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

Summary

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

Podcast: Slow Burn (Decoder Ring series, Slate Podcasts)
Episode Date: September 11, 2024
Host: Shana Roth (with Willa Paskin)
Main Theme:
Exploring how the beloved children’s book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, became politicized—especially by conservatives as an anti-welfare allegory—examining its real origins, interpretations, and why kids’ books are so readily swept up into culture wars.

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Overview of Main Theme

The episode dives into the seemingly innocent picture book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff, tracing its journey from a bedtime classic to a political metaphor, particularly among American conservatives. Host Shana Roth explores how and why this transformation happened, interrogating whether the author intended these political messages, and placing this “weaponization” of kids’ books in the wider context of literature and cultural conflict.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

The Book’s Story and Sudden Politicization

• If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (1985) enjoyed decades as a whimsical, kid-friendly story with no apparent deeper message. However, during the last decade, it’s been co-opted by conservatives as a cautionary allegory: give an inch (a cookie), and demands (favors, welfare) will spiral endlessly.
• Roth’s curiosity is piqued after a family conversation where her sister-in-law suggests the book is an anti-welfare fable (“that is, like, against social welfare programs... if you give somebody something, they’re going to want more and more and more.” – Jean, [08:24])

The Meme-ification and Spread in Conservative Circles

• Shana investigates how broad the “anti-welfare” reading actually is during her trip to the 2024 Republican National Convention ([11:32]).
  • Delegates enthusiastically relay its supposed meaning as a lesson in boundaries, self-reliance, and the perils of the welfare state.
  • Quote: “If you’re willing to throw your hands up and say, okay, fine, you can have this, you’ll lose boundaries.” — Orlando Donna, Texas delegate ([11:52])
  • Quote: “Socialists and liberals don’t like that book for a reason.” — Mike Lawlor, U.S. Representative ([12:24])
• Clips from Fox News and Congressional speeches show the book used explicitly as a metaphor against “handouts” and liberal policies ([13:25-13:43]).
  • Quote: “The radical left is the mouse never satisfied, and corporate America is the young boy bleeding resources…” ([13:43])

Tracing the Origins: How Did This Start?

• There’s zero evidence from the book’s original release (1985) that it was linked to welfare or conservative politics. The association only starts to appear after a 2015 Washington Post article by Max Ehrenfreund titled, “One of America’s most popular children’s books has a secret political message” ([15:51], [16:22]).
  • Ehrenfreund draws a parallel between the mouse/boy dynamic and Reagan-era welfare debates, asserting the mice symbolize dependency.
  • Post-2015, references in right-wing media and social threads explode, frequently crediting the book as a deliberate anti-welfare parable.
  • Notable media line: “Written by a right wing conservative think tank to indoctrinate children into opposing the welfare state.” ([18:15])

The Role of the Cookie and Cultural Catchiness

• Economic think tank fellow Rebecca Christie explains the phrase’s viral, appealing cadence and how “cookies” signify “undeserved rewards” in American culture ([14:42-14:44]).
  • Quote: “It has this image of the cookie. I really think that the cookie is important in why this caught on. ‘Did you earn your cookie or not?’” – Rebecca Christie ([14:44])

Visiting the Author: Laura Numeroff’s Intentions

• Shana interviews Numeroff at her quirky California bungalow ([19:32]).
  • The idea for the story grew from playful daydreaming on car trips—no politics intended.
  • Quote: “Not at all. Oh my god, like 900 degrees away from that. That would never cross my mind at all.” – Laura Numeroff ([23:12])
  • Laura sees herself as the distractible, restless mouse.
  • Quote: “I never wanted to have messages in my books. I think there’s room for just enjoying a story and using your imagination…” ([24:12])
• Laura expresses frustration at her story being “wrung” into a political parable.
  • Quote: “They took something that’s very innocent and sweet 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.” ([24:42])

Why Kids’ Books Always Get Co-opted

• Journalist/critic Bruce Handy puts the episode into historical context: moral, political, and cultural anxieties have always been projected onto children's books ([26:03]).
  • Older classics (e.g., The Giving Tree, Ferdinand the Bull, Horton Hears a Who) have been claimed by both right and left for various ideological purposes.
  • The story of Ferdinand, for instance, was banned in both fascist Spain and Nazi Germany, read as dangerous pacifism elsewhere ([29:54-31:08]).

