The Story of Mankind (1922)
The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Van Loon
One of the great surprises of my reading last year was revisiting Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. First read to me by my (very attractive) third grade student teacher, Mr. Johnson, it’s a vivid retelling of a Black family’s experience farming their own land in the Reconstruction-era south. Though I’d reread the book a few times since then, last year’s experience really bowled me over, and there on the cover was the literal gold stamp of approval from the American Library Association: The Newbery Medal.
As a kid, I was an equally voracious reader, and I fondly remember school librarians hosting voting parties for the Newbery nominees every year. Some of my favorite books from childhood—The Giver, Ginger Pye, From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler—belonged to this prestigious list of award winners. And without any clear direction for 2021 (or end in sight for countless hours of solitary boredom in social isolation), I decided that this year’s goal would be to read through the list from beginning to end.
And so begins my journey through every one of the first 100 John Newbery Medal recipients. Established in 1921, the Newbery Medal recognizes “the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children” of the year. That’s a pretty broad claim—what counts as “distinguished”?—but it’s also a chronological journey through the last hundred years of children’s literature. I’m not one to put much stock in awards, but what excites me about this trip is seeing how our nation’s values, especially those of educators, have grown, morphed, and shifted in the past century. How did the social upheaval of World War II or the Civil Rights movement manifest itself in children’s books? What kinds of values did we want our kids to be absorbing from decade to decade? And firstly, what did adults think kids should be reading in 1921?
Judging by The Story of Mankind, adults thought kids should be reading some boring-ass shit. Seriously, is there a worse way to kick off a children’s literary dynasty than with a 500-page summary of European history from neanderthals through World War I? (Actually, maybe. One of the runners up from that year, The Old Tobacco Shop, is about a five year-old kid who smokes a funny cigarette, falls into a kush coma, and hallucinates that he’s robbed a bunch of Spanish pirates. Fun stuff!)
It doesn’t help that author Hendrik Van Loon couches the book in all the dry existentialism of a Werner Herzog documentary. The actual first sentences read:
“We live under the shadow of a gigantic question mark. Who are we? Where do we come from? Wither are we bound?”
Sheesh, maybe kids would’ve been better off with the kush coma! Seriously, what kind of children were begging Mom and Dad to read one more chapter about the fall of Carthage? What age group would be most interested in learning the finer points of feudalism or the mercantile system? Did I mention there are pictures of the mercantile system? They’re pretty boring!
Perhaps it comes back to that word from the Newbery’s charter: distinguished. A cursory glance through the first dozen or so books on the list have a surprisingly cosmopolitan air about them—it would take three books before an American author shows up on the list, and several of the books are presumably tales from far-off countries designed to impart a sense of culture to the (I’m assuming) backswamp alligator riders America must have been churning out in those days. If I only had this book to go off of, I’d assume the selection committee desperately wanted the public to believe that their philistine children were actually worldly sophisticates.
I’d also assume that none of the selection committee had ever encountered a real-life human child. The Story of Mankind may have represented a certain ideal, but gripping pathos it is not. “Why should we ever read fairy stories, when the truth of history is so much more interesting and entertaining?” Van Loon asks (after explaining the immigration of Norsemen to England). I’ve never met a kid who talks about world history the same way other kids talk about animals or Pokemon or sports. Come to think of it, I’ve never met a kid who talks about world history, period. In a post-war society, wouldn’t kids have rather been playing “army” or “house”? Toys existed back then. Talking animal books were a thing (more to come on that soon). History is just boring when you’re a child.
One might also suspect that the last hundred years and change of discovery and development would render large passages of the book irrelevant, but Van Loon’s grasp of ancient history holds up surprisingly well. (It’s still dry as hell, but turns out we knew as much about Phoenecia in 1921 as we do today.) He writes from what I’m assuming was a fairly liberal, progressive mindset for the 1920s, and though he largely ignores nonwhite people throughout, he also mostly avoids the blatant racism I was expecting from a book of this age.
If there’s a redeeming quality to The Story of Mankind, it’s that it reads like your very smart grandpa wrote it for you. Van Loon sprinkles bits of commentary throughout that make it clear the book is written for children, even if the commentary is the stuff of nightmares. (In explaining the fear some Dutch Protestants had on meeting Catholics for the first time: “There might be another St. Bartholomew’s night, and poor little me would be slaughtered in my nightie and my body would be thrown out the window.”) In writing an accessible book on European history, Van Loon lets more of himself shine through than most historians. He’s a folksy, quirky and empathetic author, using personal flashes to bring feeling to events that most readers likely couldn’t care less about, and he seems like someone I would’ve enjoyed spending time with.
But as a children’s book, the children’s book of 1921, The Story of Mankind is a disappointing drag. Some facts are outdated, there are weirdly specific comments about Jews and money that are probably anti-Semitic, and no kid in their right mind would sit and listen to this stuff unless they were strapped to their bed with their eyes pried open.
Van Loon had already built himself a steady career as an historian by the time Story was published, and he was really just getting started. His follow-up, The Story of the Bible, does for the testaments what Mankind did for European history. In 1938, he published an anti-Hitler screed called Our Battle, which caught the attention of then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and led to Van Loon working for his 1940 reelection campaign. None of his other books won the prestige that The Story of Mankind had won, but Van Loon did just fine without it. He’d written something for his children to be proud of, even if it doesn’t stand out a hundred years later.
