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Episode: Decoder Ring: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie… Will He Want a Welfare Check?

Author: Slate Podcasts
Duration: 00:44:05

Episode Shownotes

Adults have a long history of trying to find morals and lessons in children’s literature. But what happens when a seemingly innocent book about a boy and a hungry mouse becomes fodder for the culture wars? Over the last decade, Laura Joffe Numeroff’s If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

has been adopted by some on the right as a cautionary tale about government welfare. In this episode, we explore the origins of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, the history of adults extracting unintended meaning from children’s books, and try to figure out how this particular kid’s book became a Republican battle cry. This episode was written by Cheyna Roth. It was edited by Katie Shepherd and Evan Chung. It was produced by Sofie Kodner. Decoder Ring is produced by Willa Paskin, Evan Chung, Katie Shepherd and Max Freedman. Derek John is Executive Producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. In this episode, you’ll hear from author Laura Numeroff, book critic Bruce Handy, economist Rebecca Christie and former journalist Max Ehrenfreund. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at [email protected] If you haven’t please yet, subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And even better, tell your friends. If you’re a fan of the show, we’d love for you to sign up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get to listen to Decoder Ring and every other Slate podcast without any ads. You also get unlimited access to Slate’s website. Member support is crucial to our work. So please go to slate.com/decoderplus to join Slate Plus today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Full Transcript

00:00:02 Speaker_08
Hey Slate listener, this is Mary Harris from over at What Next, Slate's daily news podcast. I'm here to remind you that at Slate, we are here to help you make sense of what comes next.

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00:00:33 Speaker_08
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00:00:43 Speaker_08
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00:01:00 Speaker_07
Hi, it's Willa. For those of you who've been listening to Decoder Ring here in the Slowburn feed for the last few months, I've got something special for you before our newest episode. A little preview of Season 10 of Slowburn.

00:01:13 Speaker_07
The new season looks at the moment in the early 2000s when a cultural and political force unlike any other shakily got to its feet and then started shaking the world around it.

00:01:23 Speaker_07
I'm talking about Fox News, and it's far from inevitable, but ultimately inexorable rise. The trailer for the new season just dropped. You should please go listen to it. It is very captivating.

00:01:32 Speaker_07
And I'm here with Slowburn's editorial director and the host of the new season, Josh Levine, to talk about it. Hi, Josh.

00:01:40 Speaker_12
Hello.

00:01:41 Speaker_07
So tell me about this new season.

00:01:42 Speaker_12
This new season is about a television network that I think most of us have strong opinions about. It is, I think, one of the few things in American life that has undeniably

00:01:58 Speaker_12
changed the way that we live, the way that we think, the way that our country operates in the last 30 years, and like didn't exist 30 years ago.

00:02:07 Speaker_12
And so it's something that I had lots of thoughts about, but in kind of classic slow burn fashion, didn't truly understand where it came from, what it was in the early days, and whether the form that it's in now was inevitable.

00:02:24 Speaker_12
So those are all questions I was fascinated by.

00:02:27 Speaker_07
What's something that, like, you learned putting the season together that you think listeners might also learn that, like, they just will not have had any idea about?

00:02:37 Speaker_12
Well, I mean, the kind of fundamental thing that people were wondering about Fox from the very beginning was whether it would be conservative. And this isn't a question that emerged like three years or eight years later.

00:02:54 Speaker_12
It was a question that sort of dogged Fox or followed it from the day that, you know, Rupert Murdoch had a press conference announcing that he was doing this thing with Roger Ailes.

00:03:04 Speaker_12
Like, you know, people weren't naive about who these people were and what their political views were.

00:03:10 Speaker_12
But the thing that I found so interesting is that a lot of very smart people who worked there, who were really good journalists, had just wildly different views about what it was that they were doing, why they were there, why they went there, what they thought that Fox was, what they thought that they were accomplishing.

00:03:28 Speaker_12
and just hearing their takes and hearing their kind of journeys through their work experience. I just learned so much. I think people will want to hear what these people have to say.

00:03:40 Speaker_07
Who are some of the people that you talk to?

00:03:41 Speaker_12
I've talked to a lot of people that have never done interviews before, like people who worked at Fox, producers.

00:03:48 Speaker_12
We talked to hosts, we talked to reporters, and then the kind of framing of the season is around both what was going on inside Fox and what was going on outside Fox by people who were deeply agitated. by it.

