On a rainy Sunday in New York City in October 1935, Munro Leaf, an editor at the book publisher Frederick A. Stokes Company, picked up a legal pad and dashed off a story for his friend, the illustrator Robert Lawson. Spun out in forty minutes across six handwritten pages, the draft centered on a young Spanish bull—chosen, Leaf would later say, because “mice and cats and bunnies were played out.”

Leaf had never been to Spain, and the only Spaniards he could think of were the monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, so he named his protagonist after the king. Ferdinand is an unlikely hero. Instead of jousting with the other bulls, he prefers to sit quietly under a cork tree and smell the flowers. When bullring scouts see him leaping and snorting after he sits on a bee and gets stung, they take him away to Madrid, convinced that they have found the fiercest bull of all. Ferdinand proves more than a match for the bellicose posturing of the matador and his crew: when they release him into the ring to fight, he simply sits down to enjoy the smell wafting from all the flowers in the hair of the lovely ladies in the stands. In the end he returns to his favorite cork tree in the pasture. Look closely at Leaf’s handwritten manuscript—on view starting May 9 in “Under the Cork Tree: The Story of Ferdinand,” an exhibition I curated at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art honoring the book’s ninetieth anniversary—and you can see that his original title was The Story of Ferdinand the Fierce, but that he erased the last two words.

Twelve years older than Leaf, Lawson was an established illustrator who had worked on more than a few now-forgotten children’s books, as well as a respected fine-art etcher. Inspired by his hero, Arthur Rackham, a leading figure in the British Golden Age of Illustration, his work was populated with gnomes and fairies. Alas for Lawson, the Depression killed the market for etching, and by 1935 he was in need of work. As Leaf said in a speech at The New York Times National Book Fair in 1937, he wrote Ferdinand “in the hope it would amuse [Lawson] enough to create pictures that would provide a quiet laugh.” His tale did much more, pulling his friend out of a creative slump.

Leaf and Lawson brought the book to May Massee, the powerhouse editor who established children’s divisions at Doubleday and, by the time of Ferdinand’s publication, Viking Press. The Viking team had reservations. Worrying that the book might cause controversy given the political upheaval in Spain, they suggested putting off publication until “the world settles down,” as Margaret Leaf later recalled. Viking’s cofounder and president, Harold K. Guinzburg, preferred a different children’s title about an enormous yellow dog: “Ferdinand is a nice little book, but Giant Otto will live forever,” he reportedly said. Still, Leaf and Lawson insisted on pressing forward. The book debuted in September 1936, just six weeks after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, with a modest print run of 5,200. An individual copy sold for one dollar.^*

Just as he had made an accidental debut in the bullring, Ferdinand was soon thrust onto the international stage. Rightly or wrongly, readers understood the book against the backdrop of the conflict raging in Spain and the tensions that would shortly erupt into World War II; they responded to its peaceable hero according to their political priors. Some attacked the friendly bull for his pacifism, prompting a defense from The New York Times: “There are those who love Ferdinand for his own sake, and don’t care whether he is a Nazi or a Communist, so long as he is true to himself.” The kerfuffle became the subject of a January 1938 “Talk of the Town” piece in The New Yorker. “Ferdinand has provoked all sorts of after-dinner conversations,” it remarked. “Some say he’s a rugged individualist, some say he’s a ruthless Fascist who wanted his own way and got it, others say the tale is a satire on sit-down strikes—you see the idea.”

Leaf was mystified. In his speech at the book fair in 1937, he described how Viking had been bombarded with letters alleging “that here was something alarming, being spread under the cloak of juvenile literature.” Was Ferdinand “Red propaganda” or “Fascist propaganda” or an artifact of “subversive pacifism”? Or, as at least one women’s club complained, “an unworthy satire of the peace movement”? Leaf rejected any such readings. The book, he later said, “was propaganda, all right. But propaganda for laughter only.”

All the controversy drove sales. By the end of its first year Ferdinand had sold 80,000 copies; by the following December it had outstripped Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind on the best-seller list. Life magazine called it “the greatest juvenile classic since Winnie the Pooh” and reported that adults were often buying the book “largely for their own pleasure and amusement.”

Urbane readers in New York weren’t the only ones who perceived Ferdinand as a parable. In Spain, the book was banned until Franco’s death in 1975. In Germany, the Nazis had it burned as “degenerate democratic propaganda.” (After the war the Jewish journalist Jella Lepman, founder of the International Youth Library, worked with the US Army to distribute 30,000 copies to German children.) For Gandhi, the book encapsulated the philosophy of ahimsa—nonviolence. Eleanor Roosevelt also professed herself an admirer; as The Washington Postrecalled on Ferdinand’s fiftieth anniversary, in her keynote speech at the 1937 Newbery Medal award dinner, the first lady apologized for not having read that year’s winner (Ruth Sawyer’s Roller Skates) since the story of the bull was “the only children’s book she had read recently.” Her husband had asked that a copy be sent to the White House. In the decades to come, as the Post reported, there were periodic calls “for Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.”

