My most interesting Christmas present was the 1999 book Dr. Seuss Goes to War, a collection of editorial cartoons that Theodor Seuss Geisel drew for the New York daily PM in 1941 and ’42. I hadn’t known the creator of Green Eggs and Ham and Yertel the Turtle ever drew editorial cartoons. I also hadn’t known he drew Japanese-Americans as a fifth column serving the cause of Hirohito and Tojo.
Two months after Pearl Harbor, that particular blind spot would have been shared by a lot more than the New York left. In fact, the notion that there was something Geisel wasn’t seeing would have occurred to almost no one. His eyes were wide-open. While the U.S. still sat out the war he’d drawn cartoon after cartoon savaging the isolationists who wanted to keep it that way. On October 1, 1941, PM carried his drawing of a granny labeled “America First” reading a storybook to a couple of frightened children. The book is called “Adolf the Wolf” and the granny concludes, “. . . and the Wolf chewed up the children and spit out their bones . . . But those were Foreign Children and it really didn’t matter.”
Minear, a historian of wartime Japan, wasn’t as sure. Horton tells the story of a friendly elephant who protects a civilization of creatures so tiny they occupy a speck of dust. If Whoville is Japan, Horton must be the postwar occupying United States, Minear reasons, and he quotes the mayor of Whoville’s expression of gratitude:
