Dr. Seuss and the internment camps

Aaron Retica, for the New York Times blog, writes about the good doctor’s WWII political cartoons, which prominently feature caricatures of Japanese and Japanese-Americans. Retica reminds us that Seuss was socially progressive for his time in other ways, but points out this his anti-racist stance only makes his racist cartoons more baffling, even if we can simplistically apologize for them by contextualizing the caricatures in terms of the war:

…the most startling and upsetting of these cartoons, which was published on Feb. 13, 1942, shows a long line of Japanese-Americans, an “honorable fifth column” spreading from California into Oregon and beyond, with each smiling person waiting to pick up a package of TNT. They are, a caption explains, “waiting for the signal from home.” It does not help Seuss’s cause when we learn that President Roosevelt signed the executive order authorizing internment a week after this cartoon came out, although of course the planning for relocating Japanese-Americans was long under way.