America’s Family

To appreciate the significance of Angel Unaware as a document of US religious history and of the history of disability in the United States first requires recognition of Dale Evans’s and Roy Rogers’s almost unparalleled positions within the landscape of white American popular culture in the middle of the twentieth century. Few celebrities could rival this pair in terms of their salience and ubiquity in entertainment media. They were a postwar power couple avant la lettre. Footnote ¹⁰

In the 1940s, Roy Rogers became the face and voice of America’s childhood fascination with all things “Western,” that vast cultural repository of settler colonial desire and myth.Footnote ¹¹ Starring in more than seventy feature-length films, in possession of a score of hit records, a comic book series, and his own radio show, Rogers was christened “the King of the Cowboys” soon after World War II. Thanks to his inventive and entrepreneurial managers, he pioneered practices of transforming one’s stardom into what would later be called a brand. Products featuring Rogers’s likeness ranged from binoculars to “real tin” lanterns, to “teepees,” to folding knives, to leather gloves, to harmonicas, to a “Roy and Trigger [his horse] Snap Shot Camera.” The man was everywhere; it would be far from wild to speculate that Rogers’s likenesses competed with portraits of Jesus for preponderance within the walls of postwar households.Footnote ¹²

Toys and merchandise did not exhaust the extent of the Rogerses’ presence in midcentury homes and young people’s lives. Beginning in the early 1950s, Rogers’s managers formed “Roy Rogers Riding Clubs,” in addition to an already robust network of fan clubs. Sponsored by the National Safety Council, these clubs would meet in movie theaters for weekend matinees, before which children would view videos of Rogers discussing matters of personal responsibility and accident avoidance. Each meeting began with a recitation of a pledge and Rogers’s “Cowboy Prayer,” artifacts of midcentury popular piety that blended the civic, celebrity, and consumption. These clubs alone claimed upward of two million young members.Footnote ¹³

What was Rogers’s already impressive fame in the early 1940s multiplied exponentially, making much of the above possible, when his brand incorporated a counterpart “Queen of the West.” Dale Evans, already a film and music star in her own right, first joined Rogers on screen in a series of Western musicals in the mid-1940s; in the wake of the pair’s commercial success, they became a couple and married, making more grist for the Hollywood press’s mills. Their off-screen and off-air partnership helped to spur the success of their ventures into television programming as the 1940s turned to the 1950s. The fact of their partnership in life and in character represented an unmatched melding of the worlds of white popular American fantasy and family life.Footnote ¹⁴

Perhaps it goes without saying, then, given the extent of this couple’s fame, that Evans’s announcement that she was expecting a child just a couple of years into her and Rogers’s marriage generated considerable enthusiasm among those inclined to keep tabs on these Hollywood royals. Outlets like the Philadelphia Inquirer’s “Chit-Chat” column kept readers well informed about the family’s plans during Evans’s pregnancy.Footnote ¹⁵ And the Rogerses themselves were not shy about letting their fans in on their family life; during rodeo performances across the United States in early 1950, Rogers confided in audiences: “Folks, if you’re wondering why Mama [Evans] is moving along a little ladylike tonight, it’s because we’re expecting a little buckaroo at our house come summer.”Footnote ¹⁶

An “Appalling Handicap”

The fact of the Rogerses’ willingness and even keenness to take on the roles that they fashioned with their fans as an ideal American family (look no further than Rogers’s invitation for fans to recognize his partner as “Mama”) surely added bulk to the emotional weight and strategic difficulties that awaited them in the near future. In August of the same year, Evans gave birth to a baby girl and underwent a series of experiences familiar to thousands, if not millions, of postwar parents, a fact which time would eventually disclose.

As Evans would later tell it, in the days after the Rogerses’ daughter, Robin, was born, her mother noted the infrequency with which the hospital’s medical staff allowed her to see her newborn.Footnote ¹⁷ When she inquired after Robin, most of the staff deflected or reassured, but her sense of unease soon proved justified. The Rogerses’ physicians had determined that Robin had what Evans later referred to as a “tragic handicap”: “Mongolism,” the set of traits that would soon be reclassified as Down Syndrome.Footnote ¹⁸ The doctors initially tried to keep this news from Evans, informing Roy and the couple’s managers first, but it was not long before she demanded explanation and learned of her daughter’s diagnosis.

