Historical Racialized Toys in the United States

GUIDES TO HISTORICAL ARTIFACTS

Books in this series are comprehensive guides to classes of historical artifacts commonly found in excavations, archives, museums, and private collections in North America and across the globe. Designed for archaeologists, material culture specialists, museum professionals, historians, decorative arts scholars, and collectors, the books explore the interconnections between objects and social identity, and are amply illustrated to aid in the identification and interpretation of the technical, temporal, and diagnostic significance of objects described. The series also serves to collate disparate and often obscure specialist literatures and provides an arena for contributors to explore the role of individual objects or assemblages in social action within communities.

Series Editors

Mark Warner is an historical archaeologist with over twenty years of experience in archaeology. He has worked in many parts of the U.S. and conducted major excavations in Maryland, Oklahoma (in collaboration with the Miami Nation) and in the Inland Northwest. He is currently working on the Sandpoint Archaeology Project, an extensive archaeological and historical study of the early settlement of Sandpoint, Idaho and the largest excavation in the history of the state of Idaho. His research interests include zooarchaeology and foodways and archaeologies of inequalities. In 2009 he was elected to serve as a member of the board of directors for the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Books in the Series

Volume 1, Chinese Export Porcelains, Andrew D. Madsen and Carolyn L. White

Volume 2, Material Culture of Breweries, Herman Wiley Ronnenberg

Volume 3, Ceramic Makers’ Marks, Erica Gibson

Volume 4, Historical Racialized Toys in the United States, Christopher P. Barton and Kyle Somerville

Volume 5, Coffin Hardware in Nineteenth-century America, Megan E. Springate

Volume 6, Historic Bottle and Jar Closures, Nathan E. Bender

Walnut Creek, CA

Historical Racialized Toys

in the United States

Christopher P. Barton and Kyle Somerville

Left Coast Press, Inc.1630 North Main Street, #400Walnut Creek, CA 94596www.LCoastPress.com

Copyright © 2016 by Left Coast Press, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-62958-194-1 hardbackISBN 978-1-62958-195-8 paperbackISBN 978-1-62958-196-5 institutional eBookISBN 978-1-62958-197-2 consumer eBook Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Barton, Christopher P., 1983- | Somerville, Kyle, 1986-Title: Historical racialized toys in the United States / Christopher P. Barton and Kyle Somerville.Description: Walnut Creek, California : Left Coast Press, 2016. | Series: Guides to historical artifacts ; volume 4 | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2015043040| ISBN 9781629581941 (hardback : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781629581958 (paperback : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781629581965 (institutional eBook) | ISBN 9781629581972 (consumer eBook)Subjects: LCSH: Toys--Social aspects--United States--History. | Stereotypes (Social psychology)--United States--History. | Racism in popular culture--United States--History. | Socialization--United States--History. | United States--Race relations--History. | United States--Social conditions--1865-1918. | United States--Social conditions--1918-1932. | Material culture--United States--History. | Archaeology and history--United States. | United States--Antiquities. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Archaeology. | HISTORY / United States / 19th Century. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / General.Classification: LCC HQ784.T68 B37 2016 | DDC 305.800973--dc23LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043040

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.

Book design and production by Lisa Devenish, Devenish DesignCover design by Piper Wallis

DEDICATION

IN LOVING MEMORY OF JAY BARTON

7

Contents

List of Illustrations 9

Acknowledgments 11

C H A P T E R 1

The Ideology of Race 13

C H A P T E R 2

The “Problems” of the Times: Race, Class, and Capitalism in America 19

C H A P T E R 3

Children and Childhood 29

C H A P T E R 4

Methodology and Data Analysis 41

C H A P T E R 5

Racialized Toys 61

C H A P T E R 6

The Child’s View 77

References 83

Index 97

About the Author 101

9

I L L U S T R AT I O N S

FIGURES

2.1 Comparison of Apollo Belvedere and Negro races / 23

2.2 Applying Blackface makeup / 27

3.1 Illustration from a book of morals for children / 35

4.1 The Artist at His Work (The Automatic Toy Works, 1882) / 55

4.2 The Old Colored Fiddler / 55

4.3 Reclining Chinaman Mechanical Bank, J. and E. Stevens Company, 1882 / 57

4.4 Broward’s Mechanical Dancer, ca. 1874 / 59

5.1 Exceptional Values in Shooting Games, Sears and Roebuck, 1923 / 62

5.2 New Game of Migration Board Game, Marshall Field & Company, 1890–1893 / 63

5.3 Modern reproduction of the Paddy and the Pig mechanical bank, J. and E. Stevens Com-pany, 1882 / 65

5.4 The Chinese Must Go” Cap Gun, Ives Manu-facturing Co., ca. 1880s / 67

5.5 Topsy Turvy Doll, ca. 1930–1940 / 68

5.6 The Colored Minstrel Boys, “Oh, What Music!” 1922 / 70

5.7 The Old Nurse (The Automatic Toy Works, 1882) / 70

5.8 Masquerade Masks, 1921 / 71

5.9 Paper Mask, 1900 / 71

5.10 Amos ‘n’ Andy, Fresh Air Taxicab, 1930 / 71

5.11 Tip the Bell Boy, 1929 / 72

5.12 The African Dodger Game, ca. 1903 / 72

5.13. Bear Hunt/Creedmore mechanical bank, J. and E. Stevens Company, ca. 1883 / 74

6.1. Illustration of girls with rolling hoop helping “Hunchback Jim” / 79

6.2. Girls jumping rope, ca. 1900 / 79

6.3 Stereoscope image of a game of hopscotch, 1891 / 80

6.4 Stereoscope image of a game of leap-frog, ca. 1890 / 80

6.5 Stereoscope image of a game of marbles / 80

6.6 Group of school children playing a ball game and ring game, Parma, New York, ca. 1900 / 80

TABLES

4.1 Toy type / 42

4.2 Locations of toy manufacture / 43

4.3 Frequency of depiction by racialized group / 44

4.4 Periods of toy manufacture and appearance / 44

11

AC K N OW L E D G M E N TS

This book is the culmination of years of implicit and explicit

support from numerous people. Our sincere gratitude first

goes to Güner Coşkunsu for her friendship, support, and

welcome commiseration on all things academia. This book

would not have been possible without her enthusiasm for the

archaeological study of childhood and her encouragement to

pursue it beyond the classroom.

We are indebted to Charles Orser, David Orr, Paul Mullins,

Christopher Fennell, and Christopher Matthews for their help

along the way, and also to Suzanne Spencer-Wood, Richard Veit,

and Rebecca Yamin for their many insights and observations

given to two junior colleagues. Patricia Hogan and Lauren

Sodano at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York

kindly provided access to the extensive and oftentimes eyebrow-

raising objects in the museum’s repository. Mr. Bill Jones of the

Mechanical Bank Collectors of America and Mr. Dave Crumb of

the Parma-Hilton Historian’s Office also generously provided

images used in this book. We thank the two anonymous reviewers

for their time and thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of the

manuscript. Cheers to Matt Johnson, Elsie Muñiz, Dr. Robert L.

Schuyler, and the many other wonderful friends, colleagues, and

professors at the University of Pennsylvania. And as always, our

deepest appreciation goes to Jessica Barton, Marie-Lorraine Pipes,

George Hamell, Paul Powers, and Sarunas Milisauskas.

Christopher P. Barton and Kyle Somerville

13

C H A P T E R 1

The Ideology of Race

Race is a learned ideology, and racism a cultivated practice. The ideology of race suggests that innate differences exist within the human species. This categorization is inherently hierarchical and leads to practices of racism, in which one or more racial groups are given privileged status at the expense of dehumanized “Others.” No valid biological evidence has been found to suggest there exist subspecies of humans; nevertheless, race remains a very real and powerful social construction that influences the dai-ly lives of people. Similar to any social construction, race as an ideology has a fabricated origin, and the maintenance and reproduction of racial ideologies through child socialization is discussed in this book. This work is an examination of how mass-produced toys bearing racialized imagery of Asian, Black, Irish, and Native American stereotypes functioned as a me-dium to socialize children of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into a racialist worldview.

Toys, of course, were not the only objects to de-pict racialized representations of the “Other,” and objects such as salt and pepper shakers, cookie jars, decorative statues, advertising, and a vast number of other items and images depicted figures of all races, ethnicities, and classes (Dubin 1987; Husfloen et al. 1996). In many ways, however, toys depicting racial stereotypes are perhaps the most shocking to mod-

ern sensibilities because they were objects specifically made for children. Toys, as a form of material cul-ture, are not only reflective, but also constitutive of societal structures, beliefs, and practices. Children’s toys underscore the projective and constructive dis-position of material culture because they are didactic objects purchased by adults and used to teach chil-dren. The toys discussed in this book reflect popu-lar racial stereotypes, and demonstrate the explicit attempt to cultivate these ideologies and practices in White children. The socialization of children into structures of race and racism was not limited to toys, as there existed myriad everyday practices meant to socialize children into a racialist worldview. How-ever, mass marketed, produced, and consumed toys represent some of the more salient and objectified forms of racist culture directed toward children.

This book is built upon our 2012 paper, “Play Things: Children’s Racialized Mechanical Banks and Toys,” published in volume 15 of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology. Toys, utilitarian ob-jects, and advertising images depicting racialized fig-ures have been the focus of scholarly examination for some time (Barrett 2003; Brown 2006; Dubin 1987; Gould 2010; Lattimer 1976; Wilkerson 1974). Here, we build on those previous works by considering not only the historical circumstances in which these toys

Christopher P. Barton and Kyle Somerville, Historical Racialized Toys in the United States, pp. 11-16. © 2016 Left Coast Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

14 HISTORICAL RACIALIZED TOYS IN THE UNITED STATES

were manufactured and sold, but also how these ob-jects socialized children into racist structures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In taking a mul-tifaceted and multidisciplinary approach, this book is meant to be many things. It is an archaeological study, a sociological examination, an anthropologi-cal study of the (primarily) Victorian culture of the United States, and a material culture study. These ap-proaches are always shot through with one another. No doubt this approach has produced a study rich in interdisciplinary perspectives on a specific social phenomenon, while requiring something of a trade-off in a systematic and coherent research agenda. With that said, it should be abundantly clear to prac-titioners of these fields that no one discipline en-joys a monopoly on explaining the entire depth and breadth of human society and culture. Nor would a monopoly be desirable, as different intellectual ap-proaches and methodological competencies are vital for a “thick” understanding of any social phenome-non (Grindstaff 2008:211).

We have compiled a database of 172 toys depict-ing racial caricatures and other stereotypes, using data acquired from antique dealers’ and collectors’ websites, period retail advertising and catalogs, pat-ent papers, and museum collections. The data col-lected include toy type, description of the toy from period advertising if applicable, name of the man-ufacturer (or distributor if the manufacturer is un-known), date or period of first manufacture/appear-ance in advertising, sale price, and the source from which the toy was found. Mechanical banks and clockwork toys and the numerous variants thereof are, by far, the most-represented of racialized toys, and therefore we focus the brunt of our interpreta-tion on these objects. Other objects for children such as toy books and puzzles were produced as early as the seventeenth century and have received greater attention elsewhere. These were not included in our toy sample, although similar patterns of racial rep-resentation are present among these kinds of toys as well (see Gould 2010).

A few points regarding this methodology should be clarified before proceeding further. First, because these objects have been removed from the contexts

of their original owners it is difficult to determine the extent to which these toys were successful in so-cializing children into structures of racism. It is also problematic to know how these toys were collected and displayed by children in the past, because they lack the controlled provenience of traditional archaeological finds. Presumably, parents purchased these more ex-pensive toys, especially pricy mechanical toys, for spe-cial occasions such as Christmas or as a surprise (Roof 1917; Waits 1992). Board and target games were for use by groups of individuals, but the use of mechanical toys is more difficult to discern, especially since most children preferred toys of their own creation, the conse-quences of which we will examine in the final chapter.

Because children are socialized into their envi-ronments by adults through material and nonmate-rial means, children’s use of space will therefore not be random, but will have patterns that reflect chil-dren’s behavior and the norms that direct the use of particular space. This disciplining of children’s space and behaviors often leaves behind material evidence (Baxter 2006a:79). It is reasonable to assume, then, that because they were fairly expensive objects, and consequently a visual reminder of the prosperity of the child’s family, and received for special occasions, they would be given a prominent place in the child’s room or elsewhere in the home, and were never tak-en outside where they might be damaged.

Mechanical toys were probably curated objects, and are one reason that so many exist today and why so few end up in traditional archaeological contexts. Due to their relatively rugged construction and pop-ularity with collectors, mechanical toys made of iron, such as clockwork figures and banks, are much more likely to have survived into the present day than toys made of cardboard, paper, or cloth. Rugged construc-tion, however, does not guarantee complete survival over a period of several decades, and indeed, many mechanical banks and toys are still fragile (O’Neill 1988; Waits 1992). That said, the number of toys in our sample is a fair representative of the total number and variety of toys produced through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see also Gould 2010). As will be seen, however, the fact that most of these toys were mechanical has profound implications

THE IDEOLOGY OF RACE 15

for the ways in which these toys may have been used to teach children about the “Other.” In addition, because mechanical toys were more expensive than other types, we argue that these toys could only be purchased by people with disposable incomes (how-ever, see Mullins 2010).

The issue of gender and toys must also be consid-ered. While many, if not most, playthings were gender specific, these toys underscore the difficulty of tracing consumption and the ambiguity of the meaning of material culture for consumers. It is tempting to attri-bute mechanical toys and target games to boys, dolls and doll sets to girls, and board games and masks to both, but the association of an object with a sin-gle realm or exclusively with females (or males) risks a devolution into essentialism, though mechanical toys are generally considered by most current re-searchers and in contemporary documents to have been for boys (Croswell 1898; Ganaway 2007; Mul-lins 2011:156–157; Roof 1917). However, given that the expression of gentility was the responsibility of both men and women during the nineteenth century, the values expressed by these toys are best examined as household items and a dialogue between parent and child, and perhaps between adults, rather than as discrete objects made specifically for either gender.

To frame the reflective and constitutive dispo-sition of toys, we draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977, 1984) theory of practice as a theoretical framework for interpreting the socialization of individuals into a racialized worldview, or habitus. These examples are situated within interpretations of the disposition of children’s toys as media for the socialization of chil-dren into a racialist habitus.

Practice Theory as a Model for Understanding ToysPierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice has been wide-ly used by scholars from a range of disciplines as a model to understand social relations (Orser 2004; Ortner 1999). Bourdieu’s practice theory, encom-passed under the umbrella term of post-structural-ism, argues that individuals do not blindly adhere

to social structures, but rather operate within a “grey area” of applying, rejecting, and modifying pre-ex-isting social traditions. The ability to mediate social structures is predicated upon the lifelong socializa-tion of an individual that cultivates a habitus, which Bourdieu (1977:53) defines as:

a system of durable, transposable disposi-tions, structured structures predisposed to func-tion as structuring structures, that is, as princi-ples which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a con-scious aiming at ends or an expressed mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.

Habitus both restricts and enables an individual’s practices within changing social situations. It is not simply an itemized list of choices that an individual can select from, but a learned worldview that filters individual practice based upon pre-existing social tra-ditions. As individual daily practices cause reactions within social networks, an individual’s habitus is al-tered to conform to changing situations, and ultimate-ly modifies social structures. The result is a dynamic relationship in which collective social structures influ-ence individual practice, and individual practice can affect social structures, thus enabling the continuation and modification of society through time and space. This model leaves us with a reflexive interpretation of social relations as societal structures in which values and practices are not static or stagnant, but rather con-stantly subjected to (re)negotiation.

This lifelong learning cultivates a unique disposi-tion, or habitus, that is the sole result of an individ-ual’s own experiences, and yet, because of the collec-tive nature of society, also shares similarities with the attitudes of other people. Simply put, no two indi-viduals have the same habitus, but no two habituses operating within the same social networks are ever completely different. This enables both a level of uni-formity and a diversified range of what constitutes social structures, beliefs, and practices.

Race and racism fit within this discourse, since both operate as structural dispositions that affect habitus and individual practice (Orser 2007:57–59).


As mentioned, race is a socially learned construction that creates a habitus in which human physical vari-ation, that is, genotypic and phenotypic responses to selective pressures, is conceived as evidence for human subspeciation. The result of these ideologies is a hierarchical taxonomy of human existence in which groups are categorized based on stereotyped, superficial, and biologically invalid characteristics. Taxonomies of race are subjectively used by groups in power to underscore their social authority as well as also to impose that authority onto marginalized peoples. Ultimately, structures of race are powerful influences used in the social relations between and among groups (Bonilla-Silva 1997:476–477). These dynamic social structures greatly affect the everyday lives of people, and in turn affect individual practice. Bourdieu’s theory of practice enables scholars to un-derstand the relationships among social structure, habitus, and practice, facilitating a theoretical model from which we can interpret the reflective and consti-tutive disposition of material culture.

Overview

In Chapter Two, we briefly discuss the sociohistor-ic milieu of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the origins and reproduction of racial ideologies. This chapter provides a theoretical foun-dation of race from which our interpretations of toys will arise. Drawing heavily from the work of archae-ologists, historians, and sociologists, this discussion situates the sociohistorical networks of race, class, and gender through an interdisciplinary perspective. In this chapter, we offer blackface minstrel shows as examples of both creators and creations of a racial-ized habitus. Minstrel shows were predicated upon pre-existing social structures that created, modified, and reproduced ideologies of race through the so-cialization of individuals (Barton 2012). This brief discussion of blackface minstrels offers a compara-tive example for interpreting racialized toys, as both practices were contemporaries in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America.

In Chapter Three, we discuss the concept of child-

hood within the United States as a distinct period in an individual’s life. Childhood is not a universally shared social practice; rather, the construct of child-hood is a temporally and spatially defined ideolo-gy. In discussing the racialized toys of the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries, we focus upon childhood through the lens of the Victorian period (1837–1901). While the timeline of the toy dataset expands beyond 1901, it is important to note that the economic, political, and social networks that cre-ated these racialized toys are rooted within the Vic-torian era and continued well past this period. In or-der to fully discuss the meanings inscribed onto and through racialized toys, we contextualize the artifacts into a brief historiography of the Victorian era in the United States to provide a framework to build our interpretations of racialized toys.

Chapter Four provides a brief history of mechan-ical and still banks, toys, dolls, costumes, and board games, and some background information on the manufacturers who created them. In this chapter, the artifacts are quantified and described based on the form, dates, and country of origin of the product, and represented race. In addition, a discussion of patent-ing, specifically, the mechanization of banks, clock-work, and pull/push toys, is detailed, as manufactur-ers often did not patent the racialized depictions, but the mechanics of the toys. In this regard, issues of authenticity arise as manufacturers and advertisers proclaim the lifelike movements and appearances of their toys. Materiality is a core component in the study of object authenticity, and an understanding of how and why certain objects are made and for what purposes reveals authentication to be a negoti-ation of social relationships, and indeed the material precipitate of it (Theodossopoulos 2013:352–353; Livingstone 1998). In order to underscore the “au-thenticity” of the racial group depicted, there must be broader social convention of the ways that, for example, Asians look and act. This is so that, apart from the advertising and packaging, the toy can be easily recognized by the consumer as the represented racial group. Such recognition by the consumer de-pends upon pre-existing social conventions on racial stereotypes, and that those ideologies are identifiable

THE IDEOLOGY OF RACE 17

when projected onto the toy. While these artifacts re-flect pre-existing social ideologies of race, they also help to recreate and modify those ideologies through the socialization of children. These racialized toys were designed and purchased by adults to discipline children into both convincing of race and ensuring practices of racism against non-White “Others.”

In Chapter Five, we provide a descriptive analy-sis of a sampling of toys depicting four “races”: Na-tive Americans, the Irish, Asians, and the Black races. While it is not our intention to provide any validity to the conception of categorizing people into races, we use this approach to garner a better understanding of how the people who created, advertised, purchased, and played with these toys interpreted the racialized world around them. These racialized toys, like all ar-tifacts, are products that reflect the social values and beliefs held within Victorian society. In this regard, we provide a brief description of the socio-histori-cal networks concerning the emotional perspectives associated with each non-White race. This section concludes in stating that, while the primary objective for many of these toys was to ensure that White chil-dren would be socialized into understanding the per-ceived physical and cultural traits, as well as the de-sired emotional responses to each represented race, the tacit purpose of these autodidactic objects was to construct an ideology of the White Race. Simply, racialized toys were used to perpetuate the ideology of a racialized “Other,” but also through this “Oth-ering,” children were taught what it meant to White.

Finally, the conclusion of the book provides a brief summation of the various topics presented throughout the work. An important aspect of these interpretations of racialized toys, and in general, all toys, is not to underestimate the power that children possess as social agents. Children have the power to influence the toy purchasing decisions made by adults, and thus have power over the curation of material culture. In addition, despite the intentions of adults, the power of children’s imaginations and innovation can take any object and repurpose it to suit the play needs at any given time or place. That is to say, how many children who received these toys had actually seen a “real” Indian, a “real” black per-

son, a “real” Chinaman? These toys did not claim to accurately represent the “real” African American as an individual with bulging eyes and unchecked bodily movements, or the Chinese or Japanese as mysterious and magical, any more so than the illus-trations in racist nineteenth-century anthropologi-cal literature meant to suggest absolute genealogical links between man and animal (Livingstone 1998). These objects are not authentic portrayals of the (real or perceived) practices of other races, but instead are representations grounded in the contestation of identity between producer and consumer, dominant and dominated, and us versus them. Indeed, while racialized toys were purchased by adults for the ob-jective of socializing children into ideologies of race, the child had the power to circumvent parental con-trol through his/her own play, and often did.

Social life is a flow of interaction, and in one sense, social life is shaped by the physical limitations of the body and space. Society is defined as an ag-glomeration of institutions, activities, and practices associated with those institutions, the people doing those practices and activities, and the structural re-lationships occurring between and among individ-uals, collectivities, and the institutions that create and recreate them (Pred 1981:6). The reproduction of society is an ongoing process where practice re-sults in the perpetuation of knowledge, institutions, and relationships. Social reproduction and social life itself are inseparable from practices, and by exten-sion, from the material world of man-made objects that facilitate them (Brubaker 1985:750). Therefore, processes of social reproduction can only be fully understood when it is understood how they worked materially. Given that material culture is important in how people create, experience, change, and give meaning to their world, it must be understood that material culture, in turn, creates people, and shapes their experiences and worlds (Dobres and Robb 2005). While these objects were toys made for chil-dren, they are also much more complex than “mere” playthings. Toys are not just tools of and for social-ization, but are deeply symbolic mediators of race, class, age, and gender embedded in dialogs of pa-rental control and child resistance (Baxter 2005:22;


Calvert 1992; Mergren 1982; Somerville 2014; Wilkie 2000). The “Paddy and the Pig” mechanical bank on the lower right-hand corner of the cover of this book, for example, was a fun plaything made for chil-dren, a source of humor and whimsy for the adult who purchased it, a dialogue between the child and

adult about the “Other” within the Victorian social cosmology, a socializing agent to expose children to these races, and an object whose mechanical proper-ties circumscribe and through play are complicit in the constant reproduction of the racist values behind their construction.

19

C H A P T E R 2

The “Problems” of the Times: Race, Class, and Capitalism in America

The years following the Civil War were a tumultuous period in American history. Beyond the difficulties of mending a bitterly divided nation, the United States experienced a social, political, and economic revolu-tion. From the demise of institutional slavery and the mass influx of European immigrants to the realities of laissez-faire capitalism and the growing influence of consumer culture, the United States was on the precipice of a new era.

