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Creative Playthings

Educational Toys and Postwar American Culture

Amy F. Ogata

Educational toys, objects intended to teach skill or develop abilities, became a common feature of postwar childhood. With therise of the American birthrate after World War II, toymakers exploited the newly prosperous middle-class market and promotededucational toys as fundamental equipment for raising baby-boom children. The major American toymakers, including Holgate,Playskool, and Creative Playthings, as well as architects, designers, and even art museums, promised to develop a child’s crea-tivity and imagination through the manipulation of specially designed objects. The elevation of creativity in the promotion oftoys developed along with discourses on psychology, education, and art.

THE HEIGHTENED FOCUS on childrenresulting from the ‘‘baby boom’’—the dra-matic rise in the U.S. birthrate from 1946

to 1964—stimulated a national debate over childrearing, encouraged sharp public interest in edu-cation, and sparked unprecedented spending onchildren. In addition to buying new parentingguides and magazines advocating techniques forcreating a healthy personality, postwar parentsspent record sums on amusements. Toys such asbuilding blocks, beads, wooden trains and cars,and peg boards became standard equipment in thepostwar playroom and schoolroom of the youngmiddle-class child. Although seemingly innocentobjects, many ‘‘educational’’ toys—toys intendedto teach physical skills or develop cognitive abil-

ities—were embedded in changing ideas about ed-ucation, postwar discussions about national image,and new research on the origins and social signifi-cance of creativity. The major American educationaltoy companies, including the Holgate Brothers Com-pany; Playskool, Inc.; and Creative Playthings, Inc.,developed and promoted objects that reflected agrowing faith in creativity as an authentic value thatcould redeem society after the destruction of warand encourage a competitive drive in midcenturyAmerica.

Although a broad sector of the middle classadopted good parenting as both a personal andnational obligation and looked to playthings as ameans of teaching their children, it was the edu-cated upper middle classes who most readily em-braced the notion that personal creativity couldbecome a source of societal renewal.1 As a resultmany ‘‘educational’’ toys achieved new recognition,not only for their pedagogical qualities but also fortheir design and promises to stimulate invention.While the word creativity has connotations of de-ception, its literal meaning (forming, making, in-venting) is relatively neutral. The term as it wasapplied to children acquired utopian associationsof beginning anew from a pure source. In lookingat the ways that the ideal of creativity permeatedthe language of advice writers and the strategies oftoy designers and manufacturers, I want to suggest

# 05508 UCP: Winterthur Portfolio article # 390202

1 Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of AmericanChildhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 143.

Amy Ogata is associate professor at the Bard Graduate Centerfor Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture.

Early versions of this paper were given at the International ToyResearch Association at the University of London in 2002 and atthe College Art Association Annual Meeting in New York in 2003.The author is deeply grateful for grants from the American Asso-ciation of University Women and the Canadian Centre for Archi-tecture in Montreal, which supported the research and writing ofthis article. Many thanks are also owed to participants in the confer-ence sessions, colleagues at the Canadian Centre for Architecture,her students at the Bard Graduate Center, and the two anonymouspeer reviewers at Winterthur Portfolio. She is grateful to Kenneth Ames,Joan Barenholtz, Theresa Caplan, Pat Kirkham, Alexa GriffithWinton, Jessica Lanier, David Sprafkin, Gennifer Weisenfeld, andJames and Felix Goldwasser for their contributions.

n 2004 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum,Inc. All rights reserved. 0084-0416/04/3923-0002 $3.00

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that what was accepted as a natural relationshipbetween creativity and childhood that character-ized the years after World War II not only was a con-struction of the toy industry but also developedalong with discourses on psychology, education,and art. In examining educational toy design andpromotion, I aim to show how creativity, a long-standing ideal of experimentation, originality, andproductivity, became desirable, consumable, andeven redemptive for baby-boom parents.

Scholars have examined the historical and so-cial importance of toys; however, most emphasishas been placed on the toys of earlier and later pe-riods and on general histories of toy manufactureand consumption. The merchandising strategiesof American toymakers have also garnered signifi-cant attention, particularly from scholars of com-munication and media, who have traced the historyand development of a widely shared children’s cul-ture. While the material aspects of toys also figureinto this work, scholars stress the ways that play,toys, and childhood are constructed by televisionand advertising. In seeking to understand the waysthat goods have underscored rituals, knowledge,and the practice of everyday life, historians of ma-terial culture have traced the multiple contextsaround the objects of childhood, especially toys,furniture, and utensils. Psychologists and educa-tors have, of course, also examined the history ofteaching toys, and especially modes of usage, in thetwentieth century. Birgitta Almqvist, for example,has explored the relationship between educationaltheory and practice and the rise of creativity as aninternational ideal, suggesting that the pairing ofthe terms educational and creative to describe toysdates from the 1960s. Yet her interest in how chil-dren view their playthings puts the emphasis on anindividual’s perception and only to a lesser degreemaps historical change.2 Many agree that the baby-

boom generation experienced unique and compli-cated childhoods, yet few have looked at how mate-rial goods produced for children—so abundantand politicized at the time—have contributed tothe image of the baby-boom child as the ideal-ized citizen of a new world of peace, freedom, anddemocracy.

Educational Toys

Objects have always played a role in educating chil-dren, but the concept of an educational device ortoy to instill specific lessons is only about threehundred years old. While there is evidence of toysfrom antiquity and the Middle Ages, the changinguse of the word toy has been used as evidence thatthe modern idea of a child’s plaything emergedonly in the early modern period. Before the mid-eighteenth century, toy meant a trifle or petty com-modity. One of the most celebrated examples of adeliberately educational toy is the set of alphabetblocks that English philosopher John Locke devel-oped for teaching literacy in the late seventeenthcentury. Locke’s blocks show how teaching objectsare historically linked to a specific set of educa-tional ideas and an ambitious, emerging middleclass who sought to train—through a solitary, in-door activity—the next generation to preserve orsurpass the social standing of the family, society, orcountry. While the concept of the educational toyhas shifted over time to encompass a wide varietyof objects and toys, it has maintained an emphasison early learning as a form of social and societalimprovement.3

Like the concept of the toy, notions of play, cre-ativity, and childhood have been knit together as amodern construction. Embedded in historical andphilosophical discussions of play, creativity has had


Cultural History and Material Culture: Everyday Life, Landscapes, Mu-seums (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1990), pp. 86–111.Birgitta Almqvist, ‘‘Educational Toys, Creative Toys,’’ in Toys, Play,and Child Development, ed. Jeffrey H. Goldstein (Cambridge, Eng.:Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 46–66.

3 John Brewer, ‘‘Childhood Revisited: The Genesis of the Mod-ern Toy,’’ in Hewitt and Roomet, Educational Toys in America, pp. 3–10. Sutton-Smith, Toys as Culture, p. 119; John Locke, Some ThoughtsConcerning Education (1693; Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.,1996), offers not only lessons on the alphabet but also a completeprogram for training children. As Hewitt and Roomet indicate, theterm educational was applied to many different objects, from scien-tific instruments to miniature kitchens; Hewitt and Roomet, Edu-cational Toys in America, pp. 1–2. Almqvist argues that the termeducational toy, as it was used in the 1960s, indicated a specificagenda of postwar competition; Almqvist, ‘‘Educational Toys, Crea-tive Toys,’’ p. 49.

2 There is a voluminous bibliography on the history of toysand playthings; see, for example, Antonia Fraser, A History of Toys(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966); Bernard Mergen,Play and Playthings: A Reference Guide (Westport, Conn.: GreenwoodPress, 1982); Karen Hewitt and Louise Roomet, Educational Toys inAmerica: 1800 to the Present (Burlington, Vt.: Robert Hull FlemingMuseum, University of Vermont, 1979); Cross, Kids’ Stuff; BrianSutton-Smith, Toys as Culture (New York: Gardner Press, 1986). Onthe media’s influence, see Stephen Kline, Out of the Garden: Toysand Children’s Culture in the Age of TV Marketing (London and NewYork: Verso, 1993); Ellen Seiter, Sold Separately: Children and Parentsin Consumer Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,1993); Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media andPostwar Suburbs (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). Formaterial culture studies, see Karin Calvert, Children in the House:The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900 (Boston: North-eastern University Press, 1992); Thomas J. Schlereth, ‘‘The Mate-rial Culture of Childhood: Research Problems and Possibilities,’’

130 Winterthur Portfolio 39:2/3

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close links with a belief in the positive effects of thehuman imagination. Since at least the eighteenthcentury, philosophers and writers have viewed playas liberating and constructive. By 1950 JohanHuizinga in his influential study Homo Ludens es-tablished that play had an important social andspiritual function in the production of art and cul-ture. Play as a free, experimental activity has, ofcourse, been closely tied to a sentimental imageof children and childhood in the modern era. TheRomantic trope of the child as an innocent ‘‘prim-itive’’ endowed with innate creativity has had en-during appeal. Artists especially have perceivedchildren’s creations as models of the authenticallypure and vital.4 While childhood creativity appearsto be a natural phenomenon, it is at the same timebound historically to the somewhat paradoxical be-lief that certain methods of training can have aliberating effect.

The design of specifically educational playthingshas therefore been closely tied to a context of ideas(and ideologies) about enhancing the physical, in-tellectual, social, and emotional development ofchildren. While Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile wasoffered a branch with leaves and fruit as an edifyingamusement, later pedagogues have favored moreabstract forms as teaching objects. Throughout thenineteenth century, as theories of education be-came increasingly codified into teaching systems,the best-known educational toys were instrumentsof reform and specific programs of learning.

Friedrich Froebel and Maria Montessori eachdeveloped teaching objects as part of a particular,integrated curriculum. Froebel’s program of gradu-ated tasks of arranging spheres, blocks, paper, andother materials was developed from the Enlight-enment legacy of understanding the forces of na-ture through experimentation but was joined to aRomantic quest for spiritual harmony with God,nature, and humanity. His ‘‘gifts’’ and ‘‘occupa-tions’’ (he did not use the term toys) were symbolicelements that formed part of a complete system.Although developed in Germany in the 1830s,

Froebel’s Kindergarten (literally a children’s garden)had widespread influence in late nineteenth-century America. Reformers such as Elizabeth Pea-body advocated the kindergarten model for allchildren, whether rich or poor, urban or rural, as ameans of improving society through the training ofboth children and their mothers. Although laterAmerican educators, such as John Dewey, AnnaBryan, and Patty Smith Hill, criticized Froebel’stheory as limiting creativity and imagination, hisdesigns were produced in large quantities, andsome later products outlived his specific kinder-garten pedagogy. Moreover, the term kindergartenbegan to be used to sell products, especially toys—even those that had no relevance to the Froebelsystem.5

Objects that might instill lessons for life at anearly age have often resembled, in both abstractand literal form, the things of everyday life. ForMontessori, objects could teach real skills as well asabstract values. In addition to teaching self-disciplineand self-reliance through cooking, washing, andcleaning, the Montessori method included princi-ples of mathematics, writing, and color theory. Child-size furniture and small-scale glasses, ceramic dishes,and real tools (such as knives and scissors) as wellas colored rods, counting beads, letters, and sand-paper taught concrete lessons and awakened a child’ssensory faculties. Like Montessori, American edu-cator and philosopher John Dewey linked learn-ing with doing meaningful activities. While Deweydid not rely on specific sets of objects to teach (andrejected the Froebel kindergarten model at hisLaboratory School at the University of Chicago),he embraced the idea that toys and play could ex-pand a child’s consciousness and appetite for learn-ing. The strongly practical activities (such as sewing,weaving, cooking, and woodworking) of Americanprogressive schools in the late nineteenth centurysuited reformers’ goals of ultimately transformingsociety. Dewey’s emphasis on the importance ofexperience in learning was taken up by one of hismost influential students, William Heard Kilpatrick,who suggested that democratic America requiredalternative models for educating young children.Moreover, his 1914 critique of Montessori’s pro-gram, which rested on, among other things, the de-signs of her teaching toys, diminished her influence


4 On creativity, see Sutton-Smith, Toys as Culture, p. 125. JohanHuizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (NewYork: Roy, 1950). Jonathan Fineberg, The Innocent Eye: Children’sArt and the Modern Artist (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1997); Jonathan Fineberg, ed., Discovering Child Art: Essays on Child-hood, Primitivism, and Modernism (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1998). Norman Brosterman has argued that Froebel’s sys-tem of gifts and occupations reinforced the development of artisticmodernism in Inventing Kindergarten (New York: Harry N. Abrams,1997). In a different approach, Detlef Mertins has looked at howWalter Benjamin theorized toys and play in Toys and the ModernistTradition (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1993).

