“Where there’s a will, there’s a way:” contingency, mobility, and subjectification at the Stratemeyer Syndicate

This essay connects the mass-produced books of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories since 1930 and the Hardy Boys Adventures since 1927, with the discourses of self-help and self-improvement and argues that the effects these books have on their young readers instigate the formation of a very specific (white, middle class) subjectivity. This modern mode of relating to oneself includes an adjustable, self-assertive, self-monitoring personality, which can be understood as an answer to the challenges of the Second Industrialization and the contingencies connected to the acceleration, fragmentation, de-familiarizations, and individualization of modernity. At the same time, the essay argues, the novels also include a very specific position in terms of gender, race, and class, which, in spite of the figure of Nancy Drew, remains fundamentally linked to the values of patriarchy, the middle class and whiteness.

When I began studying the Hardy Boys, the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, and similar books produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, I wanted to learn which stories ordinary young people had actually consumed in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.I had suspected that the canonical novels and documentary works from these decades that I and my colleagues had read in college (Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, William Faulkner, James Agee, and Walker Evans…) did not necessary constitute the soul food for most adolescents and young adults of the time.I was interested in the resources that people growing up in these years actually had at their disposal in order to develop the imaginations or fantasies about themselves needed to assemble their own identities.By identities, I mean idealized self-images, including attitudes, values, aspirations, objectives, perhaps also hopes and anxieties.I had asked my former host parents (I had been a foreign exchange student when I was in high school) and their friends what they had read as kids and young adults.The names Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys kept repeating when they related their memories.They told me that most families at the time did not even have enough money for their children to afford Stratemeyer's fifty centers, that the only literature they could afford were pulps and/or comics.Yet they eagerly awaited their turn to peruse the newest Stratemeyer mystery passing from the more affluent kids in their schools down to the less fortunate.
In this essay, I want to discuss some of the fruits of my explorations of these resources, while taking a detour through the theory of subjectification as Nikolas Rose has introduced it.Subjectification refers to the process of building a "relation to ourselves" (1998, p. 18) within a social context.According to Rose, since the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, this process has increasingly been channelled by the efforts of "psy experts" (1998, p. 13), therapists and counsellors, who help their clients master the challenges of modernization.Lisa Blackman has connected these new subjectivities to self-help discourses: "self-help techniques, framed increasingly through the discourses of therapy and counselling, provide practices through which theses self-self and self-other relations can be remade." (2004, p. 225) In her book on therapy, emotions, and the culture of self-help, Eva Illouz concurs, asserting that "the therapeutic discourse represents a formidably powerful and quintessentially modern way to institutionalize the self" (2008, p. 9).This paper will explore this institutionalization as regards the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers-and, ultimately, their relation to Stratemeyer's adolescent detective mysteries.Lauren Berlant's identification of the affective (and fatal) economies surrounding time-honoured fantasies of the good life, equality, and success in Cruel Optimism further clarifies Rose's and Illouz' assessment of a continuity between the Second Industrial Revolution (and capitalism), self-help and advice cultures, affective attachments, and subjectification.
My argument is that Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys partake of this interrelation through their usage as ideal vehicles of modern subjectivities in the process of adjustment to an accelerated, individualized, radically self-reliant, yet also controlled and normalized world.In other words: the books from the Stratemeyer Syndicate take on the task of showing adolescents how to navigate the world-and, to an extent, they do this in great similarity to the psy experts, counsellors, and advice columns.

The Stratemeyer Syndicate and affective economies
Let me begin with the success of the books.The Nancy Drew Girl Detective series (originally: Nancy Drew Mystery Stories) is one of the longest running and most successful book series for teenagers in the US.Begun at the onset of the Great Depression, it went through several re-launches and today appears as Nancy Drew Diaries under the aegis of Simon & Schuster, who bought the Stratemeyer Syndicate in 1987.The latest addition to the Nancy Drew universe is Katt Shea's 2019 movie version of The Hidden Staircase with Sophie Lills and Sam Trammell. 1 The Syndicate, a child of the Second Industrialization and the Progressive Era, which was established by the established author of young adult literature, Edward Stratemeyer in 1905, was a "production factory for series books."(Johnson 6).Stratemeyer's venture embarked on the Nancy Drew series in 1929 (the first volume, The Secret of the Old Clock, was published in 1930).It was a girls' version of his successful boy detective series The Hardy Boys, started in 1927 with The Tower Treasure.There are few Americans in the mentioned generations who did not devour one or the other series.Among the public personae who have admitted an addiction to Nancy Drew are people as diverse as Laura Bush, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Sonia Sotomayor, Gayle King, Diane Sawyer and Nancy Grace (Hoffman 2009).
Even though both series were extensively revised after 1959 2 (Bush, Clinton, Pelosi, and Ginsberg may still have read the originals), the lasting success speaks to the almost eerie potential for parasocial identification provided by the books and their master plan. 3This is something that does seem to call for an explanation, especially because many commentators have remarked on the characters' almost complete lack of interiority.How do these bland books become such vehicles for imaginary subject formation or the furnishing of generations of adolescents' imaginary landscapes?How do young readers feel empowered individually and stimulated in their life designs or dreams even though the books themselves are highly standardized and mass-produced like industrial products?
