You can’t escape childhood (or parenthood) without coming across the books of Dr. Seuss: Green Eggs and Ham, Horton Hears a Who!, The Lorax, The Cat in the Hat (now with a spinoff show), and, of course, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! He has left an undeniable mark on children’s literature and made quite the splash in a space that was previously dominated by dry Dick and Jane books.
Political cartoon by Geisel critical of America First policies. “... and the wolf chewed up the children and spit out their bones... but those were foreign children and it really didn't matter.” PM, October 1, 1941.
But before Dr. Seuss was Dr. Seuss the beloved children’s author, he was Theodor Seuss Geisel, political cartoonist. His work was published widely in places like The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, and more. During World War II, he created over 400 political cartoons. His cartoons clearly denounced individuals like Adolph Hitler and Bennito Mussolini as well as prominent Americans who were non-interventionist Nazi sympathizers like Charles Lindburgh. Geisel worked for the U.S. War Department writing films such as Your Job in Germany and Private Snafu, a series of adult animated shorts meant to educate soldiers about how to keep clean and avoid booby traps. He was critical of racism against Black people in the U.S. as well as prejudice against Jews which he saw as undermining the war effort.
Still from Private Snafu, the War Department series, 1943.
Geisel did not extend the same feelings toward Japanese Americans however. Some of his most widely circulated cartoons from World War II include racist caricatures of Japanese Americans who he assumes are all covert traitors plotting for the fall of the United States. His 1942 cartoon “Waiting for the Signal from Home” is typical of his views. He sees Japanese Americans as a fifth column, a group of people working to sabotage the United States from within. (This thinking is what led to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.) In the cartoon, Japanese people along the U.S. West Coast are being handed TNT that they can take home and presumably detonate.
“Waiting for the Signal from Home”, published in PM, 1942.
Americans of Japanese ancestry being loaded on trains headed to concentration camps, Woodland, California. May 1942.
Dr. Seuss was not alone in peddling harmful racist stereotypes in creating World War II propaganda. Japanese people were often depicted as monstrous or subhuman with long fangs (like Tokio Kid). It was common for newspapers to treat them as a monolith who should be treated with suspicion. A Seattle newspaper in 1942 stated, “Two-thirds of the Japanese-Americans are dual citizens. Approximately 15,000 Japanese Americans on the Pacific Coast are citizens sent by their parents to Japan to be educated. Until these doubtful American citizens, and all other Japanese, are taken into protective custody the Pacific defense will not be complete.”
Interested in learning more?
Read more about propaganda, World War II, and Japanese-American internment in 1940s Unboxed!
You can read more about Dr. Seuss’s wartime career in the nonfiction book Dr. Seuss Goes to War by Richard H. Minear.
Find over 6,000 photos of Japanese internment from the War Relocation Authority archives here.