To most Americans who grew up with Dr. Seuss' oddly, endearingly drawn critters and facile rhymes ("And then he ran out. / And, then, fast as a fox, / The Cat in the Hat / Came back in with a box"), the report that Dr. Seuss was, as Art Spiegelman puts it, "a feisty political cartoonist who exhorted America to do battle with Hitler" may come as a surprise. I didn't grow up in the United States, having arrived here when I was 26, but it didn't take me long to acquire a certain image of Dr. Seuss.
In fact, I first learned about Dr. Seuss' wartime roles only recently. In a footnote to his multifaceted account of the U.S. Occupation of Japan, "Embracing Defeat" (The New Press, 1999), John Dower referred to the War Department's "uncompromisingly harsh" propaganda film, "Your Job in Germany," noting that its script was written by "Theodor Geisel (later to become famous as the author of the 'Dr. Seuss' children's books)."
The film emphasized, Dower said, that "virtually every German . . . had supported the Nazis; and every German -- especially the young -- was a potential source of future revanchism." Uncompromisingly harsh indeed, immediately bringing to mind the more recent view propounded by the Harvard teacher Daniel Goldhagen that all Germans were "Hitler's willing executioners." (For Geisel, it was German "revanchism," rather than the Holocaust, because when he scripted "Your Job in Germany," the scale of the mass murder wasn't widely known.)