December 27, 2018 • 51 mins
The Seuss is loose in this episode about legendary children's book author Ted Geisel. The funny thing is, he didn't ever want children of his own, and his past work was a bit problematic.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should Know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there. And
this is the Doctor Sois Cast, our final episode of
(00:22):
this year two eighteen. So long in the books Dr
Sois Dr Sois. That's right, you know, it's funny. Well
we'll get to that. All right, everything that's funny can wait? Yep,
we're gonna talk serious. Dr SEUs was an author of
children's books. He was so great and also kind of racist. Chuck,
(00:46):
there's a lot of stuff in here. I wish I
didn't know. I know. I think we're about to ruin
Dr Seuss at the end of the year, right after
the holidays. Uh yeah, but well let's just talk about
the man. Okay, so um, we are talking. We keep
saying Dr Sois. Everybody knows him as Dr Seuss, but
(01:09):
apparently the correct pronunciation is Sois and and the guy
would know because Sois is actually his middle name. His
name is Theodore Sois Geisel or Giesel? Is it geisel
er Giesel? It would be Geisel in German. That you
go with a second vowel, So Theodore sois Geisel. Yeah,
and uh, it's sort of when I saw that, everyone
(01:32):
basically was like SEUs until he eventually was like fine,
like I can't fight this fight any longer. Well, they're like,
we'll spell it differently then. But they reminded me of
Joe Theisman. Oh yeah, the very famous story of the
quarterback Joe Theisman who changed his spelling or his pronunciation
to Theisman to ron with Heisman, right, which I think
(01:52):
is the story. I think that's true. No, No, I
think that's true. Real. Yeah, what do you think that
was just like an old football tale. No, I've never
heard of though, you're just being funny. Oh no, that
that really happened, and that really came back to bite
him in the rump when his thigh bone broke opened.
He's like, I guess my knee would have busted if
he had just kept that these is that not okay?
(02:14):
Too soon? So we're obviously once we get into Joe
thisman leg breaking talk, we're talking about dr Sis. That's,
like I said, Theodore Soyce geisl Um, who is I
can't really think of a children's book author that is
more widely known maybe Charles Schultz. Maybe I think is
(02:39):
like a comic strip guy. Children's children's book like Judy Bloom. Sure,
but I don't know if I call her children's book
young adult like children's book. I guess the baron stain
bears not the barren steam bears. Yeah. I would say
that Teddy geisl huh holds that distinct for sure. At
(03:00):
the very least, his work, his drawing is just immediately
recognizable his style. Yeah, I mean that font we you
we use that font for our Live Christmas show shirts
on the obyright. No, it's not his. In fact, I
looked it up. I was kind of curious. I was like,
what is that great font that he uses for his
(03:20):
book titles? And I don't know what he used. He
probably just handrew it, I imagine. But um, now there
are fonts called uh so ice doctors s o O
s font or grenched that you can you know you
can gank that sure did for Christmas shirts. I haven't
(03:43):
heard that word and forever gan I think I was
wearing like Huge Jenko's the last time I heard the
word gang ganked my milk off my tray bringing it
back time. I use it too, so should we go
back to the beginning, Yes, back to Springfield, mass Choose
it's a nineteen o four, that's right, March two. As
(04:03):
a matter of fact, fellow Pisces uh dr Soyce was
born h Teddy Geisel and his grandpaps had come from
Germany in the mid eighteen hundreds bought a brewery because
they were good Germans. They knew all about beer and originally,
get this, the name of the brewery was Combak and Geisel,
(04:25):
and they locally called it come Back and Guzzle. I
love that, and then awesome in German, less whatever that
would be. I think it'd be comeback in Geisel. Uh So.
He moved here and it would end up becoming the
Springfield Breweries Company, which his father then ran um And
this is really like we did. He even did a
show on prohibition, and it never really hit home to
(04:47):
me some of the repercussions of that. I was just like,
people can't drink, But I never thought about a family
business just being shut down. That was a good episode,
it was, But that's what happened that, you know, Prohibition
came along. They had this successful brewery in their family.
They're like, sorry, you're no longer in business, Go find
another job. These guys, Yeah, who were secretly drinking right, Yeah,
(05:13):
so um had the job, that is, his father did
get was eventually became the supervisor of the town's parks. Yeah,
kind of cool. And um there's a myth, an incorrect myth.
From what I understand, one of the parks had a
zoo in it, and so a lot of people say
that drawings of the animals were some of the first
at the zoo were some of the first drawings that
(05:35):
little Ted came up with. No, his father became superintendent
of the parks when he was already a grown man.
But well not a grown man. He was definitely not
a little kid at the zoo. Did he go to
the zoo and draw animals? Or is that all false?
I think it may be all false, but I'm making
that part up. I just from what I read, he
was grown enough that he wasn't a little boy drawing
(05:56):
pictures of animals at the zoo like people think. Interesting. Uh,
I thought it was as well. I love busting myths. Barra,
you should do a show. Uh. So World War one
comes along, which I've been I've been doing a lot
of World War one reading lately with the really anniversary
of the Armistist Armisists. Yeah, uh, really interesting. I didn't
(06:19):
know much about it. It's a pretty serious war man brutal.
Everything I know about is from the Wonder Woman movie. Yeah,
I kid. Uh. So they were German, uh that the
Geisls were, like we said, and so in the United
States during World War One there was a lot of
anti In fact, for a long time, actually there was
(06:39):
a lot of anti German sentiment in the US right there,
like we're not German, we just like beer. Yeah, and
her name is Geisl. Uh. So everyone it was clear
that they were German, and so, uh, you know, there
was there was I get the feeling that he, you know,
felt like he was like picked on and laughed at
(07:01):
peas because he was German. Right, So if you can't
beat him, join them. Turn that same kind of bigotry
onto others will find. Right. So he starts at a
very early age in high school um drawing cartoons, writing essays,
funny essays, satirical essays. And he started using a pen
name very early on, maybe because he was German, and
(07:21):
he just reversed his last name and he became THEO.
La Sigue. Yeah. Actually, one of my favorite books, um,
Hooper Humperdink Not Him, is written by Theo Lasigue. Yeah.
I always was like, I always thought this was a
doctor's shus book, and then I saw this and I'm like,
it was a doctor's sus book. Do you ever read
(07:42):
that one? I don't think so. What's it called? Hooper
Humperdink Not Him. It's about this kid who's throwing a
birthday party, and everybody's invited to the greatest birthday party
you've ever seen in your life, except for poor Hooper Humperdink,
and I think he gets invited finally at the end
where your parents like we should probably get Josh this
go ahead and get them ready, right, pretty much, there
(08:02):
actually was a birthday party I wasn't invited to. It
really was like, I'm Hooper Harperdink. Oh well, you know.
My deal was I wasn't allowed to go to boy
girl parties for a while, so but you were still invited, right, Yeah.
But that was even worse because I was invited and
I was like I had to say, no, I can't
go because there's girls there, right, I got you. I mean,
how humiliating is that? Especially in college. Yeah, and they
(08:25):
were like, uh, what's wrong with girls? I'm like, I
don't know. As my parents, he seemed great to me.
The smell nice. Um alright, So he reversed his name
became La Siege. I went to Dartmouth College, and, like
many many famous um humorist I guess you could call him,
he wrote for the His college humor magazine was called
(08:48):
The jack O Lantern, and it was just like, really
solidifies that college humor magazines really have produced some of
the brightest comedic minds that in this country over the years.
You know, um, yeah Letterman. I think he worked at
National Lampoon's, didn't he Jan certainly did the Harvard Lampoon.
(09:09):
I'm pretty sure um Letterman did as well, at the
very least a lot of his writers did. Okay, fine, okay,
well we'll settle on that that version of the truth.
But he got kicked off of the magazine staff when
he was caught drinking on campus during prohibition, which is
(09:30):
kind of awesome. Yeah, I bet it wasn't for him.
What do you mean? Oh, but he was like, well,
I want to be on the magazine staff. This is terrible.
This is an unjust Yeah, not awesome for him, right yeah, yeah,
I thought you meant he wasn't doing the drinking or something. Right.
This did nothing to cut his career off though, No, no, no,
he just adopted a new pseudonym. Yeah, sois right s
(09:51):
e U s s again, but he pronounced it sois.
But he was the only person who did. Um. So
he did graduate from Dartmouth in I think, which also
further goes to show that he was so if he
graduated college in that his father's brewery wouldn't have been
shut down until I don't remember when prohibition started, but
(10:14):
he would. He was obviously not a young kid necessarily
dumb animals. Um. But he Uh. He went on to
Oxford to I guess pursue a higher degree. Um. I
think he was going to be a teacher, was his
original intent, and he didn't like Oxford, but Oxford brought
(10:36):
him to his wife, Helen Palmer, his first wife, his
first wife, and um, they met and she actually had
a really great influence on him by saying, uh, I
think you are maybe going to be a better artist
than a teacher, and kind of pushed him toward that,
and he ended up pursuing a career in art, largely
because of her influence. Yeah, and he sort of did
(10:58):
the student thing. He he worked on a novel, and
he traveled around Europe and was sort of uh doing
and he was with Helen of course this whole time.
They eventually get married and then he went to work
for a magazine called Judge drawing once again like political cartoons,
humor cartoons acted. This is where he added the doctor
(11:21):
to his name as sort of a joke because he,
I guess did not get that doctorate degree or whatever
he was pursuing. No, he didn't, but later on in life,
Dartmouth did bestow an honorary degree to make him an
official doctor. When are we going to get one of those?
I've been waiting a long time, chuck. And are they
as worthless as I think they are? Totally? Yeah, I
mean sure you'll get like the discounted Wendy's that they offered.
(11:44):
But that's that's really the only perk aside from saying, like,
I'm a doctor. Can you really call yourself that? Though? Sure?
Like only chumps do that, right, Like you have to
call me doctor now, dude. You you will see me
telling people to call me Dr. Clark. I'll just I'll
be more personal. I'll be Dr Josh like a chiropractor.
I could see you going off and getting your PhD
(12:05):
one day. Yeah, yeah, I want from Bowling Green State
University and the backdoor version pretty much. Yeahs um alright.
So he got the doctor on the name became Dr
Syce and from then on he he never wrote under
his given name again, he was always doctor. Sois from
(12:28):
that point for it? Do we take a break? You
can see me getting a PhD? Yeah? This late in
my career. Yeah, this mid in my career. Huh am
I like Natalie Portman or something? Yes, all right, let's
take a break. All right, Natalie Nat, I wish right.
