Dr. Seuss Goes to War, ed. Richard H. Minear
Kazin, Michael
DR. SEUSS GOES TO WAR: THE WORLD WAR II EDITORIAL CARTOONS OF THEODOR SEUSS GEISEL ed. Richard H. Minear Introduction by Art Spiegelman The New Press, 1999 272 pp $25 SOMEHOW, all the hypsters...
...MICHAEL KAZIN'S most recent book (co-authored with Maurice Isserman) is America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s...
...He obviously wasn't reading Dr...
...Through most of 1941, he depicted America Firsters as a bevy of ostriches, their faces locked in dreamy grins...
...Seuss...
...The antic marauders leap forward to Thing One and Thing Two in The Cat in the Hat, rather than backward to the relentless Yellow Peril...
...But it fit Seuss's temperament and presaged the type of anthropomorphic scoundrels who would play central roles in his postwar books for children...
...Seuss and Mr...
...And, of course, Seuss's work still graces elementary schools and homes throughout the land...
...For the Morgans, Seuss is little more than a gifted cartoonist with a talent for creating zany rhymes...
...His cartoons complemented both the militant good cheer of Franklin Roosevelt and the self-mockery of American GIs...
...If it weren't for the impossibility of translating such Seussian names as Ham-ikka-Schnim-ikka-Schnam-ikkaSchnopps, his literary tendrils might have ensnared masses of children and parents in other lands too...
...In those years, PM sold upward of 150,000 copies every afternoon to readers who usually shared its militantly pro-labor, antiracist, and antifascist views and enjoyed the free-swinging reportage and commentary of writers like I. F. Stone, Lillian Hellman, James Thurber, and Heywood Hale Broun...
...His political sympathies notwithstanding, Seuss, who lived to the age of eightyseven, never appears to have joined a left organization or performed a political act more daring than denouncing billboards, thereby giving up a lucrative national contract for designing same...
...for Seuss, "Japan" was most often a mischievous boy in need of firm discipline...
...This was morale building with an edge but absent of rancor...
...This is closer to Charlie Chaplin's portrayal of a vainglorious Hitler in The Great Dictator, filmed just before the invasion of Poland in 1939, than it is to the paranoid mass murderer the United States was arming itself to fight...
...THAT MAKES Dr...
...Criticizing left-wing artists in Hollywood, producer Samuel Goldwyn once famously quipped, "If you want to send a message, use Western Union...
...Later that year, Seuss attacked racism in war industries by showing prospective black workers entering a maze that never quite reached a factory's gate...
...His most famous book, The Cat in the Hat, broke joyfully with the moralistic conventions of literature for beginning readers...
...The most memorable cartoons in the collection concern the war at home...
...PM's oftquoted motto, "We are against people who push other people around," may seem naive or even mendacious when one considers how gently the paper treated Stalin and his domestic disciples...
...The untouchable legitimacy and sheer market power that Seuss had achieved by the late fifties gave him entrée to homes and schools that were all but barred to left authors who wrote mainly for adults...
...cartoonists (described in John Dower's splendid book War Without Mercy), he almost never stooped to drawing a Japanese in bestial form...
...This mode of attack may seem, in retrospect, too gentle (although, as Spiegelman notes, few other dailies at the time criticized Lindbergh's racial views...
...From January 1941 to January 1943, the artist contributed hundreds of cartoons to New York City's PM, perhaps the most left-wing daily newspaper ever published in the United States outside of the newspapers issued by radical parties themselves...
...Although the Nazi tyrant was indeed riding high through most of 1941 and 1942, Seuss seemed mystified by his charisma...
...Richard H. Minear Introduction by Art Spiegelman The New Press, 1999 272 pp $25 SOMEHOW, all the hypsters who compiled end-of-century, best-of-the-millennium lists neglected one vital topic: greatest figures on the American left...
...Seuss's bumptious, wide-eyed figures, whether human or animal, who swing between smugness and perplexity, are a far cry from the steely warriors who dominated recruiting posters in the United States and other nations...
...As it is, the only book-length treatment of the man, Judith and Neil Morgan's Dr...
...Geisel, seldom rises beyond the kind of genial details found in biographies of celebrities by uninquisitive journalists who also happen to be fans...
...From the early 1950s through the 1980s, in books that sold millions of copies, Seuss (Theodor Geisel) used witty rhymes and fluid, unpredictable drawings to convey the best principles and some of the fondest aspirations of the democratic left: racial equality and integration (The Sneetches), workers' control (Yertle the Turtle), protection of nature from corporate greed (The Lorax), nuclear disarmament (The Butter Battle Book), and encouragement of men who nurture the young (Horton Hatches a Who...
...As E. J. Kahn wrote in the New Yorker forty years ago, "In his [ Seuss's] books, might never makes right, the meek inherit the earth, and pride frequently goeth before a fall, usually a pratfall...
...But it certainly matched the views of its prolific editorial cartoonist...
...Imperious Yertle and selfish Maisie (who flies off on a long vacation, leaving Horton the elephant to incubate her egg) are, like the ostriches in PM, blithely unaware of the pain they inflict...
...So, in accord with the views of most other white Americans, he depicted the Japa124 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 BOOKS nese as a treacherous horde of ever-smiling, near-sighted, small-statured villains...
