One Small Voice: Censoring Dr. Seuss just goes too far

by Lynn Mandaville

Any librarian worth her salt knows that March 2 is the birthday of Theodor Seuss Geisel.  This year was the 97th anniversary of his birth.

To the world Geisel is known as Dr. Seuss, one of America’s best known and most prolific authors of children’s books.  Since the 1930s he has produced such marvelous classics as The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. 

Each year, Seuss’s birthday is celebrated in libraries and classrooms the world around with costumes and green eggs and oral readings by celebrities and community leaders.

But this year was marked by the dubious pronouncement by Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the estate of the late author, that six of Seuss’s titles will no longer be printed.

This announcement has been met with mixed reviews.

To quote directly from Dr. Seuss Enterprises, these books have been removed from the catalog of Seuss’s books because an internal review determined that the books “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”

Further, they say “Ceasing sales of these books is only part of our commitment and our broader plan to ensure Dr. Seuss Enterprise’s catalog represents and supports all communities and families.”

The titles in question are the better-known If I Ran The Zoo, Scrambled Eggs Super!, McElligot’s Pool, To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, and On Beyond Zebra! as well as the lesser known title The Cat’s Quizzer.

Certainly, these are not Seuss’s best known works, and they probably won’t be horribly missed among the more than 60 works Geisel penned under his pseudonym.

But that’s not what bugs me about this announcement.

What bugs me is that this is a decision by the agency of the author himself to posthumously ban these works of art, an egregious act of suppression of Geisel’s freedom of speech after his death.

Take a minute to ponder that.

In today’s parlance this action might be termed “cancel culture.”

I prefer to call it by what it is, not by a popular cliché.

This is outright censorship.  An abridgement of Theodor Geisel’s freedom of speech.  An action against which he is unable to make a defense.

When Geisel was alive, he controlled the copyrights to all his works.  He alone made the decisions about the artistic content of these children’s books.

Not any more.

It has been reported that Geisel, when approached about the outdated incorrectness of some of the images and phrases in the above-named books, agreed to make some revisions.  For example, he changed a phrase in To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street from “a Chinaman” to “a Chinese man,” and altered the illustration of said man to eliminate the man’s pig tail and yellow skin.

Upon rereading this book I find that these revisions are minor, indeed.  In fact, it is nearly inconsequential in the overall effect of the story.  But the author, the artist himself, agreed while he was alive and in control of his work, to make these changes.

The decision to discontinue printing this title, to ban this book for future readers, was not made as a business decision, one that took the book out of print because of slow sales.  The decision was made, in my opinion based on the corporate statement, under duress because of the times we live in.  The entire work was, in essence, banned because of current over-indulgence in political correctness.

In the case of Mulberry Street, a ban was imposed based on one image and one phrase contained within an entire work.

Though over the many years since the publishing of Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn it, too, has been challenged for its use of an objectionable term for black people, that book has not been taken out of print.

Though individuals and groups have attempted to remove the book by way of an outright ban, the First Amendment has protected this work of art.

Granted, Huckleberry Finn is not a title owned by a corporate entity, thus not controlled by one.  It has been produced in forms altered and/or abridged by different publishers due to its copyright status, specifically that there is none.  Huckleberry Finn exists within the public domain.

But Huckleberry Finn is only censored in the sense that teachers or boards of education or the like can control whether or not this title is used in classrooms or is available to students in the school libraries, and in which altered or unabridged form.

Unlike the six Seuss titles in question, Huckleberry Finn will still be available to the buying public.

To me, this is an extremely important distinction.

Apparently, I am not alone in my feelings about this decision.

Amazon and Barnes & Noble are sold out of existing copies of the six Seuss titles.  Ebay reports used copies of these books being listed for up to $500 per copy.

The public is responding with their pocketbooks to this corporate banning of books.  Personal ownership is what will keep these works available to humankind.

Most of us are familiar with the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, in which individuals are tasked with memorizing specific books that have been removed from general availability by an authoritarian government.

This is usually a title taught in high school English classes, at least it was when I was just a pup.  It speaks to the vital importance to a free society of unencumbered access to works of art, of free expression by authors of things unpopular or offensive.

This freedom is highly prized by Americans.  That’s why it is number one on the charts of liberties most valuable to us.

So I grieve this loss, not just to Americans and speakers of English, but to the world for whom Seuss’s works have been translated into more than 20 languages at the time of his death in 1991.

I am hanging on to my copy of Mulberry Street for posterity.  It will go on my shelf with other books that have gone the way of the dodo through censorship, books like Little Black Sambo and Epaminondas, which, though offensive, have a place in the pantheon of literature.

I also have copies of Little Golden Books that have been discontinued because of their political incorrectness.

It is important that we have records of the morals and mores of our national identity.  In my opinion, it is through children’s literature that we first witness those ideas and ethics we deem necessary to the healthy development of our population.

Sometimes we get it wrong, like we do in health and nutrition.  We used to think that mercury was a good thing with which to cure certain ailments.  Now we know better.  We said alcohol was bad for us.  Now we say a little is actually beneficial.

So it goes with ideas and customs.

In a perfect world, Seuss’s books would remain in print, if only for use by anthropologists.

But they are still good teaching tools by which to teach our kids how we once got things wrong when depicting those who are different from other countries or races.

To lose these books is to lose six components of the Seuss artistic catalog, without the consent of the artist.  I fear Dr. Seuss Enterprises has made a terrible mistake.