The Race to Give Every Child a Toy
If you were an immigrant kid in New York at the turn of the twentieth century, the candy store was the center of your world. You went there to kibbitz and schmooze, to get away from the crush of tenement life and the glare of the beat cop, and, of course, to eat sweets—Tootsie Rolls and Chicken Feeds and as many chocolate pennies as a copper one could buy. Should you have walked by the candy store at 404 Tompkins Avenue in Brooklyn one November morning in 1902, you would have spotted something stranger but no less enticing: a small brown bear gazing solemnly back from the front window.
As the story goes, the stuffed animal was the brainchild of Morris Michtom, the shop’s owner. A few days earlier, newspapers had published reports of a hunting trip that President Theodore Roosevelt took in Mississippi. Roosevelt had wanted to shoot a bear. A tracker caught one for him, bopped it on the head with his rifle, and tied it to a tree. The President was not pleased. Where was the honor in killing a subdued and wounded animal? The cartoonist Clifford Berryman sketched a humorous version of the scene: Roosevelt magnanimously turning away from the roped bear, which looks more like a startled puppy with two pompoms stuck to its head than it does a creature capable of mauling a grown man to death.
Michtom was born Moshe Charmatz, in a shtetl in what is now Belarus. To help him dodge conscription by the Russian Army, his family announced that he had died of typhoid and pretended to bury him while he sneaked out of the village to start a new life. He trained as a rabbi and, more practically, as a machinist before coming to the United States, in 1888, at the age of eighteen. Berryman’s cartoon struck a chord with him. Apparently, the President of his adopted country treated wild beasts better than the tsar treated the Jews. It seems to have been patriotic, not commercial, instinct that led him to ask his wife, Rose, to sew a version of what he called Teddy’s Bear, which she did using scraps of mohair and wood shavings from the candy shop’s basement.
Michtom’s Teddy bear—the apostrophe soon disappeared—ignited a craze. He hadn’t intended to sell the stuffed animal, but everyone seemed to want one. At first, he got some neighborhood-yeshiva bochurs to help him sew more of them. When they couldn’t keep up with demand, he took a prototype to a textile factory. Michtom didn’t bother to patent his invention; the imitators merely spurred interest. Children loved the Teddies. So did fashionable women, who toted them around town as a chic accessory, Labubus avant la lettre. The Teddy craze was followed by a moral panic, as crazes involving kids inevitably are. Students in a New York University sewing class were forbidden to make Teddy bears, lest they “breed idleness among children.” A Catholic priest in Michigan went further, preaching that if little white girls were allowed to play with “the horrible monstrosity” instead of dolls, they would fail to develop their maternal instincts and doom the race to suicide.
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In fact, as Michael Kimmel describes in his new book, “Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America” (Norton), the Teddy bear was good for dolls. It was good for toys of all kinds. Before the Teddy bear, the toy market did not exist in the sense that it does now. For much of the nineteenth century, dolls were made at home from corn husks, clothing scraps, and the like, or produced from expensive, fragile bisque porcelain and kept high up on shelves to be admired by grownup collectors, not pawed by clumsy kids. Most children had marbles, hoops, balls, and little else. Few people bought toys from stores. The success of the Teddy bear changed that, accelerating off a race to supply kids with the accoutrements of their leisure. Today, parents will not be surprised to learn, the American toy business is valued at roughly forty-two billion dollars.
Kimmel is a distinguished professor emeritus of sociology and gender studies at Stony Brook University, where he founded the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities. His other books, of which there are many, have titles such as “Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era” and “The Gender of Desire: Essays on Male Sexuality.” He began writing “Playmakers” as a family history. Morris Michtom was his great-great-uncle on his mother’s side, though he inherited none of the Teddy spoils; his own great-grandfather, Michtom’s half brother, never worked at Ideal, the toy company that Michtom founded.
