LET’S NOT CANCEL DR. SEUSS
Cancel culture has many faces. Few reveal the ugliness of the impulse more clearly than banning books. This time, the target of the book-banners is perhaps the most beloved American author of all: Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. The culprits include Seuss’s own heirs, the Biden administration, and the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center. Everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves.
According to a statement by Dr. Seuss Enterprises:
Dr. Seuss Enterprises, working with a panel of experts, including educators, reviewed our catalog of titles and made the decision last year to cease publication and licensing of the following titles: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer. These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.
The statement provides no detail on what was deemed offensive, or — more importantly to the decision — whom the “panel of experts” comprised. It was clearly not a panel of readers of these marvelous books. If you want a window into the long march of leftists through the institutions of American culture, the cast of characters with power to take Dr. Seuss books out of print or remove them from reading lists is a good primer.
President Joe Biden left Dr. Seuss out of mention in the presidential proclamation of the National Education Association’s Read Across America initiative, breaking with prior proclamations by Donald Trump and Barack Obama. This does not appear to be an accidental oversight. As the New York Post notes, Dr. Seuss has been under some siege of late by the cancelers, leading up to Mr. Biden’s decision:
“Of the 2,240 (identified) human characters, there are forty-five characters of color representing 2% of the total number of human characters,” according to a 2019 study from the Conscious Kid’s Library and the University of California that examined 50 of Dr. Seuss’ books. Last week, a Virginia school district ordered its teachers to avoid “connecting Read Across America Day with Dr. Seuss” because of recent research that allegedly “revealed strong racial undertones” in many of the author’s books.
The upscale Loudoun County, Va., school district’s move came “in response to an article in Learning for Justice, the educational arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Daily Wire said.” You may know the SPLC from its own unsavory history of anti-Christian bigotry, incitement of violence, and sexual and financial scandal.
The Learning for Justice screed has to be read to be believed. One of Dr. Seuss’s classic stories, “The Sneetches,” is a jeremiad against the irrational and self-defeating nature of racism and bigotry. The Sneetches are identical birds except that some have stars on their bellies, and some do not. The star-belly Sneetches look down on the star-less Sneetches, until an opportunistic monkey named Sylvester McMonkey McBean comes to town offering for a fee to add stars to bellies. Deprived of their grounds for superiority, the star-belly Sneetches get talked by McBean into removing their stars so they can declare that to be the new grounds for their supremacy. Eventually, in the frenzy of star-on/star-off, everybody loses track of who had what, while McBean makes off with all their money. Poorer but wiser, the Sneetches abandon star-based consciousness and classification and live in star-blind harmony.
The moral of “The Sneetches” is impossible to miss even for a kindergarten-age reader; no children’s book I know of delivers the same lesson with quite such memorable satirical verve. In 1998, NATO and the U.N. even distributed copies of the book, translated into Serbo-Croatian, in Bosnia. The short story was first published in 1953, long before its message was fashionable in children’s literature, and was repackaged in book form in 1961. But the warning against McBean-style peddlers of identity politics was perhaps too on the nose for the SPLC:
“At Teaching Tolerance, we’ve even featured antiracist activities built around the Dr. Seuss book ‘The Sneetches.’ But when we re-evaluated, we found that the story is actually not as ‘anti-racist’ as we once thought. And it has some pretty intricate layers you and your students might consider, too. The solution to the story’s conflict is that the Plain-Belly Sneetches and Star-Bellied Sneetches simply get confused as to who is oppressed. As a result, they accept one another. This message of ‘acceptance’ does not acknowledge structural power imbalances. It doesn’t address the idea that historical narratives impact present-day power structures. And instead of encouraging young readers to recognize and take action against injustice, the story promotes a race-neutral approach.”
A “race-neutral approach?” Oh, the horrors! This is a window into the racialist thinking of organizations such as the SPLC, whose donations, like McBean’s star-removing income, depend on ensuring the permanence of racial grievance.
Seuss in full
Dr. Seuss was a man of his time, born in 1904 and shaped by the events of his life, particularly the second world war. He was also very much a lifelong man of the Left himself. Many of his best-known tales, like the “Cat in the Hat” books, are entirely apolitical. But many others teach moral lessons that have a decidedly political cast to them, and the attentive reader can trace the shifts in liberal thought over the decades of Seuss’s career. “Yertle the Turtle,” written in 1950, is against dictators, and treats the downfall of the despotic turtle king as his comeuppance. “The Butter Battle Book,” by contrast, written in Seuss’s old age in 1984, preaches against arms races with a clumsily anti-Reagan subtext but without much understanding that one of the parties to the Cold War was a tyranny and one was not.
