Well, pretty much all children’s books are propaganda of some sort or other; whether to get them to eat their beets, or kill infidels, there’s always some sort of angle.
“Propaganda” being, in my opinion, any media used to elicit a response from the receiver, either to think a certain way, or to move the receiver to action of some type.
I think I have an excellent example for the OP: in 1941, a children’s book was published by Faber & Faber in the UK, and by Harcourt House in the USA, called “My Sister and I: The Diary of a Dutch Boy Refugee.”
It was a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic, and was purportedly the real diary entry of a young boy, fleeing the Nazi war machine with his little sister, their mother killed in the bombing of Rotterdam.
In fact, the thing was created out of whole cloth by British propagandists, designed to help sway US public opinion towards intervention (and both sets of publishers knew this at the time).
Was it [Mik’s Mammoth](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0374448434/qid=11150828 96/sr=1-14/ref=sr_1_14/104-2746930-3008720?v=glance&s=books) ? If I remember right, he was not so much a gay caveman as a non-competitive, pacifist, vegan, artistic caveman. At the end of the book, all the fierce meat-eating cavemen see how righteous Mik is and follow his example.
Wonderfully bizarre for me, confusing and annoying for my kids.
I recall my parents getting some Mickey Mouse book from the library when I was a kid. Mickey Mouse was a postman and some guys with beards gave him a package to deliver to “Mr. Rich Guy.” Mickey noticed that the package was ticking, so he threw it over a fence–blasting the two evil reds who had tried to mail the package in the first place. “I knew they were reds because of their beards,” Mickey announced, as he was rewarded for saving Mr. Rich Guy.
When my sister and I were little and we got sick, Mom had to take us to work with her when she ran out of sick days. Mom, the ultra-Reform Jew with dashes of Buddhist and New Age sensibilities, back then ran an emergency social services referral program at Salvation Army. (That place could have been a sitcom - her other co-workers were a crusty Guatemalan herbalist who was about 4’ tall, a hard-bitten on the outside but sweet on the inside Puerto Rican lady from the Bronx, a tall, crusty Jewish unreformed hardcore Trotskyite, a very mild-mannered Mennonite from a nearby quasi-commune, and a stunning, tall, deep-voiced transvestite who used to wear gorgeous silk dresses and pumps to work, thus outdressing all the biological women. But I digress.)
To pass the time in the recreation room, my sister and I would read anything we could find. What we found, mostly, were stacks of old comic books, featuring Johnny Cash, both as an alcoholic and then afterward, when he found God and dried out. I had no idea who Johnny Cash was at the time, but in retrospect those things were hilarious.
It wasn’t unknown. It was an X. I still like A Baby Named X. I also like The Princess Who Stood On Her Own Two Feet.
Re The Berenstein Bears. I could have sworn that they were Jewish. I’m sure that I’ve seen books with them celebrating the Jewish holidays. I am positive ( I even remember some of the songs) that rather than a Christmas special, their 70 something cartoon was a Thanksgiving special.
When I was a child in the 1940’s, one of my favorite Little Golden Books was one called “Tootle.” It was about a little engine that liked to leave the tracks and romp in the fields. By the end of the story Tootle had learned to stay on the tracks no matter what. (It never bothered me that the part I liked best was the frolicking and not the moral to the story.)
When I was a freshman in college, an essay in my English 101 text pointed out how this story tried to teach conformity.
As can be seen with a glance at this list of titles, Munro Leaf produced many propagandistic works. Let’s Do Better (1945), which I discovered courtesy of a copy my mother had owned as a child, issued an appeal to young readers to avoid remaking the mistakes which had plunged the globe into the then still-omgoing World War II.
Hoping to downplay his radicalism and convince the “powers that were” of his status as a “good American”, Langston Hughes produced The First Book of Negroes. This 1952 volume discussed slavery and sports figures, but also featured a mundane fictional story about a boy who went with some relatives to eat in a New York City restaurant. The vignette could have just as easily been written about people of any race(s), which was undoubtedly Hughes’s point. I wonder how many white kids (and parents) of that era read the story and realized for the first time that Negroes were basically just human beings…
George Orwell in Boys’ Weeklies, an excellent essay on the propaganda inherent in the world view of 1930’s English comics, wrote: "I remember in 1920 or 1921 some optimistic person handing around Communist tracts among a crowd of public-school boys. The tract I received was of the question-and-answer kind:
Q. ‘Can a Boy Communist be a Boy Scout, Comrade?’
A. ‘No, Comrade.’
Q. ‘Why not, Comrade?’
A. ‘Because, Comrade, a Boy Scout must salute the Union Jack, which is the symbol of tyranny and oppression.’ Etc., etc."
Personally, I’ve always had my doubts about Lord Of The Rings, given that the heroes are either stoutly bucolic Englishmen {Hobbits}, Frenchmen {Elves}, Germans {Dwarves} and Americans {Humans, and Nordic ones at that}.
The whole thing is quite clearly an allegory for the Cold War, with the heroes allied against the Communist threat from the East and South, as personified by Sauron {compare The Lidless Eye with “Big Brother Is Watching You”} who is assisted in his quest for world domination by his dark-skinned minions the Orcs, who only seek to butcher and enslave.
The only humans from those Godless parts are the faceless Easterlings and Southrons, the Oriental and African automaton hordes who merely serve as sword and arrow fodder for the good guys.
After Sauron’s tyranny is overthrown, the Third Age, or Old Europe, begins to dwindle and vanish as Middlearth enters the New World Order of the Fourth Age, with humans as the new bulwark of freedom and democracy: a clear propagandistic longing for a post-WWII American hegemony.
I could be remembering this wrong, but I thought that the family knew whether the baby was a boy or a girl, but no one else was allowed to know. I’m trying to remember what about it creeped me out so much as a child, I think it was the idea that the parents deferred to a mysterious team of scientists who seemed to be calling all the shots.
Delphica You remembered right. The parents agree to keep the child’s sex a secret and raise it gender neutral. The story is all over the web. Like here for instance.
Re People
I’d say that People definitely teaches children a non-instinctive worldview. Our instinct is to fear and hate people who are different from the ones we grow up around.
Case Sensitive considering that many people have seriously claimed that LOTR is an allegory for World War 1 or 2, I don’t know whether you’re being serious or just giving a fine example of dry sarcasm. For those who haven’t read the many Tolkien threads, he repeatedly and strongly denied any allegory about the wars, politics, or the industrial revolution. The images of the books are from Teutonic mythology and folklore (Gandalf, with his blue hat, grey clothes, hairstyle, and vast knowledge would be a ringer for Odin/Wotan if only he was missing an eye. The cursed ring, a dragon’s horde, and a son who has nonhuman smiths reforge his father’s broken sword are all from the tale of Sigurd and Sigfreid) . The themes and lessons of the book are Christian (Vanity and pride lead to corruption. Even the righteous cannot defeat Satan without God’s grace. etc)
