Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  Sometimes the satire was too razor sharp. In mid-January 1942, Geisel began a series of cartoons called “The War Monuments,” in which he sarcastically paid tribute to those who hurt the war effort. Usually the targets were metaphorical—there was “Walter Weeper,” who complains and wrings his hands, leaving the actual fighting and sacrifices to others, and “Dame Rumor, Minister of Public Information”—but on January 13, Geisel went after a real-life target, the pacifist minister John Haynes Holmes. The well-respected Holmes was a man of genuine conviction—he was a cofounder of both the NAACP and the ACLU—and in December 1941 had offered to resign as minister of his church rather than “bless, sanction, or support the war.”46 But Geisel’s main objection to Holmes wasn’t his isolationism, but rather the minister’s suggestion that the Japanese people, while mortal enemies of the United States, were still “our brothers” in humanity. Geisel bristled at the comment. Then he hit Holmes hard, drawing a statue of the minister with one arm draped over the shoulder of a grinning Japanese fighter who holds the decapitated head of an American soldier.47

  It was a cheap shot—and the blowback was immediate. PM received hate mail over several days, much of it addressed to the attention of Dr. Seuss. “I protest the Dr. Seuss cartoon on John Haynes Holmes,” said one angry letter. “Beyond the sheer bad taste is something even deeper. That is, the implied rejection of the basic Christian principle of the universal brotherhood of man.” One reader berated PM for its “grotesque incitement of hatred,” while another suggested that such bad taste was typical of Geisel’s sense of humor: “Dr. Seuss has long been a thorn in PM’s pages,” said the letter writer.48

  On January 21, Geisel responded testily on the Letters page of PM:

  In response to the letters defending John Haynes Holmes . . . sure, I believe in love, brotherhood, and a cooing white pigeon on every man’s roof. I even think it’s nice to have pacifists and strawberry festivals . . . in between wars.

  But 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: “Brothers!” It is a rather flabby battlecry.

  “If we want to win,” concluded Ted, “we’ve got to kill Japs, whether it depresses John Haynes Holmes or not. We can get palsy-walsy afterward with those that are left.”49

  The ugly language and wariness of the Japanese was typical of the time, especially in the months immediately following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Like many Americans—and especially as a part-time Californian—Geisel was worried the Japanese might strike the West Coast. Indeed, there were already whispers that Japanese submarines had been spotted within sight of the beaches of California. Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command and an advisor to President Roosevelt, had already seen to it that the 1942 Rose Bowl game was moved from Pasadena, California, to North Carolina, fearing such a large crowd might attract the interest of Japanese bombers.

  Now, in early 1942, DeWitt was arguing for the forced relocation and incarceration of hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans, to thwart any internal sabotage by disloyal Japanese American citizens—the so-called fifth column. DeWitt had no real evidence or government intelligence to justify such a drastic measure; it was mostly his own racism driving his recommendation—“a Jap’s a Jap” he would later tell a subcommittee of the House Naval Affairs Committee.50 Evidence or not, such incendiary rhetoric was enough to stir uneasiness even among Americans who, in the days following the attack on Pearl Harbor, had stood by their Japanese American neighbors and coworkers, never once questioning their loyalty.

  Unfortunately Geisel also bought into DeWitt’s narrative. On February 13, PM ran a Dr. Seuss cartoon with the caption “Waiting for the Signal from Home,” depicting a long line of Japanese Americans—shown stretching along the entire Pacific coast—queuing up to receive bricks of TNT from a building labeled “Hon. Fifth Column.”51 From the stereotypical portrayal of the Japanese—each one is drawn exactly alike, in bowler hats and black jackets, eyes represented by small slits—to its underlying distrust of his fellow citizens, it’s one of the lowest moments in Dr. Seuss’s career. Further, it’s a shockingly tone-deaf message coming from Ted Geisel, who had experienced bigotry by association during World War I when he was pelted with coal and mocked for no other reason than a shared heritage with the enemy. By his own experience, he should have known better.

  PM received no angry letters about Ted’s cartoon, nor did the liberal Ingersoll ever address the issue. On February 19, six days after the publication of “Waiting for the Signal from Home,” DeWitt’s scare tactics finally prevailed; President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, permitting the forced relocation and incarceration in camps of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans. Prejudice was now officially policy—and Geisel and millions of other Americans hadn’t even blinked.

