by Donovan Hohn
You can watch a video clip of the number online. A pink towel hangs from a wooden post at the left edge of the frame. The post looks like something out of an old western. There is no other scenery to speak of. Behind the bathtub—which is huge, presumably claw-footed, and decorated with three pink daisies—hangs a sky-blue backdrop. Bubbles of the sort you blow with a wand come floating up from the bottom of the screen, and the gurgle of water accompanies the music. Although I watched my share of Sesame Street as a child, I far preferred Super Grover’s mock-heroic pratfalls to Ernie’s snickering bonhomie, and I have no memory of the rubber duckie number. My wife, on the other hand, still knows the duckie song by heart.
Replaying the clip, I can’t help imagining myself as a toddler sprawled on the shag rug, glassy-eyed and solitary before our old black-and-white Zenith, watching this solitary, football-headed, cross-eyed puppet—at once the child’s alter ego and his imaginary friend, half preschooler, half possibly gay bachelor—as he serenades a squeak toy that is his own fabulous alter ego and imaginary friend. “Rubber Duckie, joy of joys,” Ernie sings. “When I squeeze you, you make noise, / Rubber Duckie, you’re my very best friend, it’s true.” It’s all so synthetic, so lonely, so imaginary, so clean. And apparently children loved it. In the 1969 pilot episode of Sesame Street, in which a version of the rubber duckie song appeared, children in the test audience responded so enthusiastically to Ernie and Bert and so tepidly to segments featuring the live actors that the show’s creators redesigned it, giving the puppets a starring role.
However novel the medium, however inventive Jim Henson’s puppetry, Ernie’s bathtub serenade draws on a history of representation that can be traced back to the eighteenth century, when British portraitists stopped painting children as diminutive adults and turned them into puppy-eyed personifications of Innocence. In the Romantic era, no longer was innocence merely the antithesis of guilt and childhood the antithesis of adulthood; innocent children were the antithesis of modernity, little noble savages. Childhood became a place as well as an age—a lost, imaginary, pastoral realm.27
It is striking how much the modern history of childhood resembles that of animals. “In the first stages of industrialism,” John Berger writes, “animals were used as machines. As also were children.” In the latter stages of industrialism, poor children who escaped the factory often took to the street, where they formed what social historians call “child societies,” gangs of urchins who—like feral cats—invented a social order all their own. Partly in fear of child societies, middle-class parents of the Gilded Age began treating their children increasingly like pets. Nurseries and playrooms became more common, and toy chests began to overflow.
Then, in the early 1900s, came the crib, which unlike the cradle isolated infants in rooms of their own. According to Gary Cross, author of Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood, in the padded cells of the modern nursery, “playthings served as ‘antidotes for loneliness, . . . substitutes for the free play of the ‘child society.’ ” Lonely little middle-class girls were encouraged to keep the company of dolls, and for lonely little middle-class boys (think of Christopher Robin), there were stuffed animals, a turn-of-the-century invention. By 1906 zoos were selling them as souvenirs, and later that same year, thanks in large part to conservationist in chief Teddy Roosevelt, the teddy bear fad hit.
Roosevelt doesn’t deserve all the credit. Teddy bears and other stuffed animals, Peter Stearns explains in Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America, “were widely appealing at a time when parents were trying to facilitate new sleeping arrangements for babies and also to guard against unduly fervent emotional attachments to mothers. The decline in paid help for young children also opened the door to the use of toys as surrogate entertainment.”
One commentator at the time speculated that toy animals helped children overcome primal fears of scary predators, turning lions and tigers and bears into snuggly sidekicks. But perhaps the most astute psychological profile of the child consumer appeared in Playthings, the brand-new trade journal of the American toy industry, which by 1912 was predicting that “the nervous temperament of the average American child and the rapidity with which it tires of things” would guarantee a never-ending bull market in toys.
