More than ‘The Cat in the Hat’: Dr. Seuss drew anti-Japanese political cartoons
December 5, 2003
To many Americans, Theodor Seuss Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, is the beloved children’s book author, who penned such classics as The Lorax, Green Eggs and Ham and The Cat in the Hat.
But his reputation is less than wholesome to some Asian Pacific Americans.
In the film version of The Cat in the Hat, which hit theaters on Nov. 22 and has remained the No. 1 weekend movie, veteran APA actress Amy Hill plays Mrs. Kwan, a character one critic called the Charlie Chan of au pairs. Mrs. Kwan resembles the caricatures in Geisel’s World War II political cartoons — from her coke-bottle glasses that magnify her slanty eyes to her bucked teeth and general cluelessness.
So far, no APA groups have protested. But message boards are clogged with criticism, and privately, some APAs are giving the film a thumbs-down.
Rev. Norman Fong, of San Francisco’s Chinatown Community Development Center, has considered organizing a demonstration. “I’m personally upset with the movie,” says Fong, who worked as child caretaker while he attended seminary. “Making fun of a babysitter is no fun to me. I feel especially bad that kids are watching The Cat in The Hat, thinking Chinese babysitters are silly and stupid.”
Guy Aoki, executive director of Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA), says, “It’s unfortunate the way the filmmakers chose to dress and costume the Mrs. Kwan character. The thick glasses immediately reminded me of the way World War II Japanese were depicted.”
More than 15 years before he published The Cat in the Hat, Geisel produced some 400 cartoons for PM, a leftist newspaper based in New York City. Richard Minear, a professor at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, uncovered the cartoons in his book Dr. Seuss Goes to War.
“There are some vicious anti-Japan cartoons,” Minear said. “There’s only one Jap stereotype and it’s not Tojo, not the emperor, not a historical figure of any kind. They’re just kind of Gilbert Sullivan-ish, whereas in the German cartoons, there are a range of faces and a recognizable Hitler.”
One cartoon, in particular, shows Japanese Americans as enemies, with “cookie cutter stereotypes coming down the coast of San Francisco,” Minear said. The bespectacled caricatures line up for TNT from a warehouse labeled “Honorable 5th column.” Days after the cartoon ran, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an order to send 120,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps.
That cartoon and others compelled members of the National Education Association’s Asian Pacific Islander caucus to protest the use of Dr. Seuss as the trademark for NEA’s “Read Across America” campaign.
Louise Watkins, chair of the API caucus, said some older Japanese Americans felt that “what Geisel had done was responsible for the internment. Ö especially the one with the Chinese ó they look Chinese but they’re supposed to be Japanese ó lined up along the [coast] during World War II.
After the caucus complained in August, the national NEA president agreed to promote a more diverse crop of authors in the campaign, but he said the public already associated Dr. Seuss with “Read Across America,” making it too costly to remove the cartoon completely. The compromise satisfied both sides. “What we wanted more than anything was that Dr. Seuss not be the center of attention.”
That the cartoons expressed a racist attitude toward Japanese is not in doubt, but Minear says, “It’s a real reach to connect the cartoons with internment” since at the time, PM only had a circulation of about 150,000. “With [General John] Dewitt in high gear, organized folks pushing for exclusion, the military and the Pearl Harbor hysteria, the cartoon was small potatoes in comparison.”
Minear points out that Geisel also promoted civil rights and condemned anti-Semitism. “He’s got great cartoons that no mainstream white newspaper would have published because they were too far ahead of their time, so it’s all the more striking that he has this blind spot.
Minear surmises that Geisel, who grew up in Massachusetts, had never met an Asian person at the time he drew his cartoons. After the war he moved to California and he even traveled to Japan. Soon after he wrote Horton Hears a Who.
“That’s an allegory for Japan,” Minear says. “Horton with his big ears can hear the voice coming from a speck of dust. He saves the speck of dust, which is the civilization of Japan. It symbolizes the occupation of Japan.
“That’s ten-steps forward from his World War II stuff. He still has a way to go.”
Ironically, Mrs. Kwan, while bearing a resemblance to Geisel’s caricatures, was not created by Geisel but by writers for the film. Hill says she expected there would be some criticism from the APA community. “I come from San Francisco, which has the Asian American Theater Company. We did more controversial themes there, but that was within our community. Once you do it in the mainstream, the same type of character, everybody asks, ‘Is that the image we want to portray?’
“Unfortunately, there are so few images available, there’s no way we’re not going to get some kind of criticism. So I try my best to be a true character and a real person.”
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