the New Pantagruel

Thoughts on a Seussentenial

by John Fea

I.

hen it comes to learning how to read, American children have had plenty of tutors. In 1690, the New England Primer schooled Puritan young people in the Calvinist belief: “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.” William Holmes McGuffey sold millions of his McGuffey Readers and held a virtual monopoly on the way nineteenth-century young people were taught their ABCs. By the 1930s, elementary school students were “having fun” with Dick, Jane, and Spot. But as important as all of these developments are to the history of education in this country, they pale in comparison to the impact that Theodor Geisel has had in classrooms, libraries, and living rooms across America.

PM July 16, 1941 :: Dr. Seuss Collection,
Mandeville Special Collections Library, UC San Diego

While most of us have probably never heard of Theodor Geisel, we are all familiar with his work. Writing under the name “Dr. Seuss,” Geisel helped millions of kids become literate and, in the process, exposed them to a set of ideas that have long defined America. His sheer commercial success (over 200 million books sold), the impressionable nature of his young audience, and his multi-generational staying power demands that we give him his due as one of the most important cultural figures in the post-war era. In a clever attempt to sell more of his books and extend his legacy into the twenty-first century (probably in that order), Random House has decided to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of Geisel’s birth by declaring 2004 the “Seussentenial.”

Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, Geisel spent most of his life living and writing from his home in a remodeled naval observation tower in LaJolla, California. He and his first wife Helen did not have any children (Geisel once said that he did not particularly enjoy being around children), but his books–loaded with strange characters and outlandish story lines–made him, without competitor, the most popular and best-selling children’s author in American history. Dr. Seuss expanded our imagination, encouraged our sense of self-worth, and challenged us to make the world a better place.

Giesel had a subtle, unintended, but yet irresistibly strong influence on the way children understood America. He was not politically active, seldom lent his name or his time to social causes, and claimed consistently throughout his career that he rarely wrote with a particular agenda in mind (anyone familiar with the whimsical absurdity of works like Green Eggs and Ham or There’s a Wocket in My Pocket would certainly agree). In fact, twenty-seven publishers rejected his first book, To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, because it did not provide readers with a clear moral message.

Yet even as he tried to avoid writing morality tales, much of Geisel’s work reflects his deep and lifelong commitment to liberal individualism. Seuss’s books, through their celebration of opportunity, cosmopolitanism, and human rights, read like childhood primers on the American values. But at the same time, they remind us that the ideals of freedom, self-interest, and liberty have always existed in tension with the pursuit of a common life and the personal sacrifices that such a life requires. Dr. Seuss remains a window into the deepest convictions and paradoxes of American culture.

II.

Theodor’s Geisel’s commitment to liberalism began well before he became the national icon that he is today. During World War Two, Geisel wrote editorial cartoons from the pages of the left-leaning New York newspaper PM that scathingly criticized Naziism, Fascism, American isolationism (Charles Lindbergh was a favorite target on this front), and racial discrimination in the hiring of defense workers. PM and Geisel seemed to be a perfect match. At the time he began his work for the paper, he had gained only modest critical and commercial success with his first four children’s books, making the offer to write for PM an ideal way to introduce its 150,000 readers to the quirky style of Dr. Seuss. Drawing for PM also provided Geisel with a regular outlet for his emerging political sensibilities. “PM was against people who pushed other people around,” Geisel told his biographers shortly before his death, “I liked that.” Between 1941 and 1943, he published over two hundred cartoons on the pages of this crusading voice for America’s popular front.

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