Masarykova univerzita Filozofická fakulta
Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky
Magisterská diplomová práce
Erika F Erika
eldová 2020 Erika Feldová
20
20
Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies
North American Culture Studies
Erika Feldová
From the War Propagandist to the Children’s Book Author: The Many Faces of Dr. Seuss
Master’s Diploma Thesis
Supervisor: Jeffrey Alan Smith, M.A, Ph. D.
2020
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
…………………………………………….. Author’s signature
Acknowledgement I would like to thank my family and friends for supporting me throughout my studies. I could never be able to do this without you all. I would also like to thank Jeffrey Alan Smith, M.A, Ph. D. for all of his help and feedback.
Erika Feldová 1
Contents From The War Propagandist to the Children’s Book Author: the Many Faces of Dr. Seuss...... 0 Introduction ...... 2 Methodology ...... 5 Geisel and Dr. Seuss ...... 7 Early years ...... 7 Dartmouth and Oxford ...... 9 Back Home ...... 10 New York PM and War propaganda work ...... 12 New York PM Cartoons ...... 17 Racist Dr. Seuss ...... 25 Dr. Seuss actually goes to war ...... 36 Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ...... 47 Japan after the war ...... 47 Horton after Second World War ...... 52 Trip to Japan ...... 52 Horton hears a Japan! ...... 54 Children’s author image and criticism of social issues ...... 63 Cold War ...... 65 The good Dr. Seuss ...... 67 Criticism of social issues in Dr. Seuss’s children’s books ...... 69 Conclusion ...... 73
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From the War Propagandist to the Children’s Book Author: The Many Faces of Dr. Seuss
Introduction
Dr. Seuss was a very well-known writer who was and still is famous for his children’s books, his original characters, words, rhymes, and tempo. He also played a big part in educating American children in the past seven decades but that is not the only thing Dr. Seuss is known for. As Donald E. Pease says in the preface of his biography about Theodor Seuss Geisel
Theodor Seuss Geisel was an advertisement agency artist, animator,
producer and director of animated cartoons, caricaturist, playwright, short
story writer, documentary filmmaker, lyricist, teacher, political cartoonist, and
editor and author of children’s books. (Pease 9)
and that
Dr. Seuss’s children’s books have enjoyed phenomenal commercial and
critical success. Dr. Seuss’s works, which have changed the way children
everywhere learn how to read, have been translated into fifteen languages.
More than 200 million copies of his books have been sold worldwide. Six
books have been published posthumously. In 2001 Publishers Weekly listed
fourteen Dr. Seuss books among the top one hundred all-time best-selling
hardcover children’s books. Green Eggs and Ham placed fourth on the list,
and The Cat in the Hat ranked ninth. (Pease 9)
This is quite an impressive collection of life achievements but because I did not grow up in the U.S., I actually never read Dr. Seuss’s book or even knew his name before. I saw How the grinch stole Christmas movie starring Jim Carrey when I
Erika Feldová 3 was small, and I really loved The Lorax movie when I got older, but I did not have a reason to search for the author of the original stories. My relationship with Dr. Seuss actually started with my bachelor thesis which was about American influence on
Japanese Democracy during the Occupation of Japan. Throughout the research for my bachelor thesis, I stumbled upon the US war propaganda cartoons. At that time, I was trying to understand how the opinion of average American about the Japan was formatted before, during, and after the war. These cartoons were drawn in a really specific style and I knew that I saw the work of this artist before, but where? I looked up the artist, but I never heard the name Theodor Seuss Geisel before, so I did not connect him to the loved children’s author. And who would?
Eventually, I have found an article that talked about Geisel’s participation in the Second World War and his racist anti-Japanese cartoons. That’s when I have realized that we indeed speak about Dr. Seuss. However, with this realization came even more questions. How can somebody who is famous for writing inspiring stories for children, who is known for his goofy rhymes and remembered like the “good Dr.
Seuss”, how can this man be the same man who in Second World War created racist war cartoons? How can somebody who wrote a book with moral like “A person is a person no matter how small” be the same one who ten years before depicted every
American Japanese as a terrorist in his PM cartoons?
War changes people but was this change simply psychological or was it simply his literary evolution as he became a children’s book writer? Did Dr. Seuss write the Horton Hears a Who! out of regret which came from his racist contribution to the American war propaganda or maybe the regret over the thousands of lives lost to the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? And how this war experience influenced the author in his later writing and his “good” image? How much
Erika Feldová 4 political situation after the war impacted Dr. Seuss and how his personal experiences changed his views are the questions that I would like to answer in my thesis.
This thesis is divided into three main themes. Firstly, I’m going to describe
Geisel’s early life because it will later become my main argumentation for the psychological transformation. The focus of this part will be mostly on how his German heritage influenced his early years as the United States went to the First World War and how this experience effected Geisel’s work. Then I’m going to concentrate on his time in New York PM and other war activities in which Dr. Seuss took part, most importantly the Private SNAFU series and war films he helped to create.
And lastly, I am going to analyze the Horton Hears a Who! book and look for the differences in Geisel’s approach to equality and xenophobia in this children’s book and the New York PM cartoons. The reason I’ve chosen this book specifically is that the Whos in the story were modeled on Japanese children or perhaps population, written after Geisel’s return from Japan and because it deals with the equality theme.
I will use the names Geisel and Dr. Seuss interchangeably in this thesis just so it would not become too repetitive. Also, the pages in the book Horton Hears Who! are not numbered and I am going to cite from this book a lot so for the purpose of this thesis, I will number them accordingly to my scan of the book which means number one will start with the book cover. My last technical issue is with the book Dr. Seuss
Goes to War: the World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel which, as name suggests, contains a collection of Geisel’s war cartoon and also Richard H.
Minear’s commentary. To distinguish when I am citing Geisel’s cartoons and when I cite Minear’s text I will use for in-text citation: (Seuss, “goes to war” page number) and (Minear page number) accordingly. Similarly, for Geisel’s interview in 1980 called
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THEODOR GEISEL: The Good Dr. Seuss I am going to use: (Geisel, “Good Dr.
Seuss” page number) for Geisel’s part and (Cott page number) for the interviewer part.
Methodology
My methodological approach was qualitative with the focus on the analysis of existing books, cartoons, data and also the comparison of Geisel’s war publications and the after-war period with the focus on two books: Horton Hears a Who! (1954) and the Dr. Seuss Goes to War: the World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor
Seuss Geisel (2001). This publication is a collection of Geisel’s war cartoon and the commentary written by Richard H. Minear. This means that my primary sources were written by Dr. Seuss. However, the core of my thesis lays in the secondary sources which bring context to Dr. Seuss’s cartoons and stories. The secondary sources consist of books, essays, articles, and interviews about Geisel’s life and his lifetime work and also historical sources about the given time frame. For example, Americas
Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (2010) which talks about the process of “reimagining“ post-war Japan in the American public eye and why it was needed and the Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II written by John W.
Dower which explains the situation in occupied Japan after the WWII.
In the Three Decades of Dr. Seuss author John P. Bailey, Jr divides Geisel’s
lifetime work into three groups: Before the war started, from 1947 to 1957, and
after the year 1957 (Bailey 7). In the first period, Dr. Seuss published: And to
Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street in 1937, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew
Cubbins in 1938, The Seven Lady Godivas in 1939, The Kings Stilts in 1939,
and Horton Hatches the Egg in 1940. The first book which Dr. Seuss
published after the war was McElligot’s Pool in 1947. In this decade, we can
Erika Feldová 6 find more books with moral preaching and also many which evolved from the
Horton Hatches the Egg. For example, Horton Hears a Who! was published in
1953. He last period starts with the Cat in the Hat a Seuss’s commercial success. However, for the purpose of my thesis, I will mainly concentrate on the first and the second period. The composition of my thesis is chronological with a few logical deviations.
Erika Feldová 7
Geisel and Dr. Seuss
Early years
Theodor Seuss Geisel or “Ted” as his close friends and family called him was born as third-generation German American in 1904 in Springfield, Massachusetts.
His grandparents immigrated to the U.S. from Germany in 1867. He spent his early years in Springfield Massachusetts where his family owned a small brewery. Geisel was born into a prosperous family but with the start of the First World War, he and his family had to endure anti-German feelings that were brewing around them. The rise of anti-German sentiment made everything and everyone German a potential threat.
Donald E. Pease in his biography about Geisel says that
Ted was subjected to verbal abuse and threats of physical violence as he
traveled to and from school each day. Schoolmates yelled, “Hun!,” “Drunken
Kaiser!,” or, more ominously, “Kill the Kaiser’s Kid!” as they threw rocks and
brickbats at him and Rex, his Boston bulldog. His sister Marnie developed
agoraphobia out of the fear of being accosted on the street by hostile
neighbors.”. It got even worse when U.S. ships were attacked by German
submarines in 1917 and the war between U.S. and Germany became
inevitable. (Pease 15)
To change the opinions about his family and to show his support for the United
States he would help as a Boy Scout selling the U.S. Liberty Bonds. When his grandfather purchased from him $1,000 Liberty Bonds, Geisel had become one of the most successful salesmen in Springfield. This would later in 1917 become a reason he would be invited to a ceremony in which he was supposed to get a medal from former president Theodore Roosevelt. Ted Geisel was fourteen at that time and as he was standing in the line to be awarded there were thousands in the audience
Erika Feldová 8 who were watching the stage. When it was his turn, president T. Roosevelt ran out of the medals to give so instead of giving Geisel one, he asked the scoutmaster “What’s this little boy doing here?” and the scoutmaster quickly rushed Geisel off the stage.
This incident hurt Ted’s young pride and would hunt him for many years mainly in the form of stage-fright (Morgan & Morgan 22). As Pease argues
At fourteen Ted’s self-image was a precarious fusion of doubt and pride in his
accomplishments. That evening the status of the entire family was to have
been reaffirmed by Roosevelt, perhaps the nation’s most prestigious public
figure. But instead of his recognition as a Somebody who mattered, he was
made into a Nobody, a pair of empty pants whisked off the stage. (Pease 15)
What came next had an even bigger impact on Geisel’s life. When Eighteenth
Amendment was ratified in January 1919 his family lost their main financial income.
The prohibition would be enforced one year later. His grandfather would not see his brewery being shattered as he died one year prior to that. Geisel’s father was then promoted to his father’s position, but it only made him more miserable as he saw his business to fall (Morgan & Morgan 24).
The Prohibition would become later Geisel’s main inspiration for his self-satire.
However, together with the bullying Geisel and his family had to endure during the
First World War and the humiliation from the encounter with Theodore Roosevelt,
Geisel would later begin to feel hatred towards the discrimination and xenophobic stereotypes. He would create characters in the future which would fight the discrimination. Charles Cohen commented on this time of Dr. Seuss’s life as: “The prejudice directed at him in school during World War I, despite the respect his
German family garnered in the community and the pride they took in their heritage,
Erika Feldová 9 caused Ted to develop a hatred of such inequitable treatment.” (qtd. In Pease 21).
Sadly, Geisel would be selective in his anti-discriminatory and anti-racist views.
Dartmouth and Oxford
After that Geisel went to Dartmouth College where he started to contribute to the college humor magazine Jack-O-Lantern. In his cartoons, he made fun of
Dartmouth’s distinctive groups like prep schoolboys or Dartmouth’s Outing Club. He also liked to poke fun at literary and political figures and even made some racist cartoons about Jews, Afro Americans, and any other ethnic group which was relevant at that time (Pease 27).
When his older fellow students graduated from Dartmouth, Geisel became editor of the Jack-O-Lantern. This title would be taken away from him later when he was caught drinking with his friends on the roof during the Prohibition. He and others were put on probation “for defying the laws of Prohibition, and especially on the night before Easter” (Morgan & Morgan 36) but more importantly for him, Geisel was banned from contributing to the Jack-O-Lantern. With this sudden removal of his status, he was reminded about the discrimination and humiliation his family went through during the war and Prohibition. However, Geisel complied, and the name
Geisel would never appear in the Jack-O-Lantern again. Instead, he submitted his work under many pseudonyms until finally the name Seuss could be found under his works (Morgan & Morgan 36).
Dr. Seuss then pursued his doctorate at Oxford in 1925 which he immediately disliked. He did not like the atmosphere, the pretentiousness, and class snobbery.
Because of his German name, Geisel was excluded from the Oxford school society and could not attend any clubs. His American sense of humor was also not met with appreciation. In the end, Seuss did not finish his doctorate at Oxford and went on
Erika Feldová 10 traveling spree throughout Europe. He was later given the honorary Ph.D. by
Dartmouth University in 1955 when he became an acclaimed author (Pease 39-41).
Back Home
Eventually, Geisel came back to the U.S. and became a successful advertising creator. However, with the end of Prohibition in 1933, Geisel lost the source of his humor. He often targeted Prohibition laws in his cartoons because he found them hypocritical and again Prohibition ruined his family brewery. But when the end of Prohibition came, the alcohol companies, which needed advertisers, came back and Dr. Seuss was there to respond. He produced ads for “Schaefer Brewery and the American Can Company, invented ‘Chief Gansett’ logos for the Narragansett
Brewing Company, and created the Hankey Bird for Hankey Bannister Scotch“
(Pease 51).