Three other seemingly unrelated events coincided with the commercialization of childhood and the infantilization of animals: In 1871, a printer from Albany, New York, named John Wesley Hyatt added nitric acid to pulped cotton, thereby inventing celluloid. In 1873, the first Pekin ducks were imported to the United States from China. And in the 1880s, bathtubs began appearing in middle-class homes along with indoor plumbing. Celluloid eventually evolved into the plastics industry. The Pekin duck eventually became the preferred species of American duck breeders, making yellow ducklings a familiar symbol of birth and spring—familiar and far less alien than the Chinese themselves. And the average American bathroom, which had once consisted of a washtub and an outhouse, was consecrated as a temple of cleanliness.
Much as the modern nursery sheltered children from the social contamination of the street, so the modern bathroom protected their naked, slippery bodies from germs. In the first decades of the twentieth century, public health campaigns and soap advertisements—usually illustrated with pudgy little Pre-Raphaelite tots—exhorted parents to bathe their children often. Little boys, the thinking went, were naturally indisposed to bathing. Bath toys not only made hygiene boyishly fun; they helped overcome the naughty urges that bathing tended to arouse: “The baby will not spend much time handling his genitals if he has other interesting things to do,” one government-issue child-care manual advised in 1942. “See to it that he has a toy to play with and he will not need to use his body as a plaything.” Enter the rubber duck.
Ducklings are the aquatic equivalent of kittens and bunnies. In fact, it’s hard to think of a smaller, cuddlier animal that can swim. Most of the frogs and turtles of children’s literature are middle-aged men, whereas even in nature ducklings are model offspring: obedient, dependent, vulnerable to predation, clumsy, soft, a little dumb. Just think of them waddling in a train behind a mother duck, a familiar image memorialized by Robert McCloskey’s bestselling children’s book Make Way for Ducklings. McCloskey’s baby mallards, penciled in black and white, look like real baby mallards—a little stylized, but real. Like the ducks depicted in other venerable children’s books, they bear little resemblance to Ernie’s Day-Glo squeak toy. Beatrix Potter’s Jemima is a white Pekin duck in a bonnet and shawl. Donald Duck, the most famous Anseriformes at midcentury, was also a white Pekin, and the most common toy duck was still the ancient bird-on-a-leash, a wooden pull toy with wheels instead of feet. Before the rubber duck could eclipse it, plastic had to replace wood as the preferred material for toys, which, following the technical innovations spurred by World War II, it did.
McCloskey published his book in 1941. That same year, at the beginning of the war, two British chemists, V. E. Yarsley and E. G. Couzens, prophesied with surprising accuracy and quaintly utopian innocence what middle-class childhood in the 1970s would be like. “Let us try to imagine a dweller in the ‘Plastic Age,’ ” they wrote in the British magazine Science Digest.
This creature of our imagination, this “Plastic Man,” will come into a world of colour and bright shining surfaces, where childish hands find nothing to break, no sharp edges or corners to cut or graze, no crevices to harbour dirt or germs, because, being a child, his parents will see to it that he is surrounded on every side by this tough, safe, clean material which human thought has created. The walls of his nursery, all the articles of his bath and certain other necessities of his small life, all his toys, his cot, the moulded perambulator in which he takes the air, the teething ring he bites, the unbreakable bottle he feeds from . . . all will be plastic, brightly self-coloured and patterned with every design likely to please his childish mind.
Here, then, is one of the meanings of the duck. It represents t
his vision of childhood—the hygienic childhood, the safe childhood, the brightly colored childhood in which everything, even bathtub articles, have been designed to please the childish mind, much as the golden fruit in that most famous origin myth of paradise “was pleasant to the eyes” of childish Eve.
Yarsley and Couzens go on to imagine the rest of Plastic Man’s life, and it is remarkable how little his adulthood differs from his childhood. When he grows up, Plastic Man will live in a house furnished with “beautiful, transparent, glass-like forms,” he will play with plastic toys (tennis rackets and fishing tackle), he will “like a magician” be able to “make what he wants.” And yet there is one imperfection, one run in this nylon dream. Plastic might make the pleasures of childhood last forever, but it could not make Plastic Man immortal. When he dies, he will sink “into his grave hygienically enclosed in a plastic coffin.” The image must have been unsettling, even in 1941, that hygienically enclosed death too reminiscent of the hygienically enclosed life that preceded it. To banish the image of that plastic coffin from their readers’ thoughts, the utopian chemists inject a little more Technicolor resin into their closing sentences. When “the dust and smoke” of war had cleared, plastic would deliver us “from moth and rust” into a world “full of colour . . . a new, brighter, cleaner, more beautiful world.”
