Tag: dr seuss
Heroes But Not Saints: Why We Shouldn't 'Cancel' Flawed Progressive Icons

Heroes But Not Saints: Why We Shouldn't 'Cancel' Flawed Progressive Icons

In a recent op-ed column for the New York Times, Alexis McGill Johnson, president of Planned Parenthood, wrote that "we're done making excuses for our founder," Margaret Sanger. Planned Parenthood began that reckoning last year when it removed Sanger's name from one of its New York City clinics. Now it is taking further steps.

"We have defended Sanger as a protector of bodily autonomy and self-determination, while excusing her association with white supremacist groups and eugenics as an unfortunate 'product of her time,'" Johnson wrote.

For decades, foes of birth control and abortion have attacked Sanger (1879-1966) as a racist.

In 2011, for example, Herman Cain, the late Republican presidential candidate and African American businessman, claimed in a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation that "when Margaret Sanger—check my history—started Planned Parenthood, the objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world. It's planned genocide." Later that year, in an interview on Face the Nation, Cain insisted that "75 percent of [Planned Parenthood's clinics] were built in the black community."

In fact, according to the Guttmacher Institute, only about 110 of Planned Parenthood's 800 clinics are in areas where African Americans make up over 25 percent of the overall population. Planned Parenthood establishes clinics based on where medical needs—including a shortage of primary care providers and a high poverty rate—are the greatest. One fact that Cain (who died of COVID last year) and others have conveniently ignored is that none of Sanger's clinics, or Planned Parenthood clinics, performed abortions before Roe v. Wade made them legal in 1973.

In 2015, 25 House Republicans campaigned to have a bust of the pioneering family planning advocate removed from the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas declared that Sanger didn't belong there because of her "inhumane life's work," and because she "advocated for the extermination of African Americans."

These lies have been repeated so often that many people, including African Americans, now believe them.

There is no doubt that the Black community, and Black women, have for many years been mistreated by the nation's health care system. It is thus understandable that many Black Americans distrust many health care providers. For example, a recent survey by Kaiser Family Foundation found that Black Americans were more skeptical of the COVID vaccine than other groups.

Planned Parenthood is one of the nation's largest providers of health services – not only family planning and abortion, which constitutes a small part of its work – to low-income women and women of color. Its recent efforts to distance itself from Sanger are likely motivated in large part by its admirable effort to reach out to more African American women in need of first-rate health care.

But in doing so, Planned Parenthood need not reinforce the misconceptions about Sanger that the pro-life movement and right-wingers in general have been perpetuating for decades.

These misleading views about Sanger hinge on two aspects of her life that have generated considerable controversy and debate.

At one point in her life, Sanger flirted with the now-discredited eugenics movement, which sought to improve the overall health and fitness of humankind through selective breeding and which enjoyed widespread support from mainstream doctors, scientists and the general public – including many liberals and radicals -- in the early 1900s. Some leaders of the eugenics movement were vicious racists who viewed eugenics as a means to create a "superior" white human race, reflected in Paul Popenoe's widely-read and deeply-racist 1918 book, Applied Eugenics. Sanger was not among them, but her embrace of some aspects of eugenics understandably damaged her reputation.

In Sanger's day, many scientists believed that – in the words of that period -- "feeble minded" and "mentally unfit" people were more likely to become criminals and rapists. Reflecting those views, Sanger argued that eugenics might help reduce the incidence of babies born with physical or mental handicaps. She wrote: "If by 'unfit' is meant the physical or mental defects of a human being, that is an admirable gesture, but if 'unfit' refers to races or religions, then that is another matter which I frankly deplore." Sanger herself later repudiated her views about sterilization of the so-called "feeble-minded." Sanger's statement demonstrates that she did not subscribe to the use of eugenics in racist ways.

As a young nurse in New York City, Sanger met poor women, mostly immigrants, who had had several children and were desperate to avoid future pregnancies. She opened the nation's first birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916, went to jail to defend women's right to contraception, and founded the organization that later became Planned Parenthood. She believed that access to family planning would liberate many women from poverty and suffering.

