Through the Looking Glass, Down the Rabbit Hole, and Into the Deep End

At least that’s how it felt to me as I began a research project that led to my writing Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America.

After I’d retired from 40 years as a professor, I turned to what I thought would be a small project, one I’d wanted to do all my life: a small intimate portrait of a side of my family about which I knew next-to-nothing.

(Interviewing People Who Don't Want to Be Interviewed.)

All through my childhood, the idea for the book was sitting right in front of me. Literally. When I was a boy, there was a photograph on the piano in our living room. It was of an older man with Shirley Temple sitting on his lap. “To Barbara,” it said, “with love from Shirley Temple and Uncle Morris.” (My mother’s name was Barbara.). Okay, I knew who Shirley Temple was, but who the heck was “Uncle Morris?” And what was he doing on my piano?

It turned out Uncle Morris was Morris Michtom, the inventor of the Teddy Bear, the Shirley Temple doll, and countless other toys made by the Ideal Toy Company, which was, in the 1950s, the largest toy company in the world. I was always curious about this side of the family (from which we were largely estranged) and so I started this small project by interviewing surviving family members, poking through their file cabinets, and reading a small cache of letters and documents that survived the sales and dissolution of the company in the 1980s.

I suppose this happens to a lot of writers as they begin a project: You ask yourself a question and it leads you down a path you never anticipated, where you feel totally inadequate to answer, and you realize you can either continue and see where it leads or abandon the project. For me, the question was, “Who else was creating and manufacturing toys at the same time as the Michtoms?”

To say I knew nothing about the history of the toy industry in the early 20th century would be a massive understatement. And since there is no definitive history of the industry, I had to start piecing it together. What I found stunned me: Not only Ideal, but pretty much every single major American toy company in the early years of the 20th century were run by first-generation Jews, the children of impoverished Yiddish-speaking immigrants. Mattel, Hasbro, Lionel trains, Marx, Pressman—and all through the century!

The toys were created by these first-gen Jews, distributed by companies run by first-gen Jews and sold in department stores founded or run by largely German Jews of an earlier era (Gimbels, Macys, Abraham and Straus, Bergdorf Goodman, FAO Schwarz, Toys “R” Us). It was as if every famous toy of the century—Barbie, GI Joe, Mr. Potato Head, Rubik’s Cube, Mr. Machine, Chatty Cathy—was Jewish!

And don’t get me started on all the novelties, independently created toys, candy makers, parenting magazines, and even carousel horses! Once I started down that path, I was stunned—truly stunned—by how extensive was the influence of these first-gen Jews in the creation of the material culture of childhood in the 20th century. From the comic strips like Li’l Abner, Joe Palooka, Popeye, Betty Boop, to virtually every single comic book superhero, to a pantheon of authors of children’s books, and finally from the pioneers of the century’s new field of developmental psychology, the presence—no, the dominance—of first-generation Jews is incontestable.

Now I was truly out of my depth. Racing—to mix a metaphor—to get up to speed in a dozen different subfields, I realized there was a canvas much more vast and complex than anything I had imagined.

But I’m a sociologist by training, and so there was another question constantly nagging in the back of my head. Why was it these poor children of Yiddish-speaking immigrants? Why here in New York (mostly)? Why them? Why then? I felt I couldn’t just enumerate all these creators, writers, artists, and entrepreneurs. I needed to try and explain it.

After flailing about for a couple of years I came up with what I think is a partial explanation. It was a combination of several factors. Many had tried to enter established professional fields and were excluded because of anti-Semitism. For example, most of the comic book artists and writers had wanted to go into advertising, then a WASP-dominated white-shoe profession, but couldn’t get in. So there was a drive for assimilation, to gain a foothold in the new country in a new century, and there was the familiar roadblock of anti-Semitism, and so they needed to figure out alternate paths to express their creativity and ambitions for upward mobility.

That only begs another question: Why stuff for children? Why not Chinese laundries, Italian masons, Irish police and firefighters? I think these Yiddish-speaking immigrants also had a different idea of childhood itself from the prevailing Puritan ideas that socialization basically meant breaking the will of the child, to make them more obedient and docile. To these Jews, childhood was precious, and children were curious and creative and needed a more loving family life. It was not mere coincidence that these ideas, carried in beat-up cardboard suitcases with the menorahs and prayer shawls, happened to dovetail so perfectly with the new Progressive ideas about education. Right place, right time, and right people to seize the opportunity, to see a niche opening right before their eyes. If the 20th century was to be the “century of the child,” then someone had to cater to it.

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