In the days and months that followed, the Rogerses were subject to the onslaught of reactions and guidance that usually accompanied such news in the midcentury United States—reactions and guidance that countless families would recall in the ensuing decade in letters to editors, memoirs, newsletters, and the like.Footnote ¹⁹ Most common among these was the suggestion from physicians and others that the best thing to do for such a child was to “put them away.”Footnote ²⁰ Although the medical consensus around this recommendation was beginning to fray, if only slightly, the vast majority of medical professionals practicing in the postwar US believed that “defective” children like Robin were “hopeless cases,” and that parents ought to surrender their offspring to the care of an institution and—as many would recall—move on with their lives. One parent remembered having been advised: “Just pretend it was a bad dream.”Footnote ²¹

The Rogerses rejected this advice. It is unclear why they did so, but, as Evans herself later acknowledged, their incredible wealth enabled them to provide things for their child that others obviously could not.Footnote ²² The couple built a separate cottage beside their Southern California ranch property for Robin and for a full-time nurse who would see to her care.Footnote ²³ Keeping Robin home was enabled by paying for what many institutions billed themselves as offering (and what they suggested conditions like Robin’s required): distance from the “normal” home, protective confines, and round-the-clock professional care. What was important for the Rogerses was that their ability to provide these things on their own made possible Robin’s inclusion in their family life as a much-doted-on member.

The question of Robin’s inclusion in the public’s image of the domus of the Queen of the West and the King of the Cowboys, however, was apparently a more complicated matter. Robin’s parents opted to be less than forthcoming about their child’s diagnosis. They informed several audiences in the early months of her life that their young daughter had a “congenital heart condition,” but never mentioned or permitted those in their circle to reveal the precise—which is to say, developmental or cognitive—nature of her “handicap.”Footnote ²⁴

It is worth noting here the tenacity and intensity of stigma surrounding so-called “mentally deficient” children within this moment and context. In spite of the shifts in the etiology of cognitive disability that distinguished most of its forms from hereditary causes, it is safe to say that the vast majority of Americans were familiar with the suggestion that a child’s cognitive impairment was reflective of at least some kind of deficiency in or on the part of her parents. Even if a previous generation’s language of “inferior stock” no longer held the power it once did, scores of parents of children with disabilities recounted accusations flung at them in the postwar era suggesting that their loved one’s conditions were evidence of their own defects: biological, moral, or, most likely, some combination of the two. It was this reason—perhaps as much as any suggestion about a child’s “hopelessness” or inability to fit within a “normal” family—that must have encouraged many to put their child “away.”Footnote ²⁵

Up until two months before Robin’s birth, no one of the Rogerses’ social stature had ever identified themselves as the parent or kin of a person with a cognitive disability. However, in the May issue of Ladies’ Home Journal in the year of Robin’s birth, the celebrated author Pearl S. Buck made known the fact that she had a now adult daughter who had spent most of her life as a resident at the Vineland Training School in Vineland, New Jersey. Buck’s article, later expanded as the book The Child Who Never Grew, in many ways initiated popular efforts to detach diagnoses of cognitive impairment from eugenic logics as they resonated in American culture.Footnote ²⁶ In other words, it worked to demonstrate that such forms of difference might appear in families regardless of where parents were located within racist hierarchies of pedigree. But Buck’s revelation also reflected some of the difficulty in changing cultural attitudes. It ought to be noted that she published this article and book after enjoying a long and successful career and after much had already been determined about her daughter’s life. Upon learning of Robin’s diagnosis, it is unlikely that the Rogerses felt similarly secure in either their professional positions or their relationship to their daughter’s future.

This situation, however, did not last long. Shortly before her second birthday, Robin contracted the mumps. Her health worsened rapidly, and within days she died as a result of complications. In late August of 1952, she was buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles, marking both the end and beginning of a story.

A Messenger, Unmuted

What happened next became the center point of Dale Evans’s efforts to represent herself to the public not only as a celebrity but as a mother and as a Christian. Evans narrated and re-narrated the events that followed Robin’s death as decisive moments in her personal testimony and as decisive means by which to establish her eventual place as a successful author of Christian literature and as an advocate for so-called “exceptional” children.Footnote ²⁷

As she told it, two days after Robin’s funeral, Evans sat beneath a large color etching of her daughter that an acquaintance had made, now placed at the center of the family altar among various photos and keepsakes. Thumbing through letters of sympathy from friends and loved ones, Evans was surprised to find the room becoming “heavy” with what she described as an “unseen Presence.” Staring at the image of her child, she explained, “It suddenly dawned on me that [Robin’s eyes] always seemed as if they were seeing further than we [sic].”Footnote ²⁸

How Evans described what happened in that room varied in different tellings, but, by some combination of events, including the “flash into [her] mind” of a verse from the New Testament’s Book of Hebrews (“Be not forgetful of strangers; for thereby some have entertained angels unawares”; 13:2 [KJV]), Evans became convinced that “Robin had been an angel” and that she was being called to participate in her daughter’s heaven-directed “mission.”Footnote ²⁹

Following familiar scripts of inspiration and its burdens, Evans recalled that her initial efforts to respond to this revelation were stymied. She tried to write down Robin’s story—the truth that her daughter was and had been a “muted messenger of God”—but faltered in her attempts.Footnote ³⁰ “Her mind was weak and dry,” she recalled. She just wasn’t a writer, she thought to herself. But a few days later, while recording lines for her and Rogers’s radio show at a nearby studio, Evans found herself the one muted, like so many would-be divine mouthpieces. While unable to recite her lines, she later explained to others, a disembodied voice seemed to say to her: “Let Robin write it herself.”Footnote ³¹

