Book Review: Dr. Seuss

Dr. Seuss (mostly) libertarian greatest hits // photo my own

One of my favorite daily activities these days is reading to my son before bedtime. This got me reacquainted with the work of Dr. Seuss, whose books I hadn't read since I was a child. Even then, I really only remember reading The Lorax, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and Green Eggs and Ham.

It's fairly astonishing today, how his books often have a libertarian bent to it. Given that some of his earlier books were recently canceled, I thought it would be interesting to review the political messages of some of the books.

While I never heard of the books slated to cease production, Theodor Seuss Geisel in his early years did support racist policies such as FDR's internment of Japanese during World War II, but later realized the policy was a horrific one. He rebuked the internment and penned books that decry racism, as he did in The Sneetches, and dedicated his book Horton Hears a Who! "To my good friend Mitsugi Nakamura, of Kyoto, Japan."

While I'm no fan of cancellation, nor a fan of manipulating works of art to appease the sensitive eyes and ears of contemporary politeness, I do concede how some of the imagery and lessons in his earlier works may be problematic to impressionable young eyes. Still, I think this is the job of parents, though a publisher does have the right to decide not to publish a book. Unsurprisingly, this caused the discontinued books to spike in price in the secondhand market.

What is particularly insane, however, is for schools to order librarians to stop mentioning Dr. Seuss, pointing to a study that finds there are few minorities portrayed in his books. First of all, we're seriously using resources to run studies about the racial makeup of old children's books? Secondly, if these "researchers" hadn't noticed, humans are a minority in his books.

The latest round of cancellations isn't anything new. Dr. Seuss's books have been challenged and on the verge of bans for a long time.

If anything, Dr. Seuss's trajectory of racial sentiment is a story of triumph, that a person may harbor racially insensitive views but later, particularly following a trip to Japan, recant those views and begin proselytizing anti-racist viewpoints. One might think a stalwart leftist like Seuss would be granted at least some benefit of the doubt by the left, but that appears to be reserved for racists like FDR that never did express any remorse for their views, including the internment of Japanese, still frequently atop their best presidents in history lists.

Here are some of the books, some libertarian, some not, that can be utilized to teach the concepts of freedom to children.

The Lorax

While definitely not a libertarian book, it was my favorite growing up. Even at a young age, I was fascinated by the juxtaposition of the natural beauty of the Truffula trees against the Thneed industry. The book was obviously written as promoting environmentalism, as industry wiped out an entire ecosystem to produce fictional thneeds by chopping down Truffula trees.

At the end of the book, in a setting of environmental catastrophe, the industrious Once-ler throws down the last Truffula seed down to the boy listening to the story and is told to plant a forest of Truffula trees so that the Lorax, the environmentalist creature that speaks for the trees, may return. The question, therefore, to the astute reader, would be to ask the question, why did the Once-ler not plant the seed himself? If he was the greedy industrialist as he's portrayed to be, he would continually replant the trees as quickly as he chopped them down so he would have a continual supply of Truffula trees, and his business wouldn't have closed due to massive deforestation, and profits would continue to roll in. After all, that is how logging works when private property is applied.

"SO...
Catch!" calls the Once-ler.
He lets something fall.
"It's a Truffula Seed.
It's the last one of all!
You're in charge of the last of the Truffula Seeds.
And Truffula Trees are what everyone needs.
Plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care."

The Butter Battle Book

This book, at first glance, is pretty libertarian, as a criticism of an arms race imposed by opposing defense departments, ending in a standoff of complete destruction on both sides of a conflict, with the population on both sides huddled in bomb shelters, terrified of what may happen. However, the book was written as a criticism of the Cold War, and as such, Seuss's moral equivalency of communism and capitalism to the fictional ideological opposition of which side the Zooks or Yooks butter their bread on is head-scratching, to say the least. Soviet communism had gulags, the Holodomor, famines, while the largest failures of US capitalism were divergences from capitalist, and more importantly, libertarian, notions, like imperialistic wars in Vietnam.

Nevertheless, divorced from the original intent, the book illustrates how a small act of aggression from one side of the military, a slingshot to the opposing side's switch, escalates tensions all the way to a cartoon nuclear warhead. This evokes recent memories of the drone incident with Iran, where Trump's advisors nearly goaded Trump into a war of escalation with Iran. Thankfully, it was called off, likely much to Pompeo and Bolton's dismay. Further back, it reminds of the origins of World War I, where the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary was assassinated. While a far more egregious crime than shooting a switch (or a drone), this set off a chain of events that resulted in millions dying, the United States entering the war, resulting in the Treaty of Versailles, crashing the Weimar Republic's economy, giving rise to Nazism, World War II, and two subsequent nuclear bombs dropped on Japan, killing millions of innocent people. It's like government actors are boys with toys but with real results.

The ending of the book does not end in mass destruction, but rather two sides just staring each other down. This makes us wonder whether mutually assured destruction keeps people peaceful. To date, no two nuclear powers have engaged in a war. Do we trust governments to keep it that way indefinitely? These are the questions pondered in this book.

As I raced for the Wall, with the bomb in my hand,
I noticed that every last Yook in our land
was obeying our Chief Yookeroos' grim command.
They were all bravely marching,
with banners aflutter,
down a hole! For their country!
And Right-Side-Up Butter!

Oh, the Places You'll Go!

In an age where helicopter parenting has gotten worse and worse, with busybodies calling the police because a mother dared let her child walk to school or left her child in her car for five minutes while running an errand in a store, this book is a great children's book for free-range kids. In the book, a child ventures off into the world, the horror, by himself! The child toggles between having a great time and hitting roadblocks in a wacky and wild world. He ends up navigating his way through, triumphing in his journey. That is one kid that won't be demanding his college baby and guard him against the dangers of differing viewpoints.

