The rise of mass-marketed literature specifically targeting child readers is a significant if often overlooked piece of a larger historical pattern in which contending cultural groups attempt to control the words and worlds available to different groups within and between societies. The work of Olive Beaupré Miller, author/editor from 1919-1954 of "My Book House for Children," a series of books offering "children's classic literature graded from infancy to secondary school" (Taylor, 1986, p. 85), encapsulates this struggle in the early 20th century in the United States. Shunned by publishing elites for her mass-marketing techniques, Miller nonetheless shared their desire to preserve and pass on a classic Western literary canon. Her mass-marketing techniques, however, breached class boundaries, placing classic literature, along with evolutionary frameworks regarding human development, race, ethnicity and gender, in the homes of working class and immigrant families. Examining these books illuminates some of the challenges of educating for a tolerant, cosmopolitan world for children in a deeply intolerant society, then and now.