In a very inspiring study of "Nancy Drew and her Readers" (2006, pp. 29-70), Ilana Nash wonders why female readers were not alienated by the patriarchal structures and "oppressive social politics" in the series.Clearly-at least by today's standards-the series is racist and classist.Nash's question is also more than pertinent for the Hardy Boys Series in regard to readers without an Anglo-Saxon background or readers of colour.Nash refers to Janice Radway and Nan Enstad, "who have demonstrated that 'trashy' genre literature (romance novels and dime novels, respectively) can provide its female readership with a crucial 'place to dream,' in 1 Needless to say, there have always been Nancy Drew societies (and Hardy Boy fan clubs); there are movies, television series, comics and video games celebrating the teenage sleuths; there is, of course, a Nancy Drew Cookbook, not to mention postcards, T-shirts and other merchandise. 2You can detect the status of the versions by the number of chapters: the original versions have 25 chapters, the revised ones only 20 chapters.The revisions partly modernized the language, removed references that later generations would not understand and, perhaps most of all, cleansed the books of inappropriate language.concerning race, class, ethnicities, and religion.Rebecca S. Fribush makes the additional argument, that the revision made the novels more timid, adjusting them to the conservative spirit of the cold war (1998, p. 34). 3 Parasocial relationships are usually defined as relationships with movie or TV personalities/celebrities: "the seeming face-to-face relationship that develops between a viewer and a mediated personality" (Donald Horton and Richard Wohl first explored these relationships in 1956-see Cole and Leets 1999, p. 496).Granted that there is a difference between real-life celebrities and fictional characters, various scholars have lately explored the similarities between imagined relations to a star and imagined relations to a character.See for instance: Lind (2015) or Giles (2010).Giles writes: "Ultimately, parasocial interaction is about encountering a figure through a medium and then treating that figure as if it were another human being."(2010, p. 454).
Enstad's phrase-a location for imagining an effective subjectivity-despite circumstances that hinder such a condition in readers' real lives, and also despite the books' support of hegemonic ideologies."(2006, pp. 29-30) Anne H. Lundin makes a similar point, arguing that the "formulaic adventures of Nancy Drew appeal by their consistent and concrete enactment of the defeat of evil by good.Cognitively and affectively, the child is testing whether the world is a place to be trusted, to be the arena of growing competence and deliverance against threatening forces of evil."(2003, p. 125) Nash concludes, "the Nancy Drew series serves two masters at once, relying on conservative ideologies of race, class, and even gender while simultaneously promoting a somewhat progressive vision of girls' agency."(2006, p. 30) Similarly, the Hardy Boys books are based on an ideology of whiteness and authority, and yet somehow promise a vision of individuality and autonomy.I would add that these series can rely on highly schematic formulae while simultaneously fostering a vision of plurality.
At the time that the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series were conceived, Edward Stratemeyer had turned to the assembly line production method of the Syndicate. 4efore this, he had written individual books and entire series of adventures all by himself.The Syndicate (meaning: mostly Stratemeyer himself until his death in May 1930 and, subsequently, his daughter Harriet Stratemeyer Adams) wrote outlines for the books and on occasion sketches of the cast of characters including information on earlier books in the series.Then they sent these outlines to ghostwriters, and received the book manuscripts within three to five weeks. 5The general guideline for writers, as summarized by Carole Kismaric and Marvin Heiferman includes actiondriven plots, twenty-five chapters, cliff-hangers, no touching or kissing, no excessive violence ("no character could be knocked unconscious more than once per book"), intensity of suspense, "safe and sane" reading (1998, p. 15).
The Nestor of the Syndicate, Edward Stratemeyer, was the son of German immigrants; his father was a Forty-Niner and participated in the great gold rush before settling in New Jersey (Lange 2004, p. 17).Stratemeyer liked to emphasize the necessity of a "good yarn" by which he meant a fast, suspenseful storyline and insisted in the fundamental morality of his books.His earliest creations were luck & pluck stories along the lines of Horatio Alger, whose last books he was hired to complete (Lange 2004, p. 22).Around the turn of the century, Stratemeyer acknowledged the decline of interest in the Alger formula, and took up imperialistic adventure and war stories.In fact, Brian Rouleau dubbed the genre "fictional imperialism" for boys (2008, p. 492).Alluding to Theodore Roosevelt, Rouleau describes them as "an amalgam of 'strenuous-life' and 'muscular-Christian' doctrine stuffed into the uniform of a United States soldier."(2008) However, after WW I, the war stories also lost much of their popularity: "most of our boys are a little bit tired of army stories just at present" Stratemeyer wrote in 1923. 6tratemeyer was always keen on the success of his stories, not just for monetary reasons (he had a rather fatherly relation to his books and series).Judging from his success, he had an excellent intuition for the taste of young people.According to Carol Billman, his enterprise produced more than 1300 books in 125 series, which published 200 million copies overall (1986, pp. 2-3).In 1926, "98% of kids in an Illinois survey named a Stratemeyer character as their favourite."(Kismaric and Heiferman 1998, p. 15).In his correspondence with writers, Stratemeyer insists on action,7 and on relevance: "not old-time stuff." 8He recommends the insertion of modern appliances and up-to-date technology, modern language, and modern events/occasions.In the letter in which he commissions Mildred Wirt, up to this point the writer of the Ruth Fielding series, to take up the first Nancy Drew books, Stratemeyer expresses the hope that the first story "will make all girls want to read more about Nancy Drew." 9  Certainly, part of the strategy of making the reader feel good about and with these books was to anchor them securely within the moral discourse of the target group: predominantly white middle and upper-class families.Referring to Nancy Drew, Stratemeyer's letters and the letters of his daughter Harriet Stratemeyer Adams keep emphasizing the necessity for a resourceful and assertive heroine who is at the same time kind and calm. 10Stratemeyer reacted nervously whenever his ethics were criticized.To the Methodist Book Concern (today: The United Methodist Publishing House), which dared to call the Stratemeyer books "trash," he replied that his books had "been used repeatedly for gifts in Sunday schools" and that they are "healthful tales of a high moral tone." 11When the Anti-Defamation League protested against the representation of Jews in the Tom Swift series, he became very defensive and promised to insert a Jewish character "who would be all that any Jewish youth might desire." 12Anne Lundin emphasizes the significance of the "moral geography" of Nancy's "heroics," especially as regards women and children (2003, p. 126)."In her particular strand of moral crusading-her weave of mystery, mayhem, and moral outrage-" she suggests, "Nancy is, in the Yiddish words of one editor, 'a mensch.''We as readers are comforted by such company."(2003, pp. 127-128).