In 1919, after she had opened her first clinics in New York, William Oscar Saunders, editor of the Elizabeth City Independent, invited Sanger to give a talk in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, where African Americans comprised about 37 percent of the population. Saunders was known as an outspoken opponent of racism and anti-Semitism and was an advocate for birth control.

In November of that year, she spoke on "Woman's Place in the 20th Century" to an audience of about 800 people in Elizabeth City, the first public meeting about birth control in the South. Given the South's fierce Jim Crow laws, it is likely that the audience was mostly or all white. Her talk was so well-received that other groups in the city asked Sanger to stay an extra few days and give additional lectures. She gave one impromptu talk to elderly women concerned about their daughters' and granddaughters' unwanted pregnancies. She also spoke at an African American church, at a Black high school, and to a group of Black women about birth control. Sanger's talks catalyzed an effort by the town's residents to establish a birth control clinic for local mill workers.

"Never have I met with more sympathy, more serious attention, more complete understanding than in my addresses to the white and black people of this Southern mill town," Sanger later wrote about that trip. "All in all, these audiences were a striking demonstration of birth control's universal message of freedom and betterment."

In 1930, with the support of the prominent black activist and intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois, the Urban League, and the Amsterdam News (New York's leading black newspaper), Sanger opened a family planning clinic in Harlem, staffed by a black doctor and black social worker. Then, in 1939, key leaders in the black community encouraged Sanger to expand her efforts to the rural South, where most African Americans lived. Thus began the "Negro Project," with Du Bois, Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of Harlem's powerful Abyssinian Baptist Church, anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, educator Mary McLeod Bethune, and other black leaders lending support.

Like her African-American supporters, Sanger viewed birth control as a way to empower black women, not as a means to reduce the black population. Sanger explained that the project was designed to help "a group notoriously underprivileged and handicapped…to get a fair share of the better things in life. To give them the means of helping themselves is perhaps the richest gift of all. We believe birth control knowledge brought to this group, is the most direct, constructive aid that can be given them to improve their immediate situation."

The other aspect of Sanger's life that has raised concern is a one-time talk she gave to the women's auxiliary of a Ku Klux Klan chapter in New Jersey in 1926. In her 1938 autobiography, Sanger wrote that she was willing to talk to virtually anyone to gain support for the birth control movement. "Always to me any aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan at Silver Lake, New Jersey, one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing."

Sanger had no more meetings with any Klan-affiliated groups and may have had second thoughts about the wisdom of giving that talk in New Jersey. But that incident did not stop Black leaders from inviting her to establish the Harlem clinic four years later or to undertake the subsequent Negro Project in the South. They trusted Sanger as an ally to the cause of Black freedom, despite what some might consider her occasional lapses in judgement. Planned Parenthood's current efforts to forge stronger alliances with Black women is actually an extension – not a repudiation – of Sanger's work.

If Planned Parenthood leaders think that distancing the organization from Sanger will immunize it from attacks from Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, or other right-wing opponents of abortion who wrongly claim that Sanger and Planned Parenthood were engaged in "black genocide," they are wrong. As Katha Pollitt wrote in her Nation column last year, removing Sanger's name from its flagship clinic in Manhattan "only helps abortion opponents" and "[buys] into anti-choice propaganda." Pollitt, a well-known feminist, went even further: "Margaret Sanger did more good for American women than any other individual in the entire 20th century."

But there's a larger issue involved not only in Planned Parenthood's effort to lower Sanger's profile but also in wider efforts to take stock of racism among many progressive leaders and movements over the past century or more.

Where should we draw the line with regard to our progressive icons who said or did things in their day that we now find unacceptable?

