Charlie Brown’s America
The Popular Politics of Peanuts
Blake Scott Ball
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ball, Blake Scott, author.
Title: Charlie Brown’s America : the popular politics of Peanuts / Blake Scott Ball. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020048676 (print) | LCCN 2020048677 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190090463 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190090487 (epub) | ISBN 9780190090494
Subjects: LCSH: Schulz, Charles M. (Charles Monroe), 1922–2000—Criticism and interpretation. | Schulz, Charles M. (Charles Monroe), 1922-2000. Peanuts. | Peanuts (Comic strip) | Comic books, strips, etc.—United States—Political aspects. Classification: LCC PN6727.S3 Z624 2021 (print) | LCC PN6727.S3 (ebook) | DDC 741.5/973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048676
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048677
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190090463.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
To Nana, who taught me to love reading, and to Dr. Nelson, who taught me to love history.
1. You’re a Good Man, Charles Schulz: The Making of an American Original
2. The Future Frightens Me: The Cold War Origins of Peanuts
3. Bless You for Charlie Brown: Peanuts and the Evangelical Counterculture
4. Crosshatch Is Beautiful: Franklin, Color-Blindness, and the Limits of Racial
5. Snoopy Is the Hero in Vietnam: Ambivalence, Empathy, and Peanuts’ Vietnam
6. I Believe in Conserving Energy: Peanuts, Nature, and an Environmental Ethos
7. “I Have a Vision, Charlie Brown”: Gender Roles, Abortion Rights, Sex Education, and Peanuts in the Age of the Women’s Movement
Acknowledgments
Like most kids, I grew up reading comics and cartoons. My family did not subscribe to the newspaper, but my grandmother would save the Sunday funny pages for when we came to visit. I loved to read Garfield, Blondie, Beetle Bailey, Hagar the Horrible, and the long-running action serial The Phantom. And I genuinely loved Peanuts, which often appeared at the top of the front page. Charles Schulz’s work, however, was not like the others. Snoopy was always entertaining. But something was different.
For starters, Peanuts was not always funny. A comic strip was supposed to be funny, wasn’t it? While characters like Lucy might have strong, clear opinions, Charlie Brown could be frustratingly indecisive. In most cases, it was downright confusing to a kid. This is why many of my most vivid memories of reading Peanuts involved asking my grandmother to explain what it meant and how that was supposed to be funny. As often as not she struggled to translate the subtleties and melancholy of the strip to me. The holiday television specials were just as perplexing. They were nothing like the animated superhero shows that I loved. There were no vibrant colors, no professional voice actors, and very little action. In short, Peanuts was an anomaly.
This book has been my journey to try and figure out Peanuts, and so many people have helped me along the way. I did not know who Andrew Huebner was when I arrived for a campus visit at the University of Alabama in the spring of 2009. After an engaging conversation about his ideas concerning cultural history, though, I knew I had found my path. Over the years, Andrew was both a mentor and a friend, enduring countless meetings to discuss some new trouble that plagued my thinking. He knew when to give me space and when to give me a push. He relentlessly critiqued my footnotes and marked every typo, and yet always left me feeling encouraged about the progress I was making. Getting to work with him was a supreme pleasure and I am thankful for all the time he spared for me. Bart Elmore was another mentor who had just come out of graduate school and knew exactly what I was going through. He took time to show me the ropes of academic life and public scholarship. His boundless energy and enthusiasm always lifted my spirits and gave me the courage to step out of my comfort zone and pursue higher goals. Kari Frederickson, who was department chair for much of my graduate school career, was always looking out for me and helped me in so many ways. She was
Acknowledgments
also the first person to tell me I had a chance as a writer, which meant the world to me.
Many others were instrumental in making my years at the University of Alabama fruitful and enjoyable. Holly Grout, George McClure, Sarah Steinbock-Pratt, David Beito, Larry Kohl, Margaret Peacock, Jenny Shaw, and Heather Kopelson all took an interest in my work and advised me in their fields of expertise at various stages in the project. Sharony Green was and continues to be a dear friend and encourager. John Giggie introduced me to my editor. Grad school friends made the experience worthwhile when the studying got tough. Allison Huntley, Daniel Burge, Mark Johnson, David McRae, Joseph Pearson, and Johnathan Merritt all listened to me endlessly talk about comic strips and read chapter drafts along the way. Aaron Phillips graciously helped me access resources I needed during my manuscript revisions, especially during the pandemic. Katie Deale was a constant confidante who listened to me complain about research frustrations when no one else would have listened. Marcus Witcher became a pacesetter for me as I was nearing my defense. Had it not been for working with him every day in the summer of 2016, I am not sure that I could have finished on time.
