Tedesco Pens Essay in What the Presidents Read

Dr. Laureen Tedesco’s essay “The Little Brown Sister: A Children’s Book Model for William Howard Taft’s Benevolent Paternalism” has appeared in What the Presidents Read: Childhood Stories and Family Favorites, edited by Elizabeth Goodenough and Marilynn Olson (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025).

The essay connects Jane Andrews’s two “Seven Little Sisters” books—fictive introductions to geography for the youngest readers—to President Taft’s policy of so-called “benevolent paternalism” in the Philippines, during his tenure as U.S. governor of the Philippines and in his subsequent presidency. The unnamed “Little Brown Sister” of Andrews’s Seven Little Sisters and How They Grew (1861) and its sequel Each and All: How the Seven Sisters Prove Their Sisterhood (1888) suggests an intriguing parallel to Taft’s later term for Filipinos, “the little brown brother.” Andrews’s exhortation to readers of “the white race” to share their gifts of education and other benefits with “our dark-skinned sisters” has parallels to Taft’s efforts at education and Americanization in the Philippines, undergirded by unacknowledged racial and cultural hierarchies.