In 1918, Eleanor Roosevelt described Harvard Law professor Felix Frankfurter, then serving as an advisor to President Wilson, as "an interesting little man but very Jew." That same year, after attending a party for Bernard Baruch when her husband Franklin was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, she wrote to her mother-in-law, "I'd rather be hung than seen at" the party, since it would be "mostly Jews." She also reported that, "The Jew party was appalling." By the 1930s, however, she became a crusader for Jewish causes, a foe of anti-Semitism and racism, and a powerful (though unsuccessful) advocate for getting her husband, by then the president, to do more to save Jews from the Nazi holocaust. She was also a powerful ally of the civil rights and feminist movements and the leading figure in drafting the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Should we strip Eleanor Roosevelt's name from high schools named for her in Maryland, New York, and California?

Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, is justifiably admired for orchestrating the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that outlawed school segregation and many other path breaking liberal Supreme Court rulings. But as California's Attorney General at the start of World War 2, he played a leading role in rounding up Japanese Americans, putting them in internment camps, and confiscating their property and businesses. Only in retirement did Warren acknowledge that the relocation was a mistake based on hysteria. Should we rename the California State Building in San Francisco, schools in California and Texas, and the fairgrounds in Santa Barbara named for Warren?

Albert Einstein, a socialist, co-chaired the American Crusade to End Lynching, backed the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys (nine black teenagers who were wrongly framed of the rape of a white woman), gave talks at historically black universities, was a close friend of the Black leftist Paul Robeson even during the Red Scare, and wrote articles in support of civil rights – all unusual activities for a well-known scientist. But historians recently uncovered Einstein's personal travel diary from the 1920s, in which he wrote some racist slurs against the Chinese people. Should we tear down the 12-foot high statue of Einstein at the entrance to the headquarters of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.?

Theodor Geisel's racist depictions of Japanese Americans in his editorial cartoons (under his pen name Dr. Seuss) for the radical newspaper PM during World War II contradicted his lifelong opposition to racism and anti-Semitism, and his effort to teach children to stand up to bullies and tyrants. Should we boycott his books or remove the statue of Geisel on the campus of the University of California-San Diego, or rename the nearby Geisel Library?

Jackie Robinson not only broke baseball's color line in 1947, he was also a civil rights activist during and after his playing career, a frequent presence on picket lines and at marches. But in 1949 — at the height of the Cold War — he allowed Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey to persuade him to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee so that he could publicly criticize Robeson at the height of the Cold War. As expected, Robinson challenged Robeson's patriotism, but he also denounced American racism. The press focused on the former and ignored the latter. In 1960, he endorsed Richard Nixon for president, believing he was a stronger civil rights supporter than John F. Kennedy. Robinson later apologized for both actions. Should Major League Baseball cancel Jackie Robinson Day and should the Dodgers remove the statue of Robinson at the front of Dodger Stadium?

Betty Friedan, founder of the National Organization for Women was homophobic and expressed her concern that the involvement of women she called "mannish" or "man-hating" lesbians within the movement would hinder the feminist cause. Should we burn our copies of The Feminine Mystique?

Martin Luther King, Jr. plagiarized parts of his Ph.D. dissertation at Boston University. Should we cancel Martin Luther King Day and rename all the streets and schools named after him? Should Planned Parenthood rescind its Margaret Sanger Award, which it bestowed on King in 1966?

Paul Wellstone, the left-wing Senator from Minnesota, voted in favor of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which outlawed federal recognition of same-sex marriage. He later said he regretted his stance on the issue. Should the St. Paul, Minnesota school board take Paul Wellstone's name off an elementary school dedicated to the late senator and his wife Sheila

During his early days as an activist with the railroad workers union in the late 1800s, Eugene Debs told jokes in black dialect, supported keeping blacks out of jobs in the South, and favored segregation on trains. He also had bigoted views towards Jews, Italians, Chinese. and other immigrant groups, according to historian Nick Salvatore's Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. But Debs' views evolved. As the leader and five-time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party in the early 1900s, Debs challenged his fellow unionists and Socialists who sought to keep blacks out of their movement. He told them that "white workingmen would be exploited so long as the Negroes were held in an inferior position," according to Ray Ginger, author of another Debs biography, The Bending Cross. Should the Democratic Socialists of America stop giving its annual Eugene Debs Award?

