The reputation of celebrated children’s author Dr. Seuss has taken a bit of a beating in recent weeks, as critics have described some of his illustrations as racist.
The Amazing World of Dr. Seuss Museum in Springfield announced last week that it planned to remove a mural that included a Chinese character after three authors said they would boycott a children’s book festival because the image reinforced racial stereotypes.
And last month, a librarian in Cambridge refused to accept Dr. Seuss books sent to her school by Melania Trump.
To further explore the controversy surrounding Dr. Seuss, whose given name was Theodore Geisel, Metro Minute spoke with Pamela Mason, a senior lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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What exactly were Theodore Geisel’s views that people have been taking such an issue with?
Politically, Geisel was a left-leaning liberal and staunch supporter of Theodore Roosevelt. He was also anti-Japanese during World War II, and his political cartoons from that era are full of stereotyped depictions. He also frequently drew African Americans as monkeys or in a hyper-stereotypical blackface style. While troubling depictions are found less frequently in his children’s books, they do occur — for example, in “To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.” The inclusion of one of those illustrations in a mural at the Dr. Seuss Museum is what led to the recent boycott of that museum by three children’s book creators.
After the war, Geisel’s feelings about Japanese people changed. In 1953 he visited Japan on an assignment and was profoundly affected by the devastation from the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His 1954 book “Horton Hears a Who” is an allegory about the atomic bomb. Geisel dedicated the book to Mitsuki Nakamura, an educator he met during his 1953 trip.
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How do those views compare to other people during that period?
His views and his depictions were similar to those of many white men of his time. Like most caricaturists, he used a kind of visual short-hand to depict specific types. On the other hand, it is important to note that Americans at this time were not blind to the problems of stereotypical depictions. People who chose books to share with children were particularly attuned to the harmful stereotypical depictions of characters of color. For example, Marguerite de Angeli was a white author and illustrator of many children’s books about children from various cultures. Her book Bright April (1946) about a young African American girl was recently cited by present-day African American children’s book creator Vaunda Micheaux Nelson as an example of a book she admired as a child.
Should people like Geisel who lived during such a different time be held to current-day standards?
We are talking about sharing books with young children in 2017. Should troubling and stereotypical depictions of people of color be accepted if they were created during a period when those depictions were common? Absolutely not. There are plenty of books that do not include troubling depictions.
That said, there are some books by Dr. Seuss and others of that era which do not contain any human characters — nor any animal characters acting as debasing stand-ins for people of various cultures. The big debate in the children’s book world is whether or not books by people with questionable political views should ever be shared with young children.
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Sophia Eppolito can be reached at sophia.eppolito@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @SophiaEppolito.