Outside of the University of Alabama, others helped guide this project along. Michael Stewart Foley worked with me on edits for my first journal article. His patience, kindness, and mentorship were exemplary and went far beyond what I would have ever expected of an editor. Kevin Kruse was equally gracious with his time when I reached out to him for advice on a Masters seminar. He eventually became a reader for my dissertation and has been an advocate for me and my work. Ben Saunders offered extensive comments on my original manuscript and this book is far better for it. Stephen Lind, a fellow Peanuts scholar, listened to my ideas and helped me make sense of the pieces that were holding me back. Charles Hatfield and Jared Gardner both offered encouragement, advice, and a warm welcome to a newbie to the comic studies field.
I am so thankful for all the incredible people at Oxford University Press who made this book possible. I could not have asked for a better editor than Susan Ferber. She is thorough, thoughtful, and kind. At one crucial juncture in production, she went to bat to save the book as it now appears. So much of what is good about this book has her fingerprints on it. I would also like to thank Theo Calderara, Jeremy Toynbee, and my copy editors for their contributions to the finished project.
I have been fortunate to find colleagues in my young career who have become like old friends. John Morgan, my department chair at my first position at Miles College, looked for every opportunity he could to give me time
Acknowledgments xi and space to work on this book. Donna Manson, my chair once I moved to Huntingdon College, was equally supportive. My first provost, Anna McEwan, celebrated my achievements and helped guide me through a low personal season. I am forever grateful to her for that. Tom Perrin and Elizabeth Hutcheon talked me into sending the draft of my manuscript off when I was still too terrified to let my editor read it. Nordis Smith helped me get copies of books and resources not readily available. Kyle Christensen helped connect me with a new Peanuts scholar with whom to exchange ideas.
Numerous archives were instrumental in making this book possible. The archives at Anderson University, Duke University, Syracuse University, Harvard University, NASA, the National Archives, and the presidential libraries of Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan were all tremendously helpful in locating relevant sources.
I could not have written this book without the amazing folks at the Charles M. Schulz Museum, Creative Associates, and Peanuts Worldwide. Lisa Monhoff was the archivist at the Schulz Museum when I first walked through the doors. She showed me around the collections, and her intimate knowledge from having helped create the archive was vital. Cesar Gallegos was indispensable in completing my research. He also got me a ride on the Zamboni at Snoopy’s Home Ice, the ice rink Schulz built for the Santa Rosa community. Sarah Breaux was so helpful in the production phase of the book as I was navigating permissions. Paige Craddock at Creative Associates took an afternoon to show me around Schulz’s old studio, which is a memory I will never forget. Craig Herman, Paul Gagliardi, and Caitlin Kelley at Peanuts Worldwide were a delight to work with during the permissions negotiations, make a difficult process much easier. Jeannie Schulz, Schulz’s wife, was so gracious in taking the time to discuss the project with me and suggesting sources to consider.
So many good friends brightened my life as I went through the years of writing this book. Justin and Allison Ingram and Nick and Jaimie Sewell forced me to put the work down and have some fun now and again. Nick, in particular, discovered that the best way to motivate me was to question whether I was really ever going to finish and he used this strategy often and to great effect. Since I have moved to the Montgomery area, Carter Reeves and Keith Chandler have become the very best of friends and some of my biggest supporters. Bill Youngblood and Wes Cahoon got me excited about this project all over again with their interest in my manuscript. Currin and Kristen Clonch did the author photo for this book and helped me on a lot of home projects when I was writing or teaching. Faye Mize, my childhood neighbor, granted me an extended interview about his time in Vietnam. Unfortunately, he passed away before the book could be completed. Pleas Davis shared his
own personal experiences and kept me laughing with his wonderful sense of humor.
This book is dedicated to Dr. Larry Nelson, my undergraduate advisor and mentor, who set my mind and soul ablaze with his love for history and for God. I regret that he did not live to see this fruit of his personal investment. Everyone who ever knew him was changed by the experience and I carry his memory into the classroom with me each day. It is also dedicated to Nana, my grandmother, who helped raise me and taught me to love reading and asking questions. She believed I would write a book long before I even enjoyed reading them.
