For more than seventy years, people of all ages have been enjoying the whimsical prose of Theodor Geisel, better known by his pen name, Dr. Seuss. But Geisel’s story books, which feature everything from planets the size of specks to hat-wearing felines, are much more than the nonsensical words and zany pictures for which they are so well known. Geisel’s books disguise political and social opinions on anti-Semitism, the Cold War, environmentalism and more. Dr. Seuss illustrates the wrongs of fascism, prejudice, destruction of the environment, and the use of nuclear weapons through books like Yertle the Turtle, The Lorax, The Sneetches, and The Butter Battle Book, as well as the hundreds of political cartoons Geisel authored while working for the newspaper PM during World War II.

            Geisel worked as a political cartoonist at the New York newspaper PM from 1941 to 1943, publishing almost 400 World War II-based cartoons (Nel, “World War II”). Although publishing opinionated and satirical cartoons on many topics, including isolationism and the America First Committee, Geisel’s “ultimate scorn was aimed at Adolf Hitler,” and fascism (Nel, “World War II”; Morgan 102). Geisel visually portrayed Hitler as a snake, a baby, and a monster in his political cartoons (Geisel). He also depicted Hitler as a turtle, in Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories, a tale that follows the downfall of King Yertle, a fascist dictator who uses his subjects’ labor to power his empire (Seuss, Yertle). One aspect of fascism as a political structure is “a foreign policy inspired by the myth of…greatness, with the goal of imperialist expansion,” (qtd. in Payne 6). Yertle the Turtle embodies this facet of fascism, repeating the words “I’m Yertle the Turtle! Oh, marvelous me! / For I am the ruler of all that I see!” as he continually tries to sit higher and rule over more land. King Yertle becomes so enchanted with expanding his kingdom that he demands to sit higher than the moon, yelling “I shall not allow it! I’ll go higher still! / I’ll build my throne higher! I can and I will!” (Seuss, Yertle). Another characteristic of fascism clearly illustrated by Seuss is the “hierarchy of functions named from the top and crowned by the figure of the ‘leader,’… who commands, directs, and coordinates…the regime,” (qtd. in Payne 6). Like his counterpart Adolf Hitler, King Yertle rules his subjects with fear, and so although terrified of their leader, “[the turtles] came. They obeyed,” (Seuss, Yertle). Yertle the Turtle argues that fascism abuses the class at the bottom of the hierarchy, and Mack, the turtle at the bottom of Yertle’s hierarchy pleads that “down here below we are feeling great pain…we, too, should have rights,” (Seuss, Yertle). Unlike future books, where Seuss leaves the ending ambiguously up to the reader, at the end of Yertle the Turtle, Yertle is deservedly “King of the Mud,” and “all the turtles are free / As turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be,” (Geisel hoped people would say “’surely in their minds without [his] having to say it,’”) (Seuss, Yertle; Fensch 118).