In this chapter, we discuss the historical and so-cial matrix of the United States following the Civil War. We first provide an overview of the ideological and structural dynamics of race within the American consciousness by using examples of White fears and racism directed toward African Americans. We discuss White American attempts to dehumanize Black peo-ple through scientific racism, political oppression, and forms of popular culture. In the subsequent sec-tion, we detail the conflated relationships between Black migration and foreign immigration with White working- and middle-class fears of a destabilized economic market. Central to this discussion is the economic, psychological, and social turmoil omni-present during this period of laissez-faire capitalism. We end with a brief discussion of the development of American consumer culture by examining the constitutive disposition of material culture in creat-

ing and projecting individual desire and identity. We provide a foundation for understanding the myriad ways that racialized toys were used to display, create, and reproduce racial ideologies. This chapter serves as a brief summation of broad racial histories in or-der to contextualize racialized toys within the social networks of the post-Civil War era to the end of the Great Depression.

Race and Fear

Race is not a scientifically valid biological reality, but it remains a very real social structure that affects the everyday lives of people despite the lack of any legiti-mate empirical evidence. While for millennia people used a host of physical and cultural markers to place individuals into seemingly concrete groups of being, the ideology of what we today refer to as “race,” that is, the categorizing of individuals into taxonom-ic groups rooted in perceived physical and cultural differences, was not developed until the Enlighten-ment (Orser 2004:ix). The inquisitive overtones of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sought to uncover order in the natural and social worlds (Ep-person 1994, 1999). In regard to biological race, this pursuit for order sought to position individuals into tightly defined groups based primarily on shared



phenotypic traits. Physical characteristics such as skin color, hair, eye shape, and body size were used to cre-ate a systematic hierarchy of being. As opposed to the blurred spectrum of physical traits that comprise human variation, the ideology of race placed indi-viduals into subjectively defined, and yet seemingly objective, naturalized racial categories.

In discussing “race” as an ideological construct, we borrow the term from the philosopher Louis Althusser (1971), who defined ideology as a con-struct used in the masking of social and economic inequalities. Althusser argued that these illusionary devices, or masks, are used to protect the interests of the dominant sociopolitical and economic classes. In this view, the ideology of race promotes the hege-mony of the dominant class by creating a false con-sciousness within and between marginalized groups (Leone 2005; Little 2007:67). In nineteenth- and ear-ly twentieth-century capitalism, the possibilities of any working class solidarity uniting racialized groups was largely negated, as these ideologies positioned “races” as direct competitors with one another, as opposed to challenging the power of the dominant classes (Roediger 1990).

This ideological power of race suggested that working-class Whites, for example, had more in com-mon with upper-class Whites than with the working classes of other races, with whom they often shared the same language dialects, diets, and living and working conditions. One of the results of an adher-ence to racial ideologies was that the White working classes became some of the most vehement, vocal supporters of the “objective” differences between races. The unwavering support of racial ideologies among the White working classes was dependent upon the belief that any sociopolitical and/or eco-nomic gains of other races was translated into com-petition, or direct losses for White working-class lives (Barton 2012; Roediger 1990).

An example of this is seen among the White work-ing classes after the demise of slavery in the United States. The conflation of race and slavery in the United States was developed over an extended period of time, as much of the labor used in the early English colonies was a mixture of enslaved Africans, Native Americans,

and European indentured servants. In his foundation-al work studying the development of racialized slavery in the seventeenth century, archaeologist James Deetz (1996) noted that the primary identifier between early European colonists, European indentured servants, and enslaved Africans was religious affiliation. These label-ing practices were common throughout the English col-onies, as documentary records referred to the enslaved as “Christian Negroes” or “non-Christian/Heathen Ne-groes,” while colonists referred to themselves and in-dentured servants as “English” (see also Epperson 1994, 1999; Orser 2004:7). Such labeling may appear seman-tic, but the lack of use of the identifiers “White” and “Black” as the primary means of distinction is important for understanding the origins of racial ideologies.

As sociopolitical tensions developed between the European colonists and their European indentured servants, both of whom shared protection under co-lonial law, the latter were gradually replaced by en-slaved Africans who had limited or no legal rights. Social conflict between colonists and indentured servants was frequently the result of contractual dis-putes over the harsh conditions of servitude or the perceived failure of servants to fulfill the require-ments demanded by their masters. The demise of in-dentured servitude in the English colonies was one of the prime catalysts in the creation of racialized slavery in the United States. This is because, as European in-dentured servants were replaced by enslaved Africans, the enslaved continued to be identified as “Christian Negroes” or “non-Christian/Heathen Negroes,” while the identifier of “English” transitioned into the use of “White” during the mid to late seventeenth century. While White criminals and debtors were often placed into various degrees of indentured servitude during the remainder of the colonial period and after the formation of the United States, the dominant form of forced labor was based on Black enslavement. The conflation of phenotype, specifically skin color, and the institution of slavery facilitated the continued de-velopment of racial ideologies within America.

During the period of institutional slavery in the United States, the use of Africans and their descen-dants as slaves created a direct semiotic association between Black skin and perceived social and biolog-

THE “PROBLEMS” OF THE TIMES: RACE, CLASS, AND CAPITALISM IN AMERICA 21

ical inferiority. Because Africans were the primary source of enslaved labor, the pigmentation of their skin became internalized within the White American habitus as a marker for enslavement. These perceived connections between phenotype and slavery were so powerful that, even if an individual was born “free,” because of the color of her/his skin, as well as other subjective physical traits, he or she was still at risk of being forced into slavery.

As the United States continued its development into a full capitalist society, one in which economic capital was often used to construct and reflect social hierarchy, the omnipresence of racial ideologies as-sociating black skin with slavery often negated any sociopolitical and economic gains made by Black people. Such was the case for the Reverend Richard Allen, the founder of the African Methodist Epis-copal Church in Philadelphia. Despite being born into slavery, Allen was able to garner his freedom as a young man, and eventually became one of the wealthiest and most respected Black men in Phila-delphia. One day in 1800, Allen was apprehended by a slave catcher, who claimed that Allen was a fugitive runaway. While Allen challenged the slave catcher’s claim, it was not until Adlermann Todd, an affluent White man and friend of Allen for over twenty years, testified in defense of Allen that the slave catcher was rejected (Newman 2008). Though only one example, this case highlighted the reality that no level of eco-nomic or social capital could ensure the freedom of Black people in antebellum America.

The conflation of slavery with racial ideologies expanded far beyond the slave societies of the South, and permeated throughout the United States. In the Northeast, for example, fears of a growing Black pop-ulation during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries resulted in a host of institutional strategies and everyday practices used to quell Black influ-ence in politics, economics, and society. Legislative actions to deny Black males the right to vote, insti-tutionalized segregation, and daily violence and in-timidation were used by portions of White society to address and repress any potential Black power.

One avenue to project the perceived superiority of the White race over Black counterparts was the use

of “science,” specifically craniometry, to emphasize the morphological differences between groups. The American School of Craniometry at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, under the direction of Samuel Morton, was the leading research institution for racial studies. In 1839, Morton published Cra-nia Americana, in which he stated that the cranium was the best indicator for determining intelligence, and thus hierarchy, among the racial groups. Using a flawed methodology that included mismeasurement of cranial capacity, limited sample size, and subjec-tive selection of measuring points, Morton contend-ed that the circular shape and large cranial capacity of the White Race, specifically White males, was con-clusive evidence to support the biological and social superiority of Whites. He stated that “[t]his (White) race is distinguished for the facility with which it at-tains the highest intellectual endowments” (Morton 1839:5). According to Morton, the superiority of the White race stood in stark contrast to the perceived inferiority of the Asian race, and even more so, the Black race. In regard to the “Negro” race, Morton (1839:5) concluded that “the many nations that compose this race present a singular diversity of in-tellectual character, of which the far extreme is the lowest grade of humanity.”

Josiah Nott and George Gliddon, both medical doctors and students of Morton, in 1848 went so far as to support the theory of polygenesis, claiming that the morphological and cultural variations between the White and Black races suggested different origins, and even sub-speciation. In Types of Mankind, Nott et al. (1848) stated that the superiority and inferi-ority between the races could be observed through a multidisciplinary study of classical artworks and per-ceptions of contemporary racial groups (Figure 2.1). In their work, Nott and his colleagues proposed that the statue of Apollo Belvidere embodied the biologi-cal and cultural superiority of the White race, stating that artwork represented “the perfect type of man-ly beauty” (Nott et al. 1848:40). Conversely, they contended that the “Negro,” depicted in a simian caricature, represented the lowest grade of humani-ty. While the authors acknowledged that there were some similarities between the White and Black races,


they also fervently countered that no one could dis-avow the shared characteristics between “Negroes,” chimpanzees, and orangutans:

“Although [we] do not believe in the intel-lectual equality of races, and can find no ground in natural or in human history for such popular credence, [we] belong not to those who are dis-posed to degrade any type of humanity to the level of the brute-creation. Nevertheless, a man must be blind not to be struck by similitudes between some of the lower races of mankind, viewed as connecting links in the animal king-dom; nor can it be rationally affirmed, that the Orang-Outan [sic] and Chimpanzee are more widely separated from certain African and Oce-anic Negroes than are the latter from Teutonic or Pelasgic types” (Nott et al. 1854:457).

Simply stated, Nott and his colleagues believed that the physical differences between the races were so great and the interpreted similarities between the Black race and great apes so significant that there could not be any shared origin for humans. Through the use of “science,” these ideologies of race were empirically quantified, and thus accentuated the su-periority of the White “race.” Conjuring racist con-nections between Black peoples and apes and de-grading the Black race to an animalistic state of being perpetuated ideologies that the relegated subservient social status of Black people to the White race was natural, and thus even slavery itself was justifiable. Indeed, underscoring the circular logic of such stud-ies, most of Nott’s (himself a slave owner) own work centered on furthering the pro-slavery cause through perceived empirical and scientific data. Bolstered by racialized and racist scientific research, proslavery rhetoric claimed that, not only was the Black race bi-ologically and socially inferior to the White, but en-slaved Black people actually benefited from slavery through the diffusionary contact with Whites.

In a time before Darwinian evolutionary theory, these beliefs of polygenesis, while not completely ac-cepted by all as scientific fact, were nonetheless de-bated within academic, political, and social circles. It is important to note that these discourses regarding

the perceived inferiority and superiority of the rac-es was not restricted to the halls of universities, but leached into the everyday lives of people. Indeed, if the biological and cultural superiority of the White race could be scientifically quantified through em-pirical methods, then the subjugated status of Black people and other non-Whites could be understood as the natural order of life.

These dialectics of inferiority and superiority imbued onto and through phenotypes were created and reproduced through the existence of racialized slavery. Simply put, within an antebellum context, to be identified as “Black” conjured an unavoidable association with slavery. Although the racializing of the “Other” would be expanded to include people of Asian, Irish, Jewish, and Native American descent, the Black/White dialectic dominated the antebellum United States. Fears of the growing Black population resulted in extensive efforts to protect the sanctity of the White race through the enforcement of every-thing from institutional strategies to everyday prac-tices. For example, the development of “one drop” rules stated that if an individual had one drop of non-White blood, they were to be designated as “Ne-gro,” “Mulatto,” “Quadroon,” and so on. These rules were specifically designed to protect the purity of the White race in response to children born from sexual encounters between White men and enslaved wom-en, while anti-miscegenation laws forbade the mar-riage of interracial couples. These practices sought to quantify and define a racialized “Other” in direct op-position to an equally created identity of Whiteness, and thus protected and secured the economic and political hegemony of the White race (Barton 2012; Orser 2001, 2004, 2007).

While the practical results of these racial dialec-tics were the expansion of economic, legal, political, and social opportunities for those deemed “White” at the expense of “Other,” the ideological effects also had very real social consequences. For example, in the antebellum period, the ideological effect on free African Americans was that, no matter how much economic or social capital they might possess, there would always be an inferred association with inferi-ority as long as racialized slavery still existed (Mullins


2000). Conversely, for impoverished Whites, despite their lack of economic and/or other capital, simply because of their membership in the White race, they were superior to and better off than non-Whites. This is not to suggest that the realities of White privilege did not (and do not) exist (Du Bois 1935:700-701; McDavid 2007), but because of racialized slavery, Whites, no matter their economic or social status, believed in their racial superiority.

Figure 2.1. Comparison of Apollo Belvedere and Negro races (In Mott et al. 1854:458)


The ideological power of race was that it masked the marginalized status of much of the American populace, veiling the very real distinctions shared by the masses regardless of their racial affiliation, and replaced any development of class consciousness with a pervasive racial discourse (Du Bois 1935). Racial ideologies fostered collective consciousness-es that created imagined associations between the working, middle and upper classes based simply on the identity of being White or Black. These racial ide-ologies masked the economic, political, and social realities that the White working and middle classes shared much more in common with their racialized counterparts than they did with Whites who were above their economic station. However, rather than seeing African Americans, Native Americans, Irish Americans, Asian Americans, and others as allies in a struggle for a better life, many Whites instead viewed racialized “Others” as enemies to social progress.

Following the end of slavery, the United States experienced an expansion of racialism and racism as the White middle and working classes sought to consolidate their social superiority (Barton 2012; Mullins 1999, 2001). In a capitalist society like nineteenth-century America, economic capital is a powerful marker used to display the success of the individual. In accordance with the dominant ideol-ogies of nineteenth-century capitalism, the success or failure in acquiring economic capital was solely dependent on the individual. Ideologies of individu-ality stressed that poverty was not the result of socie-tal conditions and situations, but was a direct result of the moral failings of the individual (Leone 2005). Without the connections between phenotype and in-feriority, non-Whites, specifically African Americans after the demise of slavery, could compete with and even surpass Whites in their accumulation of eco-nomic and, thus, social capital; if African Americans were no longer hampered by an association with ra-cialized slavery, then the economic success of a Black man was the result of his own merit, while the pov-erty experienced by many working-class Whites was due to their own individual shortcomings.

White fears were further exacerbated with the pas-sage of the Fifteenth Amendment granting African

American males the right to vote. If African Ameri-cans males could not only compete with Whites in the marketplace, but could also influence the polit-ical system, then there would no longer be any dis-tinctions between the White masses and a Black pop-ulation that only a few years prior had been connect-ed to slavery (Barton 2012; Mullins 1999; Roediger 1990). While these ideologies of race did not result in direct economic gains, they did provide the White race with different internalized benefits. W.E.B. Du-Bois (1935:700) termed these ideological percep-tions of race “psychological wages”:

“...[W]hile they (Whites) received a low wage, they are compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were White. They were admitted freely with all classes of White people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, de-pendent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon their economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the def-erence shown them.”

These “psychological wages” were strategies cre-ated, modified, and reproduced by White society to delineate the social and biological superiority of the White race through the dehumanization of non-Whites. This expanding racial White habitus in the late nineteenth century was contextualized within capitalist networks that perpetuated the belief that, through hard work and determination, the White middle and working classes were merely steps away from themselves becoming members of the upper classes. In contrast, non-White groups were believed to be unproductive and lazy, the antithesis to the principles of American capitalism.

These racial ideologies concealed the reality that the majority of peoples, both White and non-White “Others,” had limited or no opportunities for admit-tance into the exclusive circles of the social elite. Ad-ditionally, racialized “Others” were viewed as willing


to work for such low wages, driving workers’ pay so low, that no White man could support his family on them (Roediger 1990). In truth, racialized groups like African Americans, Asians, Eastern Europeans, and the Irish were frequently exploited by capitalists to desta-bilize all workers’ rights and wages (Shackel 2009). Non-White workers were often used as strikebreakers and “scabs” to cross picket lines during union protests. However, rather than acknowledging the predatory practices of capitalists, marginalized Whites depend-ed on these racial ideologies instead of condemning the failed social and economic systems of laissez-faire capitalism (Du Bois 1935). As a result of racial ide-ologies, the White working and middle classes saw non-Whites as direct threats to not only the individual White worker, but to the prosperity of the nation. The popularity of political parties such as the Know Noth-ing or Nativist parties, Whites- only organized labor, and terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, embodied the rising fears of White people.

This discussion has so far examined race from an ideological framework; however, race is much more than an ideology. Bonilla-Silva (1997) raises two concerns regarding the problematic nature of the ideological approach to studying racism. First, the reduction of racism to a mere ideological construct displaces it as an epochal structure that influences so-ciety. Racism is reduced to a passé social construction that is dependent upon other social hierarchies such as social and economic class. He argues that, although the creation of race originated in the class structures of late European colonialism and capitalism, after its initial development, race “acquired a life of its own. The subjects who were racialized as belonging to the superior race, whether or not they were members of the dominant class, became zealous defenders of the racial order” (Bonilla-Silva 1997:473). Structures of race are intertwined with economic class, and are also conflated with the social networks of capitalism. Put simply, race operates not only as a precipitate of economic class but is also a separate, yet enmeshed structure affecting society.

Second, in studying racism as a psychological be-lief held by the individual, its reproduction becomes

solely dependent upon the individual, not as a struc-tural element within society (Bonilla-Silva 1997:466; Orser 2004:113-114). Salient racism within an ideo-logical framework is viewed as the outcome of indi-vidual practices that operate outside of “normal” or dominant society. In this regard, racism is interpret-ed as an irrational, isolated, and internalized belief system held by the individual rather than a central characteristic of society. Thus it is not institutions, groups, or society that are racist, but only the indi-vidual (Orser 2004:114).

Bonilla-Silva argues against the ideological ap-proach by presenting a structural view of studying race, and suggests that the processes of racialization, and thus racism, are dependent upon establishing and recreating hierarchies; that is, the group that is in control of racial labeling is in a dominant social position. The dominant group has power over subor-dinate groups to create, define, and redefine relations between races (Oser 2004:115). Racial labeling is en-hanced by the belief that physical and cultural traits are markers of a naturalized racialist taxonomy. Be-cause of this hierarchical disposition of racialist tax-onomies, subordinate groups deemed as “Other” are restricted in their opportunities to garner cultural, economic, social, and symbolic capital. Thus, the pro-cesses of racialization have profound consequences for not only the identities of groups and individuals, but also the social, economic, and political powers of those racialized groups. The relations of dominant and repressed groups operate as dialectics, in that the very existence of one group stands in contestation to the other (Orser 2004:115). For example, to be labeled “White” is a binary opposition to “Black,” and vice versa. The imposed racial labeling of the individual is a referential and inconsequential marker, as well as an identity imbued with substantial meaning and real consequences. Leone (2010:23-24) sums up the dia-lectical tensions innate within racialism:

“Race is a way of establishing hierarchy so that unequally held wealth and its absence are protected. If you can find and object to hate and see that its hatefulness is inherent in it and that you are not responsible for the hatred, then the


poverty and exploitation that may come to the hateful is deserved and virtually earned by them.”

Racial ideologies are both reflections of a racial-ized society and are constitutive of society, in that they are an “organizational map that guides the actions of racial actors in society” (Bonilla-Silva 1997:474). Understanding that race and racism are not localized to the ideological or psychological, but are facilitated through societal structures is important for contex-tualizing racialized toys. Material culture depicting racialized and racist imagery of non-Whites was not the product of individual craft, but mass-produced items that were manufactured, advertised, and con-sumed by the millions. The ability to recognize racial imagery depicted on material culture was dependent on pre-existing structures, so that both the producer and consumer could easily identify the racial group represented on the toy. These identifications of ra-cialized and racist stereotypes—both physical and cultural—were thus not the creation of an individual psyche, but were developed and reproduced through a structural discourse, or social convention, on how non-Whites looked and acted.

Such social conventions tied to racialized stereo-types were not limited to children’s toys, but were/are also omnipresent throughout the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century landscape. A powerful example of racist imagery and practice is observed in blackface minstrel shows. These widely popular per-formances offer a contemporaneous example from which to compare racialized children’s toys, as min-strel shows drew upon pre-existing stereotypes and deeply held beliefs on race.

Blackface Minstrel Shows

Minstrel shows, or blackface performances, were popular throughout the early republic (Engle 1978; Lott 1993). These performances featured White male actors playing the interpreted attitudes, behaviors, and personas of enslaved Blacks for predominantly White audiences. Many of these acts portrayed Black people as childish buffoons who were content, even happy, with paternalistic slavery (Toll 1996). African

American males were presented in a variety of often intersecting forms, from jovial tricksters to dumb and lazy roustabouts, from overgrown children in need of White supervision to insatiable sexual animals. The range of representation was meant to convey to White audiences that the rightful place for Blacks was within slavery and as the punchline to White jokes. White performers often boasted of the authenticity of their Black personas, often claiming to have learned them through direct contact with Black people. These claims of authenticity emphasized the authority of the White performer as the interpretative medium of Black culture (for example, see Dumont 1899).

The act of applying burnt cork to the body, or “blackening up,” was a performance in itself, as the White actor transformed into his Black alter ego (Fig-ure 2.2). In this regard, the White performers both invoked their power as White males and reinforced the “authenticity” of their blackface identity (Du-mont 1899:14–15). The physical transformation and performances were predicated on the actor’s per-ceived understanding of Blackness, and the ability of the White audience to recognize the performed ste-reotype. In this regard, blackface minstrel shows de-pended upon pre-existing social conventions of how a Black man or woman should look and act. This highlights the subjectivity of race, since in reality, no people of African descent look and act alike, but the White audiences, who often had limited direct contact with Black people, already held preconceived notions of racial stereotypes. These racist stereotypes had been cultivated not through daily interactions with Black people, but by White socialization into a racialist/racist worldview. These cognitive maps were the legacy of racial discourse and practice that had imposed a socially constructed hierarchy onto the physical world. These pre-existing social conventions are what blackface performers called upon in the an-tebellum period, as pro-slavery and anti-Black rhet-oric were omnipresent themes used to quell White working and middle class fears.

As with other practices of racism, these dehuman-izing blackface performances did not diminish in the postbellum period, but merely incorporated new acts to conform to changing social landscapes. No


longer were minstrel shows contained to the realm of slapstick comedy, as the introduction of characters like the “Dandy Negro” accommodated White per-ceptions in a society without slavery (Lott 1996). The “Dandy Negro” represented the newly emancipated African American, and he or she was frequently ill-dressed, wearing mismatching colors and ill-fitting clothes. The character could make audiences laugh with his/her slapstick routines, as well as make them cry with performances that explored their poverty and longing for life back in slavery.

Like the traditional enslaved plantation character, the “Dandy Negro” was meant to emphasize that Af-rican Americans were inferior to the White audience. Moreover, the often impoverished “Dandy Negro” conveyed to the audience that African Americans could not operate in a democratic, capitalist society without the guidance of White paternalism (Barton 2012:645). These perceptions of inferiority were im-portant for the audience, as blackface shows were popular among White (and Irish) working classes, as well as the burgeoning middle class. Historian David Roediger (1990:127) suggests that minstrelsy “made a contribution to a sense of popular whiteness among workers across lines of ethnicity, religion, and skill. It achieved a common symbolic language—a unity—that could not be realized by racist crowds, by politi-cal parties, or by labor unions.”

Because of their popularity, minstrel shows did more to construct and maintain racial ideologies than any form of popular culture. The variation of characters and performances through time and space illustrate the dynamic disposition of racial ideolo-gies, as the actors and audiences were able to con-form to changing social landscapes. This ability to both adhere to pre-existing racialist ideologies while also being able to accommodate evolving social net-works is predicated on the continuing relationships between social structures and practice. Blackface shows were a reflection of the racist attitudes, beliefs, and stereotypes held by Whites against Black people. In this regard, minstrel shows projected and recreat-ed a binary opposition between the Black and White races. The Black race was viewed as the antithesis to the White, so that if Blacks were portrayed and in-terpreted as inferior, ugly, buffoonish, and perverse “Others,” then Whites could distinguish themselves as superior, beautiful, and respectable.

Minstrel shows and a wide range of institution-al and everyday forms of race and racism reinforced this ideology of White racial superiority through the perceived inferiority of Black people. The result was a distinctive White worldview, or habitus, that dis-torted social networks and relationships through the lens of racial ideology. Building upon this discourse, ensuring the continued perceived superiority of the

Figure 2.2. Applying Blackface makeup (In Dumont 1899:14)


White race was dependent upon the socialization of White children into a pre-existing habitus, and while many blackface minstrel shows only admitted adults, some allowed children to attend (Bjelopera 2002:471-490). In order to socialize children into a worldview of race and racism, adults used an arsenal of immaterial and material forms of culture includ-ing, but not limited to, children’s toys.

