Stories about adoptive families
who defied matching at midcentury were
important because they offered examples of how love might triumph
over difference at a time when difference was presumed to be an
obstacle to stability and realness in family life. The Family
Nobody Wanted was the single most popular story of this kind,
effectively translating the ideas of such critics as Pearl
S. Buck and Justine Wise Polier
into narrative form and advancing
the case for transracial and
international adoptions.
The book was serialized, picked up by major book clubs, and dramatized
on film. It went through two dozen printings, was translated into
seven languages, and remained in print for three decades.
The Doss family came to public attention in the pages of Reader’s
Digest and Life in the late 1940s and early 1950s,
where they were presented as a “United Nations Family”
that was endearingly ordinary at the same time as it offered a glimpse
at difference that was unusual and unsettling. The Family Nobody
Wanted, written by Helen Doss and published in 1954, told the
full story. Helen Doss and her minister-in-training husband Carl
were a young California couple. Infertile
at a time when motherhood was the prerequisite to female fulfillment,
Helen wanted nothing in the world more than to have a “happy,
normal little family.” After adopting one infant who matched
them perfectly, they wanted more children but were frustrated by
the lengthy waiting periods for white babies. And so Helen and Carl
Doss, whose only desire was to expand their family, ended up with
twelve children: Filipino, Hawaiian, Balinese, Malayan, Indian,
Mexican, and Native American, in various combinations.
Some were afflicted by a host of other special
needs—one child had a tumor on her forehead, another was
described as mentally retarded—but these defects quickly disappeared
and the Doss children blossomed in their family filled with acceptance,
faith, and love. Separately, they appeared exotic, but together
they were just adorable American kids. Nor were their parents unusual.
The Dosses just happened to think that love had more to do with
making kinship than blood. Even so, The Family Nobody Wanted
was more than a heart-warming story. It was good propaganda at a
time of global anti-communism and domestic racial strife. Familial
harmony among races and nations, however rare, was an answer to
the accusation that Cold War policy hypocritically insisted on equality
abroad while tolerating inequality at home. The Dosses proved that
Americans believed prejudice was irrational and unpatriotic.
Their story hinted at racial realities so virulent that not even
love could overcome them. In all the years they adopted and raised
children, the Dosses never once adopted an African-American
child. Their only effort to adopt a half-black German war orphan,
four-year-old Gretchen, met such resistance among friends and family
members (Carl’s own mother swore that “no nigger will
call me Grandma”) that they finally gave up and helped
to locate a “Negro” couple interested in adopting the
child. Helen Doss was happy when Gretchen found parents exactly
“the same warm toast shade that she was.”
It is revealing that the publication of The Family Nobody
Wanted coincided with Brown v. Board of Education,
the 1954 Supreme Court case that ended segregated schooling and
also ushered in a lengthy period of violent resistance to integration.
For the African-American children
whose fates were most closely tied to that legal revolution, love
most certainly did have a color.
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