The Pushcart War Is The Kid's Book We Should All Be Reading

Revisiting Jean Merrill's 1964 "Fight the Power" classic

When people hear how I find it necessary to order my days a certain way, and they usually make a joke about how it sounds like I’m Type A. That couldn’t be any further from the truth. If anything, I’m Type Z or whatever you’d consider the exact opposite of an extremely organized person. A few years ago I wrote for the Times about how setting routines served as a counter to all the different ways the chemicals and neurons in my brain like to try and work against me, and how the pandemic made me realize how important it was to be able to have flexibility with those daily practices. In what should come as no surprise to anybody, having a baby lays waste to your entire method, and forces you come up with new ways of staying engaged in the world and art while also staying engaged in raising your kid. I’m almost always off my phone when Lulu is around, unless I’m taking a pic of her or putting on a new song, and she isn’t getting any TV until after she turns 3. She likes it when I read to her, and I’ve found an appreciation for books written for babies, but I also need something a little more my speed in the mornings when we’re hanging out. The compromise is when she wakes up and she’s eating, I’ll read a few pages from a book to her, then let her go about her day pooping and laughing at all my dumb dad jokes. Obviously we aren’t reading anything too intense, and the setup means we only get through a few pages every day, but it’s allowed me to really think deeply about the books I’m reading to my child, and finding deeper meaning in them for myself.

The book we’ve been working on the last few weeks is The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill, with illustrations by Ronni Solbert. It’s a book I vaguely recalled from my childhood, and my friend Lisa Lucas mentioning as one of her personally favorites as a kid it in an interview she did got me to pick up a copy. The truth is that I snatched it off the shelf at random, but I’m starting to feel like it kismet, because reading a few pages from the book that was originally published in 1964 has me feeling a little hopeful about the state of things in 2025 and beyond if more people also picked up a copy.

It might not look like it at first, but The Pushcart War is a near future dystopia for kids. Merrill set it a decade ahead of when it was published, and the New York City of the 1970s she envisioned was a place out of a nightmare Jane Jacobs’ must have had while she was working on The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Not surprisingly, the two books came out three years apart, and Jacobs was still fighting Robert Moses and his idea to build an expressway that would have gone right through where Washington Square Park sits. The NYC of The Pushcart War, meanwhile, feels very much like it’s set in a time and place that saw Moses not only winning the fight to put in a Lower Manhattan Expressway, but a possible future where big business and the government work hand in hand, screwing over the locals and small businesses. Doesn’t that sound absolutely terrifying? Could you imagine that sort of thing being regular practice?

Obviously I’m being sarcastic here, what with all the talk of our politicians getting free trips to Turkey, gold bars, a Boeing 747, and whatever else we don’t know about billionaires and foreign leaders giving the people we elect to run the country. All the corruption is just right there for us to see, and it seems like a large chunk of the population is very whatever about it all. And it’s that last part that makes things so much harder to stomach: it feels like people have given up and just accept this is the way things are now.

That’s what it feels like in the New York City of The Pushcart War. The big trucking companies run the streets while the mayor and police let them get away with making the city a nightmare for everybody else. The little guys, pushcart owners like Morris the Florist and Frank the Flower, are pushed aside, boxed out, and sometimes injured by the huge trucks that take up every inch of street. It’s no way to live or work, especially in a city of millions of people, so the pushcart owners fight back. They start a guerrilla campaign to shoot out as many truck tires as possible by using little tacks attached to peas that they spit out like blow darts, and suddenly, things start to get a little better in the city for everybody…except the truck company owners and politicians. The big guys use all their power to try and stop the attacks, and what ensues is a classic tale of the little guy getting scrappy and using any trick at their disposal to fight for what they believe is right.

Merrill saw a foresaw how greed can ruin a city and the rise of huge automobiles unnecessarily taking up the roads. There’s a lot in The Pushcart Wars that, sadly, resemble the Manhattan of today. The only thing missing are the pushcart peddlers. In the real world, big business was successful. That’s the one thing that has affected me most about reading Merrill’s classic: I wish we still lived in a city with fewer trucks and more small, local businesses that served their neighborhoods. I see glimmers of hope with things like congestion pricing and streets being made more friendly for cyclists and pedestrians, but I’ll never believe that a city like New York needs to be so clogged up with cars and trucks.

But there’s another message I’ve taken away from The Pushcart War that makes me think Lulu and I will revisit it in a few years when she’s a little older and maybe able to have the message sink in. It’s that people will always find ways to fight power, corruption, and greed. It might not happen immediately, and it might come in small bursts, but Merrill reminds us that it only takes something as small as a pea shot out of a blow gun to bring change. And while I try to combat the downpour of bad news that seems to be raining down on us 24/7, The Pushcart War reminded me that and has brought me a lot of comfort.