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its a Charlie brown Christmas

• Michele McAloon • Season 4 • Episode 151

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Merry Christmas everyone!!!  This is a re-run but one of my most popular podcasts about the beloved Charlie Brown.  Who doesn't love the Charlie brown Christmas Tree?  I hope all of you are captured by the wonder of this season, surrounded by love and to remember what it is to love. God Bless all Look forward to everyone in the New Year.

Michele McAloon 


We explore how Charles Schulz turned Peanuts into a cultural mirror for Cold War fear, public faith, and civil rights, and why that gentle, open style still disarms a polarized audience. Historian Blake Scott Ball joins us to trace the choices behind Linus’s blanket, Franklin’s debut, and a Christmas scripture that nearly didn’t air.

• Schulz’s Midwestern roots, WWII service, and shy start in art
• The syndicate’s Peanuts title and Schulz’s pushback
• Vulnerability as cultural critique in the 1950s
• Linus’s security blanket as language for anxiety
• Faith voiced through Linus and the Christmas pageant
• The A Charlie Brown Christmas gamble with Luke 2
• School prayer, God and country in public life
• Franklin’s integration and Schulz’s ultimatum to editors
• Media fragmentation and the changing “family audience”
• Why Peanuts endures for new generations




Michele McAloon:

You're listening to Crosswords, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. I am Michele McAloon, your host. You can find my podcast on bbokclues.com You can also find me on Twitter. I'm a Twitter bird at Michelle McAlloon1. And today we have a real treat of a book. I would like to welcome Dr. Blake Scott Ball, the author of Charlie Brown's America, The Popular Politics of Peanuts, published by Oxford University Press. Welcome, Dr. Ball.

Dr. Blake Scott Ball:

Hi, thanks for having me, Michele.

Michele McAloon:

Oh, good grief. We love having you here. Sorry, sorry, reverting back to my childhood. There we go. Dr. Blake Scott Ball joined the Huntington faculty in the fall of 2017 after completing his doctoral degree. He has previously taught as an assistant professor at Miles College, the University of North Alabama, and as an adjunct professor at the University of Alabama. And here we are to talk about Charlie Brown and Peanuts. In your introduction, you kind of position yourself as a cultural historian.

Dr. Blake Scott Ball:

That's right. I want to tell stories about not just the kind of major key events that happen in history, but also like the way that it was experienced by everyday folks. I think culture is a great way of getting into that, those connections, more than just what happened, but how it was experienced.

Michele McAloon:

Did you grow up reading Charlie Brown and The Peanuts?

Dr. Blake Scott Ball:

I did. I I watched it right at the end of, or I was reading right at the end of probably the last decade of Charles Schultz's career there in the 90s. And so a lot of peanuts was established by the time that I was reading. But yes, I did. I was that last generation to read newspaper comic strips.

Michele McAloon:

Let's start our conversation with Charles Schultz himself, the man himself, the creator of the peanuts. And your book really is not a biography, so to speak, of Charles Schultz's life. It's more of a social commentary on what happened when Charles Schultz was creating his comic strip and actually how he sort of reacted and how he used this in his comic strip. But we have to talk a little bit about the man and the creator. When was he born and what were some of the significant events in his life?

Dr. Blake Scott Ball:

Yeah, so Charles Schultz was born in 1922. He is the only child of a German-American family in St. Paul, Minnesota. His dad was a barber, owned his own barbershop. And we see this in uh Charlie Brown's dad in various comic strips is also a barber. And so we see some of the memories that Schultz has from his childhood of hanging out at his dad's barbershop after school. He grows up loving to read the comic strips himself. He and his dad, that was sort of something that they did together on the weekends catch up on the weekly escapades of all their cartoon and adventure strips. After graduating high school, he ends up in a correspondence art program. There's an art school right there in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that he begins studying with initially through the mail. He would complete his lessons and mail them in. He talked about just how shy he was to actually go and be confronted by an art teacher. He was afraid, you know, it might not go so well. But over time he develops his his confidence and and is demonstrating a real capacity in art and drawing. And so he's pursuing in his mind this career of one day becoming a comic strip artist himself. Well, World War II intervenes in that.

Michele McAloon:

Right.

Dr. Blake Scott Ball:

As a 20-year-old, he gets drafted into World War II. He spends three years in the army, including about 18 months of that in Europe, in France, and Germany. He's part of the security forces that help with the evacuation of Dachau at the end of the war. So he, you know, he's confronted by a lot of kind of really real and nasty things about the human experience there. Also, after he was drafted, his mother passed away unexpectedly for him. She'd been suffering with cancer, but his parents had sort of shielded him from that. And so she dies pretty unexpectedly while he's off to war. By the time he gets back, his father's remarried. It seems like the world is kind of moving on and getting back on its feet. And Charles Schultz feels really alone, really detached. And so an important kind of moment for him back in St. Paul was actually finding a Bible study group for young adults. His family had not been, they he'd grown up sort of nominally Lutheran. They'd not been super active in their faith. But in the the late 40s, early 50s, this becomes just an essential part of who he is. And he finds his community in church and Bible study. And it's it's also in this period that he begins to discover, sort of rediscover that love and that confidence in drawