Some of Dr. Seuss’s political cartoons were unabashedly liberal and ahead of their time. Others were wildly racist. Dr. Seuss’s work for adults includes some pretty unambiguously racist images. Husband-and-wife team Katie Ishizuka and Ramón Stephens, who run
the Conscious Kid Social Justice Library, developed
a study of Dr. Seuss’s history of racism that features a small sampling.
One ad Dr. Seuss drew for Flit insecticide featured a disgusted white woman saying to a Black man, “You hold a job, Worthless? Say, ni**er, when you hold a job a week, mosquitos will brush their teeth with Flit and like it!’” Dr. Seuss tended to draw Black people as cannibals or monkeys, and they weren’t the only racial group he caricatured.
Beginning well before the lead-up to World War II, Dr. Seuss frequently drew Japanese people with animalistic features who were violent threats to America, referred to them as “Japs,” and captioned them with jokey lines that replaced their Rs with Ls. “Velly Scary Jap-in-the-Box,” reads the caption for one cartoon of a Japanese man crawling out of a box labeled “JAP WAR THREAT.” He also drew caricatures of Jewish people with oversize noses causing chaos everywhere they went by demanding lower prices.
Notably,
Dr. Seuss also drew cartoons decrying Jim Crow laws, the policies of Nazi Germany, and American isolationism. Dr. Seuss’s political cartoons,
Maus author Art Spiegelman writes in the foreword to the 1999 book
Dr. Seuss Goes to War, “rail against isolationism, racism, and anti-semitism with a conviction and fervor lacking in most other American editorial pages of the period.”
In fact, Dr. Seuss, Spiegelman argues, drew “virtually the only editorial cartoons outside the communist and Black press that decried the military’s Jim Crow policies and Charles Lindbergh’s anti-semitism.”I
Dr. Seuss was on the right side of history in many ways — and he also drew a lot of really virulently racist stuff. That’s his legacy as a cartoonist.
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Originally Posted by Tobacco Road
