As far as Geisel was concerned, he was working within the norms of the era, relying on the language and cartoon stereotypes he’d been reading and seeing in the mass media since childhood. Pop culture of the era portrayed nearly every ethnic group—and even some white nationalities—as overtly negative caricatures, whether it was bucktoothed Chinese workers, slovenly besotted Irishmen, or parsimonious Jewish bankers with impossibly long noses. Two years earlier, the year’s most successful motion picture, The Jazz Singer, had featured Al Jolson performing “Mammy” in blackface—and Ted’s cartoons of black men and women would almost always resemble the predominant blackface negative stereotype perpetuated on film and in print.
Further, the stereotypical patois spoken by Geisel’s black characters came straight out of the Amos ’n’ Andy radio show and his beloved Rover Boys books; meanwhile, the casual usage of the pejorative nigger could be found in the Hardy Boys books and in the Western novels of Zane Grey. Even the celebrated cartoonist George Herriman, who was of mixed race, had sometimes relied on racial stereotypes for easy laughs in his various newspaper strips. Over the course of a career that would span seven decades, Geisel drew tens of thousands of cartoons, of which only a small number are truly racially insensitive—there are probably more misogynistic cartoons and cartoons about drinking. And yet the fact that as a young man, Ted perpetuated negative racial stereotypes cannot be denied. He would evolve—but it would take time.
* * *
• • • •
Nineteen twenty-nine was a good year for Geisel—but for millions of Americans, the decadent, booze-soaked 1920s would come crashing to an end in a single day. On Tuesday, October 29, 1929—so-called Black Tuesday—the stock market collapsed in a devastating meltdown that sent fortunes plummeting and plunged large swaths of the American economy into a near perpetual free fall. Almost overnight, New York went from celebratory to solemn as the encroaching Great Depression slowly shuttered factories, put families out onto the street, and shattered millions of American workers.
Ted and Helen would not go completely untouched; Helen’s brother, a securities analyst, would be among more than a million unemployed New Yorkers. The relative steadiness of the advertising industry meant Ted’s work remained stable and his income stayed moderately secure. But knowing his own prospects were sound didn’t make it any easier to watch as jobless and homeless New Yorkers formed long breadlines and thronged soup kitchens. “[All] these people who have nowhere to go,” he said sadly.45
Ted worried, too, about his father, who had managed to successfully live off real estate investments for most of the past decade, but hadn’t had a paying job since Prohibition had closed down the family business in 1920. Looking for employment in the public sector, T.R. had ambitiously sought the Republican nomination for mayor of Springfield in 1929, but hadn’t made it past the primary. Ted, a Democrat, had done his best to follow the election in a nonpartisan silence as his father lost the vote by a wide margin and returned to his post on the Springfield park commission, where he’d been seated, without pay, since 1909.
T.R’s professional fortunes would suddenly improve in early 1930, when his colleagues on the commission asked him to serve as park commission chairman—one step away from the post of park superintendent, which came with it not only control over the park system but also a regular salary. Then, in the summer of 1930, Superintendent Charles M. Ladd resigned, and T.R. was elevated to the post of superintendent—a position he would hold for the next thirty-eight years.
Ted was proud and slightly relieved that his father now had both an income and a purpose. Over the next decade, Ted’s father would help steer Springfield through the Depression, dispensing park funds and federal Works Progress Administration money to employ local workers and improve the park system. “He built tennis courts, trout streams, three golf courses, bowling greens,” Ted recalled later. Some of his projects would even bear his name, as grateful Springfielders called one picnic area in Forest Park “Geisel Grove.” “He changed people’s lives more than he would have done if he’d been a millionaire. He used WPA funds and government money to put people to work. So he ended up a very worthwhile guy.”46
Meanwhile, Ted’s sister, Marnie, found her marriage to lawyer Lloyd Dahmen rapidly deteriorating—and in the autumn of 1929, she and Nettie Geisel, with two-year-old Peggy in tow, traveled to Reno, Nevada, to establish the state residency needed to end her marriage quickly. Once the divorce had been finalized, Marnie and Peggy moved in with T.R. and Nettie in Springfield. While Marnie took a job as a substitute teacher of German, she was already beginning to spiral into alcoholism—a cruel and difficult disease to suffer in a family full of brewers and day drinkers.
