When in 1952 Robert Richman, the literary editor at the New Republic, worried about "mass imagination" and its effects on the development of aesthetic senses in American children he said he was referring to a threat created by the advance of technology, but it's interesting and important to note that the language of threat he used closely resembled the language of anticommunism. (This should not be a surprise, since, of course, communism was frequently represented as foisting upon its subjects, especially children, a standardization of expression.) In a way, then, Richman's criticism of the "uniform mental images spewed out of the television sets" and Disney's burned- in images of Johnny Appleseed, implies that communist victory may well come from within the very center of the American cultural rejoinder to communism--through the "standardization of all our public arts forms" that came in the fifties as a response to communist "mass imagination." The way out, Richman suggests by way of praising Richard Ott's The Art of Children (1952), was through a counter-standardization: self-expression. American parents "should take a vow...to honor the pictures his child makes." If "conventionalization is hard upon them," children should be encourged to create art and we should say it's all good. That American homes are going without such "honor" due self-expression is dangerous; Ott's book is "forceful testimony of these dangers."