So, she did. In the weeks that followed, Evans wrote feverishly under what she understood to be a power other than her own. On “notepads, loose envelopes, the back of scripts,” she committed to something like what scholars of religion might recognize as a practice of automatic writing. She assumed the position of her deceased daughter’s amanuensis, recording Robin’s life story, as she was understood to have relayed it to her “Heavenly Father” upon her arrival “Home.”Footnote ³²

The history of religion in the United States is, of course, dense with communicative traffic between parents and their deceased children. From nineteenth-century séances to late twentieth-century bereavement narratives, the genre of the after-death communiqué has proved an enduring medium for expressing and exploring the bonds of kinship and the social worlds that make those bonds both difficult and possible. Evans joined and invoked this tradition but did so, in both the text and her discussions of it, in a way that allowed for various interpretations. She was resolute in her suggestion that this book came from beyond her. But the presentation of the book—for example, Evans’s identification as its author and her recourse to the language of “inspiration”—was ambiguous enough for readers to take claims about its origins (i.e., Robin’s authorship) more or less metaphorically.Footnote ³³

The sum of Evans’s envelopes, backs of scripts, and notepads became Angel Unaware, a sixty-three-page volume, published in March of 1953 by Fleming Revell and serialized in newspapers and magazines throughout the United States. While the Rogerses’ fame certainly promised a wide audience for the book, neither Evans nor the press could have predicted the scope of its success. By year’s end, Robin’s story had become one of the best-selling books in the United States, outstripped only by the recently released Revised Standard Bible and the celebrity preacher Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, to whom we will turn in a moment. By March of 1954, Fleming Revell had sold almost half a million copies, with sales proceeding apace for almost a decade. If the Rogerses were already a presence in countless American households at the outset of the 1950s, the publication of Angel Unaware added Robin to their ranks and, with her, “mental retardation” as both a topic of interest and a significant site of moral investment.Footnote ³⁴

In Need of Confidence: Angel Unaware and Postwar Popular Religion

To understand Evans’s reception of her daughter’s message and the spectacular popularity of Angel Unaware, it is necessary to situate both in relation to the religious styles and culture that helped shape Evans’s experiences and that framed the book for American audiences. Doing so helps to illuminate what it was that the readers of Angel Unaware may have found in Robin’s story—what thirsts it satisfied and what longings it piqued—and how those discoveries shaped the meanings of cognitive disability in this moment. By Evans’s own account, it was through an encounter with the writings of Norman Vincent Peale that she was prepared for the reception of her daughter’s message.

Peale was another midcentury figure who could claim something bordering on a ubiquitous presence in much of American popular culture.Footnote ³⁵ The pastor of Manhattan’s Marble Collegiate Church, Peale had transformed this modest Reformed Church of America pulpit in the late 1940s into a platform for a distinctive version—at least distinctively successful—of midcentury popular religion. Blending the idioms of a generic Christian providentialism and an ascendant popular psychology, Peale worked to persuade Americans that their life’s circumstances were merely the consequences of how they thought about them and that, by assuming the proper “thought-techniques,” they might access “peace of mind, improved health, and a never-ceasing flow of energy.”Footnote ³⁶ “Altogether too many people are defeated by the everyday problems of life,” he wrote at the outset of The Power of Positive Thinking. “It is a pity that people should let themselves be defeated by the problems, cares, and difficulties of human existence, and it is also quite unnecessary.”Footnote ³⁷ With unassuming authority, Peale offered audiences something that apparently many people wanted to hear, namely, that their lives were largely under their control.Footnote ³⁸

Peale relayed this message about the unnecessariness of adversity and the accessibility of health and happiness in just about every way he could, with the result being that few could escape his insistence. His words circulated in advice columns in popular newspapers and magazines, via his own radio—and, later, television—programs, in pamphlets, through his American Foundation for Faith and Psychiatry, and, most successfully, via his books. For sympathetic crowds, Peale’s labors represented an attractive antidote to the “misery of a nation rich in things, but poor in spirit.”Footnote ³⁹ For the less receptive, they reflected a dubious attenuation of Christian commitment and a dangerous escape from the world and its problems.Footnote ⁴⁰ However, all were in agreement that millions of Americans were finding in Peale’s promises a compelling means by which to handle the world around them.

Dale Evans’s encounter with Peale transpired at a moment in which she felt especially in need of a good word. Beset by confusion and feelings of guilt and doubt in the wake of Robin’s birth, Evans turned to Pearl Buck’s abovementioned account of her daughter’s life while browsing magazines during one of her and her husband’s national rodeo tours. The prospect of hearing from another mother struck her as “an astonishment . . . a thought of hope.”Footnote ⁴¹ And yet, she soon found herself disappointed. “Down, down, went her heart,” she noted. She later explained, “here was a stark story of how a mother, after years and endless miles of searching for help for her retarded child, had come to accept with finality the bitterness that there was no actual help, not now, for her child.”Footnote ⁴² In Buck’s account of choosing to institutionalize her daughter, Evans read a confirmation of many of the attitudes and assumptions that surrounded diagnoses of “mental retardation”: that such persons’ situations were without hope. As she told it, having reached for a lifeline, Evans ended up deeper in the waters of her despair.

