In 1998, the National Education Organization (NEA) began celebrating Read Across America Day on March 2, which is the birthday of the late Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. I participated in a few of these when our kids were younger; the NEA had signed a license with Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which manages his estate, so his characters were used to promote the celebration and I read more than a few of my favorite Dr. Seuss books to students in classrooms decorated with Truffula or Beezlenut Trees.
On March 2, 2021, though, there was an announcement that (some) Dr. Seuss books were being taken out of print, and because of this and the fact that the NEA was no longer using Dr. Seuss' books to promote Read Across America Day (though the date remained on his birthday), there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth that "they," whoever "they" might be, were "canceling" or even "banning" Dr. Seuss. It's easy to see that this is bogus; last I looked, there was a whole shelf of Dr. Seuss books at my local public library, and an entire bookcase of new copies at the nearest Barnes and Noble, while an Internet search for the 2022 Read Across America Day (and Week) will lead to plenty of schools' webpages showing plans for celebrations that still center around Dr. Seuss books and characters. So there's no ban, as if there was any group larger than a local school board that could even enforce one, and he seems to be surviving any supposed "cancellation" very well, thank you.
It's also not hard to find the facts of what actually went on in 2021. First, the NEA had allowed their license with Dr. Seuss Enterprises to expire in 2018 without much notice being taken at the time; most people (including myself) only became aware of it during the tempest stirred up around the announcement in 2021 that Dr. Seuss Enterprises were going to stop printing six of his books (out of fifty or sixty). That is, they decided themselves to take just those six out of print; nobody forced them, and plenty of his books are still available new. So it's pretty clear that all the noise about some nebulous "them" doing wrong by the beloved Dr. Seuss was another bogus crisis ginned up by politicians and talking heads to distract from their failure to deal constructively with any number of real crises.
What I have found hard to find, though, is the specific set of reasons that led the publishers to withdraw each of those six books; digging that up is what led me to write this webpage, and the pages for each of the books that are linked to below. As I have come to understand it, the reasoning behind each of these two decisions by the NEA and Dr. Seuss Enterprises are kind of flip sides of the same coin, having to do with portrayals of race. Read Across America Day is intended to encourage kids to read, and bringing Dr. Seuss' characters on board seemed like a pretty good enticement in 1998. However, one thing about Dr. Seuss' books is that all the main human characters, and the non-comical human characters like people in crowds, are white (setting aside those who are not humans but instead doggish or bearish critters, or a certain Cat and Fox). This was par for the course for children's books when these were written; I understand that the contemporaneous Dick and Jane didn't have any black playmates until the late 1960s. In the 21st century, though, the NEA is interested in widening the appeal of reading among a population of students that includes an increasing fraction of kids of other colors, who are less likely to see themselves in the all-white world of Dr. Seuss' books. Thus the NEA's emphasis during Read Across America Day shifted to the promotion of a more diverse set of authors and characters, and it remains so (although, as I noted, plenty of individual schools still celebrate with Dr. Seuss).
As for the six books that were removed from print by Dr. Seuss Enterprises (pictured above), the concern was the same one that led Disney to label some of their older movies as containing "outdated cultural depictions" when they launched their Disney+ streaming service. If main and "normal" auxiliary characters are all white, then non-white characters are going to be used only in farcical roles. The common thread of all Dr. Seuss books is imagination, and the common thread of these six books in particular is comically bizarre ideas, or beasts, or locations; the narrator (a young boy in all but "The Cat's Quizzer") uses his imagination to come up with comical people to go along with these. As I said, this is kind of the flip side of the NEA's desire to present students who aren't white with "normal" characters who resemble them; Dr. Seuss Enterprises wanted to stop presenting non-white characters who are weird or even merely exotic, but in any case outside of "normal."
When I read about the general reasons for taking these books out of print, I had a hard time thinking of why any Dr. Seuss book would give rise to such objections; I remembered them all being pretty innocuous. But, of course, I had last read those six books as a white kid living in an almost all-white Midwestern suburb in the 1970s, so my perspective then was different from what it would be now. Thus I tried to find copies of the six books, to refresh my memory; however, in the hue and cry about "cancellation" in 2021, all six had become hot collectors' items, and libraries couldn't leave them on their shelves in case some borrower might "forget" to return them and then sell them on eBay. I finally realized that my local library had a non-circulating reserve shelf in the back for kids' books as well as for adults' books, so I was able to lay hands on five of them there, and my family had a copy of the sixth ("And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street"). The links below lead to pages for each of the books, with illustrations of what I found. I don't have access to the reasoning used by Dr. Seuss Enterprises (though in some cases it's pretty obvious!), so I just show plausible candidates for images or wording that might have been the causes of their concern, so you can draw your own conclusions. (Don't click on the links if your susceptibility to offense is greater than your literary or anthropological curiosity.)
"If I Ran The Zoo" has by far the most obvious trove of "outdated" material; I could only pick out a couple of possibilities in some of the other books. And it's not malicious racism, equating some ethnicity with laziness or stupidity or sneakiness or whatever. Theodor Geisel did have a history of that in his political cartoons; for example, there's one that he drew depicting American residents of Japanese ancestry as a gang of traitors during World War II that is used by Wikipedia to illustrate their article on "fifth column." But he repented, and I understand that he even wrote "Horton Hears a Who!" (1954) by way of apology for these. Certainly "The Sneetches" (1961) is and long will be a treasured fable about the idiocy of bigotry.
But from a piece of his juvenilia drawn in 1929 (a magazine cartoon that came up for auction recently, with "shockingly racist content" per the auctioneer's description of its portrayal of black people) to the Nazzim of Bazzim in "On Beyond Zebra!" (written a year after "Horton Hears a Who!"), comical caricatures of people of other races and other countries just don't get a pass any longer. When I heard in 2021 about some weathervane politician [note added 2 March 2024: now a failed Speaker of the House of Representatives] posting a video of himself reading "Green Eggs and Ham" as a display of "courage in defiance of Cancel Culture" or some such bunk, I thought of a phrase from the story whose title I borrowed for this webpage (one of the other stories in "The Sneetches and Other Stories"): "I never heard such whimpering." If he wants to make a show of defiance, let him read "If I Ran The Zoo", displaying all the pictures, and see if he gets a different kind of reaction.
Original material here is copyright 2022 by Mark Looper, but obviously I claim no ownership of the images or text that I reproduce from the works of Dr. Seuss, here or on the pages linked above, which are copyright by Dr. Seuss Enterprises. I reproduce them here under terms of scholarly and journalistic fair use. Reuse of my copyrighted material is authorized under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0).
new 1 March 2022, updated 2 March 2024