The 2015 Article’s Author Sets the Record Straight (and Regrets It)

• Shana tracks down Max Ehrenfreund, author of the fateful Washington Post “secret political message” article ([32:04]).
  • Ehrenfreund is horrified his attempt to debunk the “culture of dependency” myth was turned on its head and used to cement the misconception.
  • Quote: “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.” — Max Ehrenfreund ([32:29])
  • He regrets the headline, admits he owes Numeroff an apology, and no longer works as a journalist ([33:55-34:43]).
  • Quote: “It’s not true that the author and the illustrator were trying to impart a secret political message… 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.” ([33:55])

The Book’s Real Meaning: Ambiguity and Imagination

• The episode closes with Roth reading the book to her own four-year-old daughter and reflecting on multiple, coexisting meanings ([36:15-37:50]).
  • Her daughter sees fun and curiosity, not an allegory about welfare.
  • Shana sees care, adventure, distraction—but no single, dominant message.
  • Quote: “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.” – Shana Roth ([37:55])

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

| Timestamp | Quote | |---|---| | 08:24 | “That is, like, against social welfare programs... if you give somebody something, they're going to want more and more and more.” – Jean (Shana’s sister-in-law) | | 11:52 | “If you’re willing to throw your hands up and say, okay, fine, you can have this, you’ll lose boundaries.” – Orlando Donna, RNC delegate | | 12:24 | “Socialists and liberals don’t like that book for a reason.” – Mike Lawlor, Congressman | | 13:43 | “The radical left is the mouse never satisfied, and corporate America is the young boy bleeding resources…” | | 14:44 | “It has this image of the cookie. I really think that the cookie is important in why this caught on. Did you earn your cookie or not?” – Rebecca Christie | | 23:12 | “Not at all. Oh my God, like 900 degrees away from that. That would never cross my mind at all.” – Laura Numeroff (on intended political meaning) | | 24:12 | “I never wanted to have messages in my books. I think there’s room for just enjoying a story and using your imagination…” – Laura Numeroff | | 24:42 | “They took something that’s very innocent and sweet 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.” – Laura Numeroff | | 32:29 | “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.” — Max Ehrenfreund | | 33:55 | “It’s not true that the author and the illustrator were trying to impart a secret political message... 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.” — Max Ehrenfreund | | 37:55 | “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.” – Shana Roth |

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Origins of the "welfare" interpretation: [08:24]–[15:51]
• Fox News and Congress referencing the book: [13:25]–[13:43]
• 2015 Washington Post article’s impact: [15:51]–[18:15]
• Rebecca Christie's analysis: [14:44]–[14:56]
• Laura Numeroff interview and authorial intent: [19:32]–[25:11]
• History of children's books in culture wars: [25:57]–[31:40]
• Max Ehrenfreund’s regrets: [32:04]–[34:43]
• Closing: The book’s meanings today: [36:15]–[37:55]

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Summary of Takeaways

• If You Give a Mouse a Cookie was never crafted as a conservative parable; its author disavows any political message.
• The “welfare state” interpretation only arose in the past decade, largely due to a misinterpreted viral article.
• Children’s literature has always been a fertile battleground for adult anxieties about values, morality, and ideology.
• The tendency to “project” politics onto kids’ books says more about the adults than the books themselves.
• Ultimately, the joy and ambiguity of children’s stories allow for a multitude of meanings—which is their greatest strength, not a weakness.

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Tone:
Engaged, thoughtful, and at times gently humorous—following the host’s journey from personal curiosity, through reporting and interviews, to deeper commentary on the intersection of childhood, culture, and politics.

