Cat in the Hat’s Final Solution?

Are the works of beloved children’s author Dr Seuss racist? Are his books designed to indoctrinate unsuspecting children with extremist propaganda via the medium of rhyme? As six of his earlier books are withdrawn from print by his literary estate due to their inclusion of racial stereotypes, many conservative politicians and commentators have rushed to defend the late writer. “This is just wokeness gone mad, another example of the ‘cancel culture’ liberals and so called ‘progressives’ have forced upon us,” declares Republican Congressman Jerry Woolch. “I mean, all this fuss over the fact that one of the early editions of one of the books depicts a Chinese boy as being, literally, yellow, wearing a coolie hat and sporting a pigtail. I mean you have to see it in context – back in the forties everyone was a bigot and that was the way Chinamen dressed! You could see it in all the movies bacck then!” Woolch isn’t alone in believing that the books merely reflected the culture of their era – which was overwhelmingly racist. “In many ways, I miss those great days in the US – you could be openly racist and you know something? The coloured folks liked it that way – they knew where they stood,” claims conservative talk radio host Rick Lumbar. “They knew exactly who the racists were, no having to worry about mealy-mouthed white liberals just pretending to like people of colour for appearances sake, but really being card carrying Klan members in private. We were all happier – none of those race riots and the like – they knew to keep to their part of town, white folks kept to theirs. Except when they wanted a bit of Saturday night fun and would go over to the coloured side of town for a lynching.”

But some on the left claim that the problem with Dr Seuss goes beyond inaccurate and offensive portrayals of the Chinese. “Sure, stuff like that might well be a product of its time and, to be fair, the yellow colouring and pigtail vanished in later editions, but I just don’t see how these guys on the right can defend titles like The Jig Who Liked to Dig,” opines Steve Pune, editor of the West Coast Multi-Cultural Progressive Review. “Even as a kid I thought it went a few steps too far and could never understand how it lasted so long in print.” According to Pune, the book features a black caricature who enjoys digging holes in white people’s gardens (‘Dig, Jig, Dig’ goes the rhyme accompanying the pictures) – in order to escape a lynch mob, he eventually digs a hole so deep he finds himself in China, where he meets ‘The Slants Who Like to Play Cards in their Pants’. “Then there is the suppressed original version of the Cat in the Hat, where the eponymous character disrupts the household of a Jewish child, painting swastikas on the walls and scrawling anti-Semitic graffiti everywhere,” says Pune. “And don’t even get me started on Horton Hears a Jew, which, in this original version, features the elephant as living in occupied France, when he hears someone speaking Yiddish, apparently in his attic and trumpets an alert to the local SS garrison.”

For Pune, it comes as no surprise to find the works of Dr Seuss chock full of anti-Semitism and racial caricatures. “Let’s not forget that his real name was Theodore Geisl – if that isn’t a Nazi name, I don’t know what is,” he says. “Then there were those propaganda cartoons he did during the war, full of Asian stereotypes and calling for the internment of Japanese Americans!” Trying to act a voice of reason and moderation in the ongoing debate, academic Leon Klink, of the Liberal Arts Institute of Montana, has sought to cast doubt on the claims of both left and right. “The reality here is that nobody has banned any of Dr Seuss’ books – it is just that some of them are being allowed to go out of print,” he points out. “Moreover, as far as I’m aware, none of the titles mentioned by Mr Pune actually exist – there is no credible evidence that Dr Seuss was a Nazi sympathiser or that any of his books promoted fascism of any form.”

Klink argues that it is not unusual for children’s literature to fall out of popularity due to the problematic nature of its content. “Like all literature, children’s books are the product of the era they were written in and consequently often reflect attitudes which are no longer considered acceptable,” he explains. “Often they cease to be read simply because the world they depict seems out of date and unrelatable to modern children rather than because of any actual offensiveness in their portrayals of minorities.” Klink is adamant that there is no ‘cancel culture’ at work, censoring children’s literature. “If that were the case, then how on earth are the works of Roald Dahl still in print?” he asks. “They are full of anti-Semitic stereotypes and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory actually had to be rewritten, to remove references to the Ooompa-Loompas being African pygmys, enslaved by Willy Wonka!”

While conceding that he might have exaggerated the alleged racism in the works of Dr Seuss and even made up some of the titles he cited, Pune contends that his intent was to expose the hypocrisy of those railing against ‘wokeness’ and ‘cancel culture’. “Those right-wingers were perfectly prepared to defend the right to publish those books I made up, even when I told them that they were full of Nazi propaganda,” he claims. “That should tell you everything you need to know about them! They’ll jump on any bandwagon going in order to promote themselves!” As a corrective to his original claims, Pune has subsequently pointed out that Dr Seuss was actually of liberal opinions – a Democrat who believed that the communist threat had been greatly overstated by the right during the Cold War. “It could be argued, in fact, that one of his most popular works, Green Eggs and Ham, was actually an analogy for the US establishment’s unwillingness to contemplate different political idea and belief systems, despite not actually understanding them,” he ventures. “The narrator spends the entire book rejecting ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ – an analogy for socialism, perhaps – without even trying them, until then end, when they find that they are actually perfectly palatable.” This revelation has left some of the right reeling, with Woolch now vowing to introduce a Bill proposing the banning of Dr Seuss’ books from schools and libraries. “The man was clearly some kind of God damned Commie,” bellowed Lumbar on his radio show. “Trying to indoctrinate our kids with his leftist propaganda – we need to burn these evil books now!”