The Butter Battle Book - Dr. Seuss

National Review, July 27, 1984

DR. SEUSS, who recently won a special Pulitzer Prize commendation for his contributions to children's literature, has made yet another contribution to the genre. The Butter Battle Book is a radical departure from previous Seuss works: It is an unabashed and blatant political statement.

The book tells the story of a mythical dispute, a king of cold war, between two peoples, the Yooks and the Zooks. The Yooks, dressed in blue, are clearly intended to represent the Americans; while the Zooks, dressed in red, are allegorical Russians. The essence of the dispute is the question which side bread should be buttered on, with the Yooks buttering the top side and the Zooks the bottom. The Yanks--or rather Yooks--devise increasingly more sophisticated weaponry to frighten the Zooks, only to discover that the Zooks have come up with the same weapons or better. In the end, each side develops a nuclear weapon--or rather, "the bitsy big boy boomeroo"--and the book ends inconclusively, with each side in mortal fear over who will dare to use that weapon first.

The Butter Battle Book is trivialization of an already oversimplified world view--that of the nuclear-freeze movement. The adherents of that movement--Dr. Seuss evidently among them--see the U.S.-Soviet rivalry as an unfortunate misunderstanding over not very important cultural differences, e.g., which side bread should be buttered on; a misunderstanding fueled by a senseless arms race driven by technological imperatives alone. Quite obviously, the Yooks should have let the Zooks butter their bread however they pleased; if the United States would only stop modernizing its own arsenals, the Soviet Union would surely do the same, and the whole senseless dispute would wind down and cease. Live and let live--Yooks and Zooks and Kooks alike.

The Butter Battle Book, however, contains a number of subtle messages that could do grave damage to the cause Seuss is professing. Seuss makes the mistake, for example, of explaining that a great wall divides the Yooks and the Zooks. This is all too likely to evoke memories of the Berlin Wall--that stark prison boundary reminding the world that the heart of the East-West struggle is human liberty versus totalitarian tyranny, not American failure to comprehend Russian food, music, and poetry. Seuss also makes the serious mistake of not ending the book with an arms-control agreement or a nuclear holocaust. By ending inconclusively, with neither side having fired a serious shot and with each side wary of the nuclear weapons of the other, Seuss reminds us that nuclear weapons have kept the peace for nearly forty years now. The last page of The Butter Battle Book is an eloquent, albeit unitended, affirmation of the value of nuclear deterrence--the Zooks do not dare nuke the Yooks for fear of being nuked themselves. Children, in particular, are not likely to conclude from the sotry that the whole dispute is senseless--Seuss's books are always ridiculous, after all. Children will conclude, instead, that the Yooks are lucky they invented the bomb, so that the Zooks dare not attack them first. They may well infer--to Seuss's chagrin--that remaining strong is the surest way of achieving peace. give that man the Committee on the Present Danger Award.