Listen if you’re interested in:

• How culture wars absorb and transform children’s media
• How viral articles (and catchy headlines) shape social narratives
• The rich, imperfect history of children’s books and their shifting interpretations through time

Transcript

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[B]

Hi, it's Willa. For those of you who've been listening to Decoder Ring here in the Slow Burn feed for the last few months, I've got something special for you. Before our newest episode, a little preview of season 10 of Slow Burn. 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 and then started shaking the world around it. 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 and I'm here with Slow Burn's editorial director and the host of the new season, Josh Levine, to talk about it. Hi Josh.

[D]

Hello.

[B]

So tell me about this new season.

[D]

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 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. 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. So those are all questions I was fascinated by.

[B]

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?

[D]

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. It was a question that sort of dogged Fox or followed it from the day that Rupert Murdoch had a press conference announcing that he was doing this thing with Roger Ailes. People weren't naive about who these people were and what their political views were. But the thing that I found so interesting is that a lot of very smart people who worked there, who are 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. 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.

[B]

Who are some of the people that you talk to?

[D]

Talk to a lot of people that have never done interviews before, like people who worked at Fox. Producers, 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, like, deeply agitated by it. 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. And that kind of the. 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.

[B]

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

[D]

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. 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. 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 it didn't have problems in terms of knowing what it was. 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, even 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. But yeah, I mean, the question that you're asking I think is a question that we'll explore throughout the entire season 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.

[B]

I'm 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. Last Thanksgiving, Slate senior producer Shana Roth and her family headed to eastern Michigan to spend the holiday with her in law.

[A]

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.

[B]

Jean also has three kids, so she and Shayna inevitably end up talking parenting.

[A]

After this particularly delicious dinner, we found ourselves joking about my current driving playlist. I think, you know, we were talking about what your husband played in the car in the morning for your daughter. That's Jean. And for the record, it's Stacy's mom. Thy Fountains of Wayne. Stacy's mom has got it going on. That's what my four year old loves. But the conversation expanded from there. We started talking about messages in different medias and books. The classics were always my favorite. 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, Gene has sent us some real winners. But our conversation took a surprising turn when Jean brought up this classic. If you Give a mouse a Cookie by Laura Joffe Numeroth if youf 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. If you give a mouse a cookie, he's gonna ask for a glass of milk. 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 to make sure he doesn't have a milk mustache. And it goes on and on until it comes full circle and the mouse wants a cookie again. Oh, no. The book was so popular, it had spinoffs. If you give a moose a muffin, if you give a pig a pancake. It was turned into a popular kids show on Amazon. It's just a wholesome, enduring bedtime classic. Jean used to read it to her kids all the time. Honestly, it's short. It's easy to read nights when there were other things going on or exhaustion hit. It was a great story. 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. You know, that is, like, against social welfare programs. Gene 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 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. 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?

[B]

This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin.

[A]

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, it's been adopted by right wingers as a cautionary tale about everything from welfare benefits to storm student loan forgiveness to granting immigrants asylum. 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. Has this beloved picture book always been a Trojan horse for a conservative worldview, or is there something else going on? So today on Decoder Ring, if you read a kid a book, will they enlist in the culture wars? 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.

[E]

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 2024 Republican National Convention.

[A]

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?

[C]

Yes.

[A]

What does it mean to you?

[C]

If you're willing to throw your hands up and say, okay, fine, you can have this, you'll lose boundaries.

[A]

This is Orlando Donna, a delegate from Comal County, Texas.

[C]

When you start, you know, 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. The mouse now owns the house.

[A]

Are you familiar with the phrase if you give a mouse a cookie?

[C]

Socialists and liberals don't like that book for a reason.

[A]

Mike Lawlor is a U.S. representative from New York. He's actually read the book to children on school visits.

[C]

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.

[B]

Ultimately, we've given them a lot of cookies.

[A]

North Dakota State Senator Judy Estinson.

[B]

And the bottom line is it has not worked.

[A]

Okay, 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. 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. So there's a children's book. It's called if you give a mouse a cookie.

[B]

If you give him a cookie, he's.

[A]

Going to ask for a glass of milk. If you give him some milk, he's going to want to crawl into bed with you. That's what the Democrats are all about. You even hear it on the floor of the US House of Representatives. 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.

[C]

Satisfied, and corporate America is the young boy bleeding resources to fulfill the mouse's ever expanding demands.