(13:06):
I'll bet Natalie Portman hates being called Nat. Do you
think she seems like the type of Natalie who would
hate being called Nat? Let's find out, Dr Portman. Natalie Portman,
will you please get in touch with Listen and let
us know whether you're cool with being called Nat or not? Well, hey,
since we're on that big shout out to Mr Mark Ruffalo,
it was basically the male Natalie Portman. Yeah, he tweeted
(13:29):
out our Navajo Code Talkers episode which means that he's
aware of this podcast and we're huge fans. So if
you're listening, man, thanks yeah a lot. Not just aware,
he liked it, he encouraged people to listen to it.
He wasn't like, steer clear of this piece of poop.
This is a good podcast, is what he was saying. Man,
I remember when I saw You Can count On Me
(13:50):
for the first time. Oh my god, that movie correct me.
It was such a good movie. Yeah, not just the
first time, like just every time you watch that movie.
It's wonderful. It's really great. So I have another show
called movie Crush. Mr Ruffalo would love to have you on.
We'll just leave it there, alright. So um, alright, here's
(14:11):
what happens. Teddy Geist starts doing ads yeah, and does
quite well. Yeah. I mean, if you're an ad illustrator,
you you basically do what you're told the client says,
this is what we want. He was the kind of
artist who, because of his distinctive style, his style is
what the clients wanted. So as an ad illustrator, he
(14:35):
became nationally famous. Yeah, which is crazy to think of now,
it really is. His first big break was for something
called flit It was a bug spray. And if you
look at the flit ads, they have a picture of
the flit and it was that old timey Tom and
Jerry Pump candidates like couldn't be more poisonous? Out like
a cloud of noxious smoke that formed like a skull
(14:57):
and crossbones in the air. Basically, right, that's what he
was drawing stuff for. And he came up with a
catchphrase because he wasn't just illustrating, he was also copyrighting
in these ads, and he came up with quick Henry
the flit, and that just became a national catchphrase, like
where's the beef? Right, like somebody's pestering You're just like
to somebody else, Quick Henry the flit. That's how I
(15:17):
probably would have used it. But um, so he became
known for that, and then a second egg campaign made
him even bigger. Oh right, so he did flit for
seventeen years, dude, which is like I thought, yeah, sure,
he did that for a couple of years. I mean
there's almost two decades of doing those ads, made a
lot of money, kept him you know, uh nice and
(15:40):
employed through the through the Great Depression. And then this
one's even weirder. Uh. He went to work for Standard Oil,
who had s O Oil and s O Gas and
this was s O Marine, which was their boat oil. Yeah.
He has this pr idea to create a a fake navy,
(16:03):
the Sious Navy, the Sious Navy, which is nothing. He
just made it up out of nowhere to promote the
s O Marine oil. Yeah, and it worked, yeah, because
he basically drafted people into his navy. He would draw
like famous figures um like say eleanor Roosevelt or something
like that, dressed up in the suit the Sious Navy
uniform or whatever, and it became a thing like people
(16:24):
wanted to be in it, so they would apply to
be in it. And I guess so would hold the
party every year and just pull out all the stops
and there would be this lavish sious Sious Navy party.
You know, it's called the Sious Navy Luncheon and frolic.
That sounds so like. Uh. They had two thousand admirals
and they included among them, uh, Vincent Astor and Guy Lombardo,
(16:48):
famous band leader. And as this is a grabstar article.
As Ed put it, they were what you would call
like tastemakers today, like wealthy, influential Americans wanted to be
in this fake navy, to go to this luncheon and
frolic And he wrote these little navy story booklets and
it astonishingly it was a big deal and it actually worked.
(17:11):
And when you look at him there, they look like Dr.
Seuss books. Like, it's not like he changed his style. No, no,
this is the thing, like he became famous for famous
and saw it after for his style. Yeah, exactly. And
weirdly enough, he said that the only reason he went
into children's books initially was because his standard oil contract
didn't forbid it. Like that was some of the work
(17:31):
that he was allowed to do on the side. He
never he was like, it's not like I had a
great thing for kids. Well he even said very famously
multiple times, um, that he didn't write for kids. He
wrote for people. And he also famously said, you have kids,
I'll entertain them, right. Yeah, he didn't want kids, did
not want kids, and he never had him, so his
(17:52):
which came true. So um. He he was already pretty
famous by the time World War two came around, um,
and he actually volunteered to become a soldier, but he
was sent to Hollywood to work at what was called
Fort Fox. Yeah, this was strange. I mean I had
(18:12):
heard of the Signal Corps. Um, well, the Signal Corps
is everything from code like a code and code breakers
all the way to psychological operations. Oh, I thought the
Signal Corps was just like the people that made documentaries
and stuff. This was a division within the Signal Corps.
And so he was basically in this this um, this
(18:36):
division with Frank Capra and some other like screenwriters, actors,
like basically anybody who had anything to do with visual
entertainment was put into this group in Hollywood on the
Fox lot at what was called Fort Fox, and he
Um that's where he spent most of the war, although
there was a fascinating story about a time when he
(18:59):
went to Europe as he had to go get approvals
for a documentary he had worked on from all the
high ranking generals in Europe. So we went from headquarters
to headquarters throughout Europe. And while he was in Luxembourg
he visited some of his friends and he Um basically
got the skinny they think on the Ghost Army, you
know the Ghost Army where they had inflatable tanks and
(19:20):
like that. It was meant to make America's military look
way bigger than it was. And these guys were running
psychological operations. Well Dr SEUs was friends with some of
the higher ups in the Ghost Army, and they think
that they showed him on a map like where to
go to go see some of these Well, in between
the time he left and the time he got there,
(19:42):
that was suddenly behind enemy lines at the Battle of
the Bulge literally started around him, around him while he
was yeah, and he was like I was just driving
around thinking like it was just hard to find friendly
troops like as part of combat. But he ended up
inadvertently spending three days ten miles behind enemy lines during
the Battle of the Bulge and just barely made it
(20:04):
out with his life. Yeah, he was rescued by the
Brits um but he would eventually become a lieutenant colonel. Yeah,
in his short stint as a late thirty year old,
he's like think thirty eight when he first went in,
which really kind of interesting piece of backstory. Well, he
he was we left out a pretty pretty big part
of his formative years early on in his career was
(20:27):
he wanted to become he wanted to have a say,
in the direction America took in World War Two, and
he was very much in favor of going to war
against the Nazis and Japan and Italy and um. One
of the reasons why he was in favor was because
he was extremely anti fascist. He hated fascism. And he
(20:48):
got a job at a liberal magazine I think a
newspaper actually called PM that was founded in New York
and it was founded with the Eye too to basically
call p all out who are pushing other people around.
It's a very liberal, very anti fascist, very pro um
World War two. They didn't call it that at the time.
(21:09):
And it was very anti isolationists too. And Dr Seuss
was drawing editorial cartoons, very political editorial cartoons, about seven
days a week for this magazine. UM. And he did
some really good work in it actually. Well yeah, and
then in the in the army he actually made films.
(21:32):
He was he was making documentaries right alongside Frank Capra. Uh.
He had one series of training videos called Private Snaffoo
that were animated, UM. But they were the work of
Chuck Jones. Actually, it's just so crazy about all this
talent that's like in the army producing these things at
the time, but he he went on to make live
action documentaries UM. One called Your Job in Germany, another
(21:54):
called Our Job in Japan. UM. MacArthur stopped the release
of Our Job in Japan. Uh and apparently UM General
Patton stormed out of a screening of one of the
other ones. And I couldn't find the word but it said,
he uttered one loud curse word. Oh you couldn't find it? No,
do you? Did you? It was b s Okay, what
(22:14):
are you trying to think? What it would be? Sure?
I was like, but one word. So it wasn't the
F word unless it was just a very just long
drawn out like you know, alright, bs, that makes sense,
which I don't understand. I don't know what the problem was.
But they were both the our Job in Japan or
(22:35):
your Job in Germany, Yeah, was about occupation post post occupation,
UM life in Germany or Japan and what Yeah, you
can watch Your Job in Germany on YouTube. Yeah, and
and our Job in Japan too. Yeah. So he he
recut those basically kind of rewrote and recut those later
on and retitled them Hitler Lives and Designed for Death. No,
(22:59):
he didn't. They were recut around him without his say
oh no, no no. He and his wife later got
those films and recut them and won an Academy award. Yeah,
I had read that a producer went and and did
some recutting against their wishes and made it way worse
than they originally intended. Oh well, that may have happened,
and then maybe they then later on we recut it,
(23:20):
got the Oscar for their version. I don't know, but
we left out a lot actually because he Um he
was actually had previous to the army, had already written
children's books. Like he went fully into this because of
a ship trip that he took. Let's let's walk it
back a little bit. They went on a transatlantic voyage
(23:42):
aboard the MS uh Kung's home and apparently the ship's
engine had this beat, this hypnotic throbbing sound that just
really stuck with him and it got into his head,
and so he started composing rhyming couplets that matched with
this rhythm, kind of like, uh, that's my S S
(24:04):
Kung's home impression, all right. Well, it ended up being
what's called anapestic t traanmeter, which is what he would
make his career on this poetic meter. You know what?
That made me think of Chuck um that, Like, I've
never heard those words together in my life. But no
one ever taught me how to read a Doctor Seuss book.
(24:28):
It's almost like we have some ingrain thing in our
brain to read things in that kind of rhythm or rome,
you know what I mean? Or is it just like
my parents read that to me and that's where I
picked it up from. But who taught them? I taught
anybody how to read something in rhymes. It's just like
you just and even when you when you when you're
not reading it in the right rhythm, your brain realizes
(24:50):
it and corrects you and you go back and reread
it the right way. Like when you get to the
next line, you're like, oh wait, that's out a beat
or whatever. Like you figure it out naturally, And I
wonder why we're geared toward that. Yeah, it's funny too,
because obviously read a lot of kids books every night now,
and some of them are great, and some of them
just like they'll do a word that doesn't quite rhyme,
(25:11):
and I'm always like, come on, or they'll stuff too
much in a line and it's not like graceful in
the read, I'm like, man, this is lame. Do better
orange and door hinge. Hey, that's not bad. Well that's out, okay.
