Transcription
This video is sponsored by Squarespace, where you can find everything you need to conveniently build an elegant, custom website for your projects, portfolio, or business—all in one place.
On March 2nd, 2021, Dr. Seuss Enterprises released a short statement. Based on advice from a panel of experts and educators, they decided to end the publication of six books which, quote, "portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong." Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced today that those books will no longer be sold because of the racist depictions in the decades-old children's books. The move is to make sure his catalog represents and supports all communities and families.
The announcement coincided with Read Across America Day, an annual event promoting literacy since 1997. The National Education Association celebrated it on Seuss's birthday all around the country, encouraging kids to form a love for reading. You might remember the tall paper hats and nasty-looking scrambled eggs. I could never bring myself to eat those green eggs as a child, but I adored Dr. Seuss and what was essentially his birthday party. I learned to read with his books, and they even inspired my love for art and illustration. So I can understand why the company's decision may have thrust people into defense mode, but the backlash was a little much. Silencing Seuss? Universal Orlando quite literally being canceled? Everybody is on the cancellation block. He's an American. Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss. People reacted as if it were a blanket ban of Dr. Seuss's books, some equating it to book burning. Prices for copies on eBay soared to the hundreds, with tweet after tweet describing Seuss as yet another victim, fallen prey to the leftist woke mob's cancel culture agenda.
It was not that serious and frankly didn't warrant this level of media attention. Dr. Seuss wasn't being canceled in any meaningful capacity. Regardless, if he were somehow alive today, those same people would despise him, and the feeling would likely be mutual. Most of us remember Dr. Seuss as a wholesome and benevolent figure from our childhoods, an author whose silly, made-up words guided our developing literacy. But as a New Deal Democrat for most of his adult life, he was firmly outspoken about social and political issues. Dr. Seuss wouldn't have become the literary legend we know him as today without this aspect of his character. So why is it that someone who wrote renowned anti-discrimination books for children is being criticized for racial caricatures in his work? Well, I think it points to the complicated nature of people in general. Seuss was a figure battling contradictions, growing up in a culture marked by a contentious push and pull of social norms. He gradually learned to advocate for certain causes while also harming them along the way, and his story is an interesting case study in how individuals and society as a whole change and don't change over time. So this video isn't about canceling or absolving him, but an exploration of those shades of gray. Most of us only know about his legacy through these books, but he always had enough clout to put his opinions into the limelight—for better or worse. Whether his clashing values are the result of moral evolution, historical context, or plain old cognitive dissonance, I'll try to lay out the patterns in Dr. Seuss's legacy and consider how two things can be true at once. But first, I want to take a minute to talk about today's sponsor, Squarespace.
A long time ago, I had to design a website for a project I was working on, and I had a really hard time figuring it out. It got really frustrating really quickly, and I'm 100% sure if I had been using Squarespace, it would have been a much more pleasant experience. I could have chosen from their really eye-catching and flexible templates. The drag and drop makes it super easy to customize with whatever pages or features you want to use. You can sell products in an online store, invite people to your wedding, contact people with email campaigns. It's clean, professional, easy to navigate. I also appreciate that if you don't want to use a template, you can start completely from scratch, and it's still really easy to build with all the tools available. There's a bajillion ways to make it your own, so you can use your website for anything you need. If you want to try it out, head to squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, head to squarespace.com/qualityculture to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Thanks so much to Squarespace for sponsoring. Now, back to the video.
Theodore Seuss Geisel, or if you want to get real precise, Theodore Zo Geisel, grew up in a German-speaking household in Massachusetts in the early 20th century. When the US entered World War I in 1917, anti-German sentiments pervaded the nation, as described in the biography *Becoming Dr. Seuss* by Brian J. Jones. As a wave of nativism and xenophobia swept the country, all things German became taboo. Frankfurters became hot dogs. Street and town names were changed. A German immigrant was lynched, and recent immigrants of several nationalities tried stressing their loyalty with hyphenated descriptors like "German-American." Seuss and his family went above and beyond in various volunteer efforts to prove their allegiance, like selling war bonds as a Boy Scout. Seuss said, "Everyone was angry at the Germans. I was not only known as the Kaiser, but because of my father's job at the brewery, the 'drunken Kaiser.' I sometimes fled home with coals bouncing off my head." The entire experience had a major hand in shaping his future ideals. Harassment stopped when the war ended, and throughout his teens and early 20s, he worked on cartoons for his school's humor magazines, where he eventually developed his famous pseudonym. He had a cushy career in advertising for a few years and published a few mildly successful children's books, but as he once claimed, "I had no great causes or interest in social issues until Hitler."