While Ted’s contract with Standard Oil prohibited him from working on any other national campaigns, his advertising work in 1930 expanded to include several local and regional campaigns, including ads for desk fans sold by General Electric. The Flit ads were continuing to run all year long, with many now appearing in full color and showing up in the pages of Life, Judge, The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, Time, and Collier’s. The ads would also run in more than 3,600 newspapers, including the Springfield Union, where it was well known that the Dr. Seuss signed on each cartoon was actually local boy Theodor Seuss Geisel.
Ted had also extended his freelance work into other magazines beyond Judge, placing some of his most charming pieces in Life, where he would have a number of covers and begin a popular series called “Life’s Little Educational Charts,” featuring Seussian animals like the Mnpf and the Pflupf. And still there were the booze jokes, such as a beautiful full-page cartoon in Life featuring more of Ted’s fanciful “D.T. Beasts”—including a pair of elephant birds—being loaded into the Ark by Noah’s “dissolute brother, Goah,” who counts the animals with a jug of moonshine dangling from one hand.47 It was no wonder so many of Ted’s fans were beginning to call him “Dr. Souse.”
That winter, Ted and Helen spent Christmas in Springfield, staying in the house on Fairfield not only with his parents, but also with his sister, Marnie, and her daughter, Peggy. The house was crowded but warm, and Ted took an immediate shine to his three-year-old niece. On Christmas Eve, he sneaked to the attic over Marnie and Peggy’s room and began stamping loudly and ringing sleigh bells. “Everyone would be asleep and he would tromp around and ring Christmas bells and make noise like Santa and his reindeer,” said Peggy’s son Ted Owens. It was a tradition Ted would continue for years. “My mom enjoyed it immensely,” said Owens, “even when she no longer believed in Santa.”48
Always the proud Dartmouth man, Geisel would take part in campus events when he could, and in 1931 he was pleased to be asked to provide the art for Dartmouth’s annual Winter Carnival program. Ted attended the festivities with Helen in February, where he was delighted to see the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity house had created a Dr. Seuss–inspired catlike snow sculpture, with a tail that wound its way in through the front door, through the house, and out into the backyard. “It went into the fireplace and melted, and they had pledges replenishing the tail for three days,” Ted said.49
As a token of their appreciation, the fraternity gave Geisel some odd-shaped antlers they’d found. Geisel was enchanted, and when he returned to his office in New York, he began sculpting animal heads to mount them on. “I can thank the Phi Gams for starting me in my career as a taxidermist,” he told The Dartmouth.50 He would receive other animal horns from the Springfield Zoo, courtesy of his father, and would eventually use them to perch atop several Seussian animal trophy heads, which he sculpted himself and hung proudly on the walls of his office. “They are his main hobby,” a somewhat exasperated Marnie explained to one reporter, noting also that the heads, with their smiling faces and wide eyes, gave her nightmares.51 A photo of Ted from this time shows him sitting at his desk, wearing a matching striped jacket and tie, pencil clamped tightly in his mouth—an ashtray littered with cigarette butts
sits at his right elbow—inking a drawing of a unicorn he would eventually turn into one of his sculptured heads. Later, Ted would have his animal heads mass-produced and sold as “rare and amazing” trophies from the Bobo Isles, a nod to the Bo-Bobians he had once drawn in the pages of Jacko.
