Jack Benny and American Radio Comedy (Part 4)

One of my Black students recently told the class that he assumed any media product to come up before the 1960s (and in some cases, well after) was problematic in terms of the racial dynamics between white and Black characters. What might surprise him about the relationship between Jack Benny and Rochester?

 Let me first say that I, as a white cis woman in 2021 can’t presume to speak for anyone else, present or past, for how they might interpret such things as interracial relationships on an old radio comedy program, then or now, given that the commercial network radio system 1930s-50s was so completely dominated by white corporate power.

Back in the day, there was a range of interpretive positions that listeners of color might take (that could provide some interesting context for listeners today). Many African-Americans in the 1930s refused to listen to network radio, as almost no programs included black artists. (White actors routine spoke in ‘verbal blackface’ to voice small roles). When Eddie Anderson won the new, continuing role on the Jack Benny Jell-O comedy program in 1938 (one of the highest rated/most listened to shows on the air,) there was great interest in him and the show from the black community. The Chicago Defender and other African-American newspapers started carrying radio schedule listings, and they called the show the Rochester program with Jack Benny.

Rochester was wildly popular with both white and black listeners, for different reasons. African American listeners could enjoy the character’s sharp wit and puncturing of his boss’s ego (Rochester called his employer “Boss” more often than “Mr. Benny”, which was a small victory towards parity in the workplace). White listeners could feel that Rochester was “safe” as a servant eternally tied to housework. In my book I describe how Benny’s writers saddled the Rochester character in the first several years with belittling stereotypes (gambling, drinking, calling attention to his skin color, etc.).

But by World War II, Anderson’s character solidified a major continuing role and gained more autonomy to criticize the “boss.” Scripts allowed him to further develop his personality. Anderson simultaneously starred in several of the big-budget black cast musicals released from the Hollywood studios (such as Cabin in the Sky) as well as virtually co-starred in three very profitable Paramount films with Jack Benny. 

After World War II, the younger generation of African-Americans grew increasingly impatient with the lack of progression in black representation on network radio and television. They expressed great frustration with roles limited to valets and maids and waiters, and that spilled over to anger at the older black performers who enacted these roles. Eddie Anderson got caught in the middle of this cultural change. His Rochester character in the latter radio years and throughout Jack Benny’s 15 years in television shared a remarkably intimate and convivial relationship with “the boss,” and their repartee is truly hilarious.  Some have described their relationship as like the “Odd Couple” of later TV fame, two older men sharing the house and Rochester being like a domestic partner as well as Jack’s sharpest critic.  Eddie Anderson, because he did few other performances apart from the Benny programs on his own in the 1950s and 1960s (ill health curtailed his career), has not been recognized sufficiently as a superb comic performer who brought a unique voice and sense of timing to amplify his continuing role in Benny’s narrative world. 

 I’d like to mention several other authors who have done marvelous work exploring the historical constraints and cultural contexts in which African-American performers at mid-century worked –

Petty, Miriam J. Stealing the show: African American performers and audiences in 1930s Hollywood. 

Savage, Barbara Dianne. Broadcasting freedom: Radio, war, and the politics of race, 1938-1948. 

Watts, Jill. Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood. 

I especially point readers and scholars interested in the African-American actors’ experience in radio to this fabulous unpublished study ----  Edmerson, Estelle. "A descriptive study of the American Negro in United States professional radio, 1922-1953." MA thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1954. Edmerson undertook extensive interviews with black performers, and this report is a treasure. It is difficult to access, however, being available only on microfilm through interlibrary loan, but I have made a digital version that I can share with those who contact me. 

  Benny, like many of the comedians of that period, was Jewish, yet this is played down on the program. Can you speak about the ways that ethnic humor operated on the program? Was Mel Blanc (or Mr. Kitzel) there to deflect attention away from Benny’s own ethnicity. I just heard an episode where the Benny cast imitated the folks on Allen’s Alley to great effect and it really called attention to the more subtle ways that ethnicity was dealt with on the Benny show.

I am indebted to Holly A Pearse’s essay “As Goyish as Lime Jell-O?: Jack Benny and the American Construction of Jewishness,” which has helped me better understand Benny’s approach to ethnic representation in his own performance. Unlike many Jewish comedians who were raised in the densely-populated immigrant ethnic enclaves of New York City and the East Coast, Benjamin Kubelsky grew up in Waukegan, Illinois, the son of a Lithuanian Jewish barkeep and haberdasher in a relatively small industrial town an hour north of Chicago which had multiple ethnic groupings but only a small Jewish population. Renaming himself Jack Benny, as a performer, sought to emphasize a Midwestern white identity. He almost never incorporated Yiddish words or phrases into his vaudeville or radio performances. 

 There were long traditions of ethnic performance in vaudeville, of course, in which performers either exaggerated their own identities or took on ethnic costumes and language as part of their act. Historians have described how what Robert Snyder called these “voices of the city” brought constructed stereotypes (always a mix of benign and harmful) of Irish, Scotch, German, Italian, Greek, Scandinavian, Russian and other white immigrant ethnicities (as well as Black, Latino and Asian) to audiences in cities and towns across America. Humor involving these ethnic characters both reinforced stereotypes for audiences as well as sometimes made them seem part of a rich, vibrant American “melting pot.”

 Radio inherited these approaches to representation of ethnicity from vaudeville. It seems that radio broadcast creation, with cost limitations on production on the one hand, and freedom to imagine characters (from the audience point of view) on the other, used ethnic voices quite frequently.  In a storytelling world constrained by lack of visual cues, voice accent, tone and inflection carried a great deal of weight. Without other ways of distinguishing between different characters at the microphone, ethnic accents added an all-too-easy differentiation. I believe that in the case of Jack Benny’s early radio broadcast years, his writer Harry Conn often turned to ethnic voices among the supporting cast members to yield a quick laugh at the difference they represented from Jack’s midwestern voice. Conn used German, Yiddish, Greek or Scottish voices for bit players in Jack Benny’s skits.  After Conn left the program in 1936, these ethnic voices were not used very often by the new writers (Morrow and Beloin) who chose to use the regular cast members more intensively. 

 It seems that Jack Benny and his writers offloaded Jewish identity onto a pair of part-time cast members over the course of his radio career. In the 1933-1936 era Jack Benny used comedian Sam Hearn to voice the character of Shlepperman. Shlepperman was a Jewish immigrant with city smarts and a heavy Yiddish accent. In the skits in which he appeared, he usually poped in towards the end for a surprise twist, in places where he was unexpected.  Hearn did not want to relocate to California when Jack moved the radio show to Hollywood, so the character faded out.   

Kathy Fuller-Seeley is the William P. Hobby Centennial Professor of Media Studies in the Radio-TV-Film Department at the University of Texas at Austin; her research specializations are in US radio, film and TV history. Recent publications include: Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy (California 2017);“Archaeologies of Fandom: Using Historical Methods to Explore Fan Cultures of the Past,” in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (Routledge 2018); and (edited) Jack Benny's Lost Radio Broadcasts, Volume One: May 2 - July 27, 1932 (BearManor 2020).

The Mr. Kitzel character was added to the Benny radio program in 1946, a time when interracial and inter-religious tolerance was being promoted by progressive groups. Kitzel was first encountered on the Benny program selling hot dogs in the stands at the Rose Bowl football game. His call of “pickle in the middle and the mustard on top” gained notice in popular culture. Kitzel was the opposite type of character than Shlepperman – a naïve and gentle greenhorn, a barely assimilated Jewish immigrant who constantly misunderstood Anglo American culture and who transposed Anglo names into Yiddish idiom.  Jack Benny encounters him in brief interchanges – Kitzel does not become a fully integrated cast member.

Kitzel’s character is similar in ways to Mrs. Pansy Nussbaum, the Jewish housewife character Fred Allen incorporated into his “Allen’s Alley” radio skits from the early 1940s until his radio show ended. Both transpose Anglo-American words and names into Yiddish sound-alikes, in ways that emphasize their lack of American knowledge on the one hand, but I suppose make the listener laugh with kindness and perhaps pity rather than contempt for their lack of understanding. Social critics in the latter 1940s lodged complaints about the stereotypes at play in both these characters, but Allen and Benny both defended their creations, emphasizing their universal humanity and the opportunities they offered to laugh at human frailty.

 Henry, you mention Mel Blanc’s characters on the Benny radio and TV program, that’s interesting. Only some of Blanc’s vocal inventions were ethnic characters (I am thinking Polly the Parrot, Carmichael the Bear, the Maxwell’s sputtering engine, the train announcer sending people to Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga, the English race horse, etc.). Other characters, however, had strong ethnic identity. Professor Le Blanc the violin teacher shared Jack’s whiteness. However, the Mexican character Mel played, who answered only “Si, Sigh, Sew, and Sue” to Jack’s queries about his family and occupation, have garnered substantial criticism in the years since the skits were aired for their ugly stereotyping (similar to Blanc’s voicing of the Speedy Gonzales in Warner Bros. cartoons of the same era. 

 Snyder, Robert W. The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York. 

Pearse, Holly A. “As Goyish as Lime Jell-O? Jack Benny and the American Construction of Jewishness” Jewish Cultural Studies (2008) 272-290,

Jack Benny and American Radio Comedy (Part Three)

Another striking feature is the way that Benny’s program interacts with other contemporary series -- the various spinoff series featuring Dennis Day, Fred Harris, and others, or the role that the Colemans perform on the show. What factors made these kinds of intertextual connections possible?

Well, we see plenty of spin-off programs today on network TV, cable and streaming, between a dozen versions of NCIS, or Young Sheldon or r Frazier reboots, etc.  Marketers might call it “brand extension,” a way of giving consumers plenty more of what seems to be popular at the moment.  But using existing product ideas to fill the schedule, instead of gambling on a new and untried narrative idea, has a long history. These kinds of spinoffs happened fairly frequently back in network radio programming days, as The Great Gildersleeve show, for instance was spun off from Fibber McGee and Molly, and I believe Beulah was spun off from Gildersleeve. The sponsors who provided the production money for radio programs were conservative and looked for “sure bets,” or already-familiar performers, characters and situations that could almost be guaranteed to draw a fairly large and loyal audience.  Radio critics in the 1940s complained constantly about the lack of innovation in radio. A half dozen other radio comedy programs borrowed heavily from Jack Benny’s format (such as those starring at one time or another Jack Carson and Groucho Marx and Bob Hope).

So, it was not unexpected that every major character or performer from Jack Benny’s program was tapped by bright advertising executives who pitched spin-offs to sponsors. A Day in the Life of Dennis Day turned the Dennis character into a small-town soda jerk.  The Phil Harris and Alice Faye Show turned Phil from a drunken lout into a devoted father with loutish band members. Former tenor Kenny Baker was back on the radio in Glamor Manor. There was even a Mel Blanc show, that did not have a strong premise, and did not last long.

I happen to be a fan of The Halls of Ivy,(NBC radio 1950-1952) the gentle sitcom-like program starring movie star Ronald Colman and his wife Benita Colman. Colman had been reluctant to appear on Jack Benny’s radio program in 1946, worrying that it was beneath his dignity and afraid of failing as a comic performer.

The Colmans were a marvelous counterpoint to Benny’s social faux-pas, and quite a hit on appearances on Benny’s show. They were convinced to try a show of their own.  It turned out to be a popular show and extended his career. He plays the president of a small college, and Benita carries over her character from the Benny show appearances as the level-headed spouse who solves many of their daily problems. 

