Theodor SEUSS Geisel by Donald E. Pease;

Author:Donald E. Pease;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2010-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

DR. SEUSS’S REUNION

In the early 1950s Geisel felt that he needed to make amends for the anti-Japanese vitriol in his PM cartoons and in the film Know Your Enemy—Japan, which was released to the troops on August 16, 1945, the day the United States dropped the bomb on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered six days after the film was released. Geisel began to revise the film after he accepted an invitation from RKO to do an adaptation of it. Helen assisted with the film script, which highlighted the theme of seven centuries of authoritarian rule. The documentary was released in 1947 as Design for Death, with Hans Conried playing the voice of Japan. The film won the Oscar for best documentary. Design for Death closed with a call for a more democratic postwar culture and focused on “the problem of educating our kids—all our kids—to be smarter than we’ve been.”56

The Geisels accepted an offer from Life magazine to go to Japan to research the American occupation’s impact on educational and child-rearing practices and to learn how those practices changed the ambitions of Japan’s children. They sailed on March 24, 1953. Their trip permitted Geisel to atone for the racist and xenophobic sentiments in his World War II cartoons. After World War II Japan and Korea had adopted And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street and The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins as part of their postwar elementary curriculum. Geisel’s former classmate, Donald Bartlett, asked friends with diplomatic ties to arrange for teachers in Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe to assist the Geisels with their research by asking their students to draw pictures of what they hoped to be when they grew up. Most boys wanted to be aviators or to go to Mars; most girls wanted to be hostesses on interurban buses.57 The Geisels published the results of their research in Life magazine as “Japan’s Young Dreams.” But the publisher, Henry Luce, who “was always anti-Japanese and pro-Chinese,” called for extensive revisions of every aspect of the Geisels’ essay. Not only did the Life staff substitute “conclusions of their own not warranted by the facts,” but they also featured photographs that distorted the realities of postwar Japanese culture. “Very few children drew themselves in Oriental clothing but those few formed a high proportion of those published by Life,” Geisel complained.58

In the fall of 1953 Geisel began another book on Horton the elephant. This one drew on his recently acquired knowledge of Japan’s schools, where individualism was a relatively new concept. He dedicated Horton Hears a Who to a Kyoto educator named Mitsugi Nakamura whom he had met during his trip. According to the Seuss scholar Henry Jenkins, Geisel intended Horton Hears a Who to be used to train “children in emerging democratic cultures around the world, about the relationship between the individual and the community.”59

Having abandoned Horton to go to war, Geisel expressed his complete fidelity to the work of writing of children’s books by returning to him. Horton is representative of the animals in Dr.

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