5 Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten; Barbara Beatty, PreschoolEducation in America: The Culture of Young Children from the Colo-nial Era to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995);Elizabeth Rose, A Mother’s Job: The History of Day Care, 1890–1960(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Brosterman, InventingKindergarten, p. 101.

Creative Playthings 131

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on American preschool education until the post-war era.6

Whereas nineteenth-century reformers soughtto teach through tangible lessons, ambitioustwentieth-century parents adopted the idea of theeducational toy to provide early opportunities fortheir children. Like the kindergarten, the nurseryschool, which was established by middle-class re-formers in the 1920s, followed European models.But unlike the kindergarten, which was employedas a means of transforming the lives and habitsof poor families, the nursery school in interwarAmerica remained firmly associated with privilege.The importance of play with objects was a centralaspect of the early nursery school idea. In the 1920s,Caroline Pratt called her Play School philosophy‘‘creative pedagogy’’ and considered both childrenand teachers ‘‘artists.’’ A series of ‘‘Do-Withs’’ thatPratt designed in the first years of the twentieth cen-tury were not successful. However, the Unit Blocks(a series of differentiated wooden forms she de-veloped with Harriet Johnson) became the basis ofPratt’s curriculum at the City and Country Schoolin New York City. Moreover, these were widelyadapted for use in nursery schools around thecountry and remained in production throughoutthe century.7

Two of the major American producers of educa-tional toys, Playskool and Holgate, were establishedduring the interwar period when nursery schoolsfirst gained social acceptance. Although most nurs-ery schools were private, the model was discussedfor all children. One of the pledges of the 1930

Conference on Child Health and Protection wasto provide every child with early education, spe-cifically ‘‘nursery schools and kindergartens to sup-plement home care.’’ Many educational toys weredeveloped specially for schools, but with the onsetof the Depression, toymakers also sought a marketin the middle-class home. Like the nursery schoolthat emphasized ‘‘scientific’’ approaches for raisingchildren, toymakers employed the advice of the ex-pert to develop and then legitimize their products.Holgate was derived from a manufacturer of brushhandles, baskets, and rolling pins that was foundedin 1789. In 1929 the company turned its experi-ence with hardwood objects to the making of toysat the suggestion of Mary Frank (wife of Lawrence K.Frank, a prominent advocate of nursery school

programs), who conducted her own research proj-ects in the emerging field of early childhoodeducation.8

This close link between the design of teach-ing toys and the needs of the nursery school wasevident in Holgate’s earliest products. A hammer-ing set and a construction block set were each de-veloped by nursery school teachers who soughtdirect means of developing basic motor skills andhand-eye coordination in young children. By theearly 1930s, however, the company had appointedan in-house designer who would work with teachersto develop and test products. Although he had lit-tle training in design, Jarvis Rockwell, brother ofpainter Norman Rockwell, turned to woodworkingafter a career in finance and became the company’ssole toy designer after the president of Holgate,William T. Henretta, discovered him through a se-ries of designs for dollhouses he had produced forMacy’s. Many of the maple toys that Holgate pro-duced from the 1930s until well after the SecondWorld War were Rockwell’s adaptations of estab-lished types. These included pull toys and varia-tions on the peg board, such as the Old Woman ofthe Lacing Shoe, which was a solid wooden shoeform with holes for colored pegs carved to suggestpeople that offered the opportunity to practice lac-ing and tying (fig. 1). The nursery rhyme theme,one of Rockwell’s hallmarks, was not a central partof the nursery school pedagogy and was proba-bly added to give the toys commercial appeal. YetHolgate products, the company claimed, were de-veloped in consultation with experts on child be-havior and were tested in real-life situations. Therole of the expert in Holgate’s toy production andin the expansion of child development during theinterwar years was exemplified by Lawrence Frank,an administrator at the Laura Spelman RockefellerMemorial Foundation (LSRMF). Frank’s advocacyfor the popularization of child development in the1920s led to the establishment of child study cen-ters at major universities and the growing accep-tance of child development as a field of scientific


6 William Heard Kilpatrick, The Montessori System Examined(Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1914).

7 Rose, A Mother’s Job, pp. 100–121. On Pratt, see Beatty,Preschool Education, pp. 137–42.

8 The Story of the White House Conferences on Children and Youth(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, andWelfare, Children’s Bureau, 1967). ‘‘Holgate Brothers: Creators ofToys—Craftsmen in Woodwork,’’ Commonwealth: The Magazinefor Pennsylvania 1, no. 2 (December 1946); The Story of HolgateToys (Kane, Pa.: Holgate Toy Co., 1990). According to DonaldWallance, Mary Frank (daughter of the treasurer of Holgate) no-ticed that nursery schools often had toys made by local craftsmen,and she suggested that the company begin to manufacture objectsfor nursery schools; Donald Wallance, Case Study 11-A HolgateBrothers Company, box 4, Shaping America’s Products Archive,Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution.


study. Frank promoted the foundation of Parents’Magazine in 1926with grants from the LSRMF. Thepopular magazine covered topics from educationand advice about raising children to architecture,homemaking, food, and fashion. Like the toy com-panies of the period, it also relied on a roster ofesteemed scientists as advisers and editors.9

Playskool also claimed to have pioneered theuse of experts in developmental psychology andeducation, and their toys promised improved intel-ligence, school readiness, and character building.The Playskool Institute, established in 1928, devel-oped objects such as desks, dollhouses, and nailboards to stimulate physical and social develop-ment in young children. Like Holgate, Playskoolproduced toys according to the needs of the nurs-ery school curriculum, including some of themost ubiquitous designs for educational toys suchas a pounding bench and a linked train. An earlyPlayskool floor train consists of a bright blue lo-comotive and tender; three open cars in orange,green, and yellow; and a red caboose—all linkedtogether with oversize tabs (fig. 2). The smoothshapes were designed to be handled by small hands,and the sloping curve of the ‘‘streamlined’’ loco-motive deliberately evoked the form of contempo-rary trains. Toys such as these emphasized manual


Fig. 1. Holgate Toys, Old Woman of the Lacing Shoe, ca.1945. From Holgate Brothers Co.,Holgate Toys, Catalogue No. 19 (Kane, Pa.: Holgate Brothers Co., 1943), p. 10. (Courtesy ofHolgate Toys.)

9 Wallance, Case Study 11-A. Robert Holder, ‘‘The Storyof Holgate: An American Industrial Saga,’’ Playthings 44, no. 12(December 1946); Hewitt and Roomet, Educational Toys in America,p. 100. Steven L. Schlossman, ‘‘Philanthropy and the Gospel ofChild Development,’’ Education Quarterly 21, no. 3 (Fall 1981):275–99. Ann Hulbert, Raising America: Experts, Parents, and aCentury of Advice about Children (New York: Knopf, 2003), p. 104;Steven L. Schlossman, ‘‘Perils of Popularization: The Founding ofParents’ Magazine,’’ in Alice Boardman Smuts and John W. Hagen,eds., History and Research in Child Development: Monographs of theSociety for Research in Child Development, serial no. 211, vol. 50, nos.4–5 (1986): 65–77; Schlossman, ‘‘Philanthropy,’’ pp. 285, 291–94;Joseph M. Hawes, Children between the Wars: American Childhood,1920–1940 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997), pp. 65–85.


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coordination and encouraged the visual practiceof arranging shapes and creating lines. Using col-ored forms to denote the individual parts of themulticolored whole, these Playskool toys—like thoseproduced by Holgate—were designed both as enter-tainment and as educational equipment for youngchildren. The headline across the catalogue cover,‘‘Learning while playing, an idea and an ideal,’’reinforced the link with progressive theory, but thecompany’s mottoes, ‘‘playthings with a purpose’’and ‘‘not just toys,’’ underscored how scientists, man-ufacturers, and parents viewed the seriousness ofchildren’s play.10

Educational toys were expensive and appealedto parents who put their faith in the next genera-tion. Yet despite the apparent elitism of the edu-cational toy, a two-page spread in a Butler Brotherswholesale catalogue from 1935 bears the slogan‘‘educational playthings.’’ Traditional learning toyssuch as embroidery sets and building toys werejoined with nursery school hammer and nail setsand sold to middle- and working-class parents even

during the Great Depression.11 The progressiveideals formed in the 1920s and 1930s would re-main central in American education in the earlypostwar period. Indeed, this pre–World War II con-text, which emphasized personal improvement and‘‘scientific’’ methods of raising children, set the tonefor the postwar obsession with providing early,correct, and creative stimulation for baby-boomchildren.

Postwar Parents

In official government rhetoric, in popular visualculture, and in the reflections of private families,having children was vaunted as a personal rewardand a civic duty in postwar America. The babyboom, which actually began during the war, re-sulted from a momentous demographic shift to-ward young families having children. Along withthe population increase, a rise in wages, mass con-sumption, and expansion of middle-class values


Fig. 2. Playskool Floor Train, ca. 1930. From Playskool Institute, Playskool Playthings (New York:Playskool Institute, n.d. [ca. 1930s]). (PLAYSKOOLN & n 2005 Hasbro, Inc. Used with permission.Photo, courtesy of Hagley Museum and Library.)

10 Playskool Institute, Playskool Playthings (New York: PlayskoolInstitute, [193?]), Hagley Museum and Library.

11 Butler Brothers Catalogue for1935 (Baltimore: Butler Brothers,1934).


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put a new emphasis on raising exceptional chil-dren. If children promised personal fulfillment,then they also embodied national interests; cor-rect parenting became a weapon against war,delinquency, and communism. In a 1946 articleabout the importance of raising a new generation‘‘imbued with a high resolve to work together foreverlasting peace,’’ a writer for American Home com-mented that parenthood was ‘‘not a dull, monot-onous routine job, but an absorbing, creativeprofession.’’ As middle-class families took up thischallenge in the prosperous years after the end ofthe war, they directed their dollars toward chil-dren’s ‘‘needs.’’ In the shifting social terrain of post-war America, these included early education suchas nursery school, more personal space, increasedopportunities for play, and an unprecedentednumber of personal belongings such as books andtoys.12

The promises of the educational toy, establishedduring the interwar period, reemerged in new andparticularly forceful ways in the postwar era. Thechanges in American society, especially the swel-ling birthrate, meant new commercial opportuni-ties for toymakers. As a writer for Playthings, thetrade journal of the American toy industry, pro-claimed in 1945, ‘‘Millions of War Babies ShouldHave Educational Toys.’’ Toy companies had toadapt to new conditions, materials, and markets.During the early 1940s most toy manufacturerswere refitted to suit the needs of the war effort,producing munitions primarily and toys only on alimited basis. Once companies returned to normalproduction in the mid-1940s, they also returnedto competition with foreign imports, largely fromGermany and Japan.13 With the steady growth inthe number of American births and merchants’desire to sell year-round, toymakers, pediatricians,

and education experts redoubled their efforts topromote domestically produced educational toysas equipment fundamental to a healthy child’sdevelopment.

