What If the Same Hand Drew Both?

In February 1942, a cartoon ran in a New York newspaper. It showed Japanese Americans lined up along the entire West Coast, waiting to collect blocks of TNT from a building with a mocking, exaggerated sign over the door — the joke being that an entire people were a threat, just waiting for a signal.

Six days later, President Roosevelt signed the order that sent over a hundred thousand Japanese Americans — most of them citizens — into internment camps.

The cartoonist’s name was Theodor Geisel.

He drew hundreds of cartoons like it during the war. Anti-fascist, mostly. Some of them aimed at people who’d earned it — isolationists, Lindbergh, Hitler, Mussolini. And some of them aimed at an entire people, based on nothing but their face.

He never fully disowned that work. He also never drew anything like it again.

In 1954, he published a book dedicated to a friend in Kyoto. A small elephant hears a cry for help coming from a speck of dust too tiny for anyone else to notice, and spends the whole story trying to convince the people around him that the speck of dust is full of people who are real, who matter, who are exactly as alive as anyone standing on solid ground.

A person’s a person, no matter how small.

In 1958, he wrote about a turtle king who climbs onto the backs of every other turtle in the pond so he can see further than anyone, until the tower gets too high and the bottom turtle burps, and the whole thing comes down. He said, later, that the turtle was Hitler.

In 1961, he wrote about two kinds of creatures on a beach, identical except for a star on the belly of one, and a machine that could put stars on or take them off for money, until nobody could remember who started it or why it mattered.

In 1971, he wrote about a creature that speaks for the trees, and a businessman who cuts down the last one anyway, because the profit was there and nobody stopped him in time.

In 1984, he wrote about two countries that go to war over which side of a piece of bread to butter, and ended the book with both sides standing on a wall, each holding a button, and didn’t tell you who wins. Nobody had ended a children’s book that way before.

He spent the back half of his life writing the same warning, over and over, in a hundred disguises: watch what happens when one group decides another group is smaller, stranger, less real than they are.

He knew what that decision looked like from the inside. He’d made it, in ink, in a newspaper, in nineteen forty-two.

Nearly eighty years after that cartoon ran, six of his own books were pulled from print for the same thing — racist imagery, drawn by the same hand, that even he never got around to fixing.

His pen name was Dr. Seuss.

So which one was he. The man who drew the line for the TNT. Or the man who spent forty years insisting a person is a person, no matter how small.

Maybe the honest answer is that he was both, permanently, and the second one doesn’t erase the first. It just means he spent the rest of his life trying to out-write it.

The February 13, 1942 PM cartoon “Waiting for the Signal From Home” and its six-day proximity to Executive Order 9066 (signed February 19, 1942) are documented by the National Archives and analyzed in the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. Geisel’s own identification of Yertle the Turtle with Hitler is on record in multiple interviews, including a 1987 remark: “Yertle was Hitler or Mussolini.” The dedication of Horton Hears a Who! (1954) to Mitsugi Nakamura, dean of Doshisha University in Kyoto, followed Geisel’s 1953 visit to Japan. Dr. Seuss Enterprises’ March 2, 2021 decision to cease publishing six titles — 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 — for racist and insensitive imagery was reported by the Associated Press.