Everything I am and the existence of this book I owe to my family. Mom and Dad have believed in me, supported me, and encouraged me at every stage of my life. Ashley, Lauren, and Madison, my younger siblings, gave me the motivation to try and be the best big brother I could be. Gammaw and Aunt Kerri have the gift of encouragement and always made me feel a special part of the family. Aunt Charlie and my cousin Jordan taught me that just because there were dark spots in my ancestors’ past, it did not have to define me. Mary Kathryn is the best mother-in-law in the world and such a tremendous help at home. My daughters, Maleah, Macey, and Madelyn, taught me love like I never knew possible. And Katie, my beautiful bride, has been my rock through every battle of this book. She knew when to kick me into gear and when to give me a hug. Her patience, support, and commitment are far beyond what I ever deserved and I love her so much for it.
My deepest apologies to anyone I may have omitted from this list and, of course, all errors contained in this book are solely my own.
Charlie Brown’s America
Introduction
Charlie Brown had a hard time choosing sides. This was always part of the humor of his character. It was also one of the many things he hated about himself.
One New Year’s Eve he decided to change it once and for all: in 1965, he would be decisive, clear-cut, and well-grounded, and resolved to be “strong and firm.” Ever the realist and always happy to burst Charlie Brown’s bubble, Lucy would not let the boy deceive himself with such an impossible resolution. “Forget it,” she blurted. “You’ll always be wishy-washy.”1
Charles M. Schulz, the creator behind the comic strip Peanuts, often described his work the same way. “One of the remarkable things about the strip,” stated one interviewer in 1987, “is that there are no perceivable ideologies.” Schulz agreed. “Sort of a wishy-washiness,” he chuckled. Often the humble, Midwestern cartoonist seemed to deploy such statements as a defense mechanism to avoid staking a definite position on a controversial topic. But it was more than that. “Wishy-washiness” was his ideology. In practice Schulz was a sort of political chameleon, shifting left and right within the bounds of the broad middle of American political culture during the Cold War era. He was adept at creating scenes that acted as Rorschach tests for readers, broaching a controversial issue but leaving enough ambiguity for readers to see whatever excited or disgusted them. Between 1950 and 2000 Schulz reflected and amplified a complex range of popular feelings on issues from civil religion, racial integration, and women’s rights to fears of capitalism’s decline, environmental degradation, and the Vietnam War through his cartoons.2
A number of commentators, however, accused Peanuts of being too aloof from the most serious national and global events of its time. Social ethics professor Roger Shinn of Union Theological Seminary faulted Peanuts for being too “detached” from real-world problems. The Boston Post asserted that “in the midst of wars, rumors of wars, clamor and controversy,” Peanuts was an “escape hatch into a ‘make believe’ world of serenity and laughter.” Even at the end of the strip’s fifty-year run in national syndication, as Americans mourned Schulz’s retirement announcement and attempted to interpret his
Figure I.1 Lucy sinks Charlie Brown’s New Year’s resolution, insisting that he will “always be wishy-washy.” Charles Schulz, Peanuts, December 31, 1965. © 1965 Peanuts Worldwide LLC.
