The subversive kids’ book loved by Gandhi and hated by Hitler

As a little kid, the one thing guaranteed to soothe my fears before bedtime was The Story of Ferdinand. It’s an illustrated children’s book, barely 35 pages long, yet it has both outraged and inspired people around the world for nearly a century...

Written on a whim one rainy afternoon in 1935 by American author Munro Leaf, The Story of Ferdinand is about a bull who spends his time smelling flowers in the shade while his peers all fight each other. Ferdinand’s mother worries for him, but she can see that he’s content.

One day a group of men arrives to pick the toughest bull to fight in the bullrings of Madrid. Ferdinand has no interest and instead sits under his favorite tree. But he gets stung by a bee and flails about so wildly that the men decide he’d be perfect to compete on the big stage...

I used to hate this part of the story. Seeing Ferdinand carted off to Madrid reminded me of being taken to school, where a minefield of bullies and short-tempered teachers filled me with dread. It was the reason I needed a calming bedtime story in the first place.

In Madrid, the banderilleros, the picadors, and the matador prepare to antagonize Ferdindand, but he simply sits down in the bullring and enjoys the smell of flowers worn by the audience. Frustrated at Ferdinand’s refusal to get riled up, the organizers end up carting him back to his tree.

Leaf wrote this sweet little tale for his illustrator friend Robert Lawson in under an hour. Although Viking Press (the book’s publisher) liked the story, they didn’t have high hopes for it and focused their promotional efforts elsewhere. Then something extraordinary happened…

Word of mouth took Ferdinand from selling a respectable 14,000 copies in its first year to knocking Gone With the Wind off the bestseller list. The book’s timing, coming within months of the Spanish Civil War’s outbreak in 1936, convinced people that it held a deeper message.

Ferdinand fuelled intense debate. Was it political propaganda or subversive pacifism? Hitler ordered copies to be burned; Spain banned it until Franco’s death in 1975. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt loved it, while Gandhi (who saw Ferdinand as a fellow figure of nonviolent resistance) named it his favorite book.

For years, many dismissed Ferdinand as a fragile sissy. They feared that the book’s popularity would lead to mollycoddled children. Thankfully, attitudes have changed. He’s now widely celebrated as an empowering figure of nonconformity: someone unafraid to be himself in the face of aggression.

Anxiety and nonconformity didn’t exist in my vocabulary as a child. I didn’t have a word for what I was grappling with. Ferdinand’s resolve felt empowering. His mother’s concerned acceptance gets overlooked in all the debate, but to me that was just as important. It was my mom’s subtle way of letting me know everything would be okay.