Cesar Chavez, the leader of the United Farm Workers movement, was opposed to employers who used undocumented workers as strike breakers. As a result, he initially opposed illegal immigration and occasionally even reported undocumented workers to immigration authorities so they could be deported. But in step with other Mexican American civil rights groups, he later revised his views and supported amnesty for immigrants who had crossed the border without legal documents. Should California repeal its Cesar Chavez Day as a state holiday?

None of these people is like Klan leader David Duke, anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly, hate-monger Rush Limbaugh, or all-purpose right-winger Ted Cruz -- reactionaries who devoted their lives to promoting oppression and injustice.

Any fair-minded understanding of Margaret Sanger and other progressive activists and thinkers needs to consider the totality of those people's contributions to the struggle for social justice. We shouldn't ignore their offensive views or behavior. But we should also not judge people by their worst moments. We need to recognize that they — like many other reformers and radicals — were human beings who were both trapped by and sought to escape the social and political straitjackets of their times.

If we require our progressive and radical heroes to be saints — if we eliminate leaders from the progressive pantheon because they held some views or engaged in behaviors that were conventional in their day but problematic today — we won't have many people left to admire.

Peter Dreier is professor of politics at Occidental College and author of The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame. His next book, Baseball Rebels: The Reformers and Radicals Who Shook Up the Game and Changed America," will be published in 2022.

Why Dr. Seuss Would Have Despised His Right-Wing 'Defenders'

Why Dr. Seuss Would Have Despised His Right-Wing 'Defenders'

It is hard to imagine anything more exhausting than the constant indignation of so-called conservatives, who somehow sustain a state of rigid, barking anger over the direction of American culture. To them, every advance for human rights represents the imminent end of civilization, and every small effort to assuage historical injuries signals the twilight of liberty.

These crank crusades always have multiple objectives, both political and commercial. On the political side, the Republicans are desperate to distract us from the roaring successes of President Joe Biden's administration, whose program of vaccine production and distribution and pandemic relief legislation are about to rescue the nation from former President Donald Trump's lingering disasters. And on the commercial side, there is nothing like a cultural jihad to separate fools from their money.

The propaganda phrase of the moment is "cancel culture," a terrifying phenomenon manifested just this week in the supposed liquidation of Dr. Seuss. If you believe what you hear on Fox News Channel, the late author of dozens of classic books beloved by children and adults alike — and many other works of art in film and cartooning — is on the verge of being censored, erased, and vilified. Who is doing these terrible things? According to Fox and various other right-wing outlets, this assault is the work of "them," a suitably vague category that encompasses liberals, tech companies, Democrats, and probably Joe Biden himself.

Of course, if you believe what you hear on Fox News, then you are, by definition, a dupe.

The actual event that provoked all the outrage over Dr. Seuss has nothing to do with Biden, Democrats or any other favorite Fox villains. The Seuss estate, which oversees the 60 books and other properties he left to posterity, decided to pull a half-dozen of them because their content includes dated and offensive stereotypes.

When you remember that his first book was published more than 80 years ago, that dissonance seems almost inevitable. The estate's decision, a sensible response to changing standards, was plainly designed to protect both the Seuss brand and the memory of Theodor Seuss Geisel as a liberal humanist. It is the opposite of "canceling" Dr. Seuss. And anyone who wants to read the old titles can still find them.

The Seuss non-scandal is a fine example of misdirection and distraction, and a powerful indication that Republicans really have nothing to say for themselves. This time, the consequences are harmless, mainly the further enrichment of the Seuss estate as gullible Americans flood Amazon with orders for his books, which they evidently fear are about to be torched by "the radical left."

The irony is that Dr. Seuss was himself a lifelong Democrat whose advocacy of liberal causes dated back to the New Deal, when he drew scores of blistering cartoons for the left-leaning daily New York newspaper PM, usually on the subject of Republican perfidy. He despised Hitler, Mussolini, Charles Lindbergh, and the original "America First" movement; he deplored racism and anti-Semitism; and he served patriotically in the war against fascism. He would have low regard for the Trumpists who are now misusing his good name.

