Geisel Hears a Who!

 

As is my wont on the day before we teachers and students adjourn for winter break, I am showing the original, 1966 Dr. Seuss cartoon  How The Grinch Stole Christmas to my classes.  (Sorry, but the Jim Carrey remake does absolutely nothing for me.  It's like repainting the Mona Lisa or revising War and Peace).  

This year, I am introducing it to my World Studies classes by showing and talking about some of Theodore Geisel's WWII propaganda work.  In particular, we are analyzing this cartoon from February 13, 1942, barely two months after Pearl Harbor:  

A Dr. Seuss cartoon from the left-leaning PM magazine, 13 February 1942.

This piece appeared a week before Franklin Roosevelt issued United States Executive Order 9066 (February 19, 1942), which shortly thereafter paved the way for the Japanese-American internment.  This makes him not merely an observer of the anti-Japanese hysteria on the west coast that followed Pearl Harbor, but an advocate for the policy of detaining these supposed internal enemies.  The first time I saw the cartoon it blew my mind -- could this be the same Dr. Seuss who wrote the racially egalitarian works Horton Hears a Who and The Sneetches?  The blatant racial stereotyping is so far at odds with his later work that is seems to be an entirely different person.  But there at the bottom is the familiar signature: Dr. Seuss.  

On the other hand, Geisel, the grandson of German immigrants, was also an early critic of Hitler's anti-semetic policies, as well as of American isolationists such as Charles Linbergh.  Cartoons such as the two below put him ahead of most of the nation in warning of the dangers posed by German fascism, as well as Japanese militarism.

In this cartoon, Seuss goes after both Joseph Goebbles
and Charles Linbergh.   (From PM magazine, September 18, 1941)

In October 1941, two months before Pearl Harbor, Seuss
poked fun at the Japanese alliance with Hitler's Germany.

You may well ask why I would show both the wonderfully inclusive and anti-materialist Grinch and the darker, racially charged WWII work.  My answer is, as always, that I trust that my students -- including the ones I teach in small Special Education classes -- are fully capable of grasping the complexity of history.  They understand, as well, that individuals are capable of growth; that people can change and can make amends.  The fact is that 13 years after advocating the arbitrary detention of Japanese-Americans, Suess' Horton Hears a Who! was an allegory for the newly democratic and pacifist Japan.  The recurring phrase "a person's a person, no matter how small," is a ringning endorsement of universal human rights.  Seuss dedicated the book to a Japanese friend he met while in Japan working for the US Occupation authorities after the war.  

If anything, my life-long admiration for Theodore Geisel/Dr. Seuss is only enhanced by viewing the darker side he once showed.  That he could so radically change his views, and so publicly as well, took both wisdom and courage, two qualities in woefully short supply 6o years ago, as indeed today.