 The most unfortunate attempt at Benny radio show spinoff, in my opinion, was a program for Eddie Anderson, called The Adventures of Rochester.  Franco American spaghetti was pitched a daytime, 15-minutes program in early 1950 that took the marvelous Rochester character and regretfully removed everything interesting about him; the existing pilot episodes turn Rochester into a gullible and not very bright fellow who is the constant victim of the get-rich schemes of his feckless friends. The show turns Rochester into a hapless “Amos” character from Amos n Andy.  Just as well that the sponsor ultimately turned down the opportunity.  There are reports in the radio industry trade press that Anderson had originally hoped to pitch a daily 15-minute program called The Five O’Clock Shadow that would have his character parody private eye who-done-its. It’s a shame that this project did not find a sponsor, but a forthright African-American lead character, even with a Benny-show-pedigree, was probably too progressive in terms of racial representation for conservative sponsors to be brave enough to back.  (my book pages 178-179)

The real hallmark of Benny’s interactions with other programs was his ongoing feud with Fred Allen. Here, listeners went back and forth between the two shows as the comics threw insults at each other, and Benny developed a mean impersonation of Allen’s nasal voice. What can you tell us about the circumstances around which this interplay was allowed on radio?

Jack Benny and his writers crafted many superb running gags and recurring comic situations, some of which played out over a few episodes and some which cropped up time and again over the years. One of the longest running, and a favorite with Benny fans, is his feud with fellow radio comedian Fred Allen, which lasted from late 1936 up to Allen’s death 20 years later.  The genius to its longevity and popularity was that the contexts in which it played out changed over time. Celebrity feuds are a kind of easy, gratuitous laugh-getter for comics. They tend to get boring pretty quickly if there is not ingenuity in the writing behind it. Readers today might consider the current Jimmy Kimmel-Matt Damon mock feud, or the way that Jerry Seinfeld’s TV character could say “hello, Newman,” with all the pretend-hate in the world distilled into it. The Bob Hope/Bing Crosby frenemy [friend-enemy] rivalry that made their “Road to…” movies so popular also made feuding work in the 1940s. On the other hand, in my book I talk about the insult humor popular in various cultures, particularly between groups of young men. Throwing “the dozens” back in the 1930s and 1940s is not distant from comic rap battles today, and some of the fun of the Benny-Allen feud comes from their creativity and ingenuity in creating topper insults. Allen was much better at adlibbing than Benny, who occasionally would howl wishing that he could get even “if my writers were here.”



Radio lore claims that the Benny-Allen feud started accidentally with an ad-lib. On December 30, 1936, Fred Allen’s show, which broadcast from New York, featured amateur performers, and Allen had 10-year-old violinist Stuart Canin on the show. Canin played a marvelous version of Shubert’s short composition “The Bee,” and won prize money for being on the program. Allen supposedly adlibbed that the boy played much better than Jack Benny. I believe Allen broadcast on Wednesday evenings, Benny on Sunday. It was not that next Sunday, but several weeks later, that Allen repeated the insult, Benny’s cast members did their usual work of insulting their boss by noting Allen’s quip. Benny shot an insult back east across the ether waves, and from January through early March 1937, there was a radio ratings bonanza as millions of radio listeners tuned in each show to see what new cracks would fly. 

Fred Allen crashes Jack’s stage show in NYC in 1947, terrific and only 3 minutes long

Fred Allen show, where Jack Benny crashes the show and becomes “King for a Day”, its terrific!

Benny show, how Benny and Allen met Jan 15 1950

Benny’s side of the jokes were pretty tame, he made fun of the bags under Fred Allen’s eyes. Allen, who did most of his own writing, each week would add a few new insulting jokes to his already-prepared script at the last minute. Truly, listening to the feud is not all that hilarious, there were some “hits” and plenty of “misses” in the attempts at humor. But radio performers talking about each other, (or throwing guff at each other) had been generally frowned upon by the program sponsors, who were loath to give free advertising to any other company during the airtime they paid so dearly for. Ratings for both the Benny and Allen comedy shows shot to new highs during these weeks and there was tremendous coverage of the uproar in newspaper radio columns, and lots of talk about it in popular culture.  Benny brought his radio cast east to New York for a March 14 show, and the feud came to a climax with a live broadcast from the Waldorf-Astoria. To me the denouement was a bit of a letdown, the two went into another room, and came back singing a snarky song about friendship. 

What I learned in my research, from lots of digging into the columns of radio journalists, that in 1937 it was supposed to be kept “top secret” that the feud was actually manufactured by a fast-thinking advertising agency account executive   Don Stauffer. His company, Young & Rubicam, held both the Benny and Allen radio show accounts (Jell-O and Sal Hepatica, a particularly awful tasting antacid). When Stauffer heard Allen make the Benny comment, he pitched the idea of a mock feud to the two comics, who agreed to do it. The public was supposed to think it was a product of Benny and Allen, but increasing ratings and getting lots of free publicity had a lot to do with it.

Stuart Canin is still with us at 94, and he recently gave a marvelous interview at a Jack Benny convention that I will link to. I enjoyed getting to ask him if the people in his neighborhood heard him on the air and listened to the feud’s progress and he said yes indeed. 

That should have been the end of the feud, as I mentioned it was getting a bit tiresome (as some newspaper radio reviewers noted). But here is where long public memory, and the smart comic twists and Benny and Allen and their writers (long after the Young & Rubicam agency ceased to their listened producers) gave the comedians the later laughs. 

Paramount film studio contributed to the new chapters in the feud, as the movie executives had signed Jack Benny to a film contract, and very much wanted to translate his radio stardom into film stardom. (two wonderful books Catherine Jurica’s Hollywood’s Greatest Year 1938, and Susan Ohmer’s George Gallup in Hollywood provide the background to Hollywood’s slump and looking to the rival medium for new star power). Paramount hired film director Mark Sandrich away from RKO (he had become famous making the Astaire/Rogers musicals), and gave Sandrich the assignment of making Benny a top box office star. Sandrich decided that the way to do that was to craft a film around Jack Benny’s radio personality, and his cast members, making a kind of visual version of the radio show (grafted onto some typical music and dance numbers featuring pretty chorus girls). Sandrich had brought Benny’s hugely popular cast member Eddie “Rochester” Anderson into the first one, a sleeper hit in June 1939 titled Man About Town.

Sandrich then upped the game in April 1940’s “Buck Benny Rides Again” by incorporating the comic insults of Benny by Fred Allen, Allen’s voice emanating from a radio. Another huge box office hit resulted. Sandrich made a third film co-starring Benny and Allen, using the Feud as a take-off point for a bunch of slapstick blustering.

The resulting comedy, Christmas 1940’s release “Love Thy Neighbor” is really a dreadful film, Allen is clearly miserable and the slapstick is forced, and even Rochester has little to do in it. Nevertheless, the film made oodles of money for Paramount. And Stuart Canin appeared on stage in New York at the film’s premiere and was awarded a big scholarship for his future study of music. Sandrich then pleaded to move on to something else, and he created hit films with Bing Crosby. 

During World War II, Jack Benny travelled extensively to put on episodes of his radio program at US military training camps across the US during the prime-time network season, and then Benny toured with USO troops to North Africa, Europe and the Pacific in the summers. Everywhere he went, soldiers greeted Benny with homemade signs touting the feud, making playful insults about Benny or his rival Allen. I mention this just to demonstrate that the feud remained in enlisted men’s memories and it gave them pleasure to hope for a frustrated reaction from their beloved comic Benny. (Allen appeared in the early 1940s as a guest panelist on the delightfully erudite quiz show “Information, Please” and host Clifton Fadiman always asked him questions snarky questions about Jack Benny, another way outside their own programs that the popularity of the feud continued. (Allen, however, had serious health issues that took him off the air for most of the War. He was able to return in late1944).

The most successful way (in my opinion) that the Benny-Allen feud remained evergreen was in the ways the two comics worked it into occasional show narratives in the post-World War II years. Allen appeared as a guest star on Benny’s radio program ten times between 1944 and spring 1953 (second most frequent guest after stuffy British actor Ronald Colman and his wife Benita, another excellent example of a continuing narrative gag). Along with devising his famous “Allen’s Alley group of quirky ethnic characters who responded comically to his interview questions, Fred Allen also had a running gag on his own show of a campaign to “Bring Back Vaudeville,” enlisting Jack Haley and other old variety stars in satirical sketches on the craziness of entertainment in the old days.  When Allen came west to Los Angeles to appear on Benny’s radio program, the episode’s narrative would often revolve around Benny and Allen being asked to reminisce about their early days in vaudeville – how did they form the ideas for their acts, how did the two performers meet, how did one ask the other for advice on becoming a star. Benny and Allen would tell Rashomon-like substantially different versions of the same memories. They worked in references to the oddest acts in vaudeville – Fink’s Mules, Swain’s Rats and Cats, Japanese “flash” acts in which performers (tucked into barrels) would be tossed in the air by the acrobats who were lying on their backs, using their feet. Fred Allen took great delight in the opportunity that gave him to make jokes about Benny having to look out the “bung hole” of the barrel. Benny and Allen playfully insulted each other and fashioned a great deal of funny material that mixed nostalgic with the snark.  

Kathy Fuller-Seeley is the William P. Hobby Centennial Professor of Media Studies in the Radio-TV-Film Department at the University of Texas at Austin; her research specializations are in US radio, film and TV history. Recent publications include: Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy (California 2017);“Archaeologies of Fandom: Using Historical Methods to Explore Fan Cultures of the Past,” in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (Routledge 2018); and (edited) Jack Benny's Lost Radio Broadcasts, Volume One: May 2 - July 27, 1932 (BearManor 2020).

Jack Benny and the History of Radio Comedy: An Interview with Kathy Fuller-Seeley (Part Two)

One of the shifts I observe is a change from the focus on performers to characters. Even the announcer and the members of the band become characters without losing their ability to function in their more traditional roles. The development of bandmembers as characters looks forward to late night television, for example.

 I think that you are absolutely right, Henry, that the Benny radio show (and his TV years) lend themselves to connections to late night talk-show television in the vein of Johnny Carson’s “The Tonight Show,” and all who have followed him. Johnny moving from his opening monologue to ritual kidding of the announcer/second banana Ed McMahon, to making jokes about the bandmembers, to interweaving interviews with guests, with occasional comedy commercials and short humorous skits involving Carson himself. Carson always spoke about his huge admiration for Jack Benny and Fred Allen as mentors for comedy writing and performance. Carson’s alma mater the University of Nebraska has even digitized Carson’s senior thesis, a 45-minute audio presentation that he made in 1949 on Benny and Allen in radio comedy, “How to Write Comedy for Radio.” It’s worth a listen. 

 How might you compare the relations of Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone to other husband-and-wife comedy teams, a tradition best remembered today in terms of Burns and Allen, but wide spread in vaudeville and radio comedy?

