The Lessons of “The Lorax”

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In 1989, the year that Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie, for writing “The Satanic Verses,” American parents in Laytonville, a small town in Northern California, demanded that their children’s elementary school take Dr.Seuss’s 1971 book, “The Lorax,” off its list of required reading for second graders.The…

imageIn 1989, the year that Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie, for writing “The Satanic Verses,” American parents in Laytonville, a small town in Northern California, demanded that their children’s elementary school take Dr.Seuss’s 1971 book, “The Lorax,” off its list of required reading for second graders.The book is “Silent Spring” for the under-ten set.“I speak for the trees,” the Lorax says, attempting to defend a soon to be blighted forest, its tufted Truffula trees chopped down and knit into hideous thneeds—“a Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need”—until there is nothing left but one single seed.

Illustration by João Fazenda Like the long-ago banning of E.B.White’s “Stuart Little,” by the New York Public Library, the rumpus about “The Lorax” is at first bewildering.Dr.Seuss—Theodor Geisel—deemed it his best book.

Schools across the country assigned it.Mrs.Pate’s class at the Pepper Pike School, in Ohio, sent the author new endings.“I planted that seed, / It was so very dry,” Robby Price, a third grader, wrote.

“Then all of a sudden, / It grew 8 miles high.”

There were other Loraxes, too.In 1972, Christopher D.Stone, a law professor at the University of Southern California, argued for granting trees a legal voice.“I am quite seriously proposing that we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers and other so-called ‘natural objects,’ ” he wrote, in “Should Trees Have Standing?,” an article that was cited, that same year, in a Supreme Court dissent, and helped galvanize the environmental movement.

“I drew a Lorax and he was obviously a Lorax,” Geisel said.

“Doesn’t he look like a Lorax to you?” But, in 1989, to Bill and Judith Bailey, the founders of a logging-equipment business in Laytonville, the Lorax looked like an environmental activist.“Papa, we can’t cut trees down,” their eight-year-old son, Sammy, said after reading the book, in which a “Super-Axe-Hacker” whacks “four Truffula Trees at one smacker.” Townspeople were caught up in the so-called “timber wars,” when environmentalists camped out in trees and loggers wore T-shirts that read “Spotted Owl Tastes Like Chicken.” Logging families took out ads in the local newspaper.One said, “To teach our children that harvesting redwood trees is bad is not the education we need.”

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of “The Lorax,” an occasion that passed with little fanfare, Dr.Seuss himself having been made into something of a thneed in the latest round of book battles.Earlier this year, on Geisel’s birthday, his estate announced that it would no longer publish six of his lesser-known books, in the wake of criticism that they contain racist caricatures.Books go out of print all the time, and this decision wouldn’t have been especially notable except that it began trending on Twitter.“Buying all the Dr.Seuss volumes for the kids before the woke book burners can get to them all,” the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro tweeted.

Senator Ted Cruz sought campaign donations: “Stand with Ted & Dr.Seuss against the cancel culture mob to claim your signed copy of Green Eggs and Ham! ”

Meanwhile, groups of parents, not to say cancel-culture mobs, have been assembling at school-board meetings to demand the removal of books from classrooms and school libraries, often in districts that have been battling over mask and vaccination mandates.Book-banning crusaders, waving the flag of “parental rights,” have particularly decried books about American history and racial injustice, and books that include lesbian, gay, and trans characters.In at least seven states, they’ve objected to Maia Kobabe’s 2019 book, “Gender Queer: A Memoir.” Schools in Missouri have pulled Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home.” Glenn Youngkin’s campaign for governor of Virginia believed this to be a winning issue.

“When my son showed me his reading assignment, my heart sunk,” a fretful mother says in a Youngkin campaign ad, after discovering that her son, a high-school senior, was reading the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Beloved,” by the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, in an A.P.English class.

Progressive legislators, parents, and school boards, too, have called for the removal of books, including “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

No book has a right to be on a reading list.Teachers frequently change what they teach.

Parents are likely to take an interest in what their children are reading.Booksellers decide what books to sell.And pious attacks on books are very often absurd.What’s new is that lately some senior staff of organizations founded on a commitment to freedom of the press and freedom of expression appear to be wavering on upholding those principles.

Last year, when Target briefly stopped selling Abigail Shrier’s “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” a much admired deputy director of the A.C.L.U.tweeted support on his personal account for “stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas.” (He later deleted the tweet.) This summer, the American Booksellers Association, a longtime sponsor of Banned Books Week, whose theme this year is “Books Unite Us, Censorship Divides Us,” sent copies of Shrier’s book to seven hundred and fifty bookstores, and then apologized: “This is a serious, violent incident that goes against ABA’s ends policies, values, and everything we believe and support.” The apology proved insufficient to many booksellers.“We’re dealing with a historically white, cis organization in a white supremacist society,” a member of the A.B.A.’s diversity-equity-and-inclusion committee told Publishers Weekly .

The book-ban battle isn’t about to end anytime soon.And it’s a battle that conservatives will win if progressives agree with them about the righteousness of banning books, disagreeing only on which books to ban.

In the year of the fatwa, the fuss over “The Lorax” played out differently.The Laytonville Unified School District convened a committee to consider the Baileys’ complaint.It voted to keep the book on the required-reading list, with the superintendent arguing that the book isn’t about the timber industry but about “greed and the depletion of a finite resource.” Then the school board said that, if a parent really had a problem with a reading assignment, that parent could figure out a substitute.“No one ever suggested that the book be banned,” Bill Bailey said.

And Geisel told the Associated Press that he didn’t believe that no one should ever harvest a tree.“I live in a wooden house,” he said.“I’m sitting in a wooden chair.” His book was also printed on paper made from trees.And so far, at least, it has resisted the Super-Axe-Hacker.♦.

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