legacy, journalists still viewed Peanuts as largely apolitical. “Inflation . . . and other current events,” wrote Newsweek’s Mary Voboril in late 1999, “seldom invade the gentle provinces of the strip.” In her reading of the series, the most pressing issues in postwar American politics were missing from the period’s most-read newspaper comic strip. “Hippies, Vietnam, Watergate, IranContra, CIA spy scandals, impeachments, elections,” she listed to prove her point, “never found a topical home here.”3
Schulz often seemed to confirm this line of reasoning. A personally conservative man, he always thought of himself as a businessman first and foremost. His primary job, he believed, was to help sell newspapers. Controversial political positions were the quickest way to undermine a comic strip’s popular appeal, he believed. “You’re being hired by a newspaper editor and he buys your strip because he wants to sell his newspaper,” Schulz explained to one interviewer. “So why should you double-cross him by putting in things that will aggravate him? That’s not my job.” In his mind, he went to great lengths to avoid controversial issues. “I lean over backwards to keep from offending anybody,” he told a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal. 4
Yet Schulz regularly addressed controversial issues in his comic strip, animated television programs, and feature films. At the peak of Peanuts’ popularity, Schulz’s thoughts on such issues reached over 100 million readers each day. It is possible to pinpoint exactly how some readers interpreted Peanuts, because they told Schulz. By 1971, Schulz was receiving as many as a hundred new fan letters every day. While not all of this correspondence survived years of spring cleaning and storage, as well as a fire that claimed his first California studio in 1966, a sizable collection of letters has survived and are maintained in the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, California, just down the road from the artist’s second studio. This book relies heavily on those collections to uncover readers’ thoughts about Peanuts and how they saw it interacting with the Cold War world. This book also draws from numerous interviews, articles, speeches, private letters, and oral
histories to try and understand what Schulz was thinking, both when he produced the art and when he encountered others’ interpretations of his work. Finally, it investigates various public appropriations, both legal and extralegal, of Schulz’s characters and concepts to see how his work took on a cultural life far beyond the newspaper page or television screen. In many cases, the Peanuts characters became repositories for and expressions of Americans’ dreams, hopes, fears, and worries.5
In doing so, Charlie Brown’s America demonstrates that Peanuts was never simply an escapist endeavor, but regularly touched on the lived experience of socially- and politically-conscious Americans in the postwar era. While Peanuts readers of differing political stripes regularly wrote in to argue with Schulz about the ideas they saw in his work, what is most revealing is how often people of opposing viewpoints loved the same comic strip but for contradictory reasons. Walt Kelly, a former Disney cartoonist who became famous in the 1950s for his political satire comic strip Pogo, has been credited by one scholar with “providing in his strip . . . a rallying point around which like-minded people could gather.” Schulz provided the opposite: a rallying point around which people of diverse opinions could gather and debate.6
This book is not a biography, at least not one of Charles Schulz. If anything, it is a biography of Peanuts’ cultural life, both in the minds of the creator and his audience, as well as in the world outside the close-knit community of fan and idol. In this way, the characters are treated as both the creation of the cartoonist and also as public symbols who took on a life of their own after leaving the printing press.
While Peanuts may be the most successful example of the comic strip medium, it was deeply rooted and inseparable from the history of the art. Comic strips evolved from the raucous visual world of 1890s advertising, as newspaper moguls sought to expand their readership, and burgeoning corporations searched for a means to capture public attention and private dollars through recognizable characters. In the rapidly urbanized and industrialized nineteenth-century United States, comic strips and illustrated advertising served as an indispensable visual guide to life in the multicultural, multilingual melting pot of American cities. In this context, the symbols of comic arts became a sort of linguistic mediary between the wide range of peoples in turn-of-the-century America. It is no coincidence, then, that comic strip characters like Buster Brown easily danced between the funny pages and
mass advertising. The approval of a recognizable cultural figure could often be just the impetus a wary consumer needed to try out a new product.7
Integral to the success of the American comic strip was a characteristic comic scholars call polysemy. This meant that the same character or scene could be reasonably read in multiple ways by a diverse audience. The more people could relate to a comic strip, the more successful that comic strip could be in sales and marketing. Sometimes this meant using racial, ethnic, or gendered stereotypes to calcify the boundaries of American cultural citizenship. But in the most transcendent works of the comic strip medium, even these exclusionary boundaries could be bridged or dismantled to broaden the audience. Comic strips like Katzenjammer Kids, Little Nemo in Slumberland, and Krazy Kat all found ways to broaden audiences, whether through including ethnic characters in the American citizenry, traveling through universal dream worlds, or abandoning the world of direct social discourse for the allegories of anthropomorphized animals.