I think that the Jack Benny/Mary Livingstone duo offered radio listeners in the 1930s a different “twist” on the typical husband and wife pairings of radio and film (more like a serial continuing of a combative comedy relationship than devoted marital bliss).  Mary (Sadye Marks Benny) joined the Benny/Canada Dry radio program July 27 1932, after its first 13 weeks on air, as a young woman from small town New Jersey who had a crush on Jack the radio performer. In the next 3 months they flirted and even eventually professed their love for each other (as is detailed in a new volume of published scripts from these “lost broadcasts.”) But Benny and his writer Harry Conn, found they felt that they had just written the show’s narrative into a corner, so they shifted gears and retreated -- Mary remained on the show as Jack’s pseudo-secretary handling fan mail, but they did not date further. From 1933-1938 or so, Jack and Mary were among the top couples in radio broadcasting (as described in the radio fan magazines, who lavished detail on their new California home, their married relationship off-mike and adoption of their daughter Joan), However on the air Mary was limited to being known as his dimwitted heckling sidekick. When singer Kenny Baker joined the program in 1937, Benny and Conn made his character oafish, and consequentially, the Mary character became sharper in her criticisms of Jack’s foibles. When Eddie Anderson as the Rochester character joined as Benny’s valet and home companion in 1939, Mary’s character became more independent and acid-sharp in her comments. The Jack/Mary relationship (IMHO) was something like the sparring of screwball comedy films in which the female is the smart puncturer of the pretentions of the male boasting windbag. Yet the Benny show radio narrative never comes to the conclusion of coupling at the altar and taming of the woman. The Mary character becomes more distant and brittle in the 1940s (which has something to do with Mary Benny’s own increasing anxiety in front of the microphone) and faded out in the early1950s on the radio, replaced by the close relationship between housemates Jack and Rochester. She would appear only rarely on Benny’s television program, limited to a few times in the mid-1950s when the shows were filmed instead of live.

It’s worth noting that in the 1930s, there were not many radio comedy “married couples” to emulate (the idea that we get from sitcoms from the 1950s onward). While there were talkative husbands and wives in the morning breakfast programs. and in the afternoon soap operas, but there were few in the randy world of radio comedy.  In the 1930s, George Burns and Gracie Allen’s characters (who appeared as a team in vaudeville, radio and film) were NOT written as married. Gracie chased after men in a crazy desirous way, while George wryly commented on her transgressions. Radio fan magazines meanwhile presented a different narrative, providing lots of detail about their happy private married lives and the children they adopted. It was only in about 1940, with their radio ratings slipping, that George and Gracie changed their radio narrative and had them become a married couple. They felt that listeners felt they had “aged out” of accepting them in the dating age, and being a married couple refreshed their humor, for years to come. Fred Allen and Portland Hoffa were also featured in the radio fan magazines as a top radio comedy couple, but she always played the role of a 13-year-old fan visiting the show (which led Fred to make occasional wry commentary about what the censors would do with dialogue about them staying in hotels together).

Among the domestic radio comedies of the 30s and 40s,” Fibber McGee and Molly” were perhaps the most prominent married couple on radio in its “golden age”, with Fibber getting into trouble with some crazy get-rich scheme and redoubtable Molly responding with an “Oh, Dearie.” “Vic and Sade” and the “Easy Aces” were also married couples on radio traversing domestic issues.

“The Goldbergs” and “Amos n Andy” also of course joked about married life, but not in the way we think of in terms of male-female comedy teams. The “Ethel and Albert” 15-minute daily program written by Peg Lynch in the mid-1940s, was among the very first domestic narratives to be labelled as a “situation comedy” by radio critics (John Crosby and Jack Gould), along with “Life with Luigi”, “My Favorite Husband” (starring Lucille Ball in a role similar to her TV work) and the hugely popular “Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.”

For contemporary consumers, even for many in the advertising industry, the ways that the concept of integrated advertising is often a surprise. What are some of the ways that Benny and the others in the cast engaged with the sponsors around the program? How might we compare these approaches to more contemporary forms of product placement?

Commercial advertisements were the absolute bane of radio for listeners from the 1920s through the 1950s. (Fifties television inherited that same annoying structure). Bleating, blaring, loud and noisy commercials that listeners could only avoid by switching the set off or twisting the dial were the heavy price American audiences paid for “free” entertainment. Kathy Newman has charted the wide public outrage and campaigns mounted by consumer groups and federal agencies to try to limit the incessant ads. Cynthia Meyers examines the huge role ad agencies played in adapting print advertising to the aural medium, creating and formatting the American system of radio broadcasting, and its creation of program content as well as ads. 

Jack Benny found himself between these two forces, trying to cajole audiences to tolerate the ads and wrestling with ad agencies and sponsors for the creative freedom to have the commercials in mid-program not constitute such a jarring disruption. I think this is a particularly “fun” media industries research topic, as Jack Benny quickly became known in ad agency circles as the “best salesman” in network radio. His first three sponsors, on the other hand, were appalled at Benny and writer Harry Conn’s attempts to combine humor and advertising, and each sought to fire him. I am currently publishing the scripts from Benny’s first 2 years on radio (which do not exist in recorded form), and even reading the Canada Dry commercials that Benny and Conn wrote is slightly shocking and hilarious. The upper-crusty “champagne of ginger ales” was connected with cannibalism, torture, and illegal liquor consumption. The company was horrified and wanted to fire Benny immediately, but their ad agency N.W. Ayer&Sons noted all the positive mail they were receiving, with delighted listeners complimenting the humorous ads. 

In Fall 1934, Benny’s liberal sprinkling of jesting Jell-O references into his new show took a declining old grocery product and turned it into one of the largest-selling packaged foods in America, launching a pop culture phenomenon. Ironically, General Foods wished to move him out of Jell-O to sell the much more mundane Grape Nuts cereal in 1941, but Benny was having such fun with gelatin jokes that he refused to go. Only sugar rationing at the start of World War II and lack of product on the shelves forced Benny to switch products, and he soon parted ways with the corporate sponsor. 

Benny and his writers tackled a huge challenge with the program’s new sponsor in 1943, Lucky Strike cigarettes. Lucky Strike commercials were infamous as the most obnoxious of all American radio ads, the very essence of “irritant advertising.” Company president George Washington Hill insisted on the horrific, shouted prattle, claiming that even if listeners hated the commercials, they definitely remembered the name of the product.   In my opinion, Jack Benny and his writers worked a miracle – they devised a new addition to the comedy program in 1946, a comedy singing quartet supposedly managed by announcer Don Wilson, whose job it was to sing a popular tune with lyrics adapted to tout the praises of Luckies. The Sportsmen Quartet were brilliantly insane -- manically energetic and always losing control in a chain-reaction musical crash of whoops and hollering, causing Jack to lose his temper and scream at them to stop. The pandemonium was one of the first new comic inventions network radio had seen in several years, and critics and audiences adored it. What I appreciate about the Sportsmen’s commercials is that their song lyrics take the same obnoxious advertising slogans heard at the start and end of each Benny show (LSMFT!) and turn them into gibberish. Apparently, GW Hill thought the comedy commercials were fine, as he was pleased to see his ad slogans repeated (Hill died soon afterwards, but his minions allowed the Sportsmen to continue.) Perhaps audiences found the songs and performances to be a kind of delicious nonsense that took some of the sting out of the obligatory “irritant” ads. 

All throughout Jack Benny’s radio career, he and his writers took the sponsor’s product and turned it into joking by-play that was thoroughly enmeshed in the show’s narrative; the products became comic elements of the show through repetition and playing up the enjoyable part of drinking soda pop or eating fruity gelatin desserts (or even smoking). Ad executives at various times tried these same tactics with other products and other performers, but failed again and again. There was some kind of alchemy between Benny’s mode of comedy and the products he was asked to promote.  I am not sure, that as hard as any advertiser might try, that a similar convivial integration could ever happen today in media – perhaps we consumers are far too cynical now to put up with it. But I do have a CD in my car with Sportsmen’s comedy commercials clipped from Benny’s shows, that I listen to when I want to sing along and laugh.

Meyers, Cynthia B. A word from our sponsor: Admen, advertising, and the golden age of radio. 

Newman, Kathleen M. Radio active: Advertising and consumer activism, 1935-1947. 

 Kathy Fuller-Seeley is the William P. Hobby Centennial Professor of Media Studies in the Radio-TV-Film Department at the University of Texas at Austin; her research specializations are in US radio, film and TV history. Recent publications include: Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy (California 2017);“Archaeologies of Fandom: Using Historical Methods to Explore Fan Cultures of the Past,” in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (Routledge 2018); and (edited) Jack Benny's Lost Radio Broadcasts, Volume One: May 2 - July 27, 1932 (BearManor 2020).

Jack Benny and American Radio Comedy: An Interview with Kathy Fuller-Seeley (Part One)

 When I was in middle school, there was for a brief time an amazing radio station in Atlanta that was totally programmed with classic radio comedy and drama, which sent me down a rabbit hole trying to learn everything I could about old time radio. Ever since, I have been a fan. Witness my earlier post celebrating the wonders of the Columbia Radio Workshop and my discovery of the OTRCAT website where you could find full runs of vintage series at 5 bucks a disc, This past year, I have fallen down that rabbit hole again because of the number of shows that can be found on podcasts. Somehow vintage Dragnet, Lux Theater, Damon Runyon Theater, and Jack Benny show, among others, have put me to sleep during the pandemic, My interest in Jack Benny goes back to middle school but has taken on renewed interest since I moved to the Eastern Columbia Building in Downtown LA, just a few doors down from the May Company where Jack met his future wife, Mary Livingstone, and the home of a department store which many fans believe is where Jack went Christmas Shopping in a famous episode of the series.

For Christmas this year, among other things, my wife gave me a copy of Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley’s Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy, a wonderful book which provides the historical context I needed to listen to the great Jack Benny and Fred Allen episodes with a new level of appreciation. She offers so many different frames for understanding the historical importance of the program in terms of its place in the evolution of radio comedy, in historical representations of race and gender, in terms of cross-overs between radio shows and in terms of the comedian’s relationship with his sponsors, all important insights into American cultural history and in terms of what they teach us about the evolution of American radio. Because of my great love of this book, I reached out to its author, who is an old friend, and asked if she would agree to be interviewed. She has shared some rich tidbits from the book here, but if the is of interest, you will want to read the whole book.

Classic radio comedy and drama has been a neglected topic in media studies for a long time but we are starting to see more scholarship in this space, including your book. What factors are contributing to greater scholarly interest in these vintage radio programs?

That’s a great question, Henry, and I have a shorter answer, or a longer one that could become a 30-page lit review, haha. My views might be quite idiosyncratic, as I was trained in a history PhD program in the late 1980s, versus a media studies program, and of course I have opinions that might differ from others!

My work stands, of course, on the shoulders of giants. Within media studies, the formative books in the US radio history field have come from Michele Hilmes and Susan Douglas, (the former first investigating the ways Hollywood interacted with radio, the latter coming from a technological history background to chart the formation of early radio broadcasting).  Erik Barnouw published his epic trilogy on broadcasting history in 1966-70. 

The only claim I might make is that my book is the first academic book to take a sustained look at Jack Benny’s radio career. I learned so much about him from Hilmes, Douglas and Barnouw. Because of their examples and their mentorship, there is now a vibrant field of radio history and radio/audio-media studies. Increasing interest in historical and contemporary comedy and humor studies, in media studies and American Studies, is also encouraging scholars to study outstanding performers of the past.

Why nobody had tackled the topic of Jack Benny before was a mystery to me, but perhaps it was due to commercial network radio being even more of a “bad object” to US media scholars than television. (The British could at least be proud of the BBC). Jack Benny was US radio’s most iconic performer, so perhaps he shouldered that burden of not being worthy of discussion. Radio’s ephemeral nature, existing only as audio, and broadcast live by the networks back in its “golden age,” meant that many media scholars, drawn to the visuality of film, overlooked radio.

US radio seemed (to most critics) completely compromised by corporate control. The dominance of two networks, the “sameness” of top-rated radio programs (dominated by a small handful of comedians and singers from 1932-1955), the overwhelming prevalence of commercial concerns through advertising and the control of programming by advertising agencies and sponsors, all kept scholars away. The paucity of substantial critical radio criticism until after 1946 (when John Crosby, Jack Gould and others) did not help.  And the lack of extensive official collections of recordings and contextual documents (apart from the amazing NBC collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society) make studying US radio history a huge challenge. 

