May 19, 2007
Cheaper by the Dozen Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:15 PM EST I read with great interest Ellen Feldman’s post on Cheaper by the Dozen. I am not sure I’ve seen the movie, but I did read the book, because it was one of the volumes my elementary school’s librarians pushed on schoolchildren. In those days, some of the books I read came to my attention in that fashion, and the same books were also given as presents by well-meaning if unimaginative adults. Many were published in series—I remember the Landmark books (biographies), general science-ish things that were collectively called the About books, and some slim Prussian-blue volumes that seemed to be older and shorter accounts of the sorts of people covered in the Landmark series. All of these seemed inferior to the books you found on your own, because they were tainted by the approval of the school authorities and could be guaranteed to lack the erotic charge that came your way when you accidentally pulled Balzac’s Droll Stories off a top shelf at home. But among this inferior class of book recommended by school librarians, books not published in series or published too recently somehow seemed more legit, more like real books. I was suspicious of Cheaper by the Dozen because the goody-two-shoes types who accepted librarians’ suggestions without any evident skepticism had all read it before I had, but in the event, Cheaper by the Dozen was readable enough. As it happens, I also remember—very vaguely—something like the scene Ellen Feldman quotes from the film—the deadpan joke played on the Planned Parenthood visitor. At the time it puzzled me. This would have been the late 1950s, almost everyone in our school was part of a family with three children, and while a family with a dozen children seemed engagingly old-timey, even gently mocking someone who wanted people to have families more like the ones I knew about seemed an off note, not malevolent but strange. Years later, in a grad school labor history course, I “learned” that Frank Gilbreth’s time-and-motion studies were a villainous attempt to intensify the rate of surplus value extraction (I paraphrase here, although perhaps not as much as the reader may think). In this little demonology, Gilbreth was conflated with his rival Frederick Winslow Taylor, from whom he in fact differed a bit, but the point of the lesson was that the apparently innocent texts of a childhood in the Eisenhower years concealed vicious ideological indoctrination. My guess, half a century on, is that this was not the whole of the truth of Cheaper by the Dozen, and that the scene Ellen Feldman quotes from the movie version is nastier than the alleged Taylorism of the text. Later in grad school we learned that Lenin and Stalin had admired Taylorism; that really set the cat among the pigeons, although most of the pigeons soon learned to forget the presence of the cat. In the case of the film’s pro-natalism—its ideological commitment to large families, and hostility to birth control—I do not remember quite how much of that was in the book. The book was published in 1946, around the time the families I grew up with were starting, which points to one of the great truths about propaganda for pro-natalism: It is a hard sell. Hitler made it work, but not too many others have. My guess is that middle-class people in the West may well begin to have larger families than are now the case in the currently rich countries, but not because of ideological attacks on birth control. As for the sexual politics of 1950s American film, I remember the odd experience of sitting through an afternoon double feature at a revival house in the late 1970s, where I had gone to recover from the rigors of grad school, possibly from a labor history seminar. The bill was Topper (1937) followed by Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948, from a book published in 1946, the same year as Cheaper by the Dozen). Most of the members of the audience were retired couples, who could date a film within a year from the characters’ dresses, and did. My memory is that the female characters in Topper were sexier, less kittenish, more grown-up, and that there was something off-puttingly pro-natalist about the later film. And I remember thinking that the history of sexual liberation, like many other histories, does not always move in straight lines.
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