As Kimmel poked around, he discovered that Michtom was hardly the only immigrant or first-generation Jew to have had a major part in the development of the toy business. Hasbro, the company behind hits like Mr. Potato Head, Transformers, and My Little Pony, was founded by Hillel, Herman, and Henry Hassenfeld, three brothers who fled pogroms in Kishinev and arrived in New York just after the Teddy bear débuted. Joshua Lionel Cowen, born on the Lower East Side, to Jews who came from the border of Poland and Lithuania, created Lionel Trains. Louis Marx, a round, bald little man who was proclaimed the “toy king” of America by Time, was the Brooklyn-born son of Austrian Jewish parents. Model airplanes, hula hoops, tiddlywinks, and even Chinese checkers turned out to be Jewish creations, and the list goes on. Few of the inventors of these toys enjoyed what could be called a carefree youth. Many came from grinding poverty and squalor. Yet, Kimmel argues, they ended up shaping American childhood as we know it.
The first great wave of Eastern European Jewish immigration to the United States began in 1881, set off by virulent, violent antisemitism in the Pale of Settlement. Between studying the Talmud and running from the Cossacks, the Jewish children escaping to America had not had much time for play. But kids in the U.S. hardly had more. In 1850, only half of American children over five attended school. The other half worked. The Puritans cast a long ideological shadow. Leisure bred laziness; coddling meant spoiling. Play was considered to be “a snare of the Old Deluder, Satan,” the first step on the slick road to Hell.
Then, at the end of the nineteenth century, came the Progressive era, and with it momentous cultural change. Certain traditional ideas about child rearing still prevailed. Kimmel quotes from one popular manual, published in 1916, that advised quieting a crying baby by flipping it over and administering a vigorous spanking. (“Repeat if necessary to get results.”) But a growing cohort of reformers and psychologists believed that beating a baby might not be the best method to encourage its development. In their view, children were not wild, wicked things who needed to be tamed; rather, as Kimmel puts it, they were “happy, curious, and playful beings” in need of cultivation on the path to maturity. At stake was nothing short of the future of the species. The reformer Felix Adler, summing up the new thinking, wrote, “The human being requires a period of preparation extending over years before he is ready to take up the struggle for existence.”
Adler was born in Germany but moved to New York when he was six, after his father became the rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, that bastion of Manhattan’s Jewish upper crust. This son of privilege did not limit his concern to his own kind. A secular humanist, he left his father’s congregation to found the New York Society for Ethical Culture, where he later established a free kindergarten for children of the working class. Adler was a particularly passionate crusader against the scourge of child labor. How could kids grow properly if they were forced, from their earliest years, to toil in factories, on farms, or in mines? “The child must develop mentally, and to do so it must be sent to school; the child must develop morally, and to do so it must be kept within the guarded precincts of the home,” Adler wrote. “The child must develop physically, and to do so it must play.”
These words date to 1905, but Kimmel attributes their ethos to ancient, enduring Jewish attitudes about the sanctity of childhood and the innate preciousness of children. Jews did not believe that kids were naturally inclined toward evil. According to the Talmud, childhood is “a garland of roses.” (Kimmel neglects to note that the phrase “Spare the rod and spoil the child” is based on a line found in the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Proverbs. No people is perfect.) The Jewish parent’s job was to cultivate this bounty, to help each blossom thrive. In the 1917 book “The Jewish Child,” the physician W. M. Feldman quipped that “Hillel was the forerunner of Montessori.” In fact, the first Montessori school in the United States was founded by the psychologist and educator Margaret Naumburg, another child of German Jewish immigrants, at the Henry Street Settlement House, on the Lower East Side.