However, there has long been a parallel stream of US radio history research that comes from US history, American Studies and history of technology, areas that have studied radio broadcasting as a major mid-20thcentury cultural and political force. (topics include FDR’s fireside chats, the propaganda of Father Coughlin and Huey Long, ethnic radio in Chicago, Amos ‘n Andy, Fred Allen, radio’s role in World War II,etc.) Historians are often immersed in paper archives, so a lack of actual broadcast recordings did not totally deter them, as they delved into scripts, corporate, government or personal archives and technical documents. 

Fans and collectors of what became known as “Old Time Radio” also played a significant role in enabling the study of radio history. As Nora Patterson’s research shows, it was the work of fans from the 1930s to the 1970s (continuing today with the wonderful International Jack Benny Club and other organizations and individuals) diving into dumpsters to retrieve transcription discs, creating and sharing taped versions of old shows, that created program archives. Old radio shows, broadcast live, were almost never “re-run,” and recordings of programs were not officially kept by the networks or sponsors, or often even the performers. Fans over the years assembled checklists of programs, located rare recordings of rehearsals and repeat performances for the West Coast, and through their passion for the old shows, made a substantial chunk of old radio accessible to listeners today (and now programs are increasingly available in digital format). I was fortunate when studying Jack Benny’s radio program (encompassing over 900 episodes across 23 years) that about 700 recordings have been assembled by fans. My other contribution to Jack Benny research has been to labor to make the other approximately 240 episodes for which there are no recordings (Benny’s early formative years 1932-1935) available published in script form, dug up from the Benny papers at UCLA. The scripts are fascinating to read.  See Jack Benny's Lost Radio Broadcasts, Volume One: May 2 - July 27, 1932 (by Jack Benny and Harry Conn, edited and with introduction by Kathy Fuller-Seeley) Bear Manor, 2020.

If you want a brief bibliography of some of my favorite classic US radio history books, it would include, these, plus others I have mentioned in subsequent responses….

Hilmes, Michele. Radio voices: American broadcasting, 1922-1952.

Hilmes, Michele.  Hollywood and Broadcasting

Douglas, Susan. Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination   

Douglas, Susan, Inventing American Broadcasting

Barnouw, Erik. A History of Broadcasting in the United States: 1. A Tower of Babel: to 1933. Vol. 1. 

Barnouw, Erik. A history of broadcasting in the United States: Volume 2: The golden web: 1933 to 1953.

Barnouw, Erik. The Image Empire: A History of Broadcasting in the United States, Volume III--from 1953. 

 Havig, Alan. Fred Allen's radio comedy. 

 Ely, Melvin.  The Adventures of Amos n Andy

 Cohen, Lizabeth,. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago

 Wertheim, Arthur Frank. Radio comedy. 

 Horten, Gerd. Radio goes to war: The cultural politics of propaganda during World War II. 

Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, & the Great Depression. 

Lenthall, Bruce. Radio's America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture.  

I am of course very interested in the transition which Jack Benny makes from vaudeville to radio. What are some aspects of vaudeville that stay with him and what needs to be shed as he makes those adjustments?

 In the book I talk about Jack’s earliest episodes of his radio program in May 1932, and it seemed to me that, at that moment,  he had not really thought through how radio was going to be different from vaudeville. Jack had been on the vaudeville stage since age 16, as he moved around the small time Midwestern circuits being a violinist who interjected a bit of musical humorous byplay into his performances (first with a partner, but after World War I as a single). He learned how to perform comedy lines during his time in the Navy, participating in a variety show for charity. By 1920, he played the violin less and began talking more. In the mid-1920s he rose from regional circuits to top national vaudeville houses. Benny began to model his routines on those of the newer “suave” comics like Frank Fay, who wore fine evening dress and spoke directly and informally to the audience, telling tales and stand-up jokes (and in Fay’s case, slaying any hecklers in the audience).

Frank Faye

Jack Benny followed Fay’s career path to become a prominent (albeit much better-liked) “master of ceremonies” at the legendary Palace in New York and in top vaudeville theaters across the US.  Benny now was a genial “Broadway Romeo,” a middle-class white Midwesterner with almost no references to ethnicity in his jokes or tone of voice, well-dressed, mild-mannered, but still the fellow for whom things always go wrong. As “MC” Benny interacted with the other acts he introduced, and he told his stories standing at the front of the stage. 

That was the character Jack Benny brought to radio. What he had NOT counted upon was how much new material radio demanded at each performance. No longer would one well-crafted 17-minute monologue last an entire year as Benny traversed the country from week to week across the vaudeville circuit. His material was eaten up in a single performance, broadcast to a national audience.   For the Canada Dry radio show, Benny needed to provide about 15 minutes of comic patter between the songs played by George Olsen’s band and sung by former Ziegfeld Follies chanteuse Ethel Shutta (Olsen’s wife).   I write in my book that Benny, panicking after his fourth bi-weekly radio appearances, had run through all his best material. Benny had always been dependent in vaudeville on comedy writers to help provide him material that he would then personalize and hone. Now he hired a full-time writer, former vaudevillian Harry Conn, and the two of them started crafting a kind of comedy that moved away from Benny simply performing monologues, and brought in the best of his Palace Theater-like exchanges with the other program members. As the band and singer remained the same each week, Benny and Conn crafted radio personas for them too, and Jack interacted with them in increasing amounts of dialogue. Then Benny and Conn began to interweave skits and film parodies and visiting guests, and began to turn the show into what was something like a workplace situation comedy.  Only the upheaval of changing to new sponsors and casts four different times kept that format from becoming more ingrained into the program until 1934.

Henry’s question had been about Jack Benny’s vaudeville routine. If we were only to look at Benny’s radio career, we would think that he left his vaudeville format behind in 1932. However, all throughout this period Jack continued to appear as MC and performer at vaudeville-like stage shows at the biggest picture palaces across the land, and at state fairs or other major events.

During World War II he took his stage shows to military camps in the US and overseas with the USO.  When Benny finally capitulated in October 1950 to travel to New York to perform a live television program, he reverted back to appearing before a small studio audience, standing on stage before a curtain. In a way, Benny returned to his vaudeville MC roots for television, mixing talk in front of a seated audience with staged skits involving guest stars and his radio regulars.  As Benny’s television program in the 1950s and 1960s became more structured like a situation comedy, he took his vaudeville format to Las Vegas and successfully performed there into the 1970s. Vaudeville monologues never really ended for Jack Benny, they just moved to other places. 

Jack Benny’s program lasted for several decades on radio and then on television. What are some of the ways that they were able to keep this program fresh for audiences over a duration that would be unheard of in contemporary television (with perhaps the exceptions of Saturday Night Live or The Simpsons).

The reasons for Jack Benny’s longevity in show business are many. One is character – Benny’s own comedy persona, a likeable everyman, and a person listeners and viewers could both relate to and feel superior to  – he’s the eternal loser, a classic schlemiel in Yiddish comedy. The other comic characters he surrounded himself with were memorable, a group of quirky friends, each with flaws, but an ability to get along with the rest. 

 Another is the large collection of staple comedy bits -- Benny’s writers created a large number of comic routines, scenes and interactions that could be endlessly recycled (comfortable familiarity) but also slightly twisted or tweaked each time to make it seem new or refreshed. Benny and his writers were wise to never lean too hard on any one character or routine, so that the audience might tire of them from repetition. A character could not have a major role for weeks, and then when the character returned, it was like they had never left. Superb writing and terrific comic performances played a role. 

 The pseudo-situation comedy format that Benny and his writers devised on radio also was especially flexible, and so perhaps listeners did not tire of it as quickly as a more limited program structure. Benny always said he wanted to do many different kinds of shows to provide variety, and a radio episode could be the running of the radio program, another might take place right after the show ended or beforehand during rehearsal. The gang could go off on an adventure together (like a multi-episode trip to Yosemite). The whole episode could take place at Jack’s house involving Rochester and domestic issues. Or a guest star would interact with Jack. Or the cast would perform a parody of a current film. Radio’s ability to take the performers to any location made this much easier (there were not costs to build sets or create costumes). Benny’s television programs by the mid-1950s would often be more limited to his home place, or the TV studio stage from which he gave his opening monologues. 

 It’s worth mentioning that one reason for Benny’s longevity was that radio sponsors and networks in the 1930s, 40s and 50s were far more willing to continue an existing show that earned adequate ratings/listenership. There was less competition for audiences between rival shows broadcast at the same time, and conservative sponsors were convinced to deepen connections between their star performer and the products they wished to promote. Starting in the 1960s on network television, production became so expensive, and the race to get high ratings was so heated, that programs did not have the luxury of developing over several seasons, and shows were cancelled if they did not immediately become hits.  

Kathy Fuller-Seeley is the William P. Hobby Centennial Professor of Media Studies in the Radio-TV-Film Department at the University of Texas at Austin; her research specializations are in US radio, film and TV history. Recent publications include: Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy (California 2017);“Archaeologies of Fandom: Using Historical Methods to Explore Fan Cultures of the Past,” in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (Routledge 2018); and (edited) Jack Benny's Lost Radio Broadcasts, Volume One: May 2 - July 27, 1932 (BearManor 2020).

Just a Spoonful of Sugar: Permissive Childrearing and Walt Disney's Mary Poppins (Part Two)

Last time, I shared the first part of my reading of Mary Poppins from my book in progress about children’s culture from 1948-1968. As I hoped, I have already gotten some great responses. 

Alex Halavais posted “Kid’s Carnival” on his blog, which is well worth reading.  He writes about “the inversion of power: kids being kids without the pesky interference of grown-ups” in children’s media, an important theme which he especially explores through the example of Pippy Longstockings. He concludes about the absent parents in children’s fictions, “we don’t know how to write good parents. It isn’t easy to do. “  

But one of the striking things about the period I am studying is that there was often an effort to depict good parents in part because these stories were aimed as much at adults as at children and because they written in response to an explosion of new advice literature for Baby Boom era parents that could not avoid the challenge of discussing what good parents did. John Watson gets picked on a lot because he was so stuffy about the relations of parents and children. But there wer many more books after the war addressing these questions and most of them sought to imagine new kinds of relations between adults and children, an issue which was understood in part through the lens of anti-fascism. I will trace in this book how attitudes emerged through the Child Study movement of the Poogressive Era that would become much more widespread by the 1950s and 1960s, popularized by Benjamin Spock, but actually shaped by the thinking and advocacy of many female writers of the period. Early on, I define this discourse, which I label with many qualifications, as permissive.

Permissiveness:

• uses empathetic reflection to “take stock” and attempt to understand children’s motivations and drivers 

• values children’s sensuality, curiosity, push for independence, passion, playfulness as part of how they process the world 

• seeks to protect the rights of children to find their own voices, to pursue just solutions, to engage democratically with others in their own community

• Offers opportunities for children to achieve catharsis by working through emotional conflicts via expressive means, such as drawing pictures, writing stories, acting them out using dolls or other household materials.

• Seeks to minimize conflict by decreasing the use of authoritative statements in favor of discussions and explanations 

• seeks indirect rather than direct means to shape children’s characters 

• Is known for what it permits and accommodates rather than what it disciplines, constraints, limits and thwarts 

• gives children security and freedom to work through their own problems, watches from distance, provides resources when needed 

• embraces play as a mode of learning and as a means of communication, especially between parents and children

There are some permissive era works -- Peanuts for example -- which depend on the absence of adults, but there are many more which explore, as Mary Poppins does, the reformed relations between parents and children. And as this definition suggests, permissiveness involves more than just a shift in the authority structure of the American family.

