Biden erases Dr. Seuss from 'Read Across America' proclamation as progressives seek to cancel beloved author
By Peter Hasson | Fox News
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President Biden appears to have erased Dr. Seuss from "Read Across America Day", the annual celebration of reading in honor of the legendary children's author, whose birthday falls on March 2.
While Biden followed presidential tradition in proclaiming Tuesday "Read Across America Day," he bucked his predecessors by leaving out any mention of Dr. Seuss from the proclamation.
The White House didn't immediately return a request for comment on why Dr. Seuss was left out of the proclamation, but the snub comes as progressives have sought to cancel the beloved children's author.
One of Virginia's biggest school districts, Loudoun County Public Schools, reportedly nixed Dr. Seuss from the school's "Read Across America Day" celebration, citing alleged racial "undertones" in his children's books.
Former President Barack Obama and former President Donald Trump both highlighted Dr. Seuss' contributions in their annual proclamations, a Fox News review of White House archives found.
"The works of Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known to us as Dr. Seuss, have sparked a love for reading in generations of students.," Obama said in his 2015 proclamation. "His whimsical wordplay and curious characters inspire children to dream big and remind readers of all ages that 'a person's a person no matter how small."
Obama's 2016 proclamation described Seuss as "one of America's revered wordsmiths" who "used his incredible talent to instill in his most impressionable readers universal values we all hold dear."
Trump, in his 2018 proclamation, urged Americans to "always remember the still-vibrant words of Dr. Seuss: 'You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.'"
Then-first lady Melania Trump celebrated Read Across America Day in 2017 by reading Dr. Seuss books to hospitalized children.
"Dr. Seuss has brought so much joy, laughter and enchantment into children’s lives all around the globe for generations," Melania said at the time.
"Through his captivating rhymes, Dr. Seuss has delighted and inspired children while teaching them to read, to dream, and to care."
6 Dr. Seuss books to stop being published because of racist imagery
By Audrey Conklin | Fox News
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The sales of six Dr. Suess books will cease over racist and insensitive imagery, according to the business that preserves and protects the author's legacy.
The news comes Thursday on National Read Across America Day, when schools across the U.S. celebrate reading on Dr. Seuss's March 2 birthday to commemorate the popular children's author, who died in 1991.
"These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong," Dr. Seuss Enterprises told The Associated Press in a statement.
"Ceasing sales of these books is only part of our commitment and our broader plan to ensure Dr. Seuss Enterprises’ catalog represents and supports all communities and families," the statement continued.
Copies of "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" will no longer be published.
The decision to cease publication and sales of the books was made last year after months of discussion, the company told AP.
"Dr. Seuss Enterprises listened and took feedback from our audiences including teachers, academics and specialists in the field as part of our review process. We then worked with a panel of experts, including educators, to review our catalog of titles," it said.
A Virginia school system recently decided to discourage recognition of National Read Across America Day in light of the controversy, prompting discussion of the author and decisions to "cancel" his work on social media. The school system clarified in a Feb. 27 statement that it is not banning the author's books.
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Books by Dr. Seuss -- born Theodor Seuss Geisel in Springfield, Massachusetts, on March 2, 1904 -- are sold in more than 100 countries.
The "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" author remains popular, earning an estimated $33 million before taxes in 2020, up from just $9.5 million five years ago, the company said. Forbes listed him No. 2 on its highest-paid dead celebrities of 2020, behind only the late pop star Michael Jackson.
As adored as Dr. Seuss is by millions around the world for the positive values in many of his works, including environmentalism and tolerance, there has been increasing criticism in recent years over the way Black, Asian and other characters are drawn in some of his most beloved children’s books, as well as in his earlier advertising and propaganda illustrations.
The National Education Association, which founded Read Across America Day in 1998 and deliberately aligned it with Geisel’s birthday, has for several years deemphasized Seuss and encouraged a more diverse reading list for children.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
WaPo Correspondent: Pulling Dr. Seuss Not ‘Cancel Culture,’ Your Culture Is Just Garbage
By Amanda Prestigiacomo - The Daily Wire
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Washington Post correspondent Philip Bump strongly backed the move to stop the publishing of six Dr. Seuss books in a column published Tuesday, arguing that the scrubbing of the books has nothing at all to do with “cancel culture,” and if you think it does, that’s because your culture is the problem.
“If curtailing racist imagery in Dr. Seuss is ‘cancel culture,’ what, exactly, is your culture?” questioned Bump.
Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced Tuesday that they will stop selling six titles, citing racist and insensitive imagery. The announcement came on the heels of an anti-Dr. Seuss campaign in Virginia and President Joe Biden’s pointed decision to leave out the prominent American author in his presidential proclamation for Read Across America Day, which is celebrated on Dr. Seuss’s birthday.
Bump argued that Dr. Seuss can’t be “canceled” because he’s already dead, adding that the “vast majority” of his books are still in circulation, anyway.
“No one is ‘canceling’ Dr. Seuss, a phrasing by now so detached from reality that it doesn’t even make any sense,” wrote the Post correspondent. “The author, himself, is dead for one thing, which is about as canceled as a person can get. The vast, vast majority of his books, the ones without racist images or references, will still be sold.”
“If Dr. Seuss’s profile wanes a bit as a result of the attention being paid to his drawings — the only form of ‘canceling’ at play here — to whom is harm being done?” he asked.
The answer, according to Bump, is the people with the messed up culture, those who are “afraid” of progress, those who value “traditionalism” — and you guessed it, he’s talking about Trump supporters:
The answer, of course, is people who perceive criticism of the casual racism of the past as criticism of their own behavior or as a reminder of how the world around them is changing. It’s not that some Dr. Seuss books are being taken out of rotation. It’s that Seuss is a benchmark for a particular sort of American upbringing. Calling out Seuss’s — infrequent! — racist imagery is therefore an attack on that view of American identity.
It’s a short hop from here to rhetoric demanding that we make America great again. This, as I’ve written before, was always the value that Donald Trump offered to his supporters: unwinding the clock to a point in which everything was stable and unchanging and systems worked explicitly, if often unwittingly, to the advantage of White men in particular. Challenging Seuss drawings exposes the racism that usually undergirded those advantages.
This has been an undercurrent to our political conversation for decades. It used to be that “political correctness” was the poison undermining the United States, a phrasing that emerged in response to a limited effort to change how things were described but that eventually served as a shorthand for “attacks on traditional culture.”
While bashing conservative Americans as backward rubes who hate change, Bump offered one sentence acknowledging that speech-policing and cancel culture can go too far, writing that some “efforts to police language or actions that, intentionally or not, risk chilling people’s willingness to speak frankly.”
Bump did not provide any examples of this, nor did he acknowledge that assessing past works by current social standards is asinine, or that if we were to actually do this with all past works, we’d have very little left to read or view.
Instead, he continued to slam conservatives.
“[U]ntil a few weeks ago, my son didn’t know this book existed. So where’s the harm in his not seeing its images?” he argued. “Why would anyone think it is less problematic for a kid to be exposed to racist caricatures of African (or, at a different point in the book, Asian) people than for him not to be?”
“This isn’t some toxic ‘cancel culture.’ If it were, what would that say about the culture that you’re defending?”