A visit to Berlin in 1936 left him alarmed and disturbed as Nazi propaganda imposed a menacing atmosphere. Seuss had already sparked tension with his Republican father for voting for FDR in the last election, and in 1941, as the war in Europe raged on, he only plunged further into his liberal beliefs as a political cartoonist for *PM*, a left-leaning newspaper. In his 400-plus cartoons, he targeted American isolationists, fascists, anti-Semites, racists, and leaders of the Axis powers, while also urging American civilians to do their part. I think the fact that his family was from Germany made the war situation painful and probably made him more determined to rise above and prove how he felt about America. You get a palpable sense of his frustration at the apathy and complacency of Americans. One cartoon shows a family facing an accusatory billboard: "If all of us were fighting as hard as you are, who would win the war and how soon?" His last cartoon for *PM* in January 1943 expressed a similar sentiment, as he'd soon take his own advice and join the Army in his late 30s. Assigned to Frank Capra's Signal Corps, he wrote training films like the *Private Snafu* cartoons, post-war propaganda films, and other communications materials; many of them stressed the clear and present dangers of fascist movements. "Somewhere in this Germany are storm troopers by the thousands," the point is he'd always been willing to tell people what he believed was unjust and how these injustices should be challenged. This directness led to the political undercurrents in his children's books. Jones remarks, when Geisel was asked point-blank if he used those propagandistic skills in his books, his answer was straightforward and unapologetic: "Of course." He's gone on to say, "I'm naive enough to believe that society will be changed by examination of ideas through books and the press, and that information can prove to be greater than the dissemination of stupidity." I mean, he definitely also wanted the books to be fun, something kids would actually want to read. Many critics at the time called his work too vulgar, too brash, overwhelmingly American, with all the enthusiastic exclamation points. But he was trying to break the mold of boring, preachy children's books, as he called them. Illiteracy rates soared as television became a distraction, and the old-time readers seemed more boring and irrelevant than ever, so he mostly tried to avoid being too moralistic. Still, it's not hard to detect plenty of real-world implications. Philip Nel, the most prominent Seuss scholar, notes that even 1939's *The King Stilts* hinted at Seuss's feelings about Americans with the selfish King Bertram character, who stopped protecting his kingdom from disaster when inconvenienced. Though the politics in his books weren't concrete until after his 7-year hiatus.
More than once in his political cartoons, he depicted Hitler as a baby in a diaper throwing a tantrum. Similarly, several of his stories are about standing up to bullies or tyrants getting clowned on. 1949's *Bartholomew and the Oobleck* tells the story of a boy who must save his kingdom from a sticky green gloop raining down on the land, which was summoned by an egotistic King who wanted a new kind of weather. We've seen Bart and this king before—in 1938's *The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins*—but after World War II, the king is depicted as more childish and authoritarian, and his actions destroy the whole community until he's forced to apologize. Of course, the most well-known example of tyrannical leaders in his work was 1958's *Yertle the Turtle*, a character Seuss says was modeled on Hitler. Yertle is the ruler of all that he sees but decides he wants to expand his kingdom. He commands other turtles to stack beneath him, reaching higher and higher heights, creating a physically and psychologically oppressive system. Turtles at the bottom of the pile complain about their pains and rights, but it's only until one of them takes a stand that Yertle's regime is toppled. "And today, the great Yertle, that marvelous he, is King of the mud—that is all he can see. And the turtles, of course—all the turtles are free. As turtles, and maybe all creatures should be." Some people questioned why Seuss didn't say "surely" instead of "maybe" to be more resolute in his stance. He argued that he wanted children to come to this conclusion on their own. He never underestimated their intelligence, in a sense, and he would do this regularly. He removed the distance between the narrative and the reader, much like the billboard in that one cartoon. He tends to implicitly ask, "What are you going to do through all this?"
We can gauge what he learned from his childhood experience: we can't allow apathy or cruelty to take root in our communities. Over the years, he realized that maybe kids would be the most receptive in absorbing these values, maybe because he'd lost hope in adults. In *The Democratic Imagination of Dr. Seuss*, Henry Jenkins explains that Seuss, like many other Popular Front participants, had hoped that this spirit of democratization would keep alive their efforts to transform American society; that the men who wore the uniform would return home changed by what they had experienced through working side by side with those from many other nations or Americans of different races and ethnic backgrounds. A disillusioned Seuss warned in a December 7th, 1944, memo: "Much of what we have gained is, at the moment of Victory, threatened. Racial tensions within our army threaten to grow. Many soldiers who have seen Europe are eager to turn their backs upon it. Disillusionment, cynicism, distrust, bitterness are already souring the milk of humankindness. Maggots are already eating the fruits of Victory." He rarely drew political cartoons after 1943, but in a rare and final appearance in 1947, he criticized the effects of the Red Scare. In it, everyone's turning on each other, shouting "Communist," as a distressed Uncle Sam looks on. It conveys the division and paranoia of the era. Seuss had initially hoped people would come together, but they were becoming hopelessly hostile. He now felt it was up to the next generation to help right his generation's wrongs.