Psychological research reached a wide audiencein the postwar period as discussions about raisingemotionally healthy children attracted nationalattention. At the 1950 Mid-Century White HouseConference on Children and Youth, delegatesagreed that adults should recognize and developleisure and play for their positive psychological ef-fects on children. As theories of child develop-ment became increasingly familiar and acceptableto American parents, they were readily assimilatedinto the selling and promotion of playthings. Swisspsychologist Jean Piaget’s theory of developmentalstages and a child’s desire for hands-on experi-ential learning was known among prewar Ameri-can nursery school teachers, but it became widelyadopted in postwar pedagogy and fit neatly witheducational toy manufacturers’ aim to sell toys con-tinuously during infancy and youth. Erik Erikson’sconception of ego development also relied on suc-cessive stages. With his 1950 book, Childhood andSociety, Erikson became one of the most celebratedfigures among the many postwar child develop-ment experts. His view of the significance of playfor children, who were testing and mastering theirnew world, and its effects on the psyche of the hu-man adult lent new urgency to the importance ofsuccessive stages in the making of a healthy per-sonality. For Erikson, play and toys held symbolicmeanings for the child that became a lasting her-itage in the adult. Playskool and Holgate both di-vided their catalogues into sections for differentages and advised retail merchants to suggest age-appropriate goods. A 1950 Playskool catalogue of-fered a short essay, ‘‘What Toys Shall I Buy for MyChild?’’ by University of Chicago child develop-ment expert Ethel Kawin, who exclaimed, ‘‘It is notenough that toys are educational—they must becorrectly educational so that they teach the rightthings at the right time in the right way! ’’14 Adoptinga similarly rationalizing approach to selling toys,Holgate produced a wheel-shape ‘‘Toy Selector’’ toaid parents in identifying the most suitable itemsfor the ages of their children (fig. 3).


12 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in theCold War Era, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 120–21.Louisa Randall Church, ‘‘Parents: Architects of Peace,’’ AmericanHome (November 1946): 18–19, as cited in May, Homeward Bound,p. 119. Lizabeth Cohen has called this era and its concomitantideology the Consumers’ Republic; see Lizabeth Cohen, A Con-sumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). Charles E. Strickland andAndrew M. Ambrose, ‘‘The Baby Boom, Prosperity, and theChanging Worlds of Children, 1945–1963,’’ in Joseph M. Hawesand N. Ray Hiner, eds., American Childhood: A Research Guide andHistorical Handbook (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985),pp. 533–85.

13 Eleanor N. Knowles, ‘‘Millions of War Babies Should HaveEducational Toys,’’ Playthings 43, no. 6 ( June 1945): 120–21.Thornton B. Moore, The American Toy Industry’s Golden Era(Washington, D.C.: Business Information Service, U.S. Depart-ment of Commerce, 1949).

14 Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (1950; repr., New York:Norton, 1963). Erik H. Erikson, Toys and Reasons: Stages in theRitualization of Experience (New York: Norton, 1977). Ethel Kawin’sessay was adapted from her 1938 book, The Wise Choice of Toys(Chicago: University of Chicago Press), which was reissued in aseventh impression in 1947.


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The shift in attitude toward the toy as an every-day object rather than just a holiday or birthday giftalso reflected social changes developing since theDepression. Educational toys were essential equip-ment in the day cares and nursery schools thatbecame common institutions of twentieth-centurychildhood. Although the nursery school of the1920s was the exclusive province of the wealthy,Depression-era programs had reduced the stigmaof day care and increased the number of federallyfunded nursery schools. During wartime, nursery,day care, and play school programs took on increas-ingly educational missions for the families whoused them. Although most mothers with childrenunder six did not seek work outside the homeeven during the war, many women, especially inthe West, did take up factory jobs, and feder-ally subsidized day care centers were established,albeit belatedly, to care for and also to educatechildren. After the war, as the government moneyfor day care dwindled and many parents returnedto more seemingly ‘‘traditional’’ gender roles, theprivate home again became the primary locus of

middle-class early childhood. Yet even motherswho did not put their children in organized daycares sought opportunities to share child rearingresponsibilities. Organizing community playgroupsand play spaces was the mission of the Play SchoolAssociation, which offered recreational diversionssuch as block building, painting, and constructionfor part of the day or after school. Begun duringWorld War II, the association stressed the idea thatday care was not simply a wartime provision butthat the benefits to children and parents wouldalso serve communities during peacetime. More-over, articles on sharing child care, which aboundedin Parents’ Magazine in the 1940s and into the 1950s,suggested that parents provide activities akin tothose of the nursery school. Nursery school andday care programs remained important to postwarfamilies who increasingly believed in their educa-tional benefits. By the early 1960s Congress passedfar-reaching federal legislation to establish HeadStart programs that would provide nursery schooleducation for the poor.15

For middle-class families, toys were also anexpression of material abundance, and providingdevelopmental aids for young children was oftendiscussed as a parent’s responsibility. As parents’incomes rose and pressure to provide ‘‘appropriate’’stimulation—recommended in the wildly success-ful parenting magazines and guides—increased,toys were bountiful in the postwar middle-classhome. Mothers and fathers were encouraged toprovide their children with materials and toys iden-tical to those encountered in the day care, nurs-ery, or play school; blocks, modeling clay, paints,hammering tools, and stringing beads were rec-ommended as basic home equipment. Middle-classparents were unabashed in their aim to providecorrect amusements for their young children, andtoy companies reinforced the idea that their chil-dren would benefit with promises to develop skills


Fig. 3. Holgate Toys, Toy Selector, ca.1952. (Courtesy ofHolgate Toys; photo, courtesy of Jessica Helfand andWinterhouse.)

15 As Elizabeth Rose argues in A Mother’s Job, this educationalmission marked a change from the long history of child care pro-grams as philanthropic enterprises aimed at poor children andtheir families; see also Beatty, Preschool Education, pp. 185–92. Forhistories of the debate around the appropriation of governmentmoney for federal day care centers, see Rose, A Mother’s Job,pp. 153–80; and William M. Tuttle Jr., ‘‘Daddy’s Gone to War’’: TheSecond World War in the Lives of America’s Children (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1993), pp. 69–90. Scholars have pointed to theneed for rethinking what was ‘‘traditional’’ in postwar gender roles;see Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Genderin Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia: Temple UniversityPress, 1994). Clara Lambert, School’s Out: Child Care through PlaySchools (New York: Play School Assoc.,1944). For a discussion of thefraught history and highly debated theory behind the Head Startmodel, see Beatty, Preschool Education, pp. 192–200.


and raise IQ.16 A 1955 cartoon by Al Kaufman in theLadies Home Journal depicted a scene of womenmobbed around a display of ‘‘Toys for Very BrightChildren’’ while the proprietors looked on approv-ingly from behind a counter of ordinary playthingssuch as toy cars, stuffed animals, balls, a tricycle, awagon, and a baby carriage (fig. 4). Playing up thefaddishness of educational toys and the effective-ness of retailing strategies, Kaufman poked fun atpostwar parents’ obsession with achievement.

Consensus about the importance of basic learn-ing toys such as beads and blocks is also evident inchildren’s furniture. From at least the early 1930sand throughout the 1940s and 1950s, mass-marketplaypens, cribs, and rockers were increasingly em-bellished with spinning beads or discs that childrencould manipulate from inside (fig. 5). The brightlycolored moveable discs of a collapsible woodenAbbott and Company playpen simultaneously of-fered amusement to children and a sign of edu-

cational values to adults. The playthings manyparents, especially those who perceived themselvesas educated, chose for their children representedtheir desire for wholesome, constructive entertain-ment. But in addition to achievement, they of-ten opted for objects that evoked a discourse ofrefinement.

Toy Materials and Types

A wide variety of new materials were used in theproduction of toys in the postwar years. The avail-ability of pressed, lithographed tin for toy cars andother vehicles was extremely limited during thewar years as toy manufacturers shifted to munitionsproduction. When factories were reconverted inthe mid-1940s, mechanical toys flooded the Amer-ican market. Plastic, the quintessential postwarmaterial, had been adapted for the production oftoys even before the war. Although early plasticproved to be fragile and useful only for small ob-jects, a sturdier version would become one of themost important materials in postwar toy produc-tion. Yet in the educational rhetoric of the era, plainwooden toys were marketed as solid unpretentious


Fig. 4. Al Kaufman, ‘‘Toys for Very Bright Children,’’ Ladies Home Journal 72 (December 1955):113.

16 Cross, Kids’ Stuff, pp. 160–61; Seiter, Sold Separately, pp. 70–71;Dorothy Helshand and Frederica Friedman, ‘‘Bring the NurserySchool HOME,’’ Parents’ Magazine 16, no. 11 (November 1941): 47,82–84; William A. Buch, ‘‘How to Pick the Right Playthings for YourChild,’’ Parents’ Magazine 28, no. 11 (November 1953): 47–48, 84.


reminders of simpler times of the past and as seem-ingly blank objects upon which children’s imag-inations might be given free rein. Gary Cross hasdiscussed how prewar toys that stressed makingand building dovetailed with the ideals of the artsand crafts movement in America. This preferencefor wood remained laden with vitalist associationsof handicraft in the postwar period—even if toyswere mass-produced—and was in line with the con-sumer habits of upper-middle-class American par-ents who bought Scandinavian furniture for itsmaterials (chiefly teak and oak), evocation of crafts-manship, and sophisticated design. The educatedconsumer who purchased educational toys prob-ably resembled midcentury New Yorker magazinereaders who, Louis Menand has noted, valued crafts-manship and eschewed commercialism in domes-tic goods, even if commerce was a means of makinga living. Although many postwar consumers ex-plored the possibilities of a new world of syntheticsfor domestic goods, among the educated middleand upper middle classes, wood became the ma-terial symbol of timelessness, authenticity, and re-finement in the modern educational toy. In Francein the mid-1950s, Roland Barthes condemned plas-tic and metal as ‘‘graceless’’ and ‘‘chemical in sub-

stance and color’’ and mused upon his fondness forwooden toys:

A sign which fills one with consternation is the gradualdisappearance of wood, in spite of its being an idealmaterial because of its firmness and its softness, and thenatural warmth of its touch. Wood removes, from allforms which it supports, the wounding quality of angleswhich are too sharp, the chemical coldness of metal. . . .It is a familiar and poetic substance, which does notsever the child from close contact with the tree, thetable, the floor. Wood does not wound or break down; itdoes not shatter, it wears out, it can last a long time, livewith the child, alter little by little the relations betweenthe object and the hand.17

Barthes’s emphasis on images of the past, sensu-ous pleasure, and artistry shows how the symbolic


Fig. 5. Abbott and Co. Playpen, mid-1950s. (Courtesy Strong Museum, Rochester, NY, 2005.)