However, soon Geisel started to feel the creative hole that any money from the advertising work could not fill. He wanted to create something bigger than advertisements and started to work on his first children’s book. And to Think That I
Saw It on Mulberry Street was influenced by his childhood in Springfield. Another reason he created this book was the death of his beloved mother in 1931
(“Timeline”).
Dr. Seuss would become an acclaimed author and for his lifetime work, he would get appreciated by many awards. Among others he was awarded
two Oscars, two Emmys, a Peabody, a New York Library Literary Lion, three
Caldecott Honor Awards, and a Laura Ingalls Wilder Award. In 1999 the Cat in
the Hat’s face was placed on a 33 cent U.S. stamp. The Dr. Seuss National
Memorial in Springfield, Massachusetts, which was designed by his
stepdaughter Lark Grey Dimond-Cates, opened in 2002. In 2004 a U.S. stamp
Erika Feldová 11 with Theodor Seuss Geisel’s portrait appeared. In that same year, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (Pease 10)
Erika Feldová 12
New York PM and War propaganda work
As was mentioned Dr. Seuss started his career as a children’s author before the Second World War but in 1941, he had to postpone writing his book Horton hatched an egg and started his career in the left-wing daily New York newspaper PM where he created many pro-American war propaganda cartoons. Like in any other political cartoons at that time and even now the characters were very stereotypical and very racist. These extremist views can be found mostly in the caricatures of Japan and
Japanese soldiers. Of course, he also criticized Hitler or Mussolini in his works, but the anti-Japanese feelings prevailed in the sense that the Japanese were so caricatured that they sometimes did not even look like human beings. Even in the prolog of the Dr.
Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel edited by Richard H. Minear we can read that
The cartoons savage Hitler, Japan, Mussolini, and “isolationist” leader such as
Charles Lindbergh; exhort readers to give full support to the war effort, put up
with shortages, buy U.S. saving bonds, and help control inflation. They are
sharply critical of anti-Semitism and anti-black racism – and, shockingly,
undeniably racist in their portrayal of Japanese Americans. (Minear, cover of the
book, emphasis added)
Even the author of the prolog could not help himself and added the word
“shockingly” to Geisel’s racist approach to the Japanese and Japanese Americans.
What is also striking is the different approach to black-American racism and anti-
Semitism.
The reason why it is surprising is that Dr. Seuss has this good image surrounding him. In many books about his life and his creations we can read about
Erika Feldová 13
“The good Dr. Seuss”. And this image of a good author of children’s books does not exactly correspond to the racist author of political cartoons.
The explanation why Dr. Seuss is so undeniably racist towards Japanese and
American Japanese in his political cartoons could be connected to the fact that Japan was much more hated in the American eyes than Germany or Italy. This was because the Nazi concentration camps were not discovered until the end of the war and also because the Japanese were infamous for treating badly the prisoners:
Long after the war ended, and notwithstanding the revelation of the enormity
of Nazi atrocities, great numbers of Americans, British, and Australians
continued to believe that the enemy in Asia had been even more heinous than
the German one. A statistic that emerged in the course of the trials reinforced
this impression. Whereas 4 percent of American and British servicemen taken
prisoner by the Germans and Italians were calculated to have died in captivity,
the incidence of death among American and British Commonwealth prisoners
of the Japanese was estimated to have been 27 percent. (Dower 446)
Another argument for this sentiment is the difference between how the nations were viewed as developed or undeveloped. To be specific, Germany was seen as a highly developed country which went crazy but could be saved and restored to its glory. Japan on the other hand was looked upon as an undeveloped, savage country where everyone would die for the emperor if asked. At the end of the war Henry Luce, a Time-Life founder, would say: “Americans had to learn to hate Germans, but hating
Japs comes natural—as natural as fighting Indians once was.” (qtd. in Shibusawa 2).
Shibusawa comments that: “To him and other Americans at mid-century, racial animosity and cultural incompatibility were ‘natural’ or commonsensical. In their eyes, both the Native Americans and the Japanese were ‘savages’ who adhered to
Erika Feldová 14 strange, irrational beliefs and failed to abide by the laws of the ‘civilized’ western tradition.” (2). Dower also adds that: “The occupation of Japan was the last immodest exercise in the colonial conceit known as ‘the white man’s burden’” (Dower 23). The question of who was seen as a bigger enemy in the American eyes is of course more problematic than I am able to describe in these few lines, but I wanted to point out that the image of the Japanese was much worse than the one of Germany throughout the war.
All these cartoons were created between the year 1941 and 1942 which were the years the U.S. was mainly involved in the pacific war with Japan. The infamous attack on Pearl Harbor happened on the 7th of December 1941 which could be simplified as the start of American engagement in World War II. The next day the
United States declared war on Japan and on the 11th, they declared war on Germany and Italy as well. Even though the U.S. had been politically involved before, now they had been directly attacked on their own territory. In response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came the U.S. executive order 9066 which was passed on February
19th in 1942 not even two months after the attack.
Dr. Seuss became a well-known author after the war. Reportedly his first book
And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street was rejected by 43 publishers before it was published in 1937 (Minear 10). The publishers were scared to publish a children’s book by an author who was known for political satire and advertisement. Another reason for such a rejection was that at the time of economic depression publishers did not want to publish any book at all. So even though he published several books before the war his breakthrough book, which sold one and half millions copies sold in two years after the publishing, was “The Cat in the Hat” which was published in 1957
(Wolosky 167). Before the war years he was mostly known as an advertising artist
Erika Feldová 15 and famous for his “Quick Henry, Flit!” campaign for the Flit bug spray (Nel, “Said a
Bird” 65). That is why he did not have to sugarcoat his cartoons or be scared to lose his good image because he did not have one yet. On the other hand, his Flit advertisements were actually full of racist remarks.
The Library page of UC San Diego contains collections of Dr. Seuss’s advertisement works. Sadly, the cartoons are not perfectly dated but they all have been drawn before WWII which is giving us at least time range to work with. I found one Flint advertisement which the page says was published somewhere between
1930 and 1940. It is a four-panel comic strip that depicts two tribal Africans cooking something in a huge pot. In the second panel, we see a mosquito flying around, and in the third panel white man pops out from the pot and saves the tribal king from the mosquito bite with the Flit (Seuss, “Flit Advertisement – Tribe”).
Erika Feldová 16
Geisel uses the basic portrayal of savageness by indicating that the Africans are cannibals. The white man saving the situation with Flit portrays the main massage of the advert which would be something like: “Don’t get bitten by mosquitos like savages. Use a Flint like a civilized man.” With the connection to the colors of the skin of both protagonists, we conclude the basic racist theme that black means savage and white means civilized. Dr. Seuss used the tribal African man and the white traveler more than once for his Flit cartoons. Another stereotypical portrayal would be the cartoon with an Arab man praying for water in a desert and a white traveler on the camel asking for a Flit to “quench these damn mosquitos!” (Seuss,
Erika Feldová 17
“Flit Advertisement – Arab”). Later I will talk about Geisel’s anti-racist cartoons about
Afro-Americans and I would like to remind the reader that just a few years before he did not have a problem with the racist depiction of Afro-Americans, Arabs, and even
Jews as was mentioned before.
New York PM Cartoons The first cartoon that was published in the New York PM was drawn by Geisel even before he joined the newspaper. Out of anger or feeling that something has to be done, he drew a cartoon that was ridiculing the Italian editor of Il Giorale d’Italia
Virginio Gayda. Giorale d’Italia was a major fascist propaganda publication at that time. Dr. Seuss showed it to his friend Zinny Vanderlip Schoales who already had been working at the NY PM. Zinny then presented it to the editor Ralph Ingersoll.
That is how Geisel’s cartoon firstly appeared in PM in January 1941 and it was also a start of a seven-year-long pause before Dr. Seuss published another book (Morgan &
Morgan 100).
Dr. Seuss had attached a small note to the cartoon which said:
Dear Editor: If you were to ask me, which you haven’t whom I consider the
world’s most outstanding writer of fantasy, I would, of course, answer: „I am.”
My second choice, however, is Virginio Gayda. The only difference is that the
writings of Mr. Gayda give me a pin in the neck. This morning, the pain
becomes too acute, and I had to do something about it. I suddenly realized
that Mr. Gayda could be made into a journalistic asset, rather than a liability.
Almost every day, in amongst the thousands of words that he spews forth,
there are one or two sentences that, in their complete and obvious disregard
of fact, epitomize the Fascist point of view. Such as his bombastically deft
interpretation of a rout as a masterly stroke of tactical genius. He can crow
Erika Feldová 18
and crawl better than any other writer living today. Anyhow…I had to do a
picture of Gayda. (qtd. in Minear 11-12)
One thing that should be mentioned is that in many articles and books we can see New York PM being characterized as a leftist newspaper. We must ask ourselves what “Left” means in the American political spectrum and also how “Right” and “Left” diffused between themselves throughout the Second World War. When a country is in the war, the focus of all political parties’ switches to the war itself. How to finance, lead, and win the war becomes the most important question. So, the question if a person is part of the political right or political left becomes trivial because in the end all effort is put into winning the war. Other problems must wait. It is quite normal behavior as for example now in the pandemic many foreign and social issues were put to sleep to only be awakened later with more force. New York PM was in no way leftist in a sense this word would be used in a European environment but was leftist enough for the U.S. to be called like that (Minear 13-15).
This will become a problem later in Dr. Seuss’s career because he was associated with the “leftist” newspaper. Almost in every article I have read about the
New York PM there is always mentioned its philosophy: "PM is against people who push other people around," this sentence was also repeated by Dr. Seuss himself when he talked about his war propaganda work: “PM was against people who pushed other people around. I liked that."(Morgan & Morgan 101). In its first years,
PM also refused advertising because they wanted to be seen as the: “one newspaper that can and dares to tell the truth" (Nel, “Said a Bird” 66).
We can find several themes or topics Dr. Seuss’s cartoons deal with. For example, before the Pearl Harbor attack, Dr. Seuss created a series of cartoons in which he was very critical of American isolationism. He often ridiculed and criticized
Erika Feldová 19 one of the most famous isolationist figures – Charles A. Lindberg (Minear 17).
Another political character that was often the target of Geisel’s satire was Hitler and in smaller amounts Mussolini. Both were easily distinguished from other characters.
However, Japanese Emperor Hirohito would look exactly the same as any other
Japanese character. Japanese emperor would look the same as Prime Minister
Hideki Tojo or any Japanese soldier, but the Germans would not all have Adolf’s mustache. With this stereotypical and general depiction, Geisel would take away
Japanese identity and create the enemy that stands against American democracy and individualism. To be fair, Individualism or democracy were foreign concepts to the Japanese at that time and the non-individual stereotype is not something Geisel would create on his own but by depicting them all the same he was supporting this narrative.
Other categories or themes of Geisel’s work at PM contained the Anti-racist cartoons against Anti-Semitism and Anti-black racism. Then we have the so-called
War monument series in which Geisel would draw the situation after the war ends and how would the war monuments look like with American isolationism. A Big chunk of the cartoons was also dedicated to direct support of the U.S. army calling for buying U.S. bonds or for men to enlist. I am mostly going to concentrate on the cartoons in which the Japanese were depicted but I will also talk about the other ones to show the difference between them.
The Japanese would appear in Dr. Seuss’s cartoons even before the Pearl
Harbor attack. In summer 1941 Geisel was already determined that sold the U.S. would have to face Japan in the full-fledged war. Which was not something that many people believed or supported in early 1941. In September he drew Emperor Hirohito jumping out of the box. The box was labeled with “JAP WAR THREAT” and the
Erika Feldová 20 caption said: “Velly scary Jap-in-the-box, wasn’t it?”. Another cartoon came in
November with Japan depicted as buying things from Uncle Sam’s country store. The caption this time said: “Gimme some kerosene, some excelsior and blow torch. Ma wants to bake a cake” (Morgan & Morgan 104). Dr. Seuss would continue to use this primitive English with connection to the “Japs”. This English was affiliated with the speech American Japanese spoke, which means Geisel was saying that not only
Japan was the threat but also the Japanese people who lived in America. This is supported by the fact that the little “Japan” in the cartoon says “Ma wants to bake a cake” which means the one who is buying the kerosene is the child of Japan. I think that is it without a doubt that Geisel thought of the American Japanese as the
“children” of “mother” Japan.
The word “Jap” itself is a derogatory term that was used by the Americans in
WWII. However, the Jap is an abbreviation for Japanese which is a nation and ethnic group at the same time. Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities speaks about the word “slant” about which he says that “A world like ‘slant,’ for example, abbreviated from ‘slant-eyed’, does not simply express an ordinary political enmity. It erases nation-ness by reducing the adversary to his biological physiognomy.” He continues with
At the same time, it stirs ‘Vietnamese’ into a nameless sludge along with
‘Korean,’ ‘Chinese,’ ‘Filipino,’ and so on. The character of this vocabulary may
become still more evident if it is contrasted with other Vietnam-War-period
words like ’Charlie’ and ‘V.C.’, or from an earlier era, ‘Boches,’ ‘Huns,’ ‘Japs’
and Frogs,’ all of which apply only to one specific nationality, and thus
concede, in hatred, the adversary’s membership in league of nations.