On Facebook, Patrick Herron notes: “Reminds me of Lakoff's description in "Don't Think of an Elephant" of “strict father morality” (conservative) and “nurturant parent morality” (progressive) political frames.” This is a good point and one could argue that these distinctive ideological formulations, both of which model the American public on the structure of the family, came from the debates I am mapping here. The backlash against permissiveness has been a hallmark of conservative thought, which stresses a more discipline-centered family and dismisses engagement with children’s emotional development as producing “sniwflakes.” Both the left and the right map their aspirations for the nation onto their ideas about family life, which is the reverse side of what Lakoff is discussing.

Thanks to both for provoking further reflection through thoughtful critical engagement with the work. I welcome further such comments, since it’s going to be a while before I can send out this work for peer review and since I am not yet getting invites to give public talks on this project.

Now, back to Mary Poppins…

Poppins’ approach is perhaps best summed up by the lyrics of “A Spoonful of Sugar,” which she sings as she is encouraging the Banks children to put away their toys. A disorderly nursery was one of Watson’s  pet peeves:

“Children with toys all over the floor do not have time at the end of the day to clear them all up carefully -- handle them gently and stack them away in order. You buy a toy box but the toys are dumped in by the armful and thrown about the room at random the next day until the child comes upon the one he wants.” (142)

. Watson encourages parents to take out only one toy at a time and replace it before offering another.

Mary Poppins, however, approaches the problem in her own distinctive way:

In ev'ry job that must be done

There is an element of fun

You find the fun and SNAP!

The job's a game

and ev'ry task you undertake

Becomes a piece of cake

A lark! A spree! It's very clear to see, that a...

Spoonful full of sugar helps the medicine go down

The medicine go down

The medicine go down

Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down

In a most delightful way 

Mary Poppins issues no commands but rather she offers an invitation. She redirects their attention, using pleasure (the sugar) to inspire them to embrace the desired task and by the end of the song, the children do not want to stop, even to go on an outing. She has, in true permissive fashion, made cleaning the room into a game rather than a chore. Sugar (Mintz, 1985) was indeed a magic substance in the post-war period, added to breakfast cereals to insure that children ate them, used as a reward for good behavior in the form of suckers or candy canes at the dentist or the barbers, and resulting ultimately in a generation which was highly susceptible to childhood onset diabetes and cavities. Later in the film, Mary Poppins will get the children to take their medicine by customizing its flavor to their individual tastes: strawberry for Michael, Lime Cordial for Jane, and Rum Punch for herself. 

Mary Poppins’ mastery over child psychology is also suggested by another number where she gets the children to go to sleep by suggesting the exact opposite:

Stay awake, don't rest your head

Don't lie down upon your bed

While the moon drifts in the skies

Stay awake, don't close your eyes

Though the world is fast asleep

Though your pillow's soft and deep

You're not sleepy as you seem

Stay awake, don't nod and dream

Here, again, she does not need to issue orders, she doesn’t turn bedtime into a struggle and she does not demand that they sleep on a schedule,  but simply waits patiently for what Dreikurs describes as “logical consequences” to unfold. As Jean Webb (2002) notes in regard to the novel, Mary Poppins, as an “educator,” refuses to answer children’s questions and rarely offers direct morals, letting children make discoveries on their own as a consequence of the remarkable experiences she offers them. She exposes the Banks children  to other worlds rich in laughter, imagination, and creativity, teaching them to listen to other voices (whether those of Chimney Sweeps and Bird Ladies or a neighboring dog). When she does deliver messages, they are messages that Mr. Banks might respect, but they are often presented by Julie Andrews  in a teasing fashion. 

The book has no real equivalent to the “Spoonful of Sugar” or “Stay Awake” scenes, one of the many ways that the story was reconceptualized for a 1964 audience. There is an interesting sequence in the book, though, where Michael does naughty things all day, more or less, without any conscious motivation: 

“Michael woke up one morning with a curious feeling inside him. He knew, the moment he opened his eyes, that something was wrong but he was not quite sure what it was…. Throughout the rest of the day nothing went right with him. The hot, heavy feeling inside him made him do the most awful things, and as soon as he’d done them, he felt extraordinarily pleased and glad and thought out some more at once.” (Travers, 1934, 81, 83). 

Mary Poppins seeks to redirect his behavIor through one of her outings -- in this case, a trip around the world where he encounters stereotypical representations of various races (no doubt the reason the scene is not in the film -- another example of where racist representations are excluded but alternative ones are not provided).  In the end, she needs to settle his bad feelings with a glass of milk and a few moments of her affectionate attention:

“She stood there without saying a word, watching the milk slowly disappear. He could smell the crackling, white apron and the faint flavor of toast that hung about her so deliciously...And he thought how warm he was and how happy he felt and how lucky he was to be alive.” (Travers, 102)

There is no suggestion that this “naughty” boy needs to be disciplined. Rather, whatever bad feelings within him must be displaced by the good feelings that can only be generated through loving care. And, even if these ideas will be more fully elaborated through the film’s musical numbers, this structure of feeling points towards the permissive paradigm as it will be more fully articulated by postwar writers like Dreikurs.

Disney’s Mary Poppins is, in the end, structured around the project of “saving Mr. Banks,” helping the father to develop a more constructive relationship with his children. No such plot exists in Travers’ original novel, where, as Webb (2002)  suggests, the focus is on helping the children, “Travers is implying that the demands and stresses of capitalism separate the middle-class Banks family from the enjoyment and wonder of childhood, despite their desires.” (116)  Mr. Banks, whose name defines him through his job, must make a similar discovery in the film when he brings his children with him to his workplace. Despite his efforts to teach them the virtues of capitalist empire building, Michael refuses to give over his tuppence as a deposit, wanting instead to make a compassionate gift to the Bird Woman outside the Cathedral. When the children’s disruptions result in a run on the bank, the father faces the threat of being fired by the institution he cherishes so much. By this point, he has also found his home in a state of anarchy, overrun by soot-covered Chimney Sweeps, and in the aftermath, he has a conversation with Bert about the importance of spending more time with his children. Again, using reverse psychology, Bert tells him:

 When your little tykes are crying, you haven’t time to dry their tears and see those grateful little faces smiling up at you…. You’ve got to grind, grind, grind at that grindstone though childhood slips like sand through a sieve. And all too soon, they’ve up and grown, and then, they’ve flown and it’s too late for you to give. 

Dick Van Dyke plays Bert as an adult who has remained in touch with his inner child, who remains imaginative, playful, and jocular, who finds creative expression through his work, who understands the emotional life of children, and who still maintains the ability to speak to the adult world. In this scene, he becomes a translator between Mr. Banks and his children, helping him to take the “bitter pill” of adult life with “a spoonful of sugar.” Mr. Banks retains his dignity and maturity throughout the scene but at the bank, the father seems to internalize the other man’s anarchic spirit:  laughing, telling jokes, rejecting the dignity and decorum expected of him. The moment is rendered all the more ironic by the fact that Banks -- reverting to a boyish state -- confronts Van Dyke as  another character: the ancient bank president, who embodies the fossilization of the capitalist patriarchy.

Everyone is convinced that he might try to kill himself without the job that has defined his life, but instead, they discover he has been working in the basement, repairing the children’s kite, and he takes the children and their mother in tow to the local park, where everyone decides to fly a kite:

When you send it flying up there

All at once you're lighter than air

You can dance on the breeze

Over houses and trees

With your fist holding tight

To the string of your kite

Only then, when the children care more about their father than they do about their nanny, does Mary Poppins make her departure, flying off into the sunset, like the gunman at the end of a classic western film, having set things right within the Bank’s household. Julie Andrews play a remarkably similar plot function the following year in The Sound of Music, where as the nanny, Maria, she transforms the Van Trapp household, which was run with military precision and discipline, into one full of song and rich in emotion, as the father learns to play and in this case, perform with his children.

The persistence of such narratives suggests how deeply grounded these conflicting patterns of child-rearing were in the culture of the 1960s. It was as if the whole culture was rediscovering the pleasures of childhood play -- of turning bread and water into tea and cakes, as Bert describes it -- and the importance of fathers spending more time with their families.

Perhaps they were.

Just a Spoonful of Sugar: Permissive Childrearing and Walt Disney's Mary Poppins (Part One)

I have described my current book project as “my second childhood book,” since it is the second book I have produced about children (following The Children’s Culture Reader) and since it involves a return to core texts which helped to define my own childhood growing up in America in the 1960s. I started this book more than twenty years ago but life got in the way and in any case, I am much better situated to write this book now than I could have then.

I am roughly half-way through writing it, so it is still several years away, but I wanted to share a bit of a sneak peak with readers this week, hoping to solicit some feedback on the core argument I am making about a paradigm shift in how different generations understood the role of parenting.

Here, I am painting with broad strokes but my research has found the roots of permissive parenting in the progressive era and the work of the Child Study movement, led by mothers and female researchers who formed an alliance to try to reform and reimagine the American family. I hope to share some other bits of this work in progress as the writing takes shape.

This segment comes at the end of the introduction and as its title suggests, explores the ways competing ideas about parenting run through Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964) which as it happens is the first film I remember seeing in a cinema.

Just a Spoonful of Suger

Across this book, my approach is to situate some of the most popular children’s fictions of the era in relation to the debates around child development and psychology that preoccupied my parent’s generation, seeing the first as implicitly and in some cases explicitly addressing the concerns of the later. What advice, for example, would Dr. Spock have given to the parents of Dennis the Menace or how might Margaret Mead made sense of the imaginary worlds depicted by Dr. Seuss? 

By children’s fictions, I mean fictions for and about the nature of childhood regardless of the medium through which they are told. I am suggesting some vital connections between these two expressions of ideal parenting and childhood. These links may or may not have been fully understood by the works’ creators. In some cases, there was direct contact between child-rearing advocates and children’s media-makers; they shared the same publications; they worked in the same organizations, and in some cases, the creators actively participated in the child study movement and shaped their works to reflect pedagogical insights. Yet, even here, keep in mind the various agents who process such works between their site of creation and their site of reception. Margaret Mead (1954b) makes a similar point in Childhood in Contemporary Cultures, where she describes an experiment -- “Modern Children’s Stories”-- which sought to create a children’s book to reflect insights from the Child Study movement: 

It became increasingly clear that, after all, five-year-old children don’t buy books and that the children’s needs or preferences had to be mediated by layers of other people -- mothers, fathers, grandmothers, aunts, librarians, publishers, bookstore buyers, experts -- all of whom had a full quota of fears and hope and a much more substantial quota of firmly entrenched values and prejudices than the children for whom the story had been designed …. The cultural process by which artists and writers, sensitive to changing values, prefigure those values in their work and the guardians of public taste and morals accept and reject what they produce had proved to be too complex and sensitive for such self-conscious activity. (455). 

This is what Jacqueline Rose (1984) described as the “impossibility” of children’s fiction -- such works tell us far more about adults, their values, their aspirations, their emotional needs, than such stories tell us about children’s actual experiences.

Just as child-rearing advice needs to negotiate the transition from prewar and postwar paradigms, the creators of children’s fiction similarly had to negotiate around the persistence of genre conventions, the assumptions of gatekeepers, and the biases and tastes of parents and grandparents. Consequently, we can assume that there will be residual elements at play in even the most progressive children’s texts -- some nostalgic tug towards earlier versions of proper parenting and idealized childhood. At the same time, the works discussed here made it through all of those filters and into many American households, showing some “fit” with the values with which parents were raising their children. 