17 On fragile plastic, see Ruth E. Hartley and Robert M.Goldenson, The Complete Book of Children’s Play (New York: ThomasY. Cromwell, 1957), p. 6; on plastic adopted for use in toy man-ufacture, see Jeffrey L. Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), pp. 186–89.Cross, Kids’ Stuff, pp. 137–38. Louis Menand, ‘‘A Friend Writes:The Old New Yorker,’’ in American Studies (New York: Farrar, Straus,and Giroux, 2002), p. 143. My thanks to the anonymous reviewerfor this reference. Roland Barthes, ‘‘Toys,’’ in Mythologies, trans.Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday Press, 1972), pp. 54–55.


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qualities of wood were perceived as antithetical tothe technological associations of plastic and metal.

While Barthes emphasized the poetic proper-ties of wood, others saw in wood the antithesis tothe realistic qualities of metal and plastic. The ven-eration of wooden playthings was also a commenton the proliferation of mass-market toys, such asLouis Marx’s tin-plated wind-up toys, which aimedto please without carrying an educational program.Many of Marx’s dime-store tin toys and plastic playsets were manufactured in Japan with bright color-ful graphics (some based on television and moviecharacters) and moving parts activated by the turnof a key. Educators and parents dedicated to theprogressive notion that children should learn anddiscover by doing rejected these amusements ashindering development. In 1947, shortly afterFrank Caplan founded his company Creative Play-things, Inc., he commented, ‘‘There is a huge floodof mechanical toys from abroad for the first time inyears. Many of them are devoid of real toy value.Young children don’t need gadgets. Their imagi-nations are enough.’’18

Sturdy hardwood toys in abstract shapes, suchas the Playskool floor train, became the dominantaesthetic for postwar educational toys. A Playskoolcatalogue from about 1950 shows how the designwas adjusted to reflect reigning theories. Insteadof the streamlined curves of the earlier 1930s loco-motive, which mimicked contemporary industrialdesign, the 1950 train is reduced to its most cubicelements (fig. 6). The cars are still brightly colored,but the forms themselves have been made delib-erately abstract. Suggesting visually the form ofthe child’s block, the train’s geometry declares notonly its manipulative ease but also a growing beliefthat the young child’s own imagination could—and should be allowed to—provide the details. Thevenerable Dr. Spock commented at length on theimportance of abstract form and also on toy mate-rials in his best-selling postwar manual, Baby andChild Care:

There are two very different kinds of toy trains. One ismade of metal painted to look real . . . the other is madeof plain, flat wooden blocks that link together easily. Allthe young child can do with the realistic train is pushone car along the floor. It’s too hard to put the cars onthe track or hitch them together. . . . The wooden blockcars are different. He can link a string of them togetherand admire his long train. Two make a trailer truck. He


Fig. 6. Junior Floor Train No. 407. From Playskool Toy Catalog: The Right Toy for Every Age, 1950.(PLAYSKOOLN & n 2005 Hasbro, Inc. Used with permission. Photo, Donald Wallance Col-lection, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution; by Matt Flynn.)

18 Hope Johnson, ‘‘Toys Should Hold Interest Year ’Round,’’New York World -Telegram, November 13, 1947.


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can pile small blocks on top, call it a freight train. . . .when he is bored with dry land, the blocks becomeseparate boats or a string of barges with a tug. He can goon like this forever.19

While Spock is ostensibly discussing the suitabil-ity of forms for manipulation, he suggests that theversatility of this wooden train enhances a child’sexperimentation and inventiveness. In Spock’s sce-nario, the easy transformation of train into truckand boat suggests that the representational formsand imagery of the ‘‘real’’ adult world are unnec-essary and perhaps even inhibiting. To the equationof wooden and wholesome was added the empha-sis on plainness as a means of fostering a child’simagination.

Despite the growth of the market, the designof many postwar toys did not differ markedly fromearlier models. Holgate and Playskool, for exam-ple, continued to produce prewar designs. Evennineteenth-century educational toys, which hadcome to define progressive educational values intheir own time, lingered in postwar playthings. Forexample, the parquetry sets that Froebel had pop-ularized were manufactured and sold throughoutthe mid-twentieth century by Playskool. The Mon-tessori system, once deemed by Kilpatrick as inap-propriate for democratic American children, wasrevived in the United States in the 1960s thanksto the efforts of Nancy Rambusch, who promotedMontessori ideas and founded the AmericanMontessori Society. American toymakers producedobjects for use in Montessori schools, but alsosold variations to parents. For instance, a system of‘‘tangible arithmetic’’ that the company CreativePlaythings produced in the late 1950s was directlybased on the Montessori counting beads. More-over, Caroline Pratt’s hardwood Unit Blocksremained a fixture in nursery schools but also en-tered the home. While toy sellers continued tostock embroidery and chemistry sets, the cultivationof imagination, artistic expression, and private fan-tasy was becoming a consistent theme in the sellingof educational toys to schools and parents.

Playskool, which became the largest producerof educational toys in America by the late 1950s,had always relied on the promises of raising ‘‘bet-ter’’ children, but the tone of these assuranceschanged from practical manipulation in the 1920sto a new emphasis on personality, intelligence, andcreativity in the years after World War II. Advertise-

ments from the 1950s stressed a parent’s responsi-bility to provide for the future: ‘‘Today—you maketheir tomorrow! You can help build a better, hap-pier future for your children—by the wise selectionof educational toys. The right kind of educationaltoys must teach the right thing at the right time—in the right way. For your children’s best tomorrow —insist on genuine Playskool Toys today!’’ In addi-tion to promoting early intellectual and social de-velopment, and a ‘‘better, happier future,’’ Playskoolalso sponsored advertisements promising ‘‘creativeplay,’’ and even offered a hammer and nail set withthe slogan ‘‘Creative Pounding’’ (fig. 7). Playskool’sannouncement for the unpainted Skaneateleswooden trains and blocks, advertised in Playthings(the magazine of the toy industry), proclaimedthat ‘‘when a toy is designed to make the most ofa child’s natural creativeness . . . you gain an un-limited selling market.’’ While emphasizing thecommercial viability of ‘‘creativeness,’’ the pitch toretail toy sellers incorporated new ideas about child-ren’s play. Unlike the brightly colored floor trainsfor young children, the natural finished mapleSkaneateles train set promised to ‘‘put no adultlimits on a child’s imagination’’ (fig. 8). Holgate,too, claimed that their toys were ‘‘scientifically de-signed to put the ‘create’ in recreation.’’20

Developing creativity in children was an ideal ofnineteenth-century educational theory. An impor-tant aspect of Froebel’s kindergarten was the aimof fostering the ‘‘impulse to creative activity’’ toachieve a comprehensive expression of love andhumanity. But the Froebel kindergarten was crit-icized in America as overly dominated by the figureof the teacher and the rigid system of the ‘‘gifts’’and ‘‘occupations.’’ While the ideal of an unfet-tered children’s creativity proliferated among edu-cators and parents during the interwar period,Cold War tensions reinforced associations betweenthe idea of creativity and the values that seemed toembody democracy. Many scholars have suggestedhow postwar artistic and popular culture was usedto serve an American political project, especially inEurope. Although the debate on the actual roleof the U.S. government in making and promot-ing culture continues, the image of the creative


19 Benjamin Spock, Dr. Spock’s Book of Baby and Child Care, rev.ed. (New York: Pocket Books, 1968), pp. 304–5.

20 Cross, Kids’ Stuff, p. 160. Ellen Seiter has suggested how toyadvertising in Parents’ Magazine bore the stamp of prosperousmiddle-class values and concerns, especially education and cre-ativity; see Seiter, Sold Separately, pp. 64–71. Playskool advertise-ment in Parents’ Magazine 27, no. 10 (October 1952). Playskooladvertisement in Playthings 54, no. 4 (April 1956): 76. Holgateadvertisement in Parents’ Magazine 27, no. 11 (November 1952).


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American child, who owned numerous playthings,was a central theme in the international exhibi-tions of the period. Robert Haddow has shown howthe Museum of Modern Art’s Children’s Crea-tive Center, mounted for the American pavilion at

the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, used unorthodoxmethods to provoke an aesthetic response in chil-dren.21 The Islands of Living, a section of theAmerican pavilion devoted to consumables for thehome, showed a large selection of children’s toys,including a wind-up robot, wooden trucks, and anabstracted geodesic climbing structure. While ex-hibition propaganda put a new emphasis on chil-dren’s goods and theories of artmaking in sellinga wholesome image of America abroad, politicaltensions between the United States and the SovietUnion enhanced the worries of parents at home.

Postwar toy companies therefore relied not onlyon the ambitions of middle-class parents but alsoon their anxieties. In a 1962 Creative Playthingscatalogue, under the heading ‘‘a parent’s responsi-bility,’’ the directors exhorted: ‘‘Parents and teach-ers everywhere face an unusual challenge. They arebeing called upon to prepare children for a worldso radically new that we dare not forecast its di-rection, its technology and its social organization.Certainly rote text book learning or preconceivedideas cannot suffice for children facing such com-plexities. A bold approach to education in thehome and in the school is indicated!’’ After theSoviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, many feltthat traditional methods of teaching and learning—such as rote memorization—had failed to keep theUnited States sufficiently creative and thereforecompetitive with other countries.22 Others, how-ever, pointed to progressive ideas that, they charged,had neglected ‘‘the basics’’ in favor of characterand interpersonal skills. In the late 1950s and1960s, the clash between these views was played out


Fig. 7. ‘‘Creative Pounding,’’ Playskool advertisementin Parents’ Magazine 24, no. 10 (October 1949): 152.(PLAYSKOOLN & n 2005 Hasbro, Inc. Used withpermission.)

21 Friedrich Froebel, Pedagogics of the Kindergarten; or, His IdeasConcerning the Play and Playthings of the Child, trans. Josephine Jarvis(New York: D. Appleton, 1904), p. 9. Peter J. Kuznick and JamesGilbert, eds., Rethinking Cold War Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smith-sonian Institution Press, 2001); Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture ofthe Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996);Lary May, ed., Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of ColdWar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Frances StonorSaunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts andLetters (New York: New Press, 1999); David Caute, The Dancer Defects:The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2003). Saunders and Caute both discuss,though from different perspectives, the Museum of Modern Art.Robert H. Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American CultureAbroad in the 1950s (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian InstitutionPress, 1997), pp. 112–34.

22 Creative Playthings Holiday Catalogue (Cranbury, N.J.: CreativePlaythings, 1961). There was great debate on this subject that po-larized parents, teachers, administrators, and government; see, forexample, Arthur Bestor, Educational Wastelands: The Retreat fromLearning in Our Public Schools (Urbana, Ill.: University of IllinoisPress, 1953); and Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Can’t Read: And WhatYou Can Do About It (New York: Harper and Row, 1955).


Fig. 8. Playskool Skaneateles Train advertisement, Playthings Magazine 54, no. 4 (April 1956):76. (PLAYSKOOLN & n 2005 Hasbro, Inc. Used with permission. Photo, Science, Industry &Business Library, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.)


in the press, in popular books, and in academicstudies.