...My own list would include Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass, Emma Goldman, Cesar Chavez, John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Michael Harrington, and Betty Friedan...
...But the national bird (which Art Spiegelman guesses was modeled after "the prominently beaked Theodor Geisel himself") always appears capable of snapping out of it and driving the nasties back to the hell from which they came...
...And Seuss did more than any artist and writer of his time to challenge the cruel pieties of cold-war America and to make defying them seem possible, necessary, and droll...
...Yet Seuss never distorted Lindbergh's features or showed him doing anything more vicious than shoveling garbage and dead cats from an "Anti-Semite stink wagon...
...Of course, if grownups deemed Seuss a "serious" artist, there would, almost a decade afDISSENT / Summer 2000 n 123 BOOKS ter his death, be scores of studies exploring his influences and his motives, and debating the fit between his technique and his ideology...
...Many of Seuss's books, particularly those meant for preschoolers, are full of lovely nonsense with no discernible moral point...
...DISSENT / Summer 2000 n 125...
...Seuss...
...They are moral idiots, unworthy of the tribute that hatred pays to the objects of its passion...
...Even when, in one PM cartoon, the Fiihrer stands amid a grove of trees festooned with Jews he has lynched, he is singing a gleeful ditty (accompanied by Vichy prime minister Pierre Laval...
...another twiddles his thumbs on a tree branch while a savage woodpecker resembling Hitler topples boughs labeled "France," "Norway," "England," and so on...
...One cartoon from April of that year shows a member of the species selling "ostrich bonnets" to new clients, while behind him, a long row of customers snooze with heads lodged firmly in the soil...
...In effect, the good doctor took what was best about the Popular Front (ignoring its communist provenance and abandoning the racist images from the war against Japan) and translated it into some of the wittiest, most popular narratives ever created for children...
...But we should have learned long ago that good politics gets nowhere in a hostile culture...
...Seuss's Hitler is usually an arrogant, smirking figure—confident of future triumph...
...Still, Seuss's essential humanity did manage to flicker through the racial stereotype...
...while a third blithely hands out lollipops to enormous Nazi sea dragons...
...With rare exceptions, Seuss skewered the America First crowd with pinpoint irony instead of thrusts to the jugular...
...They seem to argue that winning the war meant expressing the best instincts in the national psyche and laughing down the worst ones...
...After Pearl Harbor was bombed, the ostrich gave Seuss a striking way to register the sea change in public opinion: an explosion labeled "War" wipes that grin off the bird's face and hurls his smoke-blackened body into the sky...
...The roots of his politics remain all but unexplored...
...Jaunty ridicule was, however, not so well suited to portrayals of the enemy abroad...
...I realize that more than a few Dissent readers will bridle at the thought that a children's author, particularly one whose books have long been staples of the commercial canon, should be ranked alongside or even ahead of men and women who devoted their lives to building great social movements...
...Seuss gave up editorial cartooning in 1943...
...politics and culture today...
...In his drawings, one (human) isolationist happily bathes with swastika-laden alligators and sharks...
...Yet for broad and continuing appeal among both young and old, one individual stands apart: Dr...
...Seuss Goes to War, edited with great care by historian Richard H. Minear and zestfully introduced by Art Spiegelman, particularly welcome...
...Yet he kept inventively elaborating his left-wing populist faith: humble the rich and haughty, treat Americans as equals who share most of the same problems and desires, and fight to defend democratic principles...
...That one hip, sublimely destructive feline may have done as much to inspire the counter culture of the 1960s as the Beats, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, and James Dean...
...One bangs the eagle with a mallet, another pings him with a slingshot, a third drills him from behind...
...In PM, Seuss depicted Uncle Sam, the tattered eagle, in a variety of moods unhelpful to the war effort: apathetic, puzzled, cowardly, ignorant...
...When depicting the foe in the Pacific, Seuss had no well-known individual to shower with scorn...
...He teaches history at Georgetown University...
...The artist clearly despised Lindbergh for suggesting that intervention was a Jewish plot and for offering Hitler his fawning praise...
...And, in the end, of course, he did...
...In January 1942, Seuss drew a series of satirical "War Monuments" that memorialized characters like "Dame Rumour" (two women chatting from marble windowsills), "John F. Hindsight .. . Master Strategist of Yesterday's Battles" (whose telescope curves backwards), and "Walter Weeper," a figure who creates a fountain with his copious tears while "others . . . furnish the blood and the sweat...
...His cartoon for December 9, 1941, shows a group of miniature Japanese soldiers awakening Uncle Sam, a long-billed eagle, from his isolationist nap...
...One is thus obliged, even after the celebrations have ended, to pose a question to the historically astute readers of this journal: which men and women best advanced our ideals, leading movements or producing intellectual work whose influence persists in U.S...
...And, to dramatize the malevolent might of reactionary southerners in Congress, he drew a top-hatted figure, labeled "poll tax bloc," who rides atop a massive, gloriously ugly creature that's a hybrid of camel, dog, horse, and vulture...
...Unlike other U.S...
...Seuss burst upon the pages of PM with a flurry of attacks on Charles Lindbergh, Gerald Nye, Father Charles Coughlin, and other "isolationists" who saw no reason to be alarmed by Germany's conquests in Europe...
Vol. 47 • July 2000 • No. 3