Very famously can rhyme something with orange, which I found
out because I think I said nothing rhymes with orange,
(25:31):
and well everyone's always said that because that's true. Well
I meant it door hinge. That's funny. So he created
a children's book on that anapestic t trameter called and
this is a story no One Can Beat that was
later changed and published in ninety seven as and to
think that I saw it on Mulberry Street because he
(25:53):
had an old friend that he ran into from Dartmouth
that turned out to be a children's book editor at
Vanguard Press. So I read an account of the story,
and the person saying telling the story said, had he
been walking on the other side of the street that day,
he may have never become a children's author. Like it
was that fateful um. He his friend from Dartmouth was
(26:15):
a new children's book editor at Vanguard, you said, And
it was so new that he was looking for material.
And Dr Seuss happened to be walking around with the
manuscript on him and just happened to be down there
and they ran into each other and this book got
published and that was the one where he first made
his name as a children's book writer. You're right, and
(26:37):
shout out to Stephen Barr, book agent. That's right. Uh
So this, this uh antipastic to traametter is what he
basically stuck with the rest of his career. He would
alter it here and there, use other meters here and there,
but this is where he you know, as Ed said,
that was his bread and butter. And it's very waltz
like you can count it off in three or four time,
(27:00):
and it just was sort of perfect for kids books.
And with that first kid's book, Um, and to think
I saw in the Mulberry Street Apparently it's about a
kid named Marco who sees a horse and cart on
the street and as he's retelling it, it just becomes
this bigger and bigger and more like bizarre and grand
thing that he saw. Um. And this will come back
(27:21):
later on in the episode. Yeah. So he's writing these books.
He's doing okay. Uh. He had his fourth book was
called Horton Hatches the Egg. I think that's where we
first meet Horton. Um. But but he wasn't like lighting
the world on fire. And then that's when he goes
in the army. Right, and let me tell you the
story about getting caught in the Battle of the Bulge. Again,
(27:42):
here we go. So he makes it through World War two,
he escapes with his life from the Battle of the Bulge,
and when he comes out of World War Two, he goes,
um right back to writing books. And he he wrote
a few more in the forties. Um. I believe he
wrote yourl the Turtle, which I know is an allegory
for Hitler, and he was on record say yeah, apparently
(28:04):
the early drafts of it he had drawn a Hitler
mustache on yoursal the Turtle. It's about anti authoritarianian Is
that Hitler or Michael Jordan's. Does he have a Hitler mustache?
He did very famously, and that this one Haynes Stevie
commercial and everyone was like, uh, someone not told him.
I don't I didn't see that. I'll have to show
(28:27):
you picture. I had my head in the sand like
I was Charles Limberg or something. Oh, that's a nice
circular reft. It's just for you and me. Um. So
he was writing some more and he was. I mean,
he was selling like thousands of copies every every time
he released a book. He was a known children's author.
He had already established his his style as something that
(28:47):
was pretty recognizable around the United States. But it wasn't
until the mid fifties that things really changed for him.
Oh wow, it is a Hitler mustache. There's no taken that.
It's it's a decision. Um. So I think in nineteen
fifty five there was a book written called why Can't
(29:09):
Johnny Read? Right? And a guy named Rudolph Flesh And
I realized what we've jumped over. We'll get back to
I'm not ready for you yet, right, Um, a guy
named Rudolph Flesh It was this, Yeah, f l e age,
it would be a good one though. Yeah, you'd have
(29:30):
to call yourself Rudy too. And anyway, Rudolf Flesh Um,
he wrote Why Can't Johnny Read? And it was basically
like an indictment of the American public school system, the
education system, and how we taught kids to read. And
it was equally an indictment of like Dick and Jane,
and the way that kids used to read or be
(29:50):
taught to read was just basically, here are words on
a page, memorize them. This is a red ball. This
is the word read. Don't be an idiot red ball
say it's kind of the worst way to teach kids
stuff it is. And the guy in the article said, um.
He wrote an article in Life later on too, he said,
you know, he would be a great children's book author
(30:11):
to teach kids how to read? Is Dr Seuss? He
hates kids, He's already writing books for kids. Why but
if he just directed that toward actually teaching them how
to read, that be that kids would definitely want that.
And it turns out that, um, an editor I think
at Houghton Mifflin or somebody wherever, wherever Dr SEUs was
writing at the time under Mifflin dunder Mifflin, what you
(30:32):
got me? Um? He said, that's actually a pretty good idea.
And that's where we got the cat in the hat.
That's right, it was. It was originally meant as a
reading primer. I think there were words and and very
famously his editor bet him after that that he could
not write a book with only fifty words. And he went,
(30:54):
take this book green eggs and ham and shove it
and shove it and give me my fifty dollars, right,
and that is supposedly true. His editor bet him that
he could not do so, and that's where green eggs
and Ham came from. Yeah, and it's fifty words exactly,
that's right. Um. So he at this point he went
from ed says, he went from being a well known
children's author to probably the best known children's author in
(31:16):
the world. Yeah. He'd shown not only could he write fun,
whimsical um stories with the disguised moral lesson in the
middle of it too, um, with great illustrations and hand
drawn fonts and all, that he could actually teach the
world's children how to read English at least. Yeah. And
then from that success he he wrote, uh, that same year,
(31:39):
how the Grinch stold Christmas? That's a big year man,
So so Cat the Hat and the Grinch of the
same year, right, yeah, okay, yeah, which is just amazing.
And then in nine six, of course, we get the
very famous TV cartoon adaptation, which people still love and
enjoy today, including me. Uh. And he ended up being
(32:00):
so successful that they gave him his own imprint at
Random House. Um. With his wife Helen Palmer Geisel, who
was um kind of by all accounts that the woman
behind the man. She was an author herself. She wrote
quite a few books. One called do you Know Do
you Know what I'm going to do next Saturday? To you?
(32:20):
One called I Know What She Did last Summer? Um, Man,
it's funny. Adding those two words just makes it threatening.
It's a horror novel. Uh, one called Why I Built
the Google House, and one called I Was Kissed by
a Seal at the Zoo. Uh. So I didn't want
to just kind of wash over her because she she
(32:42):
was an author, and very sadly she ended up committing
suicide very late in life. Yeah, within a couple of
years of an affair that he had yeah um, And
he'd apparently had multiple affairs and her um. Her suicide
note supposedly referenced this, this feeling that she'd kind of
been overshadowed by him in his career. And like you said,
(33:04):
she was very much the woman behind the man, and
I think expected to support him and all that thing,
and she did. She put her own career away so
that she could handle his correspondence and business affairs. She
was in charge of correspondence to like sick kids that
wrote them our entire classes. And um, she was she
was he all he he was the artistic genius who
(33:26):
just needed to be left alone so he could make
these books every year, and she handled everything else. And
ask somebody to put their career away so that you
can have yours. It's a big thing to ask somebody. Yeah,
I mean she was sixty nine when she uh, and
I believe I said committed suicide earlier. I apologize, I know,
we don't use that term anymore, So we say now
(33:47):
that she died by suicide, Yeah, because committed makes it
sound like, oh my god, she committed a sin. Yeah,
and we people have written in about that, and I was,
I was. We were both glad to be made aware
of that. So she was sixteen, ten years old and
apparently also suffered from uh Gilliam bear bar game bar
a syndrome. Yeah. We got corrected on that some other time.
(34:10):
It's how I remember of how to pronounce it. Yeah.
Uh so, I mean, who knows why someone eventually takes
that path in life. Could be a lot of factors,
but yeah, October sixty seven, she overdosed on medication after
they've been married for forty years too. Yeah, man um
and so shortly after that he married Audrey Diamond geisl
(34:37):
who's his widow, who is I believe still alive and
basically running his estate still. Yeah, her name was Audrey
Stone Diamond, but it was d I M O N
D no A. Oh yeah, which is interesting. I wonder
if it's efficient. But yes, she became Soyce and he went,
just go ahead and get used to it. It's SEUs.
(34:58):
She's like, really, I've always said Soyce. He's like, I
love you. And she had two daughters. Uh, And he said,
I bet you they'd love boarding school. Yeah, and she
went okay, And she later on even said, uh, this
is a direct quote. She said they wouldn't have been
happy with Ted, and Ted wouldn't have been happy with them. Yeah.
He really did not want kids or kids to be around.
(35:20):
He just liked doing the books that he liked to do.
It's pretty interesting. So he um that nineteen fifty seven year,
that was a big breakout year for him, and um,
that was kind of the year that he became the
doctor SEUs that we we see. But he kept writing
(35:40):
for many many years, I mean up until his death.
In he apparently cranked out like a book a year. Um,
some of the some of them over time kind of
took on much more progressive tones until he became the
Doctor Seuss that we see today. So prior to that though, Um,
(36:03):
in recent years, some people have kind of said, hey,
you know, Dr SEUs had some really racist, bigoted stuff
in his early work, and it's become kind of this
national conversation to kind of figure out how to do this,
because everyone loves Dr SEUs, loves Dr SEUs, there's nobody
(36:24):
who doesn't like Dr Seuss. But if you or his work,
I should say, but if you if you start digging into,
especially some of his early work, it becomes problematic. Um,
you want to take a break, Okay, all right, all right,
let's take a break and we will take part in
that national conversation right after this. Alright, Chuck, So it's
(37:02):
national conversation time. So Dr Seuss, especially in his earliest
work as Jack o' lantern and judge writer, the Humor
magazine writer, a lot of his stuff was extremely racist,
as Ed puts it, not just racist for the time,
but but monstrously racist stuff. Yeah, like uh, full on
(37:23):
blackface caricatures, um, depicted African American characters, as lazy savages
have too many kids. He made jokes about slavery. There's
one way can't even read on this show, but it's awful.
Yeah right. Um. He also, especially as after Pearl Harbor,
(37:45):
directed a lot of his creative energy toward making ugly
caricatures of Japan and depicting Japanese and Japanese Americans in
really unflattering light too. Yeah, and apparently supported tournament. Uh
and this isn't you know, you don't want to drag
somebody through the mud, but if we're going to give
(38:07):
a picture of the man, this is who he was
earlier in his life. Right, So Ed makes a really
good point. I think Ed's a great American for the
way that he kind of kind of handled this too. Um.