Discussion

In this chapter, we briefly discussed the development of race as a social construction stemming from the in-quisitive disposition of the Enlightenment. As early scientists created taxonomies to describe the natural order of life, they applied the same practices in fabri-cating categories of humans based on phenotypic and cultural differences. These taxonomies of being creat-ed a hierarchy in which the newly minted White race embodied physical and cultural superiority. The effects of these social structures have forever changed the eco-nomic, political, and social histories of the world, as the belief that separate groups of humans could be “scientifically” and objectively delineated came to be seen as a commonsensical state of the natural world: that race has always existed and always will exist.

Perhaps the most salient example of the hier-archical disposition of race can be observed in the racialization of American slavery. Through the asso-ciation of phenotype with inferiority, and thus en-slavement, the binary opposition between Black and White was so internalized within the American hab-itus that even freeborn Black people were viewed as potential slaves. For the White working and middles classes, many of whom saw themselves as teetering on the edge of social and economic poverty, the ide-ology of race offered a lynchpin with which to hang their perpetual superiority.

While the social and economic capital of indi-viduals ebbed and flowed due to the nature of cap-

italism, the identity of White remained a constant through which people, no matter how impoverished, could still make a claim to perceived racial superiori-ty. These internalized perceptions and practices were challenged following the demise of slavery in the United States, as working and middle class Whites no longer had an easily observable system to define their superiority. Rather than seeing a decline in racist dis-course in the years after the Civil War, instead there was an expansion of the structures and practices of race. In a world in which non-Whites could acquire economic, political, and social capital, and thus could theoretically surpass Whites in social stand-ing, the ideology of race became a crutch to support White beliefs of superiority.

As observed in the examples from blackface min-strel shows, the dehumanization of non-Whites, specifically African Americans, provides a contextu-al framework to examine racialized toys as forms of popular culture that were contemporaneous, pro-duced, and consumed by similar audiences. Black-face minstrel shows, like racialized toys, were depen-dent upon pre-existing structures of race, particularly on shared social conventions of how non-Whites looked and acted. In claiming the authenticity of their performance and then portraying non-Whites as animalistic, buffoonish, and violent, White per-formers drew upon structural perceptions of racial stereotypes to recreate them through the observa-tions of the audience. This creation, modification, and reproduction helped to underscore the racial superiority of the White audience at the expense of non-White characters. As we discuss in subsequent chapters, these circular dispositions of creating, modifying, and reproducing structures and practices can be readily interpreted through material culture specifically designed for children. These racialized toys were used to socialize children into pre-existing structures of race, while also ensuring the perpetua-tion of the practices of everyday racism.

29

C H A P T E R 3

Children and Childhood


It is difficult to imagine a world without children. Our Western culture in the twenty-first century is seemingly centered on them, as evidenced by televi-sion networks, endless aisles of toys and games, en-tertainers, and other activities devoted solely to the youngest generation. Yet the concept of childhood as a distinct stage in the human lifecycle, at least as we understand it, is a relatively recent invention, and who and what was considered a child has varied con-siderably over the last several centuries. Childhood is a social category found across all human cultures. It is a period of prolonged dependence during which children become socialized and accepted into the so-ciety and culture into which they were born, and it is a social construct that varies across cultures, as do the roles, activities, and behaviors considered acceptable to it (Baxter 2005:1–3). These roles, activities, and behaviors are intimately linked to constructions of gender, itself centered on categories of biology, sex, and age, and gender is essential to understand child-hood and processes of socialization (Bugarin 2005; Cohen 2007; Joyce 2000; Kaland 2008; Park 2006; contributors to Pufall and Unsworth 2003).

The study of childhood in the past is a somewhat nascent field of archaeological research, one that finds its roots in the postprocessual program of the 1980s and 1990s, on the heels of the increasing em-

phasis on social constructions of gender, identity, the body, and other broad topics in the archaeological literature. Skeletal evidence based on rates of dental eruption and bone fusion is often given as irrefut-able evidence for the presence of children in past so-cieties, as well as other biophysical markers such as fingerprints and footprints (Kamp et al. 1999; Králík et al. 2008; Lewis 2007; Lewis and Goland 2007; Scott 1999; Soren 2003). Other material evidence for the presence of children in the past includes poor-ly-made or small-scale versions of ceramic vessels or stone tools (Ferguson 2008; Högberg 2008; Kamp 2001; Nelson 1977; Smith 2005), indirect evidence such as nursing bottles, writing slates, and school-houses (Beisaw 2003; Gibb and Beisaw 2000; Somer-ville 2015; Upton 1996a), gravestones and other tex-tual and iconographic sources (Clifford 1990; Gross-man 2007; Grossmann 2004; Joyce 2000; McKillop 1995) and, of course, toys (Barton and Somerville 2012; Baxter 2006a; Engmann 2007; Lampard 2009; Somerville 2014; Wilkie 2000; Yamin 2002).

Bioskeletal evidence is often considered the stron-gest proof for the presence of children in the past, but some caution is necessary regarding the biologi-cal basis of defining childhood. While these physical markers may provide evidence for the presence of young individuals, Dommasnes and Wrigglesworth


(2008) point out that prehistoric childhoods and life spans in general may have been of shorter du-ration than modern ones. They also suggest that equating biological categories of who and what is a child with cultural categories means overlooking that who and what was considered a child may not have been linked to an explicit biological category, and it is therefore possible to imagine societies in the past in which children did not exist as social categories, or where the boundaries between child and adult were defined by means other than biological age. Skeletal evidence presented without further consideration of social and cultural context only suggests the presence of a juvenile individual of the species Homo sapiens (see contributors to Ardren and Hutson 2006; Hal-crow and Tayles 2008; Perry 2006).

Because children are literally the future of all human societies, it is essential to understand how they learn to become members of that society, and the successful acquisition of certain attitudes, rules, and behaviors that the child must internalize and practice in order to interact properly in various social and temporal contexts (Baxter 2006a, 2006b, 2008). Socialization, put simply, “is the process that trans-forms a newborn child into a member of social soci-ety,” and is usually conceptualized as the way adults teach children, often at the expense of the role that children and their peers play in their own socializa-tion (Baxter 2005:1, 27; Van Rheenen 2010). Cultur-al knowledge is transmitted and acquired through multiple visual, aural, and tactile experiences. The immediate family is generally the primary agent of socialization for children, and adults in the family use strategies such as lecturing, rewards and punish-ments, and exposure/restriction to certain experienc-es to instill in children those values and behaviors considered culturally acceptable. Some of the means adults use to socialize children include symbolic references and material objects, meaning that adult behaviors and speech patterns create and recreate gender roles, which children constantly observe and internalize (or don’t, as may also be the case). Chil-dren are not passive containers shaped by adults, but are active social agents who selectively interpret and choose ideas and behaviors for themselves as well as

for others (Baxter 2005:32). That said, as children are rarely the primary producers or consumers of mate-rial culture, especially in Western industrial settings, adult influences on children are perhaps easier to see and understand in the archaeological record.

Toys and Play: Some Definitions

Before delving into a discussion of Victorian toys, it is necessary to define what a toy is and what play is. As a reference to a child’s plaything, that is, an object made for and used exclusively by children for use in play, the term “toy” as we know it today has a recent vintage, and for many people in antiquity, toys were as much an adult diversion as a child’s, and much play was probably done with other children and rel-atives rather than with material objects alone (Chu-dacoff 2007:6). In addition to entertainment, toys have a utilitarian function in that they serve as tools for the development of physical and mental skills. Toys also serve a social role by representing a me-dium for symbolic communication between adults and children and among children, and are used to instill within children cultural values which they will need when they enter the adult world (Wilkie 2000:105). On the whole, Victorian-era toys served precisely these functions. Not only did they empha-size differing gender roles of men and women, they also reflected the Victorian belief that childhood was a pivotal period in the development of the orderly, moral adult.

One means through which children are social-ized is through play. It only takes a moment’s reflec-tion to vividly recall one’s favorite childhood game, prized toy, or the innumerable adventures possible with only an empty cardboard box. Likewise, it is widely recognized that a kitten pouncing on a piece of string is playing, as are the young chimpanzees wrestling with each other on the forest floor. Play be-haviors are observed among many mammalian and avian species. From a behavioral perspective, play is an “active, oriented behavior whose structure is highly variable, which apparently lacks immediate purpose, and which is often accompanied by spe-cific signal patterns,” including “odors, and sounds

CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD 31

… the absence of threat and submission, reversal of dominance relationships, changes in chase-flee rela-tionships, self-handicapping and noticeable changes in individual motor acts and sequencing when com-pared to nonplay situations” (Bekoff 1975:228; Fagen 1974:850). Play behaviors are often repetitive, for ex-ample, a game of tag involves the constant running and evasion of children to avoid being caught by “It.”

Play also serves an important function in the so-cial development of young animals. Social contacts are created and maintained, and hierarchies and proper social behavior are learned within the play-group. These social forces are shaped through com-munication, which is perhaps play’s most important contribution to social functioning. Many of the be-haviors present in play are also present in adult ac-tivities. This implies the use and, more importantly, knowledge and understanding of certain signs that signal the consummation and cessation of those events. As an animal develops, it learns how certain sequences of signs work in specific situations and is able to predict how certain behavioral combinations will affect its place in the social unit. Play can thus be considered to serve as a testing ground for the dos and don’ts of acceptable adult behavior (see, howev-er, Van Rheenen 2010 for a critique of this behavioral model of play as socialization).

Exaggeration and transformation are additional features of play. Movements are distorted through either exceedingly rapid or slow or large and small movements, and reversal and reordering of hierar-chies are also observable in play behaviors. In other activities, there is a chain of behavioral events from intention to goal (Lancy 1980:472–473). Transfor-mation involves a shift between reality and fanta-sy. This is seen among nonhuman animals in play fighting in which a normally violent and aggressive act, that of combat, is changed into a playful one. Yet transformation is perhaps best illustrated in humans through the notion of “make-believe.” Anyone who was young once can easily recall his or her answer to the eternal question of what one wanted to be when one grew up. Pretending to be a doctor or an astro-naut or playing “House” are just a few of the infinite examples of transformation through play.

The magnitude of culture’s force in shaping hu-man behavior gives rise to richer and more varied forms of play, including sports and games, dances and theatrical performances, music and aesthetics, and wit and humor (Norbeck 1974:271). In addi-tion, play is a highly symbolic enterprise wherein animals learn about signs and signals and what be-haviors they constitute, yet those forms such as hu-mor and wit (wordplay and horrible puns, for exam-ple) require the use of a spoken and/or written lan-guage system. This variety of play with its complex linguistic register is firmly cultural in its expression, and is the singular domain of human play (Norbeck 1974:271).

As shaped by cultural and social relationships, human play is situated within a symbolic framework that has many different expressions. Symbolic play “detaches literal meanings from sensorimotor rou-tines to form abstract representations of such activ-ities” and takes a variety of forms (Monighan-Nou-rot et al. 1987:24). Constructive play involves the manipulation of objects to create something else. A wooden block used in the construction of a house is a symbol for any blocklike object and remains un-changed. The block does not become a different enti-ty, such as a telephone or an elephant, which implies that the child uses the object within the realm of physical reality (Monighan-Nourot et al. 1987:26). Dramatic play is a form of symbolic play in which an imaginary situation is substituted for the immedi-ate context. This form of play is complex, taking into account a wide range of imitative roles, fantasy play, and object play, and is highly social. In our previous examples, playing “House” or being an astronaut re-quires some knowledge not only of what activities constitute a working home and what an astronaut does, but also that the child knows that what they are pretending to be is just that: pretend.

Furthermore, a group of children pretending to be astronauts also understands that there are certain rules for being an astronaut that are different from, say, being a cook or a mommy. It is here that children begin to develop a sense of self as both an individ-ual and a part of a much larger social group. Gender roles are culturally ascribed and gradually assimilated


through kinds of clothes children are dressed in, toys available to play with, and child rearing practices, and all affect how children play (Macintyre 2001:58). Children as young as eighteen months are able to identify differences in how boys and girls look, act, and dress, and it becomes important to children to behave appropriately according to their perception of cultural rules regarding gender roles. Such disciplin-ing means playing with toys that are deemed accept-able for one’s particular sex—tools for boys and dolls for girls, for a rather mundane example. In this way, children develop a sense of “us” and “them” that also actively shapes their gender roles and how they be-have within those roles (Macintyre 2001:59).

The use of language is also inextricably tied to social organization and to play itself. As we have seen, play is often highly repetitive and may involve the reordering, breaking, and exaggeration of behav-ioral sequences. The acquisition of language is no dif-ferent, and human children learn language through a complex process of play (Athey 1988:91). As children age and learn to string words together into sentences, they very often become enamored with another form of language play, that of the rhyme. Nursery rhymes such as those from the venerable Mother Goose are a form of wordplay with highly stylized, repetitive rhythms through which children learn the syntactic rules of language in which they mimic more complex forms of word intonation and sentence structure. The repetition of sounds and words within this form of play “consolidates learning of the associations be-tween signifier and signified” (Athey 1988:93).

As children expand their vocabulary and strength-en the ability to create complex, meaningful sen-tences, they become increasingly sensitive to social markers and voice registers within discourse. This is particularly and perhaps exclusively observed in role-play and is a highly stereotyped version of the social structures in which children live. For example, chil-dren who role-play actors in positions of power, such as fathers, will frequently speak in lower voices than those who are playing mothers, and are frequently less polite to mothers than mothers are to fathers (Ervin-Tripp 1991:93). By imitating certain forms of speech within particular social contexts, children

become aware of a wider social world and the im-plications that speech and action have on their indi-vidual place within it. They learn that words are ef-fective and that there are certain words and registers that are appropriate for certain social circumstances. Through the use of language, children also gradually become able to decontextualize language from sim-ple stereotypes and link it to more abstract concepts. “Thinking about one’s own thinking,” analysis of the logic behind reasoning processes of personal deci-sions and morals and ethics, and the formation of empathy all function to integrate the child into soci-ety (Athey 1988:98).

The reality of social conventions practiced by children through play leads us to the third type of symbolic play: games with rules. This kind of play is characterized by the recognition and acceptance of prearranged rules and the ongoing adjustment of those rules within play, and the explicit coordination of the roles of self and others to conform within the system. To successfully participate in the game within the confines of predetermined rules requires strategic planning, which presupposes the ability for mental abstraction removed from nearby physical objects and contexts (Nourot et al. 1987:29–30). Successful cooperation requires both the ability to communi-cate and the ability to actively plan for unforeseen events. When placed within a framework of cultural values, play can become a powerful metaphor. Vehi-cles within the game such as the playing pieces stand-ing in for the actual human participants and even the players themselves can take on symbolic meaning. This concept of play-as-metaphor is visible in com-petitive games, especially in sports (Birrell 1981; Frey and Eitzen 1991; Leonard and McClure 2005).

A final component of socialization concerns the creation and use of space and spatial order, a cultur-ally specific idea that encompasses acceptable loca-tions for different behaviors such as eating, sleeping, working, and playing, but also how these behaviors are accomplished through different bodily practices (Baxter 2006a). Children learn the proper use of dif-ferent spaces through differential access and restric-tion by adults, often through the inclusion or pre-clusion of different objects such as toys. As children


learn about their surroundings, they encounter and make their own spaces with different contexts and meanings that enable and constrain the behaviors that give rise to and recreate them (Baxter 2006a:79).

A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place: A General View of Victorian Culture

The study of children and childhood is but one facet of the study of Victorian culture and society, and the nature of these conceptions requires some words about the whole, both to better explain the historical back-ground from which these conceptions emerged and to make sense of the material evidence at hand. Historians generally divide the Victorian period into three distinct periods: early Victorian (1837–1850), middle Victorian (1850–1880), and late Victorian (1880–1901) (Hunt-ley 1945; Madden 1963). We turn our analysis upon the middle and late Victorian periods.

Society is defined as a mix of institutions and the activities and practices and the people participating in them associated with those institutions, as well as the structural relationships between and among indi-viduals, collectivities, and institutions (Pred 1981:6). Society is reproduced, that is, made stable or altered, through the ongoing process of everyday perfor-mances of those practices that recreate institutions, the knowledge to repeat those performances, and al-ready existing social relationships. The reproduction of social structures is therefore the unforeseen prod-uct of individual action, sometimes unconscious but also subject to reflexive analysis (Dornan 2002).

As Howe (1977:27) points out, “American Victo-rianism must be understood primarily with reference to its values. The value system is presumably central to any culture, but especially so when it is as explic-it and propagated with such earnestness as among the Victorians.” While cultural values do not affect every social actor in the same way or with the same intensity, especially among the different classes and ethnicities that are the hallmarks of the Victorian period, and though these various values waxed and waned in importance throughout the period, Victo-rian America is generally defined by several specific cultural values, which were middle class in nature

and practice (Fitts 1999; Howe 1975:508–509; Prae-tzellis and Praetzellis 2001; Reckner and Brighton 1999; Yue 2009).

The Victorian period is synonymous with indus-trial capitalism and rapid industrialization, as well as a class-based socioeconomic system. The social rela-tions between and among its classic upper, bourgeois, and proletariat delineations are the source of much archaeological research, but Victorian Americans were less class conscious than their British counterparts, and the traditional patterns of aristocracy so often linked with British Victorian culture were weaker in the United States. Thus, American Victorian culture did not have to compete with tradition in the same way as in Britain, and there was somewhat more mo-bility between social classes in the United States.

As a pastiche of social and technological changes, the Industrial Revolution introduced faster modes of transport such as steam-powered railways, trans-atlantic shipping, and communication such as the telegraph; these brought Europeans into much closer contact with other cultures, particularly those of East Asia and Africa, than in previous decades, leading to an increased self-awareness of American/European culture. This was disseminated in no small part by the fledgling practice of anthropology and the subse-quent publication of ethnographic accounts of far-off peoples and cultures, much of it predicated on dubi-ous scientific evidence (Levine 2008; Lorimer 1988; Synnott and Howes 1992). The growing pastime of pleasure travel also enhanced this cultural self-con-sciousness, and deeply influenced middle class per-ceptions about the world and its peoples. This was especially true with regard to growing nationalistic attitudes, in part fueled by the swelling numbers of ethnic minority groups immigrating to American cit-ies (Howe 1975, 1977).

Interest in public education also grew, resulting in the establishment of public schools and kindergar-tens in both urban and rural areas (Hubbard 1881; Parkerson and Parkerson 1998; Schlereth 1991). This emphasis on education in turn fueled the production of a variety of reading materials such as books of ad-vice on hygiene, maintenance of the home, etiquette, and raising children (Calvert 1992; Child 1835;


Schlereth 1991). Through disciplinary mechanisms such as specific manners of reading, speaking, and the consumption of material objects, the ideology of individualism was created, internalized, and main-tained (Foucault 1995).

The Victorian era was a period of tension and con-tradiction, as society was uneasily caught between the technological wonders of a burgeoning Machine Age and the social changes and problems brought about by its emergence. This brings us to another hallmark of Victorian culture: the obsession with or-der—order within the universe, within society, and ultimately, within the individual. The desire for or-der and material and social symmetry affirmed the faith of the middle class in science, technology, and rational thought through the products of industrial society, and helped shape Victorian conceptions of the form and structure of everyday life (Fitts 1999:50; Williams 1985:90).

At the center of these ideologies rests the corner-stone of individualism, a socially constructed ide-ology that has developed in concert with epochal structures such as capitalism and neoliberalism (Le-one 2005; Matthews 2010). The individual was an important component of Victorian society because the individual embodied the central Victorian cultur-al values of hard work, morality, sexual moderation, self-improvement, conscientiousness, compulsivity, personal temperance, and competitiveness (Howe 1977; Reckner and Brighton 1999). These values ap-plied to men and women, while the piety, purity, and submissiveness that constituted the cult of domestic-ity was the purview of women (Praetzellis and Praet-zellis 2001). An orderly individual led to an ordered society, and ultimately, to an ordered world. Many of these virtues were of direct use, it should be pointed out, within the capitalist workplace, although cre-ating self-respect and earning the respect of others was a central element in everyday Victorian life (Fitts 1999; Howe 1975:514; Tuttleton 1995).

These values formed the basis of gentility, a set of defined social codes with moral undertones that pre-scribed proper behavior, and was reflected in a new materialism and the consumption of an increasing variety and amount of consumer goods, and these

goods were a physical manifestation of these values for the consumer (Fitts 1999; Barton 2014; Cross 2004). In short, the “intended product of Victorian didactism was a person who would no longer need reminding of his duties, who internalized a powerful sense of obligation and could be safely left to his own volitions,” while creating a strong degree of cultural homogeneity, increased social mobility, and middle class social networks in emerging commercial districts (Archer and Blau 1993:28; Howe 1977:24). These so-cial values defined relations with other people, and in order to be accepted as a member of a social class, one had to display the appropriate symbols and be-haviors such as speech and manners, which them-selves are often underlain with material symbols (Le-one 2005:154–155). Consequently, while monetary wealth affected the ability to acquire the appropriate symbols, the lack of appropriate symbolic behavior impeded membership within a social class (Fitts 1999). The social values described above were linked to a moral sensibility unique to the Victorian period, and were a response to the swift changes and social problems resulting from industrialization. Vices and flaws such as drunkenness and laziness were seen as the outcomes of personal failings on the part of the individual, but by internalizing the core values dis-cussed above, an individual could be redeemed. This moral urgency was also aligned with an increased emphasis on didactic persuasion instead of physical coercion as a means of social control, resulting in the growth of institutions such as the penitentiary, the Christian mission, and the public school (Howe 1977:20; Foucault 1995; Yue 2009).

In this light, toys are but one manifestation of Vic-torian didactism and an attempt to instill order within the individual at a young age. Underlying these socio-cultural dimensions was an implicit tension between rationality, exemplified by the wonders of industry, and emotionalism, the very real and perceivable prob-lems brought along by modernization. This tension in part accounts for the sentimentalization of childhood and the desire to protect children from vice, and hence a strong emphasis on the moral individual. With the overarching cultural structure of Victorian America briefly outlined, we are able to make better sense of


Victorian conceptions of children, childhood, and the material attempts to bring children into the fold of the society into which they were born.

The Foundations of Victorian Conceptions of Childhood and Children

Before entering a discussion of Victorian conceptions of childhood, it is important to once again note that childhood is a social construct whose definitions and dimensions vary throughout time, space, and geog-raphy. Tracing the origins of Western childhood is somewhat difficult, and oftentimes the issue comes down to whether one sides with Philippe Ariés (1962) and his examination of the development of Western notions of childhood, or instead with his critics (i.e. Heywood 2007). Cook (2004) suggests that what Ariés uncovered was not the origins of Western childhood itself, but rather the notion of childhood innocence upon which later views were built. The Victorian belief in childhood innocence built upon earlier eighteenth-century ideas of child-hood as a time of susceptibility to influence, both good and evil, and therefore, childhood was a sacred time in a person’s life, but was irreversibly corrupted by life experience (Cook 2004:27). See Figure 3.1.

Prior to the nineteenth century, Euro-American childhood was an often brutal period of religious in-doctrination punctuated with all manner of abuse at the hands of parents and caretakers. By the mid-eigh-teenth century, however, children were seen not as inherently evil beings descended from the biblical Adam, but instead as inherently good beings who became corrupted (Plumb 1975). The philosopher John Locke argued that children were malleable and did not have “innate capacities, [or] knowledge lodged in a universal human condition,” but instead were shaped by experience and education and even-tually became rational beings (Heywood 2007:23; James et al. 1998:16). Children, therefore, required proper shaping to keep them from evil.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the other hand, later argued that children could not be reasoned with be-cause they lacked the facility to understand reason in Locke’s (adult) sense of the world. Rather, Rousseau

believed that children were born “good” because they were made by God, and only through the influence of human society did they become corrupt adults (Plumb 1975). Furthermore, Rousseau suggested that children possessed an innate ability to learn from nature in a way that adults could not. When left to nature, children could only do good works, and would learn from things, not adults (Heywood 2007:24). Children were essentially reified, prized for being children, not for the adult they would lat-er become (Cook 2004:30; Hubbard 1881). Both of these views were enormously influential in shaping Victorian conceptions of childhood and parenting.

