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.
"And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" (1937) was the first book written and illustrated by Dr. Seuss. It's narrated by Marco, a boy with a habit of making up exaggerated stories, as he walks home from school and looks for something interesting to tell his Dad about. However, all he has noticed is "a plain horse and wagon on Mulberry Street"; thus, in his imagination, he begins upgrading and embellishing the sight, first changing the horse to a zebra, then the cart to a chariot, and onward and upward from there.
In looking through the book to see what had caused the publishers to decide to take it out of print, I only found a couple of things. First, after transforming the duo into a reindeer and sleigh, he realizes that's not very original, and that any of his schoolmates could have come up with it: "Jack or Fred or Joe or Nat - Say, even Jane could think of that". The publishers probably included in their decision Marco's implication that girls are less creative than boys (even though it's an authentic attitude - see Calvin of "Calvin and Hobbes"), but anyway Marco then replaces the reindeer with an elephant bearing "a Rajah, with rubies, perched high on a throne." What Dr. Seuss Enterprises mostly wanted to take off the shelves by withdrawing those six books was the presentation of non-white and/or non-American people as weird or exotic, and Marco includes this Indian prince as an exotic ornament for his elephant.
"A Chinese man who eats with sticks," however, is definitely being presented as weird. By the time Marco is almost home, the horse and wagon have grown into a parade with a band, spectators, a police escort, and a sideshow consisting of this Chinese man, a magician, and a guy with "a ten-foot beard that needs a comb." I suspect this one character, in the corner of the final two-page illustration, is the main reason this book was taken out of print; I don't imagine children of Chinese ancestry (or from any other culture that uses chopsticks, for that matter) would much care to see their heritage presented as a sideshow act.
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Main PageOriginal 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