(Anderson 148-149)
Erika Feldová 21
Benedict Anderson categorizes the word “Jap” as a nation-based term and I agree but Geisel’s ‘Jap’ is race-based. Geisel’s Jap is stripped from his individuality and as Anderson said reduced to his biological physiognomy (Anderson 148). His racial features are exaggerated, and he becomes just a caricature of himself. And not only that but his nation-ness is also lost along the way. If we look at Geisel’s “Jap” would we know that he is Japanese without the text? Germany has Hitler or Nazi signs; the U.S. has the American flag. It’s true that Japan has the rising sun flag
Erika Feldová 22 sometimes too, but a lot of times the “Jap” just looks Asian with a sign “Japan” across his chest.
The connection between Japan and the American Japanese that Geisel was proposing even before the attack on Pearl Harbor would eventually result in the executive order 9066.
As many as 120.000 Japanese Americans lived on the West Coast at that time.
Two-thirds were born in the U.S. a thus had citizenship by virtue (Minear 25). Many from the other third could not obtain American citizenship because of the Naturalization
Act of 1906. The document of executive order 9066 was signed by President D.
Roosevelt on February 19, 1942. This order allowed the secretary of war “to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate
Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded”
(Ray).
The Executive order came after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and it was meant to avoid further Japanese attacks or sabotage on the West coast.
There was no specification of which group of people does this order applies to. This meant that the 9066 order was not only meant for Japanese residents and it also affected German and Italian Americans. However, the number of Japanese influenced by 9066 was much larger. Practically all Japanese immigrants from the
West, mainly California, were systematically put into the detention centers a would spend the next three years there. It did not matter if they were American citizens or how long they lived in the U.S. They had to leave their houses and could only take with them things that they could carry in their hands.
Executive order 9066 was controversial from the beginning because it intervened with basic human rights. It was challenged in the Supreme Court two
Erika Feldová 23 times during the Second World War but both times it was upheld. In 1976 President
Gerald Ford signed an order which prohibits reinstituting the 9066 in the future (“FDR
Orders”). Then in 1988, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act which was an apology to the Japanese Americans and other resident aliens. The reparations to the internees or their descendants were also part of the Act (Ray).
Of course, Dr. Seuss had no direct power over the passing of this executive order, but his cartoons were part of the fear that pressured Roosevelt to sign the order. His cartoon about the Honorable fifth Column which I will later talk about and which depicted Japanese Americans buying TNT was published on the 13th of
February 1942 only 6 days before the signing of the 9066.
How did these racist cartoons appear in the “leftist” and antiracist, progressive paper, as Richard H. Minear calls it, as was NY PM (Minear 25)? Minear says it is a
“blind spot” that the American left chose to not see. A few people protested the concentration camps but that was a minority. Not even the readers of the New York
Pm had a problem with the racist cartoons.
No reader of PM wrote in to protest this cartoon – at least, no such letter appeared among the letters to the editor. As we have seen, there were letters against
Dr. Seuss’s eagle. As we shall see, there were letters against his attack on the pacifist preacher John Haynes Holmes and against his lander of dachshunds. But there was no letter against this stark example of mainstream American racism against Asians in America. (Minear 26)
It seems like war-time America was not prepared for racial equality and even the supporters of antiracism were not able to stick to it when the enemy was not white. This is quite understandable given the circumstances. It will take almost two
Erika Feldová 24 more decades before the segregation between
White Americans and Afro Americans will come to an end.
There is an ongoing debate if war cartoons created by Dr. Seuss were his own ideas or they were commissioned. In the personal note which was added to his first cartoon, we can read that Dr. Seuss had strong feelings about Mr. Gayda and with the fact that the cartoon was created even before he joined PM I think it is completely right to think that he had created the cartoons with his own ideas and wit. Geisel’s cartoons were sometimes placed in the PM without any connection to the text it was next to, which also supports the theory that he did not draw them to be specifically part of the story or text PM was selling. At the same time, there are some cartoons that do not exactly scream Dr. Seuss – mainly the text placed in the picture or under it seems like it was put there and not written by Dr. Seuss or the cartoon is not signed by Dr.
Seuss but is certainly Dr. Seuss style (Minear 16). For example, the “You, too, can sink U-Boats” cartoon is part of the “Buy a United States War Savings Bonds &
Stamps” series (Seuss, “goes to war” 15). It is probably safe to say that some of his works were commissioned, and some were his own idea. For the needs of my thesis,
I will count all of his creations as his own. In the end, it was Dr. Seuss who drew them and agreed on the text that was put in there.
Geisel referred to his work for PM and his war cartoons as “rather shoddy” art which in Seuss's words means the "short-order business". This relates to the fact that he had to create “on average, four to five cartoons every week“ (Nel, “Said a Bird”
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68) and had no time to revise his work as he would do with his books. On the other hand, Seuss says in his Non-Autobiography about these cartoons that he likes "their honesty and their frantic fervor" (Morgan & Morgan 103). In comparison to his other works on which he would spend many months perfecting few lines for his children’s books, it seems like a lot of pressure but at the same time, this type of work pace is normal for journalism. Their “honesty” as Geisel mentioned comes probably from the fact that there was no time to revise them.
Racist Dr. Seuss In the beginning, I would like to say that it is immensely hard to judge racism of any past generation. The question is not if they were racist, because basically everyone was, the question is how much they were racist. And even with a statement like this one, it is necessary to acknowledge that this thesis is being written in 2020 and what is socially acceptable and what is not has changed extremely since the 50s and probably will change again in the future. In the case of Dr. Seuss, it is even more complicated. Geisel had and still has this “good” image attached to his persona. That is why it is even more striking when we see his racist approach to the Japanese. And what is even more contradicting is that at the same time he was drawing very racist pictures of the Japanese, he criticized Anti-Semitism and Anti-Black racism in the
United States. This is interesting because a few years earlier he was perfectly fine with anti-Semitic views when he himself depicted them in his Jack-O-Lantern magazine. Donald Pease explains it with:
News of the horrors to which Jewish populations had been subjected led
Geisel to regret the anti-Semitism depicted in some of his earlier artwork. He
metaphorically severed himself from this collective prejudice with a cartoon
published in the April 2, 1942, issue of PM that showed American Nazis
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struggling to convince Uncle Sam to permit an executioner named “Anti-
Semitism” to cut off both his hands. (Pease 65)
And just like he did with the Anti-Semitism, Geisel will later “sever himself” from the Anti-Japanese prejudice with the Horton Hears a Who!
As Pease mentioned there is a series of cartoons where he criticizes the
American government for not trying or even refusing to incorporate Afro-Americans and American Jews into the war effort. He talks mainly about the labor for war necessities. Now, there could be several reasons why he created his cartoons this way. The first one could be that he feels different because they were American citizens and race does not have anything to do with it. Sadly, this is not the case because as Geisel was also condemning towards the American Japanese.
In the “Waiting for the Signal from Home” cartoon from February 13, 1942, he essentially implies that every American Japanese is a potential threat. The cartoon depicts the “Japs” coming in line and in great numbers from Washing and Oregon to
California and getting TNT from a makeshift stand in front of a house which is called
“Honorable 5th Column”. On the top of the house is one man looking through the monocular towards the Pacific Ocean and Japan (Seuss, “goes to war” 65).
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This cartoon is similar to the one which was published in December 1941. However, in that one Japanese are depicted as cats.
The title reads: “Maybe only alley cats, but Jeepers! A hell of lot of ‘em!” There is a similar flow of mass of creatures in this case cats coming from the right upper corner to the left lower corner as in the previous cartoon. In this one, the cats do not look too intimidating even though they are already smiling the intimidation comes from the amount of them. Some of them are already jumping over the fence and it is
Erika Feldová 28 evident that even though they are just cats, the American Eagle1 cannot handle them all. To make it obvious that the cats are supposed to be Japanese Dr. Seuss drew in the sign which says “Jap Alley” and in the background, we can see the Japanese
“rising sun” flag but I think just from the grinning faces and the amount of the cats it would be obvious anyway (Seuss, “goes to war” 145).
1 Dr. Seuss never depicted America in form of an American president/leader. In his political cartoons, the U.S. is always symbolized by Uncle Sam, American eagle, etc. Japanese would also appear mostly in a form of “ordinary Japanese” or “ordinary Japanese soldier”, but Emperor and Prime minister would appear a few times. Hitler and Mussolini on the other hand would represent their countries most of the time.
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The Japanese in the “Waiting for the Signal from Home” cartoon are dressed quite nicely as they are supposed to look like Americans, but their faces look the same. Dr. Seuss drew the Japanese throughout all of his cartoons with very stereotypical features like slanted eyes, a piggish nose, and a big grin. This grin would become typical and Geisel would use phrases like “Wipe that sneer off his face!” and others (Seuss, “goes to war” 16).
One of the possible arguments would be that Japan was the American enemy in the Second World War and Jews and Afro Americans were not. In this case, I would compare the image of Geisel’s “Jap” to Geisel’s Hitler or Mussolini. Of course, this comparison has one big problem when talking about racism because we are comparing the Caucasian to Asian race. And Geisel would have no gain in race stereotyping Hitler or Mussolini. So, in this sense, it is understandable that the
Japanese would be more racially distinctive from the other American enemies simply because the others were white. But even though I would say that the difference between them is very noticeable. If we look at the cartoon where is the face of a
Japanese man with Hitler on the billboard and next to them is a text: “What have you done today to save your country from them”, I think we can agree that the Japanese do not even look like a human next to Hitler. I chose to demonstrate it on this specific cartoon because here the Hitler and the Japanese man stands on the same level. In a lot of other cartoons, these two figures have a superior and subordinate relationship. On this specific one, the placement and the text give both characters
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same the value but there is a visual difference between them (Seuss, “goes to war”
145).
Richard Minear also notices this difference though he does not use this cartoon to prove it and he is focusing more on the caricature of Hitler to which he says that it appears “less evil-looking than we might expect”. Minear argues that maybe because of Geisel’s German ancestry he was “simply unable to depict the
German leader as more vicious” (Minear 79). Another protentional reason, Minear suggests, is that Geisel’s style of writing and illustrating makes him weak in the
Erika Feldová 31
“portrayal of evil” (Minear 79). However, I have to disagree with this statement as Dr.
Seuss was perfectly fine with the depiction of evil in the case of Japan. I would even say that the caricatured face Dr. Seuss gave to the “Jap” was created to be hated.
Which makes complete sense in the war context, but with all that had been said it also smells of opportunism. Basically, it would mean that as long as we are allies or not on the bad terms, racism is wrong but if you are our enemy it is fine.
Theodor Geisel would use animals or animal monsters to portray the enemies and allies just like he used eagle to portray the United States. He would often use dachshunds for Germany (Seuss, “goes to war” 111), but he would also use snakes
(34) or mosquitos (106). For Russia, he would use a dinosaur (161), Bigfoot (162), or bear (163), and India was depicted as an elephant (179) and the kangaroo was of course Australia (178). This list could go on but there is a difference between the
“human” portrayal of a country and then it’s “animal” or “monster” form. In the cartoon from 1st January 1942, we can see Germany and Japan as some kind of monstrous snakes. The head of the German snake is the combination of Geisel’s Hitler caricature and elephant. The head for Japan stays the same as in any other Geisel’s caricature of Japan. To Hitler’s face, Geisel added elephant ears and trunk but there is no need to add anything to Japan’s face. The reason for that is probably because
Japan looks already monstrous in his human form (108).
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The last comparison of Geisel’s German depiction and Japan I would like to share is also probably one of the most visually racist ones. The title on the top says
“Married Exactly One Year Today” and it is dated December 7, 1942. There is a caricature of Hitler in his human form and next to him is Japan. It could be a caricature of Hideki Tojo or Emperor Hirohito, but it is hard to tell because again it has features of any other Geisel’s Japan and on top of all that Japan here is depicted as a woman2. Next to them is a baby monster called Hashimura Frankenstein which
2 Interestingly Japan would be depicted after the war as a woman or a child in American propaganda to create the illusion of Japan being fragile and needing to be taken care of.
Erika Feldová 33 bears resemblance to Hitler with the mustache and the face wrinkles. His mouth is curved into a grin which is the typical feature of the Japanese character. There is no other direct resemblance to the Japanese character except that the baby’s legs aren’t human. Again, we are made to believe that Japan is the monster and Hitler is allied with this monster (154).
Another issue connected to Geisel’s racism and anti-racism is that Jews and
Afro-Americans in his cartoons look the same. The only thing that is different is the
Erika Feldová 34 color of their skin which means that Dr. Seuss sees their issues as the same one. It is interesting that he did not use his caricature skills to portray stereotypical Afro
American with big lips or big-nosed American Jew. It could mean that he did not want to caricature these minorities because he didn’t want to enhance the differences between them and white people. In the end, racism was something he and New York
PM were fighting against. It could also mean that by not separating them into smaller groups, the voice of the minority would be louder. Overall Geisel in his cartoons was against racism and inequality as a whole concept not only against racism to one specific group. This can be supported by the cartoon in which we can find Uncle Sam curing the Americans of the “Racial Prejudice bug” by purging it out from the
American head by a bellow. The title says: “What This Country Need Is a Good
Mental Insecticide” (Seuss, “goes to war” 57). Unfortunately, the anti-Japanese sentiment was not included in this purge.
