*Beloved children’s book author Theodor Geisel is best known for his classic Dr. Seuss books but many may not know that he also wrote racist and misogynistic cartoons.
Author Brian Jay Jones dives deep into the early work and psyche of Geisel in the new book, “Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination,” the Daily Mail reports. In the book, Jones notes how Geisel once portrayed Blacks as slaves being sold at a white-owned department store. He also used the N-word to refer to African Americans and described women as “insignificant and helpless.”
During the Second World War, he wrote a cartoon showing Japanese Americans lining up to get explosives to bomb America. In response to criticism he allegedly said: “If we want to win we’ve got the kill the Japs.”
Decades later when Geisel was called out on these racist cartoons he said it was “just the way things were 50 years ago” and blamed feminists who wanted to “clean up everything.”
The fascinating story of how Theodor Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, created The Cat in the Hat https://t.co/ZGHIefRNSP
— Entertainment Weekly (@EW) May 2, 2019
Jones writes that “for most of his life, Geisel would never quite see the problem with this sort of cartoon portrayal’ because he was ‘working within the established norms of the era.”
In one of his first pieces as editor at Jack-O-Lantern, the student newspaper at the elite Dartmouth college, Geisel wrote: “For what is more pleasant than to see five husky college men make some silly girls realize how insignificant and helpless they are?”
When singer Josephine Baker performed in just a skirt made of bananas, he wrote to a friend that it served to “vivify rather than to conceal, her Alabama vulva,” according to the book. Geisel admitted that he went to see the “American n*****” perform at the club to “release imprisoned sex instincts.”
His work in a 1920’s ad for the insecticide Flit showed a Black husband kicked back in his chair and smoking a pipe while his wife complains about him not having a job.
She tells him: “Say, n*****, when you all hold a job a week mosquitoes will brush their teeth with Flit and like it.”
Geisel’s full page cartoon in Judge depicted the “World’s Most Prosperous Department Store” where shoppers could buy a needle for a haystack or a “n***** for your woodpile.”
See the cartoon below.
Jones writes: “The careless reference to slavery can’t be missed – the smiling men are on sale after all…and yet as far as Geisel was concerned he was working within the norms of the era.”
Theodor Geisel,, author behind Dr. Seuss books also wrote racist and misogynistic cartoons – he must have been out of his mind back then https://t.co/FAmlsMtpQk via @MailOnline
— Uncle Larry (@UncleLarry112) May 2, 2019
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