Childhood in Contemporary Cultures models how cultural analysis might address such problems. Mead and Wolfenstein (1954) explain, “Songs and stories, pictures, dances, and theatrical shows are among the gifts which a child may receive from his culture.” (231) These works are ways that the culture transmits its most cherished values to the next generation. These texts tell children how adults view them, how they are meant to behave, what risks and opportunities the world offers them, and how they should feel about their circumstances. These “gifts” in many cases are literal -- these materials are things adults offer to children as treats or rewards, or at best, they are options that adults tolerate. Often, also, these are media that adults consume along with their children in the case of film and television and even works that parents read to their children in the case of chapter and picture books. 

In her essay, “The Image of the Child in Contemporary Films,” Wolfenstein (1954) argues that consequently,  media representations of childhood “embody a complex mixture of fantasy and reality… memories and dreams of adults about their own lost childhood, as well as feelings about those mysterious beings, their own children.” (277) If permissive parents no longer believed they could “produce” children according to their own specifications, they did hope to “shape” childhood through the cultural materials they provided to their children.

Though she was writing several years before, Wolfenstein might easily have been describing the emotional trajectory of  Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964). P. L. Travers’ original novel was published in 1934, the film is set in 1910, but in fact, Disney’s movie, from start to finish, pits permissive ideas about child-rearing against more discipline-centered approaches, offering a model for a thoroughly modern upbringing.  If the story, as a recent film reminded us, centers around “saving Mr. Banks,” what he must be saved from are out-dated concepts about child development (which are extensions of his ideas about work that leave him cut off from his own family).

John Watson would certainly recognize the problems the characters confront at the opening of the story, where Mr. Banks advertises in the London Times in order to replace yet another Nanny. Writing in 1928, Watson acknowledges: 

Nurses are the weakest link in infant culture today. They are untrained, green and poorly mannered. They are either bullies or sentimentalists. It is no unusual thing for a home to have a succession of five nurses per year -- nor for a child to have had from 25-40 nurses and governesses from birth to 12 years of age. (147)

The Disney film establishes two very different sets of criteria by which a Nanny might be selected, the first “requirements” coming from Mr. Banks and the other, a contract of sorts by which the Banks’ children describe what they need and how they might curve their misconduct if they receive fair and just treatment.  No such scene exists in the original novel. There, we only learn:

 Mr. Banks went off with his black bag, and Mrs. Banks went into the drawing-room and sat there all day long writing letters to the papers and begging them to send some Nannies to her at once as she was waiting; and upstairs in the Nursery, Jane and Michael watched at the window and wondered who would come. They were glad Katie Nanna had gone, for they had never liked her. She was old and fat and smelt of Barley-water. (4-5)

To understand the contrast between the two approaches as represented in the Disney film,  it might be helpful to consider a chart the child psychologist, Rudolf Dreikurs offered in his book, Children: The Challenge, published in 1964, the same year Disney’s Mary Poppins was released. Here, he maps the difference between two competing paradigms.

Autocratic Society **********************************Democratic Society

Authority Figure  *******************************Knowledgeable Leader

Power                  ********************************* Influence

Pressure             ********************************* Stimulation

Demanding         *********************************  Winning Cooperation

Punishment        *********************************  Logical consequences

Reward              *********************************    Encouragement

Imposition          ****************************   Permit -- Self-determination

Domination        *********************************    Guidance

Children Seen, Not Heard *********************  Listen! Respect the child

Because I Said To   *************************** Because it is Necessary                                                

Now, consider the ways Mr. Banks describes his ideal candidate.

Required. Nanny. Firm, Respectable, No nonsense. 

A British nanny must be a gen'ral!

The future empire lies within her hands

And so the person that we need to mold the breed

Is a nanny who can give commands!

A british bank is run with precision;

a british home requires nothing less!

Tradition,discipline, and rules must be the tools,

Without them,disorder,chaos,moral disintegration;

In short you have a ghastly mess!

Here, and throughout the rest of the song, the key words and concepts -- “precision”, “firmness,” “discipline,” “rules” on the one hand and disorder and moral disintegration on the other -- come directly from the discipline-centered child-rearing advice of the early 20th century.  Ada Hart Arlitt’s The Child From One to Six (1930) warned that the child “will not know that there are laws that govern the universe unless he knows that there are laws that govern the home.” The home was to be regulated not by “mother love” but by the “kitchen time-piece.”  Here, we speak to a core concern of the behaviorist model: the idea that children should be fed and put to bed on a fixed schedule rather than giving over to their demands or desires.

Elsewhere, in the film, Mr. Banks sings, “It's 6:03 and the heirs to my dominion Are scrubbed and tubbed and adequately fed.” The central metaphors running through the prewar discourse emphasize industrial (Or in Bank’s case, commercial) processes. For John Watson, the home was to be run like a taylorized factory. Mr. Banks sums up his desire to prepare children for the competitive environment of British capitalism: “The children must be molded,shaped and taught/ That life's a looming battle to be faced and fought.” 

As in the pre-war models, the best methods for achieving these goals required the father to be the head of the household and for those under his “command” to maintain authority over the young. Like Watson, going hand in hand with this emphasis on patriarchal power within the home is a distrust of maternal sentimentality or what Banks refers to as “the slipshod, sugery, female thinking they get around here all day long.” Banks is portrayed as seeking a polite distance from his children: “I'll pat them on the head And send them off to bed.” Here, Banks follows Watson’s advice on such matters:

“There is a sensible way of treating children. Treat them as though they were young adults… Let your behavior always be objective and kindly firm. Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinarily good job of a difficult task. Try it out. In a week’s time you will find how easy it is to be perfectly objective with your child and at the same time kindly. You will  be utterly ashamed of the mawkish, sentimental way you have been handling it.” (82)

The children’s advertisement represents a profoundly different model of the relations between children and adults:

If you want this choice position

Have a cheery disposition

Rosy cheeks, no warts!

Play games, all sorts

You must be kind, you must be witty

Very sweet and fairly pretty

Take us on outings, give us treats

Sing songs, bring sweets

Never be cross or cruel

Never give us castor oil or gruel

Love us as a son and daughter

And never smell of barley water

The conversation between parents and children models something closer to the family council Dreikurs (1964) describes: “Each member has the right to bring up a problem. Each has the right to be heard. Together, all seek for a solution to the problem and the majority opinion is upheld.” (301) The children assume that they have the right to contribute to solving the problem and that their insights will be helpful to the adults.The children’s attempt to assert their voice in the process is only heard because their mother insists that the parents should listen to what they have to say.

The children’s criteria emphasize an affectionate relationship, the opposite of the anti-sentimentalist approach advocated by Watson and Mr. Banks. If Banks wants a nanny who can give commands, they want one with a “cheery disposition.” She is defined by the ways that she engages with them through jokes, songs, outings, and games, and not through the expectations she places upon them. She is to win their cooperation through what she permits and the guidance she offers. And as if to dramatize this process of winning cooperation, the next verse functions as a negotiation in which the children agree not to misbehave if the nanny agrees to better respond to their needs.

If you won't scold and dominate us

We will never give you a cause to hate us

We won't hide your spectacles

So you can't see

Put toads in your bed

Or pepper in your tea

Here, they hint at some of the pranks that led Katie Nana to flee in horror, describing the Banks children as “little beasts” who need a “ruddy zookeeper.” Instead, they suggest that the nanny’s discipline-centered approach provoked them to act out, a perspective shared by many permissive child-rearing experts. Mr. Banks rejects such values outright, tearing up the children’s advertisement and tossing the bits in the chimney. But when Mary Poppins arrives, she is holding the children’s advert, taped together, much to Mr. Bank’s bafflement and confusion. Her arrival represents an experiment in how a more permissive household might operate.  

"Wish You Were Here": Imaginative Mobilities and Disembodied Intimacy in Postcards (Part Two)

 “Wish you were here”: Imaginative Mobilities and Disembodied Intimacy in Postcards 

by Sui Wang

Disembodied intimacy: a paper encounter 

Epistolary communication has always been concerned with performance and interpretation. The former is expressed through disembodiment from the physical bodies and the latter often resorts to semiotic imagining. “Within a discourse of disembodiment, there is a complex relation between the imagined body of epistolary discourse and the real ‘flesh and blood’ corporeality of the epistolary actors (Milne 7).” The conscious references to the embodiments, combined with the materiality of the epistolary medium, make up for the absence of physical bodies and convey a sense of intimacy, immediacy and presence. There is an old Chinese saying that goes “I could visualize you by seeing your handwriting (见字如面).” It is a common greeting at the beginning of, often times, a hand-written letter, meaning that this letter contains the writer’s spirits. Writing as physical labor requires a presence of body thus gives handwriting the corporeality that enables the readers to conjure the image of people. As a proxy of the sender, the postcard turns into an embodiment, a sign of physicality, and a performed identity with visual and textual cues. 

In the graphic novel Griffin and Sabine, London-based postcard designer Griffin enters into an epistolary romance with stamp illustrator Sabine, who lives on one of the South Pacific islands. Their relationship begins when Sabine sends him a greeting postcard expressing her affection for his artwork. They exchange their thoughts on family, school and art. They also exchange their work -- every card they send to each other is designed or handmade by themselves, so the mass-produced feature of postcard does not apply in their case. Sabine writes in one card with an eye and window: 

“I share your sight. When you draw and paint, I see what you’re doing while you do it. I know your work almost as well as I know my own.” 

Sabine convinces Griffin of the telepathic co-presence through their correspondences, in which she writes about how she knows about his work. Suffering from a lonely soul and a miserable past, Griffin develops an intimacy with this stranger. He replies, 

“I want to hear everything. Write in detail. Tell me all about yourself. I demand to know—please. ” 

Their next correspondence takes the form of a letter, which allows them longer lengths to expound on their life stories. In the letter, Griffin recalls how his parents died and he moved to his mother’s stepsister’s Vereker house. After working under her for three years, he went to art school. When he was about to graduate, he heard of Vereker’s death, which traumatizes him to this day. He adds that Sabine’s correspondence fills the void left by Vereker’s death. It is worth noting that Griffin sees Sabine’s postcard/letter as comfort, company, and an embodiment of her to “fill the void.” Similarly, Sabine develops a yearning for his cards. The postcard exchange facilitates a disembodied intimacy between them, which opens the door for a spiritual communion instead of the face-to-face physical connection. “I have always craved a closeness that I could not find here. Now I feel it with you. My kinsmen are responsive to me—but there is no one to reach my heart, and you who are so far away, have been closer to me than any man on the islands.” 

In this card, Sabine fantasizes bodily proximity with Griffin, while their disembodied encounter makes the proximity ambivalent. After Sabine denies his request for selfie, Griffin comes to a poignant epiphany: Sabine doesn’t exist -- it’s all his imagination. He thus abandons all hope and decides that “I mustn’t write again.” While the previous correspondences confirm their mutual affection, the disembodied nature of epistolary communication eventually endangers their romance and pushes Sabine to make the move. For ages, the fragility and illusiveness of disembodied intimacy have haunted the epistolary romance. In 84 Charing Cross Road, the protagonist, Hanff, had not got to visit the bookstore in person during their twenty-year long correspondence. When she finally visited the place after the owner Doel died, the bookstore was already closed. The same anxiety over authenticity troubles epistolary relationships of today, for instance, email romance and cyber dating. In contemporary cases, there seems to be a lck of any tangible artifact. No postcard, no paper, no handwriting. The material condition has fundamentally changed, hence the reworking of intimacy: people have invented new ways to build intimacy in digital world, which in turn is being tested and performed in a hybrid online-and-offline environment. 

