Dark Facts We Learned About Dr. Seuss's Past That Made Us Cringe

Dr. Seuss, like many Americans during WWII, contributed to the war effort in his own way - by creating racist propaganda that attacked America’s Japanese enemies. Seuss was contracted by the government to produce educational cartoons for the troops, and for this he was given full artistic license. Much of his material depicted the Japanese with horrifically offensive caricatures, and the messages they contained were similarly problematic. Seuss’s propaganda also targeted the Germans and other perceived enemies of the state, but he saved his most venomous vitriol for the Japanese, and was a fervent supporter of internment camps.

World War II wasn't the only occasion for which Dr. Seuss produced racist cartoons. In his very first children’s book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, Seuss drew a racist caricature of a Chinese person and labeled him a “Chinaman.” He refused to change it until 1978. His book, If I Ran the Zoo, features two men supposedly from Africa who wear grass skirts without shirts or shoes. Several of his editorial cartoons featured demeaning depictions of Black people, and those depictions were often used to make extremely racist arguments. On March 2, 2021 (Seuss's birthday), Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which carries on the author's legacy, announced it would stop publishing and licensing six of his books: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer. The publisher renounced the books with the admission that they "portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong." "Ceasing sales of these books is only part of our commitment and our broader plan to ensure Dr. Seuss Enterprises’s catalog represents and supports all communities and families," the announcement said.

Dr. Seuss's first wife was American children's book author Helen Palmer Geisel, with whom he co-founded a publishing company called Beginner Books. Throughout the course of their 40-year marriage, Helen struggled repeatedly with her health, and for more than a decade leading up to her death, she was partially paralyzed due to Guillain-Barré syndrome. At the time of her passing in 1967, she was stricken with cancer. Rather than standing by his wife, Seuss began an affair with Audrey Stone Dimond. The affair left Helen despondent and ultimately contributed to her death.

Shortly after Helen learned of her husband's affair, the couple's longtime housekeeper found Helen's body with an empty prescription pill bottle nearby. In Helen Geisel’s suicide note, she wrote to her husband: Dear Ted, What has happened to us? I don't know. I feel myself in a spiral, going down down down, into a black hole from which there is no escape, no brightness. And loud in my ears from every side I hear, "failure, failure, failure..." I love you so much... I am too old and enmeshed in everything you do and are, that I cannot conceive of life without you... My going will leave quite a rumor but you can say I was overworked and overwrought. Your reputation with your friends and fans will not be harmed... Sometimes think of the fun we had all through the years... Seuss went on to marry his mistress less than a year after his wife’s passing.

The man behind The Cat in the Hat was born Theodor Seuss Geisel, but that’s not the name he would make famous. A pen name became a necessity when Geisel lost his job as editor-in-chief of Dartmouth humor mag Jack-O-Lantern after he and several friends were busted for drinking during Prohibition. From then on, Geisel would write under the name of Seuss, and he’d add the Dr. part of his nom de plume after college as a consolation to his father for never becoming an actual doctor.

Dr. Seuss found the majority of his success in writing children’s books, but at one point in his career he thought his talents would be better suited to the art of erotic storytelling. When Seuss joined with Random House Publishing in 1939, he did so under the condition that they allow him to publish an adult book that he had been working on for a while. The result was The Seven Lady Godivas. The book was a critical failure; out of the 10,000 copies that were initially printed, only 2,500 were sold. In an effort to make sense of the failure, Dr. Seuss claimed, “I attempted to draw the sexiest babes I could, but they came out looking absurd.”

Dr. Seuss wrote his favorite book, The Lorax, while watching a herd of elephants pass by in Kenya. Some time later, he told a reporter that the book "is about people who raise hell in the environment and leave nothing behind." So it may come as a surprise to learn that Dr. Seuss kickstarted his career with a project that used racist and xenophobic depictions to campaign for an environmentally damaging company. Before his first book was ever released, Dr. Seuss created an illustration about a medieval knight who attempts to use a pesticide called Flit to rid a dragon from his room. The wife of the executive whose company owned Flit saw the illustration and urged her husband to hire Seuss for Flit's pesticide campaigns. Several of the ads Seuss drew were also quite racist, including ads for Flit pesticide that featured caricatures of Black people. In most cases, the racism had little to do with the product itself, and seemed to be added as a base attempt at humor.

Many know that Yertle the Turtle, one of Dr. Seuss’s most popular books, is actually a thinly veiled allegory for the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. However, that’s surprisingly not the reason the book was initially controversial. Publishers were far more squeamish about the fact that Yertle’s mighty turtle stack was ultimately toppled by a belch, since depicting bodily functions was usually a no-no at the time. Seuss was ultimately allowed to keep the burp in the book.

When Theodor Geisel was a child, he was scheduled to be honored as one of the top-sellers of war bonds among the Boy Scouts, along with nine other boys. The Scouts were to be honored by President Theodore Roosevelt, but Roosevelt was only given nine awards to present. When Geisel, who was 10th in line, reached the front, President Roosevelt shouted, “What’s this boy doing here?” A mortified young Geisel was hustled off the stage, and developed a lifelong fear of crowds and people in general.

Throughout his career, Dr. Seuss occasionally attempted to cross over into more adult-oriented themes. In his first draft of Hop on Pop, Seuss included a scene where the bear cubs shout out a number of phonetic chants, like “Con Stan Tin O Ple,” “Kan Ga Roo,” and “Con Tra Cep Tive.” His publishers made him cut it out of the final edition.

Despite being one of the best-known children's authors in the world, Dr. Seuss never had children of his own - a choice he was often questioned about in interviews. He would retort, "You make them, and I'll amuse them." The author is often painted as disliking children, but in truth, Seuss's feelings about the matter weren't so black and white. During a discussion with his niece, Seuss once stated, "It was not that we didn't want to have children. That wasn't it." As it turns out, his first wife, Helen, had to have both her ovaries removed at the age of 33 - rendering the couple unable to have biological children. From this point forward, Seuss is said to have feigned his infamous disregard towards having children in order to protect her. In 2000, nine years after his passing, Seuss's second wife, Audrey, told an interviewer that Seuss was "very happy without children." Later in 2019, Audrey's daughter from a previous marriage came forward to set the record straight about her stepfather. She asserted that Seuss was "loving, kind, fun, and wonderful," and that "Ted Geisel should never be seen as a cold, self-absorbed selfish man."