The Cat in the Hat Fights Back

Long forgotten, these trenchant cartoons, more than four hundred in all, were unknown even to the Pulitzer committee that honored Dr. Seuss in 1984 — by which time some eighty million Dr. Seuss books dotted the planet. But they’ve now been unearthed by University of Massachusetts history professor Richard H. Minear, and roughly half of them appear in Minear’s Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel.

Beginning in 1941, Dr. Seuss’s single-panel, black-and-white cartoons zeroed in on “appeasers” who opposed Allied intervention against Adolf Hitler. Dr. Seuss depicted Charles Lindbergh wearing a gas mask and pitching trash from the “Nazi Anti-Semite Stink Wagon” in a cartoon with the caption “Spreading the Lovely Goebbels Stuff.”

Initially Dr. Seuss urged American entry into World War II, and after Pearl Harbor, he kept up a steady stream of “What-Have-You-Done-To-Help-Today?” cartoons. A graybeard sitting beneath a 1973 calendar regales his grandson: “There we were . . . Japs to the left of us! Germans to the right! Closing in . . . ! Did I run? I did not! Unyielding, I sat in this chair and groused about the annoying shortage of fuel oil!”

In Dr. Seuss’s skewering of 1940s political figures, we see what fellow Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman, in an eloquent introduction, calls Dr. Seuss’s “signature zaniness.” “The greatest pleasure,” writes Spiegelman, “lies in watching the artist develop his goofily surreal vision while he delivers the ethical goods. The unique galumphing menagerie of Seussian fauna, the screwball humor and themes that later enraptured millions (as well as earning millions of dollars for the artist), come into focus in these early drawings that were done with urgency on very short deadlines.”

PM’s readers even got a bit of verse entitled “Sauerkraut Symphony,” accompanying the image of a tuba player atop the New York Daily News building sounding “discord” over the city:
A GRUDGE, blowing hard as he’s able
Sits high on his Tower of Babel,
And millions he treats
To the same brassy bleats
That Hitler oft feeds us by cable.

Yet for all the familiar touches — the loopy poetry, the feathered creatures, the steam-pipe contraptions — this is not the Dr. Seuss readers remember. His Fascist-era themes occasionally prove jarring. The book’s most blood-curdling panel, from July 1942, shows Hitler in a dark forest, brandishing a noose and surrounded by hanged Jews, singing merrily with French collaborationist Pierre Laval: “Only God can make a tree / To furnish sport for you and me!”

Another panel, drawn in October 1941, features a grandmother (labeled “America First”) reading approvingly to youngsters from a swastika-stamped storybook called Adolf the Wolf: “And then the Wolf chewed up all the children and spit out their bones. . . . But those were Foreign Children and it really didn’t matter.”

To his credit, Dr. Seuss consistently decried racism. “Gracious! Was that in my head?” a bewildered John Q. Public asks, after Uncle Sam sprays “Mental Insecticide” in Public’s ear, dislodging an ugly “Racial Prejudice Bug.” The artist’s “progressive” philosophy, however, did not cover the Japanese. In countless cartoons, bucktoothed, slit-eyed, pig-nosed “Japs” are seen threatening America.

Within seventy-two hours of the bombing of Pearl Harbor (and some fifty years before Spiegelman’s celebrated Maus and Maus II depicted the Germans as cats and Jews as mice), Dr. Seuss envisioned the Japanese as cats. Surging down “Jap Alley,” tails menacingly aloft, an onrushing mob of grinning, nearsighted Japanese cats prompts an alarmed Uncle Sam eagle (wearing a distinctly Cat in the Hat top hat) to say, as he beats one cat senseless: “Maybe only alley cats, but Jeepers! A hell of a lot of ’em!” PM’s readers wrote to protest Dr. Seuss’s depictions of German dachsunds but voiced no objection to his vision of hordes of bespectacled, TNT-toting Japanese-Americans forming a Fifth Column in the United States.

If Dr. Seuss Goes to War presages the peculiar panache that later made Dr. Seuss a successful children’s author, it also reveals the man’s inconsistent political worldview. Indeed, the same man who in 1984 published The Butter Battle Book, a polemic for nuclear disarmament written for children, thirty years earlier authored Horton Hears a Who!, admittedly based on a postwar visit to Japan.

Horton, an elephant (read: the United States), learns to help a civilization of tiny beings living on a speck of dust called Who-ville (read: Japan). Given the extensive American bombing of Japanese cities in World War II — which destroyed half of Japan’s sixty largest cities and left more than half a million civilians dead — Minear marvels at Dr. Seuss’s “willful amnesia” in having the mayor of Who-ville tell Horton:
“My friend,” came the voice,
“you’re a very fine friend.
You’ve saved all us folks
on this dust speck no end.
You’ve saved all our houses,
our ceilings and floors.
You’ve saved all our churches
and grocery stores.”

Mysteriously, the artist (who abandoned postgraduate study at Oxford and conferred the “Dr.” on himself, only to receive it honorarily from Oxford many years later) never explained why in 1943, two years before war’s end, he stopped drawing for PM, whose pages also included James Thurber, Lillian Hellman, I. F. Stone, Erskine Caldwell, and Jimmy Cannon.

But Minear’s discovery proves doubly enriching: We are grateful both for what Spiegelman calls a “painless history lesson” rendered in wonderfully stylized drawings, and for the wisdom Dr. Seuss showed in seeing that his greatest talents lay elsewhere — drawing cats in hats, for instance.

James Rosen is a Washington correspondent for the Fox News Channel.