Other elements of the Syndicate's affective strategy were the use of narrative attachment and ostentatious blanks or pauses in the text.In combination, these strategies draw the young reader deeply into the text and invite them to decide how they would act if they were Nancy, Frank or Joe (Hardy).In other words, these techniques involve and embroil the reader.By narrative attachment, I mean the occasional use of interior focalization that puts the reader into the position of the heroes (here an example from the second Hardy Boy adventure The House on the Cliff): They went on cautiously until they reached the edge of the bushes and there they crouched behind the screen of leaves, peeping out at the gloomy old stone building in the clearing.But at the first glance, an expression of surprise crossed Frank's face.The Polucca house was evidently occupied!(Dixon 1991, pp.95-96) 13   This example, penned by Leslie McFarlane (ghostwriter for the first sixteen Hardy Boy adventures), anticipates Mildred Wirt's technique of making Nancy a focalizer, for instance when she is driving on a lonely road: the young reader is in the car together with her.In addition, mostly at the end of chapters, there is a moment of indeterminacy, the action arrested, where the reader is prompted to think with her, for her, in support of her: With the exception of Abigail Rowen, Nancy had called upon all of the Crowley relatives.From what the Turner sisters had told her, she was doubtful that a visit to her cottage would be worth while."Oh well, I suppose I may as well go there to-morrow," Nancy decided, after a mental debate."She's my last hope.If I fail there, I'll be forced to give up."(Keene 1930, p. 76) 14   Will she?Should she?What would I do?

Subjectivity
Nikolas Rose makes a strong point for a theory of subjectification in place of a theory of subjectivity.Subjectivity is not simply (and suddenly) there.It is emergent, a process, a formation "in a context of apparatuses, practices, machinations, and assemblages" (1998, p. 10).In an editorial on "Affect," Lisa Blackman and Couze Venn argue for a similar "reformulation of the problematic of subjectivity; it radically decenters the individual in that it considers the individual to be the product of a process of becoming rather than a starting point from which everything else is accounted for."(2010, p. 20) Subjectification is a reflexive process, as it establishes a person's attachments and distances (affinities and differences) to other persons and objects in order to find their own place.It describes a movement, a dynamic between self and others that passes through the instances and institutions of society in order to affirm and enjoin "particular relations with ourselves" (1998, p. 10).Rose is interested in a genealogy of subjectification: the "diversity of languages of 'personhood' that have taken shape" (1998, p. 25) and "the genealogy of the relations that human beings have established with themselves-in which they have come to relate to themselves as selves " (1998, p. 24).
The reader of Nancy Drew or The Hardy Boys participates in a kind of vicarious subjectification as they15 are directed, in the act of reading, to pass from action and dialogue to a reflection in Nancy's or the Hardy boys' minds-and then feels compelled to appraise this reflection.Take, for example, the following passage from The Tower Treasure, in which Frank and Joe learn that an excited and hasty claim only aggravates the situation for innocent Mr. Robinson, whom they had wanted to help: "The boys … were deeply puzzled and tremendously disappointed, for they had been practically certain that the loot would be found.Now they saw that the only consequence of the whole affair was to involve Mr. Robinson more deeply than ever in the mystery."(Dixon 1927, p. 162) The reader realizes that Frank and Joe have acted rashly and have to backtrack and reappraise their actions.
Edward Stratemeyer knew that his young readership would be eager to form an attachment with the hero/ine: "In reading over the plot," he wrote to Mildred Wirt when sending her the first outline, "you will, I am sure, see the advantage of bringing out the disagreeable points of the Topham family and especially of the daughters and also the advantage of stressing old Abigail's poverty and then her sickness and also the poverty of the Horner girls.All these things will increase the interest in what Nancy is trying to do."16I argue that the attachment that readers feel to the main protagonists and their lives is the affective condition for the production/emergence of subjectivity through the consumption of (juvenile) mass culture.A parasocial relationship is probably always defined by attachment (see Cole and Leets) or 'followership.'One 'follows' a person, a star, a fictional character; one is attached and follows in the person's footsteps (at least for a while).This attachment, this affective affinity becomes a resource for forming a relation with the self.The character appears as a model or a vehicle for the readers' relation to themselves.They respond to themselves in the same manner that they respond to Frank, Joe, and Nancy.
Reading is one of the institutions or apparatuses Nikolas Rose is thinking of in his theory of subjectification.Language, he explains, can also be seen as "an assemblage of 'discursive practices'" (1998, p. 174); narratives belong to the "[h]istorically and culturally developed sense-making procedures, practices or methods" in society (1998, p. 176).Narratives provide scenarios, sensitivities, and patterns to make sense of personal experience.Paul Ricoeur has once explained that identity can only be understood properly with the help of narrative: Only a plot (more precisely: emplotment) is able to create the dynamic identity of a protagonist that we take as a model for our own imagined or "narrative" identities (1991, p. 77).Clearly, the narratives we encounter in our lives, whether in the form of homiletic narratives, oral stories, newspaper serials, pulps, comics, novels or, today, films, TikTok or Instagram, have a huge influence on our life designs.As Couze Venn has pointed out in an exploration of Ricoeur's theory, narrative identity is intricately linked to economies of desire (2020, p. 46, 56).
