Is 'If You Give a Mouse a Cookie' secret right-wing propaganda?
Don't laugh. Some see this children's classic as a warning about how liberal handouts have turned the U.S. into a welfare state
Is there no picture book so popular or innocent it won’t rankle someone today? You might wonder given the furor over If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.
This modern classic has delighted children for nearly 40 years with its tale of an exuberantly greedy mouse who keeps wanting more than he gets from an accommodating boy.
But it’s likely that few of its young fans suspected they were reading a secret right-wing warning about the dangers of government handouts, exactly the sort of thing that might turn them into baby Trumpsters before they so much as owned a MAGA bib. Or, alternately, a left-wing critique of late-stage capitalist excesses that’s ideal for 4-year-old Bernie bros.
I certainly didn’t suspect either until my Scottish goddaughter had her second child. An idea struck as I looked for an American-accented baby gift and saw no U.K. edition of Laura Numeroff and Felicia Bond’s book with a title like If You Give a Mouse a Biscuit. Why not stay true to my roots and wrap up If You Give a Mouse a Cookie?
Looking for an update on its history to send with it, I stumbled on a Washington Post story about its supposedly “secret political message.”
Who knew the book was a Manhattan Project of children’s literature? I’d seen it as a tale of the boundless energy of animals and of human kindness to a rodent typically viewed as a pest.
But that’s apparently too simple a view of the 32-page book about a mouse who draws with crayons. Or so said a Post source, the political scientist Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institute:
“There are plenty of people out there who would read this book and say, ‘Boy, if you give a mouse a cookie, you’re just creating huge dependency, and before you know it, he’ll be taking a nap in your bed.’ ”
As the conservative economist Michael Strain told the Post:
“Giving the mouse a cookie and giving the mouse a glass of milk isn’t free. That has to come from the person who made the cookie and who bought the milk.”
The idea took hold. In some quarters, If You Give a Mouse… became a metaphor for how liberal policies are turning America into a welfare state that hands out benefits to people who haven’t earned them.
All of this might have surprised Numeroff, who has said the idea for it just came to her during a dull car trip. It might also startle anyone who believes you can read the book in exactly the opposite way: as a left-leaning critique of late-stage capitalist excesses or out-of-control consumerism.
Think about it. Its rodent is never satisfied. He gets a cookie and then wants milk, a straw, a napkin, and more. It happens in a house well-stocked with consumer goods, including a fridge, toaster, blender, telephone, and foods like orange juice and animal crackers.
Wouldn’t that rile any graying Marxists still hanging around college English departments?
Other interpretations of the book are, depending on your view, either more plausible or even wackier than the idea that the chocolate chips conceal right- or left-wing propaganda. Those views cast the book as a study in cause and effect, in scope creep in project management, or in the merits of free will versus determinism.
An ethics institute at DePauw University suggests that after children read it, you ask them to consider whether feeling that they have free will means they actually have it. You might say:
“For example, if you are hungry and there is an apple in front of you and you eat it, did you make the choice to eat that apple? Or did you have to eat it because you were hungry and it was the only food in front of you?”
That might be a lot to ask of children who’d rather watch Spidey and His Amazing Friends while sipping from a juice box, but you could also filter the book through a feminist lens. Its only two characters, the mouse and the boy, are both male.
That defaults to a pattern that’s shaped picture books ever since Peter Rabbit hopped into Mr. McGregor’s garden in 1902. Their main characters remain overwhelming male, according to a 2017 survey by the Observer along with the Nielsen market research company.
Then what explains the popularity of the book?
Bond’s mouse has more personality than her slightly generic boy in blue jeans and red sneakers. And while her watercolors are engaging, her art doesn’t equal that of contemporaries such as Maurice Sendak and Chris Van Allsburg. It has won no Caldecott Award, which helps to ensure a long life in libraries.
Yet the original has been translated into more than a dozen languages worldwide and inspired at least 17 sequels with titles like If You Give a Pig a Pancake and If You Give a Dog a Donut. Its fans include Michelle Obama, Laura Bush, and Oprah Winfrey.
The book also has inspired parodies like If You Give an Architect a Contract and a satire of drug policies, If You Give a Mouse Metformin. Numeroff is the rare author successful enough even to have published a parody of her own work, If You Give a Man a Cookie. A blurb from its publisher reads:
“If you give a man a cookie…he’s going to want milk to go with it…God forbid he should get it himself.”
All of the conflicting views of the book may, paradoxically, help to explain its popularity and longevity.
A great book can support varied interpretations. That’s partly why it endures. Each new generation finds its own meaning in it.
In the end, I suspected that if I sent If You Give a Mouse a Cookie to my godchild in her small town in Scotland, somebody might take it as a withering critique of the failures of Brexit. Her toddler is getting Pat the Bunny for Christmas instead.
is an award-winning critic and journalist who has been the book columnist for Glamour, the book critic for Ohio’s largest newspaper, and a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle. Her reviews and other articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Commonweal, and Salon.
LOL
It’s a crazy world.
I love that book.
Also if you give me a taste of ice cream….