Figure 3.1. Illustration from a book of morals for children (In Glennie 1879)


Finally, childhood in the nineteenth century was seen as wondrously innocent, a complete contrast to the stress, boredom, and toil of the modern world (Cross 2004:27). For Victorian parents, this view of children as pure and innocent coexisted uneasily with the belief that, as humans, children were also suscepti-ble to evil and corruption from within themselves and from outside sources (Beisel 1990). One proponent of gentility and respectability lamented that:

“It is painful to contemplate how many bright, beautiful children come into this world of sunshine, to sink into habits that will shadow their after-years. In all the great cities, there are large numbers of women who have been unfor-tunate and have left all hope behind. There were periods in their childhood when, in their girl-ish dreams, the world seemed all beautiful and bright.. . . In the haunts of vice and in the pris-ons there are tens of thousands of men to-day that stood, at one time in their childhood, where the road divides . . . at the diverging point, a kind, judicious, and wise teacher might have directed them into the better way” (Hill 1967 [1873]:120).

Parenting, therefore, became a struggle to foster the good within the child while controlling his or her potential for evil (Hubbard 1881). This duality, com-bined with the strong imperative to raise children to become good, moral, and ultimately ordered citizens, defined the Victorian conception of childhood and what made childhood and children so interesting and special to middle- and upper-class Victorian so-ciety (Beisel 1990; Calvert 1992:104; Harrison 1891).

Victorian childhood was not a uniform con-struct but was a series of different stages. Newborns to young toddlers were considered asexual, but be-tween the ages of three and seven, children of both sexes were dressed in clothes that combined mascu-line and feminine elements. This practice blurred the sexual division between boy and girl, and asserted that gender differences were irrelevant to young chil-dren while simultaneously reinforcing the notion of childhood as a stage separate and distinct from adulthood, though this androgyny was acceptable so

long as boys and girls would fulfill their adult duties and their proper place in society (Calvert 1992).

Children’s toys were the reflection of tensions resulting from a number of parental fears. Children were considered to be good and pure at birth, but were susceptible to evil and vice that would lead them to the antithesis of the deeply held cultural values that Victorians so prized. Parental fear of the vices of the outside world sat uneasily next to the recognition of the child’s need to play, which itself could be a source of idle amusement (Chudacoff 2007:68). Toys were a means of shielding children from the perils of modern society by structuring play such that children would be too preoccupied to con-sider other, less wholesome alternatives (Hubbard 1881; Tsanoff 1897). While Victorian childhood was notoriously sentimentalized, parents were concerned with making sure children grew up to inhabit the “proper” social roles expected of men and women (Calvert 1992:110; Glennie 1879; Harrison 1891). Gender-specific toys were one means by which par-ents encouraged socially correct behavior for boys and girls, while the very presence of toys also sug-gests that parents could afford toys for their children, encouraged their children to play, and, important-ly, gave children the time and opportunity for play activities (Cross 1997; Parkerson 1995; Somerville 2014; Yamin 2002).

The analysis of Victorian children and their toys is therefore intimately connected with the study of Vic-torian gender roles. One fundamental social change resulting from industrialization was the introduction of the factory system, in which labor and the means of production were removed from the home and into a centralized location. The movement of production outside the home created a separation between the formerly connected home and workplace into the public and domestic spheres with their own prescrip-tions of gender roles, while also transforming from a unit of production into one of consumption. This also resulted in a renegotiation of social relations in the family, typically illustrated by the man going out to work while the woman stayed home with the chil-dren. Men were expected to provide for their families, while women were expected to shape the home into


“a temple of hearth watched over by the Household Gods,” a refuge from the noise and toil of the work-place (Ruskin 1865:161; French and Poska 2007; Strange 2012). This idealized arrangement was, of course, not always possible for many working-class families, and in fact, men’s contributions to the do-mestic sphere were much more complex than simply breadwinning, and working in the public sphere was itself an act of devotion (Strange 2012; Yamin 2002).

Nevertheless, Victorian views of children are therefore intimately linked to gender roles, and the two are nearly inseparable. The notion of the ideal (i.e., middle class) Victorian home could only exist with the ideal Victorian woman who, in contrast to the virtues of aggression and competitiveness in the productive masculine public sphere, embodied the virtues of gentleness and compassion in the nonpro-ductive, feminine domestic sphere, which included children (Cook 2004; E. Reed 1894; Strange 2012). Furthermore, as the keepers of the home, women were responsible for instilling in their children these values so that they might grow up to be good, moral, and productive citizens. The locus of cultural transmission in Victorian society was the home, and the Victorians acknowledged this with the “cult of domesticity,” in which the home was conceived as an orderly and se-cure place where children learned proper values be-fore being sent forth to know their place in a rapid-ly-changing world (French and Poska 2007).

The sentimentalization of childhood was also re-inforced by religious leaders, who were increasingly marginalized by capitalism and secular concerns. As women made up the majority of church congrega-tions, ministers who hoped to maintain their sway over increasingly secular congregations deempha-sized rational means of salvation in their sermons, and stressed salvation through emotional means such as family morality, civic engagement through participation in social aid societies, and, of course, churchgoing (Cook 2004:32; Glennie 1879; Tuttle-ton 1995).

These gender roles extended into the manufacture of acceptable toys and kinds of play for boys and girls. Boyhood was considered “unfettered and self-invest-ed,” a time to develop “desirable social traits such

as courage, leadership, teamwork, and competitive-ness,” while girlhood, on the other hand, was prepa-ration for motherhood and encouraged girls “to view themselves as socially conscious beings in constant negotiation with the expectations that surrounded them” (Calvert 1992:118; Dawson 2003:63–64; Har-rison 1891). Boys were allowed to be children, that is to say, get exercise, make noise, and engage in other stereotypical male activities, which for young girls were considered unladylike. Consequently, boys had access to a greater number and variety of toys than did girls (Calvert 1992:113).

During the nineteenth century, toy manufacture quickly became big business in the United States and Europe as technological improvements in sheet-metal stamping, ceramic molding, and paper printing facil-itated the mass production of tin and iron toys, dolls, board games, and books, and enabled parents from all social classes to purchase toys for their children in varying degrees of quality (Chudacoff 2007:74).The number of American toy manufacturers grew from 47 in 1850 to 173 in 1880, and included names such as Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers, and Louis Marx. Germany became the West’s leading manufacturers of toys, particularly dolls and carved wooden toys (Knight 1884; Dodd 1858). In 1890, Germany ex-ported 27.8 million Marks worth of toys, 40 million Marks five years later, and 53 million Marks by 1901, accounting for nearly 60% of the world toy market (Ganaway 2008:372).

The transformation of the home into a unit of consumption rather than production also helped shape Victorian childhood. Although artifacts associ-ated with children are often explained as attempts by parents to instill within their children certain values, ignoring the role children have in their own social-ization, up until the end of the nineteenth century, the parents, specifically the mother, were marketed to on behalf of the child, not the child itself. Therefore, many of these toys are necessarily reflective of adult views and values (Cook 2004; Jacobson 2008:4; Wilkie 2000). As managers of the home, women were responsible for the bulk of the purchasing deci-sions made by the household. This arrangement was not lost on marketers and department stores, who


lobbied extensively for the woman’s dollar through advertising and cheap consumer goods, children’s toys, books, and other items (Schlereth 1991).

Howe (1975:512–515) observes that not ev-eryone during this time was a Victorian, and those groups—Native Americans, European and Asian im-migrants, and African Americans—depicted in the toys discussed in this book had their own cultural practices that incorporated some Victorian ideals into their original cultural heritage, and even among Anglo-American Victorians, these ideals were ex-pressed differently along class and gender lines, and on an individual by individual basis. These appropri-ations were not always involuntary, as internalizing these Victorian values could result in some degree of social mobility and participation with the dominant White Victorian society, if only marginally.

Howe (1975, 1977) also suggests that while Vic-torian didactism is, at first appearances, two sides of the same coin, the two must be distinguished on their own terms. Victorian didacticism was predicat-ed upon a belief in cultural superiority, while Victo-rian racism was an unjustified belief in the biologi-cal superiority of Whites. The prevalence and flores-cence of racial and ethnic stereotypes in the Victo-rian period found their roots in deeper traditional ethnocentric habits mixed with an increasing sense of nationalism and scientific racism that emerged during the nineteenth century. Victorian didacticism assumed that “all people would benefit by acquir-ing Victorian culture, the stereotypes supposed that some groups of people were incapable of doing so, at least beyond an elementary stage. The conflict be-tween didacticism and racism, between assimilation and rejection of others, was one of the most tragic contradictions within American Victorian culture” (Howe 1975:528).

Conclusion

Toys and play aid in the acquisition of culture through the process of socialization. The acquisition of social skill and cultural values through toys and play is, at the core, a bodily process of the uncon-scious uptake of social practices through the exercise

of practice in our own bodies as well as by observing the practices of others (Atkinson 2010). This formu-lation is the habitus, an objective set of dispositions unconsciously possessed by an individual that deter-mines how that individual perceives the world and interacts with it and, importantly, both structures and recreates these relations (Bourdieu 1977, 1984, 1990; Dornan 2002; Ortner 1984).

Practice, in this sense, is anything people do; thus, the individual is the source of social structure rather than a cog within it, simultaneously enabled and constrained by social relations and notions of acceptable action, in order to distinguish themselves from other individuals and groups. Individuals act according to a sense of appropriate practice shared by the group, and the action is determined to be ap-propriate (or not) by other individuals in that group (Jones 2007). For archaeologists, the habitus pro-vides a way of understanding patterning of material evidence as the outcomes of the activities of everyday life that “create the traits ‘constantly recurring to-gether,’” the direct purview of archaeological research (Gifford-Gonzales 2007:12).

As socialization occurs most intensely during childhood, the habitus acquired in the family pro-scribes encounters with other races and classes, and frames subsequent experiences with them (Atkinson 2010; Orser 2004). The habitus should be conceived as being structured by partial connections between people and things, as social reproduction is: insep-arable from everyday labor and other practices, and inseparable from the reproduction of the material world of buildings, tools, and other man-made ob-jects (Orser 2004:132; Pred 1981:6).

The mobilization of practices in everyday life is one component of social identity, which refers to the ways in which people name and define themselves, how they are defined by others within their own cul-ture, and how they are identified by outsiders (Mes-kell 2002:279-280; Voss 2005). This involves the maintenance of boundaries as one process of social interaction, in the various ways that individuals and groups, “us vs. them,” are categorized through so-cially constructed relationships of difference that are often forged through conflict and repression (Jones


1997:28; Voss 2005). Membership in a social group must be recognized by those within and outside the group, and as a result, social identity is subject to constant negotiation and renegotiation. The main-tenance of identification, and by extension what it means to carry that identification, carries with it con-text-specific material traces or markers that distin-guish one group from another, often with ephemeral traces such as language and speech, but also contains more salient material artifacts such as architecture,

clothing, and food (Agha 2007; Stone 2003; Upton 1996b). Given that material culture is important in how people create, experience, change, and give meaning to their world, material culture, in turn, cre-ates people, and shapes their experiences and worlds. Social reproduction in the past can only be under-stood archaeologically when it is understood how it worked materially (Dobres and Robb 2005). This materiality will be the focus of our next chapter.

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C H A P T E R 4

Methodology and Data Analysis


Introduction

In previous chapters, we have discussed a wide range of theoretical perspectives as they pertain to racial-ized toys. In this chapter, we detail the methodology used in compiling our data. In the subsequent sec-tions, we provide a discussion of each racial grouping and its associated toys; through doing so, we are by no means trying to add any validity to the subjective classifications. Rather, the following is meant to pro-vide a sociohistorical framework through which to interpret the confluence of race and toys. The time period discussed in this work, 1865–1930, was an era embroiled in social problems; in addition to the economic, social, and political issues associated with the post-Civil War landscape, White fears also focused on the “problems” concerning the influx of perceived non-White “Others.” In the following sub-sections, we discuss the physical and cultural repre-sentations of the objects, as well as the White fears manifested in each non-White race. Through doing so, the reader not only garners an understanding of the material culture, but also the justifications for dehumanizing people who fell outside of the tight-ly-held notion of what it meant to be White in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Some of the toys discussed here can be traced to known manufacturers, while others, particularly those sold in department store catalogs like those of

Sears and Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, were pro-duced by a variety of manufacturers. In these cases, identifying maker’s marks might not be found on a particular toy. Many toys were produced over a long period of time, and sometimes manufacturers sold their production lines to other companies or had their designs copied and produced by other manu-facturers (O’Neill 1988). Accordingly, it can be diffi-cult to determine the origins of some toys when the manufacturer’s name for a toy differed from that in the mail order catalog. For example, “Old Uncle Tom” in the 1882 Automatic Toy Works catalog was listed in the Marshall Field Company catalog as “Old Colored Fiddler.” We have therefore grouped similar toys to-gether as much as possible, rather than counting each individually, unless a specific manufacturer could be found. For example, the “Darkey” still bank, depicting a sharecropper, was made and sold by at least three different companies under various names such as “Give Me a Penny,” “Picaninny,” and “Sharecropper,” while the “Alabama Coon Jigger” had at least four oth-er variants made by various manufacturers.

Notably, of the great number of racialized toys manufactured between 1870 and 1930, only me-chanical banks and clockwork toys appear to have such a variety of form in this manner. While me-chanical toys have the most variants and designs,


this does not mean that they were the most common toy, a distinction that instead applied to cheaper, eas-ier-to-produce still banks. Still banks are difficult to sort by location of manufacturer because so many of them, particularly those such as the “Darkey/Give Me a Penny/Picaninny/Sharecropper” banks were manu-factured by numerous companies in the United States and England. In these cases, primacy of manufacture has been given to the United States, as American-made banks tend to predate those from Europe.

The breakdown of this 172-toy sample is as fol-lows: 53 mechanical banks (30.8%), 18 still banks (10.5%), 63 clockwork (36.6%), nine mechanical push/pull toys (5.1%), six target shooting games (3.5%), six cap pistols (3.5%), 12 dolls/doll sets (7%), three costumes (1.7%), and two board games (1.2%). More detail is shown in Table 4.1.

Table 4.1. Toy Type

Type Frequency Percentage

Mechanical bank 53 30.8

Still bank 18 10.5

Clockwork 63 36.6

Pull/push 9 5.2

Target 6 3.5

Cap pistol 6 3.5

Doll/doll set 12 7

Costume 3 1.7

Board game 2 1.2

Total 172 100

Based on the number of styles and their variants, mechanical toys are the most common form of the racialized toy. The majority of racialized toys (n=123, 71.5%) in our sample were produced and distributed within the United States. Of these American-made toys, (n=116, 94.3%) most were from the northeast-ern United States, primarily Connecticut, Massachu-setts, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. Table 4.2 provides greater detail.

As detailed in Table 4.3, toys depicting African Americans comprise the vast majority of racialized toys (n=142, 82.6%), followed by racialized Chinese (n=14, 8.1%), Native Americans (n=10, 5.8%), the Japanese (n=4, 2.3%) and the Irish (n=2, 1.2%). These toys range in date from 1873 to the 1950s, but were manufactured in the greatest variety during the late nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries. Further data is provided in Table 4.4.

METHODOLOGY AND DATA ANALYSIS 43

Mechanical Still Clock- Mechanical Cap Doll/ Board Location bank bank work pull/push Target pistol doll set Costume game Total %

United States/ Canada

Canada (distributors) * * * * * * * 1 * 1 0.8

California * * 3 * * * * * * 3 2.4

Connecticut 20 * 11 2 1 4 7 * * 45 36.6

Illinois * 1 13 2 3 * * 2 2 23 18.7

Massachusetts * * 2 2 1 * * * * 5 4.1

New Jersey * * 2 * * * * * * 2 1.6

New York 5 * 20 * * 1 3 * * 29 23.6

Ohio * 4 * * * * * * * 4 3.3

Pennsylvania 7 * * 1 * * * * * 8 6.5

Texas (patent holder) 1 * * * * * * * * 1 0.8

Unknown/ various * 2 * * * * * * * 2 1.6

Subtotal 33 7 51 7 5 5 10 3 2 123 71.5

Asia

Japan 0 * 1 * * * * * * 1 100

Subtotal 0 * 1 * * * * * * 1 0.6

Europe

Austria 1 * * * * * * * * 1 2.5

England 10 5 * * * * * * * 15 37.5

France 1 * 1 1 * * * * * 3 7.5

Germany 4 4 10 1 * * 1 * * 20 50

Portugal 0 * * * 1 * * * * 1 2.5

Subtotal 16 9 11 2 1 0 1 0 0 40 23.3

Unknown

Unknown manufacturer 4 2 * * * 1 1 * * 8 100

Subtotal 4 2 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 8 4.7

Total 53 18 63 9 6 6 12 3 2 172

Table 4.2. Locations of Toy Manufacture


Table 4.4. Periods of Toy Manufacture and Appearance

Toy Type Date Range Mean Date Median Date Mode Date

Mechanical bank 1879–1948 1916 1912 1882–1888

Still bank 1880s–1946 1911 1909 1905

Clockwork 1873–1950s 1913 1914 1923–1925

Mechanical pull/push 1879–1921 1893 1887 1880–1921

Target 1890–1939 1923 1929 1929

Cap pistol 1879–1887 1882 1881 1879, 1881

Doll/doll set ca. 1873–1970s 1921 1921 1905

Costume 1900–1921 1914 1921 1921

Board game 1889–1893 1891 1891 1890–1893

Table 4.3. Frequency of Depiction by Racialized Group

African- Native American Chinese Japanese Irish American Total

Mechanical bank 47 (88.7%) 2 (3.8%) 2 (3.8%) 1(1.9%) 1(1.9%) 53 (100.1%)

Still bank 13 (72.2%) 1 (5.6%) 0 0 4 (22.2%) 18 (100%)

Clockwork toy 56 (88.9%) 5 (7.9%) 1 (1.6%) 1 (1.6%) 0 63 (100%)

Doll/doll set 9 (75%) 2 (17%) 1 (8.3%) 0 0 12 (100%)

Mechanical pull/push 8 (89%) 1 (11%) 0 0 0 9 (100%)

Cap pistol 2 (33.3%) 3 (50%) 0 0 1 (16.7%) 6 (100%)

Board game 0 0 0 0 2 (100%) 2 (100%)

Costume/ mask 3 (100%) 0 0 0 0 3 (100%)

Target 4 (66.7%) 0 0 0 2 (33.3%) 6 (100%)

Total 142 14 4 2 10 172 (100%)

Percentage of Toys by Race 82.6% 8.1% 2.3% 1.2% 5.8% 100%


Toys depicting African Americans were the first racialized toys produced, with the earliest toy in our sample being the “topsy-turvy” doll around 1850. They were also the latest toys produced, with the topsy-turvy doll mass produced well into the 1950s. Variants of the “Jolly Nigger” mechanical bank were manufactured until at least 1948. Objects de-picting the Chinese make their appearance around 1880, coinciding with anti-Chinese sentiment in the western United States. Racialized Japanese objects are uncommon, and those that exist probably co-incide with the opening of trade with Japan as well as increasing immigration by Japanese people to the United States. Japanese toys are much less harsh in their representations than those of the Chinese, with the Japanese depicted as a mysterious and magical people. The “Mikado” mechanical bank portrayed a Japanese man who moved a deposited coin from one hand to another, accompanied by the tinkling of a bell. Likewise, the “Doke’s Tea Party” was less offensive, being a doll set of miniature wicker chairs, table, and tea set.

Irish toys are uncommon and poorly represent-ed in the sample, apart from the well-known “Pad-dy and the Pig” mechanical bank from 1882 and a “Paddy and the Pig” mechanical pull toy that was manufactured from 1930 to 1935. This is somewhat surprising given the anti-Irish sentiment in the Unit-ed States in the nineteenth century (Brighton 2001, 2008). Finally, Native American toys are almost ex-clusively represented by still banks and target games, depicting stereotyped Plains Indians with feathered headdresses, hatchets, and teepees. These first appear near the last decade of the nineteenth century, and see a heyday on a variety of still banks in the early twentieth century, reflecting nostalgia for a mythical frontier (Yellow Bird 2004).

One group noticeably lacking from the sample are Jewish caricatures. This is surprising given that anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination were present in literature and other media during this time, especially in Continental Europe (Endel-man 1991; Newton 2008). This may be due to the fact that there was no clear agreement among con-temporary social commentators and the nascent field

of anthropology about what Jews actually looked like. Early anthropologists argued that Jews were a biological race, and certain traits, such as the sharp gaze of the “Jews’ eye” and the length and shape of the nose were given as evidence; some accounts de-picted Jews with slight and short bodies while others illustrated powerful builds. Most observers agreed that the “Jews’ most distinctive trait was their adaptability, which, in the minds of some, masked deep and abid-ing racial characteristics . . . The only characteristic that definitively signaled a Jew was mutability” (D. Cohen 2002:469–474). In addition, there was the hope that Jews could convert to Christianity, and the conver-sionist rhetoric of some commentators distinguished “between an authentic Judaism and the mere ‘Hebrew’ of popular prejudice, while reminding Christians that their duty to the Jews lies in the kind[ness] of con-version rather than brutal dislike . . . Conversionist rhetoric was thus philosemitic instead of anti-Semit-ic,” and shunned social and legal resentment of them (Burstein 2003:335–336).

Mechanical and Still Banks

Mechanical banks were very popular in Victorian America, and were “a peculiarly American phenome-non” (Lederer 1940). The mechanical bank was first patented in 1867, though a working version, a wood-en model with a “disappearing coin action,” was not produced for the consumer toy market until 1869 (Griffith 1967; Horde 1867; Morphy 2007). The toy bank was a didactic object used to teach children the virtue of thrift, and was popular through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Over 600 different varieties with 280 mechanical variants were produced between 1875 and 1910, with a minimum of 10,000 individual toys produced from a single mold (Emerine 1941; Lederer 1940).

The growth of the toy industry in the United States and Europe resulted in the institutionalizing of toy making, that is to say, what was and what was not a toy became sharply defined as homemade toys were replaced with factory-made goods, although children were very inventive in making their own toys. The modern American toy making industry began in


Vermont at the beginning of the nineteenth centu-ry with the manufacture of wooden carts, sleds, and wagons for children, although the mass production of tin toys in the United States had begun in the eigh-teenth century. By 1820, Connecticut was the center of tin and iron toy production, although factories in New York and Philadelphia opened soon after (Bar-low 1998; Knight 1884:2605).

The outward appearance of a bank was rarely patented. Almost always, the mechanism itself or a technical improvement to the actual mechanism of the bank was patented. Several patents submitted in the form of a racist toy suggest other ways in which the outward appearance of the mechanism might be presented. For example, in Alfred C. Rex’s 1884 pat-ent application for the “Baby Mine” bank, depicting a seated African American woman spoon-feeding a grotesque caricature of a small black child, Rex noted that “If desired, the figures may be animals in place of human beings, the essential feature being the feed-ing [action]” (Rex 1884). James Bowen’s 1882 patent for his “Two Frog” bank, in which a reclining frog threw a coin backwards into a larger frog’s mouth, shared its mechanism with “Paddy and the Pig,” also introduced in 1882 (Bowen 1882). Likewise, the “Jolly Nigger” shared the same mechanism with “Humpty Dumpty,” a somewhat disturbing-looking circus clown (Griffith 1975).

Still banks, those that do not have any kind of internal mechanism to produce movement, were manufactured by a number of hardware companies. John Harper and Company, based in Willenhall, Staffordshire, was a prominent English manufacturer of iron toys, but began as a producer of decorative iron goods in the 1800s (O’Neill 1988:21). The A.C. Williams Company of Chagrin Falls, Ohio began as a maker of stoves, irons, and pruning tools in 1844 be-fore moving to Ravenna, Ohio after 1892. The com-pany became the world’s largest manufacturer of still banks, patenting and producing “Two-Faced Black Boy” and “Aunt Jemima” banks in 1901 and 1906, respectively, though still banks did not appear in the company’s catalogs until 1904 (O’Neill 1988:24). The company produced still banks and iron toys un-til World War II, and other toys until 1977.

