The Junior Literary Guild and the Child Reader as Citizen

Abstract

The study of American children's literature has recently turned toward institutional histories of editing, publishing, and distribution, represented by Leonard S. Marcus's Minders of Make-Believe (2008) and Jacalyn Eddy's Bookwomen: Creating an Empire in Children's Book Publishing, 1919-1939 (2006). 1 Notably, neither of these good accounts discusses the Junior Literary Guild (JLG), the most important children's book club from its founding in 1929 until the mid-1950s, when it turned its attention to serving libraries. The purpose of the present essay is to introduce the JLG into institutional histories of children's literature and to situate it within the social concerns of the afterglow of the Progressive Era. While the JLG was successful at developing and maintaining a constituency for its wares partly because it addressed structural weaknesses in distribution within children's publishing, it also negotiated and often reconciled an array of contradictory ways of framing the child reader as potential citizen. At a time when parental and institutional control of children's cultural consumption was in flux owing to new standards of child rearing and the appearance of new media that threatened reading's centrality, the JLG suggested how institutional control might foster reading as preparation for citizenship in a democracy by addressing such questions as the following: Is the reader solitary or part of a community? Should children exercise choice in their reading or should it be exercised for them? Should children read at will and primarily for pleasure, or is reading best understood, in the language of the day, to be personally or socially hygienic in some fashion? The JLG constructed a board of selectors and an advertising rhetoric that allowed it to insinuate itself between parents and children on the one hand and the newly professionalized supervisors of children's read- ing—librarians—and their clientele on the other. We might expect the commercialization of expertise to arouse opposition from constituencies