Weekly Peanuts: That Time Linus Ran for Class President
In October 1964, as the United States was embroiled in one of the most controversial election cycles of the time, Linus ran for class president.
Of course the 1964 presidential campaign pitted Democrat Lyndon Johnson (who had ascended to the office the previous November due to JFK’s assassination) against conservative Republican Barry Goldwater. Goldwater, a senator from Arizona, was noted for his tendency to make extreme statements that his campaign then had to walk back and for attracting the support of conspiratorial groups like the John Birch Society (whom he tried to disassociate from). He had also been one of only six Senate Republican who voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, arguing that the act overstepped federal authority in regulating private businesses.
Linus’s campaign leaned into some of his most extreme, fundamentalist views as in the above strip where Linus uses the language of Jeremiah and other Old Testament prophets as metaphors for his platform. As suggested in the strip, the school administration was quite embarrassed by the whole showing. His classmates, however, seemed to rally to his passionate cries. With Charlie Brown as his vice president and his sister Lucy as his campaign manager, Linus looked to be on track to win election.
But then Linus took a step too far.
At the final rally before the school vote, Linus shared his most deeply held fanatical belief: his faith in the Great Pumpkin. Where almost no outlandish declaration had seemed able to derail his momentum, the Great Pumpkin proved to be his undoing.
Linus seemed most bewildered by this development. As always, he was merely trying to be sincere. Barry Goldwater had much the same sort of approach to politics. He did not believe in the excessive packaging and marketing that was becoming American electoral politics. Indeed, he and other conservatives of the time believed that such games had been part of the problem in Richard Nixon’s failed 1960 campaign. But this had often led the candidate to make public statements about his most extreme conservative positions (like ending the federal income tax or drastically downsizing Social Security). It was a style beloved by his most ardent supports, but terrifying to the average American voter. Lyndon Johnson, a master at campaiging, took full advantage of his opponent’s electoral weaknesses.
Where Republican activists sported campaign buttons that read, “In your heart, you know he’s right,” Democrats responded with the more colloquial slogan, “In your guts, you know he’s nuts!”
The most famous piece of LBJ’s campaign against Goldwater was a campaign ad so controversial that it ran only once before being pulled. The “Daisy ad” depicted a little girl counting flower petals before her voice is drowned out by the sound of a countdown and footage of a nuclear explosion and mushroom cloud. “We must either love each other,” Johnson’s voiceover insisted, “or we must die.” The “stakes were too high” to vote for an unrestrained extreme candidate like Goldwater, the ad suggested.
Johnson’s campaign was successful in November. Democrats won 61 percent of the popular vote and defeated Republicans in the electoral college, 486 to 52. Goldwater’s greatest support had been in the Deep South, where voters responded to his opposition to the Civil Rights Act, giving segregationists like Alabama governor George Wallace (who would run for president himself in 1968) a glimpse of the potential appeal of their racial politics in a national setting.
In some ways, Linus’s defeat for class president two weeks before the national election presaged Goldwater’s defeat, which had been evident to all by the most diehard supporters by the fall. Linus, like ardent conservatives, was left reeling, trying to figure out how he had gotten so close to victory but yet fallen so short.
While Linus might be at a loss, Snoopy had little doubt what the problem had been. “If you’re going to hope to get elected,” he mused from atop his doghouse, “don’t mention the Great Pumpkin!”
There’s interesting historical fragment I came across in my research for my upcoming book Charlie Brown’s America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts. John H. Kessel, who had worked on the Goldwater campaign, published a memoir about the 1964 campaign titled The Goldwater Coalition: Republican Strategies in 1964 (1964). In that book, Kessel gave some unique insights about the despair and frustration behind the scenes in the last days of the campaign. In one passage (actually in a footnote), Kessel remembered the October 26, 1964 strip being posted up on bulletin boards and office doors all over the headquarters office in the week before the election. Apparently some staffer, infuriated with Goldwater’s refusal to moderate his message for the general elections, had clipped and pasted numerous copies of the strip in protest.
As Kessel remembered, their was little doubt to any of the staffers at the point that Snoopy seemed to be talking directly to them.