The mechanical bank is a product of Victorian in-dustrialism, commonly made of cast iron, which was a relatively new technology and inexpensive to man-ufacture in large quantities, although other materials such as wood, papier maché, tin, and lead were also used (Morphy 2002). The vast majority of mechani-cal banks were patented and produced by just three companies: the Shepard Hardware Company of Buf-falo, New York, J. & E. Stevens Company of Crom-well, Connecticut, and the Kyser and Rex Company of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Toy manufacture was a comparatively late enterprise for these companies, which were primarily engaged in heavy industrial manufacturing and tool making (Once a Month Ad-vertiser 1866). The Shepard Hardware Company, for example, did not begin making banks until 1882; prior to this, they were manufacturers of heavy in-dustrial machinery and steam engines. The company sold its bank line to other manufacturers, notably J. & E. Stevens, in 1892, and that company continued to produce Shepard banks for several more years, includ-ing the popular “Jolly Nigger” bank (Norman 1982).

The J. & E. Stevens Company was the most pro-ductive of these manufacturers, responsible for ap-proximately one-third of all known mechanical bank designs (Griffith 1963a). Founded in 1843, the com-pany began as a manufacturer of hardware until shift-ing to toy bank manufacture in 1870, and by 1890, the company had ceased manufacture of hardware al-together and produced only toys, ceasing mechanical bank production in 1928 and closing during World War II due to iron shortages, although it reopened af-ter the war and produced mostly cap pistols until the 1950s (O’Neill 1988:23). However, the most prolific inventor of mechanical banks was Charles Bailey, a toymaker who worked at J. & E. Stevens for nearly 25 years (Griffith 1963b; O’Neill 1988). Bailey designed or patented at least 29 different banks—10 percent of all known examples—which included “Darkey Fish-erman,” “Chinaman in Boat,” “Dentist,” “Darky and Watermelon,” and “Bad Accident.”

Kyser and Rex was founded in 1879 in Frankfort, Pennsylvania, producing iron castings, hardware, safes, and other goods. After Kyser left the firm in 1884, the company patented its bank designs but


licensed them to other manufacturers before clos-ing in 1898 (O’Neill 1988:23). In the earliest years of their manufacture, these toys were advertised in trade publications, popular magazines, circulars, and catalogs distributed by merchants. The Shep-ard Hardware Company distributed full-color trade cards to promote their banks, a practice that other manufacturers later copied (Norman 1982). English banks originated from Burnley in the northwest of England, where cast iron manufacturing was located, as well as Birmingham, and Walsall and Willenhall in the West Midlands, an area known for its metal working (Hurst 2003). German-made toys originat-ed from Nuremberg, a center of industrial manufac-turing, and tin and wooden toy making flourished in Bavaria in the southeast and Brandenberg in eastern Germany (McIllhone 2013). Metal toys from France were manufactured in the Archives, Belleville, Mara-is, and Temple districts of Paris (The American Statio-ner 1889:428–433).

Automatons and Clockwork Toys

Clockwork toys, an umbrella term for toys using gearing and spring mechanisms to produce some form of movement or action without any further input from the child, were popular during the nine-teenth century (George 1869; Lukin 1882). Mechan-ical figures, including banks and clockwork toys, are considered a special class of automaton—machines made in the “attempt to simulate life by mechanical means” (Bedini 1964:24; George 1869). Automa-tons were produced throughout the ancient world in Greece, Rome, Egypt, China, and the Middle East, al-though these were not toys in the modern sense (Asi-mov 1984; Bedini 1964; Cook 1995; de Solla Price 1964). Automatons from antiquity were powered by sand, water, and quicksilver to displace an object’s center of gravity, which in turn resulted in movement under its own power (Berryman 2003). Perhaps the most famous automatons of the ancient world were made by Heron in the third century B.C., who in-vented moving toy ships, a primitive steam engine, and other mechanical beings to amaze audiences (Cook 1995; White 1971). Automatons powered by

water decorated gardens of the wealthy, mechanical figures adorned clock towers in several European cit-ies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and traveling mechanical chess players enthralled and mystified audiences in Europe and antebellum America (Bedini 1964; Cook 1995; Sussman 1999; White 1971). During this time, French clockmakers replaced drive weights with coiled springs, enabling new machines to be produced at smaller scales, such as children’s toys (Barlow 1998). Clockwork toys and other automatons had a long history in Europe as cu-riosities for the wealthy, but the first American-made clockwork toy was invented in 1856 by George Brown (Shrock 2004:127).

Toys with clockwork mechanisms were first intro-duced in 1862 in France, consisting of carts with driv-ers whose limbs moved when the cart was moved, and other toys were produced in Germany and En-gland soon after (White 1971). Many clockwork toys were produced in American factories by French and German workers, who brought their knowledge of mechanical toys with them to the United States. While tin toys were common prior to and during the nineteenth century, iron toys became popular in the post-Civil War era as iron foundries shifted from wartime production to the production of hardware and household goods, and took prominent places in the catalogs of mail order houses because they were more durable than tin toys and were rarely returned as defective (Barlow 1998). Clockwork toys of all kinds were extremely popular, and those depicting racialized figures were no exception. For example, 1921’s “Alabama Coon Jigger,” depicting a dancing African American man, sold 8 million units (Cross 1997:99), and was a descendant of earlier mechani-cal dancers such as “Broward’s Mechanical Dancer,” seen later in this book.

European-made toys are primarily from England, although smaller numbers of French and German examples are also present, as well as a single Span-ish example (a “Jolly Nigger” copy). Clockwork toys were produced by a comparatively small number of manufacturers, such as the Ives Corporation and Je-rome B. Secor Manufacturing Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the Ferdinand Strauss Corporation


of New York City. Many of these companies were also involved in industrial manufacturing. The Sec-or Manufacturing Company moved to Bridgeport in 1870 as the Secor Machine Company, and was incor-porated under its new name in 1876. The company produced dies and screw-making machines, and was well known for its sewing machines (American Ma-chinist 1883; Orcutt 1886:745).

The Ives Corporation, also known as Ives, Blakeslee and Company, was established in 1868 in Bridgeport as a manufacturer of mechanical toys and other novelties. The Bridgeport factory em-ployed 40 people, with two satellite operations in New York City and one in Philadelphia employing many more (Orcutt 1886:745). The company pro-duced toys until 1930, and is considered by collec-tors to be the best known of all American toymakers of the period (O’Neill 1988:22). Weeden Manufac-turing of New Bedford, Massachusetts entered the toy market relatively late, prior to which it produced parts for oil lamps and tinplate household goods (Campbell 2014). The company became famed for its steam-powered toys, and advertised directly to children in the Youth’s Companion, a children’s mag-azine. The magazine approached Weeden and asked for designs for an inexpensive toy that could be ad-vertised to increase subscriptions. Weeden created a small steam engine to be sold for $1, and the maga-zine placed an order for 10,000 units (Barlow 1998; Campbell 2014; Shrock 2004:127). Louis Marx and Company was founded in 1919 in New York City by Louis Marx, who previously had worked for the Fer-dinand Strauss Corporation. H. L. Judd Manufactur-ing of Wallingford, Connecticut, founded in 1830 as a manufacturer of hardware for builders, stationers, and druggists, began producing mechanical banks and other toys around 1882 (Hill 1918).

Despite their large numbers and variety, mechan-ical toys of all kinds were expensive (Cross 1997; Ganaway 2007). Most mechanical banks cost $0.45 to $1.15 wholesale, excluding postage, and averaged approximately 85 cents and up, although retail pric-es could range from $2.00 to $5.00, prices that were considered rather steep for the times (empirical ob-servations; Antiques Journal 1961; RSL Auctions 2014).

The fairly high cost made them available only to rela-tively affluent customers; that is to say, those with dis-posable income. To compare, between October 1901 and September 1904, the foundry workers at the J. & E. Stevens factory earned, on average, $1.92 a day for piecework based upon the weight of usable parts each worker produced each month (J. & E. Stevens Com-pany 1901–1904). On the other hand, between Janu-ary 1874 and August 1875, the eight women workers at the J. & E. Stevens factory who painted the banks earned 97 cents a day, working two to ten hours per day (J. & E. Stevens Company 1874–1875).

As might be expected, clockwork toys were even more expensive than banks, costing $4.25 to $7.50 for the “Freedman’s Mechanical Savings Bank,” a hybrid mechanical/clockwork bank (RSL Auctions 2014:65), although most examples ranged from $0.48 to about $2.50 per item wholesale. Toys made of paper or wood, such as the “Begro” paper mask (1921) and “Game of New Migration” (1890–93), cost approxi-mately 67 cents and 45 cents, respectively, wholesale.

“Lifelike and Comical”: Toys and Victorian Representations of the “Other” Body

In industrial capitalism, manufacturers are quick to capitalize on movements within popular culture, de-fined here as the beliefs and practices shared widely among a particular population, including the materi-al objects through which they are organized and man-ifest themselves (Grindstaff 2008:207–208). Material objects of any kind are always deeply embedded in social practice, and as mass-manufactured objects, toys are often highly topical; they can be examined as extensions of popular culture in material form (Co-chran and Beaudry 2006; Galloway 2006:44; Grind-staff 2008). In this regard, toys are a sort of cultural barometer, and it is not coincidental that racial toys were popular during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when white Victorian cul-ture was on the defensive against the intrusion of the “Exotic Other” onto the American landscape. Racist playthings, and indeed other utilitarian objects, were made to elicit feelings of power and superiority at abusing the nonwhite “Other,” depicted as brutish,


uncivilized, foolish, and insignificant (Cross 1997; Dubin 1987). Racial toys also serve as temporal markers, reflecting trends in popular attitudes to-ward immigrants and nonwhites and undercurrents of larger social and demographic movements.

In order to project racialized images onto toys and mechanical banks, the manufacturer must be able to reproduce a stereotyped representation of the group being depicted that the audience can easily identi-fy. In doing so, toy manufacturers recreated popular phenotypic stereotypes as to how an Irishman, Chi-naman, African American, or Native American was known to look and act. We can therefore examine the mechanical body and the stereotypes they depict. Clearly, mechanical representations differ from liv-ing beings in important ways. Human subjects move and talk, often at the same time. Bodily movements, gestures, dances, comportment, and other move-ments are therefore infused with social and cultural significance (Kendon 1997; Matoesian 2012; Reed 1998; Simpson 2010; Teger 2007).

Butler (1988) observes that the body must be understood as a “set of possibilities” involved in an ongoing process of embodiment and appropriation. This process involves acts that simultaneously con-stitute and create meaning in their performance in everyday social situations. Social identity, including crosscutting constructs of race, gender, and class, is constructed through corporeal acts (Farnell 1999). As a “set of possibilities,” then, perceptions of the body and expressions and material representations of it bear social meanings:

“One is not simply a body, but, in some very key sense, one does one’s body and, indeed, one does one’s body differently from one’s contem-poraries and from one’s embodied predecessors and successors as well . . . [i]n other words, the body is a historical situation . . . and is a manner of doing, dramatizing, and reproducing a histor-ical situation” (Butler 1988:520-521; Matoesian 2012; Foucault 1980; Young 1980).

The body and its movements can therefore be a conduit for incorporation into or resistance to ex-isting social structures shaped by the contestation

of power, and can create a sense of community and collective identity through discursive action (Kendon 1997; Reed 1998). Bodily movements can only be understood by reference to the sociocultural context in which they occur. When reduced to descriptions of basic kinesiology and physical locomotion, bodily movements and their outcomes in social intercourse lose their signifying status; the body itself is essen-tiality stripped of its ability to embody meaningful action and knowledge (Farnell 1999:359–360). In-terpreting bodily movements and their meanings cannot be understood solely by focusing on physical movements involving muscle, bone, and kinesiology, but must be seen as a social reality in which these movements and actions are framed by the social contexts in which they occur and shape and produce their meaning (Farnell 1999:348).

Children create relationships with spaces and the meanings of spaces through adult interventions and material objects such as toys. As we have noted, the use and meaning of space is influenced by cultural ideas toward different spaces. The interpretation of movement requires an understanding of space, and the creation of it by bodily movement, because space provides orientation of and meaning for bodily move-ment, and the conceptualizing of it as intentional ac-tion (Reed 1998:523). It is important to briefly distin-guish here between different kinds of space. Objective space is “the uniform space of geometry and science in which all positions are external to one another and in-terchangeable” (Young 1980:149; Lefebvre 1991:11). This space is that of settings—the physical backdrops that include furniture and decorations that facilitate performances (Goffman 1959:20). Lived space, on the other hand, is created from bodily movement and the social relations of everyday life that produce, shape, and constitute those movements. It is the “space of social practice . . . that corresponds to a specific use of that space” and that gives those movements social meaning (Lefebvre 1991:12–16; Lefebvre and Levich 1987; Young 1980).

Therefore, as particular modalities of bodily comportment exist based on race, gender, and class, there are also particular modalities of lived space that become part of everyday disposition and practice


through socialization (Baxter 2006a:79; Bourdieu 1977; Goffman 1959; Lefebvre and Levich 1987; Young 1980). Young’s (1980) discussion of feminine body comportment serves as both a point of origin and a point of departure in examinations of the hu-man and mechanical body. Because all humans exist in a particular historical, social, and cultural situa-tion, and while these do not affect all actors in the same way (i.e., some individuals of a group have dif-ferent experiences), a unity still underlies those ex-periences, specific to the particular social structures during a particular historical epoch within which they occur, and can be described by reference to body motility. There is no mystical quality or essence to being female that all women possess, as Young ar-gues in her examples, but what it is to be female is defined by structural conditions in a particular so-ciety in a particular historical epoch as it is actually lived by women themselves (Young 1980).

The performance of these toys in middle class households occurred in settings that tended to stay put, and is one reason that so few of these toys end up in the archaeological record (Baxter 2006a). Racist toys social-ize children to objective space (i.e., outside the home), as well as the order within the home by creating a cer-tain kind of space (i.e., lived space). Thus, the analysis of the stereotypic movements automatons are designed to produce can tell us something about Victorian con-ceptions of the body and the bodily “Other.” While mechanical representations of the body obviously lack the agency of human social actors, their movements can still be examined in similar ways. People encounter each other through signs that connect individuals and groups to one another, although these signs may also involve intermediaries that relay information through a chain of communicative events (Agha 2007). These encounters with signs take place in a present and often solidify themselves as items of material expression that are identified with the performer, such as clothing, sex, age, race, speech, gestures, and facial expressions. They may also persist across time and space, shaping social relations through time and space (Agha 2007; Goffman 1959; Upton 1996b).

In all areas of social interaction, social actors rely on routinized practices that shape and are shaped by

the context in which they occur. These practices and routines, as well as their consequences, are not self-ev-ident in and of themselves, but gain meaning in their deployment between and among creative, knowledge-able social agents (C. Williams 2006:459; Simpson 2010). How people interact with the material world also depends on the meanings given to objects, those who use them, and how they are used. The meaning and significance of these social relations between peo-ple and things are derived by the interactions between social actors and things (C. Williams 2006). This idea of social interaction between people and things (here, children and adults and the toys given to children) is embodied by performances, which must be linked to the larger macrocosm of cultural values and so-cial structures within a specific historical context that shapes and is shaped by them (Bernstein 2009; Bour-dieu 1977; S. Williams 1986:359).

The socialization of a performance is also a criti-cal theme. A performance of any kind is molded and modified to fit into the understanding and expecta-tions of the society into which it is presented. For ex-ample, the “ignorant, shiftless Negro,” long a self-im-age constructed by African Americans in the South as a means of deference to white observers, is also a common theme among toys (Goffman 1959:38). The social structures that enable and constrain social relations do not exist independently of these rela-tionships, but are implicated in their very enactment during day-to-day encounters between and among people and things (Giddens 1984:69). In that re-gard, these toys, by the nature of their construction, have a naturalness of performance, depicting stereo-types that all blacks, Indians, and Irish look and act a certain way, concealing the structural conditions of Victorian society that create, shape, and recreate the conditions that give rise to them.

As subject, the human body does not simply exist in space, but is the origin of and subject that consti-tutes spatial relations because it is a lived experience, and as the body—as lived and “being in the world”—is not an object, it does not simply exist in space but acts upon it to create it (Lefebvre 1991; Pred 1981). However, the toy mechanical body straddles this line between object and subject. The toy is not lived as


subject, but it constitutes and creates spatial rela-tions through its socializing effects as it moves with-in objective space, an automaton that is both subject (movement of its own accord whose movements cre-ate meaning) and object that exists “in space as water is in the glass” (Young 1980:150).

These automatons required a child to make them function, and by entering into this interaction, a se-quence of events was quite literally set in motion creating a more overt sort of compliance than if the toy functioned of its own accord. As discussed previ-ously, toys were not the only objects that depicted ra-cialized stereotypes of the “Other”; racialized figures are found on pepper shakers, cookie jars, statues, and myriad other media and household goods. Mechani-cal toys, however, (re)construct these stereotypes dif-ferently than utilitarian objects. Dubin (1987:130) suggests that when racialized figures such as cookie jars and pepper shakers are taken in hand to perform their respective service, this creates a situation of ac-tivity by the user and passivity or compliance by the racialized figure. This activity masks racialized social structures because the gesture of shaking pepper or covering cookies appears insignificant. The act of turning a key and winding a clockwork mechanism, however, comprises a more overt interaction between the child and the machine, and by extension, the im-balanced power structure between whites and blacks is reinforced.

Bodies are not simply the physical fleshiness in which we live, but mean different things to different peoples at different times. The body is symbolic of the self and is the self; it is constitutive of society and the means by which society is produced and repro-duced (Desjarlais and Throop 2011; Synott and Howes 1992:148). Given the body’s capacity and motion to give structure to its surroundings and create mean-ingful interactions with other social actors, as well as the repeated references to the lifelike movements of mechanical toys in advertising, indeed the very em-bodiment of the desire to “simulate life by mechani-cal means,” suggests that these automatons and their bodily movements can be examined in similar ways to living social actors, albeit ones with a very limited rep-ertoire of movements (Bernstein 2009, 2011; Cochran

and Beaudry 2006; Galloway 2006; Young 1980:146).Ideas regarding the body— what it is and what

it means; the moral value of its parts and represen-tations; its physical and social worth—vary between and among cultures and through time, and therefore encapsulate different and oftentimes competing defi-nitions (Schildkrout 2004; Synnott 1992:80). Senso-ry experience is also important to understanding the relationship between materials an object is made of and the experience of materiality, another social con-struct based on materials shaped by the performance of social interactions. The senses themselves are also socially constructed, and primacy may be given to some senses over others. For example, the visual is paramount in Western culture (Joyce 2005:537; Mac-Gregor 1999). Synnott and Howes (1992:163–164) point out that, in addition to understanding the political and economic organizations of different cultures, we must recognize how different cultures construct and perceive the body. The implications extend beyond health, medicine, and psychological concerns, and are implicated in the very constitution of social relationships.

This has profound implications for the study of Victorian mechanical figures and other toys depicting racialized groups and the performances that create them. Material culture gives expression to sensory or-ders, and while it may not be possible to experience it as originally intended, largely due to differences between Victorian culture and modern culture over the passage of time, it is still possible to consider the features of an object, the materials it is made of, how it may have been used and by whom, and the possible sensory perceptions that may have been in-tended in their past social context (Hurcombe 2007). These structural properties of Victorian racism are also functions of class, because class is not a mate-rial thing (though it has material symbols) but is, in fact, a pattern of appropriate conduct (Goffman 1959:75).

In everyday social interaction, social actors may practice repression management, in which no un-meant gestures are made in order to keep one’s per-formance in expectations with social class and avoid dissonance. This means that unstructured play, such


as with dolls or paper masks, cannot create new scenes. Though social action is often studied as an engagement in the present, the consequences those interactions have on future interactions must also be considered. Masks project a perception of self, and performers move back and forth between believing and not believing in their performances, or between sincerity and cynicism (Goffman 1959). Human so-cial conduct, however, is inherently reflexive, mean-ing that social actors are able to monitor their con-duct through the course of social engagement, and are able to provide reasons for their conduct (Gid-dens 1984). Mechanical toys can be only sincere in their performances.

The use of language plays a central role in con-necting people to each other, and in classifying and valorizing perceivable objects so that social relations can be expressed through them, and is partly con-stituted of them (Agha 2007:13; Giddens 1984:xvi). Agha (2007) suggests that human activities yield ma-terial precipitates and projections that carry social value. This is obvious enough for durable artifacts such as iron toys, but less so for ephemeral artifacts such as trade cards, advertising circulars, diaries, and spoken words. This last point is critical because many of these toys were not labeled with their names, and so for a person to speak the name “Jolly Nigger,” “Old Aunt Chloe,” “Negro Washerwoman,” or “Pad-dy and the Pig” in reference to the object was also to create an ephemeral artifact that carried (and still carries) negative social value.

Discourses and utterances of any kind are ma-terial objects that make real effects on human sens-es, minds, and sociality. Words, including titles and names such as “Jolly Nigger,” “Brudder Bones,” and others are social tokens of discourse that are fleeting in their duration but that order and shape social rela-tions and can persist far longer than the initial speech act through their enactment into routinized practic-es that rely on their enactment, and replay them or transform them into material artifacts (Agha 2007:3; Hartman 2003:484–485). Identity categories such as “Jew,” or “lesbian,” or “Darkie,” or “Chinaman” are signifiers constituted by ideological forces and social anxieties that function referentially to create

those identities (Hartman 2003:484–485). Thus, the ability to assign identity categories is a powerful po-litical act, and the power to give names to others is much different than the power to name oneself (Voss 2005:461).

In creating toys that can function in only one way, the structural principles of the “Other”—who the “Other” is, what “the Other” looks like, how the “Other” acts—are fixed. In engaging the mechanism to bring the toy to life, a social interaction is creat-ed, here between the child and the automaton. The child, for example, winds “The Boxers” and becomes the spectator for the two machine-driven pugilists. Recalling that play behaviors often involve the frag-menting, breaking, and reordering of the events of “normal behaviors,” as well as elements of transfor-mation, the form of the mechanical toy, including banks, cap guns, and clockwork toys, ensured that there could be no room for alternative forms of play facilitated by the child’s imagination. The mech-anism of these toys was such that the mechanical parts create a rigidity of function, as each part of the mechanism fit together in a precise and specific way to produce a desired action, and no other action or output besides that intended by the manufacturer was possible.

Similar to mechanical banks, clockwork toys bearing racial stereotypes were manufactured almost exclusively by companies located in the northeast-ern United States, in New York, Connecticut, Phil-adelphia, and New Jersey—a “negro jig-dancer, pro-pelled by steam, is the latest Yankee notion” (Knight 1884:2606)—with a few examples made by English, German, and French manufacturers. Marketing ex-aggeration aside, advertisements for clockwork toys made specific reference to the “lifelike” nature of the mechanical movements. The description of “The Cel-ebrated Negro Preacher” in the Automatic Toy Works (1882:4) catalog noted that,

“He stands behind a desk, and slowly straightening himself up, turns his head from side to side and gestures vigorously with his arm. As he warms to his work, he leans forward over the pulpit, and shakes his head and hand at


the audience, and vigorously thumps the desk. The motions are so life-like and comical that one almost believes that he is actually speaking.”

Later in the same catalog, referencing “Fing Wing, A Melican Man”:

“This image, with its shaven head, long queue and quaint looking dress, gives a striking and life-like picture of a Chinese Laundryman. When at work, he bends over the tub, and rubs the gar-ment which he holds in his hands with a natural-ness so perfect he might easily be mistaken for a real Celestial” (Automatic Toy Works 1882:8).