00:04:01 Speaker_12
Some actively were trying to prevent it from becoming what it became. You know, activists, journalists, a lot of comedians who mocked Fox and satirized it. So, it's kind of maybe a little bit different than other seasons in that way.

00:04:16 Speaker_12
And that kind of the perspective and point of view shifts and it goes from interior to exterior and kind of back and forth across episodes and across the season.

00:04:27 Speaker_07
One of the other things I am interested or curious about is, could it have failed? Did it seem like a sure thing from the beginning, or was it not?

00:04:38 Speaker_12
One of the pieces of tape that we have at the very top of the first episode, or near the top, is this Mike Wallace, in his inimitable Mike Wallace way, just talking about what a failure Fox News was and what a flop it was.

00:04:51 Speaker_12
And this was part of a larger segment about Rupert Murdoch that they did on. 60 Minutes and just talking about how nobody was watching and it was a failure and an overreach.

00:05:00 Speaker_12
And Fox had, like, I think what would be fair to call existential problems in the first few years, but it didn't really have editorial problems or didn't have problems in terms of knowing what it was.

00:05:16 Speaker_12
And one of the things that I think is a contrast between Fox and a lot of the other kind of challengers or rivals that we focus on this season is that Fox was just always confident.

00:05:30 Speaker_12
even like totally undeservedly in the early years, it was just like swaggering around. And you know, false bravado combined with money can get you through a lot of scrapes.

00:05:44 Speaker_12
But yeah, I mean, the question that you're asking, I think is a question that we'll explore throughout the entire season.

00:05:50 Speaker_12
And that also, you know, we're telling that story from the perspective of a lot of people who are asking the same question, both inside and outside Fox. So I think that is really the kind of fundamental exploration of the series.

00:06:04 Speaker_07
I am really, really excited to hear all of this. It sounds so good. You guys should all check it out. It's premiering on September 18th in this very feed. And now stick around for the latest episode of Decoder Ring.

00:06:23 Speaker_07
Last Thanksgiving, Slate senior producer Shana Roth and her family headed to eastern Michigan to spend the holiday with her in-laws.

00:06:30 Speaker_13
My sister-in-law Jean is maybe the best cook I've ever met in real life. She makes this corn casserole thing that I was originally skeptical of, but it is incredible.

00:06:42 Speaker_07
Jean also has three kids, so she and Shana inevitably end up talking parenting.

00:06:47 Speaker_13
After this particularly delicious dinner, we found ourselves joking about my current driving playlist.

00:06:54 Speaker_11
I think, you know, we were talking about what your husband played in the car in the morning for your daughter.

00:07:00 Speaker_13
That's Jean. And for the record, it's Stacy's Mom by Fountains of Wayne. That's what my four-year-old loves.

00:07:14 Speaker_11
But the conversation expanded from there. We started talking about messages in different medias and books. The classics were always my favorite.

00:07:22 Speaker_13
Jean's a great book recommender. She has thoughts on the hundreds of books she's read to her children over the years. Since my daughter was born, Jean has sent us some real winners.

00:07:33 Speaker_13
But our conversation took a surprising turn when Jean brought up this classic.

00:07:40 Speaker_15
You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Joffe Numeroff.

00:07:46 Speaker_13
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie came out in 1985 and has sold more than 15 million copies since then. You probably know it. A little boy meets a cute mouse who asks him for a cookie, sparking a chain reaction.

00:07:59 Speaker_15
If you give a mouse a cookie, he's gonna ask for a glass of milk.

00:08:10 Speaker_13
When you give him the milk, he'll probably ask you for a straw. After he gets a straw, the mouse wants a napkin and then a mirror.

00:08:19 Speaker_15
To make sure he doesn't have a milk mustache.

00:08:23 Speaker_13
And it goes on and on until it comes full circle and the mouse wants a cookie again. The book was so popular it had spin-offs. If you give a moose a muffin, if you give a pig a pancake. It was turned into a popular kids' show on Amazon.

00:08:41 Speaker_13
It's just a wholesome, enduring bedtime classic. Jean used to read it to her kids all the time.

00:08:48 Speaker_11
Honestly, it's short. It's easy to read. On nights when there were other things going on or exhaustion hit, it was a great story.

00:08:56 Speaker_13
But Jean's kids are all grown up now. And since the time when she was reading that book to them, she'd heard something about it. Something she told me about at Thanksgiving. Something that blew my mind.

00:09:09 Speaker_11
You know, that is like against social welfare programs.

