Rumination: Dr. Seuss in the Dock

The author’s estate and publisher desperately try to avoid total cancelation.

Source: Wiki Commons

In a recent post entitled The Perils of 180ism, Persuasion Community founder Yascha Mounk touched briefly on the con­tro­versy that flared up in March 2021 over the banning of certain Dr. Seuss books, and he intro­duced the subject by saying,

“It all started when an obscure group of teachers claimed that some of Dr. Seuss’s early books included offen­sive draw­ings, prompting his estate to announce that it would no longer allow the books to be printed. Over the follow­ing days, the Chicago Pub­lic Library retired existing copies from its collection. EBay banned the books from its plat­form while con­tinuing to sell copies of ‘Mein Kampf.’”

That simple back­ground state­ment gives an inaccurate impression in important respects, I believe. A more con­sidered look at the curious case of Dr. Seuss pro­vides a telling lesson about the real-world eco­nomics of the can­cel cul­ture.

What appears to have prompted the Seuss estate, Dr. Seuss Enter­prises, and the pub­lisher of the Dr. Seuss titles, Penguin Ran­dom House, to censor six of the beloved children’s author’s books was not a claim that “some” of his “early” works included “offen­sive drawings.” Such a “claim” would have been old news, a yawner. Rather, it was a much broader and more aggressive assertion by critical race activists that absolutely ALL of the Dr. Seuss books, including the biggest-selling titles like The Cat in the Hat and Horton Hears a Who!, are racist, bigoted, and sexist in their very fabric and should be canceled entirely from all school curricula. See Katie Ishi­zuka and Ramón Stephens, “The Cat Is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s Children’s Books,” pub­lished as Article 4 in Vol. 1, Issue 2 of Research on Diver­sity in Youth Litera­ture (Feb. 2019).

It’s long been docu­mented that Theodor Seuss Geisel’s early work as a cartoonist before and during World War II included some con­tent that we would now view as racially and culturally insensi­tive and that a few of his early Dr. Seuss children’s books did as well. Back in the 1970s, in response to this criti­cism, Geisel him­self had revised one of these books, And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (the first and per­haps most auto­bio­graphical Dr. Seuss children’s book, the one that launched his career and laid the track for his later literary achieve­ments). Ishizuka and Stephens, who describe them­selves as “critical race scholar-activists” (p.36), canvass these early instances of insensi­tivity and char­ac­ter­ize Geisel the man as harboring racist, anti-Semitic, and sexist predilections. Then they go further:

They apply a multi-factor “CRT [critical race theory] frame­work” (p.10) to analyze all 50 of the available Dr. Seuss children’s books (some­thing they say hadn’t pre­viously been done), and they con­clude that the entire collection as a whole exhibits anti-Asian “Orientalism,” anti-Black racism, “White supremacy,” and sexism. See p.28 (“The presence of anti-Blackness, Orientalism, and White supremacy span [sic] across Seuss’ entire literary collection and career.”); p.30 (“Inter­sec­tions of racism and sexism occur across Seuss’ entire collection of litera­ture.”). (There have been 59 Dr. Seuss books pub­lished in total, but Ishi­zuka and Stephens say that 9 of them were not available to be analyzed.)

Ishizuka and Stephens say that in 2017 they pre­sented some of their early CRT analysis to the National Educa­tion Asso­cia­tion (NEA), the Nation’s largest teachers’ union, which has spon­sored the Read Across America pro­gram to cele­brate read­ing in pub­lic schools—a pro­gram that for 20 years, beginning in 1996, was held on Dr. Seuss’s birth­day and fea­tured Dr. Seuss books. Ishi­zuka and Stephens proudly state (p.36) that as a result of their anti-Seuss analysis and advo­cacy, “The NEA committed to start transi­tion­ing away from Dr. Seuss” and “removed all Dr. Seuss books from their annual Read Across America Resource Calendar.”