This chemical fantasy must have appealed to Londoners enduring the Blitz, and since plastic accommodates our dreams more readily than other substances, the fantasy in most respects came true. In American Plastic: A Cultural History, Jeffrey L. Meikle tells the story well. Just days before Japan surrendered, at a gathering of marketing executives, J. W. McCoy, a vice president at DuPont, delivered a sermon on mass consumption. The sacrifices consumers had made during the war economy had created “a great backlog of unfilled wants,” McCoy said, and although this demand would send the peacetime economy into “an upward spiral of productivity,” eventually, those wants would be satisfied, and “a satisfied people is a stagnant people.”
To maintain growth, marketers would have to engineer perpetual dissatisfaction. Around the same time, a less enthusiastic prophet, the British design critic John Gloag, predicted that, after the asceticism of modernism and the austerities of war, consumers would indulge in “an orgy of ornament.” Sure enough, by 1948 the Architectural Review was reporting that, as both Gloag and McCoy predicted, Americans had gone “on a baroque bender,” gorging themselves on products that came “in a lurid rainbow of colors and a steadily changing array of styles.” In the 1950s, when the patent on polyethylene expired, plastics became cheaper and thus more abundant than ever—so cheap that the only way polyethylene molders could turn a profit was by convincing consumers to start throwing plastics away.
“The future of plastics is in the garbage can,” Modern Plastics, the trade journal of the industry, declared. The era of disposability was born. Polyethylene began filling grocery store shelves, and because children’s desires are even more fleeting than those of adults, it also began filling the toy chests of the postwar baby boom. As Jeffrey Meikle observes, if the burgeoning market for cheap toys had not absorbed it, the excess supply of plastic resin “would have served witness to the folly of overproduction.”
For new parents who had themselves grown up during the Depression and the war, the fantasy of childhood as consumer paradise exerted a powerful appeal. Browsing through issues of Parents’ magazine from 1950, I came upon an ad campaign for Heinz baby food (“Scientific Cooking Gives Finer Flavor, Color and Texture to Heinz Strained Carrots”). In one Heinz ad targeted at new mothers, cartoon butterflies, fairies, and dolls encircle the photograph of a baby girl. “Wee elfin creatures go riding on butterfly wings,” the copy reads, “dolls speak in a language all their own and something altogether new and wonderful happens everywhere a baby looks ... your child lives in a magic world where everything’s enchanted.” Another ad featuring a baby boy replaces the talking dolls with teddy bears that “come mystically to life.”
Then came television, enchantment in a box. Annual toy sales in America shot from $84 million in 1940 to $1.25 billion in 1960. Peg-and-socket pop beads sold to girls as costume jewelry consumed forty thousand pounds of polyethylene resin per month in 1956. In 1958, hula hoops and Frisbees consumed fifteen million pounds of the stuff. Polystyrene replaced balsa wood as the most popular material for model cars and planes. Plasticized polyvinyl chloride, the material from which the brand-new Barbie doll was made, provided a cheaper, more durable alternative to latex rubber, rendering traditional molded rubber animals and dolls obsolete except in name.
Now take another peek into Ernie’s claw-footed tub. Here are Millais’s wondrous bubbles, and here is the child accompanied by his small, cuddly pet that speaks a language all its own. Here is the antiquated stage set tinged with nostalgia (the wooden post, the claw-footed tub). Ernie is not dressed up in a costume (he’s naked here), but in a way his orange, fuzzy pelt plays the same role as the Blue Boy’s satin suit and the bubble boy’s velvet green one; all three figures wear the colors of make-believe. Only now, in a kind of reversal of Pinocchio’s metamorphosis, and a kind of culmination, the dream child has become a puppet, a toy brought “mystically to life,” who himself plays puppeteer to his squeaky duck, the inanimate fakeness of which makes the puppet seem more real.