One last question: "Dr. Seuss, do you like writing stories for children?" "I'd rather do that than anything." He'd hinted before how kids often learn right from wrong through storytelling, and he'd seen how damaging propaganda had warped and exploited the minds of children in authoritarian countries; how crucial popular media was in influencing their future prejudices, describing them as, quote, "products of the worst educational crime in the entire history of the world. These are the most dangerous German youth. They know no other system than the one that poisoned their minds." He had an acute awareness that being raised in these environments created harmful unconscious biases, though he might have been blind to his own. Among Dr. Seuss's attacks against the Axis powers, he vilified Japanese people in a distinct way. This goes far beyond the racist caricatures, which are obviously bad in hindsight. I'm more referring to his view that while German-Americans and Italian-Americans shouldn't be held responsible for those countries' actions, Japanese-Americans' loyalty should be questioned—a view that sadly wasn't uncommon in 1942. The co-founder of the NAACP and ACLU, John Haynes Holmes, spoke out in defense of Japanese people. In response, Seuss drew a cartoon depicting his beheading by the Japanese prime minister. When criticized for it, he wrote an aggressive retort that I won't read out loud here. To be clear, Japan's leadership and military were very far from innocent. The channel, knowing better, has a nuanced video discussing their war crimes and the revisionist history Japan's engaged in since then, but the quote conveys Dr. Seuss's fervor. He soon published another cartoon suggesting Japanese-Americans were waiting for a signal from their Homeland to betray the US. Jones calls it one of the lowest moments in Seuss's career and points out he should have known better, considering he experienced bigotry by association during World War I. While Seuss received backlash for his drawings of Nazi wiener dogs, no one spoke up about this cartoon. "I can excuse racism, but I draw the line at animal cruelty." Less than a week later, President Roosevelt signed an order to forcibly relocate over 100,000 Japanese-Americans to concentration camps. Some Seuss supported at the time. Some have dismissed it as war hysteria or that he didn't have enough time to think before churning out these cartoons, but if it were that simple, why were American Germans and Italians spared his scrutiny? While Seuss attacked Jim Crow-era laws targeting Black Americans and advocated for Jewish people in the US, as well as those facing unspeakable cruelty in Europe, he actively supported maltreatment against another group of people at home. It's an example of how one can be seemingly paradoxically both racist and anti-racist. Dr. Seuss is, of course, most known for the latter.
Jenkins mentions how in some of Seuss's college lectures, he introduced the issue of race, stressing the unhappy life minorities experience in America, which, quote, "preaches equality but doesn't always practice it." He also once published a fiery essay in the *New York Times*, claiming, "He writes for kids because people who've grown up have learned to find humor in punching down. You soon began to laugh at some very odd things. Your laughs, unfortunately, began to get mixed in with sneers and smirks. This conditioned laughter the grown-ups taught you depended entirely on their conditions: financial conditions, political conditions, racial, religious, and social conditions. You began to laugh at people your family feared or despised, people they felt inferior to, or people they felt better than. Your capacity for healthy, silly, friendly laughter was smothered. You… you really grown up. You'd become adults—adults, which is a word that means obsolete children."
1954's *Horton Hears a Who* is one of his more famous writings in this vein. It follows Horton the Elephant, another character borrowed from a pre-war book to serve a larger moral purpose. He discovers a tiny, vulnerable community of Whos living on a speck of dust. Only he can hear them because of his big ears. As Horton encourages them to make their voices be heard, he fervently protects them while others seek to destroy them. "I should save him because, after all, a person's a person, no matter how small." This slogan is often co-opted by anti-choice groups, which Seuss and his wife have legally battled against in the past. But the story is about inequality, and as Jenkins notes, it encapsulates the dilemmas that many liberals faced in postwar America, torn between conflicting values of community and individualism, frightened by mob rule, and yet dedicated to democracy. It's also considered somewhat of an allegory of the US and Japan. He wrote it directly after visiting Japan in 1953, having said, "My conscience got the better of me," and dedicated it to his host in Kyoto. The trip's purpose was to examine how American occupation had affected Japanese youth. He visited schools to meet young children, pleased to find that boys and girls alike expressed healthy ambitions and hopes for peace. Some have remarked that the Whos are a representation of the US and Japan; the air of condescension can't be denied, as the Mayor of Whoville earnestly thanks Horton for being their savior: "You're a most splendid friend! You've helped everyone here on this dust speck no end!" Richard Minear, author of *Dr. Seuss Goes to War*, reminds us that not long before this book, the US had thoroughly bombed Japanese cities, even prior to the atomic bombs. "You've saved all our houses, our ceilings and floors! You've saved all our churches and grocery stores!" he writes. For an American in 1954 to write these lines, even an allegory, calls for willful amnesia. It brings to mind a 1945 short film, *Our Job in Japan*. Seuss wrote it for American troops set to occupy them, describing the Japanese people as victims of generations of corrupt government leaders who had perversely wielded the Shinto religion to wage war, and even corrected and updated stereotypes and misinformation from the previous writer's draft. While it was later released as a documentary and won an Oscar, it was never distributed to servicemen because the department felt it was too sympathetic to Japanese people. "This kid starts life with the same brain as any other kid. None of them was ever born with a dangerous idea. Ideas are taught to a child as he grows older." But it also has a certain layer of condescension embedded in the text, as though the US always knows what's best. "These honest ones are looking to us to help them prove that our idea is better than the Japanese idea. By being ourselves, we can prove that what we like to call the American way, or democracy, or just plain old Golden Rule common sense, is a pretty good way to live."
