Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Charlie Brown's America

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

Cartoonist Charles Schulz  wrote and drew Peanuts every day for half a century. In his new book Charlie Brown's America, Historian Blake Scott Ball uses the strip (and the fan mail archive at the Schulz museum) to illuminate the Wishy-Washy politics of Cold War America.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. The most important American artist of the second half of the 20th century was the cartoonist Charles Schultz. And this, dear listener, is not a statement of preference. It is a statement of fact because Peanuts, Charles Schultz's comic strip, debuted on October 2, 1950 and ended on February 13, 2000. Charles Schultz wrote and drew his comic strip every day during the second half of the 20th century. But there were also TV specials and movies and toys and gigantic parade balloons and advertising campaigns. His characters, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy, Peppermint Patty, and Schroeder were everywhere. Millions upon millions of Americans had a relationship with Peanuts, which really was a relationship with Charles Schultz as all of the characters emanated from his own inner world.

So if someone can point to another American artist who achieved more than this, then sure, I'm happy to offer a correction. But otherwise, I'm sticking with my statement. Charles Schultz was the most important American artist of the second half of the 20th century. Today, though, it is difficult to explain to someone who didn't grow up in a world of comic strips or even daily newspapers just how powerful of a platform Charles Schultz had for his art. But I recently came across a new book that helps. It's called Charlie Brown's America, and it's written by Blake Scott Ball, an assistant professor of history at Huntington University in Montgomery, Alabama. His book, he told me, began with a desire to study historical events through the everyday lives of people who live them. I was looking for an avenue to get closer to an everyday experience of the second half of the 20th century after World War II.

And I thought, you know, what better source than Peanuts with it, as you pointed out, being every day for 50 years? I mean, it's like a rolling visual journal of American life and society during those five decades. It's really incredible just as a primary source of American history. So I have to confess that when an image of your book cover popped up in my news feed, I kind of did a double take because the book is called Charlie Brown's America,

The Popular Politics of Peanuts. And politics just isn't a word I would associate with peanuts. In fact, Schultz seemed to go to great lengths in his life to distance himself from politics. He famously hated the comic strip Doonesbury for precisely this reason. He believed the cartoonist Gary Trudeau was using the comics page to score political points. And Gary Groth, the publisher of The Complete Peanuts, noted this as well when he interviewed Schultz in the late 80s. You cite this interview in your book. One of the most remarkable things about the strip, Groth said, is that there are no perceivable ideologies. Schultz agreed, chuckling,

sort of a wishy-washiness. It's your own fault because you're so wishy-washy. How could anybody ever be in love with boring, dull, wishy-washy old Chuck? Wishy-washiness is, of course, the defining character trait of Charlie Brown. He lets all the strong characters in the strip, like Lucy and Peppermint Patty, push him around. And even his friend Linus and his dog Snoopy are embarrassed of this trait, and they often take advantage of it. But wishy-washiness as political ideology, what exactly does that mean? mean. Yeah. So Charles Schultz evaluated the changing world around him not so much in the staunch, strict ideologies of a certain set of coherent beliefs that are infallible and unbendable, but instead, he sort of evaluated things on a much more personal and human and circumstantial, almost a social pragmatism. to the audience as it is sort of suggesting questions, reflecting upon concerns, fears,

uncertainties of the world that they're living in. I see the wishy-washiness of Peanuts really facilitating a place, a space for conversation. And we see this in the fan mail that comes by the hundreds and thousands of letters over the years. Yeah. You spent a lot of time at the Schulz Museum digging through their archives of fan mail for this project. And in many instances, you found direct evidence of this space. Readers writing in to talk with Schultz about their different, sometimes conflicting, interpretations of the comic. For example, when Linus read from the Bible at Christmastime, evangelicals wrote in to voice their support for what they took as Christian fundamentalism. But atheists and hippies wrote in as well to commend Linus for speaking out about the hyper-commercialization

of Christmas. So this wishy-washiness seems to work really well for Schultz as an artistic strategy. But did it really work as political strategy? Here's the World War I flying ace climbing into the cockpit of a Sopwith camel. You make the case that Schultz introduced Snoopy's most famous alter ego, the World War I flying ace, in the mid-60s as a way of commenting on the Vietnam War. And as much as I love Snoopy's fight with the Red Baron, I can totally understand why so many people, myself included, missed this, because it was a connection that Schultz made hard to spot on purpose. Yeah, the World War I flying ace is not explicitly about Vietnam, but in the larger picture, we can definitely see Vietnam as this sort of looming

conundrum in the background of Peanuts and of American life. And so this story of Snoopy is impacted by what's going on in the war. His mission is to find the Red Baron and shoot him down. It starts off kind of, you could almost read in 65, this sort of heroic ideal. You know, here's Snoopy. He's proud. He's decked out. He's flying into battle.