February 1931 would also see the publication of Boners, the first mainstream book to feature cartoons by Dr. Seuss.52 Boners was a collection of unintentionally funny bits of student writing—featuring nuggets like “A polygon is a dead parrot”53—lifted from real school exams and term papers. Geisel was brought in by Viking Press to provide twenty cartoons, and was given a prominent credit on the book’s cover and spine, a sure sign of his growing name recognition. To Geisel’s surprise, Boners was an immediate hit, selling out of six printings in four months, pushing its way onto the New York Times bestseller list, and inspiring a second volume—aptly titled More Boners, also illustrated by Dr. Seuss—only two months after the release of the first volume. Sales were brisk, and reviewers were particularly effusive about Geisel’s cartoons. “The drawings by Dr. Seuss are hilarious,”54 wrote The New York Times, while another reviewer called the cartoons “simply swell.”55
Geisel saw none of the profits from it. “I was money-worried,” he said. “The two [Boner] books were booming and I was not.”56 As the artist for the book, Geisel had been work for hire, and he’d been paid a flat fee for his twenty cartoons. In most cases, it was the writer, with his royalties, who made far more from a successful book than the work-for-hire illustrator. It was at this point, Ted later explained, that he came to realize “there was no sense in just illustrating books.”57 To make any real money in publishing, he’d have to be both the writer and the artist.
It was an attractive idea, both financially and creatively. Geisel’s work for Stanco and the Flit campaign paid well and didn’t take up much of his time. “I’d get my year’s work done in about three months,” he said later, and as a result, “I had all this spare time and nothing to do.”58 That wasn’t quite true; Geisel actually had plenty to do, with his commercial work for non-national campaigns, and the cartoons and prose pieces he was still regularly producing for magazines. But he was looking to expand his creative repertoire—and if he could get paid for it, so much the better.
Geisel would usually overstate the restrictive nature of his contract with Standard Oil—outside work was permitted, within reason—but he did have to be careful. The exclusive nature of his contract with Standard Oil, he explained, “forbade me from doing an awful lot of stuff.”59 Writing and illustrating children’s books, however, wasn’t a forbidden activity. “I would like to say I went into children’s book work because of my great understanding of children,” Geisel said later. In truth, “I went in because it wasn’t excluded by my Standard Oil contract.”60
His first children’s book, he decided, would be an ABC primer, featuring Seussian animals illustrating each letter of the alphabet. But Geisel was experimenting with colored inks for the project, which he knew was going to make it difficult to reproduce cheaply for the mass market. “It had about seventeen different blues in it and three kinds of red,” Ted said. “It would have cost about $150 a copy.”61 Geisel shopped the book around to several publishers, including Viking, the publisher of Boners. No one took it. He would keep working.
* * *
• • • •
During visits to Springfield in late 1930 and early 1931, Ted had noticed that his mother’s health was declining. Nettie Geisel was enjoying life with her daughter and granddaughter in the house—each evening, she would sing to Peggy the same baker’s song she had sung to Ted—but she had been complaining of headaches for several months. However, Nettie had recently converted to Christian Science, which meant there would be no calls to doctors, no consulting with physicians. Illness, she was certain, was something that would leave the body of its own accord.
Early in 1931, Nettie alarmed her family when she nodded off in the middle of a bridge game and lost consciousness for some time. Still she refused medical attention. Finally, in early March, over Nettie’s objections, T.R. took his wife immediately to Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, where doctors discovered a fatal brain tumor. Shortly thereafter, on March 8, 1931, Nettie Seuss Geisel died at age fifty-two. She was buried at Oak Grove Cemetery in Springfield two days later.
T. R. Geisel was devastated; Ted was nearly inconsolable. He and Helen would travel in Yugoslavia for seven weeks over the summer to give Ted the opportunity to mourn his mother and “to clear the air and get new ideas.” Marnie, meanwhile, would do her best to take over the Geisel household. There would be no more substitute teaching of German. “Marnie had to give up everything to keep house for her father and to take care of her daughter, who was then still a little girl,” said her grandson Ted Owens.62 Her alcoholism would remain largely hidden from neighbors, and the Geisels would never speak of her condition publicly, cloaking her condition as agoraphobia. Marnie would rarely venture far beyond the door of 74 Fairfield Street.