00:09:15 Speaker_13
Jean had learned that If You Give a Mouse a Cookie is not a simple story about a cute mouse. It's a book with a secret political agenda.

00:09:25 Speaker_11
That people who are on welfare don't want to be off welfare. It's if you give somebody something, they're going to want more and more and more.

00:09:33 Speaker_13
Hearing this, I just thought, wait, I grew up on If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. I read my daughter If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Had I been missing something this whole time?

00:09:55 Speaker_07
This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin.

00:09:58 Speaker_13
And I'm Shana Roth. I always thought If You Give a Mouse a Cookie was about a sweet, if greedy, mouse. But somehow, without me noticing, the book has taken on a completely different meaning for a swath of its readership.

00:10:13 Speaker_13
It's been adopted by right-wingers as a cautionary tale about everything from welfare benefits to student loan forgiveness to granting immigrants asylum.

00:10:24 Speaker_13
This is not the first time a kid's book has been caught up in a political fight, and I wanted to know where this interpretation came from, why it's caught on, and if it's what the author Laura Numeroff intended.

00:10:37 Speaker_13
Has this beloved picture book always been a Trojan horse for a conservative worldview, or is there something else going on? So today on Dakota Ring, if you read a kid a book, will they enlist in the culture wars?

00:11:10 Speaker_15
World of Secrets.

00:11:12 Speaker_18
We investigate the dark side of the wellness industry, following the story of a woman who joined a yoga school only to uncover a world she never expected. I feel that I have no other choice. The only thing I can do is to speak about this.

00:11:25 Speaker_18
Where the hope of spiritual breakthroughs leaves people vulnerable to exploitation. You just get sucked in so gradually and it's done so skillfully that you don't realise.

00:11:37 Speaker_08
It's time for another round. May you live in interesting times.

00:11:44 Speaker_05
Well, I don't think we have a choice, Mary.

00:11:46 Speaker_08
Trump's back. And this time, he's got way fewer restraints. And a literal playbook for MAGA-ifying the United States.

00:11:53 Speaker_20
For most of human history, people have lived under kings and queens, and not everybody believes that there's anything wrong with that.

00:12:00 Speaker_08
All this can be overwhelming, but you can't afford to not pay attention. That's where What Next comes in. We are a new kind of daily news podcast, fast enough to keep up and careful enough to take a step back and think.

00:12:13 Speaker_22
Conviction is not a thing that we did and now have to protect and dust off. It's a thing that we still have it within ourselves to accomplish.

00:12:20 Speaker_08
The next four years are gonna be a roller coaster. You need someone there to help you figure out what next. Follow and listen to What Next wherever you get your podcasts.

00:12:35 Speaker_13
So after talking with Gene, I couldn't stop thinking about the possibility that if you give a mouse a cookie is conservative propaganda. I wanted to know how widespread this idea really was. And then I found myself in the perfect place to check.

00:12:51 Speaker_02
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 2024 Republican National Convention.

00:12:58 Speaker_13
This past July, I was in Milwaukee covering the RNC, and I took the opportunity to ask delegates what they knew about this hungry mouse. Are you familiar with the phrase, if you give a mouse a cookie? Yes. What does it mean to you?

00:13:11 Speaker_25
If you're willing to throw your hands up and say, OK, fine, you can have this, you'll lose boundaries.

00:13:18 Speaker_13
This is Orlando Donna, a delegate from Como County, Texas.

00:13:21 Speaker_25
When you start allowing that we'll let this, we'll let a little border go, we'll let a little national defense go, you keep letting things go, all of a sudden you look back and you're like, well, what happened to our nation? We got a different nation.

00:13:37 Speaker_25
The mouse now owns the house.

00:13:39 Speaker_13
Are you familiar with the phrase, if you give a mouse a cookie?

00:13:43 Speaker_04
Socialists and liberals don't like that book for a reason.

00:13:46 Speaker_13
Mike Lawler is a U.S. representative from New York. He's actually read the book to children on school visits.

00:13:53 Speaker_04
And obviously from the standpoint of kind of Americanism, we want to teach people how to earn for themselves and how to be able to provide for themselves ultimately.

00:14:05 Speaker_13
We've given them a lot of cookies. North Dakota State Senator Judy Estinson.

00:14:10 Speaker_07
And the bottom line is it has not worked.

