Cold War Kids

Politics and Childhood in Postwar America, 19451960

Marilyn Irvin Holt

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780700619887, 9780700619641
• eBook ISBN: 9780700619887
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Educational Policy
• Index: History

Today we take it for granted that political leaders and presidential administrations will address issues related to children and teenagers. But in the not-so-distant past, politicians had little to say, and federal programs less to do with children—except those of very specific populations. This book shows how the Cold War changed all that. Against the backdrop of the postwar baby boom, and the rise of a distinct teen culture, Cold War Kids unfolds the little-known story of how politics and federal policy expanded their influence in shaping children's lives and experiences—making way for the youth-attuned political culture that we've come to expect.

In the first part of the twentieth century, narrow and incremental policies focused on children were the norm. And then, in the postwar years, monumental events such as the introduction of the Salk vaccine or the Soviet launch of Sputnik delivered jolts to the body politic, producing a federal response that included all children. Cold War Kids charts the changes that followed, making the mid-twentieth century a turning point in federal action directly affecting children and teenagers. With the 1950 and 1960 White House Conferences on Children and Youth as a framework, Marilyn Irvin Holt examines childhood policy and children's experience in relation to population shifts, suburbia, divorce and family stability, working mothers, and the influence of television. Here we see how the government, driven by a Cold War mentality, was becoming ever more involved in aspects of health, education, and welfare even as the baby boom shaped American thought, promoting societal acceptance of the argument that all children, not just the poorest and neediest, merited their government's attention. This period, largely viewed as a time of "stagnation" in studies of children and childhood after World War II, emerges in Holt's cogent account as a distinct period in the history of children in America.

1

White House Conferences on Children and Youth: The Public Discussion

“It is particularly important in today’s troubled times that we continue to move ahead toward our basic objective—improving the well-being of our children.”

—President Harry S. Truman, June 20, 1950

Truman was speaking to the men and women planning the 1950 White House Conference on Children and Youth, also known as the Midcentury Conference. Seven months later, in early December 1950, 6,000 conference participants crowded into the Armory in Washington, D.C. They came as representatives from all forty-eight states and the U.S. territories. They came from rural and urban backgrounds, from federal agencies and Congress, and as representatives of 460 national organizations that covered the gamut of religious, medical, educational, recreational, and industrial interests. Somewhat overwhelmed by the numbers, national committee chair and Federal Security Agency administrator Oscar R. Ewing wondered if, instead of this throng, more might be accomplished with fewer delegates concentrating on “one or more specific problems.” At the same time, he realized that every state and territorial entity expected to be heard and that no organization wanted their particular constituencies or interests ignored. Participants came to Washington for the purpose of initiating a “detailed examination of all problems relating to children.”¹

The increasing child population, as well as a new emphasis on considering children of diverse social-economic backgrounds, gave participants more to talk about. They met in small groups according to their special expertise and interests. Some concentrated on research projects devoted to health care, education, and the influence of the mass media. Others studied laws affecting adoption, divorce, employment, institutionalization, and juvenile justice. A number of groups looked at community resources, as well as the subjects of discrimination, youth organizations, recreational outlets, social work methodologies, religious instruction, and church youth groups. As the topics explored in this chapter will show, discussions delved into such areas as adequate housing, the impact of television, family life and divorce, and working women.

Behind the scenes, months of preparations had gone into gathering information for the delegates’ use. Data collected by state, territorial, and local organizations and agencies was submitted in reports that offered a picture of local and regional needs, effective programs, levels of funding, special local circumstances, and conditions among groups such as migrant workers and Native Americans. The U.S. Children’s Bureau provided statistical data collected nationally, and the Interdepartmental Committee, established in 1948 to promote better communication between federal agencies and departments administering programs affecting children, contributed information.

The number and reach of these federal entities was somewhat surprising. The Department of Agriculture, for example, had allocated funds for 4-H youth programs since 1928 and ran the National School Lunch Program, which began in 1946. The Bureau of Indian Affairs was in charge of Indian-only schools and medical services; the Department of Defense was responsible for military dependents, both overseas and on stateside military bases; the Veterans Administration provided survivor benefits to widowed women and their children; and the Social Security Administration oversaw Aid to Dependent Children (ADC, later renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children, AFDC). Obvious leaders of the Interdepartmental Committee were the U.S. Children’s Bureau and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), established in 1953 as a cabinet-level agency to assume the functions of the Department of Education and most of those under the Roosevelt-created Federal Security Agency. By the time the second postwar White House Conference on Children and Youth met in 1960, the number of agencies associated with the Interdepartmental Committee stood at twenty-eight. From its input, conference participants had detailed information at their fingertips. How else would they know that during the 1947–1948 school year almost 78,000 one-room schoolhouses were still operational, that national infant mortality rates were dropping, or that in 1960 over 155,000 children of servicemen killed in World War II and Korea were eligible for aid through the War Orphans’ Educational Assistance Act?²