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Jeffrey Angles summarizes Dr. Seuss participation in the Anti-Japanese propaganda like this
Although Seuss was generally liberal by nature and often spoke out against
stereotypes, he, like many Americans after Pearl Harbor, pilloried the
Japanese people, and not just their leadership, for the catastrophic turn of
events. Like many other Americans, who failed to distinguish between the
Japanese in Japan and Japanese-Americans who had been in the United
States – in many cases, for generations – Seuss also turned his anger against
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Japanese-Americans as well, satirizing them as a huge group of identical
looking people who took pleasure in the Japanese government’s attacks.
Needless to say, America had entered an era of rampant stereotyping and
anti-Japanese sentiment, and the attitudes reflected in Seuss’s political
cartoons were close to those of the mainstream. (Angles 167)
I think this summarization pretty accurately describes the era in which Dr.
Seuss created these cartoons. Japan had a worse reputation in American eyes at the time Dr. Seuss worked for the New York PM than it had after the Second World War.
The scope of the Holocaust and the conditions in the Concentration camps in Europe had been discovered in the last years of the war when the allied forces were liberating Europe from Nazis.
I am going to end this segment by saying that it is easy to judge people now when racism is more or less universally refused but at the time these cartoons were created it was the opposite. Also, if we look at it from the point of the New York PM, their main aim was not racial equality it was to get the Americans to be invested in war preparations. And when Japan attacked the U.S. the goal was to describe the enemy in a light that Americans would feel the need to help defeat Japan. The grinning “Jap” made people angry and anger makes people take an action.
Dr. Seuss actually goes to war
Theodor Seuss Geisel was thirty-eight years old in 1942 which meant that he was too old to be mobilized into the American army, but he also could not just sit around when he was the one urging other Americans to enlist. That is why in autumn of 1942 he voluntarily applied for a commission with naval intelligence. Geisel commented on his enlistment:
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The way I went to work for PM is that I got annoyed with Lindbergh and his
America-Firsters. I was already somewhat prominent as a cartoonist, but
nobody would print my cartoons against Lindbergh. So I went to work for PM
for almost nothing. When the United States got into the war I started receiving
a lot of letters saying I was a dirty old man who had helped get us into the war,
and I was too old to fight. So I enlisted. (qtd. In Nel, “Children's Literature” 468)
Geisel’s past involvement with the New York PM had a negative impact as it was feared that he was a communist. Eventually, Dr. Seuss was called into the
“Hollywood front” in January 1943 and become a member of Frank Capra’s Signal
Corps unit (Nel, “Children's Literature” 468). Captain Theodor Seuss Geisel was officially inducted into the army and with his serial number 0921507 traveled, as is said in Morgan & Morgan’s book, to his “indoctrination in California” (Morgan &
Morgan 105-106). Geisel was no soldier and even though he wore an army uniform and attended the drills his main role there was a film producer. Dr. Seuss worked on many projects between 1943 and 1945 and one of them was the short film series about Private SNAFU. Geisel worked on the project together with Frank Capra and
Mel Blanc and many more.
The ownership of individual parts is sometimes hard to distinguish. The same problem of “who did what” could be also found later in the war films because these creations were part of the U.S. War Department and thus officially belonged to the
Army. They were also created for military purposes only and they were not supposed to be seen by the public. Dr. Seuss’s contribution was writing scripts for some of the episodes, he did not participate in the animation. Private SNAFU got his name from
Erika Feldová 38 the military acronym “Situation Normal All Fouled UP”.3 There are 28 episodes which were created between 1943 and 1946 and their purpose was to show young
American soldiers how to behave in an easy and entertaining way. The private
SNAFU was extremely popular among the GI viewers and he did everything wrongly to teach soldiers what they should not do (Decuers).
The SNAFU short animations continued with the PM’s and Dr. Seuss’s message of Anti-Semitism and Anti-Afro American racism but again fails to portray
Japan without racist depictions. Philip Nell in the article Children’s Literature Goes to
War: Dr. Seuss, P. D. Eastman, Munro Leaf, and the Private SNAFU Films (1943–
46) says that
On the one hand, the SNAFU cartoons show Seuss, Eastman, and Leaf as
Popular Front patriots, fighting Fascism, criticizing prejudice against blacks
and Jews, and generally promoting the highest American ideals. On the other
hand, the SNAFU cartoons reinforce anti-Japanese racism, and often portray
women as sex objects, traitors, or both. SNAFU’s racist caricatures and the
children’s books’ latent (and overt) sexism indicate that these three authors
were not fully aware of some of the antidemocratic implications of their own
rhetoric. The flaws in these works’ liberatory strategies point to the ways in
which even progressive propaganda can oppress. Although the cartoons
advance the Popular Front’s anti-Fascist message, their anti-Japanese racism
seems to undercut otherwise progressive views on race. (Nel, “Children's
Literature” 478)
Nel says that the authors were not “fully aware of some of the anti-democratic implications of their own rhetoric” which to me seems a little bit dubious. I think that
3 A more popular translation of this acronym contains F-word and in the first episode of Private SNAFU, it’s suggested by the long pause that the official translation is only to mask the true one.
Erika Feldová 39 they did not fail to see the anti-democratic implications I think they simply chose to not pursue these democratic values. These short animations were intended for the
Young GIs. It is interesting how in any article which speaks about SNAFU there is always a comment on how the form of the message of Private SNAFU was created to suit the young, uneducated soldiers but fails to accept that not only the form but also the topics and narratives were created for them.
Before 1941 50 percent of the men conscripted into military service were rejected because of mental or physical issues. This percentage fell to 29 after the
U.S. was in the war. Of the 71 percent that was accepted, 70 percent were school dropouts. “Around 500 thousand dropped out before reaching fourth grade and 4.4 million before eighth grade. It is also said in the article posted on the page of The
National WWII Museum of New Orleans that: “For high school-aged Americans at the time, military service was a foregone conclusion. In most cases, the American fighting man was just a teenager who had likely never ventured more than 100 miles from their birthplace before the service. “ (Decuers).
The usage of animation was supposed to create an easy way for a soldier to understand what is wanted from him but not only the form was simplified. For example, Nell describes how Dr. Seuss and Gil Leaf came with the idea for one of the SNAFU cartoons:
The official military manuals were boring, many GIs lacked even a high school
education, and they were not making the connection between mosquitoes and
malaria. Leaf thought that ‘‘GIs would read a comic book, particularly one that
was a little racy, whereas they wouldn’t read olive-green manuals of which
they had hundreds’’. So, Leaf invited Geisel home for the weekend, and the
two of them created the pamphlet This Is Ann (1943). Leaf wrote the text;
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Geisel drew the pictures. It told the story of Anopheles Annie, the malaria
mosquito, portraying her as the sexy whore of the insect world, spreading
disease to men who failed to take precautions. This Is Ann became the basis
of the SNAFU cartoon, ‘‘It’s Murder She Says’’ (May 1945), in which Annie
gets SNAFU. The pamphlet is also the likely inspiration for ‘‘SNAFU vs.
Malaria Mike’’ (March 1944). (Nel, “Children's Literature” 470)
There is an apparent effort to create something that would fit the GIs standard.
Simplified it would sound something like this: “GIs like to read racy cartoons? Ok, let’s create animations where the Malaria mosquito is a whore, so they understand it with concepts they know. Whore means bad. Malaria is whore. Malaria is bad.” That would be similar to Japanese racism that was used to create the picture of the enemy. Racism maybe started to be renounced by some progressive people, but it was still in the beginning. To use racist images to depict the enemy was the easiest thing to do for a propaganda creator. It is much easier to create a racist image than to create a portrayal of democratic values. That is why I think Dr. Seuss and others used these anti-democratic narratives in their works.
Geisel would also start to work on another project, this time a film that was later called Know Your Enemy: Japan. In 1944 he was promoted to major and started to work on the film Your Job in Germany which was meant for the American troops occupying Germany (Morgan & Morgan 110). His draft script was approved the same year and he started on the movie that would be infamous for these lines: “The Nazi party may be gone, but Nazi thinking, Nazi training and Nazi trickery remains. The
German lust for conquest is not dead… You will not argue with them. You will not be friendly…. There must be no fraternization with any of the German people.” (Morgan
& Morgan 111). Geisel later commented on the film:
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It was with this film… that the impossible and ill-advised non-fraternization
policy was announced to the U.S. Army as it occupied Germany. I strongly
believed in everything that I wrote in this film with the exception of the Non-
Fraternization conclusion… which I wrote as an officer acting under orders…
and later worked to get rescinded. (Morgan & Morgan 110)
The film was finished now, and it was necessary to bring it to Europe and let it be approved by the American generals in the field. That is how Geisel ended up in
France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and Germany. He was mostly behind
Allie’s front and only one time he would be part of real fighting and that was the Battle of Bulge in which Geisel ended up by accident. He was rescued by the British and brought back without severe injuries (Morgan & Morgan 114-115).
When Geisel’s work was done, he returned home to California in January
1945 (Morgan & Morgan 115). He was hopeful for the future. Geisel believed that the war would strengthen the idea of Democratization not only in the foreign countries but also in the U.S. He hoped that American soldiers coming back to the U.S. would live by the ideas they flighted for. He also hoped 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” (Pease 72-73). However, he also expressed his distress in the memo written in 1944: “Much of what we have gained is, at the moment of victory, threatened. . .. Racial tension within our Army threatens to grow. . . Disillusionment, cynicism, distrust, bitterness, are already souring the milk of human kindness; maggots are already eating the fruits of victory.” (Pease 72-73).
After returning to the U.S. Dr. Seuss worked on one more film which was called: Our Job in Japan and was created between 1945 and 1946. The film was
Erika Feldová 42 similar to Your Job in Germany as the name suggests. The main goal of the movie was to prepare American soldiers for the occupation of the territory of the past enemy. The “past enemy” was emphasized in the film to create an environment where Japan could be “reborn”. Richard H. Minear points out that the “film was made at the end of the war for indoctrinating (or reindoctrinating) U.S. servicemen headed for service in occupied Japan” (Minear 260-261, emphasis added). The reindoctrinating centered around the reeducation of Japanese youth. This was also part of the later official strategy of the Allied Occupation forces in Japan.
It is hard to distinguish what exactly were Geisel’s contributions to any of his war films but here in Our Job in Japan we can find a motif that Dr. Seuss already used once in his NY PM cartoons and it is the purging of “Racial Prejudice bug” from the American brains. In the film, which is around 16 minutes long, it is said that the brain of Americans is no different from the brain of the Japanese. The problem is extremism and “wrong ideas” that were put inside the brain by the old leaders and had to be purged now the same way as was racism purged away from the Americans
(“Our Job in Japan”). This film is interesting to watch because we have to understand that there was not that much time or research to put it together and it was part of the official strategy so there was probably not that much creative freedom Dr. Seuss could put inside it. The overall message is much less extreme or intense than Your
Job in Germany.
In the first few shots, we can see the USS Missouri where the signing of the
Japanese Surrender happened. Speech done by General Richard K. Sutherland accompanies these pictures. In the next scene, we can see a mass of Japanese standing in a crowd. The narrator says that there are 70 million Japanese and what should we (Americans) do with them. It is interesting that there is the same depiction
Erika Feldová 43 of Japanese as this big amount of people just like we have seen in Dr. Seuss’s PM cartoons. I understand that 70 million is a huge number but the obsession with it is quite hard to understand for me. Germany at the time had a similarly big population and they were seen as a bigger threat. I think that for the answer to this obsession we should go back to the “Jap Alley” cartoon. Cats themselves are not threatening at all but when there is “A hell of lot of ‘em!” they become intimidating (Seuss, “goes to war” 145). On the other hand, Germany was seen as a developed country with new technology and that itself was enough to make a great enemy. This comparison could probably even be extended to USSR with its not that advanced technology but rich in men power but let’s go back to the film.
It continues with a description of how the Japanese brains are the same as
American brains and the Japanese kids are the same as American kids. This is quite progressive thinking right there. The narrator blames old structures of power and religion which were used to radicalize people to believe that they are “Created to rule the whole world” (“Our Job in Japan”). He also calls Japan an “old backward superstitious country” which supports my point of seeing Japan as undeveloped.
What is interesting that contrary to the Your Job in Germany where American soldiers are warned about Germans and not be friendly with them, in this case,
Americans are encouraged to show the Japanese how honest and friendly they are.
The narrator talks about how whole America would be judged on how American soldiers behave, and how Americans there should show to the Japanese American great ideas and values. In one instance he says: “We can prove that most Americans don't believe in pushing people around even when we happened to be on top.” (“Our
Job in Japan”). Something that is very similar to the philosophy of New York PM and that is why I am assuming Dr. Seuss was the one behind it.
Erika Feldová 44
In this film, there are few great ideas like the equality of brains and the people.
