Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

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  In autumn of 1939, even as both Seven Lady Godivas and King’s Stilts were landing to a relative lack of interest, Geisel was at work on yet another children’s book, his fifth in three years. This time, he was abandoning the fairy-tale conceits he’d used in both Bartholomew Cubbins and King’s Stilts to return to the realm where he was more comfortable: the animal kingdom. Whether in the pages of Jacko, Judge, or Life, or in countless ad campaigns, the work of Dr. Seuss was filled with animals, from grinning cows and goats on mountaintops, to whales in craters, turtles on tables, and drunken elephants on roller skates. And it was an elephant Geisel was playing with now, in fact—an elephant he’d put up a tree, without a clear idea yet about how to get him down.

  For his entire life, Geisel would claim that Horton Hatches the Egg had been born of a happy accident. As he initially told the story, “I was just sitting doodling on some transparent paper. I had drawn a tree, and I had drawn an elephant. When one paper lighted on top of the other, it looked as if the elephant were sitting in the tree.”60 As Geisel told and retold the story over the next four decades, he would—like Marco—add new embellishments, eventually settling on a version of the story that had the breeze from a serendipitously open window blow a sketch of an elephant on top of a drawing of a tree. “All I had to do was figure out what the elephant was doing on that tree,” Ted said in 1972. “I’ve left my window open for 40 years since that, but nothing’s happened.”61

  In truth, there were elements of Horton’s story that Geisel had covered before. A year earlier, in the pages of Judge, Geisel had written and drawn a one-page Dr. Seuss Fable called “Matilda, the Elephant with a Mother Complex.” In this story, an abandoned chickadee egg is found on the side of a trail by an elephant named Matilda, an old maid who lingered at the back of her herd, watching families through eyes “dim and misty with tears.” When Matilda finds the egg, she’s determined to sit on it, even as she eventually eats all the food within her reach and other animals come out of the woods just to make fun of her. Eventually she hatches a healthy chickadee, which flies away in terror, leaving Matilda to roam the jungle “alone and friendless . . . with nothing at all to show for her pains but a very bad case of lumbago.” Dr. Seuss’s moral was as dark as his ending: “Don’t go hatching other folks’ eggs.”62

  It also wasn’t the first time Geisel had put an unusually large or unfit animal in a tree. In the past, he’d put whales and walruses in treetops, and had even shown elephants sitting on eggs. Now he had an elephant on an egg in a tree—and it had taken some time before he could figure out how the elephant had gotten there in the first place. As Geisel initially plotted it, Horton the Elephant—Ted had discarded the names Osmer, Bosco, and Humphrey—would volunteer to sit on the egg for Mayzie, a devoted mother bird who was concerned that Horton would accidentally crush her egg under his weight. However, once Geisel decided that Mayzie was a lazy bird who was actually abandoning her egg—and that Horton was sitting on the egg because he had given his word he’d take care of it—Geisel knew he’d found his story.

  As Geisel worked on Horton Hatches the Egg throughout the fall of 1939, he was more and more pleased with how it was coming together—and was stunned at how easy it all seemed to be. “The new book is coming along with a rapidity that leaves me breathless,” he wrote to Louise Bonino at Random House.

  It is a beautiful thing.

  The funniest juvenile ever written. I mean, being written. Never before have I stood before myself and pointed so proudly, saying, “Genius you are.” I feel certain it will sell well over a million. . . . P.S. I like my new book.63

  After the failures of Godivas, Cubbins, and King’s Stilts, Geisel had decided to go back to the narrative format that had succeeded for him with Mulberry Street, and was writing this one in rhyming verse. And he was at getting to work in two colors this time, green and orange, giving the book more vibrancy and pop. Narratively, Geisel had created in Horton a likable main character who suffers stoically through one terrible situation after another—bad weather, mockery, even threat of death—and all because he makes a principled stand, determined to live up to the book’s (and Horton’s) moral and poetic refrain:

  I meant what I said,

  And I said what I meant. . . .