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
You're on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who'll decide where to go.

Horton Hears a Who!

In this book, Horton, an elephant, hears a small voice coming from a dust speck and concludes there are creatures living on the dust speck while many other animals conclude Horton is crazy for talking to voices in his mind. In the end, the Who, the people living on the dust speck shout out loud enough for the other animals to hear. He wrote it as an allegory to the post-war occupation of Japan, a plea to not treat the Japanese people any lesser than anyone else, a departure from his sentiments during the war. 

Moreover, the book serves as an overture toward equality no matter who that person is. Everybody has the same rights, as anybody else has. It's easy to construe the message as simply superficial, as race or gender, but given the size differences, it serves just as well for the elite class versus the poorer classes. The larger animals have more power and influence, as the political and executive classes, and as the book argues, should give as many rights to the proletariat, as it were, as they do to themselves. Unfortunately, this is nowhere near reality today. Just the income disparity of these so-called civil servants with US Congressmen and Senators making $174k up to $223k for Speaker, while the median American salary hovers around $50k a year. This isn't even to mention the other perks that come at the expense of the taxpayer. Meanwhile, politicians grease the elbows of their wealthy constituents and friends while forever printing money primarily at the expense of the poor.

Interestingly, the conservatives took this book to be about abortion. I suppose I can see how they read it this way, though the dynamic is all wrong; the Who were not inseparably dependent on another being to survive, nor were they put on the earth by those threatening to do them harm. Seuss actually threatened to sue an anti-abortion group for utilizing a key phrase in his book. The tiny characters in the book were not meant to be literally tiny in the moral of the story. For some reason, conservatives seem to be particularly bad at allegory. 

"Should I put this speck down?..." Horton thought with alarm.
"If I do, these small persons may come to great harm.
I can't put it down. And I won't! After all
A person's a person. No matter how small.

The Sneetches

Which is better: a star on your belly or no star? This is the dichotomy at issue with the Sneetches. Those with a star are the preferred race and those with no star are the marginalized race. Then an entrepreneur seeing a business opportunity came in and offered the ability to add and remove stars for a nominal fee. The Sneetches went back and forth between star and no star so often that no one was able to discern who had a star and who didn't, proving that underneath, there is no character difference between races.

In the end, the Sneetches lost every cent to the entrepreneur, who capitalized on the fervent racism the Sneetches had. When he left, the Sneetches got wise and voluntarily dropped their racist inclinations and began treating each other with respect.

They kept paying money. They kept running through
Until neither the Plain nor the Star-Bellies knew
Whether this one was that one...or that was was this one
Or which one was what one...or what one was who.

Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose

This was perhaps his most surprising book to me. It appears as a complete departure from typical leftist tendencies, even for the late 1940s. In it, Thidwick, a moose who was minding his own business, was approached by a Bingle Bug who asked for a ride on his antlers. Thidwick kindly obliged, but later, to his dismay, found that the critter had invited a host of other animals to live on his antlers. Thidwick was much too kind to kick these squatters off his own property as they grew to comical numbers, including a bear, a fox, and a swarm of bees. As time approached to migrate across Lake Winna-Bango with his herd for food, his unwelcome tenants all objected. They decided to put it to a vote and overwhelmingly voted to strand poor Thidwick on the side of the lake with a diminished food supply. Not too long after, a band of hunters came by and started shooting at Thidwick for his antlers. Cornered, and frightened, it seemed like the end of the road for Thidwick, but it happened that it was the day he would shed his antlers. It shed right at that moment and all of his squatters fell into the hands of the hunters, as Thidwick safely swam to the other side of the lake, exercising his freedom of association.

This entire book was a rebuke of welfare and a defense of property rights while defending voluntary charity. Thidwick has a big heart because of his willingness to help others, as evidenced by his initial interaction with the Bingle Bug. Unfortunately, his big heart gave way to involuntary assistance to other animals on his own property. Had he enforced his own property rights, he wouldn't have gotten close to being killed by the leeches attached to him. Even more shockingly for a book written by a leftist, it included a major rebuke of democracy, particularly without constitutional rights, as his squatters voted away Thidwick's personal autonomy. The last page was even more shocking, as Seuss proclaims, even more condemningly than an Ayn Rand novel, that leeches of society should be allegorically stuffed in a hunter's cabin.

If America would shed its antlers, we should all be so fortunate.

And he called to the pests on his horns as he threw 'em,
"You wanted my horns; now you're quite welcome to 'em!
Keep 'em! They're yours!
As for ME, I shall take
Myself to the far distant
Side of the lake!"

Yertle the Turtle

In arguably his most libertarian book, Yertle the Turtle was written as criticism against Adolf Hitler and fascism. It similarly applies to any powerful autocrat, including Stalin and Mao, as much as Seuss may think otherwise, given his portrayal in The Butter Battle Book.

Yertle, the turtle king of Sala-ma-Sond, was drunk with power as he began ordering turtles to pile on each other to create a high throne for Yertle, the ruler of all that he sees. Higher and higher he commanded the turtles to stack, regardless of the misallocation of resources it results in. A small turtle near the bottom, named Mack, began to complain about how difficult the turtle king was making life for the turtles toward the bottom. Yertle forcibly reprimanded him, but as they piled to ludicrous heights, Mack burped and Yertle came crashing down from the perch of his throne to the delight of the other turtles, showing how the people can and should rise up against powerful dictators.

It is notable at the end that Yertle was not replaced by another dictator of a different name or even another kinder ruler, but rather, the turtles became free.

And today the great Yertle, that Marvelous he,
Is King of the Mud. That is all he can see.
And the turtles of course ... all the turtles are free
As turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be.