In the fall of 2017, there was a furor involving Dr. Seuss, the first lady and a school librarian that many people found surprising and disconcerting. In celebration of National Read a Book Day, Melania Trump had sent a parcel containing 10 Seuss titles to a school in Massachusetts. A librarian there rejected the gift.
At that point, we were well into the first year of the “Resistance,” and the librarian, Liz Phipps Soeiro, wanted to make various political points. Attacking Dr. Seuss was one of them. “Dr. Seuss is a bit of a cliché, a tired and worn ambassador for children's literature,” she wrote in an open letter to Mrs. Trump, adding: “Dr. Seuss's illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes.”
Theodor Geisel in 1959. PHOTO: JOHN BRYSON/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
BECOMING DR. SEUSS
By Brian Jay Jones
Dutton, 483 pages, $32
The incident gave many families a bewildering insight into a reconsideration within literary culture and academia that's been under way for some time and that has accelerated in the era of wokeness. There are hundreds of millions of Dr. Seuss books in American homes, libraries and schools. His quirky drawing style and the galloping rhythms of his most popular picture books, especially “The Cat in the Hat” (1957), “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” (1957), “Green Eggs and Ham” (1960), and “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” (1960), are as instantly recognizable to soft-cheeked toddlers as they are to grizzled great-grandparents. As recently as March of this year, Dr. Seuss books occupied 14 of the 25 top slots in Publisher's Weekly's list of best-selling children's picture books. Hence with the public denunciation came a jolt of cognitive dissonance: Dr. Seuss, the national treasure, lifelong Democrat, proud progressive, tree-loving antifascist and champion of the little guy was a racist?
As with many an overheated case dug up by grievance archaeologists, the underlying reality is earthier, cooler and more complex than the school librarian's, ah, caricature. In a fluid and enjoyable new biography, “Becoming Dr. Seuss,” Brian Jay Jones takes a long appraising view of the life, career and creative evolution of Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904-91), a writer and illustrator who experimented with all sorts of fanciful eponyms before popping an honorific on his mother's maiden name to create a nom de plume. In this lively chronicle, Mr. Jones tackles the controversial elements of the Seussian oeuvre in a forthright way, setting them in the context of both the times and his subject's own life. His is a temperate perspective that doesn't spare Dr. Seuss the judgments of the present but that doesn't calumniate him for failing to anticipate the demands of what was then the unknowable future.
It is true that in Geisel's juvenilia, his early political cartooning and some of his first books for children, he evoked ethnic and racial caricatures that were common in the early 20th century and that, by the lights of the early 21st, appear shocking and shameful. Yet it is also true that as a political cartoonist during World War II, even as Geisel inveighed against Hitler in particular and Japan in general (the latter with unenlightened stereotypes), he was attacking racism, bigotry and anti-Semitism. In a 1942 cartoon for the left-wing New York daily paper PM titled “What This Country Needs Is a Good Mental Insecticide,” Geisel drew Uncle Sam pumping “mental insecticide” into a man's right ear and dislodging a “racial prejudice bug” from the left. “Gracious!” the man says. “Was that in my head?” As Mr. Jones observes: “Perhaps Geisel had come to understand that he'd had a few bugs in his own head as well. He was working to exterminate them.”
Read Full Article »