This webpage discusses the contents of one of the six books that Dr. Seuss Enterprises withdrew from print on March 2, 2021. An overview discussion is here.

"McElligot's Pool" (1947) records the musings of Marco, a boy who is fishing in the small pond for which the book is named. A passing farmer laughs at him, telling him that it is far too small for there to be any fish in it for him to catch; but Marco imagines that it may be connected by an underground stream to the ocean, and that fantastical fish might come to his hook from any number of distant places. "They might and they may."

I didn't find any overt racial caricatures in this book that might have motivated the publishers to take it out of print. For example, this resident of an unspecified country watches "some fish from the Tropics, all sunburned and hot" as they start the journey north to the cooler waters of McElligot's Pool; he might have been portrayed as a stereotypical Mexican taking a siesta under an oversized sombrero, say. As far as I can tell, the publishers simply pulled the book because they felt that it depicts a few non-American individuals as exotic ornaments of their lands, and they are trying to avoid giving children whose ancestry traces back to such lands the feeling of not being "normal."

Well, maybe these "Eskimo Fish" are a bit of a caricature.

Here someone who lives next to "the world's highest river, in far-off Tibet" watching the fish parachute past waterfalls that are too steep to swim down. Again, it's not a particularly insulting portrait, but Dr. Seuss Enterprises seems to be avoiding any portrayals of people as exotic, not even weird or bizarre. At least, these are the only elements I could find in this book that seemed likely to have been the cause of its being taken out of print.

To Next Book

To Main Page

Disclaimer

Original material here is copyright 2022 by Mark Looper, but obviously I claim no ownership of the images or text that I reproduce here from the works of Dr. Seuss, 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