History, Power, and Dr. Seuss

               In class we have discussed the internment of Japanese Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7^th, 1941. Each time we’ve talked about the internment of Japanese Americans I'm reminded that one of those camps was located in Topaz, UT a few hours outside of Salt Lake City where I’ve camped numerous times and always saw it as the most remote, desolate place on earth. The best place to escape civilization, or to remove someone from it as the government did to the Japanese Americans. What is of course not a surprise is that growing up I heard nothing of the camp in school, in what was an attempt to white wash history by the powers that be. 

As a child growing up in Utah I was also a big fan of Dr. Seuss, or Theodor Seuss Geisel, and read repeatedly ‘The Cat in the Hat’, ‘Horton Hears a Who’, etc. What I didn’t know until some years later is that Dr. Seuss was originally a political cartoonist with less than childlike views about Japanese Americans.

Here is one of many images by Seuss depicting his sentiment about Japanese Americans. 

Political cartoons are a powerful method to promote political agendas, and as we read about Arab women post 9/11, when the Japanese challenged U.S. culture in the Pearl Harbor attacks it must have created a salient nationalist American agenda. Japanese-Americans where then local threats to this identity, hence the response. This, of course, doesn’t justify such atrocities, but shows how universal human reactions can be to a threatened communal identity. What’s even eerier to think about is that while the Nazis where marching the Jews into their camps we were marching Japanese American’s into ours. Popular history has indeed told a different story.

                It should be noted that Seuss eventually apologized for his cartoon treatment of the Japanese and Africans (another frequently marginalized group depicted by Seuss).