Peanuts represents the ultimate perfection of the comic strip medium. Charles Schulz created a comic world so successfully polysemic that it attracted the largest audience in the history of the medium, counting every other American as a daily reader at its height. The comic strip sold newspapers like no other in a time of considerable consolidation and decline in the industry. There are countless stories in the Schulz archive of editors being barraged by complaints when Peanuts was accidentally left out of the final copy of local newspapers, or fans who carried a second newspaper subscription because their local paper did not carry Peanuts. But Schulz’s work also sold much more than newspapers. By the 1970s Peanuts was a multimillion dollar licensing franchise, more visible than any property not owned by Disney. In fact, in Forbes magazine’s 2019 report of the top-earning past celebrity estates in the world, Charles Schulz finished third behind only Michael Jackson and Elvis Presly. While many critics over the years lamented Schulz’s licensing decisions as a commercial sellout, the truth is that Peanuts actually succeeded more than any other comic strip at doing what comic strips were invented to do: sell. For his part, Schulz always insisted that he kept the comic strip foremost, never allowing the quality to slide. The proof of his commitment was the fact that unlike most successful cartoonists in the industry, he refused to outsource any part of the comic strip to an assistant, whether drafting, inking, or lettering. For nearly fifty years, everything readers saw in the Peanuts comic strip came from the mind and hands of Charles Schulz.8
Central to Charles Schulz’s success was his adept usage of both ambiguity and allegory to create space for multiple interpretations. Ambiguity, or a sort of intentional vagueness on the part of the cartoonist, was key in the way that
he often handled religious and philosophical issues. In the foremost examples, such as the October 20, 1963 Peanuts strip where Schulz used only eight words across eleven panels to comment on the controversy over school prayer, the cartoonist’s ambiguity was so successful that readers could not agree among themselves where the artist stood on the issue of school prayer. Ambiguity allowed the cartoonist to virtually disappear and leave the readers with a sort of mirror through which they could evaluate their own opinions of the issue at hand. Allegory in Peanuts, on the other hand, utilized readily recognizable symbols and stories, like the World War I flying ace’s dog fights with the historic Red Baron, to enable Schulz to broach enormously sensitive contemporary issues like the Vietnam War. Schulz’s innate sense and skill for employing ambiguity and allegory set him apart from his contemporaries, and his mastery of polysemy enabled readers to see the world they wanted to see. And for decades, readers got what they were looking for with the delivery of every daily newspaper.
There are at least three reasons why a study of Peanuts provides new insights into Cold War America. First, the need for fifty years of daily content required Schulz to be remarkably responsive to the social, political, and cultural changes in American life as he attempted to deliver his unique voice to an audience that could be a rapidly moving target. Second, the comic strip was capable of eliciting emotional connections to politics that did not always appear in more traditional mediums of debate, providing scholars with a way to think more deeply about the role of emotional lives of Cold War Americans. Third, while the cartoonist tried to be responsive to his audience, his audience was also very responsive to him. The decades of fan mail to Schulz includes voices that likely would have never ended up in the archive of a congressman or senator. Many of these people, like Schulz himself, did not consider themselves highly educated or of tremendous importance, yet they felt comfortable to share their deep concerns about their country and the world with their favorite newspaper cartoonist.
Peanuts has been woefully understudied for an artifact of such incredible cultural significance. Still, there have been a handful of important studies of Charles Schulz and his work. In 1989, Rheta Grimsley Johnson published an authorized biography of Schulz titled Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz, a popular memoir that had the benefit of extensive interviews with Schulz himself, though Schulz obviously played a considerable role in determining its boundaries. In 2007, David Michaelis was able to delve into some of the darker elements of Schulz’s life with his bestselling Schulz and Peanuts. His considerable work in digging up early syndicate correspondence in Manhattan—a collection of documents that became an important part of
the opening of the Schulz Museum archive—was essential in opening the door for studies such as this one. While Michaelis discussed the cultural influence of Peanuts, however, his book tended to focus on the most unseemly and sensational elements of Schulz’s relatively tame life and did little to address the later decades of Schulz’s career. Two other recent books have been significant contributions to the study of Peanuts. Stephen Lind’s A Charlie Brown Religion offers a religious biography of the cartoonist, while Jared Gardner and Ian Gordon’s edited volume The Comics of Charles Schulz: The Good Grief of Modern Life was the first concerted effort among critical scholars to analyze the meaning and significance of the comic strips. Still, none of these volumes provided an all-encompassing study of Peanuts’s immense place in Cold War American life.9
The chapters in this book are organized chronologically, each one highlighting an important theme that defined the direction of the Peanuts property in those years. This means that at times, chapters will backtrack to focus on the development of a theme earlier in Schulz’s career.
Chapter 1 introduces the man behind Peanuts. Beginning with his childhood, this biographical chapter follows Charles Schulz through school and his art education. It then delves into the unexpected passing of his mother, his draft orders for the Army, and service in World War II. Following the war, Schulz returned home searching for meaning in life. He found it in evangelical Christianity and in the pursuit of his dream of becoming a nationally known cartoonist. The remainder of the chapter follows Schulz through his surprisingly rapid rise to a nationally syndicated comic strip.
