The Cat in the Hat was a Cold War invention. His value as an analyst of the psychology of his time, the late nineteen-fifties, is readily appreciated: transgression and hypocrisy are the principal themes of his little story. But he also stands in an intimate and paradoxical relation to national-security policy. He was both its creature and its nemesis—the unraveller of the very culture that produced him and that made him a star. This is less surprising than it may seem. He was, after all, a cat.

Every reader of “The Cat in the Hat” will feel that the story revolves around a piece of withheld information: what private demons or desires compelled this mother to leave two young children at home all day, with the front door unlocked, under the supervision of a fish? Terrible as the cat is, the woman is lucky that her children do not fall prey to some more insidious intruder. The mother’s abandonment is the psychic wound for which the antics of the cat make so useless a palliative. The children hate the cat. They take no joy in his stupid pet tricks, and they resent his attempt to distract them from what they really want to be doing, which is staring out the window for a sign of their mother’s return. Next to that consummation, a cake on a rake is a pretty feeble entertainment.

This is the fish’s continually iterated point, and the fish is not wrong. The cat’s pursuit of its peculiar idea of fun only cranks up the children’s anxiety. It raises our anxiety level as well, since it keeps us from doing what we really want to be doing, which is accompanying the mother on her murderous or erotic errand. Possibly the mother has engaged the cat herself, in order to throw the burden of suspicion onto the children. “What did you do?” she asks them when she returns home, knowing that the children cannot put the same question to her without disclosing their own violation of domestic taboos. They are each other’s alibi. When you cheat, you lie.

The decision to turn “The Cat in the Hat” on the trope of the mater abscondita is not without interest, coming, as it does, from a writer who chose his mother’s maiden name as his pen name. Dr. Seuss was called Theodor Geisel, after his father, the son of a German immigrant who settled in Springfield, Massachusetts. Dr. Seuss’s mother, also the daughter of German immigrants, was Henrietta Seuss, and when he appropriated the name for his books Dr. Seuss pronounced it in the German manner, “soice,” until he realized that Americans naturally read the name as “soose,” and that the American pronunciation of “Dr. Seuss” evoked a figure advantageous for an author of children’s books to be associated with—Mother Goose. Henrietta Seuss was six feet tall and weighed nearly two hundred pounds. Dr. Seuss’s authorized biographers, Judith and Neil Morgan, report that she was an accomplished high diver (not a sport one can easily picture a two-hundred-pound woman engaging in), and that she was admired for her beauty. She was a devoted reader of bedtime stories, and she encouraged her son’s interest in rhythm and rhyme.

The single recreation of Dr. Seuss’s father was target shooting, a hobby his son once called “silly and unproductive.” In 1902, he held the world record for marksmanship at two hundred yards. He had the misfortune of inheriting the presidency of the family brewery a month before Prohibition was declared, but he was never poor. His son attended Dartmouth, then went to Oxford, but he dropped out after less than a year. His tutor told him that he was the only man he had ever met who should never have gone to Oxford. He then tried the Sorbonne. He left that institution after fifteen minutes. When he returned to the United States, in 1927, he began a successful career in advertising. He became famous for his work on behalf of an insecticide called Flit.

The breakthrough came in 1937, when an old Dartmouth friend, an editor at Vanguard Press, persuaded his boss to publish “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” a book that twenty-seven other publishing houses had turned down. This was followed by a steady stream of Dr. Seuss books, including the great political trilogy “The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins” (1938), “The King’s Stilts” (1939), and “Bartholomew and the Oobleck” (1949), and two classic studies of identity, “Horton Hatches the Egg” (1940) and “Horton Hears a Who!” (1954). And so in 1954, when John Hersey published a piece in Life deploring the books used in public schools to teach children how to read—he called them “pallid primers [with] abnormally courteous, unnaturally clean boys and girls”—he mentioned Dr. Seuss as one of the “imaginative geniuses” whom publishers might turn to in the hope of enriching the books they produced for the schools. In 1955, one of those publishers took Hersey’s advice.

This was William Spaulding, director of the education division at Houghton Mifflin. Spaulding had read Hersey’s article. He had also read a best-seller called “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” which had come out that year. “Why Johnny Can’t Read” was, similarly, an attack on primers, which it described as “horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless, tasteless little readers, the stuff and guff about Dick and Jane or Alice and Jerry visiting the farm and having birthday parties and seeing animals in the zoo and going through dozens and dozens of totally unexciting middle-class, middle-income, middle-I.Q. children’s activities that offer opportunities for reading ‘Look, look’ or ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘Come, come’ or ‘See the funny, funny animal.’ “

The author was Rudolf Franz Flesch, an Austrian émigré with a Ph.D. from Teachers College. His point wasn’t just that the Dick and Jane and Alice and Jerry readers were boring; his point was that they were based on a flawed pedagogy. This was the theory of word recognition—the idea that children learn words by memorizing them. Flesch argued that this was an absurd way to teach reading, since it left the child without resources when confronted with an unfamiliar word. The correct method, Flesch believed, was phonics, teaching children the sounds that letters and groups of letters make—he maintained that there are forty-four such sounds in English—so that they will be able to figure out unfamiliar words. Ultimately, of course, we do memorize words; we don’t stop to sound them out. But Flesch thought that people could get to that stage a lot faster if they started with phonics.

Flesch claimed that American children advanced much more slowly in reading than European children did (this was in the days when Americans still cared what Europeans thought of them); and he suggested that the failure of the public schools was a threat to democracy and the American dream, since it deprived poor and middle-class children of the quality of education available to the affluent. Flesch also asserted that “first- and second-graders in our public schools are not taught to read at all, as shown by the fact that there isn’t a single book on the market that they can manage to read by themselves,” and this hint of an unexploited class of consumers is undoubtedly what inspired Spaulding to invite Theodor Geisel to dinner. “Write me a story that first-graders can’t put down!” he told him.