Rudolph the Dog-Earred Stereotype

It’s Rudolph Meme season again! You know the one I mean (above), a cheap pseudo-Marxist reading of the song that suggests your value, if you’re different, derives from your instrumental utility. I remember figuring that reading out fifteen years ago, as a sophomore-level English major excessively proud of having discovered inequality in classic literature. And like undergrads everywhere, I had to share my discovery with everyone.

I was wrong. And dumb.

I've suggested recently that it does songs a disservice to hear them without their context. Words received at the surface level as pretty awful these days come from a time where those words meant something very different. Songs have unique problems, since we listen passively, often while doing other things. But that makes it more important, not less, that we understand the historical milieu from which music originates.

In Rudolph’s case, that milieu is the Great Depression, and its kissing cousin, World War II. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” began life as a coloring booklet published as a supplement to the 1939 Montgomery Ward catalog. For readers younger than me, the catalogs published by the Sears & Roebuck or Montgomery Ward companies were the Amazon.com of their day, making luxury shopping and top-of-the-range goods available to Americans living outside major cities.

“Monkey Ward,” as people called it, published the first Rudolph story, written and illustrated by poorly-paid copywriter Robert L. May. Here’s where we get the first glimmerings of Rudolph’s backstory: according to one source, Robert May grew up in a relatively wealthy family that lost everything in the 1929 stock market crash. May took the Monkey Ward job because he needed the money, a problem compounded by needing to cover his wife’s very expensive cancer treatments.

So May was Jewish, at a time when anti-Semitism was still commonplace and socially acceptable in America. He was poor, and not only poor, but newly poor. And he had cancer in his family, at a time when Americans said “cancer” the way we now say “HIV.” Safe to say, this guy had firsthand experience with outsidership in a closed society.

Yes, the other reindeer mock Rudolph for being different. But if we recontextualize Rudolph’s difference from mere physical freakishness, we get a completely different reading. If we read Rudolph’s red nose as symbolic of Jewishness, poverty, or both, we see something completely different. Rudolph isn’t a nonconformist, as the popular meme above implies. He’s a member of an oppressed minority, whether oppressed by White people or by capitalism.

Take it further. We don’t know much about Robert May’s personal life and knowledge, but it’s conceivable he saw the connection between the red nose, a highly visible symbol of difference, and the yellow stars forced on his fellow Jews in Europe. The song doesn’t specify what “reindeer games” Rudolph couldn’t join. But European Jews couldn’t hold certain trades, own their own houses, or save money past fixed limits.

The parallels start getting chilling.

Like you, I grew up watching the 1964 stop-motion Rudolph special, one of the oldest programs that still regularly runs on network TV. That depicts Rudolph as the victim of routine schoolyard bullying, a rebel against postwar America’s White suburban mediocrity. In some ways this makes him almost a proto-hippie. It’s no coincidence that this special hit American airwaves just as the first Baby Boomers began reaching adulthood.

But both this adaptation, and the song we sang (written by May’s brother-in-law Johnny Marks), came along later. The song didn’t appear until 1949, ten years after May’s coloring book. The TV special didn’t debut for a full quarter-century after May’s story. They’re both distorted by America’s involvement in World War II, and the national realignment that happened afterward. Our understanding of Rudolph comes from second-generation stories with their own agenda.

Robert May’s original story, read in light of the impoverished Jewish experience in 1939, feels completely different. Rudolph becomes somebody not just mocked and belittled, but actively oppressed, because a tyrannical majority believes the power structure they’ve created is foreordained. Rudolph needs rescue by the North Pole’s national leader. But that leader won’t buck the system unless imminent emergency forces his hand.

So yeah, Rudolph isn’t a Marxist finger exercise. He’s a plea for leaders to stand against systemic injustice—coupled with an acknowledgement that they won’t unless they’re forced to. In that way, when we look at increases in racism, poverty, and war-mongering in Earth’s wealthiest nations today, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is arguably as relevant now as he’s ever been.

Follow-up: Rudolph the Dog-Earred Stereotype Part Two