Critics found a similar vibe in *Horton Hears a Who*, but as Nel remarks, it's probably not productive to interpret it as a one-to-one historical analogy. It's more a matter of universal appeal. Quote: "The size functions as an arbitrary mark of difference for which the Whos are mistreated and thus can be seen as analogous to race, creed, sex, or nationality." That JoJo, the smallest Who of all, shouts the "Yach!" that saves his country suggests that even those who seem insignificant in the larger social order are significant and even powerful. Inasmuch as the Whos may be analogous to minority populations, *Horton Hears a Who* indicates that Seuss's understanding of racism and xenophobia had progressed considerably during the decade since his *PM* cartoons. The year prior, in 1953, he'd written *The Sneetches*, another anti-discrimination parable, this time partially inspired by anti-Semitism in his own community. Star-bellied Sneetches are treated as inferior in their society until some guy comes along and sells them away to get stars. "We're still the best Sneetches, and they're still the worst! Yeah, but how are we going to prove it?" The old Star-bellied Sneetches want to feel superior again, so he sells them away to remove their stars, and the scam continues until the Sneetches run out of money and realize how meaningless the whole thing always was. Although this metaphor makes most sense in the context of Jewish discrimination, it still points to a larger idea of people trying to conform to pointless, arbitrary standards and using those standards to judge others. Obviously, systemic problems are more complex than what's presented here, but for children, it drives home the simple concept that racism—i.e., treating people differently based on their appearance—doesn't make sense. "They're all Sneetches! We're all people!" It's the Dr. Seuss version of "My race is the human race."
*The Sneetches* and *Horton Hears a Who* don't magically absolve him of his past wrongdoings, but they were signs his views had evolved. But he never did change everything. Some of his artwork, even up to his death in 1991, illustrates the staying power of learned prejudice and how hard it can be to let go of old shorthands. The criticisms about racial caricatures are nothing new. In the '70s, Seuss somewhat reluctantly altered a character from *Mulberry Street* in response to complaints. "I had a gentleman with a pigtail. I colored him yellow and called him a Chinaman. That's the way things were 50 years ago. In later editions, I refer to him as a Chinese man. I have taken the color out of the gentleman and removed the pigtail, and now he looks like an Irishman." This type of critique has always existed. It's not some sort of modern cancel culture born in the last 10 to 15 years. Here we circle back to the 2021 controversy. It wasn't censorship or a ban. It was independently decided by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to cease publishing these six books. Plus, they weren't even that popular to begin with. Those who expressed outrage at this nothing-burger of a situation seemed to have ulterior motives. Nel describes them as bad-faith actors trying to distract from more pressing problems. Quote: "You incorporate these works into yourself as you're still very much figuring out who you…"
Are what you believe and what you love. When someone is critical of something that you fell in love with as a child, it can feel as if they're being critical of you. Fox News could take that and say, "Let's reflect on that. Why would we feel attacked if someone was critical of a childhood favorite?" Instead, they say, "Let's amplify the anger here and make it about the critique rather than listen to the critique." It's a really effective ploy, but it's dangerous and disingenuous. They frame it as a "they're coming for you" argument, not really saying why there might be some underlying issues in a culture that people would want to change.
In 2017, a report was submitted to the National Education Association urging them to change the focus of Read Across America Day to a more diverse range of books. The report listed stats about Dr. Seuss's work: of the 2,000 characters in about 50 books, there are 45 characters of color, and they're all portrayed through some combination of subservience, dehumanization, exotification, stereotypes, or caricature. Seuss just didn't draw people of color unless they were in some of these categories. Also, there are zero non-white girls or women. He never was great at writing girls in general—another thing he was criticized for in his lifetime. Ever notice that Sally from *The Cat in the Hat* doesn't utter a single line of dialogue? Other analyses touch on possible racist inspirations for books like *One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish* and *The Cat in the Hat*, though if these are based in truth, they're buried really deep and wouldn't be recognizable to children anyway. The caricature problem was much more apparent.
In 2018, not long after that report, the NEA shifted gears to celebrating a nation of diverse readers on Read Across America Day. I think it's a positive move. All of Seuss's books don't have to be omitted entirely; no one's calling for a burning. But if you're going to encourage kids to read, it's a good idea to include books that showcase a wide array of voices. It can help kids develop an empathetic understanding for people who are different from them. And studies have shown if kids recognize themselves on the page, it can make them feel that their stories are worth telling too, that they have value as human beings. If she sees an image in it that looks like her, it won't be one that's behind the walls of a zoo. It's thoughtfulness, not cancellation.
The NEA's changes must have put the pressure on Dr. Seuss Enterprises. Personally, I feel they were only trying to distance their image from these associations while avoiding too much loss in revenue. A couple other books contain similar drawings, but they're not going to discontinue *Oh, the Places You'll Go*; that's a bestseller. But pressures to do something had been mounting for years. Some say they should have just edited the books rather than let them go out of print, but Nell argues that sometimes the issue is coded into the very structure of the story, like *Charlie and the Chocolate Factory*. It's still weird that Wonka has little slaves in his factory, even if Roald Dahl changed the Oompa Loompas so that they're not explicitly black people from Africa anymore. The narrative still signals colonial exploitation.