In his interpretation of Michel Foucault's discussion of Diego Velázquez' painting Las Meninas, Stuart Hall explains how subjects come into being through discourse."All discourses," Hall asserts, "construct subject-positions, from which alone they make sense."Hall explains: First, the discourse itself produces 'subjects'-figures who personify the particular form of knowledge which the discourse produces.These subjects have the attributes we would expect as these are defined by the discourse: the madman, the hysterical woman, the homosexual, the individualized criminal, and so on.These figures are specific to specific discursive regimes and historical periods.But the discourse also produces a place for the subject (i.e. the reader or viewer, who is also 'subjected to' discourse) from which its particular knowledge and meaning most makes sense.(2003, p. 56) In The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, both forms of subjectification are fairly obvious.The adventures present many types of characters, which figure prominently in the discourses of the 1920s and 1930s (and later); and, as we saw, they present a position for the reader to observe and make sense of what transpires in the adventures.In Velázquez' much-discussed painting, the viewer is confronted with various models of being at the court17 : the artist-painter, the Infanta, the maids of honour, the dwarfs, the courtier, the chaperone, the guard.The gaze of the viewer surveys the scene; it faces, at the same time, the views of the represented subjects, and therefore feels also noted and watched; finally, at second glance, it may experience the eerie feeling that it has usurped the place of the 'real' (but not really represented) subjects of the painting: the King and Queen.In order to read the painting, the onlooker has to recognize and sort out the hierarchies and rules of conduct at the court and, perhaps search for their own place in the painting.Representation in the Stratemeyer adventures is obviously less subtle.The reader is confronted with a straightforward mystery; they will, to a degree, compare themselves with ('be watched by') the popular protagonist(s) and their friends; most importantly, they will be prompted to take the place of the detective/s and help them observe.The reader becomes the private eye behind the book.They become the person who will detect the secret.They will decide (with Nancy) not to give up and, in case of difficulties, (with the Hardy Boys) to rethink their actions.
I argue that what the reader detects is not fortuitous.The 'secret' of Nancy Drew and the 'secret' of the Hardy Boys (most of the books carry either 'clue,' 'mystery,' or 'secret' in their titles) is, beyond the "solution" to the plot's mystery, how the reader asserts themselves in, how they successfully navigate modernity.The fact that the currency in which this success is measured is more often than not money, tells us something about the materialism of the 1920s and the financial anxiety of the 1930s and 1940s.In The Secret of the Old Clock, which is about the search for a lost testament, Nancy's pun "Where there's a will, there's a way" (Keene 1930, p. 23) expresses the synecdochical relationship of the senses of ‚will:' money, legacy, testament, purpose, desire, and the mind's ability to control one's own actions.The real secret is Nancy's relation to herself, her own "will," her modern subjectivity, which enables her to realize her purpose, find the testament, and get at the money.Nancy's "language of personhood," her model assemblage, as Nikolas Rose might call it, has proven immensely popular through the decades.This popularity (and that of the Hardy Boys series) marks a chapter in the history of subjectivity-one hallmarked by the belief in self-making, entrepreneurial agency, and secret energies of the soul-that might just be coming to an end today.
The "catastrophe of modernity," contingency, mobility, and self-help Fortune magazine fittingly declared: "As oil had its Rockefeller, literature had its Stratemeyer" (Kismaric and Heiferman 1998, p. 15).Others compared him to Henry Ford.I believe that it is not so much the output, the production for mass consumption, the near monopoly that the Syndicate held over books for adolescents or the undercutting of prices (he was called the "father of the Fifty-Centers"), which brings the literature entrepreneur into the vicinity of the 'captains' of the Second Industrialization.It is rather a mindset that Stratemeyer passed on to his detectives, which makes these comparisons compelling.This specific mindset, soon promoted by a mushrooming advice and self-help industry, was an answer to what Niklas Luhmann has aptly called "the catastrophe of modernity" (1997, p. 683).Luhmann is talking about a comprehensive set of systemic transformations that turned peoples' lives upside down between the end of the seventeenth and the end of the nineteenth centuries.The emergence of a society that practiced functional differentiation-i.e., that differentiates society by their members' roles, tasks and capacities instead of families, clans, or estates-immensely increased its performative and innovative power; but it also meant a mental sea change for its members.It completely transformed their senses of time, space, and identity.
Outwardly, it was the gears and wheels of industrialization, the new buzzing urban centres, infrastructure such as canals, roads, pipes and power lines, the car, the railroad, and the elevated train, the ups and downs of the stock exchange, and the revolving doors of office buildings, which altered the appearance of the world. 18nwardly, it was a deep sense of contingency, of being at the mercy of constant change and openness, which created the nausea expressed in the buzzwords of modernism: disruption, fragmentation, de-familiarization, de-centering, anarchy, and dis-illusion.What connects both perspectives is the sense of a fundamentally accelerated and unstable world, and the horror and fascination of constant and unshackled motion.
People like Rockefeller (1839-1937), Ford (1863-1947), and, in a somewhat different way, Stratemeyer (1862Stratemeyer ( -1930) ) were able to ride the crest of acceleration and mobility.The crucial point here is that motion and speed were not only literally a part of the foundations of their respective empires (Rockefeller began his career organizing transportation and transportation remained at the core of his success; Ford began by experimenting with steam engines and later perfected Ransom Eli Olds' line production; Stratemeyer, apart from personally writing in breakneck speed-in 1892/1893, wrote at least 42 dime novels within 18 months-made Frank and Joe Hardy's motorcycles and Nancy's blue roadster into hallmarks of the series), but also in a probably much more significant metaphorical sense.
