Empire's Nursery: Children's Literature and the Origins of the American Century by Brian Rouleau (review)

Reviewed by: Empire's Nursery: Children's Literature and the Origins of the American Century by Brian Rouleau Caroline Lieffers Empire's Nursery: Children's Literature and the Origins of the American Century. By Brian Rouleau. New York: New York University Press, 2021. 320 pp. Hardcover 35. 00. The last several decades have witnessed a wave of historiography examining the cultural aspects of American imperialism. Empire's Nursery is a compelling new contribution to this field, and more specifically to a growing literature on children as diplomatic actors. In engaging prose richly textured with quotes and synopses from his primary sources, Brian Rouleau invites readers to reimagine children's literature from the 1860s to the 1960s as a "species of diplomatic discourse" (2). Through popular texts, adults offered up a vision of America's righteous imperialist project, and children eagerly consumed and reproduced this vision. Indeed, young people's agency, Rouleau importantly argues, is found not purely in acts of resistance against hegemony. More often, as evidenced in their responses to and emulations of popular literature, children exercised their agency by reaffirming imperialistic values. These young readers and writers were, as Rouleau puts it, "co-producers of the broader discourse of American aggrandizement" (8), finding outlets in imperialistic tropes at precisely a time when young people's lives were more tightly regulated and circumscribed through compulsory schooling, a lengthening of childhood's chronological span, and growing ideals of childhood as a time of innocence and dependence. Rouleau's chapters generally proceed chronologically, providing an important periodization for his topic. Between about the 1860s and 1900, a large corpus of dime novels and other juvenile fiction glorified the "winning" of the West, playing up stereotypes of Indigenous savagery and white American heroism and encouraging young people to imagine their roles in the project of American expansion. Similar themes animated the series fiction of Edward Stratemeyer, the topic of Rouleau's next chapter, albeit on a broader, global scale End Page 307 that mirrored the American Empire's expansion in the 1890s and early 1900s. Chapter 5 continues the chronology with its focus on dollar diplomacy in pulp fiction between about 1900 and 1930. These texts offered a new—but no less laudatory—reworking of American imperialism befitting the foreign policy of their era, showing American dominance as "a matter of indirect influence, investment, fiscal supervision, and narrowly targeted interventionism" (161). Rouleau's last chapter explores comic books during the Cold War. Even as these new media came under scrutiny for their supposed links to juvenile delinquency and possible communist infiltration, Rouleau notes that comic books still overwhelmingly celebrated American foreign intervention and "the pieties of the American Century" (213) ; the industry entrenched this position when it chose self-regulation through the Comics Code of 1954 rather than face more strenuous censorship. Rouleau also briefly discusses propagandistic comic books produced by the US government for distribution abroad, an intriguing case study that has received relatively limited historiographical attention. Rouleau's arguments in these chapters might to some extent be expected given the nature of his source material. Even so, his analysis has admirable subtlety and flair, exploring cross-currents and counterexamples, as well as issues of gender and, importantly, reader responses. Whenever possible, Rouleau notes the letters that children wrote to editors and publishers. He makes excellent use of Stratemeyer's surviving fan mail archives, for example, and notes how Stratemeyer used his juvenile readers' opinions and preferences to guide his writing, further centering children's agency in the dynamic of imperialistic children's literature. Rouleau's vast and deep reading in both published and unpublished primary sources, as well as secondary literature, gives him impressive material with which to develop nuanced points and unearth unexpected case studies, though the exact individuals and motives behind the creation of these hegemonic cultural products and phenomena are sometimes shadowy. Rouleau makes particularly valuable contributions in Chapters 3 and 4. In Chapter 3, he provides a much-needed expansion of our understanding of the Gilded Age fad for tabletop presses and amateur journalism. With impressive attention to the surviving archives, he explores how young people's juvenilia reiterated—and occasionally reworked, complicated, or even challenged. . .