by Philip Nel
Though Johnson was of a satirical turn of mind, his published work during the early 1950s makes almost no references to the FBI, HUAC, or Senator McCarthy. In contrast, in the 1940s, Johnson made fun of the Red-hunting activities of the Dies Committee, as HUAC was known at the time. In Barnaby strips from November and December 1943, the O’Malley Committee, run by Barnaby’s fairy godfather, launches an investigation into that notorious Red, Santa Claus. In one of Barnaby’s few allusions to McCarthy, in a May 1950 strip, O’Malley, concerned that the U.S. Census is overlooking his fellow pixies, undertakes his own count. When McSnoyd, the invisible leprechaun, objects, “That’s a phony G-man badge,” O’Malley responds that it is “genuine plastic.” But McSnoyd still will not cooperate, saying, “You can’t pump me, O’Malley.”5
Whether or not readers of Barnaby perceived Johnson’s subtext here, McCarthy was certainly on people’s minds. On 8 May, Ursula Nordstrom wrote to Krauss, “From behind the Iron Curtain comes the Czech edition of The Growing Story. I think it looks darling. We’re sending you a couple of copies right away. No doubt McCarthy will check up on you shortly.” By 28 July, the FBI was indeed checking up on Krauss. One report noted that in 1945, she and Johnson had attended the American Society for Russian Relief’s “tea party to launch the ‘Books for Russia’ campaign.” Agents investigated whether Johnson and Krauss had applied for passports and checked up on her correspondence with an “L. Krauss” in Baltimore—her mother.6
Though less inclined to sign petitions, Krauss was every bit as progressive as Johnson. In late 1949 or early 1950, she was visiting Baltimore and went to lunch at Nate’s and Leon’s Delicatessen with Georgia Hahn, the wife of her cousin, Richard; their daughter, Linda; and their maid, Gertrude. The waitress took one look at Gertrude and said, “We don’t serve colored.” Incensed, Ruth insisted that they be served and refused to leave. The waitress relented. For the duration of their lunch, they integrated Nate’s and Leon’s.7
Crockett Johnson, cover for The Carrot Seed, an adaptation of Ruth Krauss’s story performed by Norman Rose. Children’s Record Guild, ca. 1950. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
Published in the fall of 1950, Krauss’s The Backward Day is quietly subversive, though not in an obviously political sense. Illustrated by Marc Simont and inspired by Krauss’s memory of Camp Walden’s Backward Party, The Backward Day offers a nonsensical challenge to proper behavior. The book’s protagonist, a young boy, announces, “Today is backward day,” and then puts on his coat, his pants and shirt, and finally his underwear. He walks backward down the stairs, turns around his father’s chair, sits down, and tucks his napkin in at the back of his collar. When his father appears, the little boy says, “Goodnight, Pa.” His father replies, “Goodnight,” and the rest of the family joins in the experiment. At the end of the book, the boy puts his clothes properly and announces the end of Backward Day. Reviews ran from mixed to enthusiastic. In the New York Herald Tribune, Louise S. Bechtel felt that the book had “an amusing conception,” but “somehow it doesn’t quite ‘come off,’ even with the undoubted brilliance of the Simont pictures.” In contrast, the New York Times’s Ellen Lewis Buell thought The Backward Day “written out of a true appreciation of a child’s imagination and humor” and predicted that it would inspire an “immediate performance” from its child readers.8
In 1950 and 1951, Krauss also began gathering material for her next book, tentatively titled Definitions. The germ of the idea came from child psychologist Arnold Gesell, who observed that a five-year-old “is a pragmatist. His definitions are in terms of use: A horse is to ride; a fork to eat.” Gesell’s observation reminded Krauss of the Bank Street School’s game of Definitions, in which children offered their own meanings for words.9
Visiting Harriet S. Sherman’s kindergarten class in Rowayton, Krauss talked with children and recorded their phrases and words. Krauss also had Eleanor Reich, head of Bank Street’s Harriet Johnson Nursery School, ask teachers to collect definitions from four-year-olds and five-year-olds there. By January 1951, Krauss found herself “getting so much wonderful material in the schools that I’m afraid I’ll have a good book in spite of myself.” She provided Nordstrom with some examples: “Stars are not only to twinkle, but also when you make your bed you get a star”; “a face is something on your head”; “you put a house in a hole and a floor is to keep you from falling in the hole your house is in.” Krauss also asked questions to children on the beach. When she asked one boy, “What is a hole for?,” “he looked at me like I was nuts, frowned, and walked away from me. Another child, however, said ‘A hole? A hole is to dig.’ And that’s how the title was born.”10
