‘They canceled Mr. Potato Head! This week alone they canceled The Muppets! They’re canceling Dr. Seuss from reading programs,” Donald Trump Jr. was generally having a nervous breakdown over kids’ culture on – where else? – TV’s Fox and Friends last Tuesday.
“I literally know ‘The Cat in the Hat’ by heart, without the book there, because I read it so many times to my children,” he continued. “These things are not racist!”
Hey, Donny, calm down. Nobody’s canceling Mr. Potato Head. All the potato heads – Mr., Mrs. and whatever little Potato Heads they have will continue lying around or whatever they do – but the manufacturer is just mashing all the Potato Heads together in one charming family called Potato Heads.
Similarly, one of the many, many permutations of the Muppets has been cancelled after one season, but another is already springing up in its stead, one of a long line of Muppet shows that are destined to outlive even the planned Trump dynasty you devoutly wish for.
If you literally do know by heart the entirety of “The Cat in the Hat” – which I seriously doubt – you can continue reciting it, or at least reading it, to your heart’s content. It hasn’t been “cancelled.”
And, by the way, that book was written when someone challenged the author – known for his clever use of multisyllabic, often invented words – to prove that he could write an entertaining book for first graders using only short, simple language. Geisel kept his masterpiece to a mere 236 easy words.
And no one is condemning that book as racist. The cat remains, in 2021, unthreatened and properly hatted. The fuss – such as it is – concerns six other books. Out of more than 40, by the way.
Theodor Seuss Geisel – who was never a doctor – was born in 1904 into a privileged Springfield, Mass., family and died in 1997. In his adult years – after attending Dartmouth College and Oxford University – he went into advertising, famously creating the wildly popular “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” cartoon ads for a bug repellent. Ads which became enormously popular, lending that tagline to the American vernacular, and which – when seen today – are uncomfortably racist in their crude caricatures of the menacing bugs. It presaged today’s controversy.
To an extent, so did the many, many editorial cartoons Geisel did for PM, a feisty and short-lived left-wing New York City daily which reigned defiantly during World War II.
Geisel was scathingly anti-German and anti-Japanese.
The drawings of anti-war Americans, especially isolationists, were brutal. His depictions of our German and Italian foes were scathing. And his portrayal of our Japanese enemies were excoriating – and racist to the core. Not unlike a lot of other editorial depictions of the Japanese at the time.
Just before that war, in 1939 Geisel’s first children’s book, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” was accepted by a major publisher – after more than 30 rejections.
And it sold respectably, leading the way to what would became, after the war, a lifelong career for Geisel.
Everyone should remember that Geisel was a creature of his era, a time, the 1920s and ’30s and even later, when casual racism was routine – unrecognized, really – among perfectly well-bred white folks. Comments and writings we would abhor today were quite unremarkable at the time among the vast and largely white reading public which dictated norms. Their standards were lax, to say the least.
And that was Geisel’s time. In the course of his long and prolific life, Geisel worked as a political cartoonist, illustrator, poet, animator and filmmaker, but it was as a children’s author – as Dr. Seuss – that he became widely influential – and beloved.
I remember well when, as a teenage part-time page, book-shelver and general all around helper at our small town’s one-(large)room library, Mrs. Novak, the librarian, and I would try to be the first to grab any new Seusses that came in.
They were – and most were and are, today – wonderful books, filled with delightful colorful drawings and imaginatively employed words to portray mysterious but playful and entertaining worlds and challenge children to learn, to grow, to stretch themselves.
And no Seuss books are being banned. They are not being burned. No government or quasi-governmental entity is removing them from circulation, snatching them from our homes or libraries. And they are certainly not being “cancelled,” a word that has lost any meaning as it’s flung aimlessly and loudly about by right-wing scolds.
It is simply that Dr. Seuss Enterprises – the entity the Geisel family itself set up to look after the books and other enterprises fostered by the writer’s work – decided that those particular books didn’t reflect the late author well in 2021 and would no longer be reprinted.
Interestingly, one was the first, the one that kicked off Seuss’s career – Mulberry Street.
Its portrayal of a Chinese man is stunningly and embarrassingly crude, which Seuss himself recognized in later years.
By the way, if Don Jr. really wants to be shocked, he should check out Dr Seuss’s “The Seven Godivas: The True Facts Concerning History’s Barest Family.” It was also published in 1939, the same year as “Mulberry Street.” Years later, a commemorative edition was published, and my husband and I were lucky enough to find a copy at Audrey Nelson’s Crafts, Antiques, Collectibles and Used Books, a delightfully sprawling and ramshackle enterprise in Goshen, N. H.
Sadly, Audrey and the store are now gone. But the charmingly inventive tale of the seven lovely (and tastefully naked) Godivas – Clementine, Doreas J., Arabella, Mitzi, Lulu, Gussie and Hedwig – are here to delight guests who have their own fond memories of Dr. Seuss.