It makes sense; Seuss may have primarily written from the perspective of a version of his younger self, but why couldn't a black or Asian or Middle Eastern side character just be a fisherman in the waiting place or some guy in a marching band? Instead, they were always exceptionally foreign and unfamiliar, met only in the midst of a zany, far-off adventure. You get the sense that the white boy or man is the default human being, and everyone else just plays a supporting role in their journey. I'm not going to pretend this is the worst thing in the world for a kid to see, but perhaps the changes are in line with Dr. Seuss's own philosophy. Near the end of his life, when his biographers asked if he had any final thoughts he wished to share, he handed them a slip of paper: "The best slogan I can leave with the USA would be 'We can and we've got to do better than this.'" He'd crossed out "kids of the USA" to make it more general.
Ron L. Miller, maker of the documentary *The Political Dr. Seuss*, says Seuss was a typical 1930s liberal and that he cared less about multiculturalism than he did about the more fundamental American ideals of freedom, democracy, and equality. In other words, issues of diversity were as far away to him as the destruction in Japan. And like the children's propaganda he warned against in Germany and Japan, he had been raised in prejudiced conditions of his own. He recycled stereotypes in his books because it's what he grew up seeing—they were in the books he read as a child, in the common high school minstrel shows where he performed in blackface as a teenager, later reflected in the awful caricatures in his ads from his early 20s. This is how black and Asian people were always drawn. The man was already 60 when segregation was outlawed. Blatant, unabashed racism permeated every aspect of American culture for most of his life, and he carried those biases with him, whether he intended to or not.
Like many people, Seuss had an overly simplistic view of what racism is and isn't. In a 1942 cartoon titled *What this country needs is a good mental insecticide*, men wait in line for Uncle Sam to rid them of the racial prejudice bug. But Nell explains the flaw in Seuss's logic: "Unfortunately, racism is not a bug; it's a feature. It's not aberrant; it's ordinary. It's embedded in institutions and in culture." That Seuss is doing both racist and anti-racist work at the same time can be confusing because many of us see racism as an either/or—people are either racist or not racist. That's how Seuss himself understood racism. Unfortunately, it's more of a "both/and"—people can perpetuate it without intending to. I don't think Seuss intended to because he was unaware of the degree to which his visual imagination was steeped in caricature. He used racist stereotypes even as he was also writing anti-racist stories. That's why we need to take the question seriously because if you don't reflect, then you continue to carry forth these ideas, perhaps unintentionally, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps against your own stated principles and beliefs. I think that's what Seuss did, but I also think that's true of a lot of us.
Seuss's blind spots point to the often dual nature of people's beliefs—how two things can be true at once. Works we're nostalgic for can be both loved and examined with a critical lens. Being well-meaning doesn't shield you from being wrong, but being wrong doesn't have to mark you as irredeemable. We can learn and grow, and like Seuss said, we can do better—even better than he ever did. It wouldn't be the first time he extended responsibility to newer generations. In 1971, the year after the first ever Earth Day celebration, Seuss published *The Lorax*.
By the way, if this section sounds a bit familiar, it's because I've discussed it before in an essay about *WALL-E*. *The Lorax* begins in a barren wasteland where a child pays the mysterious Once-ler to tell his sad story. He was once an entrepreneur who moved to this spot long ago when the grass was green and the air was clean. The Once-ler began exploiting the Truffula Trees for profit, converting their tough thneeds into a versatile product, representing pointless commodities in general. "I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees," an odd creature, The Lorax appeared from the start and repeatedly pleaded with him to consider the destruction and displacement his operation was causing, but business was booming, and that's all that mattered. The Once-ler and his employees continued until nothing was left, and then even The Lorax disappeared, leaving only a word behind. Unless, at the end of the book, the regretful Once-ler puts the onus on the listening child, a proxy for the reader. He gives him the last Truffula seed, a token of hope and a call to action. Finally comprehending the message in the Lorax's final word: "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing's going to get better." It's probably the most psychologically grim Dr. Seuss book—avert warning against abject consumerism, certain capitalist practices, and ecological destruction. It was partly inspired by ongoing construction near his San Diego home as developers tore out trees to make way for rows of identical condos. Emma Maris remarks that *The Lorax*'s enduring appeal may lie in environmentalist nostalgia for a time when such problems seemed more black and white. *The Lorax* portrays a world without the complexities of carbon trading, the pricing of ecosystem services, uncertainties over baseline states, and the existence or not of pristine wilderness. For Seuss, wild nature is a paradise; industry is a malignant cancer; and heroes take a stand.
