As his early work has been unearthed, activists have painted Seuss as an unregenerate racist who encoded hate into everything from The Cat in the Hat’s supposed minstrelry to Horton’s unwanted paternalism in hearing that Who. Some of Seuss’s sophomoric efforts were indeed cringe-making by anyone’s standards. Faced with the full loss of its intellectual property’s value, “working with a panel of experts, including educators,” Seuss Enterprises instead used the birthday to announce that six Seuss books were the first things to go-like stockings hung all in a row.ī orn in 1904, Theodor Seuss Geisel had the misfortune of beginning his career as a college humorist at a time when nothing was funny, at least by today’s standards.
This year for “Read Across America Day,” the National Education Association declined to acknowledge Seuss at its annual March event that is, in fact, timed to coincide with the author’s birthday (Seuss had been the focus of the event during both the Obama and Trump administrations). Yet some have long looked to cancel the writer beloved by generations for hitting the funny bones of children while twisting the tongues of parents. Somewhere between “Pasternak, Boris” and “Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr,” “Seuss, Dr.” might seem like an unexpected addition to the samizdat library. Overnight, Mein Kampf became more available than the anapestic tetrameters of that “New Zoo, McGrew Zoo.”
eBay announced it was “sweeping our marketplace” to remove these titles that now violated the company’s “offensive material policy.” The street price for ragged copies shot up a hundred fold. The move also cut into our ability to buy used copies of the books online. The confinement not only ended the publication and licensing of six books.
The author’s own estate threw away the key to what quickly became the endangered species of its archive. Seuss’s 1950 children’s book was captured and caged along with five other titles. It was hard to escape the news when, on March 2, the zoo-loving protagonist of Dr. W hat is so wild about If I Ran the Zoo? Don’t ask young Gerald McGrew.
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