1940’s “Horton Hatches the Egg” is a surprisingly profound reflection on fatherhood, as an absentminded pleasure-seeking bird abandons her egg, and it is hatched instead by Horton the Elephant. The long-suffering inter-species stepfather, mocked for assuming the female role, is rewarded with an “elephant bird.” 1948’s “Thidwick the BigHearted Moose” is a lesson against giving handouts to freeloaders, and 1949’s “Bartholomew and the Oobleck” — written in the early years of the nuclear-arms race — warns against tampering with nature. 1957’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” is a classic twist on Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” in which Seuss tells a Christmas tale not only of the Grinch’s redemption but also of the resilience and forgiveness by the Whos. 1971’s “The Lorax” is a heavyhanded but still vibrant bit of anti-capitalist environmentalist agitprop.
During World War II, Seuss set aside his writing to draw acidly satirical anti-Nazi and anti-Imperial Japanese cartoons. Some of his Japbashing looks painfully racist by today’s standards and was embarrassing to Seuss later in life, but it was entirely consistent with the atmosphere of the free world’s struggle against two particularly brutal racist regimes. Seuss wrote 1954’s “Horton Hears a Who!” as a parable for Japanese individualism under occupation after a trip to Japan changed his mind about the Japanese people, but the book’s threatened little society and the ever-patient Horton’s mantra of “a person’s a person no matter how small” has since been appropriated by causes ranging from the existence of Israel to the value of the unborn.
In other words, a young child reading the works of Dr. Seuss will be introduced not only to a world of whimsical wordplay and imaginative illustrations, but also to thought-provoking moral questions about the wider world we inhabit, in all of its messy diversity and injustice. The books themselves reveal Seuss’s own moral trajectory over time. None of that seems to matter to the zealots.
Cancel culture, defined
The term “cancel culture,” like “political correctness,” is hated by progressives, ostensibly because it is vague but actually for the opposite reason: because it gives a name to a real phenomenon, and naming a thing is the first step to organizing resistance to it. The best way to kill an idea is to prevent the language in which it can be expressed. While those of us horrified by cancel culture should be rigorous and fair in how we apply the term, we should not shy away from calling it out by name. The campaign against Dr. Seuss is cancel culture of the worst kind.
Cancel culture is not simply the act of pointing out offensive words, deeds, and images and holding people to account for them. It has five hallmarks. One, it starts by defining “offensive” to include a vast array of things that the political Left disapproves of (some legitimately offensive, others obviously sane and true), while normalizing and defending things that genuinely offend others. Two, its list of offenses is constantly growing and changing, such that even the most politically attuned people can never know what will be grounds for cancellation next. Three, it lacks a sense of proportion or context: everything is judged not only as if it just happened in the present time, but as if it is the only thing the offender ever did. Four, it treats the reader or listener as mentally fragile and incapable of learning or nuance, such that he or she must be protected from exposure to uncomfortable things — an unreasonable way of treating children, let alone adults. And five, it lacks mercy: The living must be made to issue groveling apologies and Maoist selfflagellations and sacked from jobs having nothing to do with their offenses, and the dead are beyond redemption.
Consider for what things Dr. Seuss is subject to having his books taken out of print. The list of banned books includes his first book, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” published in 1937, which involves a boy imaginatively recounting an increasingly elaborate parade he claims to have seen while walking home. “Mulberry Street” is apparently canceled for a single image of “a Chinaman who eats with sticks,” drawn in traditional Chinese costume and a stereotypical style characteristic of the 1930s. The next four titles are all books designed to show a menagerie of
creatures from exotic places. “If I Ran the Zoo” has the most obviously problematic of these drawings, including some stereotypical Africans and Asians. “McElligot’s Pool” seems to be targeted just for a harmless drawing of an Eskimo.
“On Beyond Zebra!” is perhaps my personal favorite Dr. Seuss book, one I read countless times as a kid and countless more to my three children. It takes the exotic-menagerie concept, crosses it with the traditional alphabet book, and asks the question: What if there were more letters in the alphabet, known only to a select, inquisitive few? What if you needed those letters to spell the names of creatures that were truly unique and foreign to most people’s experience? It is a brilliant concept for a children’s book, and it genuinely encourages not only a spirit of openness and adventure and intellectual curiosity, but also a broadminded way of thinking about language. So far as I can tell, it is “canceled” for a vaguely Arab-looking character on one page, the “Nazzim of Bazzim.”