Among the 6,000 participants at the 1950 White House Conference on Children and Youth were members of the conference’s Advisory Council for Youth Participation. Dwight D. Eisenhower Library

The 1950 White House Conference on Children and Youth was the fifth in a succession of meetings that began in 1909 when activists and reformers in the national child welfare movement urged President Theodore Roosevelt to sponsor the first such conference. Reformers and child-care advocates came together in other federally sponsored meetings over the years, but the White House Conference was different. It had the power of the presidency behind it. Intended or not, the 1909 meeting (subtitled “Care of Dependent Children”) laid the groundwork for future ones and for presidential involvement. The 1909 conference was followed by one in 1919 (subtitled “Standards of Child Welfare”); later meetings, federally funded beginning in 1930, convened on the decimal year until 1970 when the last officially titled “White House Conference on Children and Youth” occurred.

Detailed organization went into conference planning. For both the 1950 and 1960 meetings, there was a small executive committee, aided by a national committee with about 100 members. Some individuals such as child-rearing expert Benjamin Spock and social welfare leader Robert Earl Bondy were considered “musts” for the national committees and, as a rule, committee members were sought out for their expertise. Occasionally, however, a name triggered political opposition. One well-known psychologist, for instance, was dropped from consideration in 1960 because Senator Bourke B. Hickenlooper, a Republican representing Iowa, “violently objected” to the man as a liberal “New Deal Democrat.” A congressman might block a potential participant, but he or she was just as likely to intercede on behalf of an individual or organization that wanted to serve on the national committee or attend the conference. Missouri’s Senator Forrest C. Donnell, for example, put in a word for the president of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which was headquartered in Truman’s hometown of Independence, and members of the Democratic National Committee asked the White House in 1950 to consider a judge who, although a Republican, was “very liberal, and an exceptionally good man.” Conferences were never completely free of partisan politics or conflicting political ideologies, but they did not dominate discussions or recommendations made in final reports. In fact, a chief concern of the executive and national committees was not political leanings but individuals and organizations that zealously advocated for one group of children at the expense of others. Conference goers had to be reminded that the meetings were about “all children,” unlike prewar conferences where the greatest emphasis was directed toward the most economically and socially disadvantaged.³

At each conference, many issues such as alleviating poverty and fighting juvenile delinquency were staple topics. In that sense, meetings shared similarities, but each also reflected the distinctive nature of the period in which it occurred. The 1950 conference resonated with an urgency to make up for what had not been accomplished or had been allowed to fall by the wayside during the war years. In the face of military mobilization and the wartime culture at home, proposals and expectations advanced by the 1940 White House Conference on Children and Youth were overshadowed or put aside. To accommodate the need for home-front labor during the war, for example, states relaxed enforcement of compulsory school attendance laws, and officials at both the federal and state levels failed to vigorously enforce the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which was designed to eliminate child labor in particularly dangerous working conditions. The result was a pressing sense of regaining lost ground when conference participants gauged current conditions and then identified emerging issues.

The world of 1950 was vastly different from that of 1940. The United States had emerged from World War II as a superpower with nuclear capability, facing off against the Soviet Union in a Cold War. When President Truman spoke of “today’s troubled times,” his mind was on the foreign troubles that faced the country. Just months before the White House conference convened, the president approved development of the hydrogen bomb as another weapon in America’s arsenal, and many in the United States believed that the country was just a breath away from another war. International tensions escalated when North Korean troops crossed the 38th Parallel in June and Truman authorized sending U.S. troops as part of the United Nation’s contingency to stop the invasion. There were troubled times at home, too. Senator Joseph McCarthy was on television and radio with claims of finding Communist sympathizers in and out of government, and Americans demanded that lawmakers address domestic issues that affected their everyday lives. Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, elected in 1948 as a Democrat from Minnesota, called it a time of “postwar and newwar [sic] angers and problems.” He later wrote, “Letters from constituents reflected the craze. Do something about housing, do something about education, do something about unemployment, but cut taxes, slash expenditures, cut budgets, they said in obvious contradiction.”⁴