While Dr. Seuss avoided the kind of moralizing that repels young readers, his stories and poems often grappled with contemporary issues, from authoritarianism (Yertle the Turtle) and racial equality (The Sneetches) to environmental degradation (The Lorax) and even materialism (How the Grinch Stole Christmas!).

What his books were really about is learning, everything from vocabulary words to personal and societal integrity. He wasn't afraid of change or changing his mind, which is why it seems likely that, were he alive today, he'd want to revise or withdraw offensive content he created so long ago. After World War II, he came to regret his own racially charged contributions to anti-Japanese propaganda, which is said to be why he dedicated Horton Hears A Who! — an allegory about the U.S. occupation of Japan — to a Japanese friend.

In short, the right-wing pundits and personalities leaping to "defend" Dr. Seuss now could learn a lot from reading him. Being who they are, they probably won't.

But you and your kids still can.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Don Jr. Erupts Over ‘Cancel Culture’ On Fox & Friends

Don Jr. Erupts Over ‘Cancel Culture’ On Fox & Friends

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Donald Trump, Jr. exploded in a rant about "cancel culture" Tuesday morning on Fox News, railing against a wide variety of right-wing identified entities he falsely claims have been "canceled" for being racist or otherwise unacceptable -- among them, Mr. Potato Head, Dr. Seuss, and The Muppets. He also railed against the thousands of people who identified the stage his father spoke on at a conservative conference last weekend as appearing in the shape of a Nazi symbol.

Trump Jr., who is not a social scientist, an expert in critical race theory, structural racism, systemic racism, civil rights, equality, or early childhood development, was invited onto Fox & Friends to discuss those issues.

"There's this cancel culture trying to cancel Dr. Seuss now," co-host Ainsley Earhardt falsely claimed. "How far are they going to take us?"

None of these brands are getting "cancelled." When the owner of a brand decides to make changes to its offerings, that's not "cancel culture," especially when it's not even responding to outside pressure campaigns, of which there are none here.

"There's no place that they won't go Ainsley, there's no place they won't go," Trump Jr. replied, apparently referring to liberals. He is the author of Liberal Privilege : Joe Biden And The Democrats' Defense Of The Indefensible, and Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us.

"This week alone, they canceled Mr. Potato Head," he claimed, which is a lie. Hasbro says it is adding a gender-neutral character to its line, called simply, "Potato Head." Mr. Potato Head and Mrs. Potato Head are not going anywhere.

"You know this week alone they canceled the Muppets," he continued, another lie. Disney is now streaming all but two episodes of the entire Muppet Show collection on Disney+, and has excellent reasons for not including those two episodes.

"You know they're canceling Dr. Seuss from reading programs, I mean these are books. I literally know The Cat in the Hat by heart without the book there because I read it so many times to my children. These things are not racist," he insisted.

The Cat in the Hat is not getting "canceled."

Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the organization that owns the rights to all Dr. Seuss works and in part exists to protect Seuss' reputation, has decided to discontinue publishing six books (out of about 60) that they feel "portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong."

Separately, in Loudon County, Virginia, one of the wealthiest areas of the country and up until a few years ago very conservative, public school officials were forced to respond to a report from the far right website The Daily Wire that claimed: "Dr. Seuss Canceled For 'Racial Undertones'."

"Dr. Seuss books have not been banned and are available to students in our libraries and classrooms, however, Dr. Seuss and his books are no longer the emphasis of Read Across America Day in Loudoun County Public Schools," Loudoun County Public Schools said in a statement.

Trump. Jr. wasn't done yet.

"You have Oreo cookie chiming in on trans rights," Trump Jr. continued in his complaint. Oreo had posted the following tweet before the House of Representatives voted to pass the LGBTQ Equality Act.


"I mean, what is going on?" Trump Jr. ranted. "It's absolutely insane. We've lost our minds. And we're encouraging it, you know, by allowing it. You saw the woke mob goes after CPAC, because this stage apparently had Nazi symbolism because these guys are so obsessed with trying to create any link to that."

CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, hosted its annual conference on a stage many said appeared to look just like a Nazi symbol.

