Moreover, well before the nascent civil rights movement took off in the United States – at a time when Jim Crow laws were in place; the United States military was segregated; and, pre-Brown v. Board of Education (1954), there were separate white and black schools – some of Seuss’s most acerbic and satiric cartoons deplored bigotry against blacks and urged broad racial inclusion, particularly with respect to mobilizing support for the war effort.
Thus, for example, in a June 29, 1942 PM drawing, Seuss depicts a cigar-smoking gentleman, identified as “War Industry,” sitting at an organ whose white keys are labeled “white labor” and whose black keys, with very old spider webs attached to them, are labeled “black labor.” An angry Uncle Sam taps the organist on the shoulder and says: “Listen, Maestro…if you want to get real harmony, use the black keys as well as the white!”
Similarly, in a July 8, 1942 cartoon, Seuss draws a huge woodpile on which a top-hatted white gentleman smugly sits, nailing a “no colored labor needed” sign atop the pile. As two black laborers look sadly at the scene, one says to the other, “There seems to be a white man in the woodpile” – a lovely riff, and a biting commentary, on the racist and despicable figure of speech “nigger in the woodpile” popular at the time.
Seuss had actually used the “woodpile” reference in one of his very first cartoons, titled “Cross-Section of The World’s Most Prosperous Department Store” and published in Judge Magazine (1929). Based upon popular figures of speech, he humorously depicted customers browsing through a department store looking for items to make their lives more difficult, including a man with a net trying to catch a fly for his ointment; a shopper looking at monkey wrenches to throw into his machinery; a customer examining haystacks with matching needles, and a man looking at a selection of “niggers” for his woodpile. Clearly, as we have seen, Seuss’s sensibilities evolved significantly over time – except as to his apparent blind spot regarding the Japanese, whom he depicted in overtly racist portrayals and whose wartime internment he emphatically supported.
Seuss published his last editorial cartoon in January 1943. After his work at PM, he turned his energies to directly supporting the American war effort, first drawing posters for the Treasury Department and the War Production Board (1942) and then joining the Army as a captain (1943), in which capacity he served as commander of the Animation Department of the First Motion Picture Unit of the United States Army Air Forces.
In December 1944 he visited Europe to premiere one of his educational films before military brass and took the opportunity to visit concentration camps at Strudhof and Shirmek. In a diary that he kept of the trip, he wrote that he found “enough horrors to condemn the Nazi system forever (atrocities).” Seuss wrote several films, including “Your Job in Germany,” a propaganda film about peace in Europe after World War II, and “Our Job in Japan,” which became the basis for the commercially-released film “Design for Death,” a study of Japanese culture that won the Academy Award for best documentary feature.
Seuss won another Oscar for best animated short film for “Gerald McBoing-Boing”; Emmy Awards for best children’s specials for “Halloween Is Grinch Night” and “The Grinch Grinches The Cat in the Hat”; a Peabody Award for the animated specials “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” and “Horton Hears a Who!”; and a special Pulitzer Prize citing his “contribution over nearly half a century to the education and enjoyment of America’s children and their parents.”