*The Lorax*'s message may seem tame by today's standards, but criticizing big business for their pollution and greed was unconventional at the time. The environmental movement had just started ramping up in the late 1960s and was considered part of the hippie counterculture, so the book didn't arrive without some backlash. Some logging communities tried to ban it from their schools because it would turn their kids against the industry. One group published a rebuttal called *The True Axe*, which ends with the line, "I think things are not quite as bad as they seemed." Still, *The Lorax* was Seuss's personal favorite work. "I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might. It was one of the few things I ever set out to do that was straight propaganda." Of course, he must have been referring to his children's books since he used to make literal propaganda. And after all, as Jones points out, Seuss got his start in perhaps the ultimate propaganda machine: advertising. Back then, ads were rarely intentionally funny, so Seuss's humor led to his work exploding in popularity. His stance on marketing seemed quite different then as he built a lucrative career pumping out ads for companies like Standard Oil, with his cartoons plastered on billboards and signs and subway cars all across the country. Though he changed his tune after the war when he started focusing on children's books. He even lost an ad contract in 1956 after his drawing in a neighborhood pamphlet called out billboards as the eyesores they are. Though I expect the loss didn't faze him; Seuss often called money a necessary evil and gave much of his away to charities. Ever the controlling perfectionist, he rarely greenlit merchandise or advertisements based on his characters. When he did, the products had to have a relevant purpose, like toys that encouraged creativity and imaginative play. He was protective of his work and wary of how it could be exploited for profit. In one instance, his agent tried to persuade him to accept an offer from a sponsor, saying if he accepted the deal, he'd go into the Guinness Book of Records as the writer who was paid the most money per word. Seuss replied, "I'd rather go into the Guinness Book of Records as the writer who refused the most money per word." I mean, you know, it's kind of stabbed at the heart of an agent whose normal job is to get as much money as possible for his client. He liked making money, but it was never the primary objective. Suffice to say, he wasn't a fan of gratuitous commercialism.
*The Lorax* reflects this attitude as it criticizes unregulated mass production and devotion to profit, stressing themes of anti-consumerism and corporate responsibility. In the book, Dr. Seuss's philosophy... Oh, The Thinks You Can Think! Jacob Held uses *The Lorax* to examine the problems with the capitalist mode of production: "We don't make things to satisfy real human needs; things are made to be sold because wealth is what drives capitalism, not well-being. Consider again the ridiculous Thneed. It's ridiculous; no one needs a Thneed. It's a thing that's made only to be sold. If there's no market for it, the Once-ler will manufacture one through ingenious marketing. He'll make sure you know you need a Thneed so he can sell you one. I'm sure he could find plenty of clever advertisers who could prey on some latent insecurity to motivate you to buy a couple."
1957's *How the Grinch Stole Christmas* shows an even earlier example of Seuss critiquing materialistic norms. The grumpy Grinch steals the Whos' gifts, food, and décor to ruin their Christmas, only to find them happily celebrating all the same. Jones mentions that Seuss struggled with writing overtly religious endings before settling on the simple, universal image of breaking bread. Seuss insisted, "There's no statement whatsoever in the book," but his dislike of hyperconsumerism was made plain in the story, just as it was in *The Lorax*. I don't think the core of the problem is that pointless products are made at all; it's that they're generally made at the expense of the environment, the well-being of humans and animals alike, and in Seuss's case, at the expense of meaningful art.
In the many years since his death, Dr. Seuss, much like Walt Disney, has become more of a brand than an extension of the man himself. With approval from Dr. Seuss Enterprises, his work is used in tons of movie tie-in advertisements, new films that lose sight of the central messages under layers of convoluted plot points, plenty of licensed merchandise, and so on and so on. Maybe the holidays mean just a little bit more, but just in case we're wrong, try our new Horton Hears a Who menu! At A&W, use Swiffer on floor spray with the breeze; use Mr. Clean on messes like these. Let's see what all this DNA kid fuss is about. I will sit in this chair; I will snack on La-Z-Boy three specially marked Cheerios. Use your MasterCard, and you can win a trip to Universal Orlando as the Cat in the Hat invades Kellogg's cereals. Me? Cuz that nasty green has been wearing to Mazda with Skyactiv technology. Noting the dir of merchandising during Ted's lifetime, some have called it exploitation, and you have to guess at it in a way that we're hoping if Theodore Geisel were alive, he would be answering those questions the same way you'd be answering those questions because you don't want to do anything that would sort of violate his legacy. Much like the Thneeds, most of these partnerships seem to prioritize profit above all else.
In a 2019 Forbes interview, the president of the company said, "We do use our books as our foundation, our guide. Ultimately, the market will tell you if you've done it right. Sometimes it's not the result we're looking for." It's not hard to imagine what the right result may be, but the scenario isn't as simple as "the company is evil and goes against everything Dr. Seuss stood for." He was stingy with his characters early on, but in 1968, the knife of copyright law gave him a reality check. He lost a lawsuit which allowed a company to sell ugly dolls based on characters he'd drawn in his adman days. The experience revealed his financial and creative vulnerabilities as a working artist. Through this, he discovered trademarks were more effective than copyright in protecting his creative property, but to keep a trademark, you have to sell stuff, so that's what he did. Starting in the early '70s, Seuss reluctantly allowed his characters into the marketplace more often, on the condition that he be given final approval. He was still pretty picky, but nevertheless authorized toys and games and clothes and décor, licensed film rights to movie studios, and even approved the theme park at Universal. So as he published *The Lorax* and criticized capitalist practices, he was knowingly contributing to consumer culture in the interest of protecting his assets. In 2003, his longtime agent said, "The implication that merchandising and commercialization in all its forms were contrary to Ted's philosophy and offensive to his business ethic is simply bunk. Dr. Seuss Enterprises has engaged in no activity that Ted did not also engage in. Ted knew the way of the world and was not about to deprive himself of a desirable opportunity for reasons of commercial disdain." The key question, of course, is what was a desirable opportunity. It's hard to say whether this statement is valid or simply deflecting responsibility, as it seems there's no point where an opportunity becomes undesirable for the brand. I can't imagine that the same man who was picky with the quality of stuffed animals would really be open to letting *The Lorax* be a spokesman in a car commercial.