  And yet both Geisel—and Dr. Seuss—continued to fight anti-Semitism and fascism, training their fire on Father Charles Coughlin. He was an easier target than Lindbergh; the priest didn’t have the aura of a national hero about him, and his politics were blatantly anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi. In his PM editorials, Ingersoll lit into Coughlin with relish, calling out Coughlin’s Social Justice magazine as “seditious” and daring the U.S. Department of Justice to remove its religious exemption from taxation or close it down altogether. Dr. Seuss, too, jumped into the fight with zeal, producing a number of anti-Coughlin cartoons, including one of Hitler reading Social Justice as he talks to Coughlin on the phone. “Not bad, Coughlin,” says the führer, “but when are you going to start printing it in German?”52 Coughlin, with his reputation increasingly tattered, would fade away before the end of the year. Ingersoll, with Dr. Seuss as his standard-bearer, declared victory. Cockeyed crusaders indeed.

  It was Ingersoll, perhaps more than anyone, who would help Geisel find his voice on matters of race, equality, and social justice. On March 27, The Saturday Evening Post ran a long piece by writer Milton S. Mayer called “The Case Against the Jew.” Mayer had likely pushed Ingersoll’s buttons before; in 1939, he had made the case for isolationism in a think piece titled, “I Think I’ll Sit This One Out.” Now, two years later, Mayer was back again, accusing Jews of being the source of all national and international distress. “The Jews of America are afraid that their number is up,” wrote Mayer. “They know that every war since Napoleon has been followed by collapse, and they know that the postwar collapse will remind a bitter and bewildered nation that ‘the Jew got us into the war.’”53

  The following day, a stunned and angry Ingersoll went after Mayer in a PM front-page editorial. Calling Mayer’s article “a glove slapped across the American mouth,” Ingersoll spent three pages vivisecting Mayer and his argument. “America is great . . . because of the fact that not races or creeds, but the people themselves are what is important,” wrote Ingersoll. “Neither the colors they come in nor the creeds their fathers handed down to them shall be allowed to hinder nor to help them in their pursuit of happiness.”54

  It would be one of Ingersoll’s most widely distributed and reprinted editorials, and Geisel seems to have been impressed with and inspired by it. It would reflect a turning point in his work. He would begin to draw more cartoons not just about anti-Semitism, but about racism and bigotry against all people. And while he would continue to go after Japan as a member of the Axis, he would never again advocate for the internment of Japanese Americans. Nor did he portray the Japanese as inhuman, as did many editorial cartoonists of the time, who often depicted the Japanese as monkeys. While Geisel would continue to rely on caricatures to make the point, he seems to have also taken John Haynes Holmes’s philosophy to heart: the Japanese were the enemy, but they were still human beings. It was the same humane sentiment Horton the elephant would voice, with a memorable turn of phrase, a little more than a decade later: “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

  Some of Dr. Seuss’s finest ca
rtoons on racism came in the weeks immediately following Ingersoll’s evisceration of Mayer. On April 1, only four days after Ingersoll’s editorial, PM published a cartoon of Geisel’s with Uncle Sam being led by a figure labeled U.S. NAZIS toward a hooded, axe-wielding figure marked ANTI-SEMITISM. “Come on Sam,” says the Nazi. “Try the great German manicure!”55 Two weeks later came a Dr. Seuss cartoon with a “Discriminating Employer” astride a tank, looking derisively over his shoulder at two smaller tanks labeled JEWISH LABOR and NEGRO LABOR. “I’ll run Democracy’s War,” says the Discriminating Employer. “You stay in your Jim Crow Tanks!”56

  By June, Geisel was able to poke a little fun at himself, paying homage to his old Flit campaign with a cartoon titled “What This Country Needs Is a Good Mental Insecticide.” In this case, instead of Flit, a determined-looking Uncle Sam blasts “mental insecticide” into a man’s right ear that blows a “racial prejudice bug” out his left. “Gracious!” says the man. “Was that in my head?”57 Perhaps Geisel had come to understand that he’d had a few bugs in his own head as well. He was working to exterminate them.

