What is a Good Citizen, Charlie Brown?
This letter has been making the rounds over the last few days thanks to the midterm elections. Several friends shared it with me on Twitter. I thought it would be a good opportunity, then, to share it with my readers and reflect on what it tells us about Schulz and what it means for us today.
This letter was re-discovered just a couple years ago by the man who wrote it as a school child. It had been long forgotten and stowed away in storage for decades. I was one of the scholars in the conversation then as we worked to authenticate the find, along with other Peanuts experts like Nat Gertler and Luke Epplin and Benjamin Clark at the Schulz Museum. It was a really exciting moment and a fresh reminder that there is still important writing from Charles Schulz out there to be found hidden away in someone’s dresser drawer or coat closet or attic box.
The grade school boy wrote to ask the artist of Peanuts what it means to be a good citizen. Like many of the adults in 1970, the boy looked to Schulz as someone with a unique insight into the American psyche, a sort of pop philosopher of the age. And Schulz sure delivered on this one.
From the vantage point of 1970, Schulz believed that defining a “good citizen” was “more difficult…[than] it has ever been before.” The 1968 election cycle had been one of the most contentious in recent memory. President Lyndon Johnson had gone from a liberal hero in the mold of Franklin Roosevelt to a villain of both young new liberals and new conservatives.
Desperate riots in poverty stricken places like Detroit and Watts and Newark dispelled the fiction that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Voting Rights Act of 1965 made considerable material progress for the urban poor. In fact, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in April 1968 as he rallied support in Memphis for black workers and planned a new march in Washington to advocate for economic reforms that summer.
Meanwhile in electoral politics, raucous protests in downtown Chicago outside the Democratic National Convention to nominate Vice President Hubert Humphrey had devolved into a full on police riot. Richard Nixon emerged from the ashes of embarrassing political defeats in 1960 and 1962 to become the new president. Looming over it all was the disastrous and seemingly endless Vietnam War.
There was ample cause for despair and Schulz knew it.
There’s certainly a note of Charlie Brown-style despair in Schulz’s reply. “All any of us can do…” his musing begins. There’s not a much any individual can do to change the world. Despite it, though, Schulz believed there was still a right thing for a person to do: follow your conscience and keep the faith in democracy.
Schulz believed that given a fair shot, Americans would find (and make) the right choice. He had personally fought for that fair shot. First as an unlikely soldier drafted into World War II and sent to help liberate Europe from the clutches of the Nazis. But even in his cartooning career he kept fighting for a fair shot for all Americans like his friends Mortie Turner, a Black cartoonist in Oakland whom Schulz constantly promoted, or Billie Jean King, the tennis phenom and advocate for women’s rights whom Schulz supported with both his time and money for years. He elevated characters like Franklin, the first Black character in a mainstream comic strip, and Peppermint Patty, a gender-fluid child from a broken home, into the national conversation.
Yes, Charles Schulz believed that democracy would guide the way.
Schulz also saw through the ploys of extremists. Even though he was generally conservative in his personal life and philosophies, he saw the dangers lurking on the far right of American political life. “Sometimes it is the very people who cry out the loudest in favor of getting back to what they call ‘American Virtues’ who lack this faith in our country,” he wrote.
He knew what he was talking about. Schulz periodically received mail from southern California’s growing right wing organizations like the Altadena Americanism Center, a far right bookstore that championed the John Birch Society (you can read more about Schulz’s tenuous relationship with the Right in Chapter 3 of my book Charlie Brown’s America). Schulz refused to accept these conspiratorial and anti-democratic ideologues as “true Americans” and regular lampooned their bizarre outlooks in storylines like Linus’s persistent faith in the Great Pumpkin.
Ultimately, Schulz believed that “our greatest strength lies in the protection of our smallest minorities.” Schulz meant minorities of all types: racial, ethnic, gender, religious, etc. These were the American virtues he had fought for and those that he believed brought the best out of the United States. This also resonated with his personal readings of important Bible passages like Matthew 20:16 (“So the last will be first, and the first will be last”) or II Corinthians 12:10 (“For when I am weak, then I am strong”).
To Charles Schulz, the United States was never better than when it lifted up the lowliest within the country.
This letter was written to a little boy more than 50 years ago, but it’s message is as powerful in 2022 as ever. We find in our public life today extremists who would willingly jettison the best parts about our country: democracy of/by/for the people, the rule of law, unity in diversity.
Charles Schulz’s voice calls to us across the decades: the fight won’t be easy, but fight we must.
