Oh, the Humanities!

Dr Seuss was originally a political cartoonist, and he was marinating in some potent racism soup due to the cultural zeitgeist at the time. It was World War 2. He drew some very gross caricatures of Japanese people, and through his political cartoons did contribute to that sort of propaganda. I think it’s been argued that Seuss was actually satirizing these caricatures the whole time, but that argument kind of falls apart when the same imagery sneaks its way into his children’s books.

There are 6 books in particular that are no longer being published for this kind of racist imagery. Though Seuss is most criticized for asian caricatures, there is a variety. “And to Think I saw it on Mulberry Street” has a caricature of a Chinese man, but “If I Ran The Zoo” has a grab-bag of all sorts of caricatures, “McElligot's Pool” contains the word “Eskimo” used to describe fish from the North Pole that are wearing parkas, “On Beyond Zebra” has a middle-eastern caricature, “Scrambled Eggs Super” has another middle-eastern caricature as well as another instance of a crowd of identical Inuit caricatures, this time human ones, not fish, and “The Cat’s Quizzer” has…

This?

”If I Ran The Zoo” is the only one where you couldn’t remedy the problem by removing a single page because the whole thing is a child imagining getting cool creatures from ~exotic foreign lands~ There are African caricatures, Asian caricatures, Persian caricatures, a Russian caricature… and…

This one is especially questionable because of the line implying this human man (identified as a chieftain although the caricature depicted is more of a stereotypical sultan.) is also going to be a zoo exhibit?

“A Mulligatawny is fine for my zoo

And so is a chieftain. I'll bring one back, too.”

The implications of that are a lot worse than the usual from Seuss, where racist caricatures are used as… more of a visual shorthand. Not a good visual shorthand, but a visual shorthand that someone with a history of political cartoons could reasonably just be defaulting to without considering the implications. Still bad, obviously, but this one is more obvious and has less plausible deniability in terms of the notion that Seuss might not have meant it that way, because I’m not seeing another way he could’ve meant this one.

Here’s the thing, though.

"And to Think I saw it on Mulberry Street" was published in 1937

"McElligot's Pool" was published in 1947

"If I Ran The Zoo" was published in 1950

“Scrambled Eggs Super” was published in 1953

Also in 1953, Theodore “Seuss” Geisel visited Japan. He saw the aftermath of the atomic bombs, and evidently rethought some things.

In 1954 “Horton Hears a Who” was published

It is widely believed that “Horton Hears a Who” was written as kind of atonement for his political cartoons that portrayed Japanese people via racist stereotypes. The book was dedicated to a friend who was Japanese. If you have the book, it should be in there, “For My Great Friend, Mitsugi Nakamura of Kyoto, Japan,” it says.

The book contains the moral that all people are people that should be treated with kindness and respect as opposed to violence, no matter what differences they may have. “A person’s a person, no matter how small”

From here on, while caricatures would sometimes still sneak in, there were many of his works where the overt message far more positive and points out how discrimination is really, really bad.

“On Beyond Zebra” was published in 1955. It is no longer in print due to containing a middle-eastern caricature

“The Sneetches” was originally written in 1953, but the book version was released as a little collection alongside a couple other stories in 1961. It’s about how the differences between groups are often inconsequential and it’s not worth dividing ourselves over and doesn’t make one group better than the other. Anyone telling you that one group is better than the other is a scam artist trying to take advantage of you. That’s not me looking too deep into it, that’s literally the plot.

“The Cat’s Quizzer” was published in 1976

“The Butter Battle Book” is about how harmful and stupid it is to get worked up over the differences between groups and how immensely foolish it is to try and kill each other over that. It’s also an allegory for the Cold War. We watched the animated version of it in my Kindergarten class and then had toast for snacktime and that is a formative memory for me. I have a soft spot for this one.