He's saying that, uh that if you look at his
early stuff, he was a younger man at the time,
and I think it was we should also say it
(38:27):
qualifies as like none of this excuses anything, but but
you know, look at the whole, the whole picture of
the person. Um, if you look at his earlier stuff
or his his worst most racist stuff is when he
was youngest, and his most progressive stuff that everybody knows
and loves his Dr Seuss when the world was kind
of changing too. It's not like in N nine and
(38:49):
he was like, I'm gonna deliver, I'm gonna serve up
a good old racist cartoon, right exactly. It's not like
he invented sea monkeys or something like that. Right. Um,
So he kind of progressed with the world. And not
only did he progress with the world and kind of
change his views too to take on much more progressive stuff. Um.
Themes like um like, uh, bigotry with the sneeches is
(39:13):
about discriminating against people and just how ridiculous that is
how people are actually people. Um. A lot of people
point to Horton here's a who as a bit of
a mia culpa for his treatment of the Japanese prior
to World War two and during World War two. Um,
the lorax is obviously pro environmentalism. Um. He fully changed
(39:35):
one of us books altogether, an earlier version of and
And to think of so On on on Mulberry Street. Yeah,
it had the word chinaman in there. It was worse
than chinaman, and he he changed that to Chinese person
like in the publication of the book for future printings. Um.
So he he definitely Um evolved his his works of volts.
(39:58):
He never came out in public he said, Hey, I'm
really sorry about all the racist stuff that I did earlier.
Um by the time he died in I think that
that really wasn't the way that the the world was
turning at the time. But he does seem to have
evolved and changed with the times and and did go
back and revise some stuff that had crept into his
(40:21):
his work. Yeah. And this is um come to light
more prominently in the past few years because there have
been like some book festivals and children's literature festivals that
have either been boycotted or where they've sort of tried
to make him a little less prominent. The cat and
the Hat I think was used. Um, wasn't it like
(40:43):
an official Read across America? Right here was the mascot
for it? Yeah, And did they officially remove the captain.
I think they've backed a little bit away from from
the Cat in the Hat as a mascot, if not entirely.
And I think that they've kind of like Dr Seuss
books are not like the focal of the Read Across
America campaign like they were right. Uh. And then last
(41:04):
year Millennia Trump made the news when she gifted a
library some Dr. Seuss books, and the librarian refused that
gift and said they are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures,
and harmful stereotypes. I don't know that that all is
necessarily true, is it? Yeah? You know, I think that
might have been a little too harsh. Well, I mean,
(41:26):
if it's if I'm wrong, I don't want to know.
The only thing that I've seen that could be pointed
to in his work, like his books, was the was
the reference in drawing of the Chinese guy um in
his first book, And to think I saw it on
Mulberry Street. I didn't see anything else. I saw some
reference that maybe the cat in the hat was supposed
(41:46):
to be black face, but I I saw that one
place right and nowhere else. It seemed to be his
earlier work, not as children's books. And I didn't see
any racist propaganda that had that was hidden in books.
If anything, the books that you would give a library,
and I didn't know. I don't know what title she
gave would have been the more progressive stuff. Yes, she
(42:08):
didn't go there and say here, look, here's the old
Jack O lantern here's the really dirty stuff, college humor,
racist cartoons. Um. And Yeah, to say that his work
was steeped in racist propaganda when talking about the children's books,
is I agree, it's not accurate, right. What I'm what
I'm trying to figure out is is that librarian hip
to something we don't know about or or not. I'm
(42:30):
very curious to know, Like if we didn't dig quite
deep enough. I'm a little surprised because you know us,
but um, I want to know if we're missing something
that Yeah, for sure. Um. I found an article where
they were just asking a lot of professionals, um in
children's literature what they thought about all this Because I'm
a big dummy, you know, I don't know how to
figure this stuff out of my own uh. And and Neelie,
(42:51):
she's a professor of children's lit at Vanderbilt, said this,
just as every author illustrator is. I think Theodore Geisel
was a product of his time. We should not judge
him by today's standards, but we must evaluate his books
that we decided to share with children using today's standards.
That a really great point. Yeah, we cannot wallow in
our own nostalgia when we make choices for the books
(43:11):
we share with young children. They're simply too many outstanding
books available, especially also of the books that were raising
our kids on it. It's new to them. If it's
if it is steeped in racist propaganda that we're not
realizing we're sharing or perpetuating, then yeah, that shouldn't be
the case. And Ed makes the great point that in
the nineteen twenties and thirties it was the exceptional American
(43:34):
who broke out of that mold and was very progressive. Uh.
And I wish he would have been one of those,
but he wasn't. Yeah, And I think that's one of
the reasons why it's there's such a cognitive dissonance when
you find this stuff out is because that's what you
think of Dr. Seuss based on his work, that like,
he would be that kind of guy, but he was human.
(43:56):
His work is larger than him because I think what
it is. And that's the case with just about everything.
It seems like, yeah, I mean, I don't want this
to taint your reading of how the grinchtl Christmas this year.
Although another thing that he was called out on once
was his um there was no female protagonists in any
of his books either again products at the time, Yeah,
(44:17):
he was a man writing about little male characters. But
he went and created a daisy headed Mazie after that,
so um he so again. His books became more progressive
further on in his career and he handled things like
um segregation and discrimination like with the Sneeches Um. The
Butter Battle Book was a clear, like glaring allegory for
(44:41):
the Cold War in the mutual assured destruction arms race.
Kind of a haunting book that ends without any resolution
with both sides, the Yuks and the Zooks. I think, um,
with their bombs pointed at one another, and it doesn't.
It's not like and they lived happily ever after. It's like,
what's going to happen? And then his last book that
(45:02):
he wrote and published while he was alive was Oh
the Places You'll Go, which I had no idea was published,
did you. I didn't know anything about it, so it
was not. It was his last book that was published
while he's alive. It's also his top selling book. So
some of these other books have been around for decades
longer than All the Places You'll Go. But All the
(45:24):
Places You'll Go is this top selling book. Because it's
given to grads. Uh every spring there's a new batch
of graduates who get All the Places You'll Go as
a gift, and like ten million copies have been sold
because it's about like your your future from what a
wait to just like doing things and taking risks and
like trying stuff and you can do it and it'll
(45:45):
be hard and you're going to run into two problems,
but you know you're you're you're a good person and
you're going to make good choices. And I have a
story about this. So last night, Um, I was talking
to you me and I was like, just out of nowhere.
I was like, did you know that of the Place
She'll Go was only published in but it's Dr Seus's
greatest selling book. And she just looked at me kind
(46:06):
of like a little flabbergas, like why would you say that.
I was like, Oh, we're doing a Doctor SEUs episode tomorrow,
and she's like, that's really weird. I'll be right back.
And she went into our bedroom and came back out
with a copy of All the Places You'll Go and
said this has been under your pillow. She said, I
was going to give this to you tomorrow for the
last episode of the End of the World. But I
(46:28):
just happened to bring it up the day before, and
that's crazy. Yeah, I thought that was really surprised. Man,
how things work out. But I read it as recently
as last night. I'm like, this is an amazing even
for SEUs, it's an amazing book. Like an article I
read said that somebody somebody said, like, you can tell
that he knew this was the last book that that
was going to be published while he was alive, that
(46:48):
he wanted this to be as his swan song. Interesting, Yeah,
I would not be surprised talking about his more progressive
views and sort of catching up with the time if
either Ellen and or Audrey as the women behind the Man,
we weren't helping him along in that respect and saying
like hey, get with it. Ohh like for changing his views.
(47:12):
Maybe I thought that as well. I could totally see that. Yeah,
because if you think about it, Helen Palmer came into
his life. Um, yeah, yeah, I could see her having
that influence on him. Yeah. He passed away finally of
cancer sept seven. And I remember this because that was
(47:34):
a rough week. Uh. I was in college and he
and Miles Davis died about five or six days apart,
and I just remember being like, man, this is this
is one of those tough ones for dude, it's my age.
They were beeboppers and children's book readers at the same time.
I've got one last thing for you about Dr Seuss.
Do you have anything else? And I got one more
(47:54):
thing too first, Okay, I'll go first. He was a
voracious chain smoker, interesting so much so that even back
in like the fifties and sixties, he knew he needed
to lay off sometimes. So when he needed to lay
off of smoking, he would um take up. He would
take up a corn cob pipe that he kept turn
up seeds in, and anytime he wanted to smoke, rather
(48:15):
than light it, he would put a water dropper in there,
and then when the turn up seeds started to sprout,
he would go back to cigarettes. What yes, I don't
fully understand that. He would start a little corn cob pipe,
turn up seeds, and then rather than light it, he
would just put a seed dropper in puff on it.
But nothing was going on. It's all just mental oral fixation.
(48:39):
And then after about three days of doing this, the
seeds would would sprout. German eight, and he'd be like, okay,
I can go back to cigarettes now. So you take
about three days off of cigarettes. And he used the
crop of turn up greens as his his indicator. I
thought you were going to say that that went on
to feed like the children in poor neighborhoods or something
(49:00):
who hate turn ups. Kids don't mat turn ups. Turn
ups are great. I agree. I'm a I'm a root
vegetable man myself, so my last thing. In two thousand seven,
the federal judge h received a hard boiled egg in
the mail from an inmate in prison protesting his diet
in prison and the federal The federal judge rendered a decision,
(49:25):
and apparently it was worked up the ladder. I can't
remember even what it was about, but he rendered a decision. Thusly,
I do not like eggs in the file. This is
Judge James um your head. I do not like them
in any style. I will not take them fried or boiled.
I will not take them poached or broiled. I will
not take them softer scrambled despite an argument, well rambled,
(49:46):
No fan, I am of the egg at hand. Destroyed
that egg today today, today, I say, without delay, And
they threw him out of court, fired him because he
was drunk. No, I don't know. Um wow, I wonder
what came out of that. I don't know. And and
and it gave very little information about what the case
(50:07):
was even on I know, like the guys like, no, really,
this is a serious complaint. Please, you're focusing on the
wrong thing. Someone help me. Oh goodness. If you want
to know more about Dr Seuss, go research and make
your own decisions about the man, the work, all that stuff. Okay, agreed. Uh.
And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. No,
(50:27):
this is our last show of the year, so no
listener mail. It's just our time of the year to
thank everyone here and year. Is this the end of
ten years? Yes, or it's sort of in the middle.
April is the beginning and end of a year, right,
but the end of our calendar year. And we just
thank everyone for hanging in for this long with us.