A few days later, Evans was again walking past a magazine shop, inclined to rush by, when a title “fairly leaped at her.”Footnote ⁴³ It was Peale’s A Guide to Confident Living, the preacher’s most successful book to date.Footnote ⁴⁴ The author’s name rang a faint bell, she would explain, and, though knowing little of him, she recalled thinking to herself, “[Oh] how I needed to learn about confident living right then.” Buying the book, “almost desperately,” Evans flipped to the chapter titled “How to Meet Sorrow.” As she explained, she immediately “began to feel herself assimilating what had happened [vis-à-vis Robin], [and] began to feel better.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Having grasped again for a tether, this time she found her way to more stable ground.

In some ways, Evans’s experience of Peale’s writing marked the beginning of Angel Unaware. A Guide to Confident Living provided almost endless examples of individuals encountering circumstances that looked to be dead ends, but that turned out in fact to be new sorts of opportunities, realized through a shift in perspective. Although Evans was unaware at the time that Robin’s death loomed in the near future, Peale’s preaching on loss provided a paradigm that mapped onto both Robin’s disability and her eventual passing, persuading Evans of their spiritual significance. In “How to Meet Sorrow,” Peale affirmed what he described as a “basic fact taught by Christianity . . . what seemed to be death is not death at all.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Through a host of families’ experiences of their loved one’s endurance beyond the grave and the consequent ability of families to “conquer” feelings of sadness, he provided a language for Evans to accept both that Robin’s condition was not what it seemed (or what others told her it was) and, later, that her death was by no means the conclusion to her life.Footnote ⁴⁷

Whether or not Evans thought of Peale specifically when she penned her daughter’s words is unknown, but the resonance between Robin’s “message” and Peale’s is unmistakable. This likely explains why Evans approached the pastor for help in securing a publisher for what would be Angel Unaware and why he gladly agreed to write the book’s introduction, announcing his eagerness to “be a part of Robin’s plan.”Footnote ⁴⁸ It was not, after all, too different from his own.

So, what was Robin’s message?

Proof for Positive Thinking

Angel Unaware took the form of something like a missionary report, with Robin Rogers relaying to God the observations she gleaned while in the field of her assignment. Early in the narrative, like so many other missionaries, Robin the narrator laments the misguided ways of the natives among whom she has dwelled, specifically regarding their attitudes about her diagnosed difference: “They didn’t realize that You provide certain conditions to accomplish some wonderful purpose. A lot of them Down There don’t understand yet, Father . . . You always have a blessing in mind, in everything you plan.”Footnote ⁴⁹ At its outset, this book coupled cultural responses to cognitive disability and faith (or the absence of faith) in divine intention. Robin lamented to God, “Many mothers with babies like me wouldn’t be so bitter and so heart-broken if they just knew you and your ways better.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Nowhere was what Robin described as this dearth of trust in providence brought into clearer relief in Angel Unaware than in the attitudes and prescriptions of various medical professionals with whom Robin and her family came into contact. This group functioned in many ways as foils for positive thinking in Angel Unaware, representing the professional tendency, as well as a broader one, toward what Peale often called “defeatism.” Throughout Angel Unaware, readers encounter physicians giving voice to the kind of “hopelessness” that Evans was disappointed to find evinced in Pearl Buck’s account of her daughter. One doctor announced that children like Robin “were no good to themselves or to anybody else.”Footnote ⁵¹ Another explained to Robin’s parents, “you have a real problem . . . There’s absolutely nothing we can do . . . There is no help.”Footnote ⁵² As Angel Unaware represented them, midcentury Americans could think little to nothing positive about “mental retardation” and about persons labeled accordingly.

Robin looked down on these attitudes with gentle pity, readers found. She relayed to God the story of one doctor suggesting that “babies who came into the world in [her] condition should be . . . ‘machine-gunned,’” and requested, “Father, if that remark was really made, forgive him, for he knows not what he’s saying. I wish he could meet You.”Footnote ⁵³ Her story represented these kinds of attitudes, even in their most violent expressions, as failures of imagination—failures to see God’s activity in the world and to find value in individuals like her with cognitive impairments.

