Quick Henry, the Brain Sponge! [warning - racist links/images]

[OtakuLoki]

The other night I was thinking about old advertising slogans that no one really thinks about any more. “Where’s the beef?” “Takes a licking and keeps ticking.” “Lose weight with AYDS.” You know the ones: victims of changing times and products. Sometimes the product they’d been hawking continues, having shifted to a new motif, other times the product and the company that sold it are gone along with the old advertising slogan.

While I was thinking about this, I remember hearing that Dr. Seuss got his start, before he began writing a corpus of wonderful children’s books, doing advertisment copy for, among other things, Standard Oil’s pesticide Flit. The slogan that I’d heard launched his career involved a dragon menacing a castle, and someone calling out, “Quick, Henry! The Flit!”

So, since, like all right-thinking Americans of a certain age, I’ve always enjoyed Dr Seuss’ artwork, I got around to plugging that phrase into Google to find out what the art looked like.

I found this collection of several of his commercial images. Very interesting.

Alas, I was also rudely reminded that he was working, primarily, in the between War years of the twentieth century. And that society has changed drastically since then. These images and copy were apparantly considered unexceptional, even funny and charming, in their day.

WARNING LINKS CONTAIN OFFENSIVE IMAGES

I have broken the links, so the reader will have to correct them to see the images in question. If you don’t care to follow the links you can just take it as read that a number of offensive stereotypes about Africans or African-Americans are being used, in the images.

orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dsads/flit/1929booklet/flitbooklet1929-17.shtml
orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dsads/flit/flitclip22.shtml
orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dsads/flit/1929booklet/flitbooklet1929-17.shtml
And all I can do looking at them is cringe.

Several years ago I’d had it pointed out to me that some of the original lyrics to Gilbert and Sullivan’s music were rather racist. I was saddened, but not too shocked. After all, those were Victorian era Englishmen. One must expect a certain level of racism to be endemic.

And, frankly, G&S were both quite safely dead by the time I was born - I can tell myself that their attitudes were safely in the past. That I can enjoy their works without endorsing all their beliefs.

I find that reasoning doesn’t work when the artist in question is Dr. Seuss.

I don’t know if it’s that I hold him in so much higher esteem than I’d ever held G&S. I just know it’s going to be a while before I can watch The Grinch without being reminded of the linked images and saddened.

[Auntbeast]

We are all products of our age.

WTF is Flit anyway? I read a bunch of the ads and haven’t quite figured out what it is.

[OtakuLoki]

@Auntbeast

WTF is Flit anyway? I read a bunch of the ads and haven’t quite figured out what it is.

Near as I can tell it’s a dry powder pesticide.
Wikipedia link.

[LouisB]

Flit was a pesticide in common use through at least WWII; “Quick, Henry, get the Flit” was a very common catch-phrase during those years.

[Hal_Briston]

@OtakuLoki

“Lose weight with AYDS.”

Don’t just think back…thanks to the magic of YouTube, you can view and cringe all over again.

[lavenderviolet]

Wow, I’m surprised I’ve never heard about this aspect of Dr. Seuss before. In looking around the web, I found this comment which hints that Dr. Seuss may have had a change of heart later in life about having done racist artwork early on:

Interview with filmmaker Ron Lamothe about The Political Dr. Seuss

HW: On the World War II political cartoons for PM and propaganda films for Frank Capra’s Signal Corps: did Geisel come to regret some of the racism displayed in those pieces, especially since race was a theme of American culture and politics (in The Sneetches and even somewhat in Horton Hears a Who) that he took an interest in?

RL: That’s a really good question, and I wish I knew for sure what the answer was. The only evidence I have comes from his biographers, who told me that years later—although still recognizing its necessity due to the war—he was regretful about some of his cartoons for PM and some of the propaganda work he did for the Army Signal Corps. I do think the fact he dedicated Horton Hears a Who—a parable about the American postwar occupation of Japan—to “My Great Friend, Mitsugi Nakamura of Kyoto, Japan,” says something of his changing attitudes toward the Japanese (this following a trip he made there in 1953). Though, as Richard Minear has pointed out, Horton Hears a Who still smacks of American chauvinism, and it makes no reference to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Maybe there is another person out there who is more of a Seuss scholar than I am who can comment on this in more detail (my family never had any of his books when I was a kid, as hard as that may be to believe).

Having grown up in the Detroit area (which is not exactly the most successful “melting pot” in the world), I’ve certainly encountered plenty of people who seemed perfectly normal but were harboring virulent racist attitudes (and not just white people). There are a lot of folks out there who have unsavory views in one respect or another, and I think it’s important to try to remember that very few people out there are truly all good OR all bad.