Functional differentiation of a society, in its consequences, not only triggers a differentiation of its members' minds along the fault lines of diverging areas of life, but it also necessitates constant re-adjustment and re-alignment to new challenges.In other words, individuals can no longer define themselves by who they are or where they come from; rather, their sense of identity comes to rest on how they negotiate their own multiplicity within a complex social whole, how they find a purpose (a will), and how they manage contingency.Thus, the impositions of modernity, the pressures of physical and mental mobility on the individual body, and the realities of survival in an anonymous mass society with mass production and a mass culture led to new ways of relating to oneself.
Rockefeller and Ford (among others) came to symbolize the mindset that seemed able to come to terms with constant mobilization and contingency: a sense of purpose and entitlement, a steadfast belief in the transformative power of the mind and the individual will, and a compulsive adherence to self-reliance (to the point of largely downplaying the influence of socio-political factors).Andrew Carnegie celebrated this mindset when, in his philanthropic program, he declared that "feelings of 'usefulness,' and habits of self-reliance" would plant "'the germ of true manhood'" (Nally and Taylor 2015, p. 52).Possibly, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford were born with this mindset, but it certainly did take institutions, apparatuses, and powers of inculcation to advance these traits into one of the leading patterns of subjectivity for the new century.
Newly formed mass culture was one of the most powerful institutions for this advancement.Michael Makropoulos has built a theory of mass culture on the contingencies resulting from modernization.In his view, mass culture "is a culture which does not primarily problematize contingency as insecurity … but rather evaluates it positively as offering opportunities and an increase in freedom" (2008, p. 10, my translation).As Richard Ohmann has shown, national mass culture comes into being in the United States "in the final fifteen years of the nineteenth century" (1996, p. 23).It is the child of the Second Industrialization and functional differentiation and, as Ohmann argues (1996, pp. 118-174), tied to the then emerging new white middle class: the professional-managerial class.The new middle class is the consumer-the spectator, reader, and user-of mass culture.And the middle class is ultimately the winner of modernization and functional differentiation.
Stratemeyer, who was himself an embodiment of the professional-managerial class, knew his target audience and held up the values and interests of his class very consistently.An ardent admirer of Horatio Alger and William Taylor Adams (who wrote the Oliver Optic series), he came to modernize the rags-to-riches as well as the luck & pluck story formulas (Johnson 1993, p. 2).Instead of (Alger's and Optic's) hard work, Sunday School manners, discipline, and energy, Stratemeyer had the white protagonists of his later stories personify self-confidence, resourcefulness, motivational psychology, quickness of mind, suggestion, and auto-suggestion.Rather than eventual fortune or respectability, Stratemeyer's late protagonists win friends and assert their will over seedy figures.As I have argued above, the secret, the mystery that the reader discovers is treacherously close to the "secret" which Napoleon Hill will reveal with Think and Grow Rich (1937) at the behest of Andrew Carnegie19 or the secret which Henry Ford allegedly found in Ralph Waldo Trine's In Tune with the Infinite (1897) or the secret which Rockefeller Foundation Vice-President Myers voiced by declaring: "lasting gains come not from help but from self-help" (qtd.In Nally and Taylor 2015, p. 52).The secret is the mindset of latenineteenth and early-twentieth-century self-help discourse.This is not awfully surprising, because self-help and advice literature can be seen as part and parcel of mass culture and simultaneously the central technology of the self of the new middle class.With origins as far back as sixteenth-century salvation guides and an attraction that derived from Benjamin Franklin's plainspoken fatherly instruction, self-help systematized and commercialized during the Second Industrialization. 20A central tenet was borrowed from the New Thought Movement: the belief that pure thought, pure will can 'crystallize' (one of Napoleon Hill's expressions 2005, p. 115) into action and material change. 21Another central tenet was the "law of attraction" (Hill calls it "auto-suggestion"), the idea that thoughts attract their "physical equivalent" (Hill 2005, p. 53). 22As a result, success and failure are your personal responsibility; or, as Hill asserted "Success Requires No Explanation.Failure Permits No Alibis."(2005, p. 114) As Lisa Blackman explains: The very difficulties of living the fiction of autonomous self-hood (Rose 1990) are contained within self-help discourses as potential stimuli for change and self-improvement.We must begin to recognize how an economy of pain, fear, anxiety and distress may be part of the apparatus through which this fictional identity is produced, lived and kept in place.(2004, pp. 230-231) During the first decades of the twentieth century, self-help as presented in books, workshops, speeches, and journals became more and more popular.Psychological advice, driven by the same spirit of self-reliance and adjustment, presented in books, newspaper columns, magazines, and call-in radio shows, complemented the self-help guides.In Cold Intimacies, Eva Illouz writes: "In the 1920s, advice literature was, like the movies, an emerging cultural industry…."(2007, p. 9) Self-help and advice inaugurated the rule of the "psy experts" which Nikolas Rose mentions, whom he also calls the "petty engineers of human conduct" (1999, p. 92).In Governing the Soul, he adds: "They actually fabricate subjects … capable of bearing the burdens of liberty" (viii).I argue that it is indeed the contingencies of a white, liberal-capitalistic regime, which the technologies of the self, inculcated by the self-help discourse, address.They mobilize the powers of the self, and give it a new vocabulary to understand itself in its individualized predicament.They supply faith, pleasure, self-esteem, and a cluster of mental techniques to their mostly white subjects. 23And, interestingly, Stratemeyer's young detectives do considerable cultural work for the same trajectory.