Angel Unaware represented its challenge to these failures formally, through a device that marked Robin’s distance from the logics that precluded contemporary Americans’ appreciation of persons like her. By frequently placing words and categories in quotation marks, the text of Angel Unaware suggested that its audience might question what were supposed to be definitive, expert descriptions of human difference. In some instances, this formal device simply invited readers to note Robin’s identity as a non-adult, communicating with charming naïveté. Robin refers to her parents “finishing up a ‘recording’ of a radio broadcast”; she explains how they “put me in a contraption called a ‘bassinet’”; and notes how, on one occasion, her father approached her “with a funny looking thing called a ‘camera.’”Footnote ⁵⁴

But, in others, Robin’s qualification of words or concepts was more pointed. This was especially the case with categories tied to the arena of medical diagnosis and treatment. Throughout Angel Unaware, terms like “affliction,” “muscle-tone,” “normal,” “Mongoloid symptom,” and “coordination” are all couched in pairs of inverted commas.Footnote ⁵⁵ Insofar as these categories were devices by which the negative meanings of Robin’s difference were defined, the text’s quotation marks introduced suspicion about their interpretative power, suggesting that they might be products of what Angel Unaware referred to as an “earth-minded” ken.Footnote ⁵⁶ Placing such categories in quotation marks opened an aperture for readers to ask: What other meanings might be assigned to cognitive disability? How else might one speak of persons like Robin?

One way in which Angel Unaware answered such queries was by illustrating Robin’s capacity to transform and improve the lives of those around her. This contrasted with what were commonly articulated warnings about the threats that children with cognitive disabilities posed to “normal” families.Footnote ⁵⁷ Evans confronted such warnings in the words of one friend who pleaded with her to place Robin in an institution, insisting, “You must not allow this tragedy to ruin your lives.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In response to assumptions and assertions of this sort, Angel Unaware demonstrated what it suggested was the cohesive power of children like Robin within their families.

In narrating her story, Angel Unaware’s Robin described the success of her “mission” in terms of how her presence in the Rogerses’ family transformed her kin. She explained that she “saw thoughtfulness developing in all the children in ‘the house of Rogers.’” As a result of her presence, her siblings were developing more concern for “people who were weaker than they were” and were becoming more “unselfish.”Footnote ⁵⁹ With respect to her parents, Robin described how her presence in their lives augmented their religious faith. She helped her mother to realize that “real success was spiritual” and she emboldened her father to be more forthright about his faith in public, noting that he began to incorporate explicitly Christian elements into his rodeo performances. Over and against assertions about the destabilizing effect of persons with cognitive disability on families, Angel Unaware suggested that children like Robin might, in fact, help to harmonize the Christian home.

What made such possibility visible to the Rogerses was their trust in God and their ability to refuse despair, Angel Unaware explained. This book provided what might register as compelling evidence for the ways in which the adjustment of one’s perspective could radically alter one’s circumstances—the basic creed of the era’s increasingly popular therapeutic Christianity. For audiences familiar with Peale’s preaching, Robin’s narrative provided yet another example of the kind of story that populated the pastor’s publications and sermons (what he called “bone-fide demonstrations in actual human experience”), wherein adversity gets translated into some form of flourishing: a promotion secured; a relationship repaired; or a faith reinvigorated.Footnote ⁶⁰ Peale recommended Angel Unaware in precisely these terms, inviting audiences to pursue in it an extension of his own teaching. In the book’s introduction, he celebrated how Evans and Rogers “found the very joy of God in what might otherwise have been an overwhelming tragedy.”Footnote ⁶¹ The suggestion was, as always with Peale, that so might you.

Responses from some of Angel Unaware’s readers demonstrate the fact that midcentury audiences were ready to receive this text as another parable for positive thinking. In these responses, one finds the familiar fecundity of evangelical testimony, whereby narratives of transformation beget narratives of transformation, demanding more of their kind. The year following Angel Unaware’s publication, the Rogerses’ publicist, Maxine Garrison, produced her own book, The Angel Spreads Her Wings, which documented the story of Angel Unaware’s making and, as the subtitle explained, offered an account of “The Inspiration of Angel Unaware and the Influence of the Roy Rogers Family on the American Home.” The book curated selections from the voluminous quantity of letters that Evans received after the publication of Angel Unaware. It was a testimony of testimonies.Footnote ⁶²

In one of Garrison’s chapters dedicated to readers who “had no immediate personal connection with retardation,” one finds accounts that would have fit just as easily in one of Peale’s volumes.Footnote ⁶³ One businessman confided in another on a commuter train: “That book [Angel Unaware] saved my life . . . I was messing up my job, fighting with my wife . . . It was getting worse every day.” Encountering the Rogerses’ ability to “[stick] by what they believed in”—presumably their conviction that Robin’s life had purpose—“made everything so plain,” he explained. “I didn’t really have problems, I was just making them up . . . I went home, and I asked my wife to forgive me, and we’ve been getting along fine ever since.”Footnote ⁶⁴ While this response may have been motivated in part by the suggestion that Robin’s disability was a “real problem,” in contrast with this businessman’s marital troubles, what stands out from his reading of Angel Unaware is the lesson that apparent problems dissipate with an adjustment of attitude.

