| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Nicholas Sammond. Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2005. Pp. x, 472. $24.95.
This book by Nicholas Sammond is only intermittently about Walt Disney and the Disney company's relationship to American childhood. More accurately, it is a sweeping account of twentieth-century social scientific discourses about middle-class American character and child rearing. The goal of the book is to link vast analytical transformations in child psychology and sociology to shifts in the public persona and marketing of the Walt Disney brand. The difficulty of this ambitious undertaking is that, despite Sammond's strenuous efforts, the relevance of The Mickey Mouse Club to, for instance, David Riesman's concept of the "other directed personality" remains elusive. Sammond asks the reader to accompany him through numerous imaginative associations; the usefulness of the book to individual readers will depend upon their willingness to follow along.	1
The early chapters consider the growth of empirical studies of childhood within the social sciences. "Children," Sammond asserts, "were precious (and national) resources, and their proper management and deployment required—no less than any other rapidly modernizing industry—the expert assistance of trained scientists who could offer a full range of techniques and technologies that could be applied... 'from crib to college'" (p. 107). Progressive reformers including Jane Addams and Bernice Abbot, child psychologists such as Arnold Gesell, writers for Parents' Magazine, and the author of the popular child-rearing manual Psychological Care of Infant and Child (1928), John B. Watson, are classed together as "child managers": those who would standardize and professionalize the rearing of children. The relentless quest for control, Sammond maintains, was a driving force behind the social scientific imperative to locate the "average, normal child" (p. 69) upon whom theories about appropriate consumption of media could be tested. Walt Disney spoke perfectly to these social concerns, because, Sammond writes, its "exclusive focus on animation ... added to the company's aura of absolute control over its subjects" (p. 120). Here, as elsewhere, Sammond does not claim a direct connection between the content of Disney's films and social scientific thinking but rather claims a resemblance through analogy.	. . .

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