  One of his best cartoons on racism would be inspired by civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph’s June 13 plea—in front of 18,000 African Americans jammed into Madison Square Garden—for an end to discrimination in the military, labor unions, and government contracting. Two weeks after Randolph’s demand came Dr. Seuss’s eloquent commentary: as a tuxedoed piano player marked WAR INDUSTRY sits at a pipe organ, Uncle Sam taps him on the back, a disappointed frown on his face. “Listen maestro,” says Sam, “if you want to get real harmony, use the black keys as well as the white!”58 Dr. Seuss, in the pages of PM for all to see, was officially a proud progressive.

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  • • • •

  When it came down to it, PM’s major political agenda during the war was fairly simple: Adolf Hitler was incredibly dangerous and had to be stopped. For Ingersoll, that meant that all of the U.S. allies had to be embraced, even Russia—and here was the source of the main political/editorial split among Ingersoll’s staff. Some viewed the Russians as a slave state under the thumb of Stalin; others thought Communism was working. Geisel leaned toward the former. He refused to be charmed by the Soviet leader, drawing him only six times in twenty months; the most heroic he would ever make Stalin look was when he portrayed him serving a Christmas Eve dinner of a roasted pig wearing a Nazi officer’s cap.59

  Hitler would earn most of Ted’s ink, showing up in more than a hundred of the nearly four hundred Dr. Seuss cartoons in PM. “I had no great causes or interests in social issues until Hitler,” said Geisel.60 His version of Hitler wasn’t the tightly wound, hotheaded führer common to so many of the cartoon portrayals at the time. Instead, Geisel’s Hitler was frightening simply because he was so calm, usually depicted with his nose haughtily in the air, eyes closed, and eyebrows disdainfully raised, carrying out atrocities in a matter-of-fact, businesslike manner.

  One of Ted’s more popular regular features was one he called “Mein Early Kampf,” depicting the adventures of Hitler as an infant. The first installment, in late January 1942, showed a stork delivering the newborn Hitler—complete with a mustache and a shock of black hair—who reaches over with a lighted match to give the stork the hotfoot.61 The following day, Hitler appeared as a toddler throwing his milk bottle at his nanny, “reject[ing] milk from Holstein cows as non-Aryan.”62 Geisel would discontinue the series after a third installment, perhaps realizing that Hitler worked better as the bogeyman than as the instigator of the joke.

  Geisel often used Hitler as a gleeful observer of American disunity, who cackled with joy as American journalists smeared Eleanor Roosevelt, or cocked an ear attentively as gigantic gears labeled OUR INTERNAL WRANGLES caught and ground. “I hear the Americans are stripping their gears again,” hoots the führer.63 But it’s when Geisel used Hitler as a genuine terrorizing force—though always with the look of smug calm on his face—that Dr. Seuss’s cartoons could become truly chilling. In July 1942, Geisel showed Hitler standing in a forest, an arm around the shoulders of the capitulating head of the new French government, Pierre Laval—another politician Geisel loathed—singing, “Only God can make a tree / To furnish sport for you and me.” Around them, the trees are filled with hanged corpses, all labeled JEW.64 It’s one of Geisel’s most haunting cartoons.

  There were other times when Geisel chose to depict Germany as a dachshund, sometimes giving it Hitler’s mustache and haircut, or a collar with swastikas. Oddly, it was this depiction of the Reich that earned Dr. Seuss another blast of hate mail, this time from dachshund owners, who resented Dr. Seuss using their pets as a stand-in for the Nazis. “If this insidious campaign continues, I am afraid people will begin to consider it their patriotic duty to kick my little darling around,” wrote one concerned reader. “Sorry, friend,” Geisel responded on PM’s letter page. “And if anyone kicks you around, sue me. You’ve got an excellent case!”65

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  • • • •

  In Geisel’s view, winning the war was all about rallying around American ingenuity, maintaining a positive attitude, and diligently contributing to the war effort through conservation, rationing, and the buying of war bonds. That meant a lot of cartoons zinging naysayers, hand-wringers, war profiteers, hoarders, and those who actively worked to undercut American morale. As Geisel saw it, one of the biggest offenders in that final category was the hyperconservative clergyman and demagogue Gerald L. K. Smith, whose monthly magazine, The Cross and the Flag, advocated a fascist agenda in highly inflammatory language. “I’m against permitting Jews to dilute our Christian tradition,” Smith would later tell The New York Times. “I don’t think our country should be mongrelized by the weaker elements.”66