Although Nordstrom loved Krauss’s ideas, potential illustrators did not. Nicolas Mordvinoff, who would win the 1952 Caldecott Medal for Finders Keepers, said that no book or illustrations could be made for “so fragmentary and elusive a text.” Nordstrom turned to Maurice Sendak, a twenty-three-year-old F. A. O. Schwarz window display artist who had already illustrated two books for Harper. After he had turned in the illustrations for the second, she asked to see his sketchbook. He left it with her, hoping that she might like what she saw. According to Nordstrom, “We needed something very special, and Maurice’s sketchbook made me think he would be perfect for it.” He was enthusiastic about Krauss’s manuscript; she took one look at Sendak’s sketches of Brooklyn children playing in the street and said, “That’s it.” Sendak was nervous about meeting Krauss, but she immediately put him at ease, and he soon “adored her. She had this little girl’s laugh, this uncontrollable giggle.” When she told him that his tiny figures were just what she wanted for the book, he was thrilled. Moreover, she invited him to spend time with her and Dave in Rowayton. At the time, Sendak was still living with his parents, and he was “not very happy” with them, “nor were they happy with me especially. So, here I was, free invitation to work with the famous Ruth Krauss, married to the famous Crockett Johnson, in Rowayton, in an old-fashioned white house with a porch, with the water there, and Dave had a sailboat. Well, you can imagine how I felt. Like the luckiest kid on the block.” Throughout the 1950s, Sendak would spend as many as two weekends a month with Ruth and Dave.11
Maurice Sendak in his twenties. Photo courtesy of Maurice Sendak. Used by permission of Maurice Sendak.
Sendak began working on sketches for A Hole Is to Dig during the summer of 1951, and by the fall, he was spending weekends in Rowayton. Johnson and Krauss “became my weekend parents and took on the job of shaping me into an artist…. Ruth and I would arrange and rearrange and paste and unpaste and Ruth would sing and Ruth would holler and I’d quail and sulk and Dave would referee…. His name should be on all our books for the technical savvy and cool consideration he brought to them.” A page in Johnson’s block capitals, with Sendak’s doodles of a cat in the margins, shows detailed instructions for the book’s binding and format: “Area for Front and Back Cover Will Be within 5¼” 6¾”.” It was Johnson’s idea that the book be in the small size.12
Ruth Krauss, sketches for A Hole Is to Dig. Image courtesy of the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection, Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
Johnson also drew up plans for five-inch-wide interlocking bookshelves, each one designed to hold “a series of Tiny Golden Books …, stressing a ‘Five-Inch Shelf of Classics’ theme.” When purchased, the shelves would contain books organized around “a ‘classic’ theme,” such as “Simple Science (big oaks from little acorns, etc.), Disney Characters, Lear Jingles, Sleep Songs, Counting Stories and Chants (one, two, buckle my shoe, etc.), Nursery Rhymes, First Books of Industry (cow to bottle, sheep to coat, etc.), Holiday Classics, Stories of the Seasons, Game Street Songs (farmer in the dell, etc.).” For any given theme, the color of the shelf would match the color of the books’
spines. Parents could buy one shelf at a time, adding a new shelves to form a bookcase. The promotional material should emphasize that “primarily these are worthwhile and entertaining books for younger children; secondarily they are toys or novelties.” It is not clear whether Johnson ever pitched his idea to Simon and Schuster, the publishers of Golden Books, but it never reached fruition.13
Maurice Sendak, sketches for Ruth Krauss, A Hole Is to Dig. Image courtesy of the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection, Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