It's amazing that we're still allowed to do this job,
(50:49):
hanging there. It'll pay off eventually, and we're gonna keep
at it forever forever. And on a personal note, a
very happy birthday to my dear sweet wife you me
birthday birthday you me uh, And thank you guys for
being with us for yet another year, and we'll see
you next year, everybody. For more on this and thousands
(51:13):
of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com m
Welcome to Stuff you should Know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there. And
this is the Doctor Sois Cast, our final episode of
(00:22):
this year two eighteen. So long in the books Dr
Sois Dr Sois. That's right, you know, it's funny. Well
we'll get to that. All right, everything that's funny can wait? Yep,
we're gonna talk serious. Dr SEUs was an author of
children's books. He was so great and also kind of racist. Chuck,
(00:46):
there's a lot of stuff in here. I wish I
didn't know. I know. I think we're about to ruin
Dr Seuss at the end of the year, right after
the holidays. Uh yeah, but well let's just talk about
the man. Okay, so um, we are talking. We keep
saying Dr Sois. Everybody knows him as Dr Seuss, but
(01:09):
apparently the correct pronunciation is Sois and and the guy
would know because Sois is actually his middle name. His
name is Theodore Sois Geisel or Giesel? Is it geisel
er Giesel? It would be Geisel in German. That you
go with a second vowel, So Theodore sois Geisel. Yeah,
and uh, it's sort of when I saw that, everyone
(01:32):
basically was like SEUs until he eventually was like fine,
like I can't fight this fight any longer. Well, they're like,
we'll spell it differently then. But they reminded me of
Joe Theisman. Oh yeah, the very famous story of the
quarterback Joe Theisman who changed his spelling or his pronunciation
to Theisman to ron with Heisman, right, which I think
(01:52):
is the story. I think that's true. No, No, I
think that's true. Real. Yeah, what do you think that
was just like an old football tale. No, I've never
heard of though, you're just being funny. Oh no, that
that really happened, and that really came back to bite
him in the rump when his thigh bone broke opened.
He's like, I guess my knee would have busted if
he had just kept that these is that not okay?
(02:14):
Too soon? So we're obviously once we get into Joe
thisman leg breaking talk, we're talking about dr Sis. That's,
like I said, Theodore Soyce geisl Um, who is I
can't really think of a children's book author that is
more widely known maybe Charles Schultz. Maybe I think is
(02:39):
like a comic strip guy. Children's children's book like Judy Bloom. Sure,
but I don't know if I call her children's book
young adult like children's book. I guess the baron stain
bears not the barren steam bears. Yeah. I would say
that Teddy geisl huh holds that distinct for sure. At
(03:00):
the very least, his work, his drawing is just immediately
recognizable his style. Yeah, I mean that font we you
we use that font for our Live Christmas show shirts
on the obyright. No, it's not his. In fact, I
looked it up. I was kind of curious. I was like,
what is that great font that he uses for his
(03:20):
book titles? And I don't know what he used. He
probably just handrew it, I imagine. But um, now there
are fonts called uh so ice doctors s o O
s font or grenched that you can you know you
can gank that sure did for Christmas shirts. I haven't
(03:43):
heard that word and forever gan I think I was
wearing like Huge Jenko's the last time I heard the
word gang ganked my milk off my tray bringing it
back time. I use it too, so should we go
back to the beginning, Yes, back to Springfield, mass Choose
it's a nineteen o four, that's right, March two. As
(04:03):
a matter of fact, fellow Pisces uh dr Soyce was
born h Teddy Geisel and his grandpaps had come from
Germany in the mid eighteen hundreds bought a brewery because
they were good Germans. They knew all about beer and originally,
get this, the name of the brewery was Combak and Geisel,
(04:25):
and they locally called it come Back and Guzzle. I
love that, and then awesome in German, less whatever that
would be. I think it'd be comeback in Geisel. Uh So.
He moved here and it would end up becoming the
Springfield Breweries Company, which his father then ran um And
this is really like we did. He even did a
show on prohibition, and it never really hit home to
(04:47):
me some of the repercussions of that. I was just like,
people can't drink, But I never thought about a family
business just being shut down. That was a good episode,
it was, But that's what happened that, you know, Prohibition
came along. They had this successful brewery in their family.
They're like, sorry, you're no longer in business, Go find
another job. These guys, Yeah, who were secretly drinking right, Yeah,
(05:13):
so um had the job, that is, his father did
get was eventually became the supervisor of the town's parks. Yeah,
kind of cool. And um there's a myth, an incorrect myth.
From what I understand, one of the parks had a
zoo in it, and so a lot of people say
that drawings of the animals were some of the first
at the zoo were some of the first drawings that
(05:35):
little Ted came up with. No, his father became superintendent
of the parks when he was already a grown man.
But well not a grown man. He was definitely not
a little kid at the zoo. Did he go to
the zoo and draw animals? Or is that all false?
I think it may be all false, but I'm making
that part up. I just from what I read, he
was grown enough that he wasn't a little boy drawing
(05:56):
pictures of animals at the zoo like people think. Interesting. Uh,
I thought it was as well. I love busting myths. Barra,
you should do a show. Uh. So World War one
comes along, which I've been I've been doing a lot
of World War one reading lately with the really anniversary
of the Armistist Armisists. Yeah, uh, really interesting. I didn't
(06:19):
know much about it. It's a pretty serious war man brutal.
Everything I know about is from the Wonder Woman movie. Yeah,
I kid. Uh. So they were German, uh that the
Geisls were, like we said, and so in the United
States during World War One there was a lot of
anti In fact, for a long time, actually there was
(06:39):
a lot of anti German sentiment in the US right there,
like we're not German, we just like beer. Yeah, and
her name is Geisl. Uh. So everyone it was clear
that they were German, and so, uh, you know, there
was there was I get the feeling that he, you know,
felt like he was like picked on and laughed at
(07:01):
peas because he was German. Right, So if you can't
beat him, join them. Turn that same kind of bigotry
onto others will find. Right. So he starts at a
very early age in high school um drawing cartoons, writing essays,
funny essays, satirical essays. And he started using a pen
name very early on, maybe because he was German, and
(07:21):
he just reversed his last name and he became THEO.
La Sigue. Yeah. Actually, one of my favorite books, um,
Hooper Humperdink Not Him, is written by Theo Lasigue. Yeah.
I always was like, I always thought this was a
doctor's shus book, and then I saw this and I'm like,
it was a doctor's sus book. Do you ever read
(07:42):
that one? I don't think so. What's it called? Hooper
Humperdink Not Him. It's about this kid who's throwing a
birthday party, and everybody's invited to the greatest birthday party
you've ever seen in your life, except for poor Hooper Humperdink,
and I think he gets invited finally at the end
where your parents like we should probably get Josh this
go ahead and get them ready, right, pretty much, there
(08:02):
actually was a birthday party I wasn't invited to. It
really was like, I'm Hooper Harperdink. Oh well, you know.
My deal was I wasn't allowed to go to boy
girl parties for a while, so but you were still invited, right, Yeah.
But that was even worse because I was invited and
I was like I had to say, no, I can't
go because there's girls there, right, I got you. I mean,
how humiliating is that? Especially in college. Yeah, and they
(08:25):
were like, uh, what's wrong with girls? I'm like, I
don't know. As my parents, he seemed great to me.
The smell nice. Um alright, So he reversed his name
became La Siege. I went to Dartmouth College, and, like
many many famous um humorist I guess you could call him,
he wrote for the His college humor magazine was called
(08:48):
The jack O Lantern, and it was just like, really
solidifies that college humor magazines really have produced some of
the brightest comedic minds that in this country over the years.
You know, um, yeah Letterman. I think he worked at
National Lampoon's, didn't he Jan certainly did the Harvard Lampoon.
(09:09):
I'm pretty sure um Letterman did as well, at the
very least a lot of his writers did. Okay, fine, okay,
well we'll settle on that that version of the truth.
But he got kicked off of the magazine staff when
he was caught drinking on campus during prohibition, which is
(09:30):
kind of awesome. Yeah, I bet it wasn't for him.
What do you mean? Oh, but he was like, well,
I want to be on the magazine staff. This is terrible.
This is an unjust Yeah, not awesome for him, right yeah, yeah,
I thought you meant he wasn't doing the drinking or something. Right.
This did nothing to cut his career off though, No, no, no,
he just adopted a new pseudonym. Yeah, sois right s
(09:51):
e U s s again, but he pronounced it sois.
But he was the only person who did. Um. So
he did graduate from Dartmouth in I think, which also
further goes to show that he was so if he
graduated college in that his father's brewery wouldn't have been
shut down until I don't remember when prohibition started, but
(10:14):
he would. He was obviously not a young kid necessarily
dumb animals. Um. But he Uh. He went on to
Oxford to I guess pursue a higher degree. Um. I
think he was going to be a teacher, was his
original intent, and he didn't like Oxford, but Oxford brought
(10:36):
him to his wife, Helen Palmer, his first wife, his
first wife, and um, they met and she actually had
a really great influence on him by saying, uh, I
think you are maybe going to be a better artist
than a teacher, and kind of pushed him toward that,
and he ended up pursuing a career in art, largely
because of her influence. Yeah, and he sort of did
(10:58):
the student thing. He he worked on a novel, and
he traveled around Europe and was sort of uh doing
and he was with Helen of course this whole time.
They eventually get married and then he went to work
for a magazine called Judge drawing once again like political cartoons,
humor cartoons acted. This is where he added the doctor
(11:21):
to his name as sort of a joke because he,
I guess did not get that doctorate degree or whatever
he was pursuing. No, he didn't, but later on in life,
Dartmouth did bestow an honorary degree to make him an
official doctor. When are we going to get one of those?
I've been waiting a long time, chuck. And are they
as worthless as I think they are? Totally? Yeah, I
mean sure you'll get like the discounted Wendy's that they offered.
(11:44):
But that's that's really the only perk aside from saying, like,
I'm a doctor. Can you really call yourself that? Though? Sure?
Like only chumps do that, right, Like you have to
call me doctor now, dude. You you will see me
telling people to call me Dr. Clark. I'll just I'll
be more personal. I'll be Dr Josh like a chiropractor.
I could see you going off and getting your PhD
(12:05):
one day. Yeah, yeah, I want from Bowling Green State
University and the backdoor version pretty much. Yeahs um alright.
So he got the doctor on the name became Dr
Syce and from then on he he never wrote under
his given name again, he was always doctor. Sois from
(12:28):
that point for it? Do we take a break? You
can see me getting a PhD? Yeah? This late in
my career. Yeah, this mid in my career. Huh am
I like Natalie Portman or something? Yes, all right, let's
take a break. All right, Natalie Nat, I wish right.
