Like most Dr Seuss books, The Butter Battle Book seems at first glance to be nothing more than a fun book of rhyming prose that appeals to children and helps them to learn how to engage with books a little better. Also like most Dr Seuss books, The Butter Battle Book actually has a far deeper meaning. Despite a title that suggests a rowdy dairy product fight at the breakfast table, it is actually a book that is vehemently opposed to war in general, and nuclear war in particular. It is not so much a book about peace, though, as an anti-war piece of writing.
The book was penned during the height of the Cold War, with a backdrop of national fear of a bomb being dropped at any given moment. It seemed during that time that the end of the world was nigh, and the tone of the book reflects this generalized fear. In this story, there is mass destruction over something as innocuous as butter. This is a metaphor for the senselessness of most other conflicts, and the extraordinarily trivial reasons for a war being started in the first place.
Because of its polarizing political stance, this was one of Seuss's more controversial publications. It was removed from the shelves of Canadian public libraries because of its position on the arms race.
Dr Seuss was the pen name of Theodor Seuss "Ted" Geisel, who was both a prolific children's author and political cartoonist. He wrote more than sixty books under this pen name, selling more than six hundred million copies of his work worldwide. The Butter Battle Book was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1984, its year of publication.
