I started school with Dick, Jane, Sally, Spot, Puff, Mother, and Father; the ideal nuclear family. I remember my first encounter with Dr. Seuss: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street and I was not impressed. I guess it seemed silly and inconsequential. I was entranced by my second-grade teacher's—Miss Alice White's—daily reading of Kipling's Jungle Book or my fourth-grade teacher's—Miss Ruth Gray—reading of Walter Farley's Black Stallion. I guess I was too old (and jaded) by the time that I encountered Dr. Seuss. However, it is impossible to dismiss a cultural icon. If the monstrous regiment of Rightist women: the Lynnster, Schlafly, and Leo get wind of Dr. Seuss' (Theodor Geisel's) politics, the Grinch, the Cat in the Hat, and the Lorax will go on the banned-books list in a wink. If this is a (fair & balanced) outing, so be it.
[x The New Pantagruel]
Thoughts on a Seussentenial
by John Fea
-Dr. Seuss
“‘Up’ may be the wrong direction.”
–Wendell Berry
I.
When 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.
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.
Geisel’s PM cartoons foreshadowed the flavor of much of his post-war work. Until his death in 1991, he wrote and illustrated books for young people that addressed nearly every major concern of the American left. For example, Yertle the Turtle, the story of a turtle named Mack who topples a tyrannical turtle-king, mirrors much of the spirit of the American Revolution, the workers movement, and the Allied assault on Hitler. “The Sneetches,” from The Sneetches and Other Stories, offers a lesson against discrimination. Some Sneetches have stars (of David?) on their bellies and some Sneetches do not, but in the end both races of Sneetches put their differences aside and learn that “…Sneetches are Sneetches / And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches.”
The Cat in the Hat, the book that catapulted Geisel to international fame, is an outright assault on the conforming tendencies of 1950s suburbia. A six-foot tall cat and his mischievous friends, “Thing One” and “Thing Two,” teach two middle-class children how to play more creatively, even if such rambunctiousness occurs in clear violation of their mother’s wishes. The Cat in the Hat not only replaced Fun With Dick and Jane as America’s preferred primer for young readers, but it also anticipated the general mood of the 1960’s counterculture.
In The Butter Battle Book, Seuss offers a stinging criticism of the nuclear arms race through the story of two nations—the Yooks and the Zooks—that find themselves on the brink of Armageddon over something as silly as how bread gets buttered. In one of his most controversial, chilling, and un-Suesslike endings, Geisel does not resolve the conflict on the final page of the book. Instead, he leaves the military representatives of both nations standing on a wall wondering who will be the first to drop their doomsday device (a “Big Boy Boomeroo”) and destroy the world.
Most prominent in Geisel’s work are the liberal Enlightenment values of progress, self-improvement, and cosmopolitanism. Perhaps more than anything else, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was a movement defined by the principles of human potential and the advancement of society. The best citizens of the Enlightenment’s “republic of letters” were those individuals who maintained primary loyalty, not to family, friends, faith, or nature, but to an international commonwealth of humankind. Such citizens of the world were rational creatures and thus had little tolerance for those who were unable to rid themselves of parochial passions or who remained too committed to traditional ways of thinking, knowing, and living. Such a progressive mindset found a happy home in the United States and came to define much of twentieth-century American liberalism. As a political and cultural offspring of the Enlightenment, the liberal democratic tradition—as evidenced in both major political parties—has exalted the ability of the autonomous person who, through exercising freedom of choice, can shape his or her own destiny. Liberalism, particularly in its elite and academic manifestations, has also fought against all forms of provincialism and anything it deems to be “backward” in nature.
As a child of this liberal tradition, Dr. Seuss encouraged his readers to achieve the impossible, to overcome limits, and to rise above the troubles of life. His books celebrate mobility—both social and geographic. Kids should not be held down by the places they live, the social circumstances in which they find themselves, or the ideas to which they have been exposed. They should instead imagine what is possible and then go out and make it happen. This, for Geisel, was the essence of the American dream. And he taught it to children well.