The fixed mechanical systems of these toys pro-duced a fixed outcome: the “Jolly Coon Jigger” could only do a gangly jig; “Paddy” could only take a pen-ny off a pig’s nose; the “Reclining Chinaman,” ac-companied by a rat, could only grin mischievously and flash four aces. The toy’s performance began and ended with that intended by its (adult) maker. This is a structural constraint, not only in the physical sense of mechanical motion, but also one imposed by Victorian social order from which it was shaped and which shaped it. Constraints operate via the mo-tives and reasons of social actors, creating conditions and consequences affecting other social actors that result in new options opening up to them (Giddens 1984:310). This social interaction reproduces the structural conditions that give rise the ideologies driving the manufacture and consumption of these toys, and in turn, reproduce the facticity of structural constraint on what the “Other” is and can be. The automaton’s movement is self-referential, because it moves out from its position in the world through its directed action, but since it is not a living body that can self-regulate its capacity for movement, it can only remain an object. The mechanical bodies exist in a space constituted by its manufacturer, an exis-tence that is self-referred and thus is lived as an ob-ject, and is contradictory because it is both spatially constituted and a constituting spatial subject through the performance of intentional actions that project and create spatial relations (Young 1980:148–153).

Institutional racism based on phenotypic

classification becomes social reality because it is a structurally stable order of relationships connecting social actors located in similar social contexts, in this case, middle-class children and adults, who accept it as social reality through the reflexive monitoring of their practices, and treats the system of institutional racism as a “real” order of relationships within which the interaction between the child and the “Other,” here the toy as avatar, is situated and which it ex-presses (Giddens 1984:331–332).

Target Games and Cap Pistols

Dubin (1987:133) suggests that, in addition to the humorous nature of these toys, there is also the sug-gestion of violence toward other races, a suggestion that is sometimes implicit but was also often shock-ingly explicit. These are perhaps best represented by target games and cap pistols, all of which appear to have been manufactured between 1879 and 1893. These examples are particularly interesting because of the overt depiction of violence toward nonwhite peo-ples. The “Chinese Must Go” cap pistol depicts a white Nativist man grasping a Chinese man’s queue. When the trigger is pulled, the white kicks the Chinese man in the behind, detonating the cap placed in the Chi-nese man’s mouth. Similarly, the Cap Head exploder functioned by placing a cap in the caricatured head of a Chinese man, and the head was struck with the hand, setting off the cap. Like the “Chinese Must Go” cap pistol, the “Niggerhead” and “Sambo” cap pistols used violence toward blacks as the means of setting off the caps. A black figure formed the handle of the pis-tol, and the cap was inserted into the figure’s mouth. Engaging the pistol’s hammer struck the cap and ignit-ed it. In the case of target games, however, the sugges-tion of violence is more implicit, and only becomes apparent by playing the game (Dubin 1987:133). For example, the instructions for the 1890 McLoughlin Brothers’ (the company was later acquired by Milton Bradley in 1920) “Jolly Darkie Target Game,” read:

“The game is to throw the balls in to the Darkie’s mouth. Each player in turn throws all the balls, and score one for each that goes in the


mouth. If a ball comes out again through one of the holes, it scores as many extra balls for the player as the number marked near the hole in-dicates. A certain number of points is set as the limit of the game, and the player who first scores that number wins” (McLoughlin Brothers 1890).

Unlike the more obvious expressions of violence provided by exploding caps using the body parts of nonwhite figures, target games depict a symbolic form of violence that is largely masked by the enter-tainment function of playing the game, where toss-ing a ball or bean ball at a caricatured black individ-ual to score points reinforces both the service role of the black figure and the complicity of the black figure in his own servitude (his, as these children’s games exclusively depict male figures) (Dubin 1987:133).

Toys as Elicitors of Emotions

Emotions are difficult to define, and are as much the concern of biology as they are of social, cultural, and philosophical inquiry, and no clear agreement ex-ists among researchers about the difference between emotion, state of mind, mood, personality type, or pathology (Desjarlais and Throop 2011; Morreall 1983; Tarlow 2012). It is clear, however, that emo-tions connect individuals with each other and with the social, and are therefore always about social in-teraction (Bourke 2008:419-420; Lyon 1995; Tarlow 2000). It is therefore instructive to consider the rela-tionship between advertising and these objects.

Once again, the Automatic Toy Works’ 1882 ad-vertising circular is illustrative. Of the “Uncle Tom Fiddler,” the ad states, “We consider this toy one of the most comically quaint of anything yet made. When seen in motion, laughter is irresistible” (1882:3). With regard to the “Celebrated Negro Preacher,” we read “The motions are so life-like and comical that one almost believes that he is actually speaking. The face and dress alone provoke irresistible laughter” (1882:4). Conversely, for toys depicting white figures or animals, the advertisements state simply that the toy is “entertaining” or “amusing” (1882:1).

A clear association can be made between emo-tions and the body, both in the toys themselves and

in the emotions the toys were meant to elicit from children. Bodily movements, including gestures, of-ten co-occur with speech or other verbal utterances and function together to constitute meaning, a social interaction that relies on both visual and auditory cues among participants (Matoesian 2012:366–367). Here, the movements created by the engagement of a toy’s mechanism co-occur with other visual cues.

Perhaps most obvious is the association with the face and the depiction of teeth. Gray (1966) suggests that Victorian laughter had different functions, but contained within it a deeply didactic component. Vic-torian humor was highly topical, and was directed at “the things and events and forms which make up and hold together contemporary experience,” and was most often used to ridicule serious things and ideas of the day in order to correct them, or more oblique-ly, “to furnish a holiday from taking things and ideas seriously . . . [and] was much more prevalent . . . than laughter used as a tactic or a revelation in an earnest discourse” (Gray 1966:146–147). While this sort of humor was most prevalent in the books and maga-zines of the time, no form of Victorian humor and the laughs elicited from it judged certain opinions and forms of conduct as wrong and dangerous.

Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss long ago sug-gested that the face is “predestined to be decorated, since it is only by means of decoration that the face receives its social dignity and mystical significance. Decoration is conceived for the face, but the face itself exists only through decoration” (quoted in Schildkrout 2004:321). Both advertising and the toys themselves frequently de-pict African American figures with their teeth exposed, though Asian and Native American toys typically do not. When compared to mechanical figures depicting Whites, the contrast becomes more striking. Consider the depictions of white and black mechanical figures in the Automatic Toy Works’ circular. For example, “The Artist at his Work” represents a mechanical character with a calm, almost serene facial expression, his body poised and controlled in his work. In contrast, “Old Un-cle Tom, the Colored Fiddler,” depicts an African Amer-ican man with an ecstatic facial expression, his teeth exposed, his feet raised. One might argue that painting and fiddling are not necessarily compatible examples;


the former requires a great deal of bodily control to ex-ecute a work on canvas, while the other allows much more movement as long as one keeps correct time, often using the feet, and hits the correct notes. When consid-ered in the context not only of the accompanying adver-tising caption, but within Victorian conceptions of the body, the contrast between Black and White mechani-cal figures becomes more striking. Of “The Artist at his Work” (Figure 4.1), the caption reads:

“This figure represents an artist in his studio in an effort to surpass Raphael. He is dressed in his morning gown and smoking cap, and appears to be very much engaged with his painting. He surveys, in different lights, his incompleted [sic] work of art, which rests on a small easel, and then commences to paint with all the confidence of one of the old masters. This is a deservedly popu-lar toy” (The Automatic Toy Works 1882:14).

Whereas of “Old Uncle Tom, the Colored Fiddler,” (Figure 4.2) the caption declares:

“We consider this toy one of the most com-ically quaint of anything yet made. When seen in motion, laughter is irresistible. The old fellow commences the performance by slowly rocking backward and forward, as if debating what he should play, then suddenly he strikes his “fa-vorite,” and rolling his head from side to side, fiddles in an ecstasy of enjoyment. Funny as it is, there is something almost pathetic in it, too. This toy is well and carefully made, and with or-dinary care will last for years” (1882:3).

The issue is not that an activity such as paint-ing requires control of the body in a different way from playing a musical instrument. The dichotomy in the desired reactions from the observer is clear: the white artist is inspiring, while the black fiddler is laughter-producing. Our earlier discussion of Vic-torian conceptions of the body and also what Vic-torians found humorous (and the reasons) is also instructive. Furthermore, figures in Victorian art with exposed teeth suggested individuals who lacked per-sonal sobriety, reason, and common sense; that is to say, a lack of self-control (Soenstroem 2001:355).

Figure 4.1. “The Artist at His Work” (The Automatic Toy Works 1882)

Figure 4.2. “Old Uncle Tom, the Colored Fiddler” (The Automatic Toy Works 1882)


Laughter, as a kind of utterance in Agha’s sense, also is a component of racialized toys and Victorian encounters with them. Dubin (1987:130–132) raises the question of whether these objects were meant to be humorous. Certainly many of these toys, both in their appearance and descriptions in advertising, sug-gest something of the inferiority and lack of self-con-trol displayed by the “Other,” especially in regard to toys depicting African Americans, as exemplified by caricatured physical appearances of the face, includ-ing the abovementioned teeth, and implicit or explic-it violence towards Blacks. The figure of a Black man who is kicked off a bench in the “Always Did ’Spise A Mule” bank, or is bucked off a goat in the “Initiating First Degree” bank was not meant to be viewed with horror or unease, but suggests, in conjunction with caricatured features, that these objects were fools meant to elicit laughter (Dubin 1987:130–132).

Recalling the emphasis placed by period adver-tisements on the lifelike character of the movements of clockwork toys, consider that these movements can be defined as a performance, which refers sim-ply to the activity of a participant on a given occa-sion that influences in any way any other participant (Goffman 1959:15). The pre-established pattern of action that defines a performance and is presented to an audience or other participants may, when played the same way to the same audience, result in the es-tablishment of a social relationship. When an indi-vidual gives a performance, an implicit, unspoken request exists that the observers take seriously the performance, that they believe the character being played possesses the traits he is presenting, and that the performance will result in consequences that are implicitly claimed by it (Goffman 1959:16).

The racialized toy depicting an African Ameri-can, Chinaman, Irishman, or Native American exists as a contradiction of simultaneously being a sub-ject capable of acting on the world but also as one whose identity as a racialized person is ascribed by those in power. That is to say, the manufacturer, in determining the modalities of bodily comportment, motility, and spatiality, creates this tension between being simultaneously a subject and object, and de-nies her/him complete subjectivity (Young 1980). As

an object, however, the racialized mechanical toy is the contradiction: it arrested the stereotype which it depicted, brought it to life in mechanical form, and served the utilitarian purpose of conveying stereo-types about “Others,” while simultaneously retain-ing a sense of novelty.

In short, the Victorian fascination with the me-chanical, along with the Victorian fascination with children and childhood, joined with the Victorian fascination with the “Other”— those peoples and cultures who did not fit into White conceptions of social order—manifested in the mechanical toy (Calvert 1992; Cook 2004). The manifestation of “Other” human figures into mechanical ones is as much a reflection of the Victorian concern with increasing numbers of the “Other” in everyday life as are concerns about the effects of expansion of mechanization into an increasing number of facets in everyday life—ultimately culminating in a loss of control of social order and ultimately humanity itself (Coll 2009:21; Rice 1994).

Toys as Depictions of the “Other”

While all social agents know more about social con-texts than they will ever directly live with due to the use of language, actors who live in one social context (e.g., the city or the country) are more or less igno-rant of what goes on in others. This includes sense of spatial separation (e.g., again, in city life or country life), but also vertical separation in terms of social classes, which in turn may result in individuals creat-ing and operating under false theories and accounts of what goes on in these other contexts and may re-sult in sources of tension between social practice and discursive consciousness (Giddens 1984:92). The stereotyped features of these objects helped define whiteness versus blackness using racialized markers of facial expressions, such as those depicting teeth, hair type, or skin color, all of which are used in the toy industry today, especially with dolls (Chin 1999).

Toys depicting Native Americans are especially pernicious. At the time many of these Native Amer-ican toys were manufactured, most native peoples had been pushed off their lands onto reservations.


Indeed, many native groups, especially in the North-east where the majority of these toys were manufac-tured, had been living on government reservations for more than 50 years (Wray 1973). Toys depicting Native Americans generally have similar features, or imply cultural features. Most have the feathered headdress or feathers in their hair, reminiscent of Plains groups, thereby lumping all Native Americans into one monolithic group. They are often depicted as violent, and cradle tomahawks or bows, and have large, ugly, painted faces. Moreover, they are por-trayed as relics of the past, “fables and myths simi-lar to witches, pirates, fairies, fortune tellers, tramps, and devils” that had no culture independent of the (white) cowboy and the western frontier (Lattimer 1976:152; Yellow Bird 2004).

The Chinese were associated with rats and their consumption as food, and are visible on the “Chi-naman in Boat” and “Reclining Chinaman” mechan-ical banks. Contemporary sources suggested that “The Chinese have a great liking for rats . . . which are esteemed as a great delicacy,” though peoples in nations in Jamaica, Cuba, and Australia were observed to consume them as well (Blyth and Tar-dieu 1876:484), and others claimed that the Chi-nese “fondness for puppies, cats, rats, snakes, etc., has been greatly exaggerated . . . it is true . . . that some Chinese do eat rats, kittens, and puppies, but

such food is by no means common” (Cunnygham 1896:187). Nonetheless, depictions of Chinese peo-ple as rat eaters and other unsavory stereotypes were common during the nineteenth century, originating in children’s textbooks in the 1840s and entering popular culture by the 1870s, where it became the dominant image of Chinese culture in America (Ling 2004). Thus, reinforcement of the rules regarding stereotypes not only constitute those stereotypes, but also the social structure of Victorian racism, its op-pression, and the divide between the “Other.”

Gambling was also associated with the Chinese, as in the case of the “Reclining Chinaman” mechan-ical bank (Figure 4.3). Franklin (1994) suggests that gambling was considered dangerous among mid-dle-class Victorians because it could expose private loss or gain, in essence to make the private public. As a form of financial speculation, it was also considered to threaten existing social boundaries between classes by enabling rapid social mobility and, for the middle class particularly, both facilitated the very existence of the middle class while creating fears of an uncon-trolled economy and the lower classes too easily rising to the middle class. Gambling instead presented ran-dom chance and individual fate rather than orderly fi-nance capitalism and telelogical evolutionary progres-sion, not only racially but socially as well. Gambling was therefore antithetical and threatening to middle

Figure 4.3. “Reclining Chinaman” Mechanical Bank, J. and E. Stevens Company, 1882 (Photo courtesy of the Mechanical Bank Collectors of America)


class ideology, and the very idea of social order itself (Franklin 1994). Another reading of the object suggests that “the Chinaman holds the winning hand; the Amer-ican laborer had lost the game,” and its introduction during a period of anti-Chinese sentiment in America played on those fears (quoted in Gould 2010:90).

Conclusion

Social life is a flow of interaction, and in one sense, social life is shaped by the physical limitations of the body and space. Society is defined as an agglomera-tion of institutions, activities and practices associated with those institutions, the people doing those prac-tices and activities, and the structural relationships occurring between and among individuals, collectiv-ities, and the institutions which create and recreate them (Pred 1981:6). The reproduction of society is an ongoing process in which practice results in the perpetuation of knowledge, institutions, and rela-tionships. Social reproduction and social life itself are inseparable from practices, and by extension from the material world of man-made objects that facili-tate them (Brubaker 1985:750). Therefore, processes of social reproduction can only be fully understood when it is understood how they worked materially. Given that material culture is important in how peo-ple create, experience, change, and give meaning to their world, it must be understood that material cul-ture, in turn, creates people, and shapes their experi-ences and worlds (Dobres and Robb 2005).

The toys discussed here illustrate how toys form the divide between what Jane Baxter (2005:46) terms the “imperial practices of adults” and the “native practices of children.” Adults perceive toys much dif-ferently than children do. Children are often much more fluid than adults in what they consider to be toys, and is why a stick found in the yard easily be-comes a sword or a magic wand. On the other hand, adults perceive toys as a rigid class of object made ex-clusively for and given to children. Although Wilkie (2000:100) notes that oftentimes children’s artifacts are viewed as parents’ attempts to inculcate values into their children, rather than explicit statements made by children themselves, the practice of market-

ing directly toward children did not emerge until the twentieth century (Cook 2004:71; Jacobson 2008:4). Within the patent applications, the mechanisms were categorized under “Improvements in Toy Money Boxes,” filed under “Improvements in Toys” (Bowen 1882; Rex 1884). However, children were only men-tioned in passing in the patent papers, if at all. For example, Charles Bailey’s 1899 patent for the “Chief Big Moon” mechanical bank noted that it “will of-fer innocent amusement to children” (Bailey 1899), while Reuben Ricker’s 1884 patent for “Rat Catchers,” a toy that does not appear to have ever been put into production, depicting two Chinese trying to capture a rat, boasted that the toy would “produce a very amus-ing effect” (Ricker 1884a). Therefore, these racialized toys are necessarily reflective of adult views and val-ues, and were made to appeal to adults who would purchase them. Nor is it always possible to know how and to what extent children played with the toys, a point we will consider in the concluding chapter.

Based simply on price, these objects were primari-ly manufactured for wealthier consumers, those with a disposable income who could afford them. Despite the fact that these objects used comparatively cheap materials, manufacturers targeted the middle class but not working-class parents, who could neither af-ford these toys nor encouraged their children to play (Cross 1997:25–26; Ganaway 2008). These toys ap-pealed to the middle class not only because they were financially available only to a narrow portion of Vic-torian society, but because they reflected the values of that narrow middle- and upper-class segment. This translation into a larger social whole occurs through any material medium, and the material object in turn reflects the forms of creative action that brought it into being, but that also recursively motivate social actors to carry out the actions the material object represents (Graeber 2011:496). Victorian mechanical toys reflect-ed “a culture that respected the past, mechanical in-novation, and utilitarian objects” (Cross 1997:2526), and by extension, adult conceptions of what was fun and what a toy was and should be.

Another important consideration is the unintend-ed consequences of social actions; it is a truism that, in the course of social interactions, “I am the author


of many things I do not intend to do, and may not want to bring about, but none the less do” (Giddens 1984:9). The reinforcement of the rules and princi-ples defining and shaping stereotypes through their depiction on mechanical toys constituted and recre-ated those stereotypes in a tangible form, but also the overarching social structure of Victorian racism and the stereotypes that constituted it. Ultimately, the objects discussed above were popular because they gave the growing movement of racial ideology and the inferiority of nonwhites a corporeal form, and in the case of mechanical toys, a form that also was complicit in that corporeality through the expe-dient identification of what groups were outside the social boundary of White and the “Other” (Brown 2006:186).

Popular culture is a site where meaning is made and not simply given or assumed, as its messages must fit within larger discourses to make sense of everyday experiences and make them meaningful (Grindstaff 2008:209). Mechanical figures reflected the capitalist social structure of the Victorian peri-od in microcosm. These machines represented ide-al workers, while the child, as “master and propri-etor” of the mechanical figure, determined when and where the figure would work, and suggests that:

“the line between amusing machines and producing machines was not so clear. The au-tomaton . . . was no less a site of production than a machine that made pins or cloth . . . [but that] simply turned out an effect rather than a product. This effect helped members of the middle class to formulate the social relations of mechanized production in terms that would en-sure their relative power” (Rice 1994:10–16).

Representational media, including texts and im-ages, must be viewed as reflecting cultural conceptions of embodiment, and also as an extension of the mate-rials through which these conceptions become accept-ed by social agents. Analysis of these materials enables examination of represented bodily ideals that were of-ten contradictory to expressed ideals (Joyce 2005:147–148). In this way, the racial stereotypes these toys de-pict and enact become ossified in tin, iron, and wood,

their mechanics hidden from the observer to heighten the sense of wonder and curiosity, the figure still and silent until the child commands it to move by winding a key or engaging a lever (Figure 4.4). The mechan-ical body is written but not able to write beyond its intended and well-rehearsed message, and is complic-it in its own subjection and subjugation in ways that the human actors they depict might be able to resist (Brown 2006:185; Dubin 1987).

How did these toys accomplish this feat of being contradictory objects, at once reflective of a nostal-gic past and idealized future, given form made pos-sible by present (for the time) industrial technology? Hoberman (2004:188) suggests that objects have their own unique qualities that originate from their production and use in a particular traditional and

Figure 4.4. Broward’s Mechanical Dancer, ca. 1874 (Photo courtesy of the Strong Museum of Play)


historical context, and which become embedded in the object at the point of its creation to give the ob-ject its meaning. Thus, the transformation of autom-atons into toys, that is, objects made exclusively for children, and their eventual ubiquity reflects both the Victorian fascination with novelty and mechanical innovation (Cross 1998:25–26) and “the desire to

simulate life by mechanical means” (Bedini 2002:1). Victorian mechanical toys represent an intricate in-tersection of Victorian conceptions of the body, the “Other,” and performativity of the body, all of which served to create and recreate structures of racism, and socialize children to them.

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C H A P T E R 5

Racialized Toys


Introduction

We have discussed a wide range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and their applications for racialized toys. In this chapter, we detail a sam-pling of toys from our compiled database. We cate-gorized these children’s toys based on the depicted racial group, as opposed to the function of the ob-ject, such as mechanical bank, doll, board game, and so on, in order to convey the wide range of toy styles, forms, and functions, as well as to emphasize the physical and social stereotypes associated with each racial group. Four non-White races are represented in all: Irish, Native American, Asian (Japanese and Chinese), and Black. In the subsequent sections, we provide a discussion of each racial grouping and its associated toys. We are by no means trying to add any validity to the subjective classifications in doing so; the following is instead meant to provide a so-cio-historical framework through which to interpret the confluence of race and toys.

The time period discussed in this work, cir-ca 1865–1930, was an era rife with social problems, but in addition to the economic, social, and political issues associated with the post-Civil War landscape, White fears were also focused on the “problems” concerning the influx of perceived non-White “Oth-ers.” In the following subsections, we discuss the

physical and social representations of the objects, as well as the White fears manifested in each non-White race. Through doing so, the reader will garner an un-derstanding of the material culture at hand, and also the justifications for dehumanizing people who fell outside of the tightly-held notion of what it meant to be White in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Native Americans

Native Americans are portrayed on ten of the 172 objects (5.8%) examined in this work. The repre-sentations of Native Americans on children’s toys follow two primary forms: the violent warrior and the “noble savage.” Even as children growing up in the 1980s, we can remember playing with plastic white- and beige-colored cowboys and orange- to red-tinted Indian figures, a time-honored racialized, White male pastime in which the Indians never won. This dehumanizing portrayal of Native Americans on children’s toys has been a part of the White American habitus for centuries.

In the years leading up to and following the Civil War, the Western United States was seen as the release valve for the economic, political, and social strife stirring elsewhere in the country. It was perceived as the American destiny to create a nation that stretched


from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Western United States offered a spiritual remedy for the ills of pover-ty, corruption, and pollution that plagued the Eastern seaboard. However, the success of American “Mani-fest Destiny” was dependent upon the removal and systematic genocide of the various Native American groups occupying those lands. Seen as obstacles to American progress, Native Americans were often por-trayed on children’s toys from the post-Civil War era well into the 1930s as violent, animalistic heathens and the targets of White aggression and violence. This representation is seen in the form of shooting gallery targets (Figure 5.1), such as the “Popgun” and “Exceptional Shooting” games of 1923 and 1929, which included cardboard figures of Native Ameri-cans alongside lions, bison, tigers, and other animals intended as the targets for White children.

The assortment of targets was intentional, as Na-tive Americans were not simply enemies to America, but were not even human. Truly, in a salient form of racist “Othering,” the Native American targets, coupled with exotic animals, were to be hunted and exterminated by play gunfire. Toys like the “Popgun”

game socialized children into understanding not only the dehumanized and animalistic nature of Na-tive Americans, but also that any form of violence against them was justified. This form of play reflect-ed the sociopolitical realties of the times, as Native Americans were subjected to intensive, systematic genocide by the American government and many of its White citizens. Such violent, dehumanizing toys underscore that these toys, as produced, marketed, and purchased by adults for either their own use, or more likely for children, were products of contempo-rary discourses on the changing American landscapes.