Despite Ted’s grumblings about money, he was doing well enough that he and Helen could vacate their apartment on West End Avenue in August to move into an even larger place at 17 East 96th Street, less than a block from Central Park. For Ted, the move had been somewhat strategic, for the new location was more convenient to the uptown publishers to whom he still hoped to pitch his projects. But there was also an element of ego involved: the Upper East Side neighborhood was more prestigious, and Ted would almost always gauge success by address. Yet Ted would never feel entirely at home in a Park Avenue neighborhood, a state of mind revealed in a bit of hastily scribbled verse:
Mrs. Van Bleck
Of the Newport Van Blecks
Is so goddamn rich
She has gold-plated sex
Whereas Miggles and Mitzi
And Bitzi and Sue
Have the commonplace thing
And it just has to do.63
Through a frequent dinner companion named Hugh Troy—a fun-loving, six-foot-five practical joker and Cornell graduate—Ted and Helen began to be invited to some of New York’s more fashionable dinner parties, thrown at some of New York’s more fashionable addresses. It was through Hugh Troy that the Geisels found themselves at the exceptionally posh dinner table of Frank A. Vanderlip, the wealthy president of National City Bank and a co-creator of the Federal Reserve—and here again, Ted refused to take the evening too seriously. Before dinner, he and Hugh Troy snuck into the kitchen and slipped a fake pearl into one of the dozens of oysters sitting on an enormous dinner platter, waiting to be presented to the evening’s guests. When dinner was finally served, a Wall Street broker discovered the pearl in his oyster, prompting a lengthy deliberation over who was entitled to the pearl: Vanderlip, who had purchased the oyster, or the broker who had found it? Helen, who thought Ted let the argument go on far too long, finally forced her husband to confess to the practical joke. Ted would tell the story for years, and was later somewhat annoyed to learn that author John Cheever—a friend of the Vanderlips—had been telling the fake pearl story as his own.
By early 1932, Geisel’s contract with Judge had expired, but at this point, he hardly needed the work or the exposure; even Walter Winchell was a fan of Dr. Seuss, declaring “I think Dr. Seuss is grand!” in his nationally syndicated column.64 Apart from his work for Life, Ted was also being published in College Humor and Liberty—a magazine he liked because it paid a staggering rate of $300 per page—and would soon show up in University Magazine, New York Woman, Collier’s, and Ballyhoo. “[I was] the Typhoid Mary of magazines,” Geisel later joked, “every magazine I’ve ever worked for had gone bankrupt, and it’s not my fault.”65 Lately, however, he was slowly moving away from magazine work to focus instead on advertising and other projects.
Those other projects still included the ABC book, for which Geisel was even more determined to find a home. He was still sending the f
inished art around to publishers—who, he complained, often mishandled his pages and smudged them with “thumb prints, footprints, grease, muck, and rubble.”66 At the same time, there had been some interest from an exhibitor who also hoped to display the finished art at Dartmouth as part of a showcase of Dr. Seuss art—but Geisel was hedging his bets on that one, still holding on to the hope the book might be picked up by a mainstream publisher. By May 1932, however, any hope for a publishing deal was abandoned when his pages went missing, lost in the mail. To this day, the ABC book remains an enigmatic entry in the Seuss oeuvre.
That autumn, Ted cast his vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt for president. For the most part, Ted’s cartoons had remained generally free of politics—the exception was a cartoon in the otherwise apolitical Liberty suggesting the Republican party swap its elephant mascot for any number of winged, horned Seussian creatures—but his vote for FDR was seen by the staunchly Republican T. R. Geisel as an act of willful political defiance. As the 1932 election approached, Ted and his father had quarreled over politics and candidates, and the tenor of their debate had gotten so heated that Ted and T.R. vowed to table any further discussions of politics—at least until after the next election. Ted also promised to refrain from doing any overtly political cartooning—a vow he was destined not to keep.
* * *
• • • •
Geisel’s work on the Flit campaign had turned Flit into one of the most recognizable brands in the nation, and transformed Ted—or rather, Dr. Seuss, whose name appeared at the bottom of every Flit ad—into one of the nation’s best-known artists. Vanity Fair even ran a brief profile of him, calling Dr. Seuss the “Czar of the Insect World” for his “insecticide dramas, the Flit advertisements, which have made his name famous among cartoonists.”67 Dr. Seuss had made insecticide funny—and now the Standard Oil Company, through its affiliation with Esso, was hoping he could do the same thing for another otherwise uninspiring product, their Essolube 5-Star Motor Oil.
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