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What can explain Ferdinand’s status in its own moment—and its enduring popularity today? Part of the answer surely lies in the beauty of the book itself. The gemlike simplicity of Leaf’s fable was matched by the wit and originality of Lawson’s drawings, a complete suite of which will soon be on view at the Carle Museum. Full of playful touches, like the sly correspondence between the decorative patches on the matadors’ costumes and the markings on the equally cocksure young bulls, the illustrations benefited from the etcher’s discipline of the burin and the drypoint needle; they have the balance and certainty of a Dürer engraving. Lawson makes masterful use of the white of the page to give his compositions breadth and light, and he employs startling points of view. One drawing is a close-up of the bee perched on a head of clover, warily eyeing the bull’s descending frame; another, after the fateful sting, shows only Ferdinand’s flying hooves as he high-tails it out of there.

But Ferdinand also quickly acquired a life beyond the page, thanks in large part to Walt Disney, who recognized a good investment when he saw one. He bought the rights in 1937 and put his team to work launching Ferdinand into an even wider public consciousness. In the lead-up to the 1938 release of the animated short film Ferdinand the Bull, the studio filled airwaves with “The Ferdinand Waltz” (“He was gentle and kind/And his moo was refined/Which the rest of the bulls all resented”), and green-lit Ferdinand toys, games, and cereal-box cutouts, along with Ferdinand Castile soap and even a Cartier brooch for $50. That year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade featured a giant Ferdinand balloon; the Rose Parade in California a few months later included Ferdinand and the matador on a float covered in red and white flowers that mimicked the book’s jacket.

In the cartoon, which won an Academy Award, Disney not only voiced Ferdinand’s mother but provided the model for the preening matador. The animators—Art Babbitt, Jack Campbell, Ward Kimball, Ham Luske, Fred Moore, and Bill Tytla—caricatured one another, too, depicting themselves as the picadors and banderilleros. The film was a hit; a reviewer for Life opined that Ferdinand was “a completely charming creature…who threatens to supplant Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and The Lone Ranger’s Silver as the most beloved animal of the movies.”

If Leaf and Lawson’s bull proved to be a cash cow, he was also a cipher for audience anxieties. Right from the start, as Bruce Handy has noted in a New Yorker essay about the culture wars that Ferdinand inspired, these included debates over gender and masculinity. Look magazine called Ferdinand “that flower-sniffing sissy of Spain”; in the Freudian journal American Imago, a psychiatrist analyzed poor Ferdinand as “an eternal child”—no bad thing—and concluded that the tale was “a clear cut castration threat.” Even Ernest Hemingway took a swing in The Faithful Bull, a one-page story published in 1951 in Holiday Magazine: “One time there was a bull and his name was not Ferdinand, and he cared nothing for flowers. He loved to fight and he fought with all the other bulls of his own age, or any age, and he was a champion.” Hemingway’s bull falls in love with a cow and refuses to perform with all others at stud; his owner sends him to the ring, where he dies fighting, to general admiration.

Digs at Ferdinand’s performance of masculinity got under Leaf’s skin even more than the charge that his story was a work of political propaganda. In a 1939 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Leaf objected to the idea “that because Ferdinand only smelled the flowers and wouldn’t fight he, Leaf, must bear resemblance to one of the softest-petaled and most delicate of garden flowers.” Leaf wanted it known that he had played lacrosse and even won a boxing championship at Harvard.

Over the decades Ferdinand lost heat as a political symbol. The McCarthy era furnished Americans with more overt targets for their anti-Communist sentiment—and pacifism, while seen as unpatriotic, was not the flashpoint it had been when world war threatened. With the rise of second-wave feminism and the gay liberation struggle, it came to seem quaint to litigate gender norms via a fictional bull, although Ferdinand still finds himself enlisted occasionally to prove other political points. A 2019 cartoon by John Darkow in the Columbia Missourian depicts Donald Trump waving a cape labeled “Ukraine call” at a bull inscribed with the word “Democrats,” who is sitting under a tree and smelling a flower. “If this doesn’t get me impeached,” the matador-president says in a speech bubble, “I don’t know what I have to do!”

A story that reflected the fears and hopes of its day continues, somehow, to reflect those of our own. In 2017 Twentieth Century Fox released Carlos Saldanha’s Ferdinand, a full-length computer-animated feature starring John Cena. The movie translates Ferdinand’s defiance of expectations into a contemporary idiom of self-acceptance: “Weird is the new normal,” he proclaims proudly. None of the adaptations and tributes can measure up to the original, but they have helped bring Ferdinand to new generations: in ninety years the book has sold upward of two million copies worldwide across more than two dozen languages.

Its hero, for his part, continues to embody the peaceful life, the pleasure of simple things, and the quiet power of holding on to one’s integrity.In one of the book’s best-known drawings, Ferdinand, still a calf, sits in the shade of his beloved tree, watching his peers locking horns in the distance. Just as Lawson had magnified the bee’s size and stature, here he makes the belligerent young bulls small as ants—no bigger than the flowers that spring up beside Ferdinand or the bunches of corks that hang over his head.