Who hasn’t read Dr. Seuss? As kids and as parents, most Americans know all about the Cat in the Hat, Yertle the Turtle, and many other of Seuss’s colorful characters. What some may not know is that despite his popular image as a kindly cartoonist for kids, Theodor Geisel, writing under the pen name “Dr. Seuss,” was also a progressive and a moralist whose views suffuse his books. Some of his books use ridicule, satire, wordplay, nonsense words, and wild drawings to take aim at bullies, hypocrites, and demagogues.
In the early 1940s, before many Americans were aware of the calamity confronting Europe’s Jews, Geisel—a Lutheran who grew up in a tight-knit German American community in Springfield, Massachusetts—drew editorial cartoons for PM, the progressive daily newspaper in New York, warning readers about Hitler and anti-Semitism and attacking the “America First” isolationists who turned a...