Watch Donald Trump, Jr.:

What Dr. Seuss Can Teach Us About Donald Trump

What Dr. Seuss Can Teach Us About Donald Trump

Reprinted with permission fromAlterNet.

Asked to explain his political views, Theodor Geisel — better known as Dr. Seuss — once said that he was “against people who push other people around.” Were he alive today, he would surely be using his sharp pen to make fun of Donald Trump.

On March 2, tens of millions of children and their parents read Dr. Seuss books as part of Read Across America Day, sponsored by the National Educational Association (NEA) in partnership with local school districts and some businesses. The NEA, which started the program 20 years ago to encourage reading, was smart to tie the program to Dr. Seuss, who remains — 26 years after his death — the world’s most popular writer of modern children’s books.

As kids and as parents, most Americans know all about The Cat in the Hat, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Green Eggs and Ham, and many others of Seuss’s colorful characters and stories. What some may not know is that despite his popular image as a kindly cartoonist for kids, Geisel was also a political progressive whose views permeate his children’s tales. Many of his books use ridicule, satire, wordplay, nonsense words, and wild drawings to take aim at bullies, hypocrites, and demagogues. Trump would have been an easy target for Geisel’s artistic outrage and moralistic mockery.

His popular children’s books included parables about racism, anti-Semitism, the arms race, corporate greed, and the environment. But, equally important, he used his pen to encourage youngsters to challenge bullies and injustice. Many Dr. Seuss books are about the misuse of power — by despots, kings, and other rulers, including the sometimes arbitrary authority of parents.

In a university lecture in 1947 — a decade before the civil rights movement — Geisel urged would-be writers to avoid the racist stereotypes common in children’s books. America “preaches equality but doesn’t always practice it,” he noted. Generations of progressive activists may not trace their political views to their early exposure to Dr. Seuss, but without doubt this shy, brilliant genius played a role in sensitizing them to abuses of power.

In several early books — including The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins (1938), The King’s Stilts (1939), and Bartholomew and the Oobleck (1949) — Geisel made fun of the pretension, foolishness, and arbitrary power of kings.

In 1941, Geisel became an editorial cartoonist for the left-wing New York City daily newspaper PM. Fervently pro-New Deal, PM included sections devoted to unions, women’s issues, and civil rights. Geisel sharpened his political views as well as his artistry and his gift for humor at PM, where he drew over 400 cartoons.

Before many Americans were aware of the calamity confronting Europe’s Jews, Geisel — a Lutheran who grew up in a tight-knit German American community in Springfield, Massachusetts — drew editorial cartoons for PM that warned readers about Hitler and anti-Semitism, and attacked the “America First” isolationists who turned a blind eye to the rise of fascism and the Holocaust. Trump adopted “America First” as one of his campaign themes.

His PM cartoons viciously but humorously attacked Hitler and Mussolini. He bluntly criticized isolationists who opposed American entry into the war, especially the famed aviator (and Hitler booster) Charles Lindbergh, right-wing radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, and Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota. Trump has rekindled anti-Semitism, nativism, and isolationism with his bombastic and hateful rhetoric.

Through his PM drawings, Geisel was one of the few editorial voices to decry the U.S. military’s racial segregation policies. He used his cartoons to challenge racism at home against Jews and blacks, union-busting, and corporate greed, which he thought divided the country and hurt the war effort. Geisel would have used his pen to remind his audience about the vicious anti-union campaign that Trump waged at his Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas and his campaign comments about lowering America’s minimum wage in order to compete with China and other foreign countries.

After World War II, Geisel occasionally submitted cartoons to publications, such as a 1947 drawing, published in the New Republic, depicting Uncle Sam looking in horror at Americans accusing each other of being communists and disloyal Americans, a clear statement of Geisel’s anger at the nation’s right-wing Red Scare hysteria, which soon spiraled into McCarthyism. Geisel would surely have dipped into his inkwell to lambast Trump’s outrageous “birther” accusations questioning President Obama’s loyalty and American citizenship, which fueled Trump’s campaign for president.

