Weekly Peanuts: Charlie Brown, the Beatnik
One of the last chapters I wrote for my upcoming book, Charlie Brown’s America (releasing May 4th), dealt with Peanuts in the 1950s. It was one of the last chapters I wrote because it was one of the most difficult chapters to write.
It’s not that I didn’t try. In grad school I wrote four different full versions of that chapter (each about 50 manuscript pages), but none of them were right. I just could not get my head around how to understand the meteoric rise of Peanuts in the 1950s.
For anyone that has read the 1950s strips, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Peanuts was very different, not just in the way Schulz drew them. The whole tone was more bleak and offbeat. The strip had not moved into the zany fantasies of Snoopy’s imaginary worlds. The cast was smaller. The critiques and observations were about things very intimate and close to home. In many ways, it was more psychological.
It was tempting for me to do like most of American pop memory has done and pick up with Charlie Brown and Snoopy in the heydays of the early Sixties and just pretend that the oddities of the Fifties never happened. But, of course, no good historian could ignore complicating evidence.
After years of wrestling with it and discussing it with advisers (like Kevin Kruse before he was Twitter famous) and academic referees and my editor, Susan Ferber, I finally developed something that satisfied my curiosity about this formative stage in Peanuts.
This brings me to this week’s strip. I was reminded of this writing struggle this week as I’ve been listening to an audio version of Jean-Paul Gabilliet’s great book Of Comics and Men. One chapter covers the rise of the “comix” or underground comic movement. He pointed out that college student presses were integral in bringing about these experimental and often controversial creations. It reminded me that Peanuts was extremely popular as reprints and appropriations in these college newspapers in the 1950s. In 1958, in fact, students at Yale University named Schulz “Humorist of the Year” and asked him about his connections to the countercultural “beat generation.”
“Does Charlie Brown represent the existential situation of the Beat Generation?” one of the student editors asked Schulz.
Schulz avoided answering directly in that case, yet in this May 30, 1958 strip, we get an answer. Charlie Brown was a “charter member” of the beatniks.
Over the years, there were many questions from interviewers about Schulz’s interests and connections to the counterculture. In his professional life and self-image, Schulz had little to do with such things. The comix were too crudely drawn and morally filthy to gain his approval. And yet, there was something in the Peanuts characters’ vulnerable “authenticity” that resonated with a generation rebelling against stoicism and conformity.
On June 22, 1970, Schulz even went so far to introduced a character named Woodstock (the character had been developing into a major role for years before it was named) to be a companion to Snoopy. The yellow bird shared his name with the countercultural phenomenon of the previous year, the Woodstock Rock Festival. Schulz had not been present at the event, of course, but like many other middle-aged Middle Americans he had read all about it in Life magazine’s August 29, 1969 cover story.
While not finding much sympathy for the more morally ambiguous elements of the event and the larger “hippie movement,” Schulz did share the sense that a return to a more natural, peaceful simplicity built on love and community was needed after the tumultuous social battles of the late Sixties. Woodstock, in part, represented that spirit to the artist.
So, there you have it. Charlie Brown was a beatnik and Snoopy’s bestfriend was a hippie acolyte. Well, sorta….