00:14:16 Speaker_13
So lots of people think if you give a mouse a cookie is a fable about the pitfalls of the welfare state. But I was pretty sure this hadn't always been the case.

00:14:27 Speaker_13
When I searched through old newspapers and magazines from the 80s, when the book was first published, I could not find a single reference linking it to welfare. And yet today, there it is. Not just all over the RNC, but all over Fox News.

00:14:41 Speaker_11
So there's a children's book, it's called If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. If you give him a cookie, he's gonna ask for a glass of milk. If you give him some milk, he's gonna wanna crawl into bed with you. That's what the Democrats are all about.

00:14:51 Speaker_13
You even hear it on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

00:14:55 Speaker_21
Mr. Speaker, I'm reminded of the classic children's book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. The radical left is the mouse, never satisfied. And corporate America is the young boy, bleeding resources to fulfill the mouse's ever-expanding demands.

00:15:10 Speaker_10
It has kind of become meme-ified. It has become a meme that fits in with what they want to say anyway.

00:15:16 Speaker_13
Rebecca Christie is a senior fellow at Bruegel, an economic think tank in Brussels. She's also a parent, and she's written about the conservative adoption of if you give a mouse a cookie for Slate because she disagrees with it so much.

00:15:30 Speaker_10
As an economist, I think that economies do better when everybody can participate. And everybody can participate when there are social supports available.

00:15:37 Speaker_10
And it has been twisted as instead this morality play of slippery slopes and inevitable consequences. And if you give the mouse the cookie, something bad is sure to happen. Why do you think quoting, if you give a mouse a cookie, has caught on?

00:15:57 Speaker_10
It's a really catchy phrase. It's fun to say. It's, you know, it's iambic. It's got this cadence to it. And it has this image of the cookie. I really think that the cookie is important in why this caught on. And cookie is a thing that we see as a reward.

00:16:12 Speaker_10
Did you earn your cookie or not?

00:16:14 Speaker_13
The association between cookies and undeserved handouts, it's not just a conservative thing. As far back as 1996, Chris Rock had a famous bit in his stand-up routine about people expecting treats for just doing basic things.

00:16:37 Speaker_13
So cookies, the baked goods, have had this enduring meaning for years. I mean, all the way back in season one of The Office, Michael Scott got in trouble for imitating Chris Rock's routine on Diversity Day.

00:16:50 Speaker_01
I take care of my kids! Stop it!

00:16:52 Speaker_13
What you want, cookie? Comedian Hannibal Buress also riffed on the phrase in 2010.

00:16:56 Speaker_00
I just bought some Oreos. I get outside, there's this guy like, hey, brother, it's my birthday today. And that was the first time in my life without any sarcasm I could say, what, you want a cookie or something?

00:17:10 Speaker_13
But as for the particular cookie in If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, from what I can tell, there's a specific moment when it got catapulted into the conservative stratosphere. It happened in 2015, three decades after the book was published.

00:17:27 Speaker_13
That's when an article came out in The Washington Post with the headline, It was by a writer named Max Ehrenfreund.

00:17:39 Speaker_10
And he comes into it saying, this is a story about charity and self-reliance.

00:17:44 Speaker_13
Aaron Freund compares the relationship between the boy and the mouse to the relationship between government and people who rely on it for support. He writes that the book's lesson is self-sufficiency.

00:17:56 Speaker_13
And he really hones in on the historical context, the moment in which Laura Numeroff published the book. 1985, a time of big hair, bigger mobile phones, and Ronald Reagan.

00:18:11 Speaker_03
It's now common knowledge that our welfare system has itself become a poverty trap, a creator and reinforcer of dependency.

00:18:20 Speaker_13
Reagan had campaigned on the image of so-called welfare queens defrauding the country, and he was adamant that people had to rely on themselves, not the government.

00:18:30 Speaker_03
Obviously, something is desperately wrong with our welfare system.

00:18:33 Speaker_10
He was somebody who built this myth of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, cementing this idea that mutual community aid wasn't necessarily integral to the American project.

00:18:46 Speaker_13
This was what was swirling around when If You Give a Mouse a Cookie was published. And that's what Max Ehrenfreund emphasized in his Washington Post article.

00:18:56 Speaker_13
And it's after that article came out in 2015, the one implying the book was covertly promoting Reaganomics, that the idea just exploded.

00:19:07 Speaker_23
Remember the children's book, if you give a mouse a cookie, it's all about how if you give in to unreasonable requests, people will expect you to do more and more unreasonable things.