Everywhere you look in this formative period of American childhood, you bump into German Jews. Here is George Hecht, who had a nice Manhattan upbringing—he lived in a brownstone in midtown which his grandfather built—and went on to found Parents magazine, and, with it, the genre of the child-rearing advice column. There is Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg, who immigrated from Austria to New York as a teen-ager and, as a young mother, threw herself into the new field of child development, eventually leading the Child Study Association. In 1913, she published “Your Child: Today and Tomorrow,” a best-selling parenting guide that aimed to serve as a corrective to the “arbitrary rules” of American attitudes toward child rearing. These people came from bourgeois families. Their parents had status. (One of Gruenberg’s grandfathers was the mayor of his Austrian town; another was a wealthy grain exporter.) Above all, they were modern. For them, the Society for Ethical Culture was a more important affiliation than any synagogue, and they were less likely to take inspiration from their religion than from the kindergarten movement that was part of their German heritage.
The Jews from Eastern Europe were different. They didn’t come to the world of play as theorists and educators bent on improving other people’s lives. They came as hustlers and inventors, eager to better their own. The Eastern Europeans—Yiddish Jews, Kimmel calls them—were poor, wretchedly so. They were numerous: more than two and a half million had arrived in the United States by 1924, when the imposition of drastic immigration quotas stopped the flow. And they were culturally alien, viewed as strange and sinister, not least by their co-religionists uptown, who put so much store in assimilating into American society. It is arresting, in light of both the Yiddish Jews’ subsequent success and the repugnant demonization of immigrants today, to come across the following passage, in “Playmakers,” from an 1893 Times article documenting a visit to the Lower East Side:
This neighborhood, peopled almost entirely by the people who claim to have been driven from Poland and Russia, is the eyesore of New York and perhaps the filthiest place on the western continent. It is impossible for a Christian to live there because he will be driven out, either by blows or the dirt and stench. Cleanliness is an unknown quantity to these people. They cannot be lifted up to a higher plane because they do not want to be.
Actually, they did want to be. There is a reason Morris Michtom moved his family from the Lower East Side to the row houses of Brooklyn as soon as he could. (When his youngest son was born, in the back of his Tompkins Avenue candy store, he named him Benjamin Franklin; he might as well have fastened the baby’s diaper with a flag pin.) Others went farther. After arriving in New York, the Hassenfeld brothers struck out for Providence, Rhode Island, where, in 1923, they founded a scrap-textile business, making fabric-covered boxes for school supplies, and, later, pencils to go inside them. Eventually, one of their kids had another idea. Why not put pretend stethoscopes and pill bottles into the boxes and sell them as toy doctor’s kits? Hasbro was born.
When Felix Adler wrote of the necessity of play, he wasn’t referring to toys. He meant physical play, sport. The Playground Association of America was founded in 1906, to give city children a place to play besides the crowded, dangerous streets; the Boy Scouts followed, in 1910. But, as Michtom discovered with the Teddy bear, the priorities of the new childhood, coupled with the growing prosperity of American society, had also created a demand for material playthings. Dolls were an obvious place to start. In 1897, the psychologist and educator G. Stanley Hall—it was he who came up with the idea of adolescence as a distinct phase of life—produced a study that showed playing with dolls to be psychologically beneficial for children. At the same time, “composition,” a new plastic-like molding material made from sawdust and glue mixed with additives such as resin, cornstarch, and wood flour, was being developed. This meant that dolls could be mass-produced to be handled.
Michtom set about to create what he called “an unbreakable doll.” For his model, he chose the Yellow Kid, an Irish street-scamp character from Richard Outcault’s popular comic strip of the same name. The Yellow Kid was a big bald baby of a boy, with jug ears, a gap-toothed grin, and a long yellow nightshirt. Kimmel calls Michtom’s choice to make a male doll “novel.” I think he may be overrating Michtom’s ingenuity; Yellow Kid dolls had been manufactured for nearly a decade before Michtom’s hit the market, in 1907. But the earlier dolls were crude, lumpen things, a cross between a beanbag and a sculpted potato. Michtom’s actually looked like the imp from the cartoon, and it sold like gangbusters.