In On Beyond Zebra, for example, Seuss challenges children to push the margins of received knowledge. The book begins in a classroom where Conrad Cornelius o’Donald o’Dell has just learned all twenty-six letters of the alphabet, prompting him to declare triumphantly: “So now I know everything anyone knows / from beginning to end, from start to close / because Z is as far as the alphabet goes.” But Conrad’s nameless friend, the narrator of the story, quickly informs him that his triumph is not complete. Didn’t Conrad know that there were letters in the alphabet that came after “Z?” If he could only exceed the boundaries of traditional knowledge he could export himself to far away lands and encounter exotic creatures such as Glikkers, Sneedles, and even Floob-Boober-Bab-Boober-Bubs. By going “Beyond Zebra,” Conrad becomes a child of the modern era. He learns that knowledge is progressive, not fixed, and as a result can serve a variety of cosmopolitan ends. The moral of the story is summed up best in Seussian rhyme: “Oh the things you can find / If you don’t stay behind.”
This challenge to question authority and the received intelligence that often comes with it is also evident in McElligot’s Pool, the story of a young boy named Marco who spends his day fishing in a tiny self-contained pond. When a farmer informs him that no one has ever caught anything other than an old boot or can in this pool, the boy begins to weave a tale of possibility in order to counter such dour prospects. The farmer, carrying a pitchfork and wearing worn-out overalls and a rumpled old hat, represents the classic Jeffersonian yeoman. He is familiar with the landscape, knows from history and tradition that the pool is fishless, and tries to impart this local knowledge to Marco. But in the progressive spirit that defines many of Seuss’s stories, Marco rejects this agrarian wisdom and even implies that perhaps the farmer is the one who is the real “fool.” What if McElligot’s pool was not self-contained; but linked through underground tributaries to other bodies of water that, in turn, would connect it to the Tropics, the Arctic, or even Tibet? If this were true, it is possible that Marco could easily pull a “cow-fish,” a “2 headed eel,” or an “Australian kangaroo fish” out of the pool.
Marco’s tale is more than just a whopper of a fish story. It reflects the way many Americans have understood Enlightenment improvement. As the political party of progress, the nineteenth-century Whigs adopted an economic and cultural vision for America that encouraged people to move beyond the confines of their local places by building turnpikes, bridges, railroads, and canals that would unite them in a common national embrace. While the idea of such a national culture was first articulated by Alexander Hamilton and defended most vigorously by Henry Clay, it triumphed with Abraham Lincoln and the Northern victory in the American Civil War. The Union success secured a Whig nation and struck the deathblow to an older, decentralized, landed, and decidedly Jeffersonian understanding of America. Marco thus echoes Whig values when he constructs an imaginative infrastructure of waterways that allows him to overcome the parochialism of McElligot’s pool. In the end, Marco’s tale of possibility, fictitious as it is, has convinced the populist farmer (if the expression on his face is any indication) of the limited scope of his own agrarian world-view.
The book that perhaps best exemplifies Geisel’s cosmopolitan individualism is, fittingly, the last book he wrote. Oh the Places You’ll Go, published shortly before his death, reads like a Horatio Alger tale of self-improvement. It glorifies the individual right of choice in shaping one’s future (“You can steer yourself any direction you choose”). “You’re on your own / And you know what you know,” says the narrator, “And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.” Even when troubles come (and they do) Seuss tells his young readers to expect to face them alone (“All Alone / whether you like it or not / Alone will be something you’ll be quite a lot”). Self-improvement can be an isolating endeavor.
Oh the Places You’ll Go is an American sermon. It draws upon an older, but still powerful, historiographical tradition that celebrated the making of Americans through the courage of the first colonists, the rugged individualism of Westward migration, and the self-determination of immigrants. Like nineteenth-century historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s provocative and controversial interpretation of the American frontier, Oh the Places You’ll Go preaches that personal happiness comes through leaving home for more liberating spaces. If life does not yield the level of self-satisfaction that we might expect, then the narrator exhorts us to “head straight out of town… It’s opener there, in the wide open air.” For Seuss (and Turner) “Out there” is where liberated individuals are made This is a lesson in social Darwinism that Seuss probably learned from his own parents—German immigrants who settled in Springfield, gained moderate success as brewers, and were able to send their son to Dartmouth.