While Sendak and Krauss worked on A Hole Is to Dig and Johnson tinkered with his ideas, federal investigations proceeded. HUAC’s Report on the Communist “Peace” Offensive: A Campaign to Disarm and Defeat the United States (April 1951) named Crockett Johnson three times, a fact picked up by local newspapers. On 19 June, professional informant Louis Budenz told the FBI that “Crockett Johnson was a member of the Communist Party. He was very active in the PM unit.” Budenz also claimed that author Kay Boyle had been a communist. These claims were untrue, though both Johnson and his old friend Boyle had signed many petitions on behalf of groups now classified as “Communist front” organizations. Budenz was eventually discredited, but in the interim, a cloud of suspicion hung over Johnson, Boyle, and many others.14
Krauss continued to find rich material for her children’s books. Before she and Sendak had finished A Hole Is to Dig, she visited fellow Bank Streeter Norma Simon’s class at New York’s Downtown Community School, a progressive coeducational elementary school whose board of trustees included many Johnson-Krauss friends: Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Mary Elting Folsom, progressive publisher William R. Scott, and civil liberties lawyer Leonard Boudin. Krauss observed as Simon’s students took packing boxes and made them into houses, and she came up with an idea for a new book, Crazy Crauss Hauss. In October 1951, she sent Ursula Nordstrom a draft of the text that began,
O dum dum deedle
dum dum doodle doodle
dum dum deedle deedle dum dum dum
I have a house—
it’s not a squirrel house
it’s not a house for bears
—it’s not any house you’d see—
and it’s not in any street
and it’s not in any road. Oh
it’s just the house for me Me ME.
The book became A Very Special House, with illustrations by Sendak. In his view, this book “most perfectly simulates Ruth’s voice—her laughing, crooning, chanting, singing voice.” Nordstrom loved Krauss’s proposal. “Honestly, Ruth,” she wrote, “I howled with pleasure over so much of it, and I think it is going to make a wonderful book.” The “Crazy Crauss House brightened up a whole dreary day for me. Don’t ever change. Don’t get sane.” Nordstrom immediately embraced the book’s mischievous message to children, encouraging their impulses to think independently. Pointing to Krauss’s line “NOBODY ever says stop stop stop,” Nordstrom added, “Quelle purge! I know some of the influential ladies will want to put you in jail for writing such a book, and me in the stocks for loving it. But oh, the happy happy little kids!”15
Before turning to A Very Special House, Krauss and Sendak had to finish struggling with the Definitions book, which Krauss would consider calling Toes Are to Wiggle and then Stars and Mashed Potatoes before settling on A Hole Is to Dig. One weekend, when she and Sendak were, in his words, “worn thin with the whole messy business of pasting, doing, and undoing,” Krauss noticed something in Sendak’s pictures that upset her. She accused him “of assigning the kids middle-class roles: boys doing boy things, and girls (even worse!) doing girl things. ‘God forbid, a boy should jump rope!’ screamed Ruth.” Sendak made some last-minute changes to the illustrations, resulting in “some suspiciously hermaphroditic-looking kids.” On the last page, he had drawn a little boy sleeping on a book. At Krauss’s request, Sendak changed him to a little girl.16
Krauss and Sendak’s collaboration on A Very Special House proceeded much more smoothly because, according to Sendak, “we had then tuned in on each other. There was much less her having to schlep me up intellectually. I was ready for her on that one.” Each page of the book shows the two of them in cahoots, Sendak’s drawings cavorting around her words, her text rubbing shoulders (and sometimes feet) with his pictures. The book is his favorite from their creative partnership: “Those words and images are Ruth and me at our best.”17
That fall brought reviews for The Bundle Book, Krauss’s first based entirely on her observations of children. In what must have seemed ominous news for her second such book (A Hole Is to Dig), The Bundle Book (1951) received only fair sales and mixed notices. Kirkus thought the illustrations “may appeal more to Mother than to the toddler,” but the story had “a gleeful humor the toddler will recognize and appreciate.” In contrast, the Horn Book thought the book had “just the right amount of suspense for the nursery age.” The New York Times’s Lois Palmer was more enthusiastic: “All those who enjoyed The Carrot Seed and other books by Miss Krauss will respond to the excitement of the author’s latest story.” However, as Nordstrom said in November 1951, “I thought reviews would be ecstatic and they have certainly been less than that,” and “sales so far of The Bundle Book haven’t come up to my loving expectations.”18