The second racialized stereotype of Native Ameri-cans portrayed on children’s toys is that of the “noble savage.” Perhaps as a reaction to the overcrowded, polluted, urban centers of the United States, the rep-resentation of Native Americans as a monolithic, un-civilized, yet peaceful people was meant to connect the American present to a nostalgic past. This imag-ery can be seen on the “Columbus” mechanical bank (Figure 5.2), depicting a stereotyped Native Ameri-can, presumably of the Great Plains, presenting a seated Christopher Columbus with a peace pipe.

Figure 5.1. “Exceptional Values in Shooting Games,” Sears and Roebuck,

1923 (In Barlow 1998)

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While this toy does not suggest the animalistic and violent overtones of target games, it still does not portray Native Americans on equal footing with Euro-peans. For example, although Christopher Columbus was the newcomer to the “New World,” in the perfor-mance of this bank, the Native American appears from seemingly nowhere and moves toward Columbus sit-ting atop a throne. Despite the intended message of peace, this mechanical bank clearly presented to the owner the subjugated position of Native Americans to European, and later, American control.

This imagery of Native Americans as noble but defeated was a common theme reproduced on chil-dren’s toys. Another example is illustrated by the “The New Game of Migration” board game. Similar to the game “Hamale,” in which two players com-pete to move their game pieces from one corner of the board to the other, the game pieces in “The New Game of Migration” represent Native Americans, and the different areas of the board signify reservations. Much like the Columbus bank, “The New Game of

Migration” portrays Native Americans not simply as non-White “Others,” but as pawns to be repositioned and placed far away from the White world.

Interestingly, out of all the racial groups repre-sented in the toy database, no depictions of Native Americans can be found in humorous forms or per-formances. Rather, the imagery is meant to inspire a dialectical opposition between instilled violence and nostalgic admiration among White children. Proba-bly this lack of comical portrayals on toys was inten-tional, as Native Americans were viewed by Whites as both dehumanized warriors and stoic noble sav-ages of a past long gone. This dichotomy could also be the result of the repressed positions of Native Americans in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, as well as the decimation of Native popu-lations throughout the United States. In this regard, Native Americans were both racialized and viewed as exotic, an interpretation illustrated in the pop-gun target games, but also embodied in the everyday performances of playing “Cowboys and Indians.”

Figure 5.2. “New Game of Migration” board game, Marshall Field & Company, 1890–1893 (In Barlow 1998)


By the late nineteenth century, Americans believed that mass migration and a vast web of railways and telegraph lines had conquered the West, and thus, the era of the “Wild West,” with all of its misrepre-sented gravitas, including the violent and noble In-dians, was gone. Unlike the humorous toys depicting Blacks, Asians, and Irish that were designed to make children laugh at inferiority, the objects portraying Native Americans both reflected and helped to repro-duce a socially constructed view of a wistful past, one populated with equally misrepresented violent and noble savages.

The Irish

As discussed in Chapter Four, only two toys (1.2% of the total database)—a mechanical bank and a pull toy, both representing the image known as “Paddy and the Pig”—portray the Irish race. Today, it is largely forgotten that the Irish were once con-sidered outside of the White race. The racialization of the Irish was based on British perceptions of Ire-land and the Irish. Ireland was used by the British as their first experiment in colonization. In an effort to justify this imperialism, the British sought to portray the Irish as inferior, uncivilized, and less biological-ly evolved than themselves (Brighton 2008; Shackel 2003). This “Othering” is observed in illustrations from the period, as represented in Figure 5.3, in which the low, pronounced brow, exaggerated over-bite, and recessed chin suggested that the Irish “were seen as the missing link between apes and humans, an idea that developed in the 1840s and did not die out until the 1920s” (Shackel 2003:4). Similar to the other racialized groups represented in the database, the dehumanization and racialization of the Irish as non-Whites was a response to White fears. The Irish, not unlike Black and Asian peoples discussed in the subsequent sections, were seen by many in the Unit-ed States as threats to White economic stability. Fol-lowing the Great Hunger (or the Potato Famine, as it is known in the United States) in the 1840s, over two million Irish immigrants fled their homeland in search of opportunities in the Americas. Given that the majority of Irish immigrants were poor rural

farm workers with limited economic and social cap-ital or industrial skills, they found employment in manual labor and domestic service, and were often relegated to impoverished ghettos riddled with high crime rates and pollution (Orser 2007; Shackel 2009; Yamin 2002).

As detailed in Chapter Two, in the nineteenth century, it was widely believed that the moral failings of the individual, not societal conditions, resulted in economic and social strife (Howe 1977). Irish im-migrants used communal social practices to circum-vent poverty by creating support networks for indi-viduals, and this collectivism helped immigrants and their descendants retain Irish traditions. Moreover, the Irish were believed to be content with their low economic standing, a perception viewed as contrary to American capitalist values (Orser 2007:89–92). Through the racialization of the Irish as “Other,” they became confined to the “lowest-paying, dirtiest jobs available” (Orser 2007:92). By 1850, the Irish and Irish-Americans represented over 87% of the free unskilled labor force in the United States (Brighton 2008). The widely-held perception that the Irish were willing to work at such a low rate that would destabi-lize the White working classes was only exacerbated by an era of economic turmoil in the mid-nineteenth century, a period that saw the Irish as scapegoats for the nation’s problems (Brighton 2008:142). As the Irish were denied admission into higher wage earn-ing employment, they were perceived by the White working classes as being willing to work for wages so low that no (respectable) White man could main-tain a living. Additionally, the Irish often served as strikebreakers or company security, so that during depressions, organized labor movements, and job shortages, anti-Irish sentiment was focused on the perception that the Irish were both undermining the White working classes by accepting low wages and working with industrialists (Brighton 2001, 2008; Orser 2007).

Perhaps the most prominent feature for the ra-cialization of the Irish was the White Protestant ab-horrence of Catholicism. An illustrative example can be drawn from the Congregationalist Pacific in 1867, which stated that the “Roman Catholic element in

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our population is certainly an element of trouble and danger. A Class of people largely ignorant, degrad-ed, and vicious is a burdensome class and demands care, patience, and watching” (quoted in Paddison 2009:512). The Protestant foundations of the United States reproduced the fears that the mass migration of Irish Catholics would represent a population that was idolatrous, superstitious, and, worst of all, un-able to support the President because of their spiritu-al loyalty to the Pope (Brighton 2008:42; Orser 2007; Paddison 2009). Thus, from a proposed biological inferiority to mass poverty and allegiance to a foreign leader, the Irish were reduced to a subhuman race for much of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century.

This racialization of the Irish can be clearly ob-served in the mechanical bank “Paddy and the Pig,” patented in 1882 by the J. & E. Stevens Company of

Cromwell, Connecticut. The bank depicts a racial-ized Irishman, Paddy, with a protruding brow ridge, simian chin, prognathic face, and fair hair and skin. The character wears green attire, with the added ac-companiment of a three-leaf clover atop his hat to underscore that the figure is Irish. Finally, between his legs, Paddy has a lassoed pig. The bank’s owner places a coin on top of the pig’s snout, and when a side lever is released, one of the pig’s hind legs springs up and drops the coin onto Paddy’s tongue and into his mouth. The imagery suggests not only a stereotyped and homogenized representation of the Irish, but a depiction laden with racist and class-ori-ented overtones. The physical features of Paddy sug-gest an almost apelike character, borrowing from the ideology that the Irish were separate from the White race. The appearance and motions of Paddy wrestling with a pig for money conflates a class element asso-ciated with the Irish in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the poorly dressed character is willing to perform any degrading job for small gains. As the Irish were relegated to some of the lowest economic positions in society and the targets of White fear and threats, “Paddy and the Pig” reflected and suggest-ed to White children that the Irish and their descen-dants were biologically, economically, and culturally inferior. Though today “Paddy and the Pig” is a high-ly sought-after collector’s item, the racist overtones of the bank are still not agreed upon by all, as one authority noted in his discussion of the bank:

In closing, a rumor from some years ago that still persists here and there today about Paddy and the Pig . . . has to do with the peri-od in which the bank was made. Supposedly some Irish Society members felt that the bank was somewhat insulting to the Irish race and requested that production be stopped . . . It is a very attractive, clever savings device and it would take some stretch of the imagination to find it in poor taste or any way derogatory toward the Irish” (Griffith 1965).

One possibility to explain the lack of toys depict-ing the Irish in the later nineteenth and early twen-tieth centuries is that Irish Americans had garnered

Figure 5.3. Modern reproduction of the “Paddy and the Pig” mechanical bank, J. and E. Stevens Company, 1882 (Photo courtesy of the Strong Museum of Play)


greater political and social capital through their sup-port of the Democratic Party, while the negative “new” immigrant platform of the Democratic party helped to focus White rage onto groups from eastern and southern Europe, and African Americans, which drew attention away from the non-Whiteness of the Irish race (Orser 2007:90). By the turn of the century, many of the Irish and their descendants represented some of the most racist and violent segments of American so-ciety, with some perpetrating riots, lynching, and the robbery of non-Whites (Ash 2013; Barton 2012).

Asians

Despite the vast social, political, historical, and re-gional differences between and among countries in East Asia, nuances of distinction on toys were meshed together to make a homogenized representation of “Asian” or “Oriental,” with the Chinese and Japanese portrayed on material culture as a seamless continu-um of culture. Thus, in order to maintain a sociohis-torical framework similar to American perceptions of race in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we combine representations of the Chinese and Jap-anese on children’s toys as one racial group. This methodology situates the objects within a discourse on the biological and cultural features believed to be synonymous with the “Asian race,” despite the reali-ties of sociopolitical variation.

A total of 14 toys (8% of the total sample) depict racialized Chinese, and four toys (2% of the total) represent Japanese. The portrayal of Asians, particu-larly the Chinese, on toys emerged in the mid-nine-teenth century. Following the California Gold Rush in 1849, Chinese immigration into the United States grew steadily until legislation through the Chinese Exclusionary Act in 1882 stopped legal immigration. From the 1850s to the 1880s, the vast majority of the Chinese population in the United States consist-ed of impoverished men fleeing the Chinese Opium Wars (Orser 2007). As with the Irish, the Chinese had limited economic and social capital, and were pri-marily employed as manual labor in mining camps or on railroads in the West. The Chinese were at first welcomed by some American industrialists as an in-

expensive source of labor for the sparsely populated regions of the Midwest and West. However, as more White Americans began migrating into these areas, the Chinese soon became viewed as a threat to White labor, and anti-Chinese sentiment was embodied in the popular rallying cry of “The Chinese Must Go” (Farmer 1889:138; see also Griffith 1955).

As with the Irish, the repression of the Chinese was largely based upon three key factors: physical stereotypes, religious difference, and employment competition. As discussed in Chapter Four, one of the tasks for toy manufacturers depicting racialized caricatures was reproducing features that the consum-er could easily identify as the race being represented. For example, the presence of the three-leaf clover on “Paddy and the Pig” stressed that the figure was an Irishman. Beyond the stereotyped physical features (skin and hair color, eye shape) incorrectly associated with the Chinese, manufacturers made toys portraying Chinese men with a queue, the long hairstyle worn by many Han males in the nineteenth century. The wear-ing of a queue was so prevalent among male immi-grants and internalized as a symbol for the Chinese, that toy manufacturers included it so that their con-sumers could easily identify the product as representa-tive of the Chinese (Figure 5.4). This is reflected in the toy database, as all of the toys depicting Chinese men have queues. At the height of anti-Chinese rhetoric in the western United States, several Nativist petitions de-manded that the government outlaw the queue hair-style, as the perceived unwillingness of immigrants to conform to White America’s views on hairstyles prop-agated the belief that the Chinese would never be able to become true Americans (Paddison 2009:541–542).

Similar to the Irish, another perceived Chinese danger to White America was based on religion. Within a largely xenophobic, Christian nation like the United States in the nineteenth century, any reli-gious practice that operated outside of a tightly-held view of Protestant-based worship was considered threatening to society. For example, anti-Chinese protests of the time claimed that “Chinese Paganism Has, By Its Fruits [,] A Practical Immorality Fouler By Far Than That known among any European or Chris-tian People,” (quoted in Orser 2007:155).

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Building upon the condemnation of Chinese reli-gion, the association of the Chinese with gambling, as depicted on the 1882 “Reclining Chinaman” mechan-ical bank (Figure 4.3), where the character holds four aces and couldn’t lose because of cheating, also likely reflected both the religious and secular abhorrence of gambling in the United States. In this regard, the Chi-nese were believed to be incapable of good moral char-acter because of their religious and social practices. In a lecture entitled, “White Man or Chinaman—Which?” Jesuit priest James Buchard in 1873 concluded that, “I have very little confidence that any considerable num-ber, if any one at all, of the Chinese population will ever be converted to Christianity [in California] . . . This infe-rior race (Chinese); these pagan, these vicious, these im-moral creatures, are incapable of rising to the virtue that is uncalculated by the religion of Jesus Christ,” (quoted in Paddison 2009:506).

Finally, the most pervasive threat posed by the Chinese was that they would undermine the eco-nomic security of the White working classes. Like the Irish and African Americans, many Chinese im-migrants lacked the social and/or political capital to obtain higher wage employment, and so many

were relegated to the lowest rungs of the social and economic ladder. In addition to their employment in mining camps and railroads, many Chinese work-ers were used as “scab” laborers during White union strikes. These practices used by the Chinese to survive in the United States were seen by the White working classes as direct threats to their livelihood, leading to proclamations that the “Importation of Chinese Bar-barians into the Country Must Be Stopped by the Bal-lot or Bullet” (quoted in Orser 2007:155).

This virulent anti-Chinese sentiment is explicitly projected in the “Chinese Must Go” cap gun (Figure 5.4). The toy depicts a White man holding the queue of a Chinese man. When the trigger is pulled, the White man kicks the Chinese man in the behind, set-ting off the cap in the Chinese man’s mouth. Coupled with the anti-Chinese political rhetoric and racist leg-islation of the time, these toys both reproduced the stereotyped imagery of how a Chinese man should look, and also justified the use of violence against Chi-nese targets. The reasoning for racializing the Chinese parallels similar justifications used against the Irish, as both were seen as threats to White America be-cause of religion and economic class.

Figure 5.4. “The Chinese Must Go” Cap Gun, Ives Manufacturing Co., ca. 1880s (Photo by Wiki-media Commons user Alexisrael, used under Creative Commons li-cense). Appearance of this photo does not im-ply endorsement of this work by its owner.)


Blacks

Of all the racial groups depicted on toys, African Americans are by far the most represented, with 142 objects (82.6% of the total). The racialization of Black people has provided the foundation from which all other racial ideologies have grown. Con-sequently, our discussion of Black representations of toys form the bulk of interpretations on White so-cialization into structures of race. We begin with the most popular and longest lasting form of racialized Black dolls: topsy-turvy.

Topsy-turvy and Tacking Between Races

A topsy-turvy doll is any doll with the head and torso of a white female attached at the waist to the head and torso of a black female, with a long, full skirt separating the two (Figure 5.5). The child could play with only one figure at a time, because the revers-ible skirt would cover the body of whichever doll was on the bottom. The name “Topsy” is believed to be the influence of the enslaved girl, Topsy, in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Sanchez-Eppler 1997:133). The dolls have been the subject of a wide range of interpretations regarding their meanings. For example, Karen Sanchez-Eppler (1997:133–134) argues that topsy-turvy dolls were made by enslaved Black women as a means to contest sexual repression by White men, while Robin Bernstein (2011a:81–82) suggests that the dolls were used to socialize enslaved girls into understanding the duality of motherhood and caretaking, and argues that topsy-turvy dolls were used to teach enslaved girls the importance of not only raising their own children, but also those of White slave owners.

While these interpretations offer interesting per-spectives on the symbolism of topsy-turvy, and the dolls may indeed have originated with enslaved wom-en, there is little hard evidence for these theories, and they do not explain the popularity of the topsy-turvy doll within White society. Archaeologist Jamie Bran-don (2004) suggests that the dolls were used as a medium to socialize girls into navigating a racialized landscape. The juxtaposed position of the two figures and covering of the head of the lower created a

Figure 5.5. Topsy Turvy Doll circa 1930–1940 (Photo courtesy of Christopher P. Barton, 2014).

horrific metaphor for racialization in Ameri-ca; the two are inextricably attached and cannot exist without the other, while simultaneously they are unarguably in two different worlds as they cannot be seen together, and this is perhaps a precursor to the ‘separate but equal’ policies that would become a defining aspect of the modern South (Brandon 2004:197).

Topsy-turvy was a didactic form of material cul-ture used to cultivate within girls (both Black and White) an idealized concept of motherhood within ideologies of race. The doll was used to recreate a bi-nary disposition between Black and White as two di-ametrically opposed, yet forever interconnected races navigating a power-laden, hierarchical landscape. One interpretation is that the doll underscored the control of space, as both figures could never be seen or played with at the same time, creating an ideology that there are “proper” places for each race with no intersecting areas (Barton 2013).

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Moreover, as an engendered object, the doll was also intended to teach young girls the importance of nurturing, maturity, and domesticity (Wilkie 2000). These ideologies were part of a growing discourse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that sought to create boundaries between the household, or “do-mestic sphere,” that is, the realm of women, and the outside, public world of men. Thus, the doll was a powerful socializing medium with the dual purpose of cultivating ideologies of both gender and race. However, in a twisted, albeit unintentional result, given that the two figures were attached at the waist, one of the figures could never garner the child’s full affection, leaving it to be abandoned by its “moth-er.” This practice counters the dominant practices of domesticity, and yet provokes an ideology of race be-cause the child would have to choose which doll to nurture and love at the expense of being a bad mother to the other. As a precursor to the hordes of racialized toys depicting African Americans, the topsy-turvy doll offers an introduction into the ways that toys were used to teach children about ideologies of race and gender (Barton 2013).

Innovations and Ideology: The Popularity of Black Toys

Industrial innovations of the mid-nineteenth century, such as the use of inexpensive pewter, tin, and ceram-ics, and also increases in leisure time, influenced toy consumption. Throughout history, toys were often miniature replicas of larger objects. Leading up to the nineteenth century, these replicas were often made from gold, silver, and other expensive materials creat-ed specifically for affluent adults. The high economic cost and limited production of these objects left the majority of people, including children, to create and use their own toys. However, with the technological innovations and social developments of the late nine-teenth century, objects specifically made for children as toys (dolls, figures, games, mechanical banks, cos-tumes, and so on) were produced and consumed by Americans in massive quantities (Barton and Somer-ville 2012).

In order to produce, market, and sell a racialized toy, however, there must be a pre-existing collective perception of how a racialized group should look and

act. As discussed in our previous chapter, the catego-rizing of humans by phenotypes was based on subjec-tive social conventions of race. The power of race was (and is) that an individual can look at the superficial physical traits of a person and, based upon a social-ized understanding, assign them into a racial group. Though this labeling is subjectively based on flawed perceptions of human variation, it is the result of last-ing ideologies of the perceived biological and cultural differences between people.

These shared subjective understandings of what it means to look “Black” or “White” are what toy man-ufacturers called upon in their racialized projections. Simply put, manufacturers had to create a depiction and use language that the consumer could readily identify as a representation of an African and/or Af-rican American. While this statement may seem ob-vious to the reader in the present, when one looks at the grotesque characterizations used by manufactur-ers to represent Black people on toys—the immense variation between representation and reality (that is, how people were identified as Black) and the racial-ized depictions—the dehumanizing effects of pre-ex-isting racial ideologies become clear. The advertising that accompanied many of the toys frequently spoke of the authenticity of the racialized deception as a re-alistic portrayal of African Americans. For example, a 1922 advertising caption for “The Colored Minstrel Boys” (Figure 5.6) reads: “Two coons with exagger-ated head and foot movement of real darkies. One plays the accordion, the other pats time and beats a cymbal with his foot . . .” (Sears, Roebuck and Com-pany 1922:567).

The 1882 advertisement for the “Old Nurse” (Fig-ure 5.7) declared:

This mechanical toy is made to imitate an old negro nurse with a child. Her motions are as natural as life. She holds the child in her hands and when the mechanism is started, (by being wound) she leans backward and forward toss-ing the child up and down in a most surprising manner. This is a very pleasing toy for children and is very popular (The Automatic Toy Works 1882:7).


As noted in our previous chapter, the popularity of these mechanical toys was predicated on techno-logical innovations meant to copy the movements of real life. While the so-called realism portrayed in these toys was meant to show the cutting-edge tech-nology of automata, the “lifelike” movements of the objects were based on conceived notions of how an African American acted. These movements, coupled with the physical appearances of the toys, which were also based upon conventions of how African/African Americans looked and dressed, were advertised much like minstrel show performances to be authentic, true representations of Black people. While in reality the physical appearances and movements of these toys were not true portrayals of African Americans, they represented an idealized projection of racist ideolo-gies of Black inferiority (Barton and Somerville 2012).

Dolls and automata were not the only forms of racist material culture meant for child’s play. For ex-ample, an assortment of masks and costumes urged both adults and children to dress as “Old Uncle Joe” and “Topsy” (Sears, Roebuck, and Company 1921:626) (Figure 5.8) or simply as a “Negro” (Ner-lich and Company 1900:106) (Figure 5.9).

Masks and costumes enabled White children to make physical transformations, albeit figuratively and temporally, to become adult-approved renditions of a Black person. Similar to minstrel shows, these masks and costumes were not simply meant to be a phys-ical representation of Black people, but were also accompanied by superficial conventions of African American movements, mannerisms, and language. For example, the radio show “Amos ’n’ Andy” was a satirical blackface program widely popular from the 1920s to 1960, in which performers Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll used racist stereotypes of a per-ceived African American southern dialectic. In their performances, Gosden and Correll portrayed African Americans as childish, moronic, and unrefined. The program was immensely popular among audiences, and was accompanied by a host of merchandise for adults and children. As seen in Figure 5.10, a great deal of the blackface performance was based not only on the physical portrayals, but also the language used, il-lustrated by poor spelling and grammar.

Figure 5.6. “The Colored Minstrel Boys, Oh, What Music!,” 1922 (In Sears, Roebuck, and Company 1922)

Figure 5.7. “The Old Nurse” (The Automatic Toy Works 1882)

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Figure 5.8. Masquerade Masks, 1921 (Sears, Roebuck and Company 1921)

Figure 5.9. Paper Mask, 1900 (Nerlich & Company 1900)

Figure 5.10. Amos ’n’ Andy, Fresh Air Taxicab, 1930 (Sears, Roebuck, and Company 1930)


In this regard, when children were dressed up as “Old Uncle Joe” and “Topsy,” they were also imitat-ing performances that they had heard on the radio or had seen at minstrel shows. Thus, White children were exposed to racist portrayals of African Ameri-cans through material culture, and also disciplined into understanding ideologies of race through an as-sortment of popular culture.

The cultivation of a habitus used to navigate a ra-cialized world was not limited to the creation and reproduction of racial ideology. For example, in a salient display of race and economic class, the toss game “Tip the Bell Boy” (Figure 5.11) urged White children to throw balls (interpreted as pretend mon-ey) at the outstretched arms of a young Black porter. The caption reads, “See if you can shoot the ball into the boy’s trays. Has double score features so all can have real fun” (Sears, Roebuck, and Company 1929).

In a cruel display of both racism and classism, White children in their leisure time were disciplined to understand the inferior social and economic status of working class African Americans. While not explic-it in the use of violence, “Tip the Bell Boy” socialized young White children into seeing African Americans as targets of ridicule and hostility. Perhaps one of the more appalling examples of racist material culture used for play can be seen in the toss-game, “The Afri-can Dodger” (Figure 5.12) Though the game was tar-geted at adults, it was likely also used by adolescents and children.

