Kirsten Little's Reviews > The Butter Battle Book

Dr. Seuss has been known to include many different political issues and views in his children's books. I find this extremely interesting and different than many authors. I feel like most children book authors would steer away from politics since many children do not understand the deeper meaning. However, Dr. Seuss used his children books as a platform for different political issues.
Dr. Seuss uses this book as a platform to talk about the Cold War to a younger audience. In the book, there are two individual sides fighting over which way is the "right way" to butter toast. Dr. Seuss was appalled by the Cold War and because of that he wanted to create a fictional war that was bizarre. Both the characters and the events within Seuss' book relate back to the Cold War. We have the two sides fighting each other, one of the main characters is meant to represent Ronald Reagan, and the grandson whose name is not mentioned, but could be called the "little boy" which is the nickname of the Hiroshima bomb. Throughout the book, the two sides compete on who can make the bigger and better weapon until the both have one that could easily destroy either side. As the tension rises within the reader, Seuss leaves the reader with no answer of what happens. He leaves it up to the reader to decide what happens. This gives the reader the opportunity to think and evaluate what they think is right and why. This could spark up controversial conversation within a classroom.
As we can see, this book could definitely cause some controversy within schools. Seuss utilized this book to show his readers that both sides in the Cold War were wrong. In the United States, this book was banned because Americans (capitalists) did not like that Seuss was contradicting perspective. Many places in Canada also followed this move in their own schools. Americans, not the working class, believed that the capitalists were able to decide what values are to be held and was laws are to be formed resulting in controlling society's ideology. This right here is exactly why Capitalist America did not like Seuss' interpretation because they wanted society to be on their side and follow they ideology, so that they could have supporters.
I completely understand why this book can be seen as controversial, but I do not think it should be banned from schools. War is something that seems to be reoccurring no matter what. Seems to be out of many people's control. Because this seems to be such a prevalent issue in our society it is important for children to learn about past wars and people's point of view on these wars. I would use this book in a classroom because the war portion of the book is obvious, but Seuss' ideology behind it is not as obvious and not super important to children. I don't think they would even notice that Seuss disliked the war. As I stated earlier, this may strike up controversy in a classroom since the ending is up to the reader, but I think this could also help students. This could help students because they are able to understand others opinions and values, which is something we all need to learn to respect.