Crockett Johnson began his career as an illustrator in the late 1930s by creating cover art for The New Masses, a leftist magazine focused primarily on fighting the growing menace of fascism, a political force that quashes “inner-directedness” in service of conformity. Although Johnson later moved to more established magazines, and then to his famous “Barnaby” cartoon series, Harold was a sort of return to the subject of his earlier work. Stripped of overt political statements, the book remains a salutation to the liberating and even disobedient elements in creativity, as well as a warning about the serious danger of a uniform and standardized world whose citizens are willing to relinquish their purple crayons to others.
As the forces of consumerism threatened to consume us, Johnson’s little pal Harold allied himself with the resistance instead: with the beboppers and other jazz masters; with the Beats, the folk revivalists, the modern dancers and the rock-and-rollers; the critical theorists, the existentialists, the Mattachinists and the absurdists; the pop artists and the foul-mouthed comedians and anyone else in this era who not only stood in defiance of conformity, but pushed against it. Harold and his cadre were fighting for the liveliness in their—and our—lives. They were fighting for the thing that makes us most human: our capacity to be spontaneously inventive.
In 1955, the struggle for originality was not simply an artistic pursuit or a matter for social science, it was also a religious concern that was at the very center of a massive act of protest. Martin Luther King Jr., catapulted into fame in Harold’s birth year by his involvement in the Montgomery bus boycott, the largest civil-rights protest in American history thus far. King’s idea that there was something sacrosanct about the “content” of each of our unique “characters” was a reflection of his belief in what he called “the sacredness of human personality.” For King, our dignity and our ability to fully be our original selves were intricately entwined.
Harold and the Purple Crayon was, in fact, very much a part of the activism, literature, art, theology and thinking of this time, a proponent of our right to be original, but also a warning about the giant wave of outer-directedness that was cresting over humanity and emptying individuals of their ability to speak from their unique experiences.