00:19:17 Speaker_07
They get what they want, they get indulged, and then they keep on demanding more things. If you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to want 10 more. If you give liberals a mandate for something, they'll take 10 more.

00:19:27 Speaker_26
That's how it is right now. We're living in a bizarre children's book. If you give a liberal an inch,

00:19:35 Speaker_13
Within a few years, it was everywhere, all over conservative media and in Reddit threads saying the book was, quote, written by a right-wing conservative think tank to indoctrinate children into opposing the welfare state.

00:19:50 Speaker_11
It was all there, waiting for my sister-in-law, Jean, to find it. I just frantically went online and searched, is this true? And lo and behold, it is. Jean had never thought of the book this way before.

00:20:02 Speaker_11
But once it was pointed out to her, she found it plausible. I can clearly see that that is a message that somebody would be trying to give through that story, this message against helping people out that are in need.

00:20:18 Speaker_13
But had Laura Numeroff, the author, really intended to give children a warning against government dependency? When we come back, I ask her. Laura Numeroff lives in a bungalow in California. A vintage Jeep sits outside. And inside is what she calls...

00:20:58 Speaker_13
Every inch is filled with quirky pop culture ephemera. Panoramic photos, bobbleheads, masks. I'm running out of room. I need to get some more shelves put in or something. And then there's the memorabilia connected to her own life's work.

00:21:16 Speaker_09
I just sold my 49th book. Well, I've been doing it since 75.

00:21:22 Speaker_13
Laura is 71 years old now. Her career was not an immediate success, though. She wrote nine children's books, but none really took off, and she struggled to make a living. So she headed to San Francisco and moved in with her boyfriend.

00:21:36 Speaker_09
So I don't know if you've ever heard of the band Night Ranger. They did a song called Sister Christian. Yeah.

00:21:42 Speaker_01
Oh, I know that song.

00:21:43 Speaker_09
Yeah. So I lived with the drummer for three years.

00:21:53 Speaker_13
That's the drummer Kelly Kagey singing lead. His parents lived in Oregon, and Laura would go motoring with him on long road trips to visit them.

00:22:02 Speaker_09
It's a beautiful drive, but it does get boring the fifth, sixth time. And so, on one of those boring drives, she started to daydream. I started thinking of animals eating food that I like.

00:22:15 Speaker_09
So I pictured a zebra eating Cheetos, but he'd have orange around his mouth, and a pizza eating orangutan tangled up in cheese string.

00:22:24 Speaker_13
And then another image popped into Laura's mind. The iconic Mrs. Fields cookie being eaten buy a mouse.

00:22:34 Speaker_09
I just, I just started saying out loud, oh, he'd probably want milk. Then you want a napkin and a straw. By the time we got to Kelly's parents' house, I had it all the way back to, he'll want a cookie to go with it. I don't know.

00:22:49 Speaker_09
It just, it just poured out of me.

00:22:53 Speaker_13
When they got back home to San Francisco, Laura sat down and typed up her story. She submitted her manuscript to several publishers, but kept getting rejected. She didn't even have an agent at that point.

00:23:05 Speaker_13
Then, finally, a new editor at HarperCollins came across it in the slush pile and decided to take a chance. Within a few years, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie was at the top of the bestseller list. So, thank God for the boring car trip.

00:23:22 Speaker_13
The publisher asked for a sequel, and then another. The series would end up selling more than 45 million copies. Before long, the book just seemed omnipresent. Like, get this, remember the hijacking thriller, Air Force One?

00:23:37 Speaker_13
Harrison Ford and Glenn Close used this book as a secret shorthand between them.

00:23:43 Speaker_23
Mr. President, I... Catherine, if you give Amas a cookie... He's gonna want a glass of milk. We gotta get this plane on the ground.

00:23:53 Speaker_13
And it wasn't just fictional presidents who latched onto the book.

00:23:57 Speaker_09
I've been to the White House several times, and I was there to read at the Easter Egg Roll during the Bush administration. Michelle Obama is a fan, too.

00:24:06 Speaker_19
All right, so we're going to read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. How many people have heard that book? Yeah, this is one of our favorites. So Sasha and Malia.

00:24:14 Speaker_13
That reading on the White House lawn happened back in 2009, before conservatives had publicly claimed the book as an anti-government assistance allegory. So I had to ask Laura, is that what she'd meant it to be all along?

00:24:31 Speaker_09
Not at all. Oh my God, like 900 degrees away from that. That would never cross my mind at all.