  An elephant’s faithful

  One hundred per cent!64

  The ending of the story, however, was proving problematic—and Ted was looking to Helen for help in getting Horton down. “She’s a fiend for story line,” said Ted.65 Indeed, Helen was taking their plot problem seriously, and had spent the better part of a class reunion luncheon explaining to her former classmates that now “there was a book overdue at the publisher’s, and Ted had an elephant up in a tree and couldn’t figure out what to do with him.”66 Cerf was also providing help where he could, and for this book had wisely paired Ted with a new editor, Saxe Commins—“one of the great men of Random House,” said Cerf67—who had worked with playwright Eugene O’Neill and was similarly a stickler for a cohesive story. In the end it was Helen, not Ted or Saxe Commins, who figured out how to bring Horton down: Horton comes off the egg when it hatches an elephant bird, and—unlike Matilda in Ted’s Judge story—he is rewarded with a happy ending.

  Geisel completed Horton Hatches the Egg in the spring of 1940 and sent it off to Random House, already certain he had a winner on his hands. Cerf was delighted with it, and immediately sent Ted a $500 advance, as well as a contract increasing his royalties. The contract, Cerf told Ted warmly, was “not the usual formal business document; it is a declaration of love.”68 Such enthusiasm, however, didn’t translate into spectacular sales for this one, either. By brat-book standards, Horton was a success, selling 5,800 copies in its first year and 1,645 in its second, but these still weren’t the kinds of sales Ted could live off of—nor were they even close to the kinds of sales he’d seen with Mulberry Street. But Cerf was happy; he felt that Geisel, after two false starts, had finally found his footing—and his voice—as Dr. Seuss.

  Reviews, too, were generally positive—though The New York Times noted somewhat curiously that Dr. Seuss had nearly bogged down his story with a moral message—and cartoon producer Leon Schlesinger paid $200 for the rights to turn the book into a ten-minute animated version, which would be released in 1942. Alexander Laing, once again writing for the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, was predictably overly effusive in his praise, at one point comparing Dr. Seuss, with an absolute straight face, to Henrik Ibsen. Unlike The New York Times, Laing thought the messaging of Horton was one of its strengths and believed Geisel might have intended Horton’s tale as “a symbolic parable for our times,” expressing an intentionally political point of view. “The symbolism is as clear as day,” wrote Laing. “It is, among other things, a parable against appeasement . . . remember that the way to attain the little winged pachyderm of happiness on earth is to stick to your principles, no matter who else is sticking to his guns.”69

  While Geisel would always maintain—with a few exceptions—that his children’s books were never intended to be political or allegorical, the war in Europe was very much on his mind as he paced his office, working through Horton’s story. “Paris was being occupied by klanking tanks of the Nazis and I was listening on my radio,” Ted wrote later. “I found that I could no longer keep my mind on drawing pictures of Horton the Elephant.”70 But while Ted wasn’t ready to wear his politics on his sleeve in one of his kids’ books, he had been flexing his political muscles elsewhere—if readers knew where to look.

  In early 1939, Ted had agreed to take up editorial cartooning in earnest for Hearst newspapers like the New York Journal-American—and perhaps hoping to keep his editorial cartooning separate from his Dr. Seuss persona, Geisel signed his political work as Tedd. While Geisel remained a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt, the president’s economic policies—especially when they hit Ted in his own pocketbook—wer
e frequent targets. Tedd regularly griped about high taxes—a gigantic canary labeled TAXES gobbles up an enormous meal as its taxpaying owners dine on a pittance of birdseed—and took to task the expensive New Deal (which he called “Goofy Economics”), to the likely delight of his Republican father. He would, however, save his hardest punches for Adolf Hitler. As the führer’s tanks steamrolled through Europe, Geisel portrayed him as an ugly suitor with a bouquet of dead fish that he hands out to women in homes labeled AUSTRIA and CZECHOSLOVAKIA, asking, “What lucky girl gets the next bouquet?”71

  Geisel’s stint as a Hearst editorial cartoonist came to an end in late 1939, at about the time he was struggling to find a way to bring Horton down from his tree—and for Ted it was just as well. He and his editors at the Journal-American were squabbling over whether the United States needed to enter the war in Europe, with Geisel hinting at the need for American intervention in his cartoons. Without his knowledge or consent, his editors were tagging on additional exposition to give them a distinctly isolationist point of view. Geisel quit.

