The Observer, April 14, 2006
Volume XXXVIII, Issue 24
Humanities Week speaker expounds on Dr. Seuss
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When children read The Cat in the Hat, or Harold and the Purple Crayon, they generally don't consider the "hidden" messages within the books, but Philip Nel does. Lean, baby-faced, and bearing an eternally youthful air, Nel bore a remarkable resemblance to his topic of children's literature and the political messages they contain in a presentation for Case's Humanities Week.
Nel spoke last week for Case's Humanities Week, the theme of which was "Childhoods." He teaches Children's Literature at Kansas State University, has published three books on children's literature so far, and has three more books in the works.
His lecture last Monday discussed the evolution of children's literature over the last several hundred years. On Wednesday, he presented his biography of the lives of David "Crockett" Johnson and his wife, Ruth Krauss, who two are best known for their works Harold and the Purple Crayon and A Hole is to Dig.
Last Friday, Nel discussed the background of The Cat in the Hat and The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, the origins of the Cat, and about his creation of Under the Hats of Seuss and his Cats, his annotated versions of the two books.
Monday's talk traced the evolution of children's primers, Puritan booklets for students in early New England in the 1680s. As America's politics diversified, so did the primers; in one, ABCs for Martin, students learned, "A stands for Armaments – war-mongers' pride; B is for Bolshie, the thorn in their side."
However, books that rammed ideology down children's throats created a stale canon for budding readers. This dilemma set the stage for The Cat and the Hat. Seuss's editor, William Spaulding, told him, "Write me a story that first-graders can't put down." According to Seuss, Spaulding gave him a list of about 300 words, and told him to make a story out of it. Seuss only settled on The Cat in the Hat after he became so desperate that he decided to write about the first two words he came across that rhymed. His result was one of the most famous children's books of all time.
Nel gave a background history of the book – how Seuss, as a dark haired German, faced discrimination at school, where his classmates all thought he was Jewish.
In the Cat in the Hat, the cat creates a total ruckus, spreading a red stain all over the house, and eventually covering the yard with it as well. Nel believes this stain was Seuss's way of poking fun at anti-communists. An explosion in The Cat in the Hat looks suspiciously similar to an atomic mushroom cloud.
Nel used the term liberal, or left, to suggest two ideals – one, the actual leftist agendas of the communist party, like ABCs for Martin, or through the ideas of questioning authority and providing stories totally opposed to the conventions of traditional stories. For instance, Johnson worked as an editor for the New Masses magazine, and wrote many political cartoons that satirized the lives of the wealthy or government officials paranoid about communists.
As a member of a small cooperative community in New York, he and Krauss lived in a diverse community, similar to Benedict's In Henry's Backyard. Johnson was so leftist that he was investigated by the Committee of Un-American Activities and the FBI. However, in his book Harold and the Purple Crayon, Harold does nothing more then go beyond the normally accepted rules of convention – he makes his own world, drawing it all in as he goes.
Finally, Nel mentioned several other themes common to children's literature – a discussion of wealth and the illusory nature of the American Dream, and also race. For example, "The Little Tailor" is a story about a tailor in Russia who travels to America to find a better life. Once here, he goes through life as a sweatshop worker before finally working once again in the same conditions as he did in Russia. The story suggests that the American dream is nowhere near as easy as it's made out to be.
Ruth Benedict's In Henry's Backyard: The Races of Mankind tells the story of a small boy named Henry, surrounded by people of different colors – literally. There are green people, brown people, red, white, all sorts of people. Mostly, they live in harmony, but later, some of the villagers start bristling at the differences. Finally, though, even though there are lots of differences, the people settle them and live in harmony. On the last page, all the colors and houses change into houses of worship for the different people, as the book manages to call for religious as well as racial tolerance.
Ultimately though, children don't recognize the messages hidden in these books; it's the parents who read to their children for whom the hidden messages are written. And if they can absorb them, then maybe their kids will too.