00:24:42 Speaker_13
So you were not a member of a right-wing think tank perpetuating Reaganomics?

00:24:50 Speaker_09
I'm afraid to answer that. I know after we get off, there'll be a knock at my door. Guys in trench coats. No, I wasn't.

00:25:01 Speaker_13
Laura never really thought of the mouse as a greedy freeloader at all. In fact, she identifies with the mouse as someone always restlessly moving from one thing to the next.

00:25:12 Speaker_09
It's very much me. I'm very easily distracted. I do have ADD. I mean, I've been tested. So I guess I was writing about myself.

00:25:24 Speaker_13
As far as the actual lesson of the book, Laura would prefer that people view it as not having one at all.

00:25:31 Speaker_09
I never wanted to have messages in my books. I think there's room for just enjoying a story and using your imagination and getting away from stuff that's bothering you.

00:25:46 Speaker_13
And she says that's generally how people treat it if you give a mouse a cookie for the first three decades of its existence. Up until right around 2015, when Max Ehrenfreund's article about it was published in the Washington Post.

00:26:01 Speaker_09
That political aspect was not happening until, I'd say, maybe the last 10 years. I just feel like they took something that's very innocent and sweet

00:26:15 Speaker_09
and joyful, and they just wring its neck and turn it into something that's spiteful or political or aggressive. And I really wish they would not do that.

00:26:30 Speaker_13
It's totally understandable why Laura doesn't want her book to be used as a political football. But, strange as it may seem, it kinda comes with the territory. Putting political ideology on a picture book? It's almost a tradition.

00:26:46 Speaker_09
Just people that have nothing better to do than pick on poor, innocent children's books.

00:26:52 Speaker_13
When we come back, the long history of grown-ups co-opting kids' books. If you give a mouse a cookie, isn't the first time a children's story has gotten caught up in a culture war?

00:27:16 Speaker_05
Kids' literature is always so charged because it's how, you know, we educate children.

00:27:22 Speaker_13
Bruce Handy is a journalist and critic. He's also written a few children's books of his own, along with Wild Things, the joy of reading children's literature as an adult.

00:27:32 Speaker_05
Obviously, children's literature is important. It's how we teach them what we think is important culturally. So, you know, a lot of weight is always put on children's books.

00:27:40 Speaker_13
And a lot of children's literature does impart specific moral lessons, and it always has.

00:27:46 Speaker_05
Children's literature begins as very prescriptive. You know, this is good, this is good, this is bad, whatever.

00:27:52 Speaker_05
To me, all this stuff always feels, you know, medicinal, whether it's a book about teaching kids to fear God in the late 1700s or teaching kids today to be an activist or whatever.

00:28:02 Speaker_05
You know, there's nothing wrong with necessarily having specific agendas in children's books, but I don't know that it always makes for the best literature.

00:28:10 Speaker_13
Like, what's the lesson in where the wild things are or cloudy with a chance of meatballs or caps for sale? There isn't one. And that's why kids love them so much. Sometimes more than the books, very obviously about sharing or faith.

00:28:27 Speaker_13
But grownups can struggle with this ambiguity. I know I do. We're trained to look at texts and extract a specific meaning from them. It's particularly pronounced with all kinds of kids stuff.

00:28:40 Speaker_13
Think of how the animated TV show Paw Patrol has been interpreted as copaganda, but children's books are the oldest kids' medium, so they especially have been co-opted, twisted, turned, and squinted at until they're imbued with meanings that the author never intended.

00:29:01 Speaker_13
Over the years, Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree has been read as an anti-feminist tract. Horton Hears a Who has been claimed by anti-abortion activists. Babar the Elephant's been seen as a colonizer.

00:29:16 Speaker_13
And then there's what happened to Ferdinand the Bull.

00:29:20 Speaker_17
Once upon a time in sunny Spain, there was a little bull and his name was Ferdinand.

00:29:28 Speaker_13
The story of Ferdinand, by the American writer Monroe Leaf, was published in 1936.

00:29:33 Speaker_05
It's about a bull in Spain who is very peaceful.

00:29:38 Speaker_13
Unlike the other bulls in the pasture, who all dream of getting to Madrid to fight in the big bull ring there.

00:29:45 Speaker_05
But Ferdinand has no interest in fighting. He just likes to sit around in the pasture and smell flowers.

00:29:51 Speaker_24
I like it better here, where I can sit just quietly and smell the flowers.

