Nearly a century ago, a man with no graduate degree adopted the “Dr.” prefix for himself. Today, graduates of Dartmouth’s medical school bearing his name realize that dream as they go on to become very professional doctors.
The Theodore Geisel name is easy to find across campus. In addition to the medical school, it appears in alumni mythology and lingers in the College’s imagination as one of its most famous alumni. But the name that belongs to one of the most beloved children’s authors also belongs to an artist whose political cartoons and early illustrations have drawn criticism for racist and xenophobic imagery, especially toward Japanese people and Japanese Americans during World War II. In March 2021, Dr. Seuss Enterprises discontinued the publication of six of Seuss’ books, including “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” and “If I Ran the Zoo,” citing racist imagery.
At a moment when Dartmouth students debate the names attached to campus buildings, Geisel’s legacy raises an uncomfortable question about the future of spaces that bear his name: How should Dartmouth remember someone who promoted harmful stereotypes yet whose imagination shaped generations of childhoods?
According to “The Beginnings of Dr. Seuss,” a Dartmouth-published biographybased on an interview with Geisel about his early life and career, he arrived in Hanover in 1921 from Springfield, Mass. At Dartmouth, he gravitated toward the Jack-O-Lantern, where he began serving as editor-in-chief by the end of his junior year. He also periodically wrote for The Dartmouth, penning what he described as “a few journalistic squibs.”
Geisel credits Dartmouth as the place he first discovered the “excitement” of joining words and pictures, even if he joked that he could not yet get them “engaged” with each other, according to the biography? The marriage of language and image that would later define his books began, in part, with student publications, campus jokes and collegiate cartoons.
Even the name “Seuss” began on campus. During his senior year, Geisel was disciplined by the College after he and other students were caught with gin during the Prohibition era. As a result, he was removed from his official role at the Jack-O-Lantern, and forced to relinquish his editorship. He pivoted to publishing work under different names. In the spring of 1925, he began signing some cartoons with his middle name, Seuss. The “Dr.” came later, he said, when he wanted to sound “more professorial.”
During World War II, Geisel drew political cartoons for the New York newspaper PM, many of which were sharply anti-fascist. He attacked Hitler, Mussolini, isolationists and Americans who, he believed, failed to recognize the threat of fascism. His cartoons were often morally urgent and democratic in their aims. They were also often racist.
In his World War II depictions of Japanese people, Geisel used caricatures that flattened individuals into threatening racial types. Some cartoons portrayed Japanese people with exaggerated features and animal-like qualities. One of his most notorious cartoons, published shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, depicted Japanese-Americans lining up for explosives, suggesting they were waiting to betray the United States from within.
History professor Jennifer Miller, who focuses on interactions between the United States and Northeast Asia, said Geisel’s cartoons fit within the context of WWII, where Japanese people were often depicted as “insects” and “less than human.”
“He’s a highly representative figure of how Japan was discussed, how Japanese people were discussed and depicted — not just during war, but really across the late 19th and 20th century,” Miller said.
But Miller also cautioned that context should not become absolution.
“I think it’s our job to embed people in the context in which they existed in their time and place without that serving as an excuse,” Miller said.
She added that people should “understand the historical context of these figures and use that to better understand what they represented and who they were,” without “falling into some attempt to excuse away the parts that make us uncomfortable.”
Rauner archivist Morgan Swan said that when examining Dr. Seuss, readers should consider the full arc of his life.
“You have to consider them [historical figures] as a product of their culture, and you have to consider in what ways they are representative of the culture that produced them,” Swan said.
But he added that a legacy cannot be judged by a singular period alone.
You should “not just take a snapshot at one moment in their life, but consider their entire life,” he said. “Is there evidence of change? Is there evidence of reflection? Is there evidence of growth?”
If Geisel’s cartoons reveal how easily imagination can serve prejudice, his later work raises a different question: whether growth changes how institutions should honor someone.
That question became more concrete in 2012, when Dartmouth renamed its medical school the Audrey and Theodor Geisel School of Medicine. The decision honored the Geisels’ “generosity,” which Dartmouth described as making them among the most significant benefactors in the College’s history. The medical school, founded in 1797, thus became attached not to the name of a physician or medical researcher, but to the name of a children’s book author whose creative legacy had become inseparable from Dartmouth’s public identity.
For some students, the name does not seem to carry much controversy in everyday life. Geisel student Sarah Auletta GR said she has “never really heard of any negative comments” within her cohort regarding Dr. Seuss.
Still, she added that when confronting the complicated histories of significant individuals like Dr. Seuss, “we need to keep asking questions” so that students can gain “situational awareness” and “start conversations and engage in conversations through the lens of equity.”
Geisel student and epidemiology department staff member MaryBeth Semosky GR said the medical school should also recognize the accomplishments of its own medical alumni.
“Dr. Seuss wasn’t even an alumn[us] of the medical school, but some of the alumni of the actual program have done amazing things for society,” Semosky said. “There’s some really, really notable people that have come through the program.”
Among those names is Samuel Ford McGill, the first person of African descent to graduate from a medical school in the U.S. — and a graduate of Geisel Medical School.
Semosky added that she believes institutions and students need to be “transparent” about the “faults” of historical figures and do the best they can to “face the realities of those faults.”
For Miller, one way to confront that legacy is by taking classes on the history of the era and Asian American history and in the Asian American studies field. In other words, she posits the answer is not simply to keep or remove a name, but to teach students how to read names more carefully.
Geisel’s past asks Dartmouth to consider what honor means. A name on a building is not a biography. It cannot hold every contradiction. But the people who walk past it can. They can ask who is being remembered, who is being left out and what parts of the story have been made too small.
Dr. Seuss taught generations of children to look again at strange worlds. Dartmouth’s task may be to look again at his.
Madeline Kahn Ehrlich '29 is a reporter from upstate New York. She is considering studying English and Public Policy. She enjoys creative writing, art and reading historical fiction.