(13:06):
I'll bet Natalie Portman hates being called Nat. Do you
think she seems like the type of Natalie who would
hate being called Nat? Let's find out, Dr Portman. Natalie Portman,
will you please get in touch with Listen and let
us know whether you're cool with being called Nat or not? Well, hey,
since we're on that big shout out to Mr Mark Ruffalo,
it was basically the male Natalie Portman. Yeah, he tweeted
(13:29):
out our Navajo Code Talkers episode which means that he's
aware of this podcast and we're huge fans. So if
you're listening, man, thanks yeah a lot. Not just aware,
he liked it, he encouraged people to listen to it.
He wasn't like, steer clear of this piece of poop.
This is a good podcast, is what he was saying. Man,
I remember when I saw You Can count On Me
(13:50):
for the first time. Oh my god, that movie correct me.
It was such a good movie. Yeah, not just the
first time, like just every time you watch that movie.
It's wonderful. It's really great. So I have another show
called movie Crush. Mr Ruffalo would love to have you on.
We'll just leave it there, alright. So um, alright, here's
(14:11):
what happens. Teddy Geist starts doing ads yeah, and does
quite well. Yeah. I mean, if you're an ad illustrator,
you you basically do what you're told the client says,
this is what we want. He was the kind of
artist who, because of his distinctive style, his style is
what the clients wanted. So as an ad illustrator, he
(14:35):
became nationally famous. Yeah, which is crazy to think of now,
it really is. His first big break was for something
called flit It was a bug spray. And if you
look at the flit ads, they have a picture of
the flit and it was that old timey Tom and
Jerry Pump candidates like couldn't be more poisonous? Out like
a cloud of noxious smoke that formed like a skull
(14:57):
and crossbones in the air. Basically, right, that's what he
was drawing stuff for. And he came up with a
catchphrase because he wasn't just illustrating, he was also copyrighting
in these ads, and he came up with quick Henry
the flit, and that just became a national catchphrase, like
where's the beef? Right, like somebody's pestering You're just like
to somebody else, Quick Henry the flit. That's how I
(15:17):
probably would have used it. But um, so he became
known for that, and then a second egg campaign made
him even bigger. Oh right, so he did flit for
seventeen years, dude, which is like I thought, yeah, sure,
he did that for a couple of years. I mean
there's almost two decades of doing those ads, made a
lot of money, kept him you know, uh nice and
(15:40):
employed through the through the Great Depression. And then this
one's even weirder. Uh. He went to work for Standard Oil,
who had s O Oil and s O Gas and
this was s O Marine, which was their boat oil. Yeah.
He has this pr idea to create a a fake navy,
(16:03):
the Sious Navy, the Sious Navy, which is nothing. He
just made it up out of nowhere to promote the
s O Marine oil. Yeah, and it worked, yeah, because
he basically drafted people into his navy. He would draw
like famous figures um like say eleanor Roosevelt or something
like that, dressed up in the suit the Sious Navy
uniform or whatever, and it became a thing like people
(16:24):
wanted to be in it, so they would apply to
be in it. And I guess so would hold the
party every year and just pull out all the stops
and there would be this lavish sious Sious Navy party.
You know, it's called the Sious Navy Luncheon and frolic.
That sounds so like. Uh. They had two thousand admirals
and they included among them, uh, Vincent Astor and Guy Lombardo,
(16:48):
famous band leader. And as this is a grabstar article.
As Ed put it, they were what you would call
like tastemakers today, like wealthy, influential Americans wanted to be
in this fake navy, to go to this luncheon and
frolic And he wrote these little navy story booklets and
it astonishingly it was a big deal and it actually worked.
(17:11):
And when you look at him there, they look like Dr.
Seuss books. Like, it's not like he changed his style. No, no,
this is the thing, like he became famous for famous
and saw it after for his style. Yeah, exactly. And
weirdly enough, he said that the only reason he went
into children's books initially was because his standard oil contract
didn't forbid it. Like that was some of the work
(17:31):
that he was allowed to do on the side. He
never he was like, it's not like I had a
great thing for kids. Well he even said very famously
multiple times, um, that he didn't write for kids. He
wrote for people. And he also famously said, you have kids,
I'll entertain them, right. Yeah, he didn't want kids, did
not want kids, and he never had him, so his
(17:52):
which came true. So um. He he was already pretty
famous by the time World War two came around, um,
and he actually volunteered to become a soldier, but he
was sent to Hollywood to work at what was called
Fort Fox. Yeah, this was strange. I mean I had
(18:12):
heard of the Signal Corps. Um, well, the Signal Corps
is everything from code like a code and code breakers
all the way to psychological operations. Oh, I thought the
Signal Corps was just like the people that made documentaries
and stuff. This was a division within the Signal Corps.
And so he was basically in this this um, this
(18:36):
division with Frank Capra and some other like screenwriters, actors,
like basically anybody who had anything to do with visual
entertainment was put into this group in Hollywood on the
Fox lot at what was called Fort Fox, and he
Um that's where he spent most of the war, although
there was a fascinating story about a time when he
(18:59):
went to Europe as he had to go get approvals
for a documentary he had worked on from all the
high ranking generals in Europe. So we went from headquarters
to headquarters throughout Europe. And while he was in Luxembourg
he visited some of his friends and he Um basically
got the skinny they think on the Ghost Army, you
know the Ghost Army where they had inflatable tanks and
(19:20):
like that. It was meant to make America's military look
way bigger than it was. And these guys were running
psychological operations. Well Dr SEUs was friends with some of
the higher ups in the Ghost Army, and they think
that they showed him on a map like where to
go to go see some of these Well, in between
the time he left and the time he got there,
(19:42):
that was suddenly behind enemy lines at the Battle of
the Bulge literally started around him, around him while he
was yeah, and he was like I was just driving
around thinking like it was just hard to find friendly
troops like as part of combat. But he ended up
inadvertently spending three days ten miles behind enemy lines during
the Battle of the Bulge and just barely made it
(20:04):
out with his life. Yeah, he was rescued by the
Brits um but he would eventually become a lieutenant colonel. Yeah,
in his short stint as a late thirty year old,
he's like think thirty eight when he first went in,
which really kind of interesting piece of backstory. Well, he
he was we left out a pretty pretty big part
of his formative years early on in his career was
(20:27):
he wanted to become he wanted to have a say,
in the direction America took in World War Two, and
he was very much in favor of going to war
against the Nazis and Japan and Italy and um. One
of the reasons why he was in favor was because
he was extremely anti fascist. He hated fascism. And he
(20:48):
got a job at a liberal magazine I think a
newspaper actually called PM that was founded in New York
and it was founded with the Eye too to basically
call p all out who are pushing other people around.
It's a very liberal, very anti fascist, very pro um
World War two. They didn't call it that at the time.
(21:09):
And it was very anti isolationists too. And Dr Seuss
was drawing editorial cartoons, very political editorial cartoons, about seven
days a week for this magazine. UM. And he did
some really good work in it actually. Well yeah, and
then in the in the army he actually made films.
(21:32):
He was he was making documentaries right alongside Frank Capra. Uh.
He had one series of training videos called Private Snaffoo
that were animated, UM. But they were the work of
Chuck Jones. Actually, it's just so crazy about all this
talent that's like in the army producing these things at
the time, but he he went on to make live
action documentaries UM. One called Your Job in Germany, another
(21:54):
called Our Job in Japan. UM. MacArthur stopped the release
of Our Job in Japan. Uh and apparently UM General
Patton stormed out of a screening of one of the
other ones. And I couldn't find the word but it said,
he uttered one loud curse word. Oh you couldn't find it? No,
do you? Did you? It was b s Okay, what
(22:14):
are you trying to think? What it would be? Sure?
I was like, but one word. So it wasn't the
F word unless it was just a very just long
drawn out like you know, alright, bs, that makes sense,
which I don't understand. I don't know what the problem was.
But they were both the our Job in Japan or
(22:35):
your Job in Germany, Yeah, was about occupation post post occupation,
UM life in Germany or Japan and what Yeah, you
can watch Your Job in Germany on YouTube. Yeah, and
and our Job in Japan too. Yeah. So he he
recut those basically kind of rewrote and recut those later
on and retitled them Hitler Lives and Designed for Death. No,
(22:59):
he didn't. They were recut around him without his say
oh no, no no. He and his wife later got
those films and recut them and won an Academy award. Yeah,
I had read that a producer went and and did
some recutting against their wishes and made it way worse
than they originally intended. Oh well, that may have happened,
and then maybe they then later on we recut it,
(23:20):
got the Oscar for their version. I don't know, but
we left out a lot actually because he Um he
was actually had previous to the army, had already written
children's books. Like he went fully into this because of
a ship trip that he took. Let's let's walk it
back a little bit. They went on a transatlantic voyage
(23:42):
aboard the MS uh Kung's home and apparently the ship's
engine had this beat, this hypnotic throbbing sound that just
really stuck with him and it got into his head,
and so he started composing rhyming couplets that matched with
this rhythm, kind of like, uh, that's my S S
(24:04):
Kung's home impression, all right. Well, it ended up being
what's called anapestic t traanmeter, which is what he would
make his career on this poetic meter. You know what?
That made me think of Chuck um that, Like, I've
never heard those words together in my life. But no
one ever taught me how to read a Doctor Seuss book.
(24:28):
It's almost like we have some ingrain thing in our
brain to read things in that kind of rhythm or rome,
you know what I mean? Or is it just like
my parents read that to me and that's where I
picked it up from. But who taught them? I taught
anybody how to read something in rhymes. It's just like
you just and even when you when you when you're
not reading it in the right rhythm, your brain realizes
(24:50):
it and corrects you and you go back and reread
it the right way. Like when you get to the
next line, you're like, oh wait, that's out a beat
or whatever. Like you figure it out naturally, And I
wonder why we're geared toward that. Yeah, it's funny too,
because obviously read a lot of kids books every night now,
and some of them are great, and some of them
just like they'll do a word that doesn't quite rhyme,
(25:11):
and I'm always like, come on, or they'll stuff too
much in a line and it's not like graceful in
the read, I'm like, man, this is lame. Do better
orange and door hinge. Hey, that's not bad. Well that's out, okay.