00:29:59 Speaker_13
But the men from the bullfights don't realize this when they cart Ferdinand off to Madrid. And when it's time for Ferdinand to enter the ring and be ferocious, he simply sits down.

00:30:10 Speaker_24
Come on! Fight! What's the matter? Be fierce! Come on! Come on!

00:30:16 Speaker_05
It's a big disappointment for everybody except Ferdinand, who gets to go back to his pasture, and I think the last line of the book is something like, And for all I know, he's sitting there still under his favorite clock tree,

00:30:29 Speaker_17
smelling the flowers just quietly. He is very happy.

00:30:36 Speaker_05
It's a lovely, sweet story. It's about the power of saying no. It's about the power of being true to yourself.

00:30:43 Speaker_13
The year after it was published, Ferdinand became a bestseller on the adult bestseller list. There was merchandise and a balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. There were songs written about him.

00:30:55 Speaker_17
Ferdinand, Ferdinand, the bull with the delicate ego.

00:31:01 Speaker_13
It was a phenomenon adapted by Walt Disney into the Oscar-winning short film you've been hearing from. But almost immediately, some readers began to look at Ferdinand in a different way.

00:31:13 Speaker_05
You know, it's probably sort of inevitable that the book became politicized because it is set in Spain and it came out three months after the start of the Spanish Civil War.

00:31:22 Speaker_16
Madrid streets are patrolled by government tanks as barricaded insurgents rake the roads with rifle fire.

00:31:28 Speaker_13
As Francisco Franco's forces were overthrowing the Democratic Republic, the image of a Spanish bull opposed to violence took on new meaning. And that only grew as militant fascism took hold across Europe, sending the whole world hurtling toward war.

00:31:44 Speaker_05
So people read it as a story about pacifism. They read it as kind of a political allegory. A lot of people saw it as an attack on militarism and by extension nationalism.

00:31:55 Speaker_13
The book was banned in Franco's Spain and in Nazi Germany. Hitler reportedly had copies of it burned. But something funny happened. Many of the countries gearing up to fight the fascists saw Ferdinand's pacifism as a problem too.

00:32:11 Speaker_05
Other people saw it as a dangerous message that, you know, the book was urging people to lay down, you know, in the face of this aggression that was coming from countries like Germany and Italy.

00:32:21 Speaker_05
So it's kind of, you know, people saw it kind of how they wanted to see it, or they saw it as how they wanted to fear it.

00:32:27 Speaker_13
Over time, fears changed, though. Ferdinand lasted longer than the political currents around it. In fact, in 2017, it was even made into a movie again, which I think would have pleased Ferdinand's author, Monroe Leaf.

00:32:41 Speaker_13
Like Laura Numeroff, he was never trying to be political. He just wanted to tell a story about a lovable animal.

00:32:48 Speaker_05
I think he was kind of, you know, baffled by it. I don't think he was prepared for that, you know, to become the kind of lightning rod that it did at the time.

00:32:59 Speaker_13
So what's happened with If You Give a Mouse a Cookie is nothing new, but that doesn't make it any less dismaying for Laura Numeroff that her book has gotten tangled into the culture war, tied to a set of beliefs she never intended.

00:33:12 Speaker_13
But, turns out, she's not the only writer who feels dismayed about what's happened, not the only writer whose intentions have been ignored.

00:33:23 Speaker_06
I feel terribly misunderstood, and I am really troubled

00:33:30 Speaker_13
This is Max Ehrenfreund. He is the author of the 2015 Washington Post piece, the one that spread the idea that if you give a mouse a cookie is anti-welfare.

00:33:42 Speaker_13
When I tracked him down, he seemed a little reluctant to talk about his article, and it soon became clear why.

00:33:47 Speaker_06
The argument of this piece is very simple. There has never existed a culture of dependency among the American poor and receiving benefits from the government does not weaken people's work ethic.

00:34:04 Speaker_13
So, Max's article has been taken to mean the exact opposite of what he intended. Max was trying to explain to readers that welfare is actually a good thing.

00:34:16 Speaker_13
The if-you-give-a-mouse-a-cookie framing was just supposed to be a grabby line to get you hooked before honing in on his real message, that government assistance benefits do not make people lazy.

00:34:29 Speaker_06
What I really wanted to suggest was that we ought to be critical of this idea, and if you give a mouse a cookie most of the time, you're just giving a mouse a cookie.