Geisel devoted almost his entire post-war career to writing children’s books and quickly became a well-known and commercially successful author — thanks in part to the post-war baby boom. He was popular with parents, kids, and critics alike.

His 1954 book, Horton Hears a Who!, was written during the McCarthy era. It features Horton the Elephant, who befriends tiny creatures (the “Whos”) whom he can’t see, but whom he can hear, thanks to his large ears. Horton rallies his neighbors to protect the endangered Who community. Horton agrees to protect the Whos, observing, in one of Geisel’s most famous lines, “even though you can’t see or hear them at all, a person’s a person, no matter how small.” The other animals ridicule Horton for believing in something that they can’t see or hear, but he remains loyal to the Whos. Horton urges the Whos to join together to make a big enough sound so that the jungle animals can hear them. That can happen, however, only if Jo-Jo, the “smallest of all” the Whos, speaks out. He has a responsibility to add his voice to save the entire community. Eventually he does so, and the Whos survive.

The book is a parable about protecting the rights of minorities, urging “big” people to resist bigotry and indifference toward “small” people, and the importance of individuals (particularly “small” ones) speaking out against injustice. A reviewer for the Des Moines Register hailed it as a “rhymed lesson in protection of minorities and their rights.” It isn’t difficult to imagine that Geisel would have a lot to say, and draw, about Trump’s track record of discriminating against African Americans in his apartment buildings — a practice that led to a lawsuit filed against Trump by the U.S. Department of Justice for violating the federal Fair Housing Act — or his ongoing attacks on immigrants and Muslims.

Geisel’s finest rendition of his progressive views is found in Yertle the Turtle (1958). Yertle, king of the pond, stands atop his subjects in order to reach higher than the moon, indifferent to the suffering of those beneath him. In order to be “ruler of all that I see,” Yertle stacks up his subjects so he can reach higher and higher. Mack, the turtle at the very bottom of the pile, says:

Your Majesty, please / I don’t like to complain

But down here below / We are feeling great pain

I know up on top / You are seeing great sights

But down at the bottom / We, too, should have rights.

Yertle just tells Mack to shut up. Frustrated and angry, Mack burps, shaking the carefully piled turtles, and Yertle falls into the mud. His rule ends and the turtles celebrate their freedom.

The story is clearly about Hitler’s thirst for power. But Geisel is also saying that ordinary people can overthrow unjust rulers if they understand their own power. The story’s final line reflects Geisel’s democratic and anti-authoritarian political outlook:

And turtles, of course … all the turtles are free

As turtles, and maybe, all creatures should be.

Geisel would no doubt make fun of Trump’s lust for fame and power and his climb to the top of his real estate empire on the backs of his employees — waiters, dishwashers, and plumbers, among others — and contractors whom he stiffed by failing to pay them for services they rendered. Geisel would also find much to criticize regarding Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and his outrageous megalomania.

The Sneetches (1961), inspired by the Protestant Geisel’s opposition to anti-Semitism, exposes the absurdity of racial and religious bigotry. Sneetches are yellow bird-like creatures. Some Sneetches have a green star on their belly. They are the “in” crowd and they look down on Sneetches who lack a green star, who are the outcasts. One day a “fix-it-up” chap named McBean appears with some strange machines. He offers the star-less Sneetches an opportunity to get a star by going through his “star on” machine, for three dollars each. This angers the star-bellied Sneetches, who no longer have a way to display their superiority. But McBean tells them that for ten dollars, they can use his “star off” machine, ridding themselves of their stars and thus, once again, differentiating themselves from the outcast group.

The competition escalates as McBean persuades each Sneetch group to run from one machine to the other “until neither the Plain nor the Star-Bellies knew / Whether this one was that one or that one was this one / Or which one was what one or what one was who.”

Eventually both groups of Sneetches run out of money. After McBean leaves, all the Sneetches realize that neither the plain-belly nor the star-belly Sneetch is superior. The story is an obvious allegory about racism and discrimination, clearly inspired by the yellow stars that the Nazis required Jews to wear on their clothing to identify them as Jewish.