Books influenced by progressive educational philosophies still faced an uphill struggle for success. Both Anne Carroll Moore, the children’s librarian at New York Public Library, and her successor, Frances Clarke Sayers, took a dim view of children’s books inspired by Bank Street’s “here-and-now” method, and the two women wielded considerable influence in the children’s book world. Much to Nordstrom’s annoyance, the New York Public Library had consistently failed to include Margaret Wise Brown’s books on its recommended list, which influenced the purchasing habits of libraries around the nation. During Children’s Book Week that November, when Brown and Nordstrom arrived at the New York Public Library for “the annual celebratory tea,” a staff member met them at the door checking for invitations. Nordstrom produced hers, but Brown searched through her handbag and came up empty. According to Leonard Marcus, “As there was no reason to doubt that Margaret had been sent one, the door-keeper’s adamancy was ludicrous in the extreme.” Nordstrom refused to enter without Brown and instead, Nordstrom told Krauss, they sat on the library’s Fifth Avenue steps “and jeered at children’s book editors who came rushing along to go to the meeting.” Annoyed that The Bundle Book also did not make the list, Nordstrom observed, “The New York Public Library doesn’t like any of Margaret’s books either, so the Bundle Book is in good company.” She criticized the “meetings of all the ladies in their new hats” who take a “precious 100%-adult approach to children’s books” and predicted that A Hole Is to Dig “will put them all on their ears.”19
Crockett Johnson, Barnaby, 31 January 1952. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
Crockett Johnson, Barnaby, 2 February 1952. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
For his part, Johnson was finishing one phase of his career and starting on the next. Barnaby learns that his fairy godfather must leave “on or about” the boy’s sixth birthday, although O’Malley explains that he can stay if Barnaby decides not to grow up—after all, “lots of people never grow up.” At Barnaby’s sixth birthday party, Gus, McSnoyd, and O’Malley stop by to say good- bye. With that, Barnaby ended its ten-year run.20
Johnson told journalist Charles Fisher, “I had to let the strip go. I think the last year or so hit a peak for quality but sales continued to slough off steadily. I decided that while I continued writing it I would never be able to start anything else. Now I have to.” Declining sales may have
been a result of blacklisting, or readers may have simply grown less interested in Barnaby. Nevertheless, the strip still had its devoted fans: Troy Record editor Dwight Marvin wrote that Barnaby “has the smallest reader percentage of any of our comics, but those who read it read no other comic.” Indeed, he noted, some people from beyond the Record’s usual delivery area subscribed solely to get Barnaby. Knowing that its Barnaby readers would call and write to complain, the Philadelphia Inquirer altered the final strip: Instead of panels depicting O’Malley’s arrival in another little boy’s bedroom, the paper’s readers saw a notice announcing that the strip had ended. One Pennsylvania reader responded, “There have been deaths in my family that have hurt me much less.”21
Barnaby’s fans paid tribute in other ways, too. In 1953, Brown University’s Pembroke College dedicated its yearbook to Johnson and adapted his characters to comment on Pembroke. Johnson supported this effort, providing the editors with “encouraging letters, … sincere interest, [and] incomparable help.” The editors noted, “Perhaps Crockett Johnson did not foresee Mr. O’Malley in the role of mentor to eight hundred college women, but he is just that.”22
Johnson had already begun exploring other vocations, one of which was inventing. In 1951 and 1952, he was working on a four-way adjustable mattress. At home, he kept a board beneath his mattress to provide the right degree of firmness. When traveling, he slept poorly, uncomfortable on soft mattresses. Krauss, too, often had back trouble. Such difficulties helped inspire Johnson’s invention: two mattresses strapped together, with a board in one. By turning the mattresses to reposition the board, the sleeper could adjust the mattress’s firmness from extra hard to medium hard, medium soft, or soft. Johnson submitted a patent application for the device in May 1952.23