For a few seconds, we can even spot two Afro-American soldiers as the narrator explains that “We can prove that most of Americans do believe in the fair break for everybody regardless of race or creed or color” (“Our Job in Japan”). The idea is nice but as we know it is not exactly correct even though it was probably the image the
U.S. wanted to portray in Japan.
I am not even sure how I should approach the enormous amount of ethnocentrism that this film produces. The whole film can be summarized in “We are good. They are bad. But they can be good too if they can learn to be like us”. There is one quote that I found especially interesting: “They can still make trouble, or they can make sense. We have decided to make sure they make sense.” (“Our Job in
Japan”). This means that the narrator assumes that Japan does not behave logically and thus making trouble. However, it is important to remember that this film was created in 1945 and the U.S. has just won a war which was initiated by the
Japanese. And even though this film is contradicting itself in some cases, for example with religion, it is still trying to create a basis for basic human rights. I think
Our Job in Japan shows excellently Geisel’s progress and could be seen as an intermediate stage between racism in his war cartoons and equality theme in his afterwar books.
Geisel and his wife Helen would eventually create a new documentary which was based on the Our Job in Japan and was called Design for Death. The film was published in 1947 and Dr. Seuss would win an Oscar for the best feature-length documentary. Sadly, I could not watch the film myself because it is quite hard to get a copy. The summary on IMDB says that it is:
Erika Feldová 45
An Academy Award winner for best documentary, the film opens with a notice
that..."Exhibition of confiscated Japanese film material authorized by
permission of the Alien Property Custodian in the public interest under License
No. LM 979"...and was assembled from hundreds of captured newsreels,
historical dramas and propaganda films. While revealing the steps that Japan
took that led to Pearl Harbor, it goes back 700 years to the feudal caste
system, a peasant revolt suppressed after the Samurai murdered over 40,000
people, to Admiral Perry forcibly opening Japan to foreign trade, to the
perversion of converting the Shinto religion of nature-worship to that of a
fanatic state creed that preached the Japanese were a Master Race and the
Emperor was a sun-god to be blindly obeyed. The film carried no credit for a
director, while Richard Fleischer shared the Producer credit with Theron
Warth. (Adams)
It continues with the topic of good people being pushed around by the bad ones and making a bad decision because of that, just like in Our Job in Japan. But what is different than the previous film is that this documentary tries to apply the conditions which lead to war to all of the wars. The opening narration as cited in the
Dr. Seuss Goes to War says that
The setting of this story was the islands of Japan. The characters in this story
were dressed in Japanese costumes. The plot had to do with the Japanese
war, but not just the Japanese war. That was a blueprint of aggression, of the
racket behind all wars. No matter what country they happened to start in. The
racket that thrives in any country where too much power gets into the hands of
too few. The same old swindle that's been going on, making murderers out of
Erika Feldová 46
peaceful men since the beginning of time. A simple racket, but people
somehow never seemed to get wise to it.
It goes on:
We learned that this racket is everybody's business, no matter what country it
starts in. The racket that lies behind all wars of aggression - Japanese
wars…Italian wars…German wars…Spanish wars...wars on every
continent…present wars and past wars. the old racket of too much power in
the hands of the few. The same racket that is threatening us today with World
War III. And it will go on giving us more and more graves until the day when
we, the people, who do the bleeding, have the will and the courage to say,
“This thing must stop!” It will only stop one we take more responsibility,
responsibility for the things that go on everywhere. (qtd. in Minear 264)
The narrator here speaks about “Japanese wars…Italian wars…German wars…Spanish wars...wars on every continent”, does it mean it includes also the
U.S? However, the use of “we learned that this racket is everybody's business” also implies that isolationism U.S. practiced before First World War did not work and that it is American people the narrator is referring to as “us” or just the pure fact that it was American documentary.
In this short segment of the film transcription, we can already see the shift from the “problem of one race” to the “problem is universal”. Like Our Job in Japan teaches its audience that all the human brains are the same in this film we should conclude that all wars are the same and that “the racket that thrives in any country where too much power gets into the hands of too few”.
This film came out two years after the end of WWII in the same year as the
Truman doctrine of Containment policy was announced and one year after Churchill’s
Erika Feldová 47
Fulton speech. The film’s message that “any country can become radicalized” suddenly seems very specific.
Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing would become one of the worst tragedies of the 20th century. The power of these bombs was so destructive that it will make the next generations scared of war in which atomic bombs would be used. The
Cold War had mostly stayed cold because nobody would push that button because if somebody would, it would mean the end of civilization as we know it. Hiroshima and
Nagasaki would become symbols of unprecedented destruction and annihilation. At the time of the bombing, there was reported around 250,000 resident civilians living in Hiroshima. Forty-five thousand died on the first day of impact and another 19,000 in the next four months. For Nagasaki of 174,000 residents, the numbers of civilian deaths were 22,000 and 17,000 (“Hiroshima, Nagasaki”). These numbers are estimated to be lower than the actual death toll mostly because it is only counting with the civilian residents and not the military personnel and foreign workers. Also is does not count people who died after the 4th month from the bombing. Another article from history.com estimates that “roughly 70,000 to 135,000 people died in Hiroshima and 60,000 to 80,000 people died in Nagasaki, both from acute exposure to the blasts and from long-term side effects of radiation” (“Bombing of Hiroshima”).
The Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would also mean the end of the war. On August 15, six days after Nagasaki, Emperor Hirohito announced the unconditional surrender of Japan. One of the reasons was the destructive power of “a new and most cruel bomb” (“Bombing of Hiroshima”).
Japan after the war The end of the Second World War has left Japan in shreds. All the bigger cities were destroyed by the Allied bombing. Nearly 10 % of Japanese were dead or
Erika Feldová 48 wounded and around 9 million had become homeless. The food supplies were nearly empty, and people had to buy their food on the illegal black market because with just the food rations that were provided by the government they would die out of starvation. The inflation rose to enormous heights and in the first year after the end of the war prices went up by 539% in comparison to the time before the war. For Japan, the Second World War started in 1931 with the occupation of Manchuria which means that the war lasted nearly 15 years and Japan was already exhausted when the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came. Japan was destroyed. The great enemy has become a pitiful loser and the U.S. was there to witness it all (Huffman
159).
When allied occupation forces which were mainly composed of American soldiers arrived in Japan and saw all of this suffering, the image of a “crazy” enemy that was constructed by the American propaganda was also shattered to pieces. I do not mean that they would suddenly lose all that hate towards Japanese people but that with the disappearance of the threat, many American soldiers had realized that the propaganda as any other propaganda was exaggerated. There was no grinning
“Jap” awaiting them.
From the start of the occupation, the U.S. had many tasks that were all defined as part of D policies: Democratization, Demilitarization, and Decentralization.
The
SCAP (abbreviation for Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers which referred to the commander General Douglas Macarthur himself and also to the allied occupation headquarters in Tokyo) has ruled the occupation through the Japanese government. The enemy quickly turned into the most important ally in fighting communism in the Far East. With the beginning of the Cold War SCAP has started
Erika Feldová 49 adopting a policy which is now called “reverse course”. The main goal of the reverse course was “economic revitalization in an attempt to make Japan a model of capitalism in Asia“ (Shibusawa 4). In order to straighten out the Japanese economy,
SCAP scrapped some of the original reforms, for example, land redistribution, some of the democratization processes were stopped and for example, Japanese reparations to its war victims were also stopped. The big part of the reverse course was also less severe punishments for prominent war criminals. For example, emperor Hirohito in whose name was the war waged had never been punished and continued to serve as Japanese emperor until his death in 1989. It was believed that the implementation of these reforms would undermine SCAP’s effort to stabilize the economy (Shibusawa 4-5)
The reason why the U.S. reversed its policies towards Japan is clear. And it would be the start of a more “friendly” relationship between the United States of
America and Japan. I had to put the word friendly into the quotes because there is, of course, nothing friendly about war enemies and between the occupation and being occupied but from this time on the relationship of Japan and the U.S. can be described as more cooperative than competitive.
However, this “friendly” relationship was not easily accepted at home in U.S.
Questions like “Why should we help the enemy?” were repeatedly asked which put the U.S. government in a strange position. The war propaganda which created the stereotypical “grinning Japanese” was now to be replaced by pro-Japanese propaganda. This phenomenon is greatly explained in the book America’s Geisha
Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy by Naoko Shibusawa from 2006. In this book, the author talks about American feelings towards post-war Japan and how
Japan was “reimagined” in the eyes of Americans. It talks about the process but also
Erika Feldová 50 and maybe even importantly how and why this reimagining was needed. How the savages become “delightful” civilization. In the first and second chapters, we can read about how women and children were reimagined first and how Japan was said to be “like a boy of twelve” (Shibusawa 13-95). The infamous comparison of Japan to be “like a boy of twelve” was done by none other than General MacArthur himself.
When talking about how the United States should manage the Japanese occupation
MacArthur argued that the way of occupation of Germany and Japan should be different because “the German problem is completely and entirely different from the
Japan problem. The German people were a mature race.” (qtd. in Shibusawa 55). He then explains that
If the Anglo-Saxon was say 45 years of age in development in the sciences,
the arts, divinity, culture, the Germans were quite mature. The Japanese,
however, in spite of their antiquity measured by time, were in a very tuitionary
condition. Measured by the standard of modern civilization, they would be like
a boy of 12 as compared to our own development of 45 years. (55)
One of the questions this book answers is: “how the enemy or ally is created and how people’s beliefs can be changed according to the political interest of a country”. The reason I am talking about this phenomenon is that Dr. Seuss himself was part of it. The man who created the anti-Japanese political cartoons now played a role in the reimagination of Japan. The book is considered more a social science book with its political relations theme but for me, it is interesting how Dr. Seuss’s reimagining corresponds to Naoko Shibusawa’s book.
In the first- and second-chapter Shibusawa writes about how this process started firstly for Japanese children and women in the eyes of American soldiers. Dr.
Seuss mirrors this occurrence but does it in the exact opposite way. He writes a book
Erika Feldová 51 for children which would be read by their parents but mainly mothers and through these eyes changes the views of the Japanese population. This strategy of changing or creating the opinion of men through their wives and children is nothing new. For example, notoriously known Uncle tom's cabin had a similar effect.
Erika Feldová 52
Horton after Second World War
Trip to Japan
Geisel wrote Horton Hears a Who! promptly after his trip to Japan in 1953 where he went to write about a Japanese youth. This job was offered to him by Life magazine and Geisel and his wife Helen accepted the opportunity. The traveling throughout the country was for Geisel’s family quite an eye-opener: “During the ten- day voyage to Tokyo the Geisels pored over research materials on postwar Japan and marveled at how little they understood of Japanese culture despite their work on the military documentary” (Morgan & Morgan 136).
The results of Geisel’s research were reported in the article called "Japan's
Young Dreams”. Geisel wrote that he went to Japan “to see how the American occupation had changed the ideas of young people, learning that they were less interested in militarism and more interested in the West” (Nel, “Said a Bird” 28).
I found this quote quite interesting because I wrote my bachelor thesis on the post-war Americanization of Japanese and one of the chapters was dedicated to the
Americanization of kids and young women throughout the contact with American soldiers. Children would first learn English words like: “hello”, “good-bye”, “jeep” or
“give me a chocolate” as they would greet the soldiers and hope for some sweets.
Young women would also get these American goods and presents but in exchange for sexual practices (Dower 110-112). America had become an epitome of prosperity and wealth in the Japanese eyes. The concept of democracy would follow in the same steps at least in the post-war years.
I do not think that this is what Geisel meant when he wrote that young people in Japan were “less interested in militarism and more interested in the West” but at the same time, he failed to see how ethnocentric his view is. To compare “militarism”
Erika Feldová 53 and “West” as opposite manners is extremely ignorant when the U.S. had just won
WWII and was in the middle of the Cold War. What he meant by that was that the young Japanese brains are becoming more like the young American brains just like it was said in the Our Job in Japan.
Dr. Seuss was invited to Japan by Life magazine to study the impact of
American occupation on education. He went there because two of his books became part of the Japanese elementary curriculum as the Japanese school system went through the reformation and I would even say Americanization. The books were And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street and The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins
(Pease 93).
The reformation of the education system was needed because the old
Japanese one was too militant. It was based on the Imperial Rescript on Education which empathized the importance of ethics, morality, and devotion to the Emperor.
SCAP replaced it with an American system that taught students democratic values and individualism. Because new textbooks could not be printed fast enough, pupils had to learn from the old ones, but they first had to censor the part that was deemed as too ultranationalist (Huffman 167).
Pease in his biography says that Geisel started to write Horton Hears a Who! after visiting Japanese schools “where individualism was a relatively new concept”.
He also points out that scholar Henry Jenkins commented on the book that Geisel wrote it to educate “children in emerging democratic cultures around the world, about the relationship between the individual and the community.” (qtd. in Pease 93). After returning to California Dr. Seuss dedicated Horton Hears a Who! to "My Great Friend,
Mitsugi Nakamura”. Nakamura was a Kyoto University professor he met in Japan
(Nel, “Said a Bird” 77).
Erika Feldová 54
Because of the time the book was written, the dedication of the book, and the topic that book deals with, it is often connected to Japan and the Japanese population. And Dr. Seuss himself acknowledged in the interview from 1987 that: “I conceived the idea of Horton Hears a Who! from my experiences there [Japan].” (qtd. in Minear 263)
Horton hears a Japan!