Very famously can rhyme something with orange, which I found
out because I think I said nothing rhymes with orange,
(25:31):
and well everyone's always said that because that's true. Well
I meant it door hinge. That's funny. So he created
a children's book on that anapestic t trameter called and
this is a story no One Can Beat that was
later changed and published in ninety seven as and to
think that I saw it on Mulberry Street because he
(25:53):
had an old friend that he ran into from Dartmouth
that turned out to be a children's book editor at
Vanguard Press. So I read an account of the story,
and the person saying telling the story said, had he
been walking on the other side of the street that day,
he may have never become a children's author. Like it
was that fateful um. He his friend from Dartmouth was
(26:15):
a new children's book editor at Vanguard, you said, And
it was so new that he was looking for material.
And Dr Seuss happened to be walking around with the
manuscript on him and just happened to be down there
and they ran into each other and this book got
published and that was the one where he first made
his name as a children's book writer. You're right, and
(26:37):
shout out to Stephen Barr, book agent. That's right. Uh
So this, this uh antipastic to traametter is what he
basically stuck with the rest of his career. He would
alter it here and there, use other meters here and there,
but this is where he you know, as Ed said,
that was his bread and butter. And it's very waltz
like you can count it off in three or four time,
(27:00):
and it just was sort of perfect for kids books.
And with that first kid's book, Um, and to think
I saw in the Mulberry Street Apparently it's about a
kid named Marco who sees a horse and cart on
the street and as he's retelling it, it just becomes
this bigger and bigger and more like bizarre and grand
thing that he saw. Um. And this will come back
(27:21):
later on in the episode. Yeah. So he's writing these books.
He's doing okay. Uh. He had his fourth book was
called Horton Hatches the Egg. I think that's where we
first meet Horton. Um. But but he wasn't like lighting
the world on fire. And then that's when he goes
in the army. Right, and let me tell you the
story about getting caught in the Battle of the Bulge. Again,
(27:42):
here we go. So he makes it through World War two,
he escapes with his life from the Battle of the Bulge,
and when he comes out of World War Two, he goes,
um right back to writing books. And he he wrote
a few more in the forties. Um. I believe he
wrote yourl the Turtle, which I know is an allegory
for Hitler, and he was on record say yeah, apparently
(28:04):
the early drafts of it he had drawn a Hitler
mustache on yoursal the Turtle. It's about anti authoritarianian Is
that Hitler or Michael Jordan's. Does he have a Hitler mustache?
He did very famously, and that this one Haynes Stevie
commercial and everyone was like, uh, someone not told him.
I don't I didn't see that. I'll have to show
(28:27):
you picture. I had my head in the sand like
I was Charles Limberg or something. Oh, that's a nice
circular reft. It's just for you and me. Um. So
he was writing some more and he was. I mean,
he was selling like thousands of copies every every time
he released a book. He was a known children's author.
He had already established his his style as something that
(28:47):
was pretty recognizable around the United States. But it wasn't
until the mid fifties that things really changed for him.
Oh wow, it is a Hitler mustache. There's no taken that.
It's it's a decision. Um. So I think in nineteen
fifty five there was a book written called why Can't
(29:09):
Johnny Read? Right? And a guy named Rudolph Flesh And
I realized what we've jumped over. We'll get back to
I'm not ready for you yet, right, Um, a guy
named Rudolph Flesh It was this, Yeah, f l e age,
it would be a good one though. Yeah, you'd have
(29:30):
to call yourself Rudy too. And anyway, Rudolf Flesh Um,
he wrote Why Can't Johnny Read? And it was basically
like an indictment of the American public school system, the
education system, and how we taught kids to read. And
it was equally an indictment of like Dick and Jane,
and the way that kids used to read or be
(29:50):
taught to read was just basically, here are words on
a page, memorize them. This is a red ball. This
is the word read. Don't be an idiot red ball
say it's kind of the worst way to teach kids
stuff it is. And the guy in the article said, um.
He wrote an article in Life later on too, he said,
you know, he would be a great children's book author
(30:11):
to teach kids how to read? Is Dr Seuss? He
hates kids, He's already writing books for kids. Why but
if he just directed that toward actually teaching them how
to read, that be that kids would definitely want that.
And it turns out that, um, an editor I think
at Houghton Mifflin or somebody wherever, wherever Dr SEUs was
writing at the time under Mifflin dunder Mifflin, what you
(30:32):
got me? Um? He said, that's actually a pretty good idea.
And that's where we got the cat in the hat.
That's right, it was. It was originally meant as a
reading primer. I think there were words and and very
famously his editor bet him after that that he could
not write a book with only fifty words. And he went,
(30:54):
take this book green eggs and ham and shove it
and shove it and give me my fifty dollars, right,
and that is supposedly true. His editor bet him that
he could not do so, and that's where green eggs
and Ham came from. Yeah, and it's fifty words exactly,
that's right. Um. So he at this point he went
from ed says, he went from being a well known
children's author to probably the best known children's author in
(31:16):
the world. Yeah. He'd shown not only could he write fun,
whimsical um stories with the disguised moral lesson in the
middle of it too, um, with great illustrations and hand
drawn fonts and all, that he could actually teach the
world's children how to read English at least. Yeah. And
then from that success he he wrote, uh, that same year,
(31:39):
how the Grinch stold Christmas? That's a big year man,
So so Cat the Hat and the Grinch of the
same year, right, yeah, okay, yeah, which is just amazing.
And then in nine six, of course, we get the
very famous TV cartoon adaptation, which people still love and
enjoy today, including me. Uh. And he ended up being
(32:00):
so successful that they gave him his own imprint at
Random House. Um. With his wife Helen Palmer Geisel, who
was um kind of by all accounts that the woman
behind the man. She was an author herself. She wrote
quite a few books. One called do you Know Do
you Know what I'm going to do next Saturday? To you?
(32:20):
One called I Know What She Did last Summer? Um, Man,
it's funny. Adding those two words just makes it threatening.
It's a horror novel. Uh, one called Why I Built
the Google House, and one called I Was Kissed by
a Seal at the Zoo. Uh. So I didn't want
to just kind of wash over her because she she
(32:42):
was an author, and very sadly she ended up committing
suicide very late in life. Yeah, within a couple of
years of an affair that he had yeah um, And
he'd apparently had multiple affairs and her um. Her suicide
note supposedly referenced this, this feeling that she'd kind of
been overshadowed by him in his career. And like you said,
(33:04):
she was very much the woman behind the man, and
I think expected to support him and all that thing,
and she did. She put her own career away so
that she could handle his correspondence and business affairs. She
was in charge of correspondence to like sick kids that
wrote them our entire classes. And um, she was she
was he all he he was the artistic genius who
(33:26):
just needed to be left alone so he could make
these books every year, and she handled everything else. And
ask somebody to put their career away so that you
can have yours. It's a big thing to ask somebody. Yeah,
I mean she was sixty nine when she uh, and
I believe I said committed suicide earlier. I apologize, I know,
we don't use that term anymore, So we say now
(33:47):
that she died by suicide, Yeah, because committed makes it
sound like, oh my god, she committed a sin. Yeah,
and we people have written in about that, and I was,
I was. We were both glad to be made aware
of that. So she was sixteen, ten years old and
apparently also suffered from uh Gilliam bear bar game bar
a syndrome. Yeah. We got corrected on that some other time.
(34:10):
It's how I remember of how to pronounce it. Yeah.
Uh so, I mean, who knows why someone eventually takes
that path in life. Could be a lot of factors,
but yeah, October sixty seven, she overdosed on medication after
they've been married for forty years too. Yeah, man um
and so shortly after that he married Audrey Diamond geisl
(34:37):
who's his widow, who is I believe still alive and
basically running his estate still. Yeah, her name was Audrey
Stone Diamond, but it was d I M O N
D no A. Oh yeah, which is interesting. I wonder
if it's efficient. But yes, she became Soyce and he went,
just go ahead and get used to it. It's SEUs.
(34:58):
She's like, really, I've always said Soyce. He's like, I
love you. And she had two daughters. Uh, And he said,
I bet you they'd love boarding school. Yeah, and she
went okay, And she later on even said, uh, this
is a direct quote. She said they wouldn't have been
happy with Ted, and Ted wouldn't have been happy with them. Yeah.
He really did not want kids or kids to be around.
(35:20):
He just liked doing the books that he liked to do.
It's pretty interesting. So he um that nineteen fifty seven year,
that was a big breakout year for him, and um,
that was kind of the year that he became the
doctor SEUs that we we see. But he kept writing
(35:40):
for many many years, I mean up until his death.
In he apparently cranked out like a book a year. Um,
some of the some of them over time kind of
took on much more progressive tones until he became the
Doctor Seuss that we see today. So prior to that though, Um,
(36:03):
in recent years, some people have kind of said, hey,
you know, Dr SEUs had some really racist, bigoted stuff
in his early work, and it's become kind of this
national conversation to kind of figure out how to do this,
because everyone loves Dr SEUs, loves Dr SEUs, there's nobody
(36:24):
who doesn't like Dr Seuss. But if you or his work,
I should say, but if you if you start digging into,
especially some of his early work, it becomes problematic. Um,
you want to take a break, Okay, all right, all right,
let's take a break and we will take part in
that national conversation right after this. Alright, Chuck, So it's
(37:02):
national conversation time. So Dr Seuss, especially in his earliest
work as Jack o' lantern and judge writer, the Humor
magazine writer, a lot of his stuff was extremely racist,
as Ed puts it, not just racist for the time,
but but monstrously racist stuff. Yeah, like uh, full on
(37:23):
blackface caricatures, um, depicted African American characters, as lazy savages
have too many kids. He made jokes about slavery. There's
one way can't even read on this show, but it's awful.
Yeah right. Um. He also, especially as after Pearl Harbor,
(37:45):
directed a lot of his creative energy toward making ugly
caricatures of Japan and depicting Japanese and Japanese Americans in
really unflattering light too. Yeah, and apparently supported tournament. Uh
and this isn't you know, you don't want to drag
somebody through the mud, but if we're going to give
(38:07):
a picture of the man, this is who he was
earlier in his life. Right, So Ed makes a really
good point. I think Ed's a great American for the
way that he kind of kind of handled this too. Um.
He's saying that, uh that if you look at his
early stuff, he was a younger man at the time,
and I think it was we should also say it
(38:27):
qualifies as like none of this excuses anything, but but
you know, look at the whole, the whole picture of
the person. Um, if you look at his earlier stuff
or his his worst most racist stuff is when he
was youngest, and his most progressive stuff that everybody knows
and loves his Dr Seuss when the world was kind
of changing too. It's not like in N nine and
(38:49):
he was like, I'm gonna deliver, I'm gonna serve up
a good old racist cartoon, right exactly. It's not like
he invented sea monkeys or something like that. Right. Um,
So he kind of progressed with the world. And not
only did he progress with the world and kind of
change his views too to take on much more progressive stuff. Um.
