Dr.

Seuss Childrens Books Show a

Commitment to Social Justice Relevant
Today

Donald E Pease, Dartmouth College / The Conversation @ConversationUS

July 30, 2015

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PRNewsFoto/Random House Children's Books

The 650 million children who have read Dr Seuss' books

have been exposed to new ways of rethinking a social
order often imbued in prejudice
On February 18, Random House announced the discovery of What Pet Should I Get?, an unpublished and
heretofore unseen picture book by Dr Seuss. The announcement came 10 days after the same publisher
revealed that it would publish Harper Lees discovered manuscript for Go Set a Watchman in the
summer of 2015.
In What Pet Should I Get? released this week the very same siblings who first appeared in One Fish
Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish now struggle with the question of what pet they should choose.
While the siblings in What Pet Should I Get? may not be as familiar as Scout and Jem Finch, Dr Seuss
new book is the latest addition to a body of work that remains just as committed to social justice as Harper
Lees famous novels.
From Flit to Horton Hears a Who!
Such matters were not always the chief focus of Theodor Geisel (Dr Seuss real name).
In the late 1930s, using the pen name Dr Seuss, Geisel created cockamamie ad campaigns for Flit bug
spray. During the early years of World War II, he contributed notoriously vicious caricatures of the people
and leaders of Axis nations for the Popular Front tabloid PM. After joining famous Hollywood director
Frank Capras Army Signal Corps unit in 1943, he co-created propaganda films under Capras tutelage.
However in the years after the war, Dr Seuss art underwent a radical thematic shift. With a flood of eager
baby boomer readers, he decided he wanted to speak to the perspective of children.
The racist caricatures of Japanese civilians and soldiers that Dr Seuss published in PM had drawn on the
social prejudice and aggression that Geisel believed lay at the heart of adult humor. So Geisel entrusted Dr
Seuss postwar art to the belief that children possessed a sense of fairness and justice that could transform
their parents world.

Geisel described his 1954 childrens book Horton Hears a Who!, in part, as an apology to the Japanese
people his propaganda had demeaned during the war. In subsequent childrens books, he began addressing
the major issues of the 20th century: civil rights in The Sneetches (1961), environmental protection in The
Lorax (1971) and the nuclear arms race in The Butter Battle Book (1984).
The zany wisdom of Dr Seuss
In 1960, Geisel spelled out the stakes of his art:
In these days of tension and confusion, writers are beginning to realize that Books for
Children have a greater potential for good, or evil, than any other form of literature on
earth.
Like To Kill a Mockingbird, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish was published in 1960. And like
Mockingbird, the conflicts, tensions and fears of that era are highlighted (albeit indirectly).
One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish follows a brother and sister who encounter a series of increasingly
fantastic creatures. Nonsensical skits and slapstick gags disrupt the childrens need to decide on a definitive
taxonomy numbers, colors, oppositions, emotional dispositions for these animals.
The array of sorting mechanisms communicates the siblings attraction to different, ever-stranger living
things. The book introduces more than a dozen creatures and each is outlandishly distinctive. Most
importantly, the children value all of them because of their uniqueness.
Overall, this tale of inclusivity cultivated an appetite for diversity and a delight for change. It rejected the
stereotypical ways of regarding persons and things through strict categorization.
Dr Seuss engaged 1960s unrest more directly in Green Eggs and Ham, also published in 1960. Using visual
and verbal eloquence, Dr Seuss forces the the adult, Grinch-looking creature to confront his stubborn
prejudice against green eggs and ham: the character is presented with a series of challenging questions
designed to expose the absence of any foundation for his bias.
The adult remains stubborn in his intolerance until his much younger counterpart convinces him that theres
no more basis for his distaste for green eggs and ham than the dislike hes taken to Sam-I-Am.
The 650 million children who have read Dr Seuss books have been exposed to new ways of viewing the
world, of rethinking a social order often imbued in prejudice. But adults continue to use the themes of One
Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. It has inspired a CEOs leadership manual, a Barnes & Noble e-reader
and the name of a dating website. The book was quoted by Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan in a
dissenting opinion earlier this year.
In 1994, Johnny Valentine and Melody Sarecky even applied it to promote same-sex marriage in their
childrens book One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads.
The pet shop that provides the setting for What Pet Should I Get? is inhabited by creatures that display
striking resemblances to Horton, the Whos and the Sneetches, along with Sam-I-Am and the fish
protagonists of One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. An offshoot of the social vision informing these
narratives, What Pet Should I Get? wont disappoint Dr. Seuss readers in the way the Atticus Finch
disappointed some To Kill a Mockingbird fans.
As older readers relive their response to a universal question nearly all children face, What Pet Should I
Get? will allow a new generation of readers to discover why Dr Seuss remains forever relevant.