The Horton hears a Who! was published in 1954. In the story Horton the elephant hears a little voice but cannot find anybody who would make such a noise.
Only a little speck of dust was flying around. He realizes that on this little speck of dust live creatures so small that they cannot be seen by an elephant eye, but of course Horton can hear them with his elephant ears. He learns that the creatures are called Whos and they live in the Who-ville and decides to protect them. Other animals cannot hear them and thus do not believe Horton, in fact, they think he just got mad. Mother Kangaroo with a child in her pouch does not want Horton going around and disturbing the village’s peace by saying he hears voices on the dust of speck. She decides to destroy the speck so Horton would stop talking to it. Firstly, the speck of dust on the clover is dropped to the clover field so Horton cannot find it.
But Horton promised to protect the Who-ville, so he searches day and night to find it.
He eventually discovers the clover with Whos only to be captured by the other animals and they want to boil the clover now. Horton pleads to the animals to not hurt the little Whos but they don’t listen so he proceeds to ask the mayor of the Who-ville to make so much noise so other animals can hear them too. When every little Who takes part in the shouting and screaming, they are finally heard and saved, because they proved that they are there. They “made themselves be heard” (Seuss, “Horton
Hears” 59). And other animals promise to protect the Who-ville from now on.
Erika Feldová 55
In the book, there is one phrase that is being repeated throughout the whole book and that is: “A person’s a person, no matter how small”.
It starts with Horton’s realization that there is a creature living on a speck of dust: “I’ll just have to save him. Because, after all, A person’s a person, no matter how small.” (Seuss, “Horton Hears” 18). Then when he is being ridiculed by Mother
Kangaroo for talking to dust and she says to put the speck down: “I can’t put it down.
And I won’t! After all, A person’s a person, no matter how small.” (28). The sentence is again repeated when the Whos are making noise to prove that they in fact exist:
“Don’t give up! I believe in you all! A person’s a person, no matter how small.” (59).
And with the happy ending, the phrase is changed to: “They’ve proved they ARE persons, no matter how small.” (70).
The equality theme is highlighted one more time in the sentence: “Please don’t harm all my little folks, who have as much right to live as us bigger folks do!” (39).
This repetition of one sentence is used in the book systematically to tight the whole story together from the start Horton discovers the Whos to the end. Repetition in children’s books is one of the most distinctive features this genre has. “It clarifies the structure of narrative for young readers and helps them to remember what they have read. It adds rhythm and the mysterious charm of ritual to the simplest of verbal formulas. It offers the “pleasure of extended suspense and delayed gratification to even the youngest audience“ (Gannon 2), says one of many definitions for repetition in children’s literature. Dr. Seuss uses often repetition in his book mostly for rhythmic purposes. The article continues with the: “repetition—whether in the sequence of events which makes up a story—or in the patterning of the textual discourse which presents that story—is also a powerful means of generating meaning in fiction. Four
Erika Feldová 56 recent critics have developed approaches to the way meaning is conveyed by repetition in fiction.” (Gannon 2).
However, the repetition of this exact line not only creates the rhythm but also makes sure that the reader will remember these words. Repetition in poetry is “used to emphasize a feeling or idea, create rhythm, and/or develop a sense of urgency“
(Wilson). I like this definition a lot because I think there is something really urgent in the line “A person is a person no matter how small”. Firstly, it creates a feeling that there is a threat lurking around. Secondly, the necessity of acknowledgment and the repetition of this acknowledgment evokes the idea that in the world we live in or
Horton lives in, it is not universally accepted yet and that is why it has to be said so many times. Also, the fact that only Horton repeats this line throughout the whole book and also the Horton is the only one who can hear them from the start means that he is the only one that believes in this saying until it is proven that Whos exist.
Because until they are acknowledged and prove that their difference does not mean that they are not “a person”, they in fact are only Horton’s imagination in the eyes of other animals. After they prove they exist, the small kangaroo says “I’m going to protect them. No matter how small-ish!” and everyone agrees (Seuss, “Horton Hears”
72).
When reading Horton Hears a Who! with the knowledge that Dr. Seuss was inspired by the Japanese when writing this book, the question comes to mind: What part of the book is inspired by post-war Japan?
There is one straightforward but quite uncomfortable answer: Whos’ smaller physical appearance can be easily interpreted as the stereotype that all Asians are small compared to the western world. Another way of interpretation of Whos but with the same results is that the relationship between big Horton and small Whos is like
Erika Feldová 57 the power struggle between two countries in this case the United States as the superpower and the Japanese as the defeated nation. If we agree that Whos are the
Japanese and compare the story to Japan at that time we find that there are some similarities between the Whos and the Japanese.
Firstly, the theme of the annihilation of Who-ville can be interpreted as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The destruction power these two bombs carried was never seen before and continual use of such a weapon would eventually end in the end of the civilization. I found several themes that correspond to this theory such as the theme of a flying bird dropping the clover to the ground.
We’ve really had trouble! Much more than our share.
When that black/bottomed birdie let go and we dropped,
We landed so har that our clocks have all stopped.
Our tea-pots are broken. Our rocking-chairs smashed.
And our bicycle tires all blew up when we crashed. (Seuss, “Horton Hears” 46)
In the third line, Whos say that they landed so hard that their clocks have stopped. There are several clocks displayed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki Atomic bomb museums that stopped at exactly 8:15 a.m. and 11:02 a.m. respectively. These clocks had become a symbol of the time life stopped in both cities. The verbs that are used in the next lines can also be used in describing the aftermath of the atomic or any other bombing: “broken, smashed, blew up, crashed”.
Secondly, the topic of proving that Whos or Japanese exist. This one is quite tricky because no one would agree with me if I said that people did not believe Japan existed. Ruth K. MacDonald also deals with the same concept and she also offers the answer. She says that “Though the Japanese did not have to prove their
Erika Feldová 58 existence, they did have to justify it before the world given the atrocities committed by their government in the World War II.” (qtd. In Minear 264). Metaphorically Japanese population becomes even smaller after the war. Their pride was crushed. They were supposed to rule over the world and now they were under the occupation themselves. MacDonald continues that: “Seuss, who saw through the wartime propaganda, successfully helps their cause here by using America commonplace to describe former enemies.” (qtd. In Minear 264).
MacDonald probably did not know that Dr. Seuss had his share in the wartime propaganda that is why she could say that, but the truth is that he had to “see through the wartime propaganda” when creating the book. Because without that I don’t think he would be able to create something with such a message. One question that comes to mind now is why? Was creating the book about equality some sort of redemption for him?
So, if the Whos represents the Japanese then Horton must represent the
United States or that is at least what Minear says in Dr. Seuss Goes to War (Minear
263). But how did the one causing the annihilation became the protector of Japanese civilization is the question. Minear explains it as a Geisel’s rewriting the history or
“willful amnesia”.
After WWII, Japan has been and still is depending on the U.S. in form of foreign security because of the constitution which was prepared by the Americans and signed by the Japanese government in 1946. There is the infamous Article 9 which bans Japan from having any type of army. In this sense, the U.S. became a protector of Japan even though I do not think this is something Dr. Seuss was referring to.
Erika Feldová 59
Richard Minear’s concept of “willful amnesia” works with alternating the history, forgetting, and creating a new environment where not only the crisis comes to halt without the massive destruction, but the producer of the destruction becomes the protector of the ones being destructed. He demonstrates it in this short section of the book:
“My friend’ came the voice, ‘you’re a very fine friend.
You’ve saved all us folks on this dust speck no end.
You’ve saved all our houses, our ceilings and floors.
You’ve saved all our churches and grocery stores.” (Seuss, “Horton Hears”
30)
Richard Minear continues that: “For an American in 1954 to write these lines – even in an allegory – calls for willful amnesia” (Minear 264).
When speaking about Horton we cannot forget that Horton’s character underwent war transformation. Before the Second World War Horton was already used as the main character by Dr. Seuss in a book called Horton Hatches the Egg which was published in 1940. In this story, as its name give away Horton protects and takes care of one egg. We have the same huge elephant and small thing that needs to be saved schematic but now Horton has to protect not a single egg but an entire civilization of little Whos and if he fails all of them will die and their planet will be destroyed.
Dr. Seuss was famous for his rhymes. He would rewrite and rephase his work or even create new words to suit the sound and tempo he wanted it to be.
For the opening line of the book she [Helen] liked “On the fifteenth of June in
the Jungle of Nool…” but he chose May instead. She reminded him to stick to
the point: “The idea is that [Whos] are small but important.” Ted rewrote
Erika Feldová 60
himself for tempo and sound. In Horton’s frantic search through a huge field of
clover, the words “had plucked nineteen thousand four hundred and five”
became “had piled up twelve thousand nine hundred and five,” and finally “had
picked, searched, and piled up nine thousand and five”. (Morgan & Morgan
145)
In this segment, Morgan & Morgan wanted to show how Helen helped with the creation of Horton, but I found interesting something totally different. I did not realize when reading the Horton itself, but the numbers used here are quite symbolic. Firstly, the use of “On the fifteenth of May” with the connection to the Japan and postwar book can be connected to the fifteenth of August which is a date that Emperor
Hirohito announced ultimate Japanese surrender just a few days after the bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Secondly the “had plucked nineteen thousand four hundred and five” which eventually changed but why 19405 in the first place? Why number that looks pretty similar to 1945. The date of the atomic bombing and the end of the
Second World War.
The problem between the historical analysis of the book and the analysis from the perspective that it is a children’s book and thus meant for children is something I had a problem with from the start. It is easier to analyze Geisel’s war cartoons as they are quite straight forward and meant for adult readers. With Horton, it’s harder. I came across the short paper written by Brian Boyd and called: The origin of stories:
Horton Hears a Who! which criticizes the historicizing approach of analysis of the story. Boyd says that:
The historian Richard Minear reflects the modes and moods of the times when
he critiques Dr Seuss’s 1954 tale in terms of what he sees as Theodor Seuss
Geisel’s typically mid-century American attitude to Japan: xenophobic hostility
Erika Feldová 61
during World War II, patronizing condescension afterwards in his eagerness to
see democracy reestablished after the American Occupation. When he wrote
Horton Hears a Who!, Ted Geisel had indeed recently visited Japan, and
wrote the story partly because he was concerned about the establishment of
democracy there and wanted to stress the importance of every vote even
within a vast population.
The Whos, crammed onto an unbelievably small space, are in one sense the
Japanese, densely crowded onto their island nation, who can be saved if all
citizens exercize[sic] their voice together. It would therefore seem easy in
retrospect to criticize Horton Hears a Who! via the whiff of hysteria in Dr
Seuss’s depiction of the Japanese in his political cartoons of World War II, and
of condescension in his hopes for Japanese democracy in the early 1950s.
But the historicizing approach is both too narrow (it ignores the universal
appeal of the story) and too blunt (it ignores the individual problem Dr Seuss
faces and the individual way he deploys universals, evolved human interests,
in order to solve it). (Boyd 4)
I understand why Boyd thinks this way because Minear does not analyze
Horton Hears a Who! as a children’s book and neither do I. However, I do not think it is that important. There are several articles and even books out there analyzing Dr.
Seuss’s literary style and as I said before most of the books meant for children have some universal moral story. I do not see anything surprising about that but what I think is surprising is that Dr. Seuss infuses his stories with politics, ecology, social issues, and others which are more than often seen as topics not suitable for children.
That is why my focus here is on the historicizing analysis.
Erika Feldová 62
Lastly, I would like to point out one fact that Jeffrey Angles mentions in his article:
Although Seuss may have hoped that the book would contribute to the spread
of democratic principles, it was not translated as Japan was emerging from the
ashes of the Second World War and formulating a new culture and electoral
system. It was translated only many years later in 1970, as Japan was taking
a place among the advanced industrialized nations of the world. If anything, it
is more likely that Japanese readers in 1970 saw themselves on the side of
the benevolent Horton rather than the tiny Whos who needed the help of
others to survive. (Angles 175-176)
This analysis works with the topic of comparing Horton and Whos to the
Superpowers and weaker nations. Angles continues that the translation of Dr.
Seuss’s book in the 70s done by Watanabe Shigeo shifts the message of the book towards the: “one must act benevolently towards the weak; it is not necessarily about recognizing the shared humanity of others and using that as a point for humanitarian action” (176-177). Jeffrey Angles also suggests that: “Perhaps it is no coincidence that the translation eliminates the dedication, thus hiding from the Japanese public the fact that this book was inspired by Seuss’s time in Japan and thus preventing
Japanese readers from seeing it as Seuss’s reflections on what the Japanese nation needed to develop.” (176).
The translation was done nearly 20 years after the release of the book and it makes kind of sense that the translator Watanabe adjusted the story to fit the 70s
Japan, but one has to ask if the alteration and the missing dedication was done by purpose to hide the fact that Whos were inspired by the postwar Japanese.