And there's this sort of irony in that he keeps losing, but it's played largely as a joke. But as this goes along, the story becomes more and more visceral for Snoopy. It becomes more and more visual. Increasingly, the setting for Snoopy's imagination becomes darker. We actually see the actual battlefield. So the neighborhood that the kids live in turns from suburbia to like these blown out trenches and barbed wire and bombs and all these sorts of things. And the way that this storyline evolves really illustrates what this wishy-washiness was about Peanuts, because what I see happening there is really Charles Schultz sort of mapping with the general population, who just a couple of years earlier was generally in support of the war, not particularly concerned about it to any high level,

and yet it is very quickly shifted and there's a momentum heading against the war, against those who are administering the war. Yeah, but as you point out, at the very moment this anti-war momentum picks up, Charles Schultz kills this storyline. And if he knew or was aware that more and more of his readers were making this connection between Vietnam

and Snoopy's fight with the Red Baron, then this decision to kill the story is totally wishy-washy, almost cowardly. But that's not what you see. You see principle. Yeah. Explain. You wouldn't think at the height of success for

a storyline that you would just cut it off. But yet that's really what Charles Schultz does. There is this kind of precipitous gain in market share, in readership in the last five years of the 1960s, and in no small part to the fact that increasingly Snoopy is becoming a leading character, and Snoopy is becoming a leading character oftentimes in the alter ego of the Flying Ace. And so these things are very much tied together. But in 1970, Snoopy very definitively deserts the war. And Charles Schultz was asked about that. And he explicitly in this interview connects it to what was going on in the Vietnam War. He said, we were just finding this was such a gruesome war that it didn't seem like the kind of thing to be made light of in a comic strip. And that was in itself a subtle but

powerful statement, I think. Let's talk about another more overt political statement, one that readers couldn't miss. In 1968, Schultz added a new character, a black character to the strip, Franklin. And I have to say, I was really blown away to learn the backstory behind this introduction. You found an exchange of letters from a reader who basically made the case to Schultz that he had to do this. The introduction of Franklin comes in the summer of 1968. and this is a really weird time for pop culture in America. There's been a recognition that some of the older racialized negative stereotypes of, say, Disney's Song of the South and things like this, there's been a recognition that, okay, those things are openly offensive and they are out of sync with the times.

But they had not yet reached a place where popular creators, whether in cartooning, in television or film, they not yet really reached a place where they knew what to replace it with. And so there's a period here in the mid-60s where, in large part, black characters disappear. And it's in this context, in the spring of 1968, Charles Schultz receives a letter from a stay-at-home mom in Southern California by the name of Harriet Glickman. And she's on this one-woman campaign to try to effect change in the popular culture that her kids are consuming at home, whether on TV, she writes to different TV studios and movie production companies, but she's also writing to cartoonists because she sees her kids enjoying the newspaper cartoons and comic books. And so

one of the artists that she writes to is Charles Schultz. And she asked Charles Schultz to introduce black characters into Peanuts. And Charles Schultz responds that he is very much in sympathy with her concern, but he feels personally and had, he said for a number of years, personally conflicted about whether he's the right person to do this, given the fact that he's a white man, he's from the Midwest, he grew up in a largely white community and was not sure if he was the right voice to do this. Well, Harriet Glickman takes the fact that Schultz is interested or that he sympathizes with her viewpoint, takes that as an opportunity to

keep pushing. And so she writes again and she says, well, I understand your concern about potentially being patronizing to African-American readers. So why don't I put you in touch with some friends from my community, some African-American families that could tell you their perspective on this? So she does. She begins to collect letters from Black friends in her communities and associates that she was working with on social reform campaigns in Southern California. And Schultz is kind of, it's almost like a light bulb goes off, this kind of realization that while he might not be the perfect person to know exactly how to write a black voice, he is perfectly situated to help move the culture, to help break the barrier, break the stalemate in the industry, in the

