lashua has studied this chapter of involuntary migration. She told me that in the colonial period, more than 5,000 English children were plucked off the streets of London and sent to the Chesapeake to work.

KRISTEN LASHUA: The word kidnapping first appears in print in 1673. And it’s used originally to mean very specifically to steal a child to sell them to plantation owners in the New World. There’s a lot of talk against kidnapping and that this is a problem, but it’s really hard to know how to stop this practice. Especially when children don’t have parents, because parents would typically be the ones who would prosecute somebody who is trying to take or harm their child.

PETER: But, Kristen, they are subjects of the king. He’s the great protector, right? I mean, he’s the father of us all, so there is a notion of the right to be protected. And that is beginning to apply to some of these children?

KRISTEN LASHUA: Yeah. By the 1680s, the king puts forward a proclamation that tries to lay out proper ways of sending children overseas. In other words, making sure that you have their consent and their parent or master’s consent.

PETER: Wow, that’s crucial. Since when did children have any right to consent to anything? That’s a terrible idea.

KRISTEN LASHUA: So this is sort of like a contested idea. If a child is going to be sent overseas, who should be the person that is giving consent for that?

PETER: Right, but it does say quite clearly that those people who pretend to be protectors of children are using that as a cover for sheer theft. And what they’re doing in effect is enslaving these English kids. Would you say that’s an exaggeration?

KRISTEN LASHUA: No. One of the things that surprised me working on this is that the language of slavery is used. In the few cases where kidnappers are actually brought to court and prosecuted, they’ll describe a child as being sold into slavery. It becomes of increasing concern that these children are being treated in the same way as African slaves are being. And so there becomes an increasing emphasis placed on making sure that everything is done legally, that these children are consenting to go abroad if they do go abroad.

So that by the middle of the 18th century, there’s reports of these children being stolen and sent to the plantations, or they’re about to be. And these English guys sort of swoop in and save them, and they’re all very proud of themselves. And then they immediately put them in the British Navy to fight in the Seven Years’ War, which is not a really great place for them to be, either– very dangerous. But the whole thing is that what matters in that moment is that the children were– or at least they said they were willing to go into the Navy, whereas to go to the New World, they hadn’t given that consent.

PETER: What does it tell us that it’s so important to English people to imagine that children have consented? What does that tell us in the face of the reality of the lack of meaningful agency?

KRISTEN LASHUA: Well, I think it’s a story that they’re telling themselves about what it means to be English, or later what it means to be British. That English and British people are law-abiding, one, and that they’re free people. And so that they are not bound laborers without a choice.

PETER: Right. They’re not slaves.

KRISTEN LASHUA: Precisely.

PETER: Yeah, so this is the English people developing their own brand.

KRISTEN LASHUA: Exactly.

PETER: It’s the liberty brand. We don’t do that sort of thing. We aren’t the kind of people.

KRISTEN LASHUA: Exactly.

PETER: Even though they are.

KRISTEN LASHUA: Yeah.

PETER: So Kristen, you’ve cited this figure of 5,000 kidnapped children over the colonial period in the Chesapeake. And if you came as one of these kidnapped children, you would not have an indenture.

KRISTEN LASHUA: Right.

PETER: So then there are lots of indentured children, too. So the scale of child migration is actually pretty significant.

KRISTEN LASHUA: It’s quite large. Right. And usually what you hear about is that migration is a sort of young man’s game. So we’ll hear about young men choosing to go to the colonies to make something of themselves. But when you look at the number of children who were sent over and children who were kidnapped, you realize that’s not exactly the narrative for a lot of people. That a lot of people are much younger than we think, and a lot of people are going not because they choose to go, but because that’s sort of chosen for them.

PETER: Kristen Lashua is a historian at the University of Virginia.