Erika Feldová 63
Children’s author image and criticism of social issues Horton can also be analyzed as an epitome of American democracy. Every individual voice must be heard in order to create one noise that would save their world. If this is not the ideal American Democracy, I don’t know what is. Even in the article: Democracy in America: By Dr. Seuss Shira Wolosky, the author of the article, makes the connection between Dr. Seuss, Horton hears a Who! and Alexis de
Tocqueville and his Democracy in America (Wolosky 170). Wolosky explains that:
It is of paramount importance that both Horton and the smallest Who act not
only each for himself, but also for the common good. Every individual is
uniquely responsible. Without the personal and individual acceptance of
responsibility, the very survival of the world is threatened. Dr. Seuss's is thus a
vision not only of individuals, but of community. It rests upon a faith that the
exercise of individuality will build and strengthen social life. It will not initiate a
dispersion into irreconcilable diversities but rather will serve as a common
ground for respecting differences and making possible their expression and
appreciation. As a social vision, it pledges itself to a community of unique,
participating individuals, without which the individuals themselves, with their
world, will perish. (173)
Reading Horton Hears a Who! as an epitome of American Democracy also corresponds to the fact that Dr. Seuss was inspired by Japan. The democracy in
Japan was at the beginning when Dr. Seuss arrived there. Under American rule the democratization of Japan was one of the aims of the occupation.
Similarly, the Whos in Who-ville can represent any minority who is being mistreated. The minority must fight for their rights and be noisy about them. They have to “make themselves be heard” (Seuss, “Horton Hears” 59). There is no direct specification of what Whos represents in the book called Who’s Who & What’s What
Erika Feldová 64 in the books of Dr. Seuss. It is a dictionary of Dr. Seuss’s universe which was compiled by Edward Connery Lathem and published in 2000. Description of Whos looks like this: “Creatures, central to the story, that inhabit the town of Who-ville, situated on “a small speck of dust” in Horton Hears a Who! 2: Residents of Who-ville, and intended victims of the Grinch’s Christmas Eve descent upon their town in How the Grinch Stole Christmas“ (Lathem 141).
Interestingly there is a great chance that Whos were modeled on the
Japanese but there is no reason to think the same about the Whos from How the
Grinch Stole Christmas. This makes me think that even if the Whos from Horton
Hears Who were inspired by Japanese or modeled of the Japanese children, Dr.
Seuss never intended for them to actually be seen like that. The Whos are not supposed to depict one historical situation but they depict anyone who is in danger because he is different because in the end: “A person is a person no matter how small” (Seuss, “Horton Hears” 18).
When asked about the book and the connection to postwar Japan in 1987, thirty-four years after the release, Geisel commented that:
“… Well, Japan was just emerging, the people were voting for the first time
[since the war, perhaps – Japan had had elections since the nineteenth
century and universal male suffrage since 1926], running their own lives – and
the theme was obvious: ‘A person’s a person no matter how small,’ though I
don’t know how I ended up using elephants. And of course, when little boy
stands up and yells ‘Yopp!’ and saves the whole place, that’s my statement
about voting – everyone counts.” (qtd in Minear 263)
The democratic theme of Horton Hears a Who! cannot be denied especially when the author of the book says so. However, I think there are two themes or topics
Erika Feldová 65 that are relevant. If we focus on the “everyone counts” topic there is no discussion, but I think there is a more prominent topic connected to the “person is a person no matter how small” quote. Which for me evokes more racial, gender, and just pure human equality than democratic voting values.
Cold War
Many things happened between 1941 and 1954. The most important events would be the alliance between the U.S., Great Britain, and USSR, the defeat of Nazi
Germany, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and surrender of Japan in August
1945, the start and the end of the American occupation of Japan, Korean War, Death of Stalin but mainly start of the Cold War.
The United States won World War II and with that Dr. Seuss won too. His cartoons supported the American victory in the conflict. His work was complete.
However, at the end of one world conflict, another one has been born. The alliance between the U.S., UK, and USSR was fragile and with no reason to work together, it was easily broken. In 1945 Churchill already spoke about Iron Curtain in his Fulton speech. Truman Doctrine of containment of communism was announced on March
12, 1947. The American financial aid in form of the Marshall plan meant mostly for destroyed European countries was approved to scale down radical voices and theoretical communist revolutions. NATO was established in 1949 to create a military defense. The first escalated conflict between the West and East was Berlin Blockade between 1948 and 1949. And first victories of the Communist bloc were the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 and the start of the Korean war in 1950. And in this kind of political environment, Horton hears a Who! was created.
The eagle who eventually drops the clover with Who-ville is named Vlad Vlad- i-koff which is a very Russian sounding name. The bird is said to be “A mighty strong
Erika Feldová 66 eagle, of very swift wing” (Seuss, “Horton Hears” 36) and is portrayed as a villain who does not take a part in the ending realization that Whos in fact exist. Because he is absent at that time, he remains to be a villain contrary to the other villains who went throughout the transformation at the end. It is interesting that Dr. Seuss chose an eagle to portray the USSR because in his war comics as I mentioned earlier, he usually used the eagle to depict the United States.
Dr. Seuss did not officially participate in the Cold War anti-USSR propaganda.
After the Second World War, he started to focus more on his children’s books, but it does not mean that he would not comment or show his anti/USSR opinions. Vlad
Vlad-i-koff is a great example of this but that is not the only one. Interestingly Dr.
Seuss in his whole life has written and published only two book reviews. And one of them was the review of Japanese author Osaragi Jiro’s novel called Kikyo from 1948
(Angles 166). The review was published in 1955 and Dr. Seuss stressed in the review the importance of the translation of the books between the U.S. and Japan.
He says that
The people praising the loudest [the English translation of the Osaragi Jiro’s
novel] are the groups of Americans and Japanese who have been working
together, ever since the war, to promote a healthier interchange of ideas. They
feel very strongly that unless we and the Japanese learn to see eye to eye the
Japanese may learn to see eye to eye with the Russians. (Seuss, “The past is
nowhere“ 33)
The reason why he is mentioning Russians is that USSR let the Japanese translators translate Soviet novels with little of charge (Angles 167). Jeffrey Angles in the Dr. Seuss goes to Japan: ideology and the translation of American icon comments: “His message is clear: American publishers should do the same to
Erika Feldová 67 encourage mutual understanding between the two countries and to help promote a liberal, democratic agenda in Japan. Translation, he recognized, promotes values from the source culture, and, as Japan searched for a new, national direction in the postwar era, a translation could provide critical sustenance for those seeking a break from the past.“ (Angles 167). Dr. Seuss wanted to promote translation of the
American novels into the Japanese because he didn’t like the Russian influence over
Japanese readers.
The good Dr. Seuss Dr. Seuss is and probably will be loved as a children’s book author. The Image of an older man with a big smile on his face, with white hair and a white beard, is the first image that pops into mind when talking about this author. In the Multicultural
Children’s Literature: A Critical Issues is a line that demonstrates just how much Dr.
Seuss is loved. It would probably not be needed to explain this phenomenon if we would be situated in the U.S., but we are not, and the impact of Dr. Seuss is smaller here in Czechia. The sentence goes like this: “Just saying “Dr. Seuss” usually makes people smile as they spout off their favorite titles or deliver lines from pages they know by heart.”. (Gopalakrishnan and Persiani-Becker 236) For me, it is quite a cheesy line, but I think this is exactly how Dr. Seuss is going to be remembered.
In the interview with Geisel from 1980 Jonathan Cott, the interviewer describes in the first paragraph his way to Geisel’s house in La Jolla, California:
“You’re going to see the good Doctor?” asked the cab driver cheerily as we drove up the La Jolla hills to Theodor Geisel’s home. “He’s full of character and brings joy— unlike most doctors!” the driver adds. “My children love his books, and so do I. (Cott
119)”. The interview itself is called THEODOR GEISEL: The Good Dr. Seuss and the whole interview is creating this dreamy image about Theodor Geisel.
Erika Feldová 68
Gopalakrishnan and Persiani-Becker also add that: “Some of us learned to read and rhyme from his books like The Cat in the Hat, whereas others of us learned how to get along well with our peers and those of different cultural back-grounds by reading The Sneetches a title useful for young and older students.”. (236) Which again paints this image of somebody from whom “we learned to read” and who taught us to not be discriminating and to “get along”. I am not trying to undermine Dr.
Seuss’s effort in educating children on basic human relations. I am trying to highlight how his past is clashing with what his legacy has become. However, there is one phenomenon that I came across when researching the “good” image of Dr. Seuss.
People and perhaps me too are getting more fired up when racism of somebody connected to the children entertainment industry comes to the surface.
I wanted to compare Geisel’s racism to the Walt Disney anti-Semitism, and I couldn’t be more wrong. I mean I came across many sites that say that Walt Disney was anti-Semite, but I could not find one credible source that I could use. Contrary to that, I found out that Disney’s anti-Semitism is more a rumor than a historical fact. It comes from the time when The New York Times reported in 1938 that: “Walt Disney gave Hitler’s personal filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, a tour of his studio. Riefenstahl offered to show Disney her depiction of the 1936 Berlin Olympics” which Disney refused when he realized that the connection to German filmmaker could hinder his reputation. All of this happened only one month after the infamous Nazi assault the
Kristallnacht (qtd. in Iszo).
Another possible allegation comes from the Riefenstahl biography written by
Steven Bach that says: “upon her [Riefenstahl‘s] return to Germany, she thanked
Disney for receiving her, saying it “was gratifying to learn how thoroughly proper
Erika Feldová 69
Americans distance themselves from the smear campaigns of the Jews. (qtd. in
Iszo)”.
However, Neal Gabler, author of Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American
Imagination said that
he read every one of Disney's papers in the company's archives, and says "I
saw no evidence, other than casual anti-Semitism that virtually every gentile at
that time would have, that Walt Disney was an anti-Semite," according to the
report. (qtd. in Iszo)
The reason why I am bringing this up is that there seems to be creating a lot of emotion in people for something that “virtually every gentile at that time would have” and the reason for that is probably because Disney’s work is mainly meant for children and I think that people tend to be harsher or more critical when children are involved. Walt Disney just like Dr. Seuss is supposed to be this magical figure that brings joy to children and adults but when this image is shattered criticism is much bigger than it would be for any other type of writer or filmmaker. Or maybe it is because of the topics these figures write about. Children’s books and fairytales tend to be more moralistic than books for adults because there is the element of teaching in the children’s book which in normal books is not that relevant. And because of that when the morality of the author is questioned, he or she looks hypocritical.
Criticism of social issues in Dr. Seuss’s children’s books
The concept of a children’s author who has a past of political involvement can be seen as unique but is nothing too incomprehensible. Actually, Olga Bukhina in her Why Are They So Afraid of Children’s Books? The Subversive Power of
Imagination (Part 2) says
Erika Feldová 70
A political component was not absent from children’s literature from its
inception; it exists, for example, just as hints in many nursery rhymes. Well-
known rhymes London Bridge is Falling Down or Robin the Bobbin, the Big-
bellied Ben originally were epigrams mocking the politics of Henry VIII, and
later came down to the nursery. (Bukhina 189-190)
And a lot of Geisel’s war colleagues went on to work in the children entertainment industry as writers, artists, or animation creators. The truth is that Dr.
Seuss never stopped with his commentary on the social and political issues even after World War II. In fact, his books are often created around these social commentaries. The most used example is his book The Lorax which was published in 1971 and in which Dr. Seuss is addressing the environmental crisis one of the topics that are not easily found in children’s literature. Yertle the Turtle was modeled on Hitler and Horton Hears a Who! was mirroring the situation of American occupation in Japan. And these are just examples. In most of his books, we can find some moral story that is often connected to some social issue. For example, the book and also famous movie: Grinch (How the Grinch Stole Christmas) can be interpreted as the criticism of American consumerism. Grinch steals all the Christmas presents in order to destroy Christmas but then the whole village of Whos realize that
Christmas is not destroyed just because there are no presents because Christmas is not about the presents and material gifts but about the family, friends, and traditions.
Even before the war, Dr. Seuss’s children’s books had some kind of moral story, but it was not the main theme of the books. For example, John P. Bailey, Jr. says about the And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street that “There is a moral in the story, as there is in many of his later books. It is served up in a very sugar-coated dose, teaching (if it teaches at all) that although it's fun to imagine the outlandish, one
Erika Feldová 71 should still tell the prosaic truth.“ (Bailey 7). And there actually is no moral story in the
500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins which Bailey again comments that “it's as if Dr.
Seuss had wanted to tell a funny story without preaching, just to prove that he could”
(Bailey 8). Dr. Seuss’s books that are now mostly analyzed in connection to some social issues have all been published after the Second World War with the first few ones responding to the war itself.
We can argue that many children’s books have some kind of moral story.
However, Dr. Seuss deals with contemporary issues and even topics that can be seen as too hard to understand for children. When Geisel was asked about his books being sometimes political, he answered with
“Yes, […] children’s literature as I write it and as I see it is satire to a great
extent—satirizing the mores and the habits of the world.” Then he continued
with “There’s Yertle the Turtle […], which was modeled on the rise of Hitler;
and then there’s The Sneetches […] which was inspired by my opposition to
anti-Semitism. These books come from a different part of my background and
from the part of my soul that started out to be a teacher. (Geisel, “Good Dr.