It takes 10 more years as Seuss approved of products over the years. He lamented, "I don't know that I want to spend the last several years of my life doing this." He once again considered the measures a necessary evil, something he wanted no part in, but nevertheless had to engage with. Maybe he wrote *The Lorax* for this very reason. In the article, "The Disneyfication of Dr. Seuss: Faithful to Profit 100%," Nell acknowledged that in light of trademark law's strength, the Disneyfication of Dr. Seuss must be seen as a symptom of a legal system designed to benefit capitalism more than moral or artistic values. If Dr. Seuss Enterprises has to sell lesser versions of Dr. Seuss's work in order to strengthen that work's legal standing, then there's something wrong with the system. Nothing is static; there's only two directions it can go: onward and upward, or it can go downward and oblivion. And if it takes selling cookies or figures or t-shirts or this or that or the other thing, so be it. So perhaps what started out as protection of a creative legacy led to an inevitable entanglement with a system that prioritizes profit—the same capitalist machine he criticized in *The Lorax*. Maybe in our culture, the market does decide, whether Dr. Seuss liked it or not. As it often happens, the interests of the powers that be tend to trump the welfare of everyone else.
In 1945, just a few months before the official end of the war, Seuss wrote a new project for his film department to strike fear and motivation in the soldiers' hearts. In the script, he described how energy could be used to create weapons of mass destruction—ones that could be launched by pushing a button a thousand miles away. After sending it in for approval, his superiors demanded that all copies be destroyed. Seuss had unwittingly described the object of the classified Manhattan Project. This private snafu cartoon was also never released. His disappointment from the script rejection fell away in August when the atomic bombs were dropped in Japan and the war subsequently ended. He called up his superior and said, "I understand everything now. All is forgiven." The casual disregard for the lives of tens of thousands of Japanese civilians is jarring, though maybe this opinion is only easy to have in retrospect. At the time, anti-atom sentiments were the minority; most Americans were relieved to avoid an on-the-ground invasion and that the war was over at last. It had been a fraught and fearful few years, and Seuss was among those who found it difficult to empathize with the enemy.
Seeing the effects of fascist propaganda in Germany in 1936 and even Italy in the 20s shook him to his core. Once the war began, he felt defending Europe was a matter of moral necessity, and his political cartoons radically emphasized his stance. He criticized isolationists, perhaps more than anyone, suggesting the "America First" types were being selfish and naive cowards—a wildly unpopular opinion at the time. A Gallup poll reported that 70 to 85% of Americans opposed involvement, but Seuss insisted they'd have no choice in the matter. In the '70s, he expressed regret about the hurry drawings and snap judgments but still appreciated the frantic fervor of the warnings: "I probably was intemperate in my attacks on them, but they almost disarmed this country at a time it was obviously about to be destroyed. I think I helped a little bit—not much, but some—in stating the fact that we were in a war and we damn well better ought to do something about it." By the time of the atomic destruction in Japan, he felt the ends justified the means. It seemed several of the objectors were military leadership or scientists—those with real knowledge of the weapon and its effects. Seuss was wrong about his level of understanding when he called up his superior; he couldn't have realized the gravity of what had just occurred and how the world would change from that point on.
Over the years, the dire reality came into focus. "Duck and cover," a boy told Tony. "That flash means act fast. We must be ready every day, all the time, to do the right thing if the atomic bomb explodes." The Soviet Union developed their own atomic weapons, and both countries continued adding to their arsenals throughout the Cold War. Fears of mutually assured destruction loomed over everyone's heads. In 1984, Seuss published the controversial *The Butter Battle Book*, an allegory of the nuclear arms race. The style and tone call back to his bold political cartoons: "Run to the wall like a nice little man, drop this bomb on the Zooks just as fast as you can!" The book tells the story of the Yooks and the Zooks, two groups clashing over which side of toast should be buttered. Their territories are separated by a wall, and the conflict escalates as they invent more and more elaborate weapons to threaten each other. And then it ends abruptly with a cliffhanger, leaving only a sense of "Who's going to drop it? Will you or will he? We'll see. We'll see." Seuss received hate mail, and the book...
Was banned in some libraries. Some called it anti-military, to which he responded, "I'm not anti-military; I'm just anti-crazy." Others claimed he was trying to scare their kids with the ambiguous ending, but he felt a happy ending would have been dishonest. And, as was his way, he refused to talk down to children about hard truths. Others still felt the simplicity not only undercut the seriousness of the threat but insisted that Seuss was making a false moral equivalence. They felt the US was in the right, and he wasn't being patriotic enough in his comparisons. And so, his assertion of "maybe continually producing weapons of mass destruction is bad" was met with the American tradition of ardently defending every military effort the country has ever been involved in, especially when communism is involved.
In 2004, an article in the conservative magazine National Review described the book as a perfect emblem of the moral equivalence that neutered so many liberals during the Cold War. It assumes that the half-century conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was based on nothing more meaningful than a dispute over how people prefer to butter their bread—as if communism weren't a threat to liberty, but an eating preference. The central conflict of the book is trivial, and that was the point. Like the SNES, Seuss sought to boil down the issue to its base level. He didn't support communism, but he also wasn't trying to illustrate the complexities of a decades-long conflict. He was simply calling out the innate madness of the arms race.
