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

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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.

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

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 Gene.

And for the record, it's Stacy's mom by 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, Jean 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 Joffey Numeroth.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

On 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.

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.

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?

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

And I'm Shana Ra.

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 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 Dakota Ring, if you read a kid a book, will they enlist in the culture wars?

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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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

Mike Lawler is a U.S.

representative from New York.

He's actually read the book to children on school visits.

And obviously from the standpoint of kind of Americanism, we wanted to teach people

how to earn for themselves and how to be able to provide for themselves ultimately.

We've given them a lot of cookies.

North Dakota State Senator Judy Estenson.

And the bottom line is it has not worked.

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.

If you give him a cookie, he's 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 U.S.

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 satisfied.

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

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 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, 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.

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 stand-up routine about people expecting treats for just doing basic things.

I take care of my kids.

You're supposed to be a dumb motherfucker.

I ain't never been to jail.

What you want a cookie?

Sue, 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.

Stop it!

What you want, cookie?

Comedian Hannibal Burris also riffed on the phrase in 2010.

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?

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, this is a story about charity and self-reliance.

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 Numeroff published the book.

1985, a time of big hair, bigger mobile phones, and Ronald Reagan.

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

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.

Obviously, something is desperately wrong with our welfare system.

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 Ehrenfreund 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.

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.

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 gonna want 10 more if you give liberals a mandate for something they'll take 10 more that's how it is right now we're living in a bizarre children's book if if you uh give a liberal an inch

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.

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Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Laura Numeroff lives in a bungalow in California.

A vintage Jeep sits outside.

And inside is what she calls my wacky room.

And I dare you to describe this.

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.

I just sold my 49th book.

Well, I've been doing it since 75.

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.

So I don't know if you've ever heard of the band Night Ranger.

They did a song called Sister Christian.

Yeah, oh, I know that song.

Yeah, so I lived with the drummer for three years.

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.

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.

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.

And then another image popped into Laura's mind.

The iconic Mrs.

Fields cookie being eaten by a mouse.

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.

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.

So

thank God for the boring car trip.

The publisher asked for 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, Catherine,

if you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to want a glass of milk.

We got to get this plane on the ground.

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

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.

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 are going to read.

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?

Not at all.

Oh my God, I'm like 900 degrees away from that.

That would never cross my mind at all.

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

I'm afraid to answer that.

I know

after we we get off, there'll be a knock at my door.

Guys in trench coats.

No, I wasn't.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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 kind of comes with the territory.

Putting political ideology on a picture book?

It's almost a tradition.

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

When we come come back, the long history of grown-ups co-opting kids' books.

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If you give a mouse a cookie, isn't the first time a children's story has gotten caught up in a culture war.

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

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.

Because obviously children's literature is important.

It's how we teach them what we think is important culturally.

So a lot of weight is always put on children's books.

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

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 late 1700s or teaching kids today 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.

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 propaganda.

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 Monroe Leaf was published in 1936.

It's about a bull in Spain who is very peaceful, unlike the other bulls in the pasture who all dream of getting to Madrid to fight in the big bull ring there.

But Ferdinand has no interest in fighting.

He just likes to sit around in the pasture and smell flowers.

I like it better here, where 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!

Wait!

What's the matter?

Be fierce!

Come on, come on!

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 cork tree, smelling the flowers just quietly.

He is very happy.

It's a lovely, sweet story.

It's about the power of saying no.

It's about the power of being true to yourself.

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.

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.

Madrid's streets are patrolled by government tanks as barricaded insurgents rake the roads with rifle fire.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Monroe Leaf.

Like Laura Numeroff, he was never trying to be political.

He just wanted to tell a story.

about a lovable animal.

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.

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.

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.

I feel terribly misunderstood, and I am

really troubled.

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.

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.

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.

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 his real message that government assistance benefits do not make people lazy.

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.

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.

Quote, 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.

But it's also the line people took to mean that Laura Numiroff intentionally wrote an anti-welfare screed, and he regrets that.

He says he owes her an apology.

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.

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

Despair.

You know,

it was a moment for me to question

myself, you know, and to ask

what I had done as a journalist.

Max is actually not a journalist anymore.

He's a historian, a postdoc at Kenyon College.

How do you feel about it now?

Well, I hope people will read the book.

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's.

He's.

G a

gun.

Going.

Going to

ask

for

a

glass of milk.

You just look 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 the 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.

Like 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 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 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 Dakota Ring.

I'm Shana Roth.

And I'm Willab Haskin.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.

This episode was written by Shana Roth.

It was edited by Katie Shepard and Evan Chung.

It was produced by Sophie Codner.

I produced Decodering with Evan, Katie, and Max Friedman.

Derek John is executive producer.

Merit Jacob is 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.

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