  October 1939 would mark his final appearance as Tedd—and the last time he would work under a different pseudonym. The next time Ted Geisel had anything to say about politics, he would say it as Dr. Seuss.

  CHAPTER 6

  COCKEYED CRUSADER

  1940–1943

  In August 1940, Ted and Helen drove out to California and made a down payment on two acres of hillside property in La Jolla, California. Since visiting the seaside town on their November 1928 anniversary trip, the Geisels had been determined to find a way to make La Jolla either their summer home or permanent residence—and this hillside tract, they hoped, would be the ideal place to start. Ted and Helen spent six weeks in California that summer, walking their property and visualizing the house they hoped to build among the boulders and flowering trees. Helen, who managed both their checkbook and their finances—Ted’s one attempt at balancing their checkbook ended in failure when he insisted on rounding every line item up or down—estimated the house would cost around $8,000. Until the brat books started paying, then, Ted was going to have to keep his day job as an adman.

  Fortunately for the Geisels’ finances, there was still plenty of work from Standard Oil, both with the Flit campaign—which was now sprawled colorfully across the sides of subway cars—and the always entertaining Seuss Navy. There was a new client, too, in the Narragansett Brewing Company of Rhode Island, run by the colorfully named Rudolf Haffenreffer Jr. Rudy Jr. was a keen marketer with a fondness for cigar store Indians, and Ted had run with that idea, creating a new mascot for the company named Chief Gansett. The chief was a cigar store Indian who whizzed around on wheels, delivering foaming glasses of bock beer, usually accompanied by a little black cat who reacted expressively and reminded readers that Narragansett beer was “Too Good to Miss!” The chief would boost the sales of Narragansett beers—the company would later credit Dr. Seuss’s ad campaign as a key part of its financial turnaround—and remain the iconic face of the company for decades.1

  Even though Horton Hatches the Egg was proving slow to earn out, Cerf was still sending Ted on book signings and autograph tours. Despite the success of his last book tour, Geisel still dreaded the very idea of public events, but he went to each of them without complaint, out of deference to Cerf. In November, Geisel would even attend a Random House party at the Philadelphia Booksellers Association, penning a poem for Cerf called “Pentellic [sic] Bilge for Bennett Cerf’s Thirty-Ninth Birthday,” which he had beautifully printed on card stock and read aloud to partygoers. It didn’t even matter to Geisel that Cerf wasn’t thirty-nine (he was forty-two) nor that it wasn’t his birthday (that was in May). Cerf howled at all of the jokes anyway. For Geisel, that was always enough.

  Cerf’s open display of amusement aside, it was getting harder to find things to laugh about. Each morning, before sitting down at the drawing table in his office, Geisel would read through the newspapers—out of the eight daily newspapers in New York City, The New York Times was his paper of choice—and was becoming more and more alarmed by what he was reading about the war in Europe. During a vacation in Germany in 1936, Ted had been shocked by Hitler’s policies and propaganda—and now he was equally as distressed by the Italian propaganda machine propping up the despotic strong-man Mussolini, whose rise Geisel had watched warily since visiting Italy in 1926.

  For most of autumn 1940, Geisel kept seeing one name in the paper over and over again: Virginio Gayda, editor of Il Giornale d’Italia, and one of Mussolini’s fascist mouthpieces of preference. All fall, Gayda bullied his way through one story after another, with a playground swagger worthy of Mussolini himself. In September, Gayda warned the United States that if it attempted to provide any assistance to Great Britain, it would be attacked “from the sea, land, and air by the concentrated forces and the warlike wealth” of the Axis.2 By November, he was accusing the United States of “ideological political conflict, which is skidding toward belligerency;”3 in late December, he was back to issuing veiled threats about the United States sparking “a spread of the conflict . . . to the Western Hemisphere.”4

  By winter, Geisel decided he’d had enough of Virginio Gayda’s tough-talking fabrications. “Almost every day, in amongst the thousands of words that he spews forth,” Geisel wrote with some annoyance, “there are one or two sentences that, in their complete and obvious disregard of fact, epitomize the Fascist point of view, such as his bombastically deft interpretation of a rout as a masterly stroke of tactical genius.”5 Using pen and brushstrokes of thick black ink, Geisel drew a cartoon showing Gayda dangling from a hook, his feet barely touching the ground, as he bangs his propaganda out on a steam-powered typewriter, punching the keys hard enough to break them. As Gayda’s message rolls out on a long paper banner, a naked winged Mussolini approvingly holds up the other end, one palm raised in the fascist salute.

