Babies Made Us Modern by Golden Janet

Author:Golden, Janet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2018-03-28T04:00:00+00:00

7

The Inner Lives of Babies

Infant Psychology

Forty-four million people attended the 1939–1940 World’s Fair in New York City. The Fair’s official theme, “The World of Tomorrow,” offered an optimistic vision to a nation still reeling from an economic depression and warily watching events in Europe and Asia that would soon lead to World War II. On the fairgrounds, the promise of the future enticed viewers to several shows and events featuring babies. The manufacturers of Karo Syrup and Gerber Baby Food cosponsored the “First Year of Life” exhibit along with the Maternity Center Association of New York City. More than 660,000 people viewed the display, picking up 400,000 free pamphlets, including “Baby’s First Year of Life” and “Father Plays a Leading Role.” Another corporate sponsor, Mead Johnson, presented an exhibit on “Child Health, Normal Growth and Development,” while Junket’s Food Products sponsored a “personality baby contest.” There were special events as well, including a baby crawling contest that ended in controversy because the infants were left crawling and crying in the broiling sunshine for more than an hour. A more successful effort drew fairgoers attracted to a fundraiser for the “Free Milk Fund for Babies” featuring well-known stars Abbott and Costello, Cab Calloway, and Irving Berlin, among others.1

The New York World’s Fair, like so many of its predecessors, included an incubator exhibit organized by Dr. Martin Couney. Visitors found it in the amusement area rather than in the health and medicine exhibit hall displaying scientific marvels. Shortly after the fair opened, New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling published a profile of Couney, portraying the elderly doctor as “a Patron of the Preemies” and describing the “bantam weight babies” in the incubators. Liebling observed that one of Couney’s first American preemies, from the Omaha Exposition in 1898, survived to win a Croix de Guerre in World War I.2

At the door of the incubator building, a sign announced, “All the World Loves a Baby.” Maybe so, but the financial statement suggested that the public no longer loved incubator shows. One disappointed viewer, a young boy, stood outside the exhibit warning would-be paying customers, “They don’t do no tricks. They just sleep.” Despite overall good press, including articles in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the Washington, DC, Times Herald, Couney’s exhibition struggled to make money, leading to some testy exchanges with the fair organizers. It was an ominous sign. Failure to draw a crowd at the World’s Fair in 1939 presaged the closing of Couney’s Atlantic City boardwalk summer incubator show in 1943 and the end of the Coney Island Incubator exhibit two years later. Incubators saved lives (98 of the 108 babies housed in the New York World’s Fair exhibit survived), but in the 1940s, the public considered them hospital technologies, not commercial entertainment.3

Perhaps incubator babies no longer fascinated viewers because other weakling babies – multiples – eclipsed them as public showpieces. The first surviving set of quintuplets, the identical Dionne girls born in Canada in 1934, became tourist magnets at their government-built

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