After all, he wasn't naively detached from the moral complexities of war. The passionate endorsement of war in these early '40s cartoons versus the solemn warning in the Butter Battle Book reveals the nuance of his stance. Seuss's philosophy clearly laid in whether he believed a war was being fought for just reasons. Of course, of course, the natural question then becomes, who gets to decide what's just? It seemed that for him, fighting against fascism was a far more necessary cause than fighting against communism. He believed the war against Germany, Japan, and Italy was essential. Notably, he made a point to condemn American wars fought in later years, stressing to younger generations that involvement in conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia was nothing like World War II. The Cold War was different; he felt nothing good could come of it, regardless of the positions each side represented. For him, it was defined by one-upmanship rather than doing the right thing. And significantly, mutually assured destruction would leave no victors. "If we arm against nuclear climax, we're finished. Before, when I was fighting against Hitler, we were dealing with human will, which could accomplish miracles. Today, no amount of spirit or belief can win a war of this sort."
Critics may say the Butter Battle Book is too simplistic. "I think it has to be simplistic. I think this problem would be solvable if we made it more simplistic. The damn thing has got to stop. How it stops, I don't know." Who knows whether he'd still have been against these weapons if other countries didn't have them? Maybe he wouldn't have cared as much as long as the US was the only country able to wield this power. A 1947 study indicates this was indeed the popular public opinion—that many even opposed sharing the information with the UN, though it's unclear whether Seuss felt the same. Decades after the bombings in Japan, with the drastic shifts in global superpowers, his opinion of using and producing these weapons transformed, and he staunchly advocated against them.
Seuss never did relinquish the hope that newer generations would help write the wrongs of their parents and grandparents. In response to complaints about the book, he said, "One thing I think is great is that kids are discussing problems in a way they didn't when I was a kid, so I'm leaving it up to them to write the happy ending for me. Adults haven't been able to do it so far." The ending of the Butter Battle Book, the same way it was for The Lorax, for Yertle the Turtle, for Horton Hears a Who, all point a finger at the reader—to form a stance, to make the changes necessary for a better world. But after exploring Seuss's story and observing all the modern parallels, it's hard to imagine a happy ending is within reach. To tell the truth, this video isn't just about Dr. Seuss; it's about me and you and the glacial pace of social progress. Learning more about Seuss only reinforces that old saying: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
He spoke about generational divides in the 1920s: "When people my age were written off as a slob generation. Adults despised us; we were considered a Lost Generation of fools." In the '30s and '40s, he condemned nationalism and proud bigotry, the apathy towards distant genocides, American isolationists opposing and delaying aid to vulnerable European countries, and the hampering effects of political partisanship. In the '50s, he complained about the proliferation of ads in every community, how major news media prioritized selling advertisements instead of reporting news, and of the needless division caused by fears of communism. In the '70s, he bemoaned the decline of children's literacy in the US and criticized big business's motive of profit over environment. Throughout, he voiced how people of certain ethnicities and backgrounds were vilified and excluded. It's also painfully familiar—same old, same old. Our first reaction to these parallels might be a sense of paralysis and disillusionment. Does anything ever really change, after all? But change has never been an overnight process. And if there is no "back in the good old days"—not really—then the alternative is much more hopeful. If today we can generally agree that some of what was considered normal back then shouldn't be—that there's a wrong side of history, and we can point to where we failed—it means the tides have turned, at least a little, and we will keep turning if we make them. Jenkins writes, "On the left, we were often slow to acknowledge partial victories, resulting in a profound and disempowering climate of pessimism and cynicism." What we need at the present moment are new utopian fantasies, new visions of the future that will motivate struggles for social transformation.
Dr. Seuss was just a person. He was great at what he did, but he didn't know everything. He was flawed and still had a lot to learn—both fallible and malleable. Kids are going to keep reading his books, and that's obviously fine. We don't have to completely abandon nostalgia in order to celebrate other voices or engage in critical thinking. But it serves no one to put any person on a pedestal or to think we're exempt from making similar mistakes. We're not immune to propaganda, but we also have the capacity to change for the better—because we're flawed, because there's room to learn from the mistakes of the past. Maybe Dr. Seuss's happy ending won't be realized because there's no beginning, or middle, or end. There's only this constant state of flux, a cycle of the same old arguments repeated within the sequence of incremental progress. The steps are small, and the issues appear the same, but the reality is there's a marked improvement between the societies of 1904, when Seuss was born, and 1991, when he passed away. All we can really hope for is that, like Dr. Seuss, when we leave the world, it will have become a better place than what it was when we arrived.
Hope you enjoyed the video; it was really interesting to get into all the history for this one. If you'd like to support the channel, check out our Patreon. We post over there every week. It's getting pretty hard to make it financially sustainable from AdSense alone, so if you like our channel, we'd really appreciate if you consider donating to us on Patreon here and there. Teren is currently putting up interviews from his next video that he's going to be posting pretty soon, so that's exciting. But that's about all. I'll catch you guys the next one.