The unassuming cover of Robert Lawson’s They Were Strong and Good does not reveal much about what lies inside. The 1941 Caldecott Medal recipient looks deceptively dull. Composed of plain text and black-and-white drawings that are suggestive of etchings, the work does not immediately reveal its lively humor.
The book is a personal yet timeless homage to America and the people who made it. There are humorous moments, such as the unbecoming contrast of urban Paterson, New Jersey, with the bucolic land it once was. There is also the wonderfully suggestive illustration accompanying the detail that the author’s maternal grandmother did not care for life at sea (read tastefully drawn image of the grandmother’s behind as she succumbs to seasickness).
The drawings and text have a mature look to them, yet, contrary to many people’s uneducated prediction, many children are drawn in and fascinated by the book. Lawson’s craft here was intentional. In 1940, he stated:
I have never, as far as I can remember, given one moment’s thought as to whether any drawing that I was doing was for adults or children. I have never changed one conception or line or detail to suit the supposed age of the reader. And I have never, in what writing I have done, changed one word or phrase of text because I felt it might be over the heads of children. I have never, I hope, insulted the intelligence of any child. And with God and my publishers willing, I promise them that I never will.
Lawson isn’t trying to tell you everything exactly as it happened (more on that later), he’s giving you, young and old alike, a good story with intricate illustrations, at times cartoonish at others classical, always interesting.
Defining a style
According to one account, Lawson honed his unique style in a mad-dash of illustrating Christmas cards. From an old dustjacket:
It seems that when the Lawsons acquired a lovely old colonial house in Westport, Connecticut, a large mortgage went with it. There came an opportunity to make designs for Christmas cards — good pay, steady work — and they resolved that each (Mrs. Lawson illustrates too) should turn out one card every day until the house was paid for. It took two or three years, but Mr. Lawson declares that those years were splendid training for the more important work to follow.
This author argues They Were Strong and Good is important work that preserves oral history and fosters patriotism.
No good, very bad
But, of course, patriotism has gone out of fashion. There’s quite a bit of buzz about the evil, no good, very bad racism in Lawson’s book. Specifically, the narrator’s father was part of a family that owned slaves in 1850s Alabama, and there is a depiction of Native Americans being chased off by a Black woman after begging for food (which led to the interesting question of whether there was slavery in Minnesota proving that nowhere in America is free from that unforgivable stain).
There’s a loud contingent of the opinion that They Were Strong and Good should be re-titled They Were Privileged and Wrong. And that the book also needs to be stripped of the Caldecott Medal and banned from public schools and libraries. As we know, erasing anything impure is the best way to understand the human faults that led to the behavior we do not wish to emulate. As one particularly eloquent keyboard crusader put it, “I feel like books like this should be forgotten in the past. There is no reason to keep these racists accounts around.”
The general objection is that the narrator’s father is depicted in boyhood as part of a slave-owning family and fighting for the Confederacy, and there is no explicit condemnation of this inhumane action. The section entitled “My Father” begins “When my father was very young he had two dogs and a colored boy. The dogs were named Sextus Hostilus and Numa Pompilius. The colored boy was just my father’s age. He was a slave, but they didn’t call him that. They just called him Dick. He and my father and the two hound dogs used to hunt all day long.”
A later edition of the book updated “colored” for “Negro.” As many have pointed out, this suggests a need to continually update and revise based on what is considered acceptable in any given age. But the only thing that is acceptable in the 21st Century is annihilation. Not a trace of these horrid, sub-human cretins who enslaved people is to be left.
Understanding the story
While Lawson’s book does not explicitly condemn slavery and the Confederacy, it is not fair to say he doesn’t show it is wrong and condemned in the United States. A story that stops to make a long, detailed condemnation is not a very good story. There is a reason he left it out.
There’s also the assumption that the audience reading the book was not historically illiterate. It is odd to hear people say that they were “shocked” to find “racist depictions” in a book about the Civil War written in the 1940s. A basic appreciation for history would lead us to expect things that are unpleasant or make us uncomfortable. A basic understanding of human nature would help us realize why there are still such unpleasant and uncomfortable things in the world around us.
Lawson’s story certainly does not let his father off scot free. In a manner of Biblical justice, the father begins to pay for the crimes into which he was born. His father leaves for war when he is 12. Gone are the days of idyllic hunting and profiting on the backs of unjustly detained slaves. At 14, after a daring expedition to secure a store-owner’s gold, the boy becomes a soldier for the Confederacy, likely because of the sheer desperation of a military operation woefully undermanned and lacking supplies.
In conditions of scarcity and near-starvation, the narrator’s father stood proudly holding the guidon for the cannons to line up on the battlefield. For everyone who wants to dismiss the father as vicious, loathsome, hateful scum, can he or she imagine the character required to brave such conditions as a malnourished 14-year-old? Can this kind of bravery and fierce loyalty lead to standing for an unjust cause out of a misplaced sense of honor? Demonstrably so! Such qualities are admirable even when wrongly applied.
For the deaf in the audience: the father was not good qua son of slave-owning but he demonstrated goodness in fortitude and bravery, attributes which were, arguably wrongly, put in the service of the Confederacy; nonetheless, the author’s father is presented as a 14-year-old of exceptional character.
From hunger on the battlefield, the narrator’s father’s position deteriorates. Retreating in disgrace after a Menie ball to the leg, he is reduced to a lengthy convalescence in a converted barn. Later, at 16 with limited occupations in the economically decimated South, the father travels to New York to “make his fortune.” He never did make a fortune, it seems, but he was continually teased for walking with a limp and being a “little Rebel” for his Southern accent. Slave-holding and sedition do not breed fortune and power in Lawson’s account; far from it.
It’s worth considering how the New Yorkers reacted to the “little Rebel” vanquished on the battlefield seeking his fortune among the Yankees he once fought. The impulse of recent years to erase such people from history, to “cancel” those who have fallen into grave sin, is a disturbing one. Expunging fault will never be easy because it has a terrible way of cropping up again. What should most disturb us about reading about actions that make us uncomfortable is not that someone else committed them but that we are capable of such actions ourselves.
The final word
On the whole, They Were Strong and Good is a rollicking look at an American family, who are, as the author notes, typical of so many Americans. Were they white? Yes. Were they flawed? Yes. Are we flawed and capable of monstrous evil? Yes, so don’t let the previous answers prompt you to burn the book.
In fact, it may be wise to check a copy of the They Were Strong and Good out of the public library and never return it. The only reason it’s still on the shelf is merely an oversight.
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