Midway through Oh the Places You’ll Go, Seuss describes the most dreadful of all places for Americans—“The Waiting Place.” It is here where people on the move get stuck. They stop being mobile and become confined to a specific locale where the pace of life is much slower. Patience, however, is not a virtue for those who are “off to great places.” If, for whatever reason, a “high flyer” is forced to land, he or she should not stay grounded for long. “NO!,” the narrator proclaims, waiting is “not for you.” “Somehow you’ll escape / all that waiting and staying / You’ll find the bright places / where Boom Bands are playing.” The sermon closes with the promise of America: “And will you succeed? / Yes, you will indeed! / 98 and ¾ percent guaranteed.”
Precisely because of its uplifting message of self-esteem and mobility, Oh the Places You’ll Go has enjoyed much commercial success. It has made annual appearances on best-selling book lists–especially during May and June when it has become a popular graduation gift. A quick look at the customer comments on the web pages of on-line booksellers like Barnes and Noble and Amazon reveal its continuing popularity. The praise for the therapeutic philosophy behind the book is astounding. One customer wrote: “Dr. Seuss acknowledges in this book that sometimes when all options are unattractive, we need to head right out of town. And how right he is.” Another reader noted that Oh the Places You’ll Go would help people “escape those unhappy times for good times to come.” Yet another enthusiastic commentator concluded: “Next to the Bible this is my all time favorite book.” And one reviewer reaped the scorn of Amazon customers when he or she dared to call the premise behind the book “flawed” and criticized it for teaching his or her son that “if you don’t like where you are, get up and leave it all behind for great adventure….” Needless to say, only 2 of 15 people found her review to be “helpful.”
III.
Oh the Places You’ll Go raises some interesting paradoxes in Geisel’s thought when compared with The Lorax, perhaps his most straightforward piece of social commentary. The Lorax addresses the environmental consequences of capitalism. The story begins on a dark and clearly post-industrial landscape. A young boy is walking down “The Street of the Lifted Lorax” in search of the “Once-ler,” a reclusive hermit who lives in a rickety shack at the end of the street. The boy wants to know more about the creature for whom the street is named. Who was the Lorax and why did he leave? These are questions that only the Once-ler can answer.
The Once-ler begins by explaining to the boy that the area surrounding the Street of the Lifted Lorax used to be a utopian-like countryside full of bright-blue lakes, green grass, and colorful “Truffula Trees.” Swomee Swans, Bar-ba-loot bears, and Humming Fish all lived happily within this Edenic habitat. But all of that quickly changed when the Once-ler (he describes himself to the boy in the third person) arrived and began chopping down trees in order to make “Thneeds,” an odd-looking piece of clothing made from the Truffula’s silky-soft tufts. While the Once-ler never quite tells us what one might do with a Thneed, he is sure about the fact that a Thneed is something “That-All-People-Need.” Enter the Lorax: a short, stumpy, orange creature with a thick mustache and a cranky personality who emerges from the stump of a Truffula and announces that he speaks “for the trees.” He demands that the Once-ler stop chopping Truffula trees and accuses him of being “crazy with greed,” since no one in his or her right mind would ever actually purchase a Thneed.
But the Lorax underestimates both consumer desire and the capitalist’s need to satisfy it. After a man in a business suit buys the first Thneed for $3.98, the Once-ler calls all of his relatives to come to this new land and join him in the Thneed-making business. Before long, the Once-ler has built machines to cut down Truffula trees and factories to manufacture them into Thneeds. The Lorax continues to protest, even to the point of sending the birds, bears, and fish elsewhere so that they can find food and clean air. The Once-ler, though saddened a bit by the havoc he is wreaking on the environment, remains ever the capitalist, affirming that “business is business / And business must grow….” Despite the prophetic words of the persistent Lorax he claims to have a “right” to expand his company in the way he sees fit.
Eventually, due to all the smoke in the air and the “glump” in the lakes, the Lorax exits his utopia, lifted away through the last “hole in the smog.” He does, however, leave a monument to himself and his message—a circular brick platform inscribed with the word, “UNLESS.” Seuss then takes us back to the conversation between the Once-ler and the boy on the now depressed landscape. The Once-ler, who has clearly repented of his environmental crimes by this point, claims that the boy’s arrival has enabled him to decipher the meaning of the Lorax’s inscription. “Unless” someone acts, he concludes, other places around the world will suffer a similar fate at the hands of industrial capitalism. The Once-ler gives the boy the last remaining Truffula seed and tells him to plant a new forest. Perhaps then, he hopes, the Lorax and his friends will return.