00:34:39 Speaker_13
But if he wanted to present hard, objective evidence debunking myths about welfare, instead he just gifted conservatives with a catchphrase. Max is the one who decided to headline the piece.

00:34:53 Speaker_13
Quote, one of America's most popular children's books has a secret political message, end quote. It's very clicky and it helped the piece get big.

00:35:03 Speaker_13
But it's also the line people took to mean that Laura Numeroff intentionally wrote an anti-welfare screed. And he regrets that. He says he owes her an apology.

00:35:14 Speaker_06
It's not true that the author and the illustrator were trying to impart a secret political message. I think that was misleading. I don't think that this book is a piece of political propaganda.

00:35:25 Speaker_06
But the phrase, if you give a mouse a cookie, it seems has become a piece of political propaganda, perhaps as a result of my work.

00:35:34 Speaker_13
When you realized that this was the legacy of your piece, what was your reaction?

00:35:39 Speaker_06
Despair. You know, it was it was a moment for me to question myself, you know, and to ask what what I had done as a journalist.

00:35:55 Speaker_13
Max is actually not a journalist anymore. He's a historian, a postdoc at Kenyon College. How do you feel about it now?

00:36:03 Speaker_06
Well, I hope people will read the book.

00:36:09 Speaker_13
When people read anything, they'll come to their own conclusions about it. And that's not a flaw. Good writing is meant to be interpreted in wildly different ways, no matter how many Reddit threads or Fox News hits say otherwise.

00:36:25 Speaker_13
Good books are meant to be huge, to be layered, to be more to more people than even their authors could have dreamed. That's what makes them last. So, people are free to read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie as being about the welfare state. Fine.

00:36:44 Speaker_13
But if they insist that this is the one and only message, they're just wrong. Can you read this book to me? If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. I sat down with my daughter and took another look inside the book.

00:37:05 Speaker_13
She's four and just starting to learn how to read. It's my husband's copy from when he was a kid. His. He's. He's.

00:37:15 Speaker_14
Going. Going. Going to. ask for a glass of milk. We just look so happy.

00:37:35 Speaker_13
If you were a character in this book, who do you think you would be? The mouse. When we read this book together, my daughter sees not a mouse leeching a little boy dry, but a mouse and a boy having fun together.

00:37:48 Speaker_13
I see that too, and also a little more besides, because I also see that the boy is taking care of the mouse, and that care is an adventure they're on together too. Seeing a mouse constantly distracted by curiosity and desire, I can relate.

00:38:09 Speaker_13
What's this for? Oh, it's a light. Light for like what? To make it brighter in here. See? Oh. At this age, my daughter really does remind me of the mouse. She wants a snack and while she's eating the snack, she'll think of a cat.

00:38:25 Speaker_13
So she'll ask me to be a cat and she'll be my owner. And then she'll decide her cat needs toys. So she'll want her Lego and on and on and on until I'm ready for a nap.

00:38:37 Speaker_13
But if we keep reading this book together, maybe she'll also see herself as the boy too. Not just wanting a snack, but wanting to provide one. To be the character who knows how to do things, who knows how to take care.

00:38:53 Speaker_13
See, there are so many different ways to enter into and understand this simple seeming book. And that's not a flaw. It's why so many people still read it.

00:39:08 Speaker_14
What do you think the book is about? A mouse and a cookie and a kid.

00:39:21 Speaker_13
This is Dakota Ring. I'm Shana Roth.

00:39:24 Speaker_07
And I'm Willow Haskin. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decoderring at slate dot com. This episode was written by Shana Roth. It was edited by Katie Shepard and Evan Chung. It was produced by Sophie Codner.

00:39:41 Speaker_07
I produced Decoder Ring with Evan, Katie and Max Friedman. Derek John is executive producer. Merritt Jacob is senior technical director. We'd like to thank Maria Russo and Christopher Olin.

00:39:53 Speaker_07
Rebecca Christie's article for Slate is called How a Classic Children's Book Got Hijacked by the Culture Wars. And Bruce Handy's piece on Ferdinand the Bull appeared in The New Yorker.

00:40:03 Speaker_07
If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, and even better, tell your friends. If you're a fan of the show, I'd also love for you to sign up for Slate Plus.

00:40:15 Speaker_07
Slate Plus members get to listen to Decoder Ring and every other Slate podcast without any ads. You also get unlimited access to Slate's website.

00:40:23 Speaker_07
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