Creativity and the Critique of American Culture

Self-consciousness about living in an age of newvalues and responsibilities preoccupied sociolo-gists, educators, and critics who dissected the socialhabits of America. David Riesman’s Lonely Crowd(1950) and William H. Whyte’s Organization Man(1956) were two sociological portraits of the post-war era that achieved popular success. In theseworks the authors condemned the conformity ofmiddle-class business culture. For Whyte, the ‘‘Or-ganization Man’’ was a figure who stood for thetransience and mindlessness of the American cor-porate employee in all aspects of work, family, andsocial life. Even research scientists, Whyte sug-gested, were steered toward the application of ex-isting ideas rather than the development of newones.23 If the culture of conformity stifled the cre-ative instincts of individualism, then it was to chil-dren and their education that researchers looked tofind both the source of the problem and its remedy.

In his best-selling book, The Lonely Crowd,Riesman argued that although school walls deco-rated with children’s art appeared to honor creativ-ity, the school was a singular agent in the destructionof imagination. Riesman singled out children’splay for its unpredictability, but, he noted, play it-self had been taken over by instructors. He claimedthat ‘‘play, which in the earlier epoch is often anextracurricular and private hobby, shared at mostwith a small group, now becomes part of the schoolenterprise itself, serving a ‘realistic’ purpose.’’24

While sociologists pointed to the increasing pres-sure on children to learn the social skills that wouldmake them useful and dutiful employees someday,educational researchers suggested that success andcontentment in later life might derive from crea-tivity rather than from a high IQ.

From the 1930s, researchers in the field ofeducational psychology had begun to address therole of creative thinking and imagination, but itwas not until midcentury that creativity becamea widely researched area of investigation. In 1950

J. P. Guilford, president of the American Psycho-

logical Association, established the path that manyothers would soon follow. Creativity, he argued,not only was difficult to measure and predict butit seemed not to correlate with intelligence. More-over, he suggested that creativity, although ne-glected by psychologists, was quickly becoming ahighly desirable economic value and a governmentinterest. Studies on creativity flourished in the late1950s and early 1960s, and conferences, includingthree sponsored at the University of Utah between1957 and 1959, gained the attention of universityresearchers, the National Science Foundation, theU.S. Air Force, and major industrial enterprises.25

In 1962 two University of Chicago professors,Jacob W. Getzels and Philip W. Jackson, publishedan important study on the relationship betweencreativity and intelligence. Working with studentsat what was originally Dewey’s Laboratory School,they argued that students who scored poorly on IQtests were often successful in school and in life.Children with typically high IQ scores, however,were not concomitantly judged to be highly crea-tive. Beyond suggesting that giftedness was not lim-ited to performing well on IQ tests, these researchersstressed the value of creativity in learning and inlater life and asked, ‘‘Why are not our childrenmore intellectually venturesome and creative?’’26

The professional discussions on creativity be-came part of a larger vision for children of thebaby-boom era. Delegates at the 1950 Mid-CenturyWhite House Conference on Children and Youthemerged with a pledge to American children: ‘‘Wewill help you develop initiative and imagination,so that you may have the opportunity freely tocreate.’’ Guiding children’s imaginations towardcreative activity was both their teachers’ and par-ents’ new responsibility in the making of a healthychild. Developing creativity in children was a con-sistent theme of Parents’ Magazine from the 1930son, reaching a peak in the postwar era. The mag-azine promised both practical and psychologicalbenefits as a result of ‘‘creative’’ play. In 1950 themagazine suggested that ‘‘parents eventually gainfreedom from the constant need to amuse and en-tertain their youngsters. The children gain a pre-cious ability to be happy even in solitude. They


23 David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the ChangingAmerican Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950).William Hollingsworth Whyte, The Organization Man (New York:Simon and Schuster, 1956), p. 137.

24 Riesman, Lonely Crowd, pp. 62, 63.

25 J. P. Guilford, ‘‘Creativity,’’ American Psychologist 5, no. 9

(September 1950): 444–54. Thea Petchler, ‘‘Postwar AmericanResearch into the Nature of Creativity: Whose Investment, WhoseBenefits?’’ (paper presented at the College Art Association AnnualMeeting, New York, 2003).

26 Jacob W. Getzels and Philip W. Jackson, Creativity and In-telligence: Explorations with Gifted Students (London and New York:John Wiley and Sons, 1962), p. 120.


develop initiative and ingenuity, and become pop-ular because they can think of things to do ‘forfun.’’’ Even in 1968 critics were still suggesting thatby allowing children’s creativity unfettered expres-sion, ‘‘there is every good assurance that they willbecome skilled and happy people.’’27

Both official and general interest in the idea ofcreativity stimulated the commission of a govern-ment-issued pamphlet, A Creative Life for Your Chil-dren, by Margaret Mead, anthropologist and cura-tor at the American Museum of Natural History.Appearing the same year as Getzels and Jackson’sstudy, Mead’s was directed at the curious parentrather than an academic audience. While toymak-ers saw creativity as a merchandising strategy, Meadinterpreted the word as a child’s way of under-standing and contributing to society. She suggestedthat creativity is ‘‘a chance for every child, as hegrows and comes to understand the world, to makea part of the world he sees. It means giving child-ren a chance to do in play, as they grow, the kindof thing that is done by poets and landscape ar-chitects, scientists and statesmen to such a superbdegree.’’ Rather than defining the concept of cre-ativity as the act of making in general, or as artis-tic experimentation, Mead saw creativity as bothpersonal and social. The application of creativ-ity toward explicit types of future gains was notaddressed by Mead, although she implied it wasa national concern. Katherine B. Oettinger, headof the U.S. Children’s Bureau, invested the ideaof creativity with more visionary qualities. In herintroduction to Mead’s text, she claimed that achild’s potential for creativity ‘‘makes each day welive with children of such vast importance to us, tothem, to our country, and to the world of tomor-row, so dimly seen by us, but so close and vital toour children.’’ Mead herself was careful to statethat the American child was recognized as an in-dividual (with his or her own clothes, playthings,and belongings), but that the whole community‘‘industry, government, the services—can unite inproviding space and time and situations in whichyoung people can experiment with an as-if worldbefore they settle down to dignity and freedom in areal world.’’28 The notion that the imaginative ex-periences of childhood could affect the personality

or fortunes of the adult—and the country—heldimplications for the satisfaction, ingenuity, andproductivity of future generations. Play and play-things, therefore, gained wide attention for howthey might enhance the development of creativity.

Getzels and Jackson, like Riesman and Whyte,pointed to the heavy emphasis on what they called‘‘factualism and usefulness’’ at the expense of playand imagination, particularly in the early years ofchildhood. Among the various factors that mightaffect the roots of creativity, the child’s toy box wasidentified by Getzels and Jackson as critical in theformation of a child’s thinking. They suggested,moreover, that the promises of the ‘‘educationaltoy’’ bore some of the blame for encouraging les-sons at the expense of imagination:

Even that last bastion of the child’s private world—hisbox of toys—is being taken over by the press of practi-cality. Here too the key adjectives are ‘‘realistic’’ and ‘‘edu-cational’’ or at the very least ‘‘readiness-producing,’’instead of ‘‘imaginative’’ or ‘‘exciting’’ or even just plain‘‘enjoyable.’’ The floppy rag doll that did nothing andyet everything as the malleable companion of the child’sdreams has given way to the true-to-life human replicathat leaves nothing to the imagination—it ‘‘really talks’’and takes in and oozes at all the appropriate orifices.The ancient lead soldier in his frozen posture, which thechild could transmute into anything his play required, isno match for the modern Transparent Man whose re-movable vital organs form an educational jigsaw puzzlefor mother’s little, successful doctor-to-be. . . . Even thepreverbal child’s toys are now sold not just as playthingsbut as Play-School, the pitch being that these toys are not‘‘just toys’’ but carefully designed to train the infant in‘‘appropriate’’ motor, intellectual, and problem-solvingskills, presumably appropriate for gaining early admis-sion to pre-nursery school.29

From educators’ perspectives, therefore, the ‘‘edu-cational’’ toys that proliferated on the postwarmarket (which included science kits, constructiontoys, anatomical forms, and encyclopedias as well aspounding benches, peg boards, and plain blocks)had become mindlessly didactic tools of social com-petition rather than open-ended objects that mightstimulate original thinking.

Educators seeking to train parents in the im-portance of play and advertising copywriters foreducational toymakers often emphasized that playshould be considered a child’s work. Parents’ Mag-azine published numerous articles on the educa-tional and developmental value of play. Althoughparents apparently accepted the advice to allow


27 Story of the White House Conferences, p. 20. Mary C. Jane, ‘‘AreYou Raising an Idea Man?’’ Parents’ Magazine 25, no. 7 ( July1950): 80. Suzanne Newton, ‘‘How to Encourage Your Child’sNatural Creativity,’’ Parents’ Magazine 43, no. 7 ( July 1968): 83.

28 Margaret Mead, A Creative Life for Your Children (Washing-ton, D.C.: Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1962),pp. 4, 41. 29 Getzels and Jackson, Creativity and Intelligence, pp. 121–22.


children more playtime and more toys, the con-nection to work set up an enduring critique of theeducational toy—that it was inappropriately seri-ous and unimaginative. Rival toy manufacturerswho made inexpensive character toys as well as ed-ucation specialists who challenged the notion ofsingle-minded training through play both rejectedthe simple equation of work and play. Lawrence K.Frank addressed this problem in his introduction toa 1957 handbook of children’s play: ‘‘Some peo-ple have been so impressed by the importance ofplay that they want all the child’s playthings to be‘educational,’ that is, to be limited to those toysand games which are designed to teach some spe-cific skill or to convey some definite meaning.’’Frank continued, ‘‘but if we do this we deprive thechild of a large area of experience equally essentialto his development as a well-rounded personality.It is as if we say that everything in life must be us-able and practicable and reject everything that isesthetically desirable, that gives tone, color, andrichness to living.’’ The vogue for creativity amongchild development experts along with the critiqueof the didactic educational toy and the growingfaith in abstract art are some of the reasons that a

genre of aesthetically sophisticated toys flourishedin the two decades after World War II. BirgittaAlmqvist has suggested that the educational toy wasreborn as an open-ended creative toy in the late1960s. I am arguing that this genre was establishedearlier in postwar America and promoted not onlyby psychologists and educators but also by moreunlikely sources—designers, architects, and artmuseums.30

In 1948 the Walker Art Center in Minneapolisdeveloped and distributed a toy called the MagnetMaster, which was designed by Arthur A. Carrara,a young Chicago architect, along with Daniel S.Defenbacher, then the director of the museum(fig. 9). Carradan Associates, the firm created toproduce the toy, consisted of Defenbacher, Carrara,and his brothers Reno and Alfonso Carrara. Whileboth Defenbacher and Arthur Carrara were trainedin architecture, Carrara was the designer of MagnetMaster. Before the war, he had experimented withthe use of magnets for the design of structural


30 Lawrence K. Frank, introduction to Hartley and Goldenson,Complete Book of Children’s Play, p. viii. Almqvist, ‘‘Educational Toys,Creative Toys,’’ p. 50.