Seuss” 130)
Geisel says that it comes from his past self who wanted to be a teacher, but he continues with “Every once in a while, I get mad. The Lorax […] came out of my being angry.” (Geisel, “Good Dr. Seuss” 131). This reminds me of the reason he started to work for New York PM. He got angry with Virginio Gayda and created the cartoon which was later his first published cartoon in NY PM. This anger Dr. Seuss speaks about is probably his fuel in creating the children’s books which are more than just bedtime stories even though they are masked as one.
Erika Feldová 72
In the article "Said a Bird in the Midst of a Blitz.. ": How World War II Created
Dr. Seuss the author Philip Nel says that:
His [Geisel’s] career as cartoon propagandist made Seuss more willing to
confront his readers, even at the risk of offending them. Furthermore, Seuss's
work in the fight against Fascism both galvanized his commitment to various
social issues and motivated him to write books that encourage readers to
challenge certain structures of power. (Nel, “Said a Bird” 66)
One of the biggest strengths of Dr. Seuss’s work is the fact that his books have become so popular with such an “anarchic power of imagination” (Handy, 2017, p. xxii). In many of Geisel’s children’s books, the authority of adults is challenged, and their structures and institution questioned. In Horton the Mother Kangaroo is the main source of authority and she is also the main “villain” because of her authority and because she chooses to not believe Horton, other animals listen to her orders.
Which makes them “less” villainous. Just like enemy soldiers are less responsible than their leaders. But the Mother Kangaroo is not defeated like the army leader is.
She was not physically crushed, and she did not lose her authority, but she had to accept that she was wrong. Her authority thus is questioned. For children’s literature parental authority is something that is mostly accepted as a foundation. The success of Dr. Seuss was in creating books that helped children learn to read and parents to buy books that questioned their authority. (Bukhina 193–194)
Erika Feldová 73
Conclusion Theodor Seuss Geisel was an extraordinary author who will be remembered for his goofy characters and rhythmic lines, but he was not just that. Just like Geisel’s pictures and stories would shape many American children in the second half of the
20th century, his war cartoons and war films created public opinions of the Japanese in the first half, and they weren’t nice. The inevitable question is: “Why should he create a nice image? Japanese were enemies. There was no reason to depict them nicely”. Well, counter-response for that would be: “Germans were enemies too and he did not draw them so non-humanly as he did with Japanese”. Racism in his war comics towards Japanese and even worse to American Japanese is apparent.
Geisel’s past as a third-generation German who lived throughout the First World War in the U.S., or New York PM philosophy did not stop him. Philip Nel comments that
Dr. Seuss was not “fully aware” of the anti-democratic message his war cartoons and animation of Private SNAFU were conveying. To which I argued that I think he was aware, and he simply chose not to follow these values because it would be counterproductive.
The main reason Dr. Seuss got into the New York PM was that he feared that the U.S. does not take the German, Italian, and Japan threat seriously and that is why a great portion of his war cartoons was making fun of isolationist approach and figures like Charles Lindbergh. His cartoons called for Americans to buy U.S. war bonds and for American men to enlist. The anti-racist cartoons were also drawn in support of the war effort. The message of these cartoons was “there shouldn’t be an obstacle like racism in fighting together with the enemy. The private SNAFU existed to communicate official information to GIs in an easy and funny format so they would listen to it. Not only it was educational, SNAFU was also entertaining and thus immensely popular. Like that Geisel again achieved what he wanted by writing
Erika Feldová 74 episodes with narratives GIs were used to even though it contradicted some of his own values. The question here is if it was populist or pragmatic but that is probably something that I cannot answer.
Geisel’s approach changed with the defeat of the enemy. He worked on the Our
Job in Japan which was again used as a lesson for American soldiers on how to behave as an occupational force in the defeated enemy territory. This time Dr. Seuss denounced racism as the film builds on the fact that all humans are the same and only the ideas in their brains are different. And of course, part of the message was that our American ideas are the right ones as would any ethnocentric culture say.
The process of Dr. Seuss denouncing his racism was finished with the book Horton
Hears a Who! which was published in 1954 more than a decade after Dr. Seuss worked for NY PM and almost a decade after the end of WWII.
The Horton Hears a Who! is a classic Dr. Seuss’s story about equality and that everyone’s voice counts. The book is merged with themes that relate to the war and post-war Japan. Usage of inspiration from Japan to write a book like this is quite symbolic for Dr. Seuss because of the reasons I mentioned earlier. However, it is not surprising. Where else was the democracy in total beginnings with American protective rule over it? The transformation of Japan from the Second World War enemy to Cold War ally was quick and not so both-sided as would one imagine with creating alliances. Japan kind of did not have any other option but that does not mean it did not profit from this relationship. However, the Cold War was not probably the main reason the Japanese were used as inspiration for the equality story, even though the use of so Russian sounding name for antagonist as is Vlad Vlad-i-koff is quite straightforward.
Erika Feldová 75
My main question was “How can somebody who wrote a book with moral like
“A person is a person no matter how small” be the same one who ten years before depicted every American Japanese as a terrorist in his cartoons?” and the answer for this is quite obvious: He changed. His life changed, his audience changed, the enemy disappeared and with that, his racism towards the Japanese probably disappeared too. There is nothing I could find that would suggest Dr. Seuss had something personal against the Japanese. If anything, I found that he was against discriminating against minorities because of his childhood experience as an
American German in WWI. And he and his wife Helen recognized how much they did not know about Japanese culture even though they worked on a documentary about
Japan that won Oscar. The end of the WWII and start of the Cold War influenced
Geisel in one way or another. There was no need for him to engage in politics now and he could return to his books. However, that does not mean that he would stop to be interested in what is happening in the world and the U.S. Geisel would not return to politics and journalism, but he will continue to talk about the problematic issues in his books.
I thought that in my thesis I would describe the transformation of ideas of one interesting individual but in the end, I feel like I’ve described more how these ideas of race equality were not accepted yet even in the environment where it was said to be accepted. And even though the racism was eventually denounced, often ethnocentrism took its place. The fight for equality never seems to end as even now in the 21st century the question of race equality brings people to the streets. The surge in racism also corresponds to the foreign threat, for example, I have noticed that with the immigration crisis and ISIS many people around me would talk about how different we are and how immigration would mean an end to European culture.
Erika Feldová 76
These voices went as far as saying that every immigrant is a potential terrorist just like Dr. Seuss implied in his cartoons 80 years ago. And I do not think that these people would do and say the same without the crisis, that is why I have to spare Dr.
Seuss from my full judgment.
However, there is one thing that I cannot overlook and that is the fact that just like in Europe we saw many populists rise with describing Muslims as evil and saying what “people wanted to hear” just like that, Dr. Seuss pursued race equality when it fits him. He would draw Anti-Semitic caricatures in college just to make fun of people who are Anti-Semitic later in his war cartoons. He would preach anti-racism towards
Afro-Americans in the same newspaper in which he would also be racist towards the
Japanese. Japanese were of course enemies in the Second World War and that made them different enough to not count in the pro-equality concept New York PM believed in, but was not Geisel once at the same spot as the American Japanese he illustrated as a terrorist? In the First World War when he was discriminated against, for his German ancestry which should have made him loathe discrimination as is mentioned in many of Dr. Seuss’s biographies. Geisel would probably not do it if he would not feel like it was necessary. It is true that many Americans in 1941 were pro- isolationist and did not want the U.S. to participate in the war. However, this would stay as a controversial period of Dr. Seuss’s life.
One of the many problems of racism and inequality for me nowadays is that we do not see much of the historically accurate movies or stories where the good guy would be also racist. In most cases, we have a bad racist antagonist vs. a good non- racist or do-not-care-about-race protagonist. This works great for the learning process of racism means bad, but it also means that we are stimulated to think that good people in the past were not racist which is not true. By describing the process
Erika Feldová 77 of changing racist views of somebody who is celebrated and remembered as “Good
Dr. Seuss” I am showing the opposite of what movies and media want us to forget.
Just like Germany should never forget about the Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp, the Japanese should never forget the “rape of Nanking” and Americans should never forget the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we should not be creating a history that suits our perception and feelings nowadays. And with the same breath, we should also acknowledge that what is seen as controversial or toxic currently was probably normal back then. Human society still evolves, and I believe that by comprehending the situations and the conditions of people who in the past felt the need to be racist, we can learn from that and create an environment where racism won’t be needed anymore.
Erika Feldová 78
Works Cited:
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Apr. 2020.
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Power of Imagination (Part 2)“. Dzieciństwo. Literatura I Kultura, vol. 1, no. 2,
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signs-executive-order-9066.
Erika Feldová 79
• Gannon, Susan R. “One More Time: Approaches to Repetition in Children's
Literature.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 1, 1987,
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• Geisel, Theodor. “THEODOR GEISEL: The Good Dr. Seuss.” Listening:
Interviews,1970–1989, by JONATHAN COTT, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis; London, 2020, pp. 119–134. JSTOR,
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• Geisel, Theodor Seuss, and Richard H. Minear. Dr. Seuss Goes to War: the
World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel. New Press, 2001.
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18 Nov. 2009, www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/bombing-of-hiroshima-and-
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news/culture/no-truth-in-claim-that-walt-disney-was-an-anti-semite-410965.
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• Lathem, Edward Connery. Who's Who & What's What in the Books of Dr.
Seuss. Dartmouth College, 2000.
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Capo Press, 2009.
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Munro Leaf, and the Private SNAFU Films (1943?46).” The Journal of Popular
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5931.2007.00404.x.
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Dr. Seuss.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 34, no. 2, 2001,
pp. 65–85. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44029446. Accessed 27 Apr. 2020.
• Pease, Donald E. Theodor SEUSS Geisel. Oxford University Press, 2010.
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1945. YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw-89Mco-
xo&ab_channel=NuclearVault.
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Erika Feldová 81
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Erika Feldová 82
České Resumé
Má práce se zabývá transformací rasistického námětu v rovnoprávný v pracích Theodora Seusse Geisela lépe zmámeného pod pseudonym Dr. Seuss.
Geisel během Druhé Světové války pracoval pro New York PM, pro který vytvořil mnoho propagandistických karikatur. I když ve svých obrázcích kritizuje
Antisemitismus nebo Rasismus vůči Afroameričanům, stejný přístup se nedostává
Japonským Američanům. Geisel je ve svých karikaturách Japonců až překvapivě rasistický a nerozeznává mezi Japonci žijící v Americe a Japonsku, spíše by se jeho přístup dal shrnout jako: “Každý Japonec v Americe je potencionální terorista”.
Důvod, proč je rasismus Dr.Seusse tak překvapivý je proto, že po válce se z něj stane uznávaný a velice milovaný autor dětských knih, ve kterých často prosazuje morální zásady jako například rovnoprávnost. Jedna z takových knížek je i Horton
Hears a Who!, ve které slon Horton zachrání celé společenstvo malinkých Who.
Krédo této knihy zní: “Člověk je člověk a nezáleží na tom, jak je malý” a Geisel tuto knihu napsal po svém výletě do Japonska. Jak se z Geislových „krvelačných a
šílených“ Japonců stanou malincí Who, kteří jsou zachránění, protože i oni jsou lidi je pak hlavní téma mé práce.
Moje práce dospěla k závěru, že v době, kdy NY PM a Geisel hlásali rasovou rovnost, společnost a ani oni sami nebyli ještě připraveni ji akceptovat. Geisel používal antirasismus, když mu to vyhovovalo a pomocí rasismu pakt tvořil nenávistný obraz nepřítele. Když skončila válka a nebylo nutné, aby Geisel pokračoval, vzdal se rasismu a vrátil se ke svým dětským knihám. Transformace rasismu v Geislových pracích je částečně způsobena prostředím, ve kterém knihy byly tvořeny a částečně jeho literární evolucí, podle toho, jak se měnilo jeho publikum.
Erika Feldová 83
English Resumé
My thesis deals with the transformation of a racist theme into the equality one in the works of Theodor Seuss Geisel better known as Dr. Seuss. During World War
II Geisel worked for the New York PM, for which he created many pro-American cartoons. Although he criticized anti-Semitism and racism against African Americans in his pictures, the same approach is not used when dealing with Japanese or
Japanese Americans. Geisel is surprisingly racist in his cartoons to the Japanese and does not distinguish between Japanese living in America and the ones living in
Japan. Rather his approach could be summed up as: "Every Japanese in America is a potential terrorist." After the war, Dr. Seuss became a respected and highly beloved author of children's books in which he often promoted moral principles such as equality. One such book is Horton Hears a Who! in which Horton the elephant saves a whole community of tiny Whos. The credo of this book is: "A person is a person no matter how small" and it was modeled on post-war Japan. How the Geisel's
“bloodthirsty and mad” Japanese become the little Whos who must be saved, because they too are people is the main theme of my work.
My thesis concludes that at the time New York PM and Geisel proclaimed race equality, the society, and even him and PM were not prepared yet to accept it. He used anti-racism when it fits him and used racism to create an evil image of the enemy. When the war was over and there was no need for Geisel to create this hateful image, he renounced it and went back to his children’s books. The transformation of the topic of racism in Geisel’s work is partly because of the environment in which were the books created and partly his literary evolution as his audience changes.