"These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong," said Dr. Seuss Enterprises decided to end the publication and licensing of McElligot's Pool (1947), Scrambled Eggs Super! (1953), On Beyond Zebra! (1955), and The Cat's Quizzer (1976) in addition to And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street and If I Ran a Zoo. In an effort to keep his more overtly racist imagery away from children, Dr. However, years later, he expressed regret for his anti-Japanese work to his biographers. It should be noted though that he worked at PM from 1941 to 1943, when he was in his late 30s-several years after he published And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street and only seven years before the publication of If I Ran a Zoo.ĭuring the war, Geisel defended his racist depictions of Japanese and Japanese-Americans saying, "right now, when the Japs are planting their hatchets in our skulls, it seems like a hell of a time for us to smile and warble." The hateful stereotypes in Geisel's "early" work was done for a number of different employers including the Army Signal Corps, for which he drew political propaganda, and the New York newspaper PM, for which he drew political cartoons. In this work, which can be viewed in collections at the University of California, San Diego library and the Springfield Library and Museum Association, Arabs are portrayed as sultans and camel-riding nomads Japanese and Japanese-Americans are depicted as buck-toothed and squinteyed and Blacks are depicted as savages who live in the tropics and wear grass skirts. In another put Out of Print, If I Ran a Zoo (1950), there are two shirtless and shoeless characters from "the African island of Yerka" that are depicted as resembling monkeys.īut these characters are far from Geisel's only production of racist imagery.įrom the 1920s through the 1940s, Geisel drew many advertising and political cartoons that utilized racist imagery. While editions from the 1970s changed "a Chinaman" to "a Chinese man," the racist imagery remained unaltered. In And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937), one of the books put Out of Print, there is a character identified as "a Chinaman," who has lines for eyes, and carries chopsticks and a bowl of rice. While advocates of anti-racist literature cheered it as a decision long overdue, proponents of the American tradition of portraying racial and ethnic groups through offensive imagery-think Washington Redskins and Aunt Jemima-jeered it as an attack on freedom of speech. So when Penguin Random House put six of Theodor Seuss Geisel's books Out of Print because of their inappropriate content for children, opinion was strongly divided as to the rightfulness of this publishing decision. Seuss is one of America's favorite children's authors.
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