Fig. 9. Carradan Associates, Magnet Master, 1948. (Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal n The Estate of Arthur Carrara.)


joints, but because of the limited power andaesthetics of magnets then available, he had littlesuccess. After the war, he found that the ‘‘Alnico’’magnets could accomplish the task. Carrara ap-proached several manufacturers about produc-ing a magnetic toy and, after meeting WilliamFriedman, assistant director of the Walker ArtCenter, secured the center’s participation. TheMagnet Master first appeared at the Walker’sChildren’s Fair in May 1948. The design was re-fined and national distribution began in February1949 with the participation of several Americanmuseums. The Magnet Master was given a retailprice of $9.95, and a junior size for children undersix was priced at $4.95. Amid growing interest inMagnet Master, but with increasing expenses andlimited income, the Carradan Associates partner-ship was liquidated in 1950.31

The Magnet Master, a kit of brightly coloredsteel parts secured with Alnico magnets offeredeasy construction of what the Walker Art Centercalled ‘‘objects or arrangements having either a util-itarian or abstract ‘work of art’ appearance.’’ Pair-ing uprights, planes, and geometric forms, theMagnet Master allowed for free compositions aswell as the creation of realistic objects. The kit camein two sizes for different ages and was directed atchildren age four and older. Museum officials evenconducted test studies on children at a local ele-mentary school to adapt the product for use in amuseum program of art education.32

Magnet Master was advertised as a ‘‘playtool’’and a ‘‘new creative toy’’ to emphasize the ideal ofartistic play with arrangement and balance. TheWalker Art Center noted that there were no dia-grams for children to follow because ‘‘childrenare naturally imaginative and will derive greaterpleasure and benefit when left to their own im-ages and devices’’ and urged parents to allow thechild to experiment by him- or herself. An articlein Look magazine showed painter Max Weber play-

ing alongside an eleven-year-old named Johnny,suggesting how both the professional artist andthe creative youth could find aesthetic pleasure inthe manipulation of toys.33

Although Magnet Master was initially offered bythe Walker Art Center and at select design shops,it was advertised widely and ultimately distributednationally with a cardboard counter display thatfeatured the Look profile as well as the propertiesof magnetism (fig. 10). Despite initial success, thekit was relatively expensive and remained popularwithin the circle of art education specialists whoprized sophisticated methods of teaching the prin-ciples of art and design. Magnet Master was pro-moted as a constructive toy and, according to a listof suggested sales techniques, salespeople were en-couraged to stress that ‘‘Magnet Master is a pieceof playroom equipment. It is not merely a shortlived toy.’’ As well-designed equipment for thehome, Magnet Master grew out of the Walker ArtCenter’s commitment to a program of good designin ‘‘everyday art,’’ which they mounted in a series ofexhibitions and publications in the late 1940s andearly 1950s.34

At about the same time, designers Charles andRay Eames developed a number of paper toys—TheToy (1950) and the Little Toy (1951), the Houseof Cards (1952), and the Coloring Toy (1955)—which were simple kits that allowed a child to ex-periment with construction and building. Soldthrough the Sears and Roebuck catalogue, TheToy was a set of wires and panels that could betransformed into many different forms. While TheToy was intended for all ages, the Little Toy wasclearly intended for children and was scaled ac-cordingly (fig. 11). The designers of Magnet Mas-ter had eschewed examples for children to follow,


31 ‘‘Magnet Master,’’ Everyday Art Quarterly 8 (Summer 1948);Daniel S. Defenbacher Correspondence, folder 1, and CarradanAssociates, 1950, folder 3, box 21, Walker Art Center Archives,Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Arthur A. Carrara Papers, box FF6.12, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, Art Institute of Chicago.Donald Wallance, Case Study 5-A Carradan Associates, 1948–49,box 4, Shaping America’s Products Archive, Cooper-HewittNational Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution.

32 ‘‘Magnet Master,’’ p. 2. Carrara had also invented a series ofcardboard structures in animal forms to which the Magnet Mastercould be adapted; see a typescript to Evelyn Peterson of an un-identified article, Arthur A. Carrara Papers, box FF 6.12, Ryersonand Burnham Archives, Art Institute of Chicago. Wallance, CaseStudy 5-A.

33 ‘‘Magnet Master,’’ p. 3. This toy was selected for the ‘‘Shop-ping Scout’’ column of Parents’ Magazine, which suggested thatchildren could manipulate it into ‘‘endless designs’’ (Parents’ Mag-azine 24 [April 1949]: 14). ‘‘New Toy: Unique Magnet Sponsoredby Walker Art Center of Minneapolis Develops Sense of Design inChildren,’’ Look (February 15, 1949): 96–97.

34 As of September 1950, Magnet Master was offered by themajor department stores with toy departments as well as by spe-cialty toy shops and design stores such as Baldwin Kingery inChicago and New Design in New York, which had had a ‘‘test sale’’of 200 sets in November 1948; General Correspondence, folder 3,box21, Walker Art Center Archives, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.A traveling exhibition of toys included Magnet Master as well asPlayskool, Holgate, and Tigrett toys; see Hilde Reiss, Toys: A Groupof American Toys Selected for Their Educational Value (San Francisco:American Federation of Arts, 1960). In the early 1950s, DonWallance researched several case studies of toy manufacturers for aWalker Art Center exhibition that included Playskool, Holgate,and Magnet Master. His papers are located at the Cooper-HewittNational Design Museum Archives.


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but the Eames’s toys included explicit and com-plicated instructions for building tents, airplanes,tunnels, towers, and other forms. Yet they alsoimplied that they saw children as designers: ‘‘Weknow you can create your own objects with theLittle Toy.’’ The Eames’s toys married design andmodernist aesthetics to what they considered thechild’s own play instincts. The Coloring Toy in-cluded cutout cards and shapes as well as crayonsand directions to parents: ‘‘The Coloring Toy doesnot presume to make artists out of children or toteach them how to play (children are far aheadof us on both counts). But we do hope that thecontents of this box and the clues it offers willstimulate the use of these and other materials in anever expanding variety of ways.’’35 The Eames’s toys

privileged design and aesthetic experimentationover educational theory, but their toys found com-mercial outlets among several mail-order cataloguesand stores that served both a broad public and thoseinterested in educational materials.

Creative Playthings, Inc.

In contrast to Holgate and Playskool, CreativePlaythings, Inc., was founded in the mid-1940s andperhaps best embodies how creativity was appliedto educational toy design in the years after WorldWar II. Begun by Frank and Theresa Caplan as asmall enterprise in the 1940s, Creative Playthingswas expanded in the 1950s with Bernard Barenholtz.Frank Caplan, who had degrees from the Collegeof the City of New York and Teacher’s College,had originally begun a company called CreativeToy Makers with a Pik-a-Part clown toy. He metBarenholtz, who also had a degree from Teacher’sCollege, at the annual New York Toy Fair in 1946.In 1950 Caplan and Barenholtz entered into apartnership to supply educational toys and equip-ment to schools. With Caplan as president andBarenholtz as vice president, the company went


Fig. 10. Magnet Master counter display, ca. 1949. (Courtesy of the Walker Art Center Archives, WalkerArt Center, Minneapolis.)

35 The Eames’s toys were produced by Tigrett Enterprises until1961; see Pat Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twen-tieth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995); and John Neuhart,Marilyn Neuhart, and Ray Eames, Eames Design: The Work of the Officeof Charles and Ray Eames (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989). TamarZinguer has suggested the close relationship between the Eames’sToy, kite design, and their architectural ideas; see Tamar Zinguer,‘‘The Toy,’’ in Beatriz Colomina, AnnMarie Brennan, and JeannieKim, eds., Cold War Hothouses: Inventing Postwar Culture, from Cockpitto Playboy (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004). MichaelHaber, ‘‘Designed for Play,’’ Graphics 14 (March 1958): 126–30.


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public in 1961 and established offices in Cranbury,New Jersey, with a factory in Herndon, Pennsylva-nia. In1966 the company was acquired by ColumbiaBroadcasting Systems (CBS).36 The project of edu-cators who saw in well-designed toys the potentialfor teaching young children, Creative Playthingspackaged and sold progressive educational theoryin the form of toys.

In a 1946 prospectus for manufacturers at theNew York Toy Fair, Frank Caplan announced thatthe firm was established to promote the ideas ofpioneering educators to parents, retailers, man-ufacturers, and designers through a central buy-ing service. With the advice of experts (includingLawrence Frank) in psychology, education, and arteducation, Creative Playthings developed and soldcarefully selected objects. Through ‘‘approved playcenters’’ Caplan proposed places where parentscould ‘‘shop ‘with confidence’ in the knowledgethat their selections contribute to the wholesomedevelopment and happiness of their children.’’From this beginning, Creative Playthings contin-ually sold the designs of other manufacturers, in-

cluding Holgate and Playskool (which merged in1958) and Tigrett Enterprises, and aligned itselfwith earlier progressive values, adapting designssuch as Caroline Pratt’s Unit Blocks and Montessoricounting beads, which it sold through cataloguesto schools and parents. In February 1950, shortlybefore Magnet Master was liquidated, Caplan in-dicated that Creative Playthings was interested incollaborating for the school market.37 CreativePlaythings’ early designs were indebted to theseearlier nursery school models, but in addition tofurthering a progressive educational mission, itstoys quickly acquired the cast of artistic modernism.

In the late 1940s, the company developed hard-wood building forms designed by Caplan andMartha New called Hollow Block (fig. 12). Plainmaple cubes that were open on one side, HollowBlock seemed little more than a sturdier versionof a wooden crate or a larger, hollow version ofnursery school blocks. The regularity of the squareform when paired or stacked enhanced the flex-ibility of these large ‘‘blocks,’’ which were lightenough for a three-year-old child to arrange. With


Fig. 11. Charles and Ray Eames, The Little Toy, 1952. (n 2004 EAMES OFFICE LLC [www.eamesoffice.com].)

36 Theresa Caplan, Frank Caplan: Champion of Child’s Play (NewYork: Vantage, 1999).

37 Press release, Caplan Archive (private), Princeton, N.J.General Correspondence, Walker Art Center Archives.


the addition of colored cushions or casters, theforms could be transformed into practical furni-ture (such as desks or storage units). While HollowBlock met the aims of nursery school activities, italso answered the postwar architectural demandfor prefabricated building materials. Other Crea-tive Playthings objects also embodied current no-tions of ‘‘unstructured play,’’ in which the games,objects, or fantasy were left to the child insteadof being determined by the manufacturer. Thecompany’s lacquered birch planes, boats, cars,and trains were deliberately uncolored and freelydefined, and some were large enough to ride on.A three-legged magnifying glass offered opportu-nities to investigate the scientific properties of un-usually large objects and also doubled as a stool.And later, a rocking toy formed from two pieces ofbent plywood eliminated suggestions of an animalform. Caplan and Barenholtz, following recom-mendations of psychologists and pediatricians ofthe era, believed that providing unpainted andvague forms would stimulate a child’s imagina-

tion.38 Therefore, these representational objectsemphasized shape and natural textures and colorsrather than realistic detail.

With creativity emphasized in their name, Crea-tive Playthings soon became linked with sophisti-cated taste and modern aesthetics through a seriesof collaborations with the premier institution forcontemporary art and art education, the Museumof Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Thecompany’s connection with the museum was firstestablished through the dynamic art education pro-gram. With the appointment of Victor D’Amico in


Fig. 12. Creative Playthings, Hollow Block, ca. 1950. From School Interiors Co., Inc., and CreativePlaythings, Inc., A Guide to Equipment and Materials for Early Childhood (New York: Creative Playthings,Inc., 1957), p. 7. (Courtesy of Creative Playthings, Inc.)

