Here are the ‘wrong’ illustrations that got six Dr. Seuss books cancelled

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Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the official manager of books published under the moniker Dr. Seuss, announced on March 2 that it will no longer be publishing six Dr. Seuss titles because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”

The most popular of the six titles are 1950’s If I Ran the Zoo and the 1937 book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, which was the first children’s book published under the Dr. Seuss name by author Theodor Seuss Geisel. As of March 2, which also happens to be the author’s birthday, both books remained in the top 10 most popular children’s titles on Amazon.com.

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The other titles no longer being published are McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer, which were all released between 1947 and 1976.

Dr. Seuss Enterprises did not specify which illustrations were offensive, but four of the titles contain cartoon depictions of Asian people, while three contain stereotypical portrayals of Inuit.

If I Ran the Zoo features a young boy imagining a hunting expedition to the fictional land of Zomba-ma-tant where locals “wear their eyes at a slant.” Other pages also show the “African island of Yerka,” featuring squat African tribesmen with large hoops through their noses.

And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street has its young protagonist imagining an increasingly fanciful street parade that  includes “a Chinaman who eats with sticks,” a “Rajah, with rubies” and two fur-clad figures being pulled by a reindeer.

McElligot’s Pool follows a boy imagining the far-out things he’ll catch while fishing in a stagnant pond, including “Eskimo Fish from beyond Hudson Bay.”

Scrambled Eggs Super! has its young protagonist boasting about the increasingly rare eggs he would source for breakfast, including that of the Mt. Strookoo Cuckoo, for which he would enlist the help of a beturbaned helper named Ali. The people of the fictional Arctic nation of Fa-Zoal are also shown clad in furs and paddling skin boats in order to harvest eggs from a “Grice.”

The Cat’s Quizzer, the most recent (and least popular) of the six books appears to have gotten pulled because of a page 11 illustration of a yellow figure in a coolie hat with the caption, “how old do you have to be to be a Japanese?”

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Of the six, the problematic imagery in On Beyond Zebra! is probably the least obvious. The book catalogues a whimsical set of new letters in the alphabet, and briefly features the “Nazzim of Bazzim,” a figure of unspecified nationality riding a camel-like creature called a “Spazzim.”

The six titles were selected after consultation with a “panel of experts,” according to Dr. Seuss Enterprises. The books will no longer be printed or licensed, meaning that the titles will also not be available for sale as e-books.

Thirty years after his death, Theodor Seuss Geisel remains the world’s top-selling children’s author. Of the 20 best-selling children’s books on Amazon right now, 15 of them are Dr. Seuss titles. The Publisher’s Weekly ranking of top-selling children’s show five Dr. Seuss books currently in the top 10.

In recent years, however, Geisel has been targeted for imagery deemed stereotypical or out-of-date, including a 2014 scholarly work asserting that The Cat in the Hat is an elaborate mockery of black people. In 2017, when then-First Lady Melania Trump gifted a collection of Dr. Seuss to a Massachusetts school, the books were returned by librarian Liz Phipps Soeiro with a note that the literature was “steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes.”

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Of Geisel’s decades-long portfolio, it’s his advertising work and editorial cartoons — drawn in the 1930s and 1940s — that contain the heaviest use of derogatory racial caricatures. One of the more notorious is a series of ads for the insecticide company Flit that features big-lipped Africans riding elephants and living in grass huts.

After the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, Geisel published a number of cartoons depicting Japanese people with stereotypically prominent front teeth. One 1942 cartoon even endorses Japanese-American internment by showing Japanese-Americans as disloyal citizens stockpiling explosives and “waiting for the signal from home.”

Despite this, Geisel could simultaneously take stances against racism and prejudice, even when those concepts were against the mainstream. While an editorial cartoonist for the liberal New York paper PM, Geisel was an early advocate for strong U.S. action against Nazi Germany, and in one cartoon said Americans needed a “good mental insecticide” to clear their minds of “racial prejudice.”

Later in life, Geisel would pen several Dr. Seuss titles that would openly grapple with racism, most notably The Sneetches, which catalogues the travails of a bird-like species that enforces a rigid class structure based on which among them have stars on their bellies.

• Email: thopper@nationalpost.com | Twitter: TristinHopper

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