entertainment industry of not representing the black audience. And so he takes the step and he takes it in a very Schultzian way. It's subtle, but it's powerful. He introduces Franklin at the beach with Charlie Brown. They're just, They're two boys in their swim trunks, clear as day. One is white, the other is black, and yet their interaction is just instant and kind of natural. At the end of their week together, building Sandcastle together, Charlie Brown invites Franklin to come visit him at his home. Before long, Franklin moves to the neighborhood, in fact. Yeah, I feel we should mention how conservative the comics page was as a platform, especially at this moment. Cartoonists like Schultz worked for syndicates

who in turn sold the strips to individual papers, and the editors of these individual papers were very vocal about what they did and didn't like so when Schultz put Franklin into the same school system as some of the other white kids a number of southern editors started complaining and the syndicate even approached Schultz with the idea that perhaps he should stop this storyline with Franklin. To which Schultz responds, how about you print the strip the way I draw it or I quit? Yeah.

Now, I feel like this statement, which you quote in your book, reveals not just his conviction, but also an awareness of his own power. You know, it kind of brings some of the wishy-washiness of the whole thing to the surface because by making Franklin such a generic, personalityless character, Schultz doesn't really have anything to offer except this idea of colorblindness, which is something we're still dealing with today

in popular culture, especially in TV. We get shows with diverse casts, but never an acknowledgement that these diverse characters have like actual racial identities. Yes. And it kind of pains me to think that Charles Schultz, through this act of conviction,

may have paved the way for this wishy-washy approach to diversity and popular culture. Yeah, that's a fabulous point. You know, colorblindness in its execution in culture is always in danger of sort of falling into the sort of simple trap of just an eye test, right? Does it look diverse? Rather, the question of whose voices and whose stories and whose perspective and whose lens, you know, are we using or giving power to in these spaces. And that was an area where I think you're exactly right. The American society and culture was really struggling with and still struggling with as we're having our critical race theory arguments in 2021. And it was one that Charles Schultz really struggled with. And while I give him great credit for the really important and influential and brave stand that he takes with Franklin, I also explore some of the ways in which Franklin in this effort kind of falls short of delivering exactly what Harriet Glickman and others were calling for, which was an expansion of the voices in the conversation.

So, yeah, absolutely. There's sort of positive elements to the wishy-washiness of this wishy-washy ideology, but they're also negatives, things that get overlooked or undervalued because of that wishy-washiness. Hi, Chuck. Hi, Peppermint Patty. Hi, Franklin. Hi, Marcy. Hi, Chuck. There's another character Charles Schultz introduces around the same time, Peppermint Patty and her friend Marcy, who both become lesbian icons. But it's really more Peppermint Patty, and she's still one today. And I imagine that Schultz must have been aware of this interpretation. And I feel that if it really bothered him, he would have forced Patty to

wear a dress or get with the program. But obviously, he was 100% behind this lovely character. And he allowed her to forge her own way and chafe at things like dress codes and people telling her that she had to be more like a normal girl. But I feel like in this character, with Peppermint Patty, I feel, you know, this is an example of where we can see wishy-washiness working for him, not just artistically, but politically. It's almost like you can see the roots of a don't ask, don't tell policy with Patty. Yeah, that's, you know, that is a great point. And in some ways, it almost connects to that colorblind ideology with Franklin of sort of, we're going to meet on our broadest, most basic terms, and we're going to appreciate our community and our

togetherness, but we're not going to delve into our differences or our places of conflict. Wow. All right, Marcy, I hope you're satisfied. You've destroyed Chuck's guest cottage. It's not a guest cottage, sir. It's a dog house. And Snoopy is not a funny looking kid with a big nose. He's a beagle. When are you going to face up to reality? I think Peppermint Patty is probably one of the most complex characters in the whole 50 year story. Where Charlie Brown always struggles to articulate his feelings to the person that he loves, Peppermint Patty almost seems to be conflicted over, and perhaps because Schultz felt constrained in expressing some of these things, but she's conflicted in even expressing how it is that she feels. And so even her expressions of love oftentimes come out as much as expressions of just

deep internal frustration, which I think for a lot of folks in the LGBTQ plus community that that's very relatable. That feeling of not having the vocabulary or the freedom to express and explore what these complicated feelings are and what they mean about who you are. Still waiting, sir? I hate to disappoint you, sir, but I saw Charles and he's not coming. Marcy, you don't know about these things. He'll be here. Charles doesn't even know you called last night. He was asleep. The kid's fallen for me. He said he'd come for me today. You wouldn't understand.