The accompanying caption reads:

Well! Well! Well! Here he is Boys. Three shots for Five Cents and if you hit the Nigger you get a cigar. Now Boys and Girls, you can have all the fun of hitting the nigger right at your own home. We will send you the complete outfit by mail for 18 cts. The African Dodger Outfit is made of wood, the back end made to look like canvas, on which is painted in red letters. “Three shots for 5 cts, hit the nigger and get a cigar”. Through a hole in this canvas the blackest faced nigger you ever saw now places his head. A small wooden ball is used, and if you hit the nigger you send him a firing out of the hole. It is not

as easy as it looks. You can charge your friends a penny for 3 shots (Ardee Manufacturing Compa-ny 1903, emphasis in original).

It is important to understand that these objects meant to be material culture for children were not advertised to them, but rather directly at adults.

Figure 5.11. “Tip the Bell Boy,” 1929 (Sears, Roebuck, and Company 1929)

Figure 5.12. “The African Dodger Game,” ca. 1903 (Ardee Manufacturing Company 1903)

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Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth cen-turies, commodity advertising was limited to adult consumers, while advertising directly to children during this time was understood as an infringement on the rights of parents in controlling their children. Moreover, many advertisers saw marketing to chil-dren as a waste of resources, as “children had little [money] to spend and presumably little influence over the purchase decisions of their elders” (Cross 2000:17). Not until the middle of the twentieth cen-tury did advertisers begin to advertise directly to child consumers. Thus, the toys, costumes, and games dis-cussed in this book, ranging from the nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, represent not the desires of children to play with racialized toys, but the inten-tion of their elders to create and recreate a racialist worldview. While most of the advertising for these toys contains either images of children playing with the objects or text that mentions “boy(s)” or “girl(s)” as the intended targets of play, the adults who pur-chased these toys may have also sometimes been fel-low playmates in these racialized performances.

The socialization of White children into a racist ideology through the didactic media of toys did not go unnoticed by contemporary Black consumers. In a letter to the editor of Half-Century Magazine, an Af-rican American publication from Chicago, Alvah L. Bottoms detailed an experience that she and other Black shoppers had in the presence of racist toys:

While shopping the other day, I saw a young white woman leading a three-year-old child by the hand to the toy department where a num-ber of other mothers were lined up waiting to take their children in to see Santa Claus. When the child reached the tiny house in which Santa was seated, she named a number of things she would like to have for Christmas and finally added, “Oh, yes, Santa Claus, please don’t forget to bring me a dancing nigger and an Aunt Jemi-ma doll, like that one over there.” She pointed to a grinning black doll garbed in a bandana handkerchief and gingham dress and a doll representing a lanky old colored man dressed slovenly in ill-fitting clothes that bore a label in

glaring letters “Alabama dancing coon.” Several colored mothers in the line turned and saw the objectionable dolls and hurried their protesting offspring out of the store.

No doubt that small white child will receive that “dancing coon” and the “Aunt Jemima” doll on Christmas morning and she will form a num-ber of conclusions. First, she will learn to call all colored people “nigger” or “coon” and she will gain an idea as she gets older that about all col-ored men are fit for is to dance and amuse white people; her Aunt Jemima doll will give her the impression that colored women are fit only for servants. The impression made on a young child is lasting—they no more forget the term “nig-ger” as applied to black people than they forget to call felines cats or canines dogs. These toys should be forced off the market. I am yours for race betterment, Mrs. Alvah L. Bottoms (Bottoms 1920:16).

Bottoms and the other African American shop-pers understood the power of children’s toys in cre-ating and recreating a racist worldview within White children. In an act of resistance, Bottoms and the other Black mothers left the store in response to its selling of racist paraphernalia. This example shows how Black consumers were aware of the didacticism of toys as (re)creators of racism, and illustrates Black responses to these racist commodities.

The ability of these toys to (re)create the intended racialized ideologies and practices in children was re-inforced by the restrictive functions of the objects. A child’s imagination is truly a wondrous thing that can complicate the intentions of adults to impose ide-ologies through toys. Children can transform nearly anything into a toy, thus changing the preconceived meanings and functions of the object to suit the fan-ciful needs of the player. A wooden stick can become a sword, guitar, witch’s broom, or virtually any ob-ject. This reflexivity is based upon a child’s socializa-tion into society, but this seemingly free-flowing dis-position of imagination creates problems for adults trying to rear children into normative behaviors and ideologies (Barton and Somerville 2012:52–53).


While racialized toys may have been purchased by adults to cultivate racialist and/or racist ideol-ogies, within a child’s hands, the intentions of the adult take second place to the child’s imagination. For example, throughout the nineteenth and twenti-eth centuries, adults would frequently buy expensive porcelain dolls depicting White people in the latest fashions, yet often, the cloth and rag dolls represent-ing Black women were the consistent focus of chil-dren’s play and affection. Indeed, one contemporary consumer observed that, “My little girl has two such [rag] dolls, one white and the other black, but her af-fections are centered on the colored woman . . . never going to bed without Dinah in her arms, and crying for ‘Di’ if the nurse had forgotten to put it in her crib” (quoted in Formanek-Brunell 1998:34).

To circumvent the agency of children, toy manufacturers and adult consumers sought to make racialized toys, costumes, and games as restrictive as possible in their intended functions. Specifical-ly, racialized automata and mechanical banks were the forebears of explicit racism targeted to children. Unlike dolls that can take on different performances and identities, and that could be moved at will by

the child, automata and mechanical banks were sta-tionary objects that had only one function (though racialized banks served to teach children about race and also to socialize them into practices of capital-ism). In restricting the functions of such toys to limit the possible interpretations that could be conjured by a child, the object became an overtly didactic me-dium of racist socialization. For example, a mechan-ical bank such as the “Bear Hunt” or “Creedmore Bank” (Figure 5.13) could only be used by the child as a bank, with limited possibilities for different in-terpretations. The restrictive nature of these toys was an intentional practice by adults in the attempt to control the imaginations, and thus the ideologies, of children. As active social agents, children often un-intentionally circumvented these attempts by adults to dehumanize Africans/African Americans, as in the case of the Black doll being the recipient of the White girl’s affections. In an ongoing attempt to cultivate ideologies and practices, however, toy manufactur-ers and adult consumers sought to restrict alterna-tive interpretations by children by creating explicitly racist figures with limited functions. Thus, in many regards, these objects can be interpreted as both

Figure 5.13. “Bear Hunt”/“Creedmore” mechanical bank, J. and E. Stevens Compa-ny, ca. 1883 (Photo courtesy of the Strong Museum of Play)

RACIALIZED TOYS 75

didactic forms of material culture used to socialize children into ideologies of race and racism, and also as reflections of White adult desires to materialize their own sense of identity and “Whiteness” through the play of their children.

Discussion

Toys are but one medium used in the socialization of children into structures of race and practices of racism. Without myriad socializing media, a child receiving a racialized toy would not understand the racism prevalent within the object. Rather, through lifelong experiences of racialist/racist socialization, individuals become integrated into networks of op-pression. Toys are a part of this discourse, because they operate both as reflections of societal views, be-haviors, and ideologies, and are constitutive of soci-ety through the socialization of individuals. As di-dactic objects, racialized toys helped to raise children into a racist worldview, and cultivated what Bourdieu (1977) termed habitus.

Through socialization and life-long experiences, individuals develop a unique habitus that enables them to navigate their social worlds. Habitus is a so-cial disposition that enables and restricts individual practice based upon social structures and normative behaviors. The examples of racialized toys discussed here helped to socialize children, particularly White children, into understanding a racial ideology, and thus a practicing racism. While these toys explicitly proclaim the biological and cultural inferiority of groups like African Americans through dehumaniz-ing imagery, these objects were, in fact, used to instill a collective consciousness and identity of the White race. Whiteness is both an omnipresent, and yet am-biguous reality within American society. It is nearly impossible to empirically quantify those character-istics that are overt parts of the White race, but these

toys embodied concise racist stereotyped traits for what constituted non-Whites. Part of this ambiguity surrounding the White race is due to the innate flaws of race as a social construct with no validity in phys-ical and biological reality. Thus, identifying practices with a specific group, such as the White race, is im-possible. Markers used to identify individuals with racial groups exist along a varying spectrum, not within clear-cut categories of being. Race is therefore not an objective biological reality, but a subjective interpretation with no quantifiable merits.

Another problem with identifying practices asso-ciated with the White race is that the ambiguity of Whiteness is, in fact, a power strategy used to under-score the perceived differences of non-Whites. The White race as a collective consciousness is construct-ed not through identifying practices as White, but by labeling biological and cultural traits as “Other.” It is the creation of other non-White races, and their associated biological and cultural stereotypes that were used to identify individual membership within, for example, the Black race, and also introspectively and indirectly to construct the White race. The White race was (and is) created and recreated through the defining and categorizing of non-White races, not by self-imposed characterizing traits. Like blackface minstrel shows, the racialized toys discussed here were part of a reflexive, ongoing process used to teach children the perceived biological and cultural inferiority of the Black race, and in doing so, creat-ed within individual children a habitus that fostered practices of racism and also constructed an identity of Whiteness. As objects specifically created for chil-dren, these racialized toys underscore the power of material culture as reflectors and (re)creators of soci-ety. Though these objects were inanimate, they were by no means passive social agents. Rather, they were dynamic forms of material culture that helped to shape the social world through the play of children.

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The Child’s View

Racialized toys of all kinds appear to conspicuously taper off after 1930, as determined by our own obser-vations and their decreasing presence in toy catalogs and other documents (Barlow 1998; O’Neill 1988), although a few examples from Japan and Spain per-sist through the 1950s. These toys today rarely see the light of day except in the hands of collectors. While mechanical and clockwork toys bearing racial stereo-types have long disappeared from catalogs and circu-lars to become the purview of collectors and enthu-siasts, racialized toys and games have not completely vanished even into the present day, as demonstrated by Native American Halloween costumes, “Racist or Just Cuddly?” battles over stuffed sock monkey dolls depicting President Barack Obama and the African American actor Mr. T, and the continuing production of topsy-turvy and golliwog dolls (Chin 1999; Gould 2010; Salt Lake City Weekly 2008). Battles also con-tinue to rage over ethnic toys, which draw accusations of being racist, too ethnic, or not ethnic enough, and this “ongoing commentary over how toys reproduce race reveals how unsettled, and yet obsessed, our na-tion remains on the topic of race” (Gould 2010:272).

While society today might find these objects unset-tling, we need not be ashamed or feel embarrassed by their presence and popularity with Victorian people. Toys depicting racialized stereotypes varied consider-ably in their levels of hostility and regard for the group

depicted, but were another way for Victorians to make sense of an increasingly diverse population, and for ourselves in the present day to make sense of another facet of Victorian culture (Gould 2010:272). As Living-stone (1998:15) astutely observes,

“We live in a time, of course, when issues to do with representation are all the rage. For some, this stems from a . . . ‘certainty’ . . . that everything is just representation and that no judgments can be made about adequacy or inadequacy, accuracy or inaccuracy, truth or falsity. For others, it becomes more a matter of political correctness. Certain images are to be censored solely because they are offensive to cer-tain sections of contemporary society . . . certain representations of people and places, or races and regions, can be re-examined and repudiated precisely because they are inauthentic depictions or characterizations of the human subject and its habitus. In other words . . . [we cannot forget] the importance of some notion of authenticity be-cause, without it, history can only be censored or dragooned into the service of the most powerful; with it, history can be exposed and criticized.”

Objects have distinct lifecycles in which they play different roles in different social contexts. They mediate social relations between humans and between humans



and the object itself, generating different meanings of value and significance and the larger social systems that give objects their disparate meanings (Brown 2010:188; Galloway 2006:44; Grindstaff 2008). Be-cause the meaning of an object is constructed by the social context in which it exists, a change of context may (or may not) result in a change of meaning. Following material objects along this trail of chang-ing contexts enables an understanding of the object’s changing meaning, and historical ontologies emerge when an object is removed from its historical context and becomes meaningful or not (Brown 2006; Mac-Gregor 1999:259). Indeed, these racialized toys have entered a new stage in their lives from children’s play-things to relics coveted by adult collectors, where the meaning of these objects emerges not from their pro-duction or the means by which they were produced, but by their exhibition both within the particular his-torical and cultural context from which they were pro-duced and exhibited as well as their display and cu-ration by collectors in the present (Hoberman 2004; Mergren 1982).

Up to this point, we have admittedly treated chil-dren as little more than empty vessels into which adult values were instilled through the toys they were given. We would be remiss, however, to end our discussion of these toys without mention of children themselves and their views of the world, especially since, at the very least, it is impossible to know how children may have actually played with these toys (Chudacoff 2007:85). While it is difficult to determine what sort of effect these automatons, games, dolls, and costumes had on children, historical sources can provide some insight. Many children did certainly take to heart racialized structures through the medium of white and black toys, although interestingly, children were frequently influenced by what they read. As a child in 1855, au-thor Frances Hodgson Burnett, whose bestselling Little Lord Fauntleroy was among the most popular children’s books of the time, obtained a black doll after reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and used it to act out parts from the novel, including lashing it to a candelabrum stand and whipping it (Bernstein 2011). One writer recalled a childhood friend who had read about plantations and slaves, and acquired black china dolls to represent slaves and a white doll

to act as an overseer; another read a schoolbook with a picture of a chained slave laboring in a sugar field and a whip-wielding White overseer standing nearby, and promptly obtained the chain from her mother’s key ring to tie up her Black doll; other children burned, beat, stabbed, hung, or held slave auctions for their Black dolls (Bernstein 2011:160–167). This, of course, was not limited to girls, as one eight-year-old boy in 1898 told psychologist T. R. Croswell that his favor-ite game was playing with make-believe lances and swords because he had read about “brave men and of Mohammedans and Christians” (Croswell 1898:254).

In an 1898 survey of 1,929 boys and girls in Worces-ter, Massachusetts, Croswell surveyed 1,000 boys and 929 girls to identify their favorite toys and games (Croswell 1898). Croswell’s study identified over 700 different kinds of amusements, all of which required very little, if any, formal materials to use. Informal toys and games were most popular with children. Among boys, Croswell found that ball games were most pop-ular, followed by marbles, sledding, football, and tag, while girls liked dolls, sledding, jumping rope, tag, hide and seek, and ball games (Croswell 1898:326). Mechanical and clockwork toys and banks, masks, and other items discussed here are not among the top 25 favorite activities or toys in any category.

A similar pattern was revealed by Zach McGhee’s 1900 survey of 3,958 boys and 4,760 girls aged 6 to 18 in South Carolina. Nearly 70 percent of the boys in McGhee’s study listed baseball as their favorite form of play, followed by football, swimming, marbles, and chase games, while the girls, like their Northern coun-terparts in Croswell’s study, liked to play dolls and jump rope, clapping and rhyming games, and croquet (Mergen 1982:69; Van Rheenen 2010). The rolling hoop, a metal (and later wooden) band taken from an old barrel and propelled along with a stick or baton, was held in high esteem by both boys and girls, and mention of them is found in a number of children’s journals and photographic portraits from the period (Calvert 1992:115; Figure 6.1). Period photographs of children also show them holding dolls, carts, toy boats, and other objects, but the researcher is hard-pressed to find any period photograph or even adver-tising image of children playing with a clockwork fig-ure or mechanical bank, racialized or not.

THE CHILD'S VIEW 79

So what did Victorian children do for fun if they were not playing with mechanical toys and paper masks? Croswell’s study is instructive here, as dolls, marbles, and games that would not leave material traces were most popular. There was, of course, much variation in preferences for certain games and toys in Croswell’s survey. Some children indicated that they preferred play-ing alone or with toys and games that were not com-petitive or physical, whereas others liked the noises and tactile sensations provided by some toys. In a section of Croswell’s study examining reasons for using/not using certain amusements, however, several children, especial-ly older ones from ten to fourteen years of age, noted that they preferred games over toys, largely because they could play with other children. An eleven-year-old girl noted that she had no favorite game, and played “games with the other children whether I like the game or not”; a thirteen-year-old boy said he played games he liked “when the other boys want to”; an eleven-year-old boy answered that he liked “marbles, ball, top. I don’t know why I like to play those best”; there was also the eight-year-old boy who liked to play with tops because he could hit other boys’ tops and break them (Croswell 1898:353–354). Competitive games such as tag, jump-ing rope, ball games, and races were popular as well (Figures 6.2–6.5). Croswell’s findings about preferenc-es for games and toys that involved other children were corroborated by contemporary observers in other geo-graphic areas (Babcock 1888; Clark 1897; Newell 1903; Roof 1917; Figure 6.6).

Figure 6.1. Illustration of girls with rolling hoop helping “Hunchback Jim,” the titular subject of an accompanying sentimental poem about a crippled man, “ever gentle in his troubles and resigned to Heaven’s will,” who worked to support his ailing mother and held the affection of all the children (Barnett and Gregory 1882:124–125)

Figure 6.2. Girls jumping rope, ca. 1900 (Photo courtesy of the Power-house Museum)


Figure 6.6. Group of school children playing a ball game (foreground) and ring game (background), Parma, New York, ca. 1900 (Photo courtesy of the Monroe County Public Library Division of Local History)

Figure 6.3. Stereoscope image of a game of hopscotch, 1891 (Photo cour-tesy of the Library of Congress)

Figure 6.4. Stereoscope image of a game of leap-frog, ca. 1890 (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress).

Figure 6.5. Stereoscope image of a game of marbles (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress)

THE CHILD'S VIEW 81

Toys were sometimes used in novel ways that their adult creators never intended, and children were quite inventive in devising their own toys, one of which was the aforementioned rolling hoop. One girl and her friend pricked rubber balls with a pin and filled them with water to spray unsuspecting victims, while another child punched out the tops of fruit and vegetable cans to make play money, and still others used the natural world to make their playthings, such as the ubiquitous mud pie and the venerable stick (Chudacoff 2007:84–94). Many expensive and elab-orate toys were not played with at all. One woman remembered that while she had owned a stylish and expensive imported wax doll, her favorite toys were simple rag dolls she had made. The rag dolls were more durable and conducive to indoor and outdoor play, as opposed to her doll from London “that lay in waxen state in an upper drawer at home—the fine lady that did not wish to be played with, but only looked at and admired” (Calvert 1992:113). Owning expensive store-bought toys was also a poor gauge of a child’s happiness. One man, the child of wealthy parents, recalled that he did not have fond memories of his childhood, and that he was often bored de-spite his large collection of fantastic and lavish toys (Ganaway 2008:377).

Nor did all adults agree on the worth of mechani-cal toys. As we have noted, considerable ambivalence existed toward increasing mechanization in the Vic-torian period, and these reservations extended to the playroom as well. No doubt that while many con-sumers were entranced by the “ingenious mechanics . . . evidenced in various automata . . . the result of only mechanical ingenuity, wrought out by mechan-ical science and the marvelous handiwork of man” (George 1869:306), other commentators were less effusive in their praise. Some pointed out the “inge-nious mechanics,” themselves made by machines, were liable to break when a curious child wished to discover how his mechanical plaything moved, but more troubling was the belief that these toys fostered an insatiable sense of novelty that would only end in disappointment, and that the mechanical toy itself would be discarded after the novelty of watching it had passed (Waits 1992). Nonetheless, judging by

their great variety and popularity into the present day, mechanical toys were (and are) enthusiastically welcomed into the home by parents and children.

Children were also aware of the deep gender di-vide in Victorian society, especially for what was con-sidered acceptable play behavior for boys and girls. One girl observed that for boys, “their whole world was filled with doing, doing, doing, whereas [girls’] was made wholly of watching things get done,” and some girls rebelled by destroying their dolls or using them as weapons to attack boys (Chudacoff 2007:88; Wilkie 2000).

Conclusion

Social systems do not exist apart from the patterned social practices that make them up, and social prac-tices are reproduced by the recursive reenactment of them, and exist in time and space as they are put into action (Sewell 1992:6). As we have noted, toys are dialogues of control and resistance between children and adults (Baxter 2006a; Wilkie 2000). Toys from the Victorian period were meant to teach the values and morality so prized by genteel Victorian soci-ety. These values formed the basis for middle-class social and cultural capital, and racialized toys were one means by which the middle classes generated symbolic capital. Social capital constitutes the actual or potential resources that can be gathered that will legitimate social order, and include family names, class or clan affiliation, or lineage. Social capital is dependent on the constituent base of a socially de-fined group (Orser 2004:134). Capital is intimately connected with social fields, the objective and lived spaces of social practice in which the middle and up-per classes could impose these values and their mate-rial correlates on subordinate African American and immigrant groups.

While the production of racialized toys was but one strategy (out of many) to socialize children, the corollary to this is examining the likelihood that this opportunity will in fact be mobilized, and, more to the point, be successful in socializing children. Learned dispositions do not necessarily govern all human action, and may be pushed into the back-


ground in situations where codified rules govern practice, and so those learned dispositions are best deployed in situations where the principles guid-ing those dispositions are weak or nonexistent, and where the learned dispositions govern action (Orser 2004:132, 140; see also Barton 2013). As the dom-inant producers of both racist ideologies and the means of production to put them into material form, the ability to both mobilize racist ideologies and put them into a readily consumable material form was one strategy out of a number of other social and eco-nomic strategies by the middle and upper classes to maintain their dominant position over the “Other” (Orser 2004:136–140).

Victorian American culture contained strongly de-lineated conceptions of gendered social roles infused with a set of cultural motifs, strongly tinged by a unique sense of moral urgency based on personal virtue, tireless work ethic bound up in the institutions of the church, capitalism, and didactism that left little room for those groups who would not or could not accept it (Yue 2009). From an early age, boys and girls were prodded through the toys they were given and the forms of play that were enabled by these toys. As one contemporary writer noted, “The boy who has a toy gun marches and drills and camps and fights many a battle before the real battle comes. The little girl who has a toy stove plays at building a fire and putting on a kettle long before these real responsibilities come to her” (Harrison 1891:16).

As we have seen, it would be wrong to assume that Victorian children always, if ever, followed willingly the path shown to them by their parents. In this re-gard, it can be difficult to describe the meaning a me-chanical bank or clockwork toy or board game had for a particular child, especially if the toy is no longer in its original historical context. Certainly most chil-dren played with the toys they were given according

to parentally approved ways of playing with them, and it is likely that most internalized the gender roles those toys and games suggested. Undeniably, many of our present-day views of children and childhood stem from these older Victorian ideas. Yet Victorian children, despite their parents’ best efforts and finan-cial expenditure, were not passive consumers of adult beliefs and attitudes.

Toys and children are prominent components of the archaeological and historical records, and toys must be viewed as more than idle amusements, and instead as a dialogue and often locus of conflict be-tween parents and children, and between children and their peers. Victorian toys were an attempt to instill order within boys and girls, ensuring that they would become model, moral individuals who knew their respective roles, as well as the roles and place of the “Other” in society. As objects specifically created for children, the racialized toys discussed here highlight the power of material culture to reflect, constitute, and continually act in the recreation of society. These toys are simultaneously objects of fun and amusement for children and adults, material manifestations of a certain kind of domination of subordination arising from a particular historical context under a particular set of social circumstances, mediators of dialogues on race and class, and (re)creations of the principles and social structures that gave them meaning and made their manifestation possible. These toys are all these things and more. Though they lacked the agency of the flesh-and-blood people they portrayed, these toys employed their own unique form of practice to shape children’s play. Underneath it all, however, racialized and ethnic toys of all types and from all periods of time say much more about the adults giving the toys than the children who received them.

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A B O U T T H E AU T H O RS

Christopher Barton received his Ph.D. from Temple University in Philadelphia in 2013, and is an instructor of anthropology at the University of Memphis in Tennessee. He is a historical archaeologist interested in the materiality of race and class. Barton is the supervis-ing archaeologist at the African American community of Timbuctoo in Westampton, New Jersey, and is the author of numerous works addressing the archaeology of race and community outreach.

Kyle Somerville received his Ph.D. in 2014 from the University at Buffalo in New York, and is principal investigator at Powers Archae-ology, LLC in Rochester, New York. His research projects include examinations of faunal exploitation by Iroquoian groups in New York State during the prehistoric and Contact periods, as well as the study of rural household consumption in western New York. Somerville is the author of numerous works focusing on zooarchaeology, industrial archaeology, and the archaeology of children and childhood.

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