38 In a case study of Holgate Brothers, Don Wallance notes thesimilarity between the Hollow Block and a Holgate design from1931; Wallance, Case Study 5-A. The Rocking Beauty, now an iconicform in the collection of the Vitra Design Museum has been con-tinually misdated to ca. 1952; it appears in Creative Playthings’ cat-alogues only after 1969. ‘‘Creative Playthings: An Object Lessonwith an Academic Approach,’’ Interiors 113, no. 7 (1954): 88–93;‘‘Ph.D.s in Toyland,’’ Newsweek, May 29, 1967. Creative Playthingsalso relied on experts; among those listed on official letterhead andin their catalogues were Lawrence K. Frank, Gerald S. Craig, ClaraLambert, and Craig Muriel Logan.


1937 as director of the Educational Project, the im-portance of teaching young children to approachmaterials and artmaking without preconceived no-tions of ‘‘art’’ became a primary concern for MoMA.By 1951 the education department occupied twofloors of the museum’s new building, expandingits offerings of art classes for children, mountingan annual Holiday Art Carnival that was adaptedfor use abroad, producing nationally televised pro-grams such as The Enchanted Gate, and mountingtraveling exhibitions and organizing slide talks thatwere circulated in cities and small towns across thecountry. D’Amico pioneered the method of ‘‘crea-tive art education,’’ which encouraged children toexplore materials, textures, and their own imagi-nations rather than copy existing models. Caplanwas a member of the Educators’ Committee of Bet-ter Playthings along with Jane Cooper Bland, animportant member of D’Amico’s staff. Bland wasalso listed in early publicity as a consultant for Crea-tive Playthings. In the years during and after WorldWar II, the museum sponsored several exhibitionsof designs for children’s art, toys, and amusements

and displayed artwork by European, Soviet, andJapanese children in the Young People’s Galleryon the second floor of the museum.39 The im-portance of children to the museum’s vision ofthe future was also evident in exhibitions that ad-dressed one of the greatest concerns of the postwarperiod—housing.

For Marcel Breuer’s 1949 project, House in theMuseum Garden, which was erected in a lot adjacentto MoMA’s courtyard, Creative Playthings contrib-uted objects for the children’s room and playroom(fig. 13). Designed for commuters with about an


Fig. 13. Marcel Breuer, Children’s Playroom, House in the Museum Garden, Museum of Modern Art,1949. (Ezra Stoller n ESTO.)

39 Carol Morgan, ‘‘From Modernist Utopia to Cold War Re-ality: A Critical Moment in Museum Education,’’ in John Elderfield,The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: Continuity and Change,Studies in Modern Art 5 (New York: Museum of Modern Art andHarry N. Abrams, 1996), pp. 151–73; Nancy Alison Shaw, ‘‘ModernArt, Media Pedagogy and Cultural Citizenship: The Museum ofModern Art’s Television Project, 1952–1955’’ (Ph.D. diss., McGillUniversity, 2000); Robert H. Haddow, ‘‘Victor D’Amico’s CreativeCenter,’’ pp. 112–34. Victor D’Amico, ‘‘What Is Creative Teach-ing?’’ School Arts 54 ( January 1955): 3–8; Victor D’Amico, Experi-ments in Creative Art Teaching: A Progress Report on the Department ofEducation at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: Museumof Modern Art, 1960).


acre of land and priced at about $27,000, thethree-bedroom dwelling was ‘‘fitted to the require-ments of a typical American family.’’ This idealis-tic model of middle-class living was furnished withexamples of ‘‘good design’’ such as Charles Eames’splywood chairs, Eero Saarinen’s fiberglass wombchair, and Breuer’s own Isokon furniture. At thecenter of the house was the kitchen, which al-lowed for the surveillance of other areas, especiallythe children’s playroom and adjoining bedroom.Through the playroom windows, the viewer couldsee Creative Playthings’ Hollow Block furniturearranged as a desk and shelves and as seating andstorage with foam cushions, exemplifying the flex-ibility of Breuer’s open plan. Among the other toysincluded in this room were a child-size loom, a car-pentry set mounted on the wall, plain unpaintedwooden trains, and a Magnet Master set assembledon the playroom table. All of the amusements inthis model playroom, provided by Creative Play-things and New Design, reinforced the idea thatchildren should be given toys that could enhancetheir creative instincts. The House in the MuseumGarden received unprecedented publicity and nearly100,000 visitors in the six months that it was open.A questionnaire survey conducted at the time re-vealed that visitors’ favorite rooms were the cen-tral kitchen and children’s playroom, which bothreceived an 84 percent approval. Of those polled,76 percent showed interest in the furniture inthe children’s rooms. Even Eleanor Roosevelt ap-proved of the flexibility of the children’s furni-ture: ‘‘I particularly like the children’s playroomwith nothing but those hollow blocks which couldbe made into furniture and still remain toys.’’40

While the practicality of the children’s furnish-ings was central to the concept of a middle-classhouse, the aesthetics of the cubes and brightly col-ored cushions also reinforced the idea that this wasa modernist project.

The publicity the exhibition generated broughtattention to the designs on view at MoMA by Cre-ative Playthings and items in the company’s shopon Madison Avenue. An article in the New Yorker,for example, praised the abstract and practical qual-ities of the Hollow Block as a refreshing changefrom commercial design. Indeed, the writer jest-ingly linked the aesthetics of children’s furnitureto broader social effects: ‘‘If the present kinder-

garten generation develops, when it has grown up,some rather horrid mass psychosis, I shall certainlybe the first to blame it on the general vulgarity ofthe nursery decoration that our young are exposedto. Parents who share my mistrust of cloying pinkor blue color schemes, of the ubiquitous DonaldDuck motif, and of the sort of furniture that lookslike stunted examples of humdrum pieces shouldby all means investigate the nursery paraphernaliato be found at Creative Playthings.’’41 The imageof modern domesticity on view in the garden atMoMA showed how art and practicality could beconsidered synonymous. Moreover, it stressed thatspaces and things designed for children were cen-tral to the postwar discourse on housing and familylife.

After the success of the Breuer house, the mu-seum immediately began to plan another dwellingin the garden and for it they chose Los Angelesarchitect Gregory Ain. In an attempt to increasepublicity, address an even larger market, and offsetcosts, the Ain House was cosponsored by Women’sHome Companion Magazine, which had a decidedlymiddle-class readership. The Ain House openedin 1950 and, unlike Breuer’s building, offered aglimpse into a more affordable model, althoughthe interior retained the modernist stamp of ‘‘gooddesign.’’ Again the children’s rooms featured Crea-tive Playthings’ unpainted wooden toys and HollowBlock in addition to an Eames storage unit. Toreinforce the role of art in the domestic interior,and especially in children’s spaces, the museumhung paintings and prints along with severalchildren’s works that belonged to the EducationDepartment.

In addition to making household toys and fur-niture for schools, Creative Playthings also fur-nished the outdoor environment of the playground.In 1953 the company added Play Sculptures as adivision. Play Sculptures were playground equip-ment designed by artists and industrial designersin an effort to expand and refresh ideas aboutplayground planning. Long interested in urban-istic questions and the place of the child in thecity, Creative Playthings’ directors launched thePlay Sculptures idea to redefine the conventionaljungle gym through art. Swedish sculptor EgønMoeller-Nielsen’s fiberglass helical slide, which Crea-tive Playthings sold in America, was held up as amodel for modern playground equipment that


40 ‘‘Kitchen Is Most Popular Room in Museum’s House,’’ De-partment of Public Information Records [I, 12; 2], Museum ofModern Art Archives, New York. Eleanor Roosevelt, ‘‘MuseumModel Home Is New but Expensive,’’ New York World-Telegram, June24, 1949, PI I [12; 2], Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

41 S. H., ‘‘On and Off the Avenue, About the House,’’ The NewYorker, May 21, 1949, PI I[12; 2], Museum of Modern Art Archives,New York.


allowed for exercise and stimulated aesthetic fan-tasy (fig. 14). Unlike conventional playground slides,the round mountainlike structure with an internalladder and a molded ridge for sliding was a large-scale evocation of the free forms and enhancedsafety that the company championed. At onceplainly utilitarian and daringly sculptural, Moeller-Nielsen’s design became a signature of the com-pany’s aspirations to reform children’s playgrounds.To promote their new project, Creative Playthingscosponsored, again with MoMA and also with Par-ents’ Magazine, a competition for new playgroundstructures in the fall of 1953. The Play Sculpturecompetition emphasized inventive sculptural de-signs that promised not only to enliven the conven-tional playground but also to stimulate children’simagination, exercise the body, and adhere tosafety requirements. Of the 360 submissions, thejury chose three designs that Creative Playthingsproduced in full-size models, exhibited at MoMA,and sold through catalogues.42

The first-prize winner, Virginia Dortch Dorazio,a twenty-eight-year-old painter, created FantasticVillage—four concrete playhouses with pierced pan-

els and a trellis of metal rods (fig. 15). Robert J.Gargiule’s second-place design, Stalagmite Cave,used spool-shaped upright forms that could serveas low tables or provide narrow hiding places.Sidney Gordin, a sculptor, created Tunnel Maze,which consisted of five bridgelike forms that couldbe staggered in an undulating landscape and of-fered places to crawl under or hide beneath (fig.16).The museum exhibited the models and full-size re-productions and allowed child visitors to test thedesigns. All the winning entries relied on a sin-gle unit that could be repeated to create a strik-ing visual environment, and all emphasized howchildren could explore shapes and textures whilecreating their own fantasy scenarios in the recessedand hidden spaces. Just as plain wooden toys mightfree a child’s imagination, so too the Play Sculp-ture designs suggested that a child’s imaginationmight achieve new freedom when exercised in con-cert with the child’s body and the wider context ofthe city, school, or park. Behind the theory thatabstraction could enhance creativity was the ex-ample of American modern art and design, whichwas achieving new heights of prestige at home andabroad. In addition to claims of educational sound-ness, the company advertised that in Play Sculp-ture ‘‘there emerges a play environment which isa spot of good design—harmonious with today’sarchitecture.’’43

The creative playground became a widely dis-cussed issue in the 1960s and 1970s as cities andsuburban towns sought new ways to deal withboth children’s play needs and perceived crisesof American life such as juvenile delinquency anddiminished physical capability. David Aaron, a for-mer designer of Creative Playthings’ Play Sculp-ture, commented ominously in 1965 that ‘‘child’splay should continually stimulate and strengthencreative inclinations until they are capable of adultdirection. Yet something in our environment, inthe climate of play in this country, seems to inhibitcreativity and to destroy the potential for inven-tiveness with which most children are born. Ourproblem, then, is not so much how many creativepeople we can give birth to, but how many of thecreative people who are born we can keep.’’ Since


Fig. 14. Egøn Moeller-Nielsen, Slide, ca. 1950. FromPlay Sculptures, Inc., Play Sculptures: A New World of Play(New York: Play Sculptures, Inc., 1957), p. 10. (Courtesyof Creative Playthings, Inc.)

42 The jury included Caplan and Philip Johnson, curator ofArchitecture and Design, as well as Greta Daniel (who chaired thecommittee) and Victor D’Amico from the Museum of Modern Art.Other members were: Edith Mitchell, Delaware State Director ofArt; Penelope Pinson from Parents’ Magazine; George D. Butler,director of the Department of Research at the National RecreationAssociation; see ‘‘Play Sculpture,’’ Arts and Architecture 71, no. 8(August 1954): 12–13.

43 On the ideological uses of postwar modernism, see, forexample, Eva Cockcroft, ‘‘Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of theCold War,’’ Artforum 15, no. 10 (1974): 39–41; and Serge Guilbaut,How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism,Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1983). Play Sculptures: A New World ofPlay (New York and Herndon, Pa.: Play Sculptures, Inc., ASubsidiary of Creative Playthings, Inc., 1957).


