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Cartoon Seuss, Author Seuss, Doctor Seuss, Racist Seuss

Published: May 16, 2026 1 minute 14 comments

Can a prestigious institution with ties to a famous alum reconcile that relationship with the man’s racist past?

Theodore Geisel, Class of 1925, is a Dartmouth alumnus whose children’s books and campus namesake sit alongside racist imagery, a contrast that raises questions about legacy and accountability.

“Waiting for the Signal From Home…” by Dr. Seuss, PM 1942

Madeline Kahn Ehrlich for The Dartmouth comes to grips with Dr. Seuss’ controversial past as others are dealing with their connections to Cesar Chavez and associates of Jeffrey Epstein.

The Theodore Geisel name is easy to find across campus. In addition to the medical school, it appears in alumni mythology and lingers in the College’s imagination as one of its most famous alumni. But the name that belongs to one of the most beloved children’s authors also belongs to an artist whose political cartoons and early illustrations have drawn criticism for racist and xenophobic imagery, especially toward Japanese people and Japanese Americans during World War II.

At a moment when Dartmouth students debate the names attached to campus buildings, Geisel’s legacy raises an uncomfortable question about the future of spaces that bear his name: How should Dartmouth remember someone who promoted harmful stereotypes yet whose imagination shaped generations of childhoods?

“An Appeal” by Dr. Seuss, Field/PM (1942)

In 2017 Richard Minear for the Asia-Pacific Journal took a look at the WWII Japanese cartoons of Seuss.

Dartmouth’s Ms. Erlich concludes:

Geisel’s past asks Dartmouth to consider what honor means. A name on a building is not a biography. It cannot hold every contradiction. But the people who walk past it can. They can ask who is being remembered, who is being left out and what parts of the story have been made too small.

Dr. Seuss taught generations of children to look again at strange worlds. Dartmouth’s task may be to look again at his.

For the record Seuss’ politically incorrect portrayal of those with different backgrounds began before his World War Two cartoons. In his first book as Dr. Seuss, And to Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937), there was what current society would describe as problematic representations, even after multiple revisions.

The Chinaman/Chinese boy/Chinese man portion was so awkward Mulberry Street became one of six Seuss books the publisher stopped reissuing in 2021.

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Comments 14

  1. Was it his feelings or that of his employers? Did he change and grow? Might help in explaining.

    1. The WWII cartoons reflected the feelings of the vast majority of Americans during that time, though as mentioned his 1937 book was problematic enough to be continually revised.
      In 1961 the Dr. Seuss short “The Sneeches” was a children’s story about discrimination, as mentioned in The National Post link.

      1. Also worth noting that “Horton Hears a Who” was written as a sort of mea culpa for his WWII cartoons.

  2. Some cartooning that looks racist today was more xenophobic then. Germans often looked like monsters. I vaguely remember a comic book in which the Japanese were caricatures and the Chinese were drawn sympathetically.
    As for Seuss, judge him by where he ended, not where he started.

  3. That’s a well-crafted discussion of the issue, and she’s to be applauded. Personally, yesterday I had the follow-up visits for my 10 year victory over cancer, courtesy of the hospital his school feeds into, so that disclaimed. But I would also differentiate between his somewhat short-lived and unheralded work as a political cartoonist and his far, far more famous work as a children’s author.

    I grew up on Seuss, but his forays into odd parts of the world, cartoonish as they seem in retrospect, were more about the exotic than the subhuman. That is, they were written with a white, Western European audience in mind, which is certainly racist, but more of a sin against inclusion than a declaration of white supremacy.

    I’m inclined to say that pulling certain books from production is sufficient. If I were Dartmouth, I would accentuate the negative, latch on to the affirmative and don’t mess with Mr. In-Between

    1. Actually, the song goes: “Accentuate the positive. Eliminate the negative. Latch on to the affirmative. Don’t mess with Mister In-between.”

  4. Dr. Seuss illustrated a very large number of editorial cartoons during WWII. While it is undeniable that a certain percentage of them indulged in racial stereotypes, the primary characteristic of his work was not racism, but rather his emphatic support for U.S. involvement in the fight against fascism. He pulled no punches, and while some of his drawings crossed ethical boundaries according to today’s standards, in the context of the age in which he wrote his cartoons are no more (nor less) offensive than (for instance) the propaganda cartoons that Warner Brothers produced during the war, many of which featured very similar stereotypes.
    I prefer the approach that Warner Brothers took with Whoopi Goldberg’s introduction to the Looney Tunes Golden Collections, in which she said that the “cartoons…. depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in American society. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today…. These cartoons are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.“

  5. “Judge not…”. Unless you have telepathy. no one can know another’s mind. Geisel’s work s like everyone else’s. Mostly good but some bad. Personal action is what counts. Historical norms aren’t the present. Whoopi is right though. We should never forget.

  6. It is important to note that “PM” was a leftist/progressive publication.

    1. In addition to Minear’s book of Seuss’ wartime propaganda cartoons (referenced in the notes to his article linked to above) there’s a later collection including works by him and other cartoonists in /PM/: /Dr. Seuss & Co. Go to War/.

      Buildings and honors named for now-problematic individuals can be a particular issue at universities. [Disclaimer: no comics content follows]. A few years ago the California Institute of Technology was faced with the fact that a number of its honorees had been deeply involved with the Human Betterment Foundation, a California-based group that promoted eugenic sterilization. The most prominent of these was Nobel laureate Robert Millikan, who as chairman of the executive council had been primarily responsible for transforming the undistinguished Throop Institute into Caltech. (A semi-official history of Caltech is entitled “Millikan’s School.”) After some deliberation his and four other names were stripped from all campus buildings and other honors.
      https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/caltech-to-remove-the-names-of-robert-a-millikan-and-five-other-eugenics-proponents

      2. Although Minear’s first book is a wonderful collection of Seuss’s PM cartoons, the haphazard way that the book is (dis-)organized is beneath contempt. Each of the densely packed (and very dull) “thematic” commentary sections is followed by a separate, roughly chronological set (barring possible typos) of cartoons, but the repetitive references in the text to those cartoons provide only the publication date (rather than page numbers), and there is no guarantee that a specifically cited cartoon is in the volume at all. Sorting all of the cartoons into one strictly chronological archive would have been easier to follow, and placing the commentary closer to the cartoons being described would have been a great improvement, except that much of his “commentary” is simply a text description of what appears in the cartoons. The end result is a definite demonstration that Seuss’s 250-odd cartoons stand on their own, and do not need to be dressed up with 60-odd pages of superfluous text.

  7. There’s zero chance that they’ll do anything about Geisel, warranted or not.

    That’s because Dartmouth won’t even remove Leon Black’s name from a campus building (Black Family Arts Center), despite him being a /very/ close Epstein associate. Black wrote this poem in that 50th birthday book

    “Blonde, Red or Brunette, spread out geographically
    With this net of fish, Jeff’s now The Old Man and The Sea”

    If the Dartmouth admin circles the wagons for sexual abusers, pointing at racist pictures from WWII is going to do what?

  8. So many cogent points, but I agree with Will Shetterly — it’s where Seuss ended. As for World War II, the Japanese and the Germans were bent on our destruction or subjugation. In the context of the times, it is understandable that many cartoonists portrayed them as monsters.

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