Meanwhile, the real flesh-and-blood child, the postmodern child, the Plastic Child has disappeared from view, banished to the other side of the glass screen. There, sprawled on the shag rug, his chin propped on his hands, or slumped into a beanbag chair, he reminds me of John Berger’s zoo animals. “The space which they inhabit is artificial,” Berger writes. “Hence their tendency to bundle towards the edge of it. (Beyond its edges there may be real space.) In some cages the light is equally artificial. In all cases the environment is illusory. Nothing surrounds them except their own lethargy or hyperactivity.”
Not long after PBS first broadcast it, Ernie’s rubber duckie song went to number sixteen on the Billboard charts. Radio stations were playing it, adults were buying it. And unlike the other Sesame Street characters, Ernie’s rubber duck was not trademarked. Producers had picked up the prop at a local dime store, which meant that even as it became a recurring character and a pop music phenomenon, it remained in the public domain, free for the taking, no licensing fees required. In a way, its ascendancy confirms Daniel Boorstin’s observation in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America that in America we have arranged the world so that we do not have to experience it, replacing heroes with celebrities, actions with images—and, one might add, animals with television characters.
But does that mean that if Ernie had gone bathing with a white duck or a green one, our iconic ducks would be white or green? I’m not sure. The threads of chance and meaning are hard to disentangle. On the album cover of the LP single of the song, Ernie, for some reason, is holding a different duck, a calico duck, white with burnt-orange spots. Perhaps there is more to the message in this particular bottle than the medium. Perhaps celebrity alone does not explain the yellowness of the duck.
“Ideals of innocent beauty and the adorable have changed little in a hundred years or more,” the historian Gary Cross writes. “Many today share with the Victorian middle class an attraction to the blond, blue-eyed, clear-skinned, and well-fed child and are appalled by, uninterested in, and even hostile to the dark, dirty, and emaciated child. Even when humanitarian groups try to shame us into giving money to support poor peoples far away, they usually show us an image of a smiling olive-skinned (not black) girl, a close copy of our ideal of innocence.” So maybe it’s just as Curtis Ebbesmeyer suspected. Maybe there is bigotry at play. Is it too much of a stretch to see in the yellowness of the rubber duck a visual reminder of that well-fed, blue-eyed, clear-skinned, yellow-haired Victorian ideal? After all, real ducklings have black, beady eyes, not blue ones like the ducks in Eric Carle’s book.
Tuesdays during the seventh month of her pregnancy, my wife and I atte
nded a prepared-childbirth class on the maternity ward of our hospital: linoleum, vinyl chairs, fluorescent lights, a tinted plate-glass window with a view of buildings, strangers, many with impressively inflated abdomens, some also with swollen breasts and feet. On one wall of the classroom hung a poster of an egg, mid-hatch. Contemplating it during the long, tedious hours of instruction, I began to wonder why this particular poster had been hung before our eyes. Was it meant to comfort us? Did we prefer the clean, white orb of an egg to the bloody mammalian mess of one body gushing forth from the wounded nethers of another? On the opposite wall of the classroom hung an enlarged sepia photograph of naked, racially diverse babies; aligned firing-squad-style along a fence over which they appeared to be attempting an escape, they displayed their wrinkly bums for our delight. Children are fundamentally the same, such images suggest, indistinguishable as ducklings despite the color of their skin. They inhabit a world before sex, before race, before history, before self, before humanity. Children, then, are beasts of burden, too—ducklings and bunnies of burden—asked to carry the needful daydreams of adults. The apotheosis of the rubber duck wouldn’t be truly complete until the children who had watched that 1970 episode of Sesame Street grew old enough to look back forgetfully with longing and loss.
THE FIFTH CHASE
There are profitable ships and unprofitable ships. The profitable ship will carry a large load through all the hazards of the weather.
—Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea
[H]owever man may brag of his science and skill . . . for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make.
