By Joan Baum
Happy birthday to Dr. Seuss on March 2. The date was designated by the National Education Association in 1998 as National Read Across America Day, an annual event acknowledged by the president of the United States, and educators and lovers of children’s literature across the country, and, until recently, associated with the famous author, illustrator, animator, poet, filmmaker and political cartoonist Theodore Geisel (1904-1991), whose over 60 books have sold more than 600 million copies worldwide in more than 20 languages — not to count all the mass media adaptations.
But, now, six of Dr. Seuss’s books will no longer be published, because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,” and National Read Across America Day no longer will be connected to him.
Yes, the old adage proves untrue that sticks and stones may break your bones, but words may never harm you.
As of March 2, 2021, six Dr. Seuss books will no longer be readily available in schools and libraries, though eager beavers have already bought up, stolen or pretended to lose library copies, according to some librarians, and are negotiating big sales online. Try getting a look at those six books now!
I did, however, manage to see one, the only one available at the local library I was visiting: Dr. Seuss’s first children’s book, “And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street.”
I was not able to find copies of the other five, and it is indeed possible that they contain illustrations that seem to some not just “hurtful” or “wrong” but offensive, though I have a hard time believing that Dr. Seuss would have crossed that line.
The page in “Mulberry Street” that has attracted censure has a running, smiling “Chinese boy who eats with sticks” illustration in the lower left. Mulberry Street in the book, by the way, is not in Greenwich Village but near Geisel’s home in Springfield, Massachusetts. Considering the area’s high-end (and, likely, whites only) status at the time of the book’s composition in 1937, it was probably a telling choice on Dr. Seuss’s part to make that street the scene of a young boy’s imaginative visions of various and diverse populations who joyously parade along, figures who would otherwise have been alien to Mulberry Street denizens.
Given recent reports of violence threatened and committed against many who live in Chinese communities, the sensitivity of today’s teachers seems especially understandable. But it should become, as the cliché goes, a “teaching moment,” not a savaging one, against a man whose life and work brought and continues to bring delight to so many children and adults in over 100 countries.
Although “Mulberry Street” was written in the late 1930s, it won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1961. Dr. Seuss also was the artist behind the post-war film “Design for Death,” made for the U.S. Army, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1947 and featured Japanese culture (note that date!).
A political cartoonist whose work appeared for years in New York’s liberal-leaning newspaper PM, a strong supporter of FDR and World War II, Dr. Seuss drew numerous political cartoons that spoke out against racist attitudes toward Jews and Blacks. He also wrote about growing up in Springfield after World War I, recalling prejudice, because of his family’s German heritage.
Some of his college cartoons, as The Forward recently noted, “were trenchant and vociferously anti-Nazi when that was not the default position for his Ivy-educated milieu [Dartmouth].” Check out the documentary “The Political Dr. Seuss.”
These are challenging times for teachers, librarians, and those who believe in making up their own minds based on political and cultural history, evidence, context, intention and effect.
It’s probable that many school boards that voted to exclude “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from their state’s school curricula and local libraries have never read the entire book or know much about Mark Twain, who dedicated this now iconic narrative to his longtime Black friend G.G., and who knew exactly what he was doing by using the N-word. Anyone who can read without a gasp Huck’s decision not to turn Jim over to the authorities has to be historically illiterate, psychologically dense and unappreciative of the power of fiction to do what legislation often cannot.
As Dr. Seuss wrote in “I Can Read With My Eyes Shut” (1978), “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”
In every sense!
Joan Baum is a writer who lives in Springs.
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