At first glance, Oh the Places You Go and The Lorax seem to be cut out of the same political mold. Post-war liberals from Harry Truman to John Kerry have defended both social mobility rooted in individual choice and the protection of environmental resources from the extremes of corporate capitalism. But when read together, these two stories shed more light on the paradoxes in the Seussian canon than they do on the ideological consistency of his work. They suggest that belief in personal self-betterment, as exalted in Oh the Places You’ll Go, can easily degenerate into crass self-indulgence. The “Once-ler,” who travels in a covered wagon reminiscent of the ones used by settlers of the American West, leaves home to find pastures suitable to his pursuit of personal happiness. The result of his move to the “wide open air,” however, is an environmental holocaust.
Similarly, when we are “off to great places… off and away…,” we are often doing so at the expense of the communities we leave behind. It should probably not surprise us that Seuss’s phrase, “Oh the Places You’ll Go,” has been used by Entrepreneur Magazine to promote the use of cell phones, laptops, and other technological gadgets that make up every businessperson’s “mobile arsenal.” The magazine informs its readers that “with the latest and greatest in mobile toys, you’ll be ahead of the other girls and boys. And wherever you are, you will succeed. (98 and ¾ percent guaranteed).” One has to wonder what the Lorax, that stubborn critic of the corporate world’s role in the destruction of place, would think of it all. When self-improvement and pursuits of happiness are defined entirely by social and geographic mobility, it makes it increasingly more difficult to care for natural and human places in the ways that the Lorax challenges us to do. Responsible conservation requires a care and love for places that can only come from staying put and obtaining an intimate knowledge of a particular landscape and its history. It demands the practice of virtues such as patience, neighborliness, and loyalty—character traits that run counter to the flow modern life.
These paradoxes in Geisel’s work have been part of the American experiment for over two hundred years. Thomas Paine’s defense of common sense rights has always been at odds with John Adams’ commitment to the public good. Such tensions have become the lifeblood of American historical and political interpretation. For some scholars, America was built on a Lockean foundation of individual rights, democratic choice, and the potential for economic and social improvement. Others have argued that the founders were civic humanists who, in the classical republican tradition, asked citizens to suppress self-interest (in exchange for virtue) and welcome a world defined by limits. More recent scholarship seems to suggest that indeed both sides of this historiographical tussle are correct. Americans in the past sought to creatively balance these two ideals. While Dr. Seuss was devoted to the belief that liberal individualism was essential to any democratic society, he also realized that it was often not sufficient to sustain the kind of communities needed for a republic to survive.
Geisel regularly used communitarian or classical republican themes to show that liberalism did have its limits. The popular How the Grinch Stole Christmas tells the story of the sinister Grinch who believes he can steal happiness from the “Whos down in Whoville” by depriving them of their Christmas presents. Though the Grinch’s master plan—to swoop down from Mt. Crumpet disguised as Santa Claus and quietly pilfer all the Who’s earthly possessions—has no moral grounding whatsoever, it is possible, at least early in the story, to sympathize with the Grinch’s critique of Who society. The Whos are clearly a people of material abundance. They bask in a host of luxuries, from the latest toys and noise-makers to the obscenely large feast of which they partake each Christmas. But we soon realize that there is more to the Whos than meets the eye. While the Whos certainly have a right as citizens and individuals to fulfill their holiday wants and desires with consumer products, and absolutely have the right to be disgruntled by the theft of virtually all that they own, their most important connections are not to their goods, but to each other. In the end they teach the Grinch (and us) that true happiness comes from being part of something larger than one’s self.
