When I was a teacher at a New York City public school, one of my favorite traditions centered on the Dr. Seuss book Oh, the Places You’ll Go. On the last day of school before summer vacation, I would read the book to my class of first or second graders and then remind them of the places they would go. All these years later, I still tear up thinking about it.
Dr. Seuss’s books were among the first books my grandchildren learned to read, and I remember the wonder in their voices as they read aloud for the first time, not from memory but by putting together the shapes and sounds of letters to make words. And with Dr. Seuss’s books, what fun words they were!
So, the recent headlines about how six books by author Theodore Seuss Geisel (also known as Dr. Seuss) would no longer be published felt personal to me. It’s unnecessary. It’s wrong. The way it was announced on Dr. Seuss’s birthday, celebrated since 1998 as Read Across America Day, smells of a plot.
The media tell us that an image of an Asian man in And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (Dr. Seuss’s first book, written in 1937) was racist, as was a drawing of African men in the book If I Ran the Zoo, published in 1950. “Audiences” and “experts” convinced Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the organization that has managed Dr. Seuss’s books since the author’s death in 1991, these titles had to go.
Of course the National Education Association was involved. The largest teachers union in the nation is a bastion of liberalism (that apparently doesn’t see the irony in its wholehearted support of abortion). Now, the cancellation of Dr. Seuss is on the union’s to-do list, and President Biden must have gotten the memo because there was no mention of the beloved author in his White House message on Read Across America Day. (Jill Biden is a member of the NEA, by the way.)
The NEA partnered with Dr. Seuss Enterprises on Read Across America from 1997 to 2019. But that year, the Conscious Kid Library and the University of California-San Diego produced a study on Dr. Seuss’s books and found that too few of his human characters were people of color, and their portrayal didn’t pass muster. (The study’s title was “The Cat is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s Children’s Books.”)
Now, the union has published a recommended reading list, and I’m sure I don’t have to tell you who’s not on it. What is on the list? For starters, there’s When Aidan Became a Brother, about a transgender boy, and Stella Brings the Family, about two gay men and their daughter.
The repudiation of Dr. Seuss is frankly puzzling, as many of his books contain messages of inclusion ordinarily lauded by liberals. The Sneetches unabashedly takes on racism without hitting children over the head with the message, and The Lorax was an early warning about climate change.
A favorite of the pro-life movement (and maybe this is one of the woke crowd’s strikes against Dr. Seuss) is Horton Hears a Who, a book that contains the unforgettable line: “A person’s a person no matter how small.” Dr. Seuss wrote Horton to explain his new understanding of the Japanese, whom he previously pilloried in political cartoons following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Horton Hears a Who is proof that people can change, just as the relationship between the United States and Japan shows that nations that were once enemies can learn to live in peace and partnership.
An attempt to silence Dr. Seuss’s unique voice is one more polarizing event in our increasingly divided nation. It’s the last thing we need. What we could use more of is the send-off that generations of children have heard, including my 6- and 7-year-old students heading for the challenges of the next grade:
So …
Be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray
Or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O’Shea,
You’re off to Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting.
So … get on your way!
Janet Morana is the executive director of Priests for Life, author of Recall Abortion and Shockwaves, and co-founder of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign.