The detectives
The Secret of the Old Clock (which Nancy Drew discovers) almost seems to mirror the disruptions of modernity in its title.The clock is old, outmoded, it has been stored, almost forgotten, before Nancy traces it down and finds a tiny notebook hidden in it (Keene 1930, p. 166).The old times are over, their representative in the story, Josiah Cowley, has been abused, has died, and his legacy-his will-has been all but plundered by the new generation, represented by the Topham family.Josiah was seen as "a rather nice extremely queer sort of individual" (1930, p. 3); he represents someone who does not fit into the new times.Richard Topham, in contrast, upwardly mobile, active at the stock exchange, and his wife Cora, "a vapid social climber" (1930, p. 3), as Nancy says, are harbingers of the dislocations of modernity.Their daughters are arrogant and conceited.They do not show respect.The Tophams have tricked old man Cowley into leaving his wealth to them, overturning the 'natural' course of things, according to which the money would go to the needy relatives and two young girls, whom Cowley loved and who live in great poverty because of several strokes of fate.Unless-Nancy finds a new will.
The Tower Treasure (which the Hardy Boys recover) begins with a dangerously speeding motorist who almost pushes Frank and Joe Hardy off the road and later upturns the car, leaving it "a mass of tangled junk" (Dixon 1927, p. 12).The Hardy Boys do not know yet that this is in fact the first clue to solving the puzzle of the stolen treasure of the Applegate mansion.The scapegoat for this theft is the father of one of the Hardy's friends at school, Henry Robinson, who loses his job over the accusation.His son Perry will have to leave school and forgo his education to save the family.Unless-the Hardy boys realize that the loot is not hidden in the tower of the Applegate mansion, but in a water-tower servicing the railroads for which the thief had worked.
Unemployment, job loss, ruined families, speeding machines turned to junk, speculators as social upstarts, a "railwayman" (Dixon 1927, p. 191) as thief: themes such as loss of tradition and time feeling out of joint jumpstart the first books in the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series and link them to a contingent age.In her essay "Solving the Crime of Modernity," Amy Boesky has commented on Nancy Drew's achievements in risk management.She takes into account Stanley Hall's "invention of adolescence" (2019, p. 186) in a psychological study of 1904.Youth, Boesky argues, was seen as particularly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of modernity.When two University of Chicago students, Leopold and Loeb, kidnapped and murdered the son of a wealthy businessman in 1924, one commentator wrote, "It is the of modern youth, of modern parents, of modern economic and social conditions, and modern education."(Boesky 2019, p. 187).Indeed, Nancy and the boys fight the ills of modernity with its own weapons.
Nancy, Joe, and Frank's resourcefulness has two main sources: Firstly, they exhibit the physical and mental mobility that the Self-Help discourse celebrates, symbolized by the blue roadster and the Hardy's motorcycles (see also Romanlov 1995).Secondly, they believe in rational problem-solving backed up by the conviction of a fundamentally benign universe which rewards people who are honest and energetic.Further technologies of the self, on which for instance Napoleon Hill elaborates in his thirteen steps, are demonstrated by the detectives: motivation and determination ("where there's a will there's a way") belong to it; leadership, on which Hill affords a subchapter (courage and self-control belong to it, 2005, pp.120-127), is something for which Nancy is depended upon (Keene 1962, p. 2); Hill's path from desire and auto-suggestion to success follows the sequence Observation, Imagination, Organized Planning, Decision, and Persistence (Step 4 to 8)-a sequence which does not seem to be very far from Nancy's repeated slogan: "I may discover a real clue to-day, and if I do, I'm going to trail it down!"(Keene 1930, p. 65).The Hardy Boys concur in their persistence: "I'm hanged if I'll give up!" says Frank (Dixon 1927, p. 84).For the Nestor of modern self-help books, Samuel Smiles (Self-Help, 1859), but also for the much later Wallace Wattles (The Science of Getting Rich, 1910), agency, action-orientation, and purpose are decisive.Nancy and the Hardys, unlike Horatio Alger's Sunday School heroes, set traps, make things happen-even when Nancy is not on a case, she delivers legal papers for her father (Keene 1930, p. 24), the catchphrase being 'she delivers.'And, finally, as we learn in The Secret: Nancy "had studied psychology in school and was familiar with the power of suggestion and association" (88) Not only does she draw inferences from the associations of other people, she also knows how to smile and bring around people in the right moment-something Dale Carnegie will systematize in How to Win Friends & Influence People (1936).
I argue that the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew provided much more than simply escapism in the times of the Great Depression.As Brian Rouleau points out, they "became the basis for the improvisational play and imaginary worlds that youths constructed, whether alone or in groups" (2008, p. 510).Anne Ludlin is convinced that "Nancy Drew fiction resonates with the way young female readers" create "their imaginative landscape."(2003, p. 123) What they playfully improvised, among other things, are possible forms of subjectivity, possible forms of becoming oneself and relating to others.Much has been written, in this regard, about Nancy's function as a progressive role-model for girls (see Heilbrun 1995, p. 17).Amanda Cross, aka Carolyn Heilbrun was only one of several feminists who praised Nancy Drew for her independence, her lack of attention to boys, her ability to take charge, and her irreverence toward authorities (1994).Certainly, Mildred Wirt, the ghost writer and co-creator of Nancy Drew, herself an amazing character with the first master degree for a woman in journalism from the University of Iowa, an adventuress, airplane pilot, and writer of more than 130 books, made Nancy Drew the most successful Stratemeyer series because of Nancy's assertive and attractive character.Carolyn Heilbrun identified the Wirt version of Nancy Drew with her own image as an early feminist: "I would have suspected she was a contemporary."(Heilbrun 1995, p. 12) Ilana Nash calls her a "powerful fantasy figure […]" (2006, p. 46) and the books "a training ground where girls develop the self-images that might sustain them for the rest of their lives" (2006, p. 49).

