🐂 Ferdinand still refuses to fight after 90 years

The Story of Ferdinand remains one of the most quietly radical children’s books ever published. Ferdinand is a bull who does not want to fight. While the other bulls run, jump, and butt their heads together, Ferdinand prefers to sit under a cork tree and smell flowers. His refusal to perform aggression makes him gentle, but not weak.

This year marked the book’s 90th anniversary as a cultural lightning rod. Published in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Europe, the story was quickly interpreted as pacifist, communist, fascist, anti-fascist, patriotic, subversive, or simply kind. Franco’s Spain banned it, and Hitler reportedly denounced it as “degenerate democratic propaganda.” Gandhi, Thomas Mann, H.G. Wells, and the Roosevelts admired it.

Its most enduring line still feels fresh: Ferdinand “liked to sit just quietly and smell the flowers.” In a time of renewed militarism, culture wars, bullying, nationalism, and pressure to perform hardness, Ferdinand’s quiet self-possession remains powerful. He is a hero of nonviolence, inwardness, and the right to live according to one’s nature.