Collectibles in the cabinet 

The postcard has a long shelf life and even longer after-shelf-life. The oldest ones can circulate for decades. Their possible last stop is the collector’s room. Postcard collection completes the cycle of private-public, moving it from the private domain to (quasi-)public exhibit. The life of a postcard as collectible is not completely separated from its life as gift, souvenir or epistolary vehicle. Many tourists send the postcard to themselves or friends for the sake of keeping their collection. A postcard from Chicago in 1908 reads: 

“Dear Elizabeth, 

I owed you a card of Mrs. Palmer’s house knowing you have a collection. It is brownstone however and not this red. We are all well. I suppose father will go to Lake Forest first and after to [Meutor?]. I have enjoyed being at home this winter very much. There is no news. Hope you are all well. 

Yours Nellie.” 

Nellie sent this card to Elizabeth not only for greeting but as a gift for her collection. When a postcard enters into a collection, its textual information and expressivity will be weakened, which shows a process of de-contextualization and de-privatization. As Naomi Schor writes on her postcard collection of Paris: 

“Postcards are organized in series, and their very seriality negates their individual mnemonic properties; what matters in the case of my postcard collection is not the contiguity between an individual card and the environment from which it was detached; rather it is the contiguity I restore between a single card and its immediate predecessor and follower in a series I am attempting to reconstitute, or the contiguity I create between cards linked by some common theme.” (255) 

The fragmentariness of the postcard takes on another layer of meaning. Instead of being an “in media res” of personal narratives, it is put back to a numbered published series. In this case, the “context collapse” does not seem to matter any longer. To be precise, the context is re-invented, or, returns to its barest starting point. In the postcard collection, the visual on the verso often takes the leading role, while the handwritten texts (if there is any) on the recto become the ornamentation. The sides flip again. The postcard regains its commodity value on the collecting market; this time, it is not only a cheap picture carrier, promo card, or a random souvenir that collects dust on the shelf, but a real collectible. Just as the collections of other kinds, the rarity denotes the value of collectibles and the trend keeps changing, responding to the zeitgeist. In this sense, the postcard collection reiterates the previous point on how the postcard serves as “a sign of time”. 

Nowadays, the collecting culture of the postcard is intricately linked with the pen pal community. On the forum of the international postcard association “Postcrossing”, many initiatives of postcard exchanges are for the purpose of collection. By collecting postcards of different places around the globe, the collectors meet new friends, exchange cultural traditions, and curate their typologies of places. “Postcrossing” even has a special section for trading, requests and offers where postcard fiends can specify their needs for cards (written/unwritten, stamped/unstamped, of specific places or themes) and complete their collection. Instead of adhering to the original published order, they can be very creative about their collections in terms of how the cards are picked and arranged. In the postcrossing community, postcard exchanges can fulfill the tasks of greeting, correspondence and trading in a one-time, single move. At the turn of the 20th century, the picture postcard offered a convenient and cheap means for long-distance communication; it brought together families, friends, lovers and strangers, albeit asynchronously. The distance and travelling time have romanticized the sender’s journey, as well as the receiver’s waiting. Its physical weight is light, while cultural weight is heavy. It functions as an epistolary vehicle, aesthetic object, souvenir and collectible. The enmeshed roles render it a cornucopia of meanings and enable it to travel between the private and public domains. Today’s email, mobile message and social media remediate different functions of the postcard, but none of them provides the imaginative mobilities, disembodied but materialized intimacy and curatorial serendipity that the postcard evokes. 

Works Cited 

Baldwin, Brooke. “On the Verso: Postcard Messages as a Key to Popular Prejudices.” 1988. The Journal of Popular Culture. 22: 15-28. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-3840.1988.2203_15.x 

Bantock, Nick. Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence. , 1991. Print. 

Baranowska, Mafgorzata. “The mass‐produced postcard and the photography of emotions.” 1995. Visual Anthropology, 7:3, 171-189, DOI: 10.1080/08949468.1995.9966647 

Belk, Russ W. “Been There, Done That, Bought the Souvenirs: Of Journeys and Boundary Crossing.” 1997. Consumer Research: Postcards From the Edge. Edited by Stephen Brown and Darach Turley. London and New York: Routledge: 22–45. 

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. United States: Prism Key Press, 2010. Print. 

Cure, Monica. Picturing the Postcard. University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition. 

Dotterrer, Steven, and Galen Cranz. “The Picture Postcard: Its Development and Role in American Urbanization.” The Journal of American Culture 5.1 (1982): 44–50. Web. 

Farfan, Peny. “The Picture Postcard is a sign of the times’: Theatre Postcards and Modernism.” Theatre History Studies, vol. 32, 2012, p. 93-119. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/ths.2012.0018. 

Ferguson, Sandra. “A Murmur of Small Voices: On the Picture Postcard in Academic Research”. Archivaria, Vol. 60, Sept. 2006, pp. 167-84. https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/12520. 

Heinrich von Stephan, from an address to the 1865 Austro German Postal Conference, re-printed in Staff, Picture Postcard 44. 

Hoskins, Janet. “Postcards from the Edge of Empire: Images and Messages from French Indochina.” 2007. IIAS Newsletter: 44. 16 – 17. 

Jenkins, Henry. Comics and Stuff. NYU Press. 2020. 

Kelly, Ryan, and Daniel Gooch. “Understanding Participation and Opportunities for Design from an Online Postcard Sending Community.” Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference on - DIS '12 (2012): n. pag. Web. 

Klinghammer, Waldemar. “Eine Reise nach Norwegen und Spitzbergen auf der ‘Auguste Victoria’.” Humoristische Schilderung aus der Kleinstâderperspektive. Rudolstadt: Verlag der Fürstlich priv. Hochdrückerei. 1903. 

Andriotis, Konstantinos, and Mišela Mavrič. “POSTCARD MOBILITY: going beyond image and text.” Annals of Tourism Research 40 (2013): 18–39. Web. 

Laverrenz, Viktor. In das Land der Fjorde: Reisebriefe aus Norwegen. Berlin: N.p. 1901. 

Lash, Scott, and Celia Lury. Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Print 

Marsh, Allison. “Greetings from the Factory Floor: Industrial Tourism and the Picture Postcard.” 2008. Curator: The Museum Journal. 51. 377-391. 10.1111/j.2151-6952.2008.tb00324.x. 

Milne, Esther. Letters, Postcards, Email (Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies) Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition. 

McLuhan, M., & Lapham, L. H. Understanding media: The extensions of man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Inc. (Originally published 1964) 

Östman, Jan-ola. " The postcard as media". Text & Talk 24.3. 2004. pp.423-442. https://doi.org/10.1515/text.2004.017 Web. 

Prosser, Rosslyn. “The Postcard: The Fragment.” Life Writing. 2011. 8:2, 219-225, DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2011.559737 

Rogan, Bjarne. “An Entangled Object: The Picture Postcard as Souvenir and Collectible, Exchange and Ritual Communication.” 2005. Cultural Analysis. 4. 

Schor, Naomi. “Collecting Paris.” The Cultures of Collecting. 1994. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p. 252-74. 

Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. “The New Mobilities Paradigm.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, vol. 38, no. 2, Feb. 2006, pp. 207–226, doi:10.1068/a37268. 

Trained as a media scholar and a journalist, Sui Wang’s work explore the media history of modern China and Japan with focuses on visual culture and sonic media. She is a second-year master student in East Asian studies at University of Southern California. Currently, she is working on her master thesis, which investigates how the listenership of overseas Chinese radio stations makes their diasporic identities. In her leisure time, she loves rewatching Chris Marker and writing short stories in Amazon reviews. You can read more of her other work at www.suiwang.org

"Wish You Were Here": Imaginative Mobilities and Disembodied Intimacy in Postcards (Part One)

The following paper was written by Sui Wang, who was a student in my PhD seminar on Media Theory and History last fall. I was impressed by the lyrical quality of her writing and the multiple perspectives she brought to bear on the postcard, a medium that has rarely received critical attention.

 “Wish you were here”: Imaginative Mobilities and Disembodied Intimacy in Postcards 

by Sui Wang

Abstract 

The postcard is a rich medium inscribed with entangled relationships. As a commodity, it circulates between publishers, buyers and collectors. As an emerging communication technology, the advent of the postcard caused many to reconsider previously held understandings of concepts such as intimacy and privacy at the turn of the 20th century. It mediates the distance with romantic intentions and facilitates virtual, asynchronous encounters. The handwritten messages on the recto grant glimpses into, despite its brevity, the relationship between the senders and receivers. On the verso, they have photographs or color fine prints that depict historical places. It is imperative that we understand the boom of picture postcards within the context of both the technological advancements of the era such as photography and color lithographs and the growth of the postal service. It is also important to contextualize and historicize it in the genealogy of epistolary communication, for instance, how it remediates some elements of letters and how it is remediated by the message apps of today. A re-examination of this technological history bespeaks a disappearance of tangible artifacts, by which correspondents conceive the virtual presence. This essay adopts a bifurcated method combining close readings of textual and visual messages on postcards, on the one hand, and investigations of its representational nature and materiality vis-à-vis the technological infrastructure, on the other hand. Drawing on postcards from the early 20th century and literary examples, I argue that picture postcards depict a central tenet of epistolary communication, namely, the process that the immaterial bodies of senders and receivers, as well as of places, are imagined through reading and writing. 

Introduction 

“I am a visual image and made on paper. I embody the intention of the sender and the pleasure of the receiver. I tell small stories of travel; the joy, the hardship, the movement, the ticketing, the comfort, the discomfort, the lost luggage, the lost time and the stories of cities with their own peculiar rhythm. I register the spectacle and the viewer, held in place by the click and aim of cameras, destinations with their promise of something other than the known and events that may take you out of your comfort zone, even speaking of love. I carry words: ‘I’ve been in Greece for only a few days (fell in love with it)’. My action is embodied in acts of communication, I reveal fragments of stories that are personal representations of places and people, and I accumulate in a range of storage containers and in displays. I become a collection, which resembles elements of narrative. I constitute a memory archive and can prevent forgetting. I can be read in different ways by the interested and the disinterested (219).

— “The Postcard: The Fragment,” Rosslyn Prosser 

Postal historians date the genesis of postcards to the late 19th century, while its precursor had appeared in various forms of card-with-messages: visiting card, pictorial notecard, decorated envelop and the carte-de-visite. Despite the slightly different social protocols developed around them, they share a similar format (pair of text and visual) and were invented to facilitate the epistolary communication. In the 1860s, Postal Director Heinrich von Stephan pioneered the postcard in Germany for the sake of efficacy and convenience, arguing that the present form of the letter did not show sufficient simplicity for “a large class of communications” hence needed to be updated. “It is not simple enough, because note-paper has to be selected and folded, envelopes obtained and closed, and stamps affixed. It is not brief enough, because, if a letter be written, convention necessitates something more than the bare communication.” The early backlash primarily centered around the loss of epistolary privacy and possible censorship. The public nature of it, which was counter to our assumption of epistolary communication, fostered people’s hesitance to embrace this new medium. When it was eventually implemented later, it was used mostly in realms of military correspondence and business communication, very rarely intended for love and family letters. Even so, The 1869 Post Office Regulation still stipulates that “the Post Department will not be responsible for the contents of the message… Nevertheless the post offices are instructed .… to exclude postcards likewise from transportation and delivery, if obscenities, libellous remarks or other punishable acts are found on the cards.” The field postcards during the Franco-Prussian War period were undecorated and designed with fixed forms that only conveyed basic information, such as name, place, and sign of life. 

