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Mrs. Sidney S. Blake. Jr., of Philadelphia, and Sidney, III. She borrowed this
antique cradle from her sister, who shopped four months before finding it.
What Ever Became
ofthe Cradle? By THOMAS J. NAUGHTON
The author and his family at his home in Old ^aybrook. Conn. His mother-inlaw,
Mrs. J, Seelye Bixkr, rocks her youngest grandchild, .Alexander Naughton.
Once it was a must in every nursery.
And there's still nothing like
a cradle for rocking baby.
So why did it ever go out of fashion?
Not long ago, after three or four nights of floor-walking with
a sleepless new member of the family, I got to wondering
why we didn't have a eradle. For almost any other routine
performance, it seemed to me, we had some helpful gadget;
for giving him bis batb or taking him riding in the car we
had up-to-date eontrivanees whose ingcniiity amazed his
grandmotber. But when he was holding out against going
to sleep, nothing we bad was any use; back we went to the
Stone Age and daddy's shoulder and daddy's weary feet.
The situation plainly called for a eradle. Where was it?
At the breakfast table I asked my wife about it. Her
eyes widened in surprise. (Continued on Page 115)

April 28, 195G
What Ever Became ofthe Cradle?
CConlinued from Page 42)
"Why, I don't know," she said. "It
sounds like a good idea to me. Let's just
see what the book says."
The book, at our house, includes some
half a dozen volumes on baby care.
Among them they tell you everything
you could want to know about almost
any infant question you can think of—except
cradles. About the cradle the book.
Dr. Benjamui Spock and his worthy colleagues,
said nothing. It's all right to
rock a child—in fact, the book recommends
it. How you rock him is up to you.
So, I went out to get a cradle. I found
out why we didn't have one. The reason
is simple: there aren't any. Three of the
biggest department stores in New York
haven't had a cradle in stock for years
and have no idea where to get one. Sears,
Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogues
list cradles for dolls, but not for
children. Catalogues of major makers of
children's furniture show cribs, bassinets
and dozens of other things, but no
cradles. The Department of Health.
Education, and Welfare, the Gesell Institute
of Child Development at New
Haven, the Child Study Association of
America—none of them could teli me
where to get a cradle.
This, now, was puzzling. Where did it
go? Was it possible [hat there was something
wrong with it, that it was somehow
bad fora child? In view of what the book
said about rocking, that didn't seem
likely, but Î looked into it anyway. Department
of H., E,. and W., Chüd Study
Association, Gesell—none of them has
ever heard of any study showing that a
cradle is bad for a child. They don't know
of anything wrong with it. And on rocking,
they're with the book ali the way.
One young pediatrician told me of his
first visit to the children's ward of a large
hospital whose staff he had just joined,
a couple of years ago. It was a new
ward—fresh, gleaming cribs ranked precisely
along the sides, big windows,
everything the latest and best to be had.
And right in the middle of its rubber-
.•unnered aisle stood an old, somewhatbeat-up
rocking chair. What for? To rock
the babies in and soothe them when they
got fussy. Science, for all its wonders, has
yet to devise a crib that can do that, A
cradle, of course, could i" ' it beautifully.
Very likely the ward would have had a
cradle in it, instead of the rocking chair,
if anybody could have found one.
When something becomes extinct,
there ought to be a reason. The buffalo
herds and the passenger pigeon were done
to death for sport and money, the oil
lamp and the buggy were replaced by
things that did their jobs better. But nobody
could have made money by exterminating
the cradle, and it hasn't been
replaced by anything that will do its
job better or that will do its job at all. In
the place where stood the cradle now
stands nothing. Presto! Like a magic
trick, with not even a puff of smoke to
mark where it used to be.