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‘‘sculptured’’ playgrounds allowed for many chil-dren to play simultaneously (rather than waitingfor turns), they were sold as a practical, aesthetic,and social improvement. The most pointed ideo-logical comment on the link between modern art,children’s creative expression, and political de-mocracy came in 1959 when Creative Playthingsprovided a playground adjacent to the free Pepsi-Cola stand and the Model Home at the AmericanNational Exhibition in Sokolniki Park in Moscow.The juxtaposition of abstract design for childrenand apparent consumer freedom reinforced theimpression that future Americans would perpetuatethis vision of invention and abundance. Althoughthe number of Play Sculpture designs actually in-stalled was limited, the desire to erase the distinc-tion between equipment and fine art sculpture wastaken further in a new line of toys launched thefollowing year.44

To further the ‘‘good design’’ standards pro-moted by Creative Playthings through its alliancewith MoMA, the company began to hire artists todesign new products. Isamu Noguchi, LouisKahn, Robert Winston, and Henry Moore allagreed to collaborate with Creative Playthings, al-though many of their schemes were not realized.In 1954 Swiss sculptor and toymaker Antonio Vitalidesigned a series of wooden Playforms for CreativePlaythings. Vitali worked with Caplan and Baren-holz to adapt the aesthetics of his hand-carved toys


Fig. 15. Virginia Dortch Dorazio, Fantastic Village, 1953–54. From Play Sculptures, Inc., Play Sculp-tures: A New World of Play (New York: Play Sculptures, Inc., 1957), p. 17. (Courtesy of Creative Play-things, Inc.)

44 See, for example, Alfred Ledermann and Alfred Trachsel,Creative Playgrounds and Recreation Centers, rev. ed. (1959; repr., New

York: Praeger, 1968); Richard Dattner, Design for Play (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1974); Peggy L. Miller, Creative Outdoor Play Areas(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972). David Aaron withBonnie P. Winawer, Child’s Play: A Creative Approach to Playspaces forToday’s Children (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 37. ‘‘TheU.S. in Moscow: Russia Comes to the Fair,’’ Time Magazine, August3, 1959, p. 14. On the discourse of competition and consumptionat the Moscow exhibition, see Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: TheVisual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1994). One of the most thorough realizations ofthe Play Sculpture idea was installed in Philadelphia at 18th Streetand Bigler; see ‘‘Up, Down, and Over: Philadelphia’s Children GetExciting Set of Playgrounds,’’ Life Magazine, September 13, 1954.


and sculptures to a specially designed mechan-ical lathe that could produce the small animals, ve-hicles, and figures in sufficient quantities (fig. 17).Featuring smooth, undulating, unpainted surfacesthat formed to a child’s hand, Vitali’s toys rein-forced the association between visual abstraction,tactile appeal, and imaginative development. Byeliminating details, such as facial features, doors,or separate parts, Vitali’s designs put the visual andintellectual emphasis on the form and the naturalgrain of the wood, reinforcing the company’s idealof freeing the child’s imagination through abstrac-tion. Creative Playthings was one of several postwartoy companies to emphasize natural materials andform, but the sculptural qualities of the Vitali de-signs gained the attention of professional design-ers who embraced both the artistic qualities andthe theory behind them. Art and design period-icals, such as Interiors and Arts and Architecture, pro-moted the Vitali toys (paraphrasing the companyliterature) as a ‘‘bold experiment in art education.These toys embody good design, sturdiness, andplay value.’’45

The role of design in stimulating creativity,while ostensibly aimed at children, was always in-tended for adults. The prevailing belief among post-war scientists and educators that parents controlledand determined the process of development wasinstilled through guides and magazines. Design-ers, artists, and corporations embraced the notionof play as a means of sharpening ingenuity. In 1966

a writer for Progressive Architecture theorized that toysmight affect the next generation of professionalsand clients, asking, ‘‘Is creativity in these mattersbeing sufficiently developed in the important andimpressionable years, no matter what the futureoccupation of the child? Is sensitivity to material,form, structure, connection, and modularity a byproduct of these toys?’’ In answer to his own ques-tion, the author claimed emphatically that ‘‘toomany toys are designed as if for adults, with direc-tions to match: too restrained, too tidy, too down-to-earth for a child’s imagination. Too many toys arethe product of a designer whose reined-in imagi-nation is harnessed to the pursuit of a literalnessthat will always outrun him. The last thing a child


Fig. 16. Sidney Gordin, Tunnel Maze, 1953–54. From Play Sculptures, Inc., Play Sculptures: A NewWorld of Play (New York: Play Sculptures, Inc., 1957), p. 6. (Courtesy of Creative Playthings, Inc.)

45 On the Kahn-Noguchi playground for Riverside Park in NewYork, see Susan G. Solomon, American Playgrounds: RevitalizingCommunity Space (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England,

forthcoming). Antonio Vitali, Spielzeugdesigner, Creator of Toys(Weingarten: Kunstverlag Weingarten, 1994). ‘‘The Contempo-rary Object,’’ Arts and Architecture 71, no. 11 (November 1954): 37.


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needs in a toy is utter realism. But the highly com-petitive market makes a manufacturer aim for afirst-impression exterior, often to the neglect oflong-term delight and creative growth.’’46

Yet broader shifts within the toy industry af-fected the aesthetics and fortunes of the postwareducational toy. Mergers with Lincoln Logs andHolgate Toys made Playskool the major producerof educational toys until it was absorbed intoMilton Bradley and later into Hasbro, which con-tinues to manufacture educational toys under thePlayskool name. Similarly, CBS acquired CreativePlaythings in 1966 along with Wonder, Gym Dandy,and Ideal Toys toy companies and educationalpublishing concerns including Holt, Reinhart, andWinston. CBS’s interest in consolidating a foot-hold in the educational materials and media mar-ket points to the large audience they anticipatedamong middle-class parents. Caplan and Barenholtzremained at CBS as consulting directors and tookon other educational projects for a period, but theyeventually resigned. The growth in distribution—from a small shop and a mail-order business tospecially designed stores and seasonal holiday shops

in upscale department stores—was evident whenthe company included an eight-page catalogue in-sert and a two-page advertisement listing the 1,300local baby shops carrying Creative Playthings in a1971 issue of Life magazine devoted to children.In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Creative Play-things offered even more toys by European design-ers, such as Patrick Rylands, Kurt Naef, PekkaKorpijaakko, and Jorma Vennola, and producedmore lavish catalogues that expounded upon thecompany’s philosophy. As mass-market toy manu-facturers began to rely on television advertising toappeal to a children’s culture of action, fantasy,and novelty, Creative Playthings went in the op-posite direction, suggesting to parents that chil-dren actually needed fewer toys of higher qualityand better design. In the late 1970s, however,Creative Playthings joined the prevailing trend andmanufactured many of its toys out of plastic, evenproducing some using popular cartoon characters,which would have been anathema to the company’sfounders. Frank and Teresa Caplan continued toadvocate for child development and creative playthrough their foundation and the numerous pub-lications of the Princeton Center for Infancy andEarly Childhood. Barenholtz established the PynePress and continued as an avid toy collector. By


Fig. 17. Antonio Vitali, Play Sculpture Family, Creative Playthings, Inc., ca. 1954. (n The Children’sMuseum of Indianapolis.)

46 E. P., ‘‘The Child at Play in the World of Form: A Catalogue ofArchitectural Toys,’’ Progressive Architecture 47 (April 1966): 191–98.


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the mid-1980s, CBS had sold Creative Playthings,along with its other interests in the toy market. TheCreative Playthings name is now owned by a makerof backyard play equipment, located in Framingham,Massachusetts.47

Playskool, Holgate, and Creative Playthings al-ways relied on a striving middle- and solidly upper-middle-class clientele who shopped from mail-ordercatalogues, read Parents’ Magazine, and attendedmuseums. The educational toy as it had been his-torically conceived has often seemed elitist andeven irrelevant in contrast to the commercialtoy market and a children’s culture constructedaround popular media, especially television. Whilewholly dependent on an adult culture that val-orized achievement and competition, educationaltoys can teach us broader lessons about the sig-nificance of material culture to the perceptions ofnational identity and about the inherent contra-dictions of postwar life. Although white middle-class parents seemingly longed for freethinkingand creative children, many lived in the new, de-liberately homogeneous, suburbs. If in theory well-designed toys promised a neutral training in theways of democracy, then in practice they wereavailable only to an elite group. Moreover, an ethosof parental responsibility in raising a generationthat would value peace and freedom seemed to re-quire early training in experimental ways of think-ing, but this was at odds with a political era stronglysuspicious of originality.

The deliberately artful, ‘‘creative’’ toy was aspecific genre of the postwar educational toy in-dustry. Educational toys never dominated the toymarket, but they reveal how the culture of am-bition in postwar America took a material formthat affected the broader toy market and otherindustries (such as juvenile furniture) and hadwidespread reach into areas such as elementary

education that affected a large segment of thepostwar population. Moreover, the discourse ofthe educational toy in the postwar period has hadlasting effects. Faith in objects to teach lessons is acontinuing motivator of today’s toy market. Crea-tivity and imagination are the ubiquitous prom-ises of a large number of toys on the market today.Yet, as Brian Sutton-Smith comments, ‘‘we havelittle compelling evidence of a connection be-tween toys, all by themselves, and achievement. . . .what is more obvious is that, since the appearanceof toys in the seventeenth century, we have stead-ily and progressively developed a belief that thereis a connection between toys and achievement.’’At a time when the reigning business cliche is‘‘Thinking outside the box’’ and a so-called Crea-tive Class has been identified as the leaders of thefuture, it would seem that the baby-boom genera-tion has thoroughly assimilated its early lessons.48

The objects that Holgate, Playskool, and Crea-tive Playthings produced show how toy design re-flects not only a long history of teaching objectsbut also specifically twentieth-century Americanconcerns. The construction of creativity as a tran-scendent force of personal liberation was indebtedto earlier periods, but the specific social circum-stances of the postwar period gave the idea ofcreativity new appeal, as well as a newly materialexpression. Yet the ubiquitous call for creativitysuggests that it was also seen as a means of as-suring a more general, and sustainable, nationalrebirth. As researchers, toymakers, and parentingexperts encouraged the idea that a generationraised to think creatively could ensure Americaninterests in the future, an innate creativity thatcould be fostered through consumables was pro-jected onto a developing generation that prom-ised, if only because of its sheer size, to renew thenation. These early object lessons in thinking,building, and making thus transcended the play-room, the toy store, and the nursery school to re-veal larger preoccupations about culture, art, andthe image of America itself.


47 ‘‘Designing for the Real Customer,’’ Progressive Architecture71 (November 1970): 71–74; and ‘‘Child’s Play: Creative Play-things’ New Store,’’ Industrial Design 17 (April 1970): 38–39.Creative Playthings, Inc. 68/69 (Princeton: Creative Playthings, Inc.,1968); Creative Playthings, 1970–71 (New York: Creative Playthings,a Division of Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., 1970). ThomasMeehan, ‘‘Creative (and Mostly Upper-Middle Class) Playthings,’’Saturday Review 55 (December 1972): 42–47.

48 Sutton-Smith, Toys as Culture, p. 125. Richard Florida, The Riseof the Creative Class and How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community,and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Paul H. Ray andSherry Ruth Anderson, The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million PeopleAre Changing the World (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000).


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