Were he alive now, Geisel would surely object to the similar ideas emanating from Trump during his campaign — including his anti-Semitic tweet depicting a Jewish star surrounded by dollar bills and his inflammatory rhetoric about Muslims, Mexicans, and people with physical disabilities. Nor is it difficult to imagine that Geisel would have a lot to say, and draw, about Trump’s failure to mention Jews when he issued a proclamation about Holocaust Remembrance Day, and his unwillingness to condemn recent hate crimes targeted at Jewish cemeteries, community centers, and day schools until he was pressured to do so.

Geisel’s The Lorax (1971) appeared as the environmental movement was just emerging, less than a year after the first Earth Day. He later called it “straight propaganda”— a polemic against pollution — but it also contains some of his most creative made-up words, like “cruffulous croak” and “smogulous smoke.”

The book opens with a small boy listening to the Once-ler tell the story of how the area was once full of Truffula trees and Bar-ba-loots and was home to the Lorax. But the greedy Once-ler — clearly a symbol of business — cuts down all the trees to make thneeds, which “everyone, everyone, everyone needs.” The lakes and the air become polluted, there is no food for the animals, and it becomes an unlivable place. The fuzzy yellow Lorax (who speaks for the trees, “for the trees have no tongues”) warns the Once-ler about the devastation he’s causing, but his words are ignored.

The Once-ler cares only about making more things and more money. “Businesss is business! / And business must grow,” he says. At the end, surveying the devastation he has caused, the Once-ler shows some remorse, telling the boy: “Unless someone like you / cares a whole awful lot / nothing is going to get better / It’s not.”

The Lorax is an attack on corporate greed — a trait that Geisel would certainly recognize in Donald Trump, along with his denials of global warming, his pledge to expand the use of coal to generate electricity, his attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency, and his pledge (during his speech to Congress this week) to weaken environmental regulations.

In 1984, Geisel produced The Butter Battle Book, another strong statement about a pending catastrophe, in this case the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, fueled by President Reagan’s Cold War rhetoric. “I’m not anti-military,” Geisel told a friend at the time, “I’m just anti-crazy.” It is a parable about the dangers of the political strategy of “mutually assured destruction” brought on by the escalation of nuclear weapons.

In this book, Geisel’s satirical gifts are on full display. The cause of the senseless war is a trivial conflict over toast. The battle is between the Yooks and the Zooks, who don’t realize that they are more alike than different, because they live on opposite sides of a long wall. The Yooks eat their bread with the butter-side up, while the Zooks eat their bread with the butter-side down. They compete to make bigger and better weapons until both sides invent a destructive bomb (the “Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo”) that, if used, will kill both sides. Like The Lorax, there is no happy ending or resolution. As the story ends, the generals on both sides of the wall are poised to drop their bombs. It is hard for even the youngest reader to miss Geisel’s point.

Geisel would surely poke fun at Trump’s cavalier and bombastic attitude toward nuclear weapons as well as his proposal, announced at his speech to Congress this week, to increase the Defense Department budget by $54 billion.

Geisel wrote and illustrated 44 children’s books characterized by memorable rhymes, whimsical characters, and exuberant drawings that encouraged generations of children to love reading and expand their vocabularies. His books have been translated into more than fifteen languages and sold over 200 million copies.

His books consistently reveal his sympathy with the weak and the powerless and his fury against bullies and despots. His books teach children to think about how to deal with an unfair world. Rather than instruct them, Geisel invited his young readers to consider what they should do when faced with injustice. Geisel believed children could understand these moral questions, but only rarely did he portray them in overtly political terms. Instead, he wrote, “when we have a moral, we try to tell it sideways.”

Although Trump has been subject to much criticism and satire by columnists, editorial writers, TV pundits, and comedians, as well as Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live, no cartoonist has been able to scrutinize and ridicule his bullying and buffoonery the way Geisel dissected the despots and blowhards of his era. We could surely use Geisel’s voice — and his pen — since Trump took office.

Peter Dreier is professor of politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College.

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