  Geisel was appalled by Smith—but he was even more disgusted that Smith’s message and magazine were being propped up and vocally endorsed by two United States senators: his old nemesis, the America Firster Gerald P. Nye, and Robert Reynolds of North Carolina, a rabid Nazi apologist. Geisel found it galling to hear Nye talk about Smith in such fawning terms—there was always something about Nye in particular that really annoyed Geisel. After listening to the senator give yet one more depressing, fatalistic anti-Semitic radio speech, Ted informed Helen he was going to take down that “horse’s ass” Nye.

  Helen was not amused. “Don’t use language like that.”

  “But he is a horse’s ass,” Ted insisted. “I’ll draw a picture of him as a horse’s ass and put it in PM!”

  “You can’t,” said Helen. “It’s a vulgar idea.”67

  Ted would do it anyhow. On April 26, he delivered to Ingersoll a cartoon of Smith—under a hooded Ku Klux Klan robe—wielding a sword labeled DEFEATISM as he rides two men in a pantomime horse costume. Across the horse’s front end is the name Senator Reynolds; across its rear is emblazoned Senator Nye. As promised, Geisel had literally turned Nye into a horse’s ass.

  Ingersoll, who rarely, if ever, provided Geisel with cartooning advice, may well have raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to get us in a million-dollar lawsuit,” he warned, “and you’ll be sued yourself.”68 The cartoon ran anyway, without any changes, in that afternoon’s edition of PM.

  Several days later, a letter from Nye, directed to Dr. Seuss, arrived at the PM offices. “The issue of Sunday, April 26th carried a cartoon,” began Nye, “the original of which I should very much like to possess. May I request its mailing to me?” Geisel, trying to salvage the last laugh, refused to send it, hanging it in his own home office instead. “Whatever I lacked—and it was plenty—as a polished practitioner of the subtle art of caricature,” he said later, “I did become prolifically proficient in venting my spleen.”69

  Axe sufficiently ground, Dr. Seuss now turned to larger themes of preparedness, productivity, and optimism. Trying to keep up the American spirit, Geisel drew cartoons about getting off the sidelines, getting American businesses wor
king, and warning against overconfidence or complacency. One week, there was an American eagle in a boxing ring, wearing one boxing glove while the other hand is pampered by a manicurist at a table reading THE OLD EASY LIFE. “Champ,” beckons his trainer, “ain’t it about time we tied on the other glove?”70 Another week, Seuss’s cartoon featured a turtle labeled DAWDLING PRODUCERS, with two columns of turtles stacked on its back, leaning slightly away from each other to make a V shape. “You can’t build a substantial V[ictory] out of turtles,” Geisel warned in the caption.71 (It wouldn’t be the last time he would stack turtles.) There were also cartoons urging Americans to conserve and ration resources, one showing a thoughtless family hot-rodding down a winding road, hats flying, even as a soldier sits in his stalled-out tank. “The gas you burn up in your car in one whole year,” explains Dr. Seuss, “would only take a light tank 653 miles!” Ted gives the last word to the stranded tank driver, who addresses the reader directly: “So save it, pal! My trips are more important.”72

  Geisel’s cartoons to encourage reduced gasoline usage were considered so effective, in fact, that in May he received a civilian War Savings Commendation from the government—and was asked to provide similar cartoons about salvaging and recycling for the War Production Board. At the same time, the U.S. Department of the Treasury approached Geisel about producing cartoons to encourage Americans to buy war bonds and stamps, rather than wasting money on luxury items. When Ted and Helen drove across the country for their annual retreat to California—Ted might preach gas conservation, but he and Helen still had places to be—Ted brought along armloads of sketches and incomplete drawings he was working on for various government projects. “This is in no sense of the word a vacation,” Helen assured one correspondent in July. “Ted has endless government work to do besides his daily cartoon. But the working conditions are so beautiful!”73 Helen had good reason to be concerned about Ted’s productivity; after producing five books in three years, Ted hadn’t brought any new work to Random House since completing Horton Hatches the Egg in 1940. But the brat books would have to wait; Ted was too busy being a cockeyed crusader.