Inclusion and exclusion
But Nash also points out that Nancy partook of the fundamentally conservative universe of the Syndicate: while being confident, competent, and head-strong herself, she actively upholds retrograde gender values and a rather Victorian femininity for everybody else in her environment.In Leslie McFarlane's Hardy Boys, women exclusively play the role of outside claqueurs.Frank and Joe perform in a masculine world in which muscles often still count more than brains and in which modernity mostly consists of technical gizmos.Sometimes they seem to be operating in a male toy universe.Teddy Roosevelt's strenuous life is not forgotten here, and for Joe and Frank mobility often means fighting and overpowering thugs after an arduous pursuit.The fact that the thugs are mostly foreign and more often than not from the Global South, where the youngsters from Bayport incidentally give a little American help to a foreign army (The Mark on the Door) or destabilize a corrupt dictator (Footprints under the Window), connects McFarlane's politics of race to Mildred Wirt's.Yet, in spite of these old-fashioned features, Fenton Hardy's advice for his sons always contains one or the other formula from the self-help catechism.
In contrast to the Hardy Boys, Nancy usually remains in the United States.What may seem like gendered provincialism turns out to be one of the assets of the series: Nancy appears more tangible than the Bayport youngsters because she is more involved in an ordinary economy.Her sphere is in the community in which she lives: she visits shops and businesses, department stores and doctors' offices, diners and gas stations, farms and summer camps, banks, and lawyers' offices.In other words, there is much more connectivity provided here and Nancy is able to embody an attractive class position within this economy.Several commentators have pointed out that with her complete independence, liberal father, prosperity, and her roadster, Nancy is not a realistic image for her fans, but more like a fantasy, an ideal, an opportunity for projection and dreams.This certainly also extends to her class position.
Nash identifies Wirt's gender politics as an ideal of upper-class femininity-and it is entirely clear that in Nancy's fictional Iowa town, River Heights, the Drews belong to the Brahmins.However, in the ideological set-up of the series, Nancy embodies a solid middle-class orientation.Moreover, Nancy consistently acts as a sort of gate-keeper, practically policing the class boundaries.In The Secret of the Old Clock, there are at least two boundaries to be patrolled: on the one side Highland Boulevard, where the Tophams live, on the other side, the Muskoka River, where the poor people live.The Tophams, the social upstarts, and Wall Street "skinflints" (Keene 1930, p. 89) present themselves as a class of people who are actually too rich to consume properly.Their house is "more bizarre than [Nancy] had anticipated"; "The walls were heavy with paintings which were entirely out of place in such a small room, and period furniture had been added indiscriminately" (1930, p. 96).The Topham girls accomplish the feat of disrupting consumption twice (1930, pp. 16-17; 52-55) in the novel by creating a scene in the local department store, smashing an expensive vase and tearing up a costly dress.Only Nancy can stop them.
In the Hardy Boys space also plays an important role; not only in the mentioned demarcation of North and South, but also in terms of centre and periphery.After losing his job because of the charge of having stolen the tower treasure, Henry Robinson has to move his family to the margins of the city."Why that's in one of the poorest sections of the city!Frank, I had no idea it was so bad!" declares Frank's friend Callie.And indeed, "the streets became poorer and meaner as [the friends visiting the Robinsons] neared the outskirts of Bayport."(Dixon 1927, p. 111) "There were squalid shacks and tumbledown houses on either side of the narrow street, and ragged children were playing in the roadway" (1927, p. 111).The fact that (presumably in contrast to the other dwellers) the Robinsons do not deserve to live in this space is visible: "It's the neatest place on the whole street," Frank comments (1927, p. 111).The Robinsons have cleaned up the yard and repaired the fence.
In The Secret of the Old Clock, the banks of the Muskoka River house the destitute people, those who, Amy Boesky explains, no one in "River Heights seem [s] to care about […] once the missing will is found.The real poor in these early mysteries-like the people of colour, Jews, immigrants, or servants the books treat so disparagingly-are expected to know their place and stay within it."(2019, p. 192) They seamlessly connect with the criminals, who are "usually 'dark-hued and poor,' with 'piercing dark eyes,' foreign accents, or hooked noses" (2019, p. 192).On the occasion of a ride through the Muskoka banks, Nancy rescues herself from torrential rain and retreats to the farm of the Horner sisters, which marks the border back to the middle class.The Horner sisters, the two kids Josiah Cowley loved, belong to the 'deserving poor,' who have fallen on hard times without their own doing.Only Nancy can bring them back.Thus, Nancy's detective work is about social stability and identity politics.Similarly, the Hardy Boys' detection of the hidden loot eventually restores the Robinsons' opportunity to become self-reliant individuals and return to the middle class.
The class, race, and gender politics of the Stratemeyer Syndicate from the 1920s onwards, become quite obvious at this point.Modernization (and, then, of course the Depression) brought with it a class re-alignment, which also affected the relative positions of ethnic and racialized groups, women and the definitions of individual bodies.For the white professional-managerial class, one central object was that, to quote Amy Boesky, "the middle-class reassert[s] its central claims on prosperity, property, and guardianship" (2019, p. 200).Disability/Critical Race Studies have pointed out that "[w]hiteness and Ability count as 'property,' conferring economic benefits to those who can claim Whiteness and/or normalcy and disadvantages for those who cannot lay claims to these identity statuses" (Annamma et al. 2016, p. 24).More often than not, Frank, Joe, and Nancy attest to this rule and normalize it.