Chapter 2 investigates the Cold War origins of Peanuts. The strip in the early 1950s was quite different from what later generations would come to recognize and cherish. During these years Schulz became a sort of cult hero of existentialism, drawing a strip that could be quite bleak in its meditations about modern life. Issues of social alienation, atomic anxiety, and emotional conflict were common themes of this period during which Schulz’s artistic and literary styles were developing. From early in his career, Schulz attracted considerable attention for some of the deep subjects addressed in his works. Linus’s security blanket in particular became a massive hit with both young parents raising the baby boomer generation and psychologists looking for relatable ways to express the unique psychological issues they were observing in modern life. Schulz’s work also ascended to the heights of both his profession
and national influence during the 1950s, winning him top accolades among his peers and admiration in the White House.
Chapter 3 explores Peanuts’ religious commentary. By the end of the 1950s, Cold War America was deep in the throes of a third Great Awakening. This mid-century revivalism had its origins in the nuclear anxieties of the decade and was fueled by a number of middle-class social worries from racial integration and urban decay to fears of juvenile delinquency and the decline of American culture. These were the same issues addressed in Peanuts as the comic strip made its rapid climb to national prominence. It is not surprising, then, that Schulz’s work became overtly evangelical by the end of the decade. And by the middle of the 1960s, Schulz and a growing religious subset in his audience would come to see Peanuts as a lone bastion of evangelical Christianity in American popular culture. This change showed up most drastically in the character Linus Van Pelt, who became America’s best-known pop theologian. Linus regularly rebuked, counseled, and corrected his friends with direct quotations from the Bible and his meditations on Christian theology. This new direction in Peanuts increasingly singled Schulz out as a Christian cartoonist and pop thinker.
While religion was becoming a central part of Peanuts by the 1960s, racial diversity was not. Schulz had pushed back against gender norms of the midtwentieth century, but like all other national syndicated cartoonists in the 1960s, largely avoided the minefield of race and civil rights. By 1968, however, Schulz would become a somewhat reluctant reformer when he introduced the first black regular cast member in a national comic strip. Yet while Schulz was the first to take that step, he would struggle in subsequent years to find an authentic voice and role for his new cast member. Chapter 4 tells this story of the integration of Peanuts.
In the late 1960s, there was only one issue that could ultimately overtake civil rights as the leading concern for Americans: the Vietnam War. Chapter 5 analyzes Charles Schulz’s commentary on the divisive conflict that came to define three presidencies and a generation of young Americans. By the end of the decade, Snoopy had blossomed into a central character in the comic strip. His characteristic daydreams and regular role-playing increasingly set him apart from the other characters in Peanuts as he imagined a world far larger than theirs. Schulz would openly come to worry that Snoopy might come to overshadow the children—and in many cases in the 1960s, he did. Nowhere was this more true than in Snoopy’s Vietnam era dreams of endless combat and defeat. This chapter tells the story of how Snoopy’s war in Peanuts during the 1960s and 1970s became a voice for the desperate anguish many
Americans felt as they tried to maintain support for individual soldiers while simultaneously hating the draft and despising the Vietnam War.
Chapter 6 delves into the ways that Schulz’s personal disenchantment with the role of the federal government was displayed in Peanuts in the 1970s and 1980s. Like much of his audience, Schulz increasingly characterized his understanding of American values in individualistic terms and found subtle ways to vilify government expansion, on issues such as environmental protection and abortion rights. This chapter also analyzes three different federal ad campaigns involving Peanuts characters during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. Dealing with issues of energy consumption, the American economic system, and air pollution, these three campaigns carried a central message of personal responsibility, decentralization, and the power of the individual to shape a better future. There was also a clear emphasis on freemarket capitalism as the solution to the national problems of consumer waste, stagnation, and environmental degradation. This chapter examines previously unpublished correspondence of the friendship between Charles Schulz and Ronald Reagan, from the latter’s governorship to the presidency. Reagan joked with Schulz on the eve of his election in 1980 that Snoopy might be able to undercut his appeal to his base. Reagan even offered the famous beagle a cabinet position in his administration in exchange for not entering the presidential race. As this chapter demonstrates, Peanuts had close but subtle ties to the rightward shift in American politics. Peanuts, of course, was far from a rightwing, ideological publication. But in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a decided shift in tone in Schulz’s work that mirrored growing public skepticism of government management and the rising culture wars. As the center moved, so did Peanuts. Chapter 7 turns to feminism, sexuality, and gender identity in the work of Charles Schulz. Peanuts had always been about the battle of the sexes. On October 3, 1950, the second day of the strip, the little girl Patty had skipped down the sidewalk gleefully reciting the children’s rhyme, “Sugar and spice and everything nice, that’s what little girls are made of,” stopping only to emphasize her point by giving Charlie Brown a black eye. Yet it was Lucy Van Pelt who most embodied the characteristics of the powerful female in Peanuts, refusing to accept her prescribed place in society. But with all of her strength, Lucy also embodied many negative stereotypes of women in postwar America. As the 1960s progressed, so did Schulz’s handling of his female characters, and by the 1970s Peanuts became intertwined with the feminist movement in 1970s. Still some of the most prominent connections between Peanuts and social movements came not from the artist, but from fans who employed the characters to reflect their own feelings and ideas about the changing times. This chapter will conclude with an in-depth
look into how Peppermint Patty and Marcie became important symbols in lesbian publications, against Schulz’s wishes.