Domestic issues and conflicts abroad were ever present in the minds of those concerned with the 1950 White House Conference on Children and Youth. Less obvious, or noticed, were reports that the child population was on the rise. While the conference was in its planning stages, the U.S. Census Bureau was counting the population. During the late 1940s the U.S. Public Health Service noted a slight increase in the national birth rate, but it was not until the Census Bureau began issuing preliminary reports for the 1950 U.S. Census that Americans began to realize that the increasing number of children they saw in their own communities was a national trend. In 1950, the number of children under the age of fifteen stood at a startling 1.4 million, and there were over 363,000 young people between the ages of fifteen and nineteen in the United States. No one could have predicted in 1950 that growth in the child population would continue at an unprecedented rate, but the decade that followed witnessed the phenomenal “baby boom.” Between 1946 and 1960, almost 60 million children were born in the United States.⁵

By their sheer numbers they, as well as teenagers of the postwar period, had the capacity to impact American culture and its institutions. Their behavior and their perceived needs influenced society’s concept of childhood, as well as the formulation of public policies that affected them. Enormous expectations were invested in this group. Both parents and society in general projected the belief that these youngsters and teenagers would achieve more and have greater opportunities than any generation before them. The repeated message for children was that they lived in a country where they could grow up to be whatever they wanted, realizing any personal dream.

In a way, postwar expectations were a culmination of decades in which American society formed beliefs about childhood and the nature of children. In the 1800s perceptions evolved from defining childhood as a relatively short phase early in life to expanding the period of childhood into adolescence. Children were perceived as innocents and childhood as a time for emotional and intellectual development. In the ideal childhood, there was time to play, especially when games and playtime were adult-directed and structured. There were chores to be done, but no hard labor, and youngsters were to be nurtured in a child-centered family.

By the early twentieth century this attitude, perpetuated by the middle class, was firmly established. In fact, one commentator wrote in 1903 that “The Cult of the Child” reigned in the United States. Contemporaneously, Ellen Key proposed in The Century of the Child that in the twentieth century “all social arrangements and decisions would be based solely on an assessment of their impact on children.” Key’s charge to the citizens of the world came during a period of heightened activity among those involved in America’s child welfare movement and at a time when the systematic application of the social sciences was touted as the modern way to cure the country’s many social ills and inequities.⁶

Facing the future, and its demands, required progressive thinking in all things, including how society defined children and the elements that produced a nurtured childhood. The growing-up period called childhood expanded during the nineteenth century. By the end of World War I, adolescence, considered to be the period between puberty and the legal age of majority, was thought of as a developmental stage toward adulthood. No longer children, adolescents were not yet quite adults. In part this viewpoint became common because an increasing number of older adolescents lived at home for longer periods of time, attended secondary school, and entered the labor force at a later age. To accommodate that stage in life, the words “teenage” and “teenager” entered the vocabulary of twentieth-century Americans. Sometimes the words were used interchangeably with adolescent, but they took on their own meanings. “Teenage” first appeared in publication in the 1920s. “Teenager” became widely used in the 1940s when teens, too young for war duty but old enough for the home-front war effort and jobs, solidified a youth culture that was uniquely their own.

Traditionally, children and young people are defined by milestones associated with a certain age. These might be religious or cultural markers, but others are established by state laws—for instance, the age that a teenager can leave school or get married. While society generally divided youngsters into children, adolescents, or teenagers, the age at which youngsters passed from one stage to another could be rather nebulous. By the mid-twentieth century, the U.S. Children’s Bureau established new definitions for its own purposes. Using data from the 1950 census, children and “youth” were placed into five categories: 0–4 years (preschool); 5–9 years (early school ages); 10–14 (middle school ages); 15–19 (latter school ages); and 20–24 (years at the threshold of adult working lives and/or marriage). The addition of an age category beyond the teen years indicated that young people attending college or vocational schools, serving in the military, beginning their married lives, and/or becoming parents were in a transitional phase between the teen years and full adulthood. This last category also suggested that American society felt some continuing responsibility for these young adults.⁷

In the postwar era, the everyday lives and experiences of children and teenagers were scrutinized by educators, child-rearing advisors, psychologists, medical personnel, child-welfare workers, and the popular press. The country had fought a war to protect itself and its young. Now that the war was won, adults faced the daunting task of ensuring that America’s youth were not only nurtured but prepared to meet the challenges of a world that now included nuclear weapons and a Cold War environment that pitted the “free” world against communism.

Children and teenagers, as well as family life, became popular topics for magazines, newspaper columns, television and radio programs, child-rearing literature, and professional forums. No topic was too important or, it seemed, too trivial. In the popular press, hosting the perfect birthday party was treated as seriously as identifying warning signs in a child’s physical development. Women’s magazines and newspaper columns offered up advice, as did authoritative parenting books. There seemed no end to expert opinions on discipline, infant feeding, nutrition, home health care, or child psychology....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 White House Conferences on Children and Youth: The Public Discussion
• 2 Education at Midcentury
• 3 The Delinquent, the Dependent, and the Orphaned
• 4 A Healthier Generation
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index