I'm trying to tell you, sir. He's not coming. Look, Marcy, you just tootled along. I'll sit here and wait for my date. If that's the way you want it, sir, don't stay up all night. Yeah, yeah. Did you find any letters where Schultz actually, you know, corresponded with fans who were appreciative of this connection that they made regarding Peppermint Patty's

sexuality? Every instance I found, he stayed pretty far away from that discussion. That said, from the late 50s onward, Schultz had renegotiated his contract to take control of all of the licensing of the Peanuts characters. And there are a number of occasions like, for example, a song, what was the name of the band in the mid 60s? The Royal Guardsmen. Yeah. Creative Associates and Schultz took them to court to get them to do proper licensing to do that song. And they got it worked out and they were able to do that. But the point is, Schultz was not above pursuing legal remedies to people using his characters in ways that he did not approve. And the fact that this proliferation in gay culture

of kind of reappropriating the character of Peppermint and Patty and Marcy, the fact that that is allowed to continue without really any kind of redress from the Schultz folks kind of signifies that he at least saw this as a allowable reading of the characters uh even if he did not publicly endorse that you know so yeah so so i i think there's i think there's something i think there's something there again it's a super subtle way of voicing a political opinion but yeah i i buy this one um one I like it

so Schultz draws the comic until his death in 2000 and I really am fond of that last decade of the strip because in the 90s many of his peers like Bill Watterson and Gary Larson throw in the towel or maybe they just see the future they of what the Internet's gonna do to newspapers and comic strips. But Schultz is not a quitter. He continues until he physically has to stop. In fact, he passes away on the very evening before the last peanut strip runs in newspapers. But after reading your book, I feel like the year 1988 is also important when it comes to endings.

Because this is the year that the cultural dominance of Peanuts starts to decline. Who is he? That's General Washington, General George Washington. He's going to preside over the convention. On the surface, 1988 looks like a big year. No, Snoopy, he's all right. In fact, there's a bigget, multi-part animated TV series called This Is America, Charlie Brown. But this series, you write, tries and fails to deal with some pretty big shifts, cultural and political shifts, that are taking place in America at this moment. What happened? Well, first of all, it was history-making in that it was the first animated miniseries in American history.

And what this This is America, Charlie Brown, what it attempts to do is to tell the history of the country through the eyes and retelling of the Peanuts characters. And it's trying to, in some ways, bridge a gap between Reagan's America, this very hyper patriotic, very, you know, American exceptionalist kind of lens of, you know, here's what makes America great and unique out of all the nations of the world. With a counter to that, the sort of emerging, increasing look to how America can't really live up to its potential without identifying and dealing with and taking responsibility for its flaws and its missteps and its contradictions. Although my report is also about American music, it has a very serious side to it. Slavery, where people were owned like property, had lasted for 245 years in America.

And so these two things are uneasily embodied in the course of this miniseries, which goes from a religious origins of America in the Pilgrims story, through the Constitutional Convention, all the way to the space program in the 1980s. But also then through the voice of Franklin, dealing with the realities of slavery and its legacy in the second half of the 20th century. After I read your book, I went on YouTube to watch the series, and it was fascinating to see them put Franklin on stage to talk about slavery and black culture. But they also pan out to the audience, and we see that there is actually more than one black person in this universe.

Too little, too late, of course, but even watching this now, 30 years after it aired on television, I could still feel how out of sync with America it was at this time. But this might also have something to do with the fact that this is the very moment another cartoon family takes center stage. This changing of the cartoon guard, you can really feel this historic shift. Yeah, but the incredible thing, to a person, you look at interviews with Matt Groening, or you look at interviews with the South Park creators.

They all end up going back to Charles Schultz. And Peanuts was the one that inspired this way of sort of taking cartooning and using it to explore the deeper meanings and values and controversies of life. Even in this moment that that Schultz and Peanuts is sort of sort of sunsetting, it's giving birth to a whole new generation of media that goes goes well beyond Schultz's taste but certainly wouldn't be there and wouldn't have the couldn't have the the audience and influence that they do had it not been for that kind of landmark work of Charles Schultz. Blake Scott Ball's book is called Charlie Brown's America, The Popular Politics of Peanuts.

It's published by Oxford University Press. This episode was edited and produced by me, Benjamin Walker. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.