In the fall of 1970, as Schulz celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of Peanuts, a young artist named Gary Trudeau launched Doonesbury, filled with unrepentant cold sarcasm, and became the voice of a new generation in the same way Peanuts once had spoken to the alienated and discontent of the 1950s. Charles Schulz despised Doonesbury. Aside from seeming unprofessional and downright disrespectful, in the aging cartoonist’s estimation, Trudeau’s work rested on what Schulz believed was the cheapest and least durable form of humor: political commentary. Schulz prided himself on building Peanuts on more solid ground, focusing on timeless human experience and eternal values of love, friendship, and hope. But Peanuts was never as timeless as Schulz liked to imagine, not even when it came to politics.
The book concludes with a CBS miniseries titled This is America, Charlie Brown, which aired over the 1988–89 television season. In this program, Schulz tried to encapsulate what he saw as the common history and culture that had brought prosperity to the United States in the twentieth century. This program was a unique blend of conservative Christian traditionalism and progressive historical revision. The result was a miniseries largely panned by critics and audiences alike. By trying to comment to a broad audience— a strategy that had been effective throughout Schulz’s career—by the twentieth century, Peanuts was losing its prominence. It had fallen out of step with a society in the throes of what historians now refer to as the “culture wars.” Because Schulz tended to play to the middle and downplay his political opinions, a strategy that had made him a cultural darling for the better part of forty years, his work now seemed quaint and antiquated in the polarized world of The Simpsons and Pat Buchanan’s “War for the Soul of America” speech. Newspapers like the Chicago Tribune one of the original seven newspapers to publish Peanuts in 1950—openly called for the retirement of Charlie Brown and the gang. Schulz’s strong base of evangelical readers too came to question the depth and authenticity of the artist’s faith as he expressed a growing discomfort with evangelicalism’s preachiness and insistence on moral conformity.
In the end, Schulz found himself right where he had always been: stuck in the wishy-washy middle of the American political spectrum. And where that centrism had actually served as a virtue during the political battles of the Cold War, it left Peanuts without a side in the fever pitch of a new age of open partisanship.
The epilogue examines the legacy of Peanuts today. In 2001, ABC purchased the rights to the television specials and in the 2010s experienced the
highest ratings since their premieres in the 1960s and 1970s. In 2015, 20th Century Fox premiered the first feature length Peanuts movie in over thirty years to great critical and commercial success. That summer Charlie Brown was once again the focus of American media attention, though in a drastically different political moment than the one he had walked into sixty-five years earlier. There were signs, however, that he was as relevant as he had ever been. The film inspired a summer trend of Peanuts-themed avatars on Facebook that signaled a clamoring among some Americans for a return to a more cordial, wishy-washy political middle in the midst of a historically contentious and crude presidential campaign. It was as though they were joining President Barack Obama as he wrote with longing nostalgia in his introduction to the twenty-fifth and final volume of “The Complete Peanuts” collection in 2016: “Like millions of Americans, I grew up with Peanuts. But I never outgrew it.”
But in other ways, America did seem to be outgrowing Peanuts. This was most apparent in 2016 when MetLife ended its prominent thirty-year advertising deal with Peanuts. Schulz had produced an art empire that had expressed the concerns of Cold War America, but at the same time left a body of work inextricably linked to that past era.
