Household Poisons & Dr. Seuss

by Will Allen

Pesticide advertising flared out of control after World War I. The United States was awash in ads, with practically every rock, barn, and flat space covered with promotions and propaganda. Amidst this visual assault, corporate advertisers desperately sought gimmicks to make their products leap out at the consumer and rise above the crowd.

As cities grew, advertisers hit on a few pivotal strategies that dramatically and permanently expanded the market demand of both city and country residents. One of the most successful and innovative pesticide sales campaigns was for Flit, a fly and mosquito killer.

In the 1920s, America’s most common household spray device was a hand-pump sprayer with a pressurized canister. Each sprayer had a half-pint, pint, or quart reservoir with a bicycle-like pump attached to spray the poison. By the early 1930s, this pump became popularly known as the “Flit gun.” Although Flit was the name of Standard Oil’s bug spray, it also became the generic name for this type of pump, due to the popularity of the bug spray. The Flit campaign was so successful that by the mid-1930s airplane crop-dusters were called “flying Flit guns.”

Standard Oil had grown to dominate the world’s petroleum industry. In the late 1920s, the company needed a distinctive advertising campaign to make Flit rise above the sea of advertisements for other bug killers. Standard Oil was used to being number one in sales with its pesticide spray, and the company wanted to remain on top.

After seeing two 1927 cartoons that featured Flit guns as props, Standard Oil hired the cartoonist, Theodore Seuss Geisel, to create Flit advertisements. Geisel subsequently came to be known as Dr. Seuss. For the next 15 years, Seuss’s humorous ads, which were really commercials in the form of cartoons, appeared in thousands of weekly and hundreds of daily newspapers and magazines.

At the time of his hiring, Seuss was a well-known but underpaid “screwball” cartoonist writing humorous copy and drawing cartoons for Judge, a national humor magazine. With his cartoons for Standard’s bug killer, Dr. Seuss turned Flit and the Flit gun into household necessities. His success, which kept Flit in the leadership position in the marketplace, also made the incredibly prolific Geisel economically comfortable and afforded him enough freedom to gestate his later cartoon masterpieces.

The Seuss taglines—“Quick Henry, the Flit!,” “Swat the Fly!,” “Kill the Tick!”—became nationally known slogans. Seuss helped America become friendly with poisons; we could laugh at ourselves while we went about poisoning things. In the process, the public grew comfortable with the myth that pesticides were absolutely necessary.

The Flit campaign was an advertising stroke of genius, and luck. Seuss helped America become friendly with poisons; we could laugh at ourselves while we went about poisoning things. In the process, the public grew comfortable with the myth that pesticides were absolutely necessary.Gradually, American householders came to depend on their Flit guns. Whether filled with Flit, Bif, Black Leaf 40, or arsenic, the home spray device had become an essential tool in the public’s mind. The petroleum solvent that Seuss was selling as Flit, however, was very dangerous and probably carcinogenic in large doses—though mild when compared to the World War II chemicals that would be sprayed from Flit guns on everything from bedbugs to flies, mosquitoes, and humans after the end of the war.

Considering the reverence with which Dr. Seuss is held today, it is difficult to envision him as a pivotal figure in the public acceptance of poisonous pesticides. Nevertheless, some historians feel that his campaign was largely responsible for popularizing dangerous pesticides to the American public. Adelynne Whitaker, the author of A History of Pesticide Regulation in the U.S., contends that the Dr. Seuss cartoon campaign had the effect of increasing pesticide use tenfold for the nation’s families.

Geisel must have known that Flit’s cartoons and his World War II cartoons for DDT had an enormous impact on the public’s use of pesticides and acceptance of DDT. One of Seuss’s later books, The Lorax, with its save-theenvironment theme, is ironic when compared to impact of the Flit cartoons. Perhaps Dr. Seuss realized his earlier mistakes and indiscretions with Standard Oil’s Flit and tried to make amends with The Lorax.

^{Reprinted from The War on Bugs by Will Allen, with permission from Chelsea Green Publishing, www.chelseagreen.com.}