Another reader, an American soldier, wrote to Evans from his post in East Berlin. He conveyed how Angel Unaware assuaged his feelings of despair about his and his fellow soldiers’ situation—his response taking a surprisingly violent turn. “I was so relieved mentally, spiritually, and physically [after having read a serialized selection of Angel Unaware in a newspaper] . . . I could have taken on the whole Chinese army. I’m not joking . . . that article did me more good than a rest leave.”Footnote ⁶⁵

In Robin and her parents’ story, people like this soldier and the businessman above found themselves persuaded that their woes might be undone with a shift in perspective. The book’s early reviewers promised the same, christening the volume “purely inspired” and guaranteeing, as did Charles Allen of the Atlanta Constitution, “This little book will help all who read it.”Footnote ⁶⁶ For these audiences, Angel Unaware was immediately recognizable as the kind of inspiration many midcentury readers craved: yet another reminder that happiness was within reach.

Envying Angels

Beyond providing readers with another script of positive thinking’s power as evinced in the Rogerses’ response to Robin’s life, Angel Unaware also addressed the appetites of its readers for inspiration and happiness by positing Robin’s difference—as both angel and child with a disability—as exemplary of the kind of disposition or subjectivity that positive-thinking Christianity prescribed and promised. The book invited audiences to identify Robin, and to identify with her, as embodying the “peace of mind” prescribed by the likes of Peale. She was to serve not only as a messenger but also as a kind of model. In presenting her accordingly, the book furthered its case for the social value of persons like Robin, aiming to interrupt the logics that presented this population as unmitigated tragedies.

Throughout the text of Angel Unaware, Robin offered observations of midcentury Americans’ troubles that demonstrated her distance from and ability to transcend worldly woes. “Humans worry too much,” she noted, before inquiring, “If they could somehow trust more and worry less, they’d have heaven on earth wouldn’t they?”Footnote ⁶⁷ In other instances, the book conveyed this admirable detachment with slightly more specific commentary. Describing her experience of an air raid warning, Robin opined, “How they do make noise, and how people do scamper around like a lot of frightened ants! I just couldn’t understand it. Maybe you can explain it to me later, Father.” She continued, sharpening the tool of her criticism: “It’s so foolish to go out of your way to get scared . . . I asked myself, ‘What’s wrong Down Here anyway? Why don’t they just get Your peace?’”Footnote ⁶⁸ In passages like this one, Robin both rehearsed the basic convictions of positive thinking—explaining the problems of a tense political environment in terms of attitude—and modeled the ability not to let such things disturb her contentment. Along these lines, the book prompted its readers to look at things from a similar distance.

In her commentary on and around Angel Unaware, Evans made explicit what the text was meant to illustrate by linking the value of persons like Robin to their supposed immunity from the world’s worries. In a preface added to the paperback edition of the book, she wrote, “To the retarded and handicapped [God] gives a treasure few people can ever attain. He gives them the double blessing of purity of thought and an amazing capacity for love.”Footnote ⁶⁹ As bearers of this double blessing, this population might be looked upon as emblems of the kind of frictionless freedom that positive thinking promised. Evans continued, “Should we not look with at least some sense of envy on those who will never attain the questionable freedom of knowledge which enables them to say, ‘I’m not sure I believe in God!’?” Here, she interprets incapacity as corresponding with a contentment and credulousness that is contrasted with a world consumed by worry—one that Evans described elsewhere as “tense, frustrated, [and] always rushing.”Footnote ⁷⁰

To be sure, representations of persons with cognitive impairments that suggested that this population’s social value might be in their apparent distance from the world and its constraints were not unique to Angel Unaware—or to the postwar era. As many scholars have demonstrated, constructions of cognitive difference have long served as instrumentalizing means to describe gaps between authentic moral selves and social encumbrances, between the compromising forces of the worldly and idealized visions of nature, the past, and the holy. In examples ranging from premodern discourse and practices surrounding “holy fools” to representations of “idiots” in Romantic poetry, one finds the manufactured use of such forms of difference for launching various claims about value—in ways that simultaneously exalt and diminish people with disabilities.Footnote ⁷¹ What was distinctive about Angel Unaware within this longer representational history was the connections it drew between these forms of difference and the midcentury appetite, informed and stoked by Peale and his peers, for a particularly unflappable combination of faith and happiness—or a kind of faith in happiness. In its representation of Robin and others like her, Angel Unaware recast diagnosed impairment and the faith with which it supposedly resonated as a kind of salvation from psychic stress and, therefore, as a source of desperately needed wisdom in an anxious age.