  It was hardly insightful political commentary, but Geisel was pleased enough to show it to Virginia Vanderlip Schoales, the daughter of Frank Vanderlip, the very same banker whose party Geisel had enlivened years earlier with the fake pearl in a dinner oyster. The thirty-two-year-old Schoales was a liberal reformer—little surprise, considering her mother had been a suffragette—and had recently joined the staff of a new progressive daily newspaper in New York called PM. Schoales asked if she could show the cartoon to PM’s editor, Ralph Ingersoll. Geisel said she could.

  Ingersoll liked what he saw, and on January 30, 1941, the cartoon was published in PM, accompanied by a note from Ted:

  Dear Editor—If you were to ask me, which you haven’t, whom I consider the world’s most outstanding writer of fantasy, I would, of course, answer: “I am.” My second choice, however, is Virginio Gayda. The only difference is that the writings of Mr. Gayda give me a pain in the neck.

  This morning, the pain became too acute, and I had to do something about it. I suddenly realized that Mr. Gayda could be made into a journalistic asset, rather than a liability . . . Anyhow, I had to do a picture of Gayda.6

  Unlike his political cartoons for Hearst, both the Gayda cartoon and its accompanying note were signed Dr. Seuss. And with that, Geisel assumed he was done with political cartooning again. Gayda had annoyed him, and he’d gotten it off his chest.

  And yet, there was another public figure, this one American, who Geisel disliked as much if not more than Gayda, who would spur him to pick up his ink brushes again. “I got irritated into becoming a political cartoonist,” said Ted, “by one of our nation’s most irritating heroes, Col. Charles Augustus Lindbergh.”7

  Lindbergh, the thirty-nine-year-old aviation hero whose 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic had turned him into an international celebrity, was a vocal supporter of American isolationism. In Lindbergh’s view, America needed to build up its army purely for its own defense—and should leave the war in Europe to European armies and politicians. “We are in danger of war today not because
European people have attempted to interfere with the internal affairs of America,” Lindbergh said in 1940, “but because American people have attempted to interfere with the internal affairs of Europe.”8 Lindbergh had advocated for American neutrality in the war and believed peace could be achieved in Europe through negotiation. But Geisel thought Lindbergh was being both unreasonable and unrealistic. No one liked war, Geisel said, but Lindbergh “was pushing non-preparedness.”9 “A Gallup Poll established the fact that 70 to 85 percent of all Americans were strongly opposed to any involvement in the war,” Geisel said later. “And so was I. But I also believed that we had absolutely no choice in the matter and had better by God get prepared for a war that sure as hell was going to sock us.”10

  Geisel’s own views had been bolstered in part by the increasing boldness of Franklin Roosevelt. In his 1941 State of the Union Address, the president had called for “the full support of all those resolute peoples everywhere,” and asked Congress to approve the Lend-Lease Act to permit the United States to more easily ship aid to Britain and other allies. In the same speech, Roosevelt openly derided Lindbergh’s politics of “appeasement”—and though he never called out the colonel by name, it was clear who he was referring to when he advised Americans to be wary of those who “preach the ‘ism’ of appeasement” and cater to the whims of “that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests.”11

  On April 17, 1941, Lindbergh appeared at a rally in Chicago, where he announced that he had formally joined the America First Committee, a conservative organization whose stated purpose was “to make America impregnable at home, and to keep out of those wars across the sea.”12 Six nights later, on April 23, Lindbergh was at New York’s Manhattan Center, trying to rally an already raucous crowd that PM described as “a liberal sprinkling of Nazis, Fascists, anti-Semites, [and] crackpots.”13 Geisel was appalled. “I got mad at Charles Lindbergh,” he said. “We were obviously going to have a war . . . So I began drawing pictures against the America First movement. Nobody wanted to publish them because it was unpopular to say we’d be in conflict.”14