Shedding Light on the Politicized Past of an American Treasure

It’s a match-up so unlikely that it deserves a cartoon of its own. Imagine the propaganda battles of World War II being fought, say, in a boxing ring. In one corner, wearing black death’s-head trunks, is Nazi spinmeister Joseph Goebbels. In the other, wearing a red-and-white-striped Uncle Sam topper that will reappear, transformed, on the Cat in the Hat, backing Britain and FDR, excoriating Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini, France’s Vichy regime, isolationists such as Charles A. Lindbergh and Father Coughlin, hoarders, slackers and defeatists is--Dr. Seuss?

Yes. From 1941 to ‘43, the man we know as the author of beloved children’s books was the editorial pen-and-ink man for PM, a left-wing New York daily. He drew about 400 cartoons for the newspaper, of which 258 have been collected here by Richard H. Minear, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, who argues that Dr. Seuss, along with Bill Mauldin and Herblock, was one of the “very greatest political cartoonists of that era.”

In one sense, this is no surprise. Messages have always lurked just below the surface of Seuss’ whimsy. “The Sneetches,” for example, is a plea for tolerance among birds who may or may not have blue stars on their bellies. We can’t help thinking of the yellow cloth stars the Nazis forced Jews to wear. “The Lorax,” with its hero who “speaks for the trees,” is a straightforward environmentalist tract.

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In another sense, though, it’s unsettling to see artifacts of our childhoods in a new and less innocent context. Theodor Seuss Geisel, who had drawn insecticide ads for Esso during the Depression (“Quick, Henry, the Flit!”), had already arrived at his mature style: “Horton Hatches the Egg” was published in 1940. In his PM cartoons, elephants that look just like Horton symbolize India. An ostrich that looks like a Sneetch stands for isolationism. Cats or dogs in corners, anticipating Oliphant’s little penguin, comment on the action by gaping or wincing.

In the introduction, Art Spiegelman (“Maus”) notes that “Dr. Seuss’ political cartoons were, perhaps, ahead of their time in seeking to entertain as well as convince. This is by no means to deny Seuss’ earnestness; it’s just that--much as with Chaplin’s ‘The Great Dictator’--comedy was too frail a weapon to deal mortal blows to Hitler.”

Indeed, Seuss’ vain, preening Hitler is more to be laughed at than feared. He comes across as less sinister than Vichy leader Pierre Laval or the uniformly grinning, slant-eyed, buck-toothed figures that represent Japan. Seuss “called ‘em as he saw ‘em, and most of the time he was on the side of the angels,” Spiegelman asserts. Minear points out cartoons, brave for their time, that urge the United States to disavow segregation and give blacks an equal chance at war-industry jobs. Seuss also condemned anti-Semitism. But he had a blind spot about Japanese Americans, shockingly apparent in his cartoon for Feb. 13, 1942:

Slant-eyed, buck-toothed members of the “Honorable 5th Column” throng the shores of California, Oregon and Washington, picking up packets of TNT while one trains a telescope on the western horizon, “waiting for the signal from home.”

What better justification for the internment camps could be imagined? “Racism,” Minear says, “was an ingredient in much if not all of American wartime thinking about Japan,” and it would be “unfair to expect Dr. Seuss to be qualitatively different from his contemporaries.” But that’s just what we do expect. It’s his own fault--convincing us over all those years, with green eggs, ham and the Grinch, that he was one of the world’s good guys, and leaving us to reflect on how even good guys are coarsened, inevitably, when they go to war.