On the Possible Politics of Positive Thinking

Many of Peale’s contemporaries smeared his gospel and its purchase as a “cult of reassurance,” which, through its insistence upon the accessibility of the individual’s happiness, commanded compliance with powers that governed much of postwar American society. Alongside criticisms that worried that Peale’s and others’ so-called “easy religion” neutralized the moral power and demands of “orthodox” Christianity, midcentury critics like the journalist William A. Miller and the sociologist A. Roy Eckardt wryly described such faith’s compatibility with hierarchy’s maintenance.Footnote ⁷² In a relentlessly sardonic essay (“Some Negative Thinking About Norman Vincent Peale”), Miller noted how books like The Power of Positive Thinking were pitched to employers and executives as resources for conjuring their employees’ submission, quoting advertisements that promised things like: “EXECUTIVES: Give this book to employees. It pays dividends!” And “Greater efficiency from the office staff. Marked reductions in clock watching[!]”Footnote ⁷³ Eckardt offered similar commentary on how Peale’s promises could occlude power dynamics in ways that were both deceptive and punishing. Of this cult’s “priests,” he suggested, damningly, “[They] are not unlike Red Cross workers in wartime, binding up the wounded so that they can go forth and get shot to pieces all over again.”Footnote ⁷⁴ While Eckardt left much of the specifics of his metaphor’s battle largely undescribed, it was clear that both he and Miller took such phenomena to be cases of opiates for the masses and then some.

Recent scholarship has lent more substance to these critical salvos. Kevin Kruse and Christopher Lane have offered histories that make explicit Peale’s—and, later, the Rogerses’—investments in promoting an aggressively capitalist economic policy alongside a politically conservative Christian nationalist agenda.Footnote ⁷⁵ As Lane argues, Peale’s theological assault on “defeat” and “failure” as states of mind takes on a different cast when viewed through the lens of midcentury American imperial ambition and political paranoia. Kathryn Lofton summarizes Lane’s insights with punch: “This [i.e., positive thinking] is not a request to rethink your dark thoughts and switch them into cheerier ones; it was an order from a militarized state to stay on the sunny side of their Cold War surveillance.”Footnote ⁷⁶ If one listens more closely, these scholars suggest, one hears decidedly ominous chords subtending the proliferating promises of happiness.

Including Angel Unaware in our accounts of this moment in US history, however, demands that we reconsider our sense of the possibilities of positive-thinking Christianity and its analogs. Evans’s book and its reception highlight how the content and style of Peale and his peers’ therapeutic gospel did not necessarily hamstring adherents, making them mere pawns in others’ games, as Miller and Eckardt and some later interpreters have suggested. Angel Unaware shows how, in their optimistic obstinance, such religious repertoires could be fashioned into levers that might pry open space for contending with institutions, social norms, and values.Footnote ⁷⁷ In the book’s representations of the prescriptions and prognoses of medical professionals, specifically, we saw how an insistence upon positive thinking provided means by which to challenge dominant authorities and the social arrangements and assumptions that extended from them. What the book presents as Robin’s guileless trust in God and sanguineness becomes a vantage from which to envision and experiment with new possibilities for persons with disabilities and their kin.

Many of Angel Unaware’s readers eagerly assumed this point of view. Scores of the letters that Evans received in response to the book from parents of children with disabilities reported both similar encounters with physicians and also their resistance to them. “The doctor advised us to put our child in a home for retarded children . . . but to put her away and hide from the world, I couldn’t do it. We have given her all the love we could, same as a normal child,” wrote one mother.Footnote ⁷⁸ Another explained, “They told me that I should put my baby in an institution, but we always want to have her at home with us. I know God will give us strength for everything.”Footnote ⁷⁹ This same parent made explicit how it was Robin’s guidance that left her feeling empowered to refuse others’ prescriptions: “The words of your daughter have given me great strength . . . I shall no longer be coward.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Such responses sound less like the “yessirs” of Miller’s imagined readers of Peale and more like the echoes of a collective determination.

In their communication with Evans, many parents also affirmed their ability to recognize that which doctors and others had denied with respect to both their children’s capacities and their influence within their homes, echoing the book’s understanding of these capacities as indices of divine presence. As one mother explained,

In response to what they experienced as intensely restricted and misguided interpretations of their loved ones’ differences, these readers joined Angel Unaware in elaborating understandings of persons with cognitive impairments that were not reducible to an enumeration of deficits but instead stemmed from a confidence that their loved ones’ apparent limitations might be better understood as distinct, divinely intended forms of value (Figure 1).Footnote ⁸²

Figure 1.

Pencil sketch of Robin Rogers, which appeared in a larger piece of fan art memorializing the Rogerses’ children. The image shows a child’s face with wide eyes and curly hair. Representations of Robin, from sketches to dolls, were not uncommon responses to Angel Unaware. Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles, MSA.24. Courtesy of the Autry Museum of the American West.