Constant competition in the burgeoning toy business meant constant innovation: more bells, more whistles. In 1920, Ideal came out with Flossie Flirt, a flapper baby doll with marcelled hair, rubber arms (“They feel almost as soft and as smooth as your own”), and eyes that rolled in their sockets. She was followed by Snoozie Smiles, which had two faces—one happy, one sad—and a voice box that imitated baby sounds, something that Thomas Edison had tried and failed to pull off three decades earlier. One of Michtom’s more notable technological advances came with Betsy Wetsy, a doll whose development Kimmel characterizes as an engineering “nightmare.” Michtom persisted, ending up, in 1937, with a doll that could drink, sniffle, cry, and pee into a diaper that little girls delighted in changing.
Betsy Wetsy was a triumph, Michtom’s last. He died the next year, at the age of sixty-eight. His son Ben took over as chairman of the Ideal Toy Company. “When I was a kid, I liked toys because they helped me make believe,” Ben told one journalist. “And what I wanted to make believe was that I was grown up.” In the mid-fifties, Ideal considered producing a toy bound to make little girls feel very grown up indeed: a Marilyn Monroe doll. Ultimately, the company passed; what would an adult doll do? Three years later came Barbie, designed by Ruth Handler, the youngest of ten children born to a Jewish blacksmith who had immigrated from Poland, and brought to market by Mattel, the company she ran with her husband, Elliot, also a first-generation American Jew.
So why did Jews thrive in the world of toys? The most obvious reason is timing. Until the twentieth century, Germany controlled the toy business. That changed with the embargoes and boycotts of the First World War—exactly the time that Eastern European Jews were getting their American foothold. But Kimmel wants to find a distinctly cultural answer, too. He draws tenuous connections; he ignores inconvenient facts. He talks about nachas, the Yiddish term for the pride parents take in their children; he blurs his focus to cover the well-trodden territory of the comics business and the Jewish artists who channelled their acute sense of outsider status into creating characters like Clark Kent, who could simply shed his nerdish trappings to become the all-American Superman. “Making people happy is a serious business, true, but making children happy requires having the ability to think like a child,” Kimmel writes. “It requires resisting that biblical admonition from 1 Corinthians that growing up means one must ‘put away childish things.’ ” The rise of novelty toys—gags like fake vomit and dog poop, whoopee cushions, and snakes in a can—he attributes to “an immigrant Jewish male imagination—puerile, juvenile, gross, and funny.” Tell that to Soren Sorensen (Sam) Adams, the Danish immigrant who is credited with inventing many of the same contraptions, along with some six hundred others, including sneezing powder and the joy buzzer.
The question of provenance can be tricky when it comes to toys; imitation is inherent to the business. Barbie was famously based on Bild Lilli, a German doll marketed as a novelty for adults. Even the origin of the Teddy bear has been the subject of dispute. Everyone wants credit for a hit; for a flop, not so much. In 1958, Ben Michtom thought he had a winner on his hands: a Baby Jesus doll to sell at Christmas. He travelled to Rome to get permission from Pope Pius XII to manufacture it. An extraordinary photo in Kimmel’s book shows Michtom and his wife stiffly posed next to a Vatican translator and the Pontiff. (Amazingly, Ideal offered the Church a royalty, as if the Holy See owned the rights to the likeness of the Saviour.) There is a photo, too, of the doll itself, a nude little cherub packaged in a box designed to look like both a manger and an illuminated Bible. The Baby Jesus doll turned out to be a failure of the Jewish male imagination. Nobody wanted one. The big toy that season was a pliable putty invented twenty years earlier by a man with the distinctly non-Jewish name of McVicker to clean coal soot from wallpaper, then rebranded, for children, as Play-Doh.
Toys changed American childhood. But did they change it for the better? The argument in favor is, unsurprisingly, as old as the industry itself. Dolls have long been said to breed curiosity, not to mention empathy; G. Stanley Hall believed that boys playing with dolls would encourage them, later in life, to be kinder to their wives. Dolls for boys did eventually take off, though one doubts whether G.I. Joe, introduced by Hasbro, in 1964, under the comically masculine label of “action figure,” had Hall’s hoped-for effect.
