Actually, they did want to be. There is a reason Morris Michtom moved his family from the Lower East Side to the row houses of Brooklyn as soon as he could. (When his youngest son was born, in the back of his Tompkins Avenue candy store, he named him Benjamin Franklin; he might as well have fastened the baby’s diaper with a flag pin.) Others went farther. After arriving in New York, the Hassenfeld brothers struck out for Providence, Rhode Island, where, in 1923, they founded a scrap-textile business, making fabric-covered boxes for school supplies, and, later, pencils to go inside them. Eventually, one of their kids had another idea. Why not put pretend stethoscopes and pill bottles into the boxes and sell them as toy doctor’s kits? Hasbro was born.
When Felix Adler wrote of the necessity of play, he wasn’t referring to toys. He meant physical play, sport. The Playground Association of America was founded in 1906, to give city children a place to play besides the crowded, dangerous streets; the Boy Scouts followed, in 1910. But, as Michtom discovered with the Teddy bear, the priorities of the new childhood, coupled with the growing prosperity of American society, had also created a demand for material playthings. Dolls were an obvious place to start. In 1897, the psychologist and educator G. Stanley Hall—it was he who came up with the idea of adolescence as a distinct phase of life—produced a study that showed playing with dolls to be psychologically beneficial for children. At the same time, “composition,” a new plastic-like molding material made from sawdust and glue mixed with additives such as resin, cornstarch, and wood flour, was being developed. This meant that dolls could be mass-produced to be handled.
Michtom set about to create what he called “an unbreakable doll.” For his model, he chose the Yellow Kid, an Irish street-scamp character from Richard Outcault’s popular comic strip of the same name. The Yellow Kid was a big bald baby of a boy, with jug ears, a gap-toothed grin, and a long yellow nightshirt. Kimmel calls Michtom’s choice to make a male doll “novel.” I think he may be overrating Michtom’s ingenuity; Yellow Kid dolls had been manufactured for nearly a decade before Michtom’s hit the market, in 1907. But the earlier dolls were crude, lumpen things, a cross between a beanbag and a sculpted potato. Michtom’s actually looked like the imp from the cartoon, and it sold like gangbusters.
Constant competition in the burgeoning toy business meant constant innovation: more bells, more whistles. In 1920, Ideal came out with Flossie Flirt, a flapper baby doll with marcelled hair, rubber arms (“They feel almost as soft and as smooth as your own”), and eyes that rolled in their sockets. She was followed by Snoozie Smiles, which had two faces—one happy, one sad—and a voice box that imitated baby sounds, something that Thomas Edison had tried and failed to pull off three decades earlier. One of Michtom’s more notable technological advances came with Betsy Wetsy, a doll whose development Kimmel characterizes as an engineering “nightmare.” Michtom persisted, ending up, in 1937, with a doll that could drink, sniffle, cry, and pee into a diaper that little girls delighted in changing.
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you in an overstimulating environment where we can’t hear each other.”
Cartoon by Sarah Kempa
Betsy Wetsy was a triumph, Michtom’s last. He died the next year, at the age of sixty-eight. His son Ben took over as chairman of the Ideal Toy Company. “When I was a kid, I liked toys because they helped me make believe,” Ben told one journalist. “And what I wanted to make believe was that I was grown up.” In the mid-fifties, Ideal considered producing a toy bound to make little girls feel very grown up indeed: a Marilyn Monroe doll. Ultimately, the company passed; what would an adult doll do? Three years later came Barbie, designed by Ruth Handler, the youngest of ten children born to a Jewish blacksmith who had immigrated from Poland, and brought to market by Mattel, the company she ran with her husband, Elliot, also a first-generation American Jew.