Dr. Seuss is Political? The Cat is a Communist??

On my nieces' second birthday, my gift to her was a series of Dr. Seuss books. She received the first eight all at once and the rest would arrive once a month for the next six months or so. I had them mailed to my home and when they arrived I would take them with me to my parents’ house for Sunday dinner where the whole family gets together. After dinner, I would read to her in an attempt to spend some quality time and form a bond with my only niece. She would get so excited and that brought me all the joy and satisfaction in the world. I didn't get why she would get so excited and dismissed it as one of those things kids get excited about because they are kids. You see, that was my first full exposure to Dr. Seuss because I was already ten years old when my family migrated to the United States and I never had that first hand experience your typical child growing up in American culture would have. Nevertheless, I was still aware of Dr. Seuss's place in American culture or at least I thought I did until reading Cat People: What Dr. Seuss Really Taught Us.

To be completely honest, even reading Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) as an adult to my little niece I figured someone would interpret in it some sort of subliminal messages or at least the potential of some sort of hidden sexual or Freudian agenda that psychoanalysts can take and run away with, but not to the scope introduced by Louis Menand's article. To place Dr. Seuss along side Noam Chomsky and Claude Levi-Strauss is an interesting concept for me. I didn't know when Dr. Seuss first appeared on the scene (1957) and even if I had, I would have never made the connection to the Cold War and the book's political agenda. In his article, Menand mentions the social conditions that existed post World War II that created a need for the baby boomers to develop at a rate that can compete educationally with that of European children, particularly Russian children. Thus, we have the National Defense Education Act of 1958 which pumped some of the military spending dollars into the educational system that would revive interests among young people who were perceived as being made "vicious and stupid" by the commercial culture as well as by televisions that made their way to 72% of American homes by 1956. Dr. Seuss books as a phonics tool used to introduce children to word sounds would inevitably play a part in teaching them reading faster than they were accustomed to.

In the Dana Nelson Salvino chapter, The Word in Black and White: Ideologies of Race and Literacy in Antebellum America, it is mentioned that there exists a reciprocal relationship between literacy and culture. She mentions, "...along with learning how to read, students also learned what to read" (142). She goes on to discuss literacy in terms of the democratization process as well as listing it as a tool for differentiation. That is, literacy created a subordination or a hierarchal social order of sorts. She also mentions the relationship between education and the citizenry of those being educated and the social ideals that were created during the educational process. Somehow, knowing that the historical context of which Salvino was examining is different than that of Menand, the message is the same. Both view literacy, regardless of the time period they are attempting to examine, as a politically charged concept. Evidently, this concept is deeply rooted in the psyche of the minds of those living in the various eras. For the baby boomers, Dr. Seuss may have been an invention of their social conditions in a response to some political agenda. For my niece it is just another colorful book that her uncle read to her and that is just fine with me.