[A]

It has kind of become memeified. It has become a meme that fits in with what they want to say anyway. 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. As an economist, I think that economies do better when everybody can participate, and everybody can participate when there are social supports available. 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? It's a really catchy phrase. It's fun to say. It's, you know, it's iambic.

[E]

It's got this cadence to it, and.

[A]

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. Did you earn your cookie or not? 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 standup routine about people expecting treats for just doing basic things. I take care of my kids. You're supposedly a dumb mother. I ain't never been to jail.

[B]

What, you want a cookie?

[A]

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. I take care of my kids.

[C]

Stop it.

[A]

What you want cookie? Comedian Hannibal Buress also riffed on the phrase In 2010, I just bought some Oreos.

[D]

I get outside as this guy, like, hey, brother, it's my birthday today.

[C]

And that was the first time in.

[D]

My life without any sarcasm, I could.

[C]

Say, what, you want a cookie?

[E]

Or something.

[A]

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. That's when an article came out in the Washington Post with the headline, one of America's most popular children's books has a secret political message. It was by a writer named Max Ehrenfreund, and he comes into it saying.

[E]

This is a story about charity and self reliance.

[A]

Ehrenfreund 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. And he really hones in on the historical context. The moment in which Laura Neumeroff published the book. 1985. A Time of Big hair, bigger mobile phones, and Ronald Reagan.

[C]

It's now common knowledge that our welfare system has itself become A poverty trap, a creator and reinforcer of dependency.

[A]

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.

[C]

Obviously something is desperately wrong with our welfare system.

[A]

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. This was what was swirling around when if you give a mouse a cookie was published. And that's what Max Aaron Freund emphasized in his Washington Post article. And it's after that article came out in 2015, the one implying the book was covertly promoting Reaganomics, that the idea just exploded.

[C]

Remember the children's 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.

[B]

They get what they want, they get indulged, and then they keep on demanding more things. If you give a mouse cookie, he's.

[A]

Going to want 10 more.

[B]

If you give liberals a mandate for.

[A]

Something, they'll take 10 more.

[C]

That's how it is. Right now we're living in a bizarre children's book, if you give a liberal an inch.

[A]

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. 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, 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. 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.

[E]

Is what she calls my wacky room. And I dare you to describe this.

[A]

Every inch is filled with quirky pop culture ephemera, panoramic photos, bobbleheads, masks.

[E]

I'm running out of room. I need to get some more shelves put in or something.

[A]

And then there's the memorabilia connected to her own life's work.

[E]

I just sold my 49th book. Well, I've been doing it since 75.

[A]

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.

[E]

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

[A]

Yeah. Oh, I know that song.

[E]

Yeah. So I lived with the drummer for three years.

[A]

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

[E]

It's a beautiful drive, but it does get boring the fifth, sixth time.

[A]

And so on one of those boring drives, she started to daydream.

[E]

I started thinking of animals eating food that I like. 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.

[A]

And then another image popped into Laura's mind. The iconic Mrs. Fields cookie being eaten by a mouse.

[E]

I just started saying out loud, oh, he'd probably want milk. Then he wanted 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, it just poured out of me.

[A]

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. 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.

[E]

So thank God for the boring car trip.

[A]

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? Harrison Ford and Glenn Close use this book as a secret shorthand between them. Mr. President.

[C]

Katherine. If you give a moss a cookie.

[A]

He'S gonna want a glass of milk.

[D]

We gotta get this plane on the ground.

[A]

And it wasn't just fictional presidents who latched onto the book.

[E]

I've been to the White House several times and I was there to read at the Easter egg roll during the Bush administration.

[A]

Michelle Obama is a fan too.

[B]

All right, so we're gonna read if.

[A]

You give a mouse a cookie.

[E]

How many people people have heard that book?

[A]

Yeah, this is one of our favorites. So Sasha and Malia are Gonna. 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?

[E]

Not at all. Oh my God, like 900 degrees away from that. That would never cross my mind at all.

[A]

So you were not a member of a right wing think tank perpetuating Reaganomics?

[E]

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.

