Long before the Grinch stole Christmas or before Sam-I-Am asked you to try green eggs and ham, Theodor Seuss Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss), was a political cartoonist for the New York-based newspaper PM. To mark Dr. Seuss Day, we spoke with SIS professor Patrick Thaddeus Jackson to break down how Geisel’s whimsical drawings and silly rhymes reflected serious global issues that continue to resonate, even as we reckon with the more problematic aspects of his legacy.

Many of Geisel’s cartoons criticized isolationism and fascism during World War II. How does this reflect American attitudes at that time? What are some specific examples of how his early drawings inspired or carried over into his children’s books?

When we are looking at political cartoons in particular, we should be careful to regard them as political rhetoric rather than a simple reflection of attitudes. Political rhetoric is an intervention into a political dispute, whether it’s a dispute among members of the audience or a dispute that members of the audience are having with others. Geisel’s editorial cartoons were definitely intervening into a dispute within the US audience about whether the United States ought to get involved in the war in Europe, calling attention to the threats posed by the Nazis, and lampooning those who would simply retreat behind the borders of the US and trust the Atlantic Ocean to protect them. One of my favorites of that sort is the 1941 “Lads with the Siamese Beard” cartoon, pointing out the connections between the Nazis and the “America First” movement in typically humorous Seussian way. Interestingly, the bearded “America First” character looks very similar to the wise men of the Kingdom of Didd in Geisel’s 1938 children’s book, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.

It’s also important to note that political rhetoric has to draw on existing commonplaces and tropes in order to be understood, and Geisel’s work is no exception. His drawings of Japanese figures in particular used depictions that strike us as offensively racist today, such as accentuating the figures’ front teeth and epicanthic (eye) folds and parodying a Japanese accent as being unable to pronounce the letter “r” (which he wrote out as a double-ll, e,g, “velly” instead of “very”). In so doing he was tapping into a deep well of anti-Asian sentiment that was widespread enough in the US at the time that Roosevelt’s decision to place thousands of US citizens of Japanese descent in internment camps starting in 1942 was, if not universally applauded, at least broadly accepted—at least in part due to the notion that persons of Japanese descent were, in one fundamental sense, alien to the United States. So, Geisel is in that way very much a man of his times.

How do you see his evolution from political cartoonist to children’s author reflecting a shift in mindset in how Americans engaged with global issues? Generally, what makes creative mediums so effective in engaging younger audiences?

Geisel was always interested in children’s books, actually! He wrote and published several before the war and returned to writing children’s books shortly after the war. This strikes me as less reflective of how Americans engaged with global issues and more an expression of how important Geisel felt that US participation in the war was—so much so that he put his children’s book writing career on hold. After the war, for at least the next 60 or so years, there was a broad consensus in US foreign policy that “America first” isolationism (which really means unilateralism, the notion that the US ought to be bound or constrained by international agreements that could restrict its freedom of action on the world stage) was neither viable nor desirable. So—and I am speculating here—perhaps Geisel felt that his efforts were no longer needed to reinforce that consensus?

On the broader question of creative mediums, the nice thing about younger audiences is that they tend to be less cynical and more open to wonder and whimsy than many older folks are. Dr. Seuss’ books (the vast majority of them, anyway; 500 Hats is notable for being written in straight prose, unlike most of his other books) feature absurd wordplay and silly rhymes, including those that are only made by his invention of nonsense words that fit the required scheme. And the situations depicted are often fantastical. So, they are fun. Younger audiences haven’t been taught to be “serious” yet, so they can, perhaps, appreciate that fun better. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg aim many of their films at a young audience for exactly that reason, although their brand of fun is more on the thrilling adventure side and less on the absurd/whimsical side.

Many people are often surprised to learn that beloved cultural figures like Dr. Seuss had deep connections to political commentary. What other examples of this crossover between entertainment and international affairs do you find particularly interesting or impactful?

I’m always amazed when people are surprised that popular artists have political views and sometimes use their art for political commentary. Lucas was clearly aiming at the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy when having Anakin Skywalker, after his fall to the dark side of the Force, parrot Bush’s categorical stance about friends and enemies—“If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy,”—and anyone who misses the Vietnam parallels in Return of the Jedi (forest-dwelling indigenous forces defeat the mechanized Empire) is not thinking hard enough. Geisel’s Lorax, who speaks for the trees, is a pretty clear statement about environmentalism, and his tale of the star-bellied Sneetches is an obvious commentary on racial discrimination and anti-Semitism. Writers write and creators create using the materials they find around them, and some of those materials are political.

In terms of international affairs, I have been convinced for a long time now that science fiction, in particular science fiction that concentrates on alien encounters, is rehearsing themes that animate much of what we look at in international studies. The discovery that self makes of other, the encounter between self and other, the negotiation and subversion and reconstitution of boundaries between groups…that’s the stuff of international life, after all. We’re saddled with this term “international” that seems to presume that the only relevant actors are “nations” (but then we largely focus our accounts on states!), but I’d say that the dynamics in which we are interested are much broader than just those involving “national” communities. A lot of this gets worked out in popular culture, and I would say, in science fiction especially. When we find non-human sentient life out there in the universe—and I believe that we will—the debate among human beings is going to be whether we’re in Star Trek, or Aliens, or perhaps Independence Day. Or Contact, the film with which I always close my science fiction and social science courses.

Looking at current international affairs, what lessons can we take from Seuss’ ability to communicate complex political ideas through accessible storytelling and imagery? How does the 2021 reckoning of offensive and racist imagery reflect tensions and shifts in foreign policy and cultural attitudes?

I often wish I could write as clearly as Dr. Seuss could! Part of the trick, though, is that he wasn’t setting out to communicate an idea. He was depicting a situation and letting it play out. Academics generally, at least in the social sciences, tend to be more interested in argument than in that kind of imaginative depiction. The closest we come is when writing up field notes, but even then, the portrayal of a situation serves an argument. But that’s part of what makes art compelling: it “says” things without our being able to easily summarize in argumentative prose what it says. Ursula Le Guin once commented that if she could say what her books are a metaphor for, she wouldn’t have written them. So, art calls for interpretation, and that’s where the interesting work happens.

Certainly, standards and notions of acceptability change over time. Since one always creates from what is around—it’s not as though creative artists reach into some Platonic ideal realm of Art and come back with aesthetic products—there is always a possibility that what plays one way, in one context, will play differently in another, later context. The Seuss estate’s decision to pull back six of Geisel’s books makes sense, because they simply don’t read the same way now as they did then (go seek out a copy of If I Ran The Zoo and see what I mean). Artistic depictions are not just reflections; they shape the cultural environment. And when we decide that we don’t want it shaped in a particular direction, the best thing to do is not to keep circulating things that shape it in that direction, or in some cases to accompany that circulation with a lot of contextual framing. This isn’t censorship; it’s changing standards of acceptability.

All of which is to say that popular culture is a domain in which we consider important issues involving how we treat one another and what we consider to be acceptable forms of action. We tell stories, we envision alternatives, we inspire the good and condemn the evil. The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, which I brought up before, is among other things a parable about maintaining social order by providing welfare for the poorest. Our mistake is sometimes imagining that this is a problem because popular culture should be “just an innocent good time,” devoid of wider implications. But we are creatures who crave and create meaning, utilizing the cultural materials at hand to work out our destinies with fear and trembling. Is it surprising that we would do that even when contemplating what to do on a rainy day when mother is away? 

Credit for political cartoons due to UCLA Library