Recall that one of the charges against Seuss is that his books feature too few non-white people, and you can understand the inherent absurdity of also banning his books for depicting non-white people. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Consider the lack of perspective in canceling a book like “On Beyond Zebra!” just for a single image that is only vaguely stereotypical of a foreign culture. This isn’t even a matter of being offensive; some conception of foreign-ness is how you introduce children in the first place to the idea that the world is full of different people with different ways of life. Reading the menagerie books is a first step on that journey of learning. The same could be said of a
book like Richard Scarry’s “Busy, Busy World” and its tour of the world’s cultures. And if a few of the images reflect outdated stereotypes, it is easy enough to point that out to your children (I was cautionary about the Africans in “If I Ran the Zoo” with my kids). Why can’t parents be trusted to ensure that Dr. Seuss books, or “The Muppet Show,” are safe for children’s consumption? Children are good at learning if you give them a chance, and they deserve a world of technicolor variety and imagination; that as much as anything animated Dr. Seuss’s books.
There is also an agenda of cultural control at work here. As Erick Erickson notes:
“This isn’t really about Seuss. This is about progressive indoctrination. The NEA has a helpful list of books to consider as replacements for Seuss. You can see the list here. The list is an indoctrination course in woke. From ‘Julián Is a Mermaid,’ about a boy who wants to be a mermaid, to ‘Americanized: Rebel Without a Green Card,’ a story about illegal immigrants in the United States, to ‘The Prince and the Dressmaker,’ about a crossdressing prince.”
Finally, there are layers of irony in these controversies as far as the politics of free speech and free thought. Twenty or thirty years ago, liberals were obsessed with caricaturing conservatives as book-burning bluenoses. That was partly a legacy of McCarthyism and other speech controversies of Seuss’s own era, memorably satirized by Ray Bradbury in “Fahrenheit 451.” Yet the book-banning energy is all on the left these days. Oh, the thinks you can’t think.
Rachel Poser’s recent New York Times profile of Princeton classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta comes across as both glib and ominous. Referring to Mr. Padilla’s mission, the headline of the piece reads: “He Wants to Save Classics from Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?” The Herculean task Mr. Padilla has in mind is convincing other classicists to reject the privileged position given to Greece and Rome within the field. Why? Because he believes that classics as a discipline has played and continues to play an outsize role in the construction of whiteness and, thus, the perpetuation of systemic racism.
The immediate impulse of those who, like myself, are committed to helping others appreciate the beauty and profundity of the classical world is to mount a vigorous defense of Western civilization. Though such a response is commendable, it is incommensurate with the task at hand. But how does one defend Western civilization, that 2,500-year-old institution of interlocking ideas, concepts and procedures? The mere fact that we, the citizens of the United States of America, are heirs to the immense intellectual and cultural treasures of ancient Greece and Rome creates a prima facie case that these two ancient civilizations deserve their privileged position in the West. From the codified curricula of the trivium and quadrivium to the rigors of philosophy and philosophical expression to Beethoven, Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis to the rule of law, democracy, the city, abolitionism and property rights, the legacy of the classical world never ceasesto amaze.
The testaments of those who have been seduced by the field’s siren song speak volumes about the power of that legacy, and might be the best way to counter Mr. Padilla’s arguments. Ironically, Mr. Padilla himself has spoken positively about his initial encounter with classical ideas. He recalls in the Times profile that as a young, poor, bookish immigrant from the Dominican Republic, in a filthy shelter in New York’s Chinatown, he serendipitously found a book entitled “How People Lived in Ancient Greece and Rome.” As he began to dig deeper into the field, Ms. Poser writes, he was “overwhelmed by the emotive power of classical texts” and “captivated by the sting of Greek philosophy, the heat and action of epic.” Absent from these recollections of his entry into the field is any trace of racial animus or bitterness. The ancient Greeks and Romans initially appealed to him not because he was a poor, Black immigrant, but because he was an intellectually curious human being.