And the most curious thing i.s that it
was not only useful but for hundreds of
years practically universal. It is by far the
oldest and most widely familiar piece of
infant furniture ever known. In olden
days everybody had one—king or commoner,
lord or ]out, if you had a baby
you had a cradle to rock it in, as a matter
of course. In colonial America no parents
would have dreamed of trying to get along
without one. Even in the deepest backwoods,
where diapers had to be made out
of mamma's old petticoats; in the days
when the bath water, if any, had to be
warmed up in the cabin fireplace, papa
took his ax to a tree and banged together
some kind of cradle. It wasn't a convenience,
it was a necessity. And now—poof !
Gone.
Vet every parent still knows how
quickly a gentle swaying motion will
bewitch a tired child to sleep. A ride in a
car will do it, but that's a little unhandy at
three o'elock of a winter's morning. Walking
him in your arms will do it, but the
catch is this: unless you want to walk all
night you have to put him down, and then
he wakes up. Sometimes jiggling his crib
will do it, but you need luck for that.
Cribs aren't realiy built for it, and usually
you're more likely to rattle him
awake than you are to quiet him. They're
all pretty poor substitutes, obviously, for
the little rocking bed that isn't there.
Some cradles, of course, in the showier
homes, were so elaborately carved that
nobody could keep them clean. But none
of that was any fault of the cradle. Essentially
the cradle was simple and strictly
functional. Good ones, well made along
spare, pleasing lines, were handsome as
well. They lasted for generation after generation.
Some from colonial times are
still around now. People who favor early-
American decoration often have them,
They use them for holding firewood. The
baby, if there is one, sleeps somewhere
else—and if it doesn't sleep, its father
walks the floor with it.
What happened? There are two answers,
both right. One comes from the
furniture makers. A leading maker of
children's furniture, Mr. Walter L, Beaman,
president of the Gem Crib and
Cradle Company, of Gardner, Massachusetts,
dates the death knell of the cradle
at forty-Iwo years ago. Up to that time,
he says, his company was making cradles,
bul in ¡9!4 it switched to wheeled cribs,
the advantage of these being that a
mother could keep the baby in its bed and
yet move it around the house easily, to
have it under her eye. The innovation,
says Mr, Beaman, was a great success.
Others started doing the same thing, and
that, as far as the cradle was concerned,
was the end. "I believe no one will deny."
he says, "that we probably had more to
do with putting the old cradle out of
commission than anyone else."
Child-care authorities, however, think
that's only part of the story. The real
cause of the cradle's demise, they believe,
was a theory of child rearing that rose up
whose watchword was "science" and
whose docirine, generally speaking, was
that anything parents normally thought
was good for a child was probably bad,
Many people, including some of the
younger child-care authorities themselves,
associate this school of thought
mainly with the i92Ü's. but. in fact, it
goes back long before that^and before
1914, too—to around 1900. Breast feeding
was bad, partly because ofthe quality
of the food^which was produced in a
deplorably unscientific way—but mostly
because it involved sensations of affection.
Showing alTection was coddling,
and was terrible—warp the child's personality.
There was a list of Don'ts that
covered nearly everything: Don't pick
your baby up; don't do this; don't do
that. And high on the list was Don't
Rock It.
(jrrandmothers and great-grandmothers,
including our baby's, remember the
Don't-Rock business well. Rocking could
cause insomnia, ruin eyesight, impair the
sense of balance, to name just a few of
its dangers. None of the "scientists" ever
proved, of course, that rocking actually
did do any of these things, but. on the
other hand, it was hard to prove it
wouldn't, and with all the dire talk going
on, parents, understandably, preferred
not to take a chance. Iron cribs had begun
coming in many years earlier. They
came in at first, presumably, because they
were cheap, but well before 1914 a great
many parents who could easily have afforded
cradles were using fi,\ed cribs of
wood or iron instead, because they were
afraid rocking might be harmful.