To borrow from the language of disability studies, we can see how, in the case of Angel Unaware, the application of positive thinking helped parents and other readers to marshal a critique of what is often referred to as the “medical model of disability.” While professional discourses clearly located “mental retardation” in the individual bodies of those described accordingly, as that which had to be managed through expert treatment and enclosure, Angel Unaware’s readers drew attention to how the “problem” of “mental retardation” was a matter of social impairment as much as it was a matter of individually measurable limitation. They testified to the ways in which it was cultural attitudes—expressed in, but not limited to, professional medicine—that in part confined what their children might do or be in the world.Footnote ⁸³

And Angel Unaware’s readers linked these claims to efforts to try to transform their communities to better accommodate their loved ones. In addition to challenging prescriptions about institutionalization, readers reported to Evans on their work to lobby political representatives for access to education and to try to form schools and training programs for their kin.Footnote ⁸⁴ In the years that followed the book’s publication, Angel Unaware became central to the development and growth of the National Association for Retarded Children (NARC), which quickly became one of the most influential disability advocacy organizations in the country, spearheading some of the nation’s first examples of disability rights legislation. This was true because Evans donated the book’s proceeds to the association, an essential injection of cash in its fledgling days, but also because Angel Unaware provided an organizing banner for parent-members to wave. Local chapters of the NARC used the material of Angel Unaware to educate their neighbors about cognitive disability as a social issue, hosting readings, listening parties, and reviews in their homes and in connection with other voluntary organizations. The book served as the theme for floats in local Christmas parades, and organizers, at both the national and local levels, mobilized the Rogerses’ images in their fundraising. Across such examples—as the NARC’s members insisted on their children’s rights to social acceptance, on access to public schools, and on federal funds for research—the message of Angel Unaware helped to frame the absence of these things as failures of will and imagination, as consequences of negative thinking, rather than features of “mental retardation” as such. For many, this emergent arena of activism was an extension of Angel Unaware’s commitment to finding purpose and value where others had deemed it absent.Footnote ⁸⁵

Angel Unaware also provided a paradigm for advocacy itself in its performance of a mother’s voicing of her child’s thoughts and needs. Large numbers of mothers who wrote to Evans explained how the book offered them new kinds of access to their loved one’s personhood and a vocabulary for describing experiences of their agency. “Your book showed me through your Angel into my Angel’s heart,” wrote one. “By reading it, I understand so much better.” Recognizing that her child was “here to tell us something,” this same individual felt galvanized to serve as a mouthpiece for her son’s “message,” which consisted both of less obvious spiritual meanings (“What [they are], I’ve got to learn”) and of the imperative to try to help other children and families in similar situations.Footnote ⁸⁶ Another mother explained, in verse, how her “angel” had brought her “heart to sing”: an account both of affection and of how her child could animate her, leading her to activities like writing the very poem in which this language appeared.Footnote ⁸⁷ Another parent-reader similarly connected what she understood to be her child’s supernatural identity to her own capacitation: “he has given me the very things I lack—patience, courage [and] love for other handicapped children, a need to reach other parents. I too feel that he is one of God’s angels.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Here we get some sense of how Angel Unaware’s ontological claims about Robin’s identity as an angel pointed up a register in which one’s agency or even voice were not reducible to linguistic abilities or utterances (most of these parents presumed that their children had limited capacities in this respect), but rather that which emerged through specific relations of care. The supposedly firm partitions between mother and child, articulate and “disarticulate,” divine and mundane, thin and blur, with parents endeavoring to both give voice to and, in some sense, speak with their loved ones.Footnote ⁸⁹

In this respect, Angel Unaware and responses to it resonate loudly with a broader set of phenomena within the archives of American religion, wherein the communication between human and more than human subjects provides a context for contending with and perhaps revising biomedical claims about the body. In his classic study of American Catholic women’s devotionalism, Thank You, St. Jude, Robert Orsi describes how twentieth-century Catholic women’s relationships with Jude, patron saint of hopeless causes, afforded discursive footholds in an increasingly unstable social landscape. As professional medicine arrogated to itself almost total authority to name and narrate the body’s vicissitudes in the twentieth century, Orsi shows how his subjects improvised roles for themselves as characters in alternative stories—defined by desire, submission, and reciprocity—in ways that translated diagnosed ailments into the language of a sacred, relational drama. In doing so, they worked to requisition dimensions of the gendered authority that medicine had wrested from them.Footnote ⁹⁰

In the case of Angel Unaware, readers’ identification of their children as heaven-sent agents helped them to challenge and expand the sorts of rubrics that determined what their loved one’s diagnosed differences could mean. Reference to God’s will—understood as registering in persons in the forms of positive affect, filial happiness, “courage,” etc.—provided new means to conceive of their kin beyond their apparent limitations. And this language similarly relocated disability’s significance and, by extension, the subjectivity of those deemed “mentally handicapped” beyond the individual, within broader networks of the family and an emergent community of parents in similar situations. While studies like Orsi’s focus on power dynamics on a relatively low scale, in Angel Unaware we see how its role as a text helped to mobilize its audience into a collective effort to transform these specific categories’ meanings and the positions of those they labeled in the midcentury US. In this case, a theological resolution against “defeat” functioned as a kind of incitement.