Much like Mr. Padilla’s, myown early admiration for the classical world can attest to the powerful appeal of the tradition. Unlike Mr. Padilla, however, I haven’t grown disillusioned with the field. My engagement with classical antiquity continues to affirm, for me, its civilizing values, rather than the corrosive barbarism of identity politics. As an African American, I am not an immigrant. I can trace my lineage back to slaves (and a few indentured servants) who lived in the early 18th century. I am thus living proof that the classical tradition has just as much to offer the descendant of slaves as it does those who are to the manor born. I suspect that this is part of what attracted the younger Mr. Padilla to the field: Like me, he sensed that the ancient Greeks and Romans promised a degree of cultural competence and uplift, if one could master them. Unfortunately, Mr. Padilla has since racialized that promise.
I was introduced to the classics through ancient Greek political theory. One of my professors at Colorado State University was Bill Hervey, an African American and Cornell Straussian who’d been a student of Werner Dannhauser and Allan Bloom. Political science was Mr. Hervey’s field, and he took an interest in my academic development due to my solid grades as a freshman in his Western Political Theory graduate course. He loved all things ancient Greek, especially Aristotle and Plato. The sheer mania with which he taught Aristotle’s Politics and Plato’s Republic was always accompanied by an equal amount of sophrosyne. His teaching and his love of the ancient Greeks were sights to behold. Most importantly, he taught me that the classical knowledge found mainly in the works of ancient Greek political theory was the very embodiment of a liberal-arts education. Such knowledge makes us free, he would say, by separating us from particulars of race, of class, of gender, of time and place, and of necessity. Real freedom is intellectual freedom.
This type of freedom has been completely lost on Mr. Padilla. He now calls that first experience of classical ideas, which he once found so exciting,a “sinister encounter.” All thathe sees in the classical tradition today is whiteness and theoppression of black people. As Ms. Poser characterizes it, Mr. Padilla sees the tradition asinherently racist:
Classics and whiteness are the bones and sinew of the same body; they grew strong together, and they may have to die together. Classics deserves to survive only if it can become a “site of contestation” for the communities who have been denigrated by it in the past.
Setting aside the silliness of postmodern tropes about the body and whiteness, surely Mr. Padilla is aware of the scholarly literature on Blacks in the ancient world. Most notably, the AfricanAmerican scholar Frank M. Snowden Jr. argues that classical antiquity’s familiarity with Black people was through black-skinned Ethiopians. Based on the ancient evidence — literary, epigraphical, papyrological, numismatic,and archaeological — when the Greeks and Romans contrasted the physical characteristics of Ethiopians with whites, the description implied neither physical, mental, nor moral superiority or inferiority on the part of the Ethiopians. According to Mr. Snowden, the GrecoRoman world fundamentally rejected “color as a criterion forevaluating men.”
It is not clear exactly why Mr. Padilla has grown so alienated from an academic field he seems to have conquered based on his intellectual talent. What with matriculation from Collegiate Prep, Princeton, Oxford and Stanford, one would think Mr. Padilla would be a lot more sure-footed and circumspect. One of the more shallow and fallacious claims Mr. Padilla makes in the Times piece is that classicists and the field of classics share responsibility for the Capitol riot that took place on Jan. 6. The fact that some of the rioters wore GrecoRoman paraphernalia — Greek helmets, T-shirts bearing Greek or Roman phrases — is enough for Mr. Padilla to admonish his fellow classicists for not recognizing that “systemic racism is foundational to those institutions that incubate classics and classics as a field itself.” This guilt-by-association argument is simply absurd: Because “racists” like the classics, classics and those who study and teach them must be “racist.” It is no wonder that Mr. Padilla wants to destroy the field.
One can only conclude that Mr. Padilla’s desire to burn the field down is the product of a mindset that originated with academics at elite institutions in the 1960s, and gained momentum in the 1980s with the emergence of multiculturalism. This mindset seeks to highlight the Afroasiatic roots of the classics, and — as Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath discuss in their book, “Who Killed Homer?” — sees the West and its classical past as irredeemably racist, imperialistic and sexist. Reinforced by senior classics professors who, at a minimum, view the ancient Greeks and Romans as merely two ancient cultures among many, it has gained steam to the point where the tradition’s defenders often feel as if they’re fighting a rear-guard battle. And that’s ashame, because whatever a student’s skin color or ethnic background, the classical tradition itself still has a power to challenge and change minds that the Afroasiatic alternatives can’t match — a power that once moved Mr. Padilla, and sadly no longer does.
Andre M. Archie is an associate professor of ancient Greek philosophy at Colorado State University and the author of “Politics in Socrates’ Alcibiades: A Philosophical Account of Plato’s Dialogue Alcibiades Major.” Copyright 2021 National Review. Used with permission.