This example shows how some aggressive CRT acti­vists bring social and eco­nomic pressure to bear on their targets to achieve cancela­tion by using influ­ential inter­mediary organiza­tions (whose leaders are often pre-disposed to take left-leaning posi­tions on pub­lic policy issues) as pressure multi­pliers. In this age of Twitter and Instagram, when social shaming and cancela­tion cam­paigns can take off like wild­fire and can quickly generate enor­mous momen­tum and over­whelming eco­nomic pressure, the Seuss estate and pub­lisher were clearly facing (and are still facing) the threat of com­plete destruction of the eco­nomic value of the Dr. Seuss collection of titles.

In response to this mounting threat, those who con­trol Dr. Seuss Enter­prises (probably left-leaning them­selves) appear to have made a cal­culated deci­sion to acknowledge the racial and cultural insensi­tivity of six early Dr. Seuss titles and to work with the pub­lisher, Penguin Ran­dom House, its book dis­tributors, online retailers, and libraries and schools to censor those six titles entirely—in effect, to air­brush them out of history. Thus, I suspect, the actions of libraries, online book­sellers, and other dis­tributors, potentially even eBay, to suppress the six banned titles probably occurred at the request of or in coor­dina­tion with the Seuss estate and the pub­lisher of the Seuss books. (After Dr. Seuss Enter­prises declared the six books anathema, some of the titles—as any econo­mist could have pre­dicted—started gener­ating multi-thousand-dollar bids in auctions on eBay, and that got a lot of media atten­tion in the midst of the Fox News vs. MSNBC horn blaring over the Seuss flap. My guess is that eBay’s manage­ment was either embarrassed to see its auction plat­form used to advance a Fox News narra­tive or decided to cooperate with the Seuss estate’s efforts out of socio-political affinity. In any event, eBay soon also banned the six excom­muni­cated Seussian titles from its site—while, as Yascha Mounk points out, con­tinuing to allow auctions of some truly infamous works.)

Not surprisingly, as measured by recent new book sales, the six Dr. Seuss titles that were can­celed (how­ever notable their cul­tural and his­tor­ical value) had negli­gible mone­tary worth for the Seuss estate and its pub­lisher: The most well-known of the can­celed titles, the already once-revised And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, sold only around 5,000 copies in 2020 (as com­pared to more than 300,000 copies per year each for the best-selling Seuss titles), and the others on the banned list evi­dently sold exactly zero copies in 2020, at least as tracked by Book­Scan. See Alexan­dra Alter and Eliza­beth A. Harris, “Dr. Seuss Books Are Pulled, and a ‘Cancel Culture’ Controversy Erupts,” New York Times (Mar. 1, 2021).

Without negating the moral sig­nifi­cance of the actions taken, the deci­sion to cast out the six titles plainly looks like a desperate effort by Dr. Seuss Enter­prises and Penguin Ran­dom House to sacri­fice a little flesh in order to hold the line and pre­serve the currency and revenue potential of the remainder of the Dr. Seuss collec­tion. Indeed, in the imme­diate wake of the cen­sor­ship con­tro­versy, record numbers of the remaining titles sold as new books (many probably pur­chased by Dr. Seuss fans who feared that the rest of his works, too, could soon be dumped into the can­cela­tion incin­er­ator).

The problem, of course, for the estate and its pub­lisher, and for the millions of readers who love Dr. Seuss, is that it’s very, very diffi­cult in today’s atmo­sphere to stop the can­cela­tion snow­ball once you allow it to start rolling down the hill. (Pardon the com­pounding of meta­phors.) Unless the subject under attack is a favored poli­tician, like Vir­ginia Governor Northam or Presi­dent Clinton, or a revered cul­tural icon, like George Wash­ington or Thomas Jeffer­son (and the Seuss estate and pub­lisher are undoubtedly hoping against hope that Dr. Seuss qualifies in this cate­gory), critical race acti­vists and social justice warriors are almost never satis­fied with a par­tial atone­ment. They’ll con­tinue to push and pressure insistently—through aca­demic channels, through sub­terranean cham­bers of insid­ious burrow­ing, and through the pub­lic use of highly connected influ­ential organi­za­tions like the NEA—for com­plete anni­hi­la­tion.

One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.