Themes like um like, uh, bigotry with the sneeches is
(39:13):
about discriminating against people and just how ridiculous that is
how people are actually people. Um. A lot of people
point to Horton here's a who as a bit of
a mia culpa for his treatment of the Japanese prior
to World War two and during World War two. Um,
the lorax is obviously pro environmentalism. Um. He fully changed
(39:35):
one of us books altogether, an earlier version of and
And to think of so On on on Mulberry Street. Yeah,
it had the word chinaman in there. It was worse
than chinaman, and he he changed that to Chinese person
like in the publication of the book for future printings. Um.
So he he definitely Um evolved his his works of volts.
(39:58):
He never came out in public he said, Hey, I'm
really sorry about all the racist stuff that I did earlier.
Um by the time he died in I think that
that really wasn't the way that the the world was
turning at the time. But he does seem to have
evolved and changed with the times and and did go
back and revise some stuff that had crept into his
(40:21):
his work. Yeah. And this is um come to light
more prominently in the past few years because there have
been like some book festivals and children's literature festivals that
have either been boycotted or where they've sort of tried
to make him a little less prominent. The cat and
the Hat I think was used. Um, wasn't it like
(40:43):
an official Read across America? Right here was the mascot
for it? Yeah, And did they officially remove the captain.
I think they've backed a little bit away from from
the Cat in the Hat as a mascot, if not entirely.
And I think that they've kind of like Dr Seuss
books are not like the focal of the Read Across
America campaign like they were right. Uh. And then last
(41:04):
year Millennia Trump made the news when she gifted a
library some Dr. Seuss books, and the librarian refused that
gift and said they are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures,
and harmful stereotypes. I don't know that that all is
necessarily true, is it? Yeah? You know, I think that
might have been a little too harsh. Well, I mean,
(41:26):
if it's if I'm wrong, I don't want to know.
The only thing that I've seen that could be pointed
to in his work, like his books, was the was
the reference in drawing of the Chinese guy um in
his first book, And to think I saw it on
Mulberry Street. I didn't see anything else. I saw some
reference that maybe the cat in the hat was supposed
(41:46):
to be black face, but I I saw that one
place right and nowhere else. It seemed to be his
earlier work, not as children's books. And I didn't see
any racist propaganda that had that was hidden in books.
If anything, the books that you would give a library,
and I didn't know. I don't know what title she
gave would have been the more progressive stuff. Yes, she
(42:08):
didn't go there and say here, look, here's the old
Jack O lantern here's the really dirty stuff, college humor,
racist cartoons. Um. And Yeah, to say that his work
was steeped in racist propaganda when talking about the children's books,
is I agree, it's not accurate, right. What I'm what
I'm trying to figure out is is that librarian hip
to something we don't know about or or not. I'm
(42:30):
very curious to know, Like if we didn't dig quite
deep enough. I'm a little surprised because you know us,
but um, I want to know if we're missing something
that Yeah, for sure. Um. I found an article where
they were just asking a lot of professionals, um in
children's literature what they thought about all this Because I'm
a big dummy, you know, I don't know how to
figure this stuff out of my own uh. And and Neelie,
(42:51):
she's a professor of children's lit at Vanderbilt, said this,
just as every author illustrator is. I think Theodore Geisel
was a product of his time. We should not judge
him by today's standards, but we must evaluate his books
that we decided to share with children using today's standards.
That a really great point. Yeah, we cannot wallow in
our own nostalgia when we make choices for the books
(43:11):
we share with young children. They're simply too many outstanding
books available, especially also of the books that were raising
our kids on it. It's new to them. If it's
if it is steeped in racist propaganda that we're not
realizing we're sharing or perpetuating, then yeah, that shouldn't be
the case. And Ed makes the great point that in
the nineteen twenties and thirties it was the exceptional American
(43:34):
who broke out of that mold and was very progressive. Uh.
And I wish he would have been one of those,
but he wasn't. Yeah, And I think that's one of
the reasons why it's there's such a cognitive dissonance when
you find this stuff out is because that's what you
think of Dr. Seuss based on his work, that like,
he would be that kind of guy, but he was human.
(43:56):
His work is larger than him because I think what
it is. And that's the case with just about everything.
It seems like, yeah, I mean, I don't want this
to taint your reading of how the grinchtl Christmas this year.
Although another thing that he was called out on once
was his um there was no female protagonists in any
of his books either again products at the time, Yeah,
(44:17):
he was a man writing about little male characters. But
he went and created a daisy headed Mazie after that,
so um he so again. His books became more progressive
further on in his career and he handled things like
um segregation and discrimination like with the Sneeches Um. The
Butter Battle Book was a clear, like glaring allegory for
(44:41):
the Cold War in the mutual assured destruction arms race.
Kind of a haunting book that ends without any resolution
with both sides, the Yuks and the Zooks. I think, um,
with their bombs pointed at one another, and it doesn't.
It's not like and they lived happily ever after. It's like,
what's going to happen? And then his last book that
(45:02):
he wrote and published while he was alive was Oh
the Places You'll Go, which I had no idea was published,
did you. I didn't know anything about it, so it
was not. It was his last book that was published
while he's alive. It's also his top selling book. So
some of these other books have been around for decades
longer than All the Places You'll Go. But All the
(45:24):
Places You'll Go is this top selling book. Because it's
given to grads. Uh every spring there's a new batch
of graduates who get All the Places You'll Go as
a gift, and like ten million copies have been sold
because it's about like your your future from what a
wait to just like doing things and taking risks and
like trying stuff and you can do it and it'll
(45:45):
be hard and you're going to run into two problems,
but you know you're you're you're a good person and
you're going to make good choices. And I have a
story about this. So last night, Um, I was talking
to you me and I was like, just out of nowhere.
I was like, did you know that of the Place
She'll Go was only published in but it's Dr Seus's
greatest selling book. And she just looked at me kind
(46:06):
of like a little flabbergas, like why would you say that.
I was like, Oh, we're doing a Doctor SEUs episode tomorrow,
and she's like, that's really weird. I'll be right back.
And she went into our bedroom and came back out
with a copy of All the Places You'll Go and
said this has been under your pillow. She said, I
was going to give this to you tomorrow for the
last episode of the End of the World. But I
(46:28):
just happened to bring it up the day before, and
that's crazy. Yeah, I thought that was really surprised. Man,
how things work out. But I read it as recently
as last night. I'm like, this is an amazing even
for SEUs, it's an amazing book. Like an article I
read said that somebody somebody said, like, you can tell
that he knew this was the last book that that
was going to be published while he was alive, that
(46:48):
he wanted this to be as his swan song. Interesting, Yeah,
I would not be surprised talking about his more progressive
views and sort of catching up with the time if
either Ellen and or Audrey as the women behind the Man,
we weren't helping him along in that respect and saying
like hey, get with it. Ohh like for changing his views.
(47:12):
Maybe I thought that as well. I could totally see that. Yeah,
because if you think about it, Helen Palmer came into
his life. Um, yeah, yeah, I could see her having
that influence on him. Yeah. He passed away finally of
cancer sept seven. And I remember this because that was
(47:34):
a rough week. Uh. I was in college and he
and Miles Davis died about five or six days apart,
and I just remember being like, man, this is this
is one of those tough ones for dude, it's my age.
They were beeboppers and children's book readers at the same time.
I've got one last thing for you about Dr Seuss.
Do you have anything else? And I got one more
(47:54):
thing too first, Okay, I'll go first. He was a
voracious chain smoker, interesting so much so that even back
in like the fifties and sixties, he knew he needed
to lay off sometimes. So when he needed to lay
off of smoking, he would um take up. He would
take up a corn cob pipe that he kept turn
up seeds in, and anytime he wanted to smoke, rather
(48:15):
than light it, he would put a water dropper in there,
and then when the turn up seeds started to sprout,
he would go back to cigarettes. What yes, I don't
fully understand that. He would start a little corn cob pipe,
turn up seeds, and then rather than light it, he
would just put a seed dropper in puff on it.
But nothing was going on. It's all just mental oral fixation.
(48:39):
And then after about three days of doing this, the
seeds would would sprout. German eight, and he'd be like, okay,
I can go back to cigarettes now. So you take
about three days off of cigarettes. And he used the
crop of turn up greens as his his indicator. I
thought you were going to say that that went on
to feed like the children in poor neighborhoods or something
(49:00):
who hate turn ups. Kids don't mat turn ups. Turn
ups are great. I agree. I'm a I'm a root
vegetable man myself, so my last thing. In two thousand seven,
the federal judge h received a hard boiled egg in
the mail from an inmate in prison protesting his diet
in prison and the federal The federal judge rendered a decision,
(49:25):
and apparently it was worked up the ladder. I can't
remember even what it was about, but he rendered a decision. Thusly,
I do not like eggs in the file. This is
Judge James um your head. I do not like them
in any style. I will not take them fried or boiled.
I will not take them poached or broiled. I will
not take them softer scrambled despite an argument, well rambled,
(49:46):
No fan, I am of the egg at hand. Destroyed
that egg today today, today, I say, without delay, And
they threw him out of court, fired him because he
was drunk. No, I don't know. Um wow, I wonder
what came out of that. I don't know. And and
and it gave very little information about what the case
(50:07):
was even on I know, like the guys like, no, really,
this is a serious complaint. Please, you're focusing on the
wrong thing. Someone help me. Oh goodness. If you want
to know more about Dr Seuss, go research and make
your own decisions about the man, the work, all that stuff. Okay, agreed. Uh.
And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. No,
(50:27):
this is our last show of the year, so no
listener mail. It's just our time of the year to
thank everyone here and year. Is this the end of
ten years? Yes, or it's sort of in the middle.
April is the beginning and end of a year, right,
but the end of our calendar year. And we just
thank everyone for hanging in for this long with us.
It's amazing that we're still allowed to do this job,
(50:49):
hanging there. It'll pay off eventually, and we're gonna keep
at it forever forever. And on a personal note, a
very happy birthday to my dear sweet wife you me
birthday birthday you me uh, And thank you guys for
being with us for yet another year, and we'll see
you next year, everybody. For more on this and thousands
(51:13):
of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com m
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