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how an escalating arms race between two states with sophisticated weaponry could really end in mutually assured destruction. The Yooks and the Zooks, the symbolic stand-ins for the United States and the former Soviet Union, have been engaged in a long-standing feud. This feud is over a particular custom—how people should butter and eat their bread. The Yooks prefer to eat their bread butter-side up, whereas the Zooks prefer to eat their bread butter-side down. Each group thinks the other eats their bread wrongly. Moreover, their rival’s custom is a threat to their entire way of life. At first they had a few low-level skirmishes along the wall that separates their towns. Over time, though, these skirmishes convince each side to develop ever more sophisticated weaponry. The one-upmanship between the Yooks and the Zooks continue until they both develop the Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo, a bomb with enough destructive force to destroy an entire town. The book ends with a general from each side holding a Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo, posturing on the wall separating their towns.

Seuss wrote The Butter Battle Book as a protest of the Reagan administration’s escalation of the nuclear arms race with the former Soviet Union. This book originated from his concern that “a democratic government could impose ‘such deadly stupidity’ on people like him who were so opposed to nuclear proliferation.”20 He thought that the Reagan administration’s policy had the very real potential of causing another world war. This time, though, a world war could mean the end of human civilization, given that each superpower had enough nuclear weapons to annihilate every population center in the world. We can interpret the cliffhanger ending of The Butter Battle Book as being Seuss’s means of getting people to question the legitimacy and even sanity of the Reagan administration’s nuclear deterrence policy.

Nel’s cultural criticism approach gives us the theoretical framework necessary to identify at least two reasons Seuss’s criticism of capitalism run amok, pollution of the environment, and nuclear deterrence is ironic yet effective. First, Seuss began his professional career as a cartoonist for the very successful and lengthy Flit insecticide campaign. As the brainchild of the “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” advertising campaign, he had an intimate working relationship with one of the most influential corporations in the United States at the time, Standard Oil. Perhaps it was Seuss’s familiarity with advertising and large corporations that made his criticisms of crass U.S. consumerism and laissez-faire capitalism so compelling. Second, by the time Seuss wrote his books criticizing influential tendencies in U.S. society he had become a well-known and respected children’s author. That status enshrined him as an icon and supposed purveyor of bourgeois U.S. cultural sensibilities. Having an icon of bourgeois U.S. cultural mores and sensibilities, one whose books middle-class parents read to their children, criticize the status quo must have been a warning siren, indeed. The sometimes satirical nature of Seuss’s art allows him to dwell in these ironies and take full advantage of them.

Ending the Tale

As we have seen in this chapter, Beardsley’s aesthetic theory of art, Danto’s philosophy of art, and Nel’s cultural criticism approach are three ways people can decide what makes something a work of art. We applied each of these theories to Dr. Seuss’s children books and oil paintings. Beardsley’s aesthetic theory contended that Seuss’s works are artworks because they were created with the purpose of invoking an aesthetic experience in us whenever we appreciate them. Danto’s philosophy of art reminded us that when Seuss wrote his children’s books and painted his oil paintings matters a lot in determining whether they will be considered works of art. Nel’s cultural criticism approach got us to admire Seuss’s talent for conveying meanings in illustrations and verse, especially in his later activist books. It also allowed us to appreciate Seuss’s ability to use irony and allegory