[A]

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.

[E]

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.

[A]

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

[E]

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.

[A]

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 Aaron Freund's article about it was published in the Washington Post, that political.

[E]

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 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.

[A]

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.

[E]

There's people that have nothing better to do than pick on poor, innocent children's books.

[A]

When we come back, the long history of grownups 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.

[C]

Kids literature is always so charged because it's how, you know, we educate children.

[A]

Bruce Handy is a journalist and critic. He's also written a few children's books of his own, along with Wild the Joy of Reading Children's Literature as an Adult.

[C]

Because 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.

[A]

And a lot of children's literature does impart specific moral lessons, and it always has.

[C]

Children's literature begins as very prescriptive. You know, this is good, this is good, this is bad, whatever. To me, all this stuff always feels, you know, medicinal. Whether it's a book about teaching kids to fear God in the, you know, late 1700s, or teaching kids today to. To be an activist or whatever, 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.

[A]

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. But grown ups 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. Think of how the animated TV show Paw Patrol has been interpreted as the 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. 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. And then there's what happened to Ferdinand the Bull. Once upon a time in sunny Spain, there was a little bull and his name was Ferdinand. The story of Ferdinand, by the American writer Munro Leaf, was published in 1936.

[C]

It's about a bull in Spain who is very peaceful bull, unlike the other.

[A]

Bulls in the pasture who all dream of getting to Madrid to fight in the big bull ring there.

[C]

But Ferdinand has no interest in fighting. He just likes to sit around in the pasture and smell flowers.

[A]

I like it better here, but I can sit just quietly and smell the flowers. 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. Come on, fight.

[C]

What's the matter?

[A]

Be fierce.

[C]

Come on.

[A]

Come on.

[C]

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.

[A]

And for all I know, he's sitting there still under his favorite cork tree, smelling the flowers just quietly. He is very happy.

[C]

It's a lovely, sweet story. It's about the power of saying no. It's about the power of being true to yourself.

[A]

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. Ferdinand, Ferdinand, the bull with the delicate ego. 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.

[C]

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

[A]

Madrid streets are patrolled by government tanks.

[C]

As barricaded insurgents from rake the roads with rifle fire.

[A]

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.

[C]

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

[A]

The book was banned in Franco, 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.

[C]

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. 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.

[A]

Over time, fears change, 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, Munro Leaf. Like Laura Numeroff, he was never trying to be political. He just wanted to tell a story about a lovable animal.

[C]

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

[A]

So what's happened with if youf 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. 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.

[C]

I feel terribly misunderstood, and I am really troubled.

[A]

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

[C]

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.

[A]

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

[C]

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.

[A]

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. One of America's most popular children's books has a secret political message, end quote. It's very cliquey, and it helped the piece get big. 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.

[C]

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. 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.

[A]

When you realized that this was the legacy of your piece, what was your reaction?

[C]

Despair. You know, it was. It was a moment for me to question myself, you know, and to ask what. What. What I had done as a journalist.

[A]

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

[C]

Well, I hope people will read the book.

[A]

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. 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. 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. 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 is. He is g. A I g. Gonna. Going. Going to ask for a glass of milk. He looks so happy. 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. 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. What's this for? Oh, it's a light. Light for like what? To make it brighter in here. See, 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. So she'll ask me to be a cat and she'll be my owner. And then she'll decide her cat needs to toys so she'll want her Lego. And on and on and on until I'm ready for a nap. 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. See, there are so many different ways to to enter into and understand this simple seeming book. And that's not a flaw. It's why so many people still read it. What do you think the book is about? A mouse and a cookie and a kid. This is decodering. I'm Shana Roth.

[B]

And I'm Willa Paskin. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email [e-mail] this episode was written by Shana Ross. It was edited by Katie Shepard and Evan Chung. It was produced by Sophie Konder. I produced Decoder Ring with Evan, Katie and Max Friedman. Derek John is executive producer. Merritt Jacob is senior Senior Technical director. We'd like to thank Maria Russo and Christopher Olin. 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. 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. 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 decoder plus to join Slate plus today. We'll see you in two weeks.

[C]

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