Book Review/Heather Seggel

Good Grief! It’s Charlie Brown’s America

I have distinct recollections of reading “Peanuts” in the funny papers as a kid. From asking my mother what “gross” meant (and learning I was pronouncing it wrong) to being bewildered by the frequent Bible references (Ecclesiastes? Oh my), it was both a mainstay of my childhood and a source of local pride as I lived in Sonoma County, along with cartoonist Charles Schulz. “Charlie Brown’s America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts” (Oxford University Press) looks at the ways Schulz used his comic strip to reflect on the issues of his time, and how the strip’s popularity led fans to project their own meanings onto his work, sometimes changing its meaning in the process. Author Blake Scott Ball has made a serious study of the intersection of history and pop culture that’s as much fun to curl up with as a stack of comics.

Beginning with a brief biography of Schulz, Ball highlights influences that later appeared in the budding artist’s work. Significant among them was Schulz being drafted and his harrowing service in World War II. He came home shaken deeply by the experience, but was able to resume his pursuit of a syndicated comic strip, teaching art and submitting his work relentlessly.

When “Peanuts” was at the height of its influence, the Vietnam War consumed much of America’s attention. Enter Snoopy in his scarf and goggled helmet. The “World War I flying ace” and his perennial hunt for the Red Baron and cursing of the endless war was commentary that could be read multiple ways. There was also a series of strips where Charlie Brown was sent to summer camp and likened the experience to being drafted. American soldiers loved the strips, and many adorned their personal property as well as their planes with depictions of Snoopy, while parents clipped and mailed the comic strips to them in care packages. Schulz created a nuanced critique that you could miss if you weren’t reading closely, a middle space he frequently occupied, describing not just Charlie Brown but himself as habitually “wishy-washy.”

Consider the neat trick Schulz pulled off with his first television special, “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” The show concludes with a lengthy Bible reading performed by the character Linus, explaining to Charlie Brown that the point of Christmas is to honor the birth of Jesus. But the plot leading up to that moment picked apart the crass consumerism that the holidays are so often beholden to. Viewers on the left and right, devout Christians and die-hard atheists, could each find something there to take comfort in; as a result, the show that networks feared would be too preachy for a modern audience became a bona fide hit and holiday classic.

Ball analyzes the ways Schulz was by turns conservative and progressive, and acknowledges that demanding political opinions from a comic strip about small children could be a stretch, especially when its creator worked less to promote an agenda than to help sell newspapers. Schulz was usually affable but could be prickly when pressed on his views, usually defaulting to a response that focused on his drawings. But he integrated “Peanuts” with the addition of Franklin, a Black character, and featured women’s sports heavily in part due to a friendship with tennis star Billie Jean King. The environmentalist movement of the 1970s got a boost from his artwork, and even a TV special (“It’s Arbor Day, Charlie Brown”). But Schulz made the focus of the kids’ activism personal responsibility and not corporate accountability, a sort of deliberate wishy-washing that allowed businesses to pollute and manufacture single-use products while shifting responsibility for this new mountain of waste to a handful of plucky neighborhood kids.

“Peanuts” really was there through much of modern American history. It’s enlightening to read Ball’s breakdown of where the strip captured the moment and where it strayed. Popular opinion in the 1960s and ’70s was that the strip was progressive and leaned to the political left, hence the easy adoption of its images by American soldiers in Vietnam and also those protesting the war at home. By the 1980s, with the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the country’s hard tack to the right, “Peanuts” no longer seemed radical. The expansion of the comics page and cable TV’s multiplying options also offered a lot of shiny new things to enjoy. But even today, 20 years after Schulz’s death, his work is a common reference point that retains some relevance — Ball points to an editorial cartoon where Lucy, whose head is shaped like a Coronavirus molecule, holds a football labeled “REOPENING” for an ever-reluctant Charlie Brown to kick. “Charlie Brown’s America” is a fine work of comics scholarship and a reminder that the entertainment we consume can be much deeper than it appears at first glance.

Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2021

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