In the late 19th century, postcards and the postal systems were introduced to most of Europe, the United States and Australia. The design of the postcard also went through different stages as it gradually transitioned into picture postcards of today. In the undivided-back phase, people could only write addresses on one side, and brief messages on the margin of the picture side. Some pictures were printed in a way to accommodate the messages. The contemporary postcard resumes “divided-back” format, where the torso of postcard is divided into two spaces, for correspondence and address respectively. The craze for postcards swept Europe and the United States at the turn of century, concurrent with the booming of mass tourism and international postal service. It is estimated that around 200 - 300 billion postcards were produced and sold during this time (Rogan 1). Postcard mania did not discriminate nationality, class, age or gender. The postcard as a visual medium was also conceived as a popular art. The postcard introduces a new paradigm of epistolary writing, which upholds the economy of words and democratic colloquialism. As Milne aptly puts it, “perhaps for the first time the postcard made visible the discursive practices of the general public. The texts of ‘the everyday’, the products of ‘ordinary’ writers, were now being circulated and read in a manner and on a scale that had not previously been possible (117).” Postcard senders squeeze their travel stories, homesickness and fleeting feelings of sceneries into several sentences within the limited space on the verso, expecting the addressees can at least capture some of it when they receive that stamped paper with smeared postmarks and scribbled handwritings. 

A postcard travels. It not only travels from place to place, but travels between private and public spheres as well. The postcard is originally addressed to a specific receiver as a personal correspondence, while it ends up circulating semi-publicly from the hands of publishers and postmen to receivers and collectors. It is the semi-public circulation of postcards that makes us reconfigure privacy and intimacy in the changing contexts and differing socio-technical relations. “Aesthetics and communication, ritual and symbol, technology and business, play and action, imagination and remembrance, desire and materiality, commodity as well as subjective experience (Rogan 3),” the postcard seems to integrate all these aspects into a snippet. 

Art historians tend to attach unbalanced emphasis to the pictorial side of postcards. Viewing it as “a sign of time”, scholars ascertain the history through the visual representations of places on postcards. The picture postcard acquires the documentary role of photography hence replicates its controversies. Photography eventually denies the wishful positivistic thinking of the transparency of this medium. The archive of picture postcards embodies visual coloniality, with the cards exhibiting the exotic and creating stereotypical topography. Earlier as an attempt to examine the “scientific” history, the interpretation of pictures/photographs gradually turns into revisionist revisits. While the picture side seems to provide a fascinating arena for studying visual history, this should not eclipse the other side, in which the public image is annotated with private information. In order to understand the entangled nature of postcards, I propose to read both sides in relation and examine the private-public negotiation at the nexus. This essay will adopt the Lury and Lash’s method of “following the object”, and tracing the cultural biographies of postcards to further investigate the multi-modalities and discursive practices it engenders. 

Imaginative mobilities: “wish you were here” 

Inextricably tied with tourism, picture postcards have always been a medium for travelers. At the beginning of the 20th century, urban tourism rose in popularity in the United States. City tours and factory tours became a trend among the leisure class. The developments of transportation networks, the travel industry and lodging facilities later lowered the cost of travel and promoted travel as a lifestyle for people of a wider range of classes. Industrial towns and factories embraced tourism as a means of advertising and published picture postcards for the branding effect. Marketed as souvenir cards, picture postcards were ubiquitous in tourist attractions. Writing postcards was equivalent to the present day ritual of taking pictures and the postcard a possible precursor to Instagram post. Travel accounts of the early 20th century demonstrate the fad of writing postcards among travelers: 

Figure 1. Easton's Point, Newport, Rhode Island, circa 1901-1907. Postmark date: May 18, 1907. From National Trust Library Historic Postcards Collection. 

“When I entered the hall with all the interesting Nordic wooden carvings, I found the room filled with people, who without exception sat writing. And what did they write? Picture postcards!! Oh, scourge of all scourges in this century. Like a pest you have fallen over us, and you pursue us into the most desolate valley. No one is safe from you. You are capable of spoiling the most beautiful voyage, the most picturesque landscape, the most serene fjord, the highest lookout point. . . . And what does the tourist do, when your call wakes him up from his silent contemplation of nature? . . . He digs deep into his pocket, brings out his purse and buys, more or less grudgingly, 2, 4, 6, 10, or 20 postcards, according to the number of friends and family. Instead of enjoying the marvelous view of the landscape . . . the tourist sits down and with an unusable pencil scribbles some unreadable lines (Laverrenz 60-61).” 

Rather than “silently contemplating the nature”, travelers turned their eyes away from the “marvelous view” and buried their heads in writing the postcards, whose pictures, though highly idealized, became the tangible substitutes for the real views hence the authentication of travel. The former benefits the receiver, while the latter matters more to the sender. Postcards create the need to share the views during travel and, probably in a remote sense, mitigates the solitude of travel. Like other forms of entertainment, tourism celebrates togetherness. Despite the fact that the materiality of postcards often authenticate travel, the overabundance (instead of flourishing) of postcards can jeopardize that authenticity. Scholars like Cure brought awareness to this issue, arguing that “…despite the inherent role of media in performing travel, over-mediation threatened to obscure the immediate experience (689).” Invented as a cheaper substitute (than photography), pictures on the postcards soon, took over the landscape itself. A Britain cruise tourist concluded that “tourists no longer needed to remember the views and places visited—it was sufficient to bring home the postcards (Rogan 10; Klinghammer 1903).” Compared to the physical evidence, the real experience of travel appears fleeting thus tenuous. Similar stories are happening in the era of social media. Our travels are increasingly mediated by Instagram posts and organized by the Instagrammable spots. The postcard cultivates the virtual travel culture, which by extension foresees the simulacrum and art reproductions. It also offers a productive site for “contesting valorizations of authenticity and imitation” and analyzing the duality of “immediacy” versus “hypermediacy” in Bolter and Grusin’s terms (Cure 1050). 

Further investigations into the authenticity in relation to postcards would require a close scrutiny of its modalities. When Walter Benjamin lamented on the loss of aura in his monograph, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he argues that the reproduction of art work dissolves the “aura” of original work in removing its distance from viewers. In the case of postcards, the “distance” is maintained through the travel of postcards and the lengthy time it would take. It also preserves the “aura”, or the sense of being here/there and now/then, via the personalized textual messages attached to the images. 

Based on my research on postcards from the National Trust Library Historic Postcards Collection (circa 1900-1920), most of the texts are about their travel stories with regard to the place, lodging and weather. They also include messages like “thinking of you”, “wonder what you are doing”, “will be home soon” and the like. For instance, this postcard from Rhode Island in 1916 reads: “Dear Mal, 

Figure 2. Taku Glacier, Alaska, circa 1907-1914. Postmark date: July 17, 1919. From National Trust Library Historic Postcards Collection 

We arrived hear [sic] tonight but I couldn't get ashore until half past seven and I didn't moor [sic] as you would be at home but will be in again soon. 

From H [?] Northport, yacht Robin Maine.” 

This Mr/Ms H shared his travel anecdote and communicated a sign of his safety in roughly two sentences, plus, he also expressed the expectation of “being again soon”. Some postcards are even more concise. A postcard from Santa Catalina Island in 1906 reads: “This is where I spent Labor Day. Elmer.” The pithiness makes it hard to read much more into it. There is little for readers to infer from. Östman contends that “postcards have a particular rhetorical structure.” Besides the recurring elements like name, address and greeting, the rhetorical elements and the order of them vary from culture to culture. The elements may include “reference to the picture, weather and circumstances, foreign language, reference to the workplace, greeting and leave-taking (431).” A closer look into the texts on postcards reveals more semiotic and linguistic patterns. The texts on postcards are often of conversational language and exhibit dialogism markers, such as questions, responses, pragmatic particles and emotional markers (433). Figure 1 is a fine-print postcard with blue ocean waves picture. Rob was sharing this nice surf view with Agnes when visiting Rhode Island. The language is succinct, simple, even somewhat poetic. His greeting conveyed a sense of lightheartedness and intimacy, which naturally evoked speculations on his relationship with Agnes -- are they lovers? What does he mean by “Your moonlight view was a ‘beaut’”? This kind of inside joke is very typical of postcard writing. The messages are often coded in a language between the senders and the receivers, which effectively hinders the voyeuristic reading from the unintended readers like postmen or family members who happen to pick up the postcards. It could be also considered as a linguistic strategy to counter the loss of privacy, or to deal with the unavoidable semi-publicness of postcard. What makes sense to the receiver may not make sense to another person at all. This phenomenon echoes the “context collapse” on contemporary social media - the interpretations of information are highly hinged on the different social contexts people are making sense of under. “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning (McLuhan and Lapham 6).” The context that confines the meaning-making indeed carries the performances of social identities. On the contrary, the postcard is inherently fragmentary and anti-context. 

Dear Agnes: Have you any nice surf views. I should like very much to have some. Your moonlight view was a "beaut” Rob. my boat 

“This is the most wonderful sight. The picture gives one no idea of the size of the glacier. It is the most lovely blue. The crevasses are a deep blue and shades out to a very light blue. The boat ran very close to it and we were able to get some wonderful views. It was quite interesting. Could hear it cracking and saw some pieces fall off. Simply cannot write about all the lovely things, will tell you about it later.” 

In Figure 2, the sender wrote what they saw in eidetic details, for instance, “deep blue and shades out to a very light blue”; his words are brimming with excitement and sublime feelings towards nature, but simultaneously emphasizing the disparity between the represented view and the real view: “the picture gives one no idea of the size and the actual color of the glacier.” They went on to add sonic information that the image simply cannot include, i.e. the cracking sounds of ice. Lastly, the sender, again, questioned the expressive capacity of the postcard and concluded with “will tell you about it later.” This postcard perfectly demonstrates the trope of “wish you were here” that encourages the receiver to imagine a shared presence through reading the visual-textual messages it contains. However, it also indicates that the shared presence should only be imagined in a mediated fashion. The way to bridge the gap between the image and the glacier, as the sender stated, is physically being together and “tell you all about it.” A postcard like this thus retains the aura and romanticizes the distance between them. For the receiver, it kindles the hope for their next meeting and makes the time before it bittersweet. According to Milne, the “absence” here is creative; “it opens a discursive space in which desires and subjectivities that might not otherwise be articulated can be explored. (5)” 

Andriotis and Mavric examined the postcard under the Urry’s “the New Mobilities Paradigm (NMP in short)”, namely “corporeal, imaginative, communicative, virtual and the mobility of objects, and systems supporting them, which in turn produce and sustain social lives.” In light of the communicative and visual properties, they view postcards as “representing virtual mobility of the time (19).” I argue that the postcard produces “imaginative mobilities” for the viewers. According to NMP, “imaginative mobility is triggered by images (and texts) circulating through print and visual media.” Through reading the postcards, the addressees not only imagine a shared presence, but go on imaginative travels to afar places. For many of them, the postcard is likely the only way to encounter faraway places. The aura, embodied in the distance between senders and receivers, between real views and represented views, enhances the imaginative mobilities provided for virtual travelers. What is more important are the personal touches to the imaginative mobilities embedded in the postcard messages. The strange places are brought by familiar people. The personal/impersonal duality keeps paralleling the private/public binary among the discussions of postcards. 

MORE TO COME

Trained as a media scholar and a journalist, Sui Wang’s work explore the media history of modern China and Japan with focuses on visual culture and sonic media. She is a second-year master student in East Asian studies at University of Southern California. Currently, she is working on her master thesis, which investigates how the listenership of overseas Chinese radio stations makes their diasporic identities. In her leisure time, she loves rewatching Chris Marker and writing short stories in Amazon reviews. You can read more of her other work at www.suiwang.org