Nancy Drew's and the Hardy Boys' racialized narrative strategies evacuate anybody not belonging into their preferred groups literally to the margins, that is: to those not 'deserving.'Cases in point are the African American caretaker Jeff Tucker in The Secret of the Old Clock, characterized by dialect and an "alcoholic glitter in his eyes" (Keene 1930, p. 139); the "dark-complexioned young woman of foreign appearance who wore a vivid Chinese costume" (Keene 1931, p. 4) named Yvonne Wong in The Secret of Red Gate Farm; the greedy labour leader and speculator Nathan Gombet in The Hidden Staircase, who has "clawlike hands" (Keene 1947a, b, p. 29) and an African American woman as his accomplice; and the Romano king Zorus, gone mad and trying to overthrow the United States in The Clue in the Old Album.Racial and ethnic demarcations are similarly obvious in the universe of the Hardy Boys.The newly immigrated Italian Rocco in The Tower Treasure is made the butt of a joke and brought into the vicinity of the Black Hand (Dixon 1927, pp. 134-136).Grateful to the Hardy boys, Perry Robinson uses the tell-tale phrase: "You've been pretty white to me all through this-."(1927, p. 81) In other words: Nancy and the Hardys are guarding a 'normality' that will also have normative effects on the young reader.
In her essay on "Self-Help and America in the 1930s," Sue Currell has pointed out that self-help guides in the 1920s and 30 s aimed at achieving superiority by adjustment."These books," she writes, "relied on fixed definitions of normality, where the measurement of self-esteem, sanity, and social usefulness appeared possible because of the scientific application of social and psychological statistics…" (2006, p. 131).As Thomas Leonard has pointed out, those statistics tended to come to the result that white middle-and upper-class persons just happened to be smarter (2016, p. 73).Currell remarks that the 'normality' desired in self-help is "based on a culturally specific drive for superiority and success that relegates difference to a problem." (2006, p. 132) And indeed, Wallace Wattles, to name only one example, insists in The Science of Getting Rich on the prohibition of associating with or studying poverty (2003, p. 36).Nancy Romalov remarks on the "whiteness and class bias of these stories."(1995, p. 241) Similarly, Amy Boesky reminds us about Nancy Drew's world, "Deviance is safely pushed away…" (2019, pp. 200-201).
In an excellent Master Thesis on embodiment in Nancy Drew, Katie Still from Georgia State University points out that all Stratemeyer ghostwriters "utilize physiognomy to alert the reader to characters' 'true nature,' whether good or bad." (2009, p. 67) They "reinforce the belief that deviance and goodness are located in and on the physical body."(2009, p. 67) Alice and Grace Horner in The Secret of the Old Clock not only show their 'deserving' nature through their neat clothes and clean house, but also through their physical attractiveness.The Robinsons in The Tower Treasure carry themselves with dignity, good humour, and self-possession in the face of adversity (Dixon 1927, p. 112).Frank and Joe, themselves, are bright eyed and exude a "firm yet good-humoured expression" (1927, p. 2).Nancy with her curly golden hair and physical attractiveness between her overly masculine girlfriend George and her overly plump friend Bess embodies the ideal: white, feminine, mobile, independent, and-owing to self-improvement-superbly adjusted to the vicissitudes of modernity.Identifying with these heroes, the young reader will be socialized not only into the available technologies of the modern self but also into the expectations toward the modern hegemonic subject.

Conclusion
In their social environments, children and adolescents hungrily soak up clues and tokens as to how they may be successful in their worlds: belonging, accepted, acknowledged, valued.They look out for models and opposites, vicariously experiencing how people relate to others and to themselves.Imaginatively or first-hand, they test how it feels to be this or that self, to manage themselves in this or that way, to align themselves with this or that person.They form attachments to people, ideas, values, habits, objects.Parents, caretakers, peers, school and the cultural surroundings accompany this process of subjectification.
The first three decades of the twentieth century brought a constantly expanding supply of advice for adults and young adults, informing them on issues of health, psychology, marriage, career, and social relations.With Nikolas Rose and Eva Illouz, I have argued that this self-help and advice industry helped structure subjectification and subjectivities for the new century.Not only did it teach life skills, but it also formed group-specific identities, with the bulk of self-help catering to a white, upwardly mobile professional-managerial class.My suggestion in this essay was that the literature for adolescents, the newly defined teenagers, published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate did much the same for the younger age group.
Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys exemplify the imaginary resources available in the socialization and subjectification of the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers.In whichever way individual persons may have grown up and developed since the 1920s, the templates presented by the most popular books on the market at the time support very specific models of relating to oneself.These are models guided by self-confidence, self-assertion, independence, but also self-control, self-discipline (self-management), planning, agency, and persistence as well as psychological awareness.They also suggest a preferably patriarchal or conservative attitude toward gender and family patterns, while not completely ignoring modernization.In their emphasis on self-reliance, these models are defensive about class; they recognize boundaries and value them.In their insistence on physiognomy, these models maintain racial hierarchies.
Much of what I have here described and discussed will not sound far away for many readers.Many of the practical, cognitive, and ideological ideas involved became so entrenched during the twentieth century that they have come to appear almost 'natural.'This is perhaps one of the reasons why Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys are still continued today (and why the granddaughter of my former host parents, now just out of school, still has a Nancy Drew Detective Certificate from her High School proudly exhibited on her door).But it also seems to me that the success of this specific pattern of subjectivity has run its course.In times of climate crisis, globalization, and fallout from four decades of neoliberalism accompanied by ignorance toward ongoing problems with race, origin, and gender, the ideal of self-reliance has lost some of its glamor and we may just be realizing that not every will is followed by a way.
Funding Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.
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