Michael Kimmel is the author of the new book Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America. His many other books include Guyland. He is a SUNY distinguished professor emeritus of sociology and gender studies, and he lives in Brooklyn.
Q: How did your family history factor into your decision to write Playmakers?
A: It was decisive!! I’ve been waiting to do this book all my life. When I was a boy, there was a photograph on the piano in our living room. It was of an older man with Shirley Temple sitting on his lap. “To Barbara,” it said, “with love from Shirley Temple and Uncle Morris.” (My mother’s name was Barbara.).
Okay, I knew who Shirley Temple was, but who the heck was “Uncle Morris?” And what was he doing on my piano?
It turned out Uncle Morris was Morris Michtom, the inventor of the Teddy Bear, the Shirley Temple doll, and countless other toys made by the Ideal Toy Company, which was, in the 1950s, the largest toy company in the world.
I was always curious about this side of the family (from which we were largely estranged) and my retirement after 35 years as a professor provided the opportunity to begin to research what I thought would be a brief family history.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: The biggest surprise was that not only Ideal, but pretty much every single major American toy company in the early years of the 20th century were run by first-generation Jews, the children of impoverished Yiddish-speaking immigrants. Mattel, Hasbro, Lionel trains, Marx, Pressman – and all through the century!
The toys were created by these first-gen Jews, distributed by companies run by first-gen Jews, and sold in department stores founded or run by largely German Jews of an earlier era (Gimbels, Macy’s, Abraham and Straus, Bergdorf Goodman, FAO Schwarz, Toys “R” Us).
It was as if every famous toy of the century – Barbie, GI Joe, Mr. Potato Head, Rubik’s Cube, Mr. Machine, Chatty Cathy - was Jewish!
Once I started down that path, I was stunned – truly stunned – by how extensive was the influence of these first-gen Jews in the creation of the material culture of childhood in the 20th century.
From the comic strips like Li’l Abner, Joe Palooka, Popeye, Betty Boop, to virtually every single comic book superhero, to a pantheon of authors of children’s books, and finally from the pioneers of the century’s new field of developmental psychology, the presence – no, the dominance – of first-generation Jews is incontestable.
Some of the most fun in the research was following leads down long trails that almost always led to descendants of the originators, and those interviews gave me more juicy stories than the mere facts of the presence and dominance of these first-gen Jews.
The more I found out about their actual lives, as well as their accomplishments, I understood more about my own family as well.
Q: What role did these entrepreneurs’ Jewish identity play in the creation of many legendary American toys?
A: Hmm. Really interesting question. It's hard to say. So many of them were so busy trying to fit in, to assimilate, that they may have downplayed it. A few - toymakers, comic book artists, children's book authors - saw themselves as outsiders, wanting to fit in, afraid of "sticking out."
The great comic book creator Stan Lee speculated about this when he answered an interviewer's question about that topic in the comic book world (which I also discuss in the book):
"Could it be that there was something in our background, in our culture, that brought us together in the comic book field? When we created stories about idealized superheroes, were we subconsciously trying to identify with characters who were the opposite of the Jewish stereotypes that the propaganda tried to instill in people’s minds?”
But I think it's a bit more than playing against stereotypes. It’s also that these first-gen, Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews carried with them, in their beat-up cardboard suitcases, an idea about childhood itself that was at odds with the traditional Puritanical ideas about child-rearing in the 19th century, and one that perfectly fit - and informed - the ideals of Progressivism in the first decades of the 20th century: That children were precious, curious, and creative, and the point of child-rearing was to nurture them, not break and/or mold them.
Q: Of the various toys you wrote about in the book, do you have any particular favorites?
A: What a fun question. Many of the toys I wrote about - Lionel trains, Revell plastic models, Mr. Potato Head, Mr. Machine, hula hoops, pogo sticks (invented by my great uncle George Hansburg), just to name a few - were the toys that animated my own childhood.
In the course of the research, though, I came to appreciate others for the creativity, the whimsy, the playfulness of the creators, and the dogged ambition of the companies that produced them.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I've just begun researching a new book, based initially on some of the research for Playmakers.
At the turn of the century, every Sunday, the Jewish Daily Forward would publish five photographs of men who had "disappeared." It was the "gallery of missing men."
These men had often come to New York alone, and when their families arrived the men had moved one, found new, and more "glamorous" partners, or failed miserably and moved West, or... well, we just don't know. It spurred me to look at men who disappear, men who live double lives, and why that seems to be so predominantly American. So I think that's the next project.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Just thinking about what I would want readers to take away from the book. Referring back to MY favorite toys, I was thinking that what I hope readers find, in the book, is the story of many of THEIR childhoods as well.
The toys and games we played with, the comic books we read, the children’s books we read (and were read to us), the materials from which we constructed our fantasies – this is the story of the people who created them.
It’s an inspiring history of irrepressible creativity and ambition, but also joy. Being Jewish meant more than subscribing to a “religion of doubt” but also of joy, wit and mischief! What a pleasure for readers to see their childhoods – and those of their children and grandchildren – through this lens.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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