In the postwar period, toys were relied on to reinforce the prevailing social message of the day: that girls were girls and boys were boys. Gender—the male one in particular—is Kimmel’s specialty, and he is good on the topic. He notes that many toy ads in the fifties showed fathers and sons playing together with model airplanes and tanks that mimicked the war equipment that the men had known firsthand. It was the time of the Lavender Scare, of “Rebel Without a Cause”; bonding with their fathers through play, it was thought, would save boys from homosexuality and juvenile delinquency, and, at the same time, re-domesticate the fathers who had returned from the excitement of war to the stultification of suburban life.
Toys were even implicated in the country’s race problem. In the nineteen-forties, the psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted their famous “doll tests,” in which Black children from both the North and the South were given four dolls, identical save for skin color, and asked to evaluate them. (“Give me the doll that looks like a nice child.” “Give me the doll that looks bad.”) The subjects overwhelmingly preferred the white dolls, leading the Clarks to conclude that “prejudice, discrimination, and segregation” had damaged Black children’s self-esteem—findings that were later used to support the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.
A few years after the Clarks published their study, Sara Lee Creech, a white florist from Belle Glade, Florida, became obsessed with the idea of creating a Black doll that would, in her words, “represent the beauty and diversity of black children.” With a friend, she photographed nearly five hundred Black schoolchildren to develop a range of realistic skin tones for the toys. One enthusiastic supporter of Creech’s effort was her fellow Belle Glade citizen Zora Neale Hurston, who introduced her to influential Black leaders like Jackie Robinson and Ralph Bunche. Another proponent was Eleanor Roosevelt, who called the dolls “a lesson in equality for little children.”
Creech’s doll, produced by Ideal, was named Saralee, after its white creator. The plan was to release four versions, each with a different skin tone and hair style. The first came out during the 1951 Christmas season. The New York City public-school system appointed Saralee its official doll; Ebony raved that “a transformation has taken place in toyland.” But sales of the doll lagged, a technical problem with its pigmented vinyl led to a recall, and Saralee was soon taken off the shelves. Kimmel blames Ideal for having “sabotaged” the toy with lacklustre marketing. It surely didn’t help that stores like Saks and Macy’s didn’t stock Saralee for fear that Black customers would scare white ones away.
Mainly, parents wanted toys that would make their children smarter. They still want this. Kimmel tells us of early-twentieth-century German critics who complained that overly realistic toys—intricate dollhouses and train sets and such—would “suck the blood out of the minds of children.” One postwar Playskool catalogue came with an essay by a child-development expert from the University of Chicago which admonished parents to buy not merely educational toys, but ones that were “correctly educational so that they teach the right things at the right time in the right way!” Parental anxiety has become only more acute, and toy companies are happy to indulge it. By the time I was babysitting, in the early two-thousands, Baby Einstein was the rage. (In 2007, a study in the peer-reviewed Journal of Pediatrics reported that parking a baby in front of the company’s video programs not only failed to encourage precocity but in fact caused language delays.) These days, parents may turn to Lovevery, a subscription-based company founded in 2015, by two friends in Boise, Idaho, that provides parents with age-appropriate bundles of toys “designed by experts for your child’s developing brain.”
This is all well and good. (I, an American parent, thoroughly enjoy playing with Lovevery toys—so, I think, does my son.) But, as well-intentioned as these companies may be, they exist, after all, to make a sale. In her celebrated parenting guide, Sidonie Gruenberg warned against the propensity to shower a child “with toys far in excess of what he can use or enjoy.” Simple things would better stimulate the imagination. Try some sticks and stones, she suggested. See what happens. My own child had a birthday recently, his third. He enjoyed opening his presents. The next day, I found him playing with an empty cookie tin that he had filled with a plethora of Q-tips (invented in 1923 by Leo Gerstenzang, an immigrant Jew from Warsaw) and proclaimed “treasure.” Children are inventors, too, and they are always one step ahead. ♦