And who can forget the adventures of Horton, the kindly elephant who confronts the selfishness of the world around him by displaying traditional virtues amid difficult trials? In Horton Hatches the Egg, Horton must face the ridicule of the entire jungle when he agrees to protect the egg of a lazy bird named Mayzie who would rather sun bathe in Palm Beach than nurture her incubating offspring. Horton’s loyalty, patience, and trustworthiness are evident in his mantra: “I meant what I said / And I said what I meant… / An elephant’s faithful / One hundred percent.” In Horton Hears a Who, the heroic elephant comes to the aid of a microscopic civilization that he discovers on a speck of dust. When the Wickersham Brothers, a gang of rascally monkeys, threaten to boil the speck in Beezle-Nut oil, Horton goes to extraordinary measures to keep this newfound civilization safe. Even as Horton persistently informs us “a person’s a person no matter how small,” his actions remind us that the individual rights of personhood are often secured by the sacrifice of others.
In one of his lesser-known works, I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, Geisel cautions his young readers that cosmopolitan ambitions do not always yield a more comfortable life. This is the tale of a young boy who was living a “happy” and “carefree” existence in the “Valley of Vung” before he encounters a series of personal mishaps—from stubbing his toe on a rock to getting bit by something called a Quilligan Quail—that prompts him, in the words of Oh the Places You’ll Go, to “head straight out of town.” The moment his problems start to overwhelm him, a “chap” arrives driving a “One-Wheeler Wubble” and asks him if he would like a ride to the City of Solla Sollew, “where they never have troubles, at least very few.”
The boy takes the Wubble-driver up on his offer, but along the way encounters a host of other, more difficult, tribulations. The driver, for example, exploits the boy’s labor by forcing him to pull the Wubble across rocky and steep terrain. He finally manages to shake his oppressor, but the trials do not abate. In the course of his journey the boy misses a bus to Solla Sollew, gets caught in a “flubbulous flood” that almost kills him, is recruited into an army engaged in a military battle it cannot win, and falls into a traffic-laden underground tunnel full of birds. When he finally does make it to Solla Sollew, he finds no celestial city, but rather a place that is permanently closed to outsiders. It is at this point that the message of Solla Sollew departs decidedly from that of Oh the Places You’ll Go. Realizing the futility of his quest, the boy decides to abandon his dream of cosmopolitan happiness and return to the Valley of Vung to face up to his original problems. Sometimes the way of improvement leads home.
The progressive commitments behind what historian Michael Kazin has called “the Seussian Left” have done much good for America. They informed a foreign policy that toppled Hitler and contained communist totalitarianism (a lesson that left-wing critiques of George Bush’s intervention on behalf of democracy in Iraq often fail to remember). Progressives (including the liberal Republican Teddy Roosevelt) “conserved” our environment amid the devastating destructiveness of Onceler-like industrialization. And liberals like FDR and LBJ fought for the rights of ethnic immigrants seeking American freedom even as these newcomers clung tenaciously to their Old World traditions and communities in a way that some believed was un-American.
But the contradictions in Seuss’s canon between individualism and community, cosmopolitanism and local attachments, and self-interest and self-sacrifice reveal the inability of the left to inspire us—to offer any hope for those longing for a different kind of human flourishing. Can liberalism prompt us to get out of bed with voices of praise on Christmas morning even when all of our gifts have been stolen? Does it give us strength to risk our lives for the preservation of others—whether it is Horton’s Whoville or those in the crumbling towers of the World Trade Center? What motivates one to surrender cosmopolitan ambition and return home to face, sin, suffering, and trial? Where do we find the courage to defend creation against those seeking to destroy it?
The paradoxes and tensions in Seuss’s work offer a window into one of the twentieth-century’s most influential liberals searching—maybe unconsciously—for answers to questions that his liberalism, even on its best days, cannot seem to provide. For all of his true brilliance, one wonders if Seuss really grasped the limits of his own optimistic faith in ambition and progress. In many ways, his books read more like an author trying to come to terms with the liberalism of his youthful days at PM and less like an uncritical celebration of that leftist legacy. Perhaps it is this very struggle—one that we all must face while living in a country that was founded as a great Enlightenment experiment—which has allowed the writings of Theodor Geisel to have such an enduring appeal.
John Fea is Assistant Professor of History at Messiah College. He specializes in early American History and is currently writing a book on the relationship between Protestantism and the Enlightenment in Fenwick's Colony--the first permanent English settlement in the Delaware Valley.
Copyright © 2004 The New Pantagruel