That's what did the cradle in. The
wheeled crib added its bit. all right, but
had it not been for the Don't-Rock Fever,
there would have been nothing to prevent
parents from having a wheeled crib
for daytime convenience and a cradle for
peace at night. Instead, they abandoned
thecradlealtogether. By the 192O's. when
the Don't-Rock school burst forth in a
final eruption of publicity, the cradle had
already disappeared. And, incidentally,
the rocking chair hud disappeared too.
In modern pédiatrie opinion, of course,
the whole Hands-Off theory was nonsense.
Breast feeding is back, generally
recognized today as just about the best
thing a mother can do, not only for herself
but for her child. Showing normal
afl'ection is not only condoned but recommended,
urged, and sometimes actually
prescribed—seen now as probably the
surest way there is to avoid warping a
'A delegation of fans out there want the car back they gave you,"
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"5
child's personality. If your baby wants to
be picked up, go ahead and pick it up.
And if it's fussy, rock it.
Since old-established custom—not to
mention Nature—became respectable
again, the rocking chair has been winning
its way back. In the past few years it has
begun reappearing in its tradition-honored
places—on the porch, in the living
room. More and more parents—like the
nurses and doctors in that children's
ward—have been finding it very useful in
the nursery. But the cradle is still out In
the cold. Probably the reason is that during
the long years of its banishment our
homes changed so much that now, in many
of them, there's no place to put it. It's
good for only a few months of a child's
life—up to about the end of his first
year—after which the child goes into a
crib anyway and the cradle must be
stored. In the days when houses had
space to spare, that didn't make any difference;
today it does. For many parents
it's easier to get along without a cradle for
those few months, whether daddy needs
the exercise or not. than it is to find room
for it between times. Sadder stiil, it's been
away so long that most young parents,
having never seen a cradle with a child in
it. don't even think of it.
And so, it's gone and more than half
forgotten. Celebrated in song, poem and
story—Rocked in the Cradle of the
Deep; Down Will Come Baby, Cradle
and All; When From the Cra'dle to the
Grave I Look—not today. Faneuil Hall
in Boston is called the Cradle of Liberty;
if we were starting the American Revolution
now. we'd have to call it a crib or a
bassinet. The Hand That Rocks the
Cradle is the Hand That Rules the Worid.
The hand is out of practice, with nothing
to rock—and look at the shape the
world's in.
There is a chance that the cradle will
come back, "it may not be too long before
manufacturers begin to put them
out," wrote the lady ofthe Department of
Health. Education, and Welfare, "as
pediatricians arc now lauding them."
Beat the drum and clang the cymbal, welcome
home the exile, wrongfully convicted.
It shouldn't be very hard to figure
out a design for a cradle that would convert
to a crib, say, or for one that could
fold up into not much more space than a
suitcase or a bridge table. Ingenious
Do-It-Yourselfers could have a field day
with it.
At least for a while, though, I won't
have to bother; for the time being, my
problem is solved. One of our neighbors,
it turned out. had an antique cradle. He
was fairly amazed when I talked to him
about it, but he's a good-natured fellow,
and he lent it to us. It's wonderful. Just a
little troughlike thing, about three feet
long, with simple wooden rockei^s. We
keep it in the baby's room, for naps and
nighttime, and it works like magic. It
works so well that my wife's mother was
a little scared of it. at Hrst, Now that she's
used to it, she's quite bitter about those
Don't-Rock people who kept her from
ever having one for her four children. The
baby's great-grandmother is delighted—
takes her back, she says, to when she was
a little girl, and she wishes she hadn't
paid any attention to the Don't-Rock
talk either, [hough that's all a long time
ago now. Our pediatrician thinks it's
great, and I haven't done any night floorwalking
in weeks. My wife was saying the
other day it's the best idea she ever had.
It's such a success, in fact, that several
people around us want to borrow it. in
turn, after our boy outgrows it. The
neighbor who lent it to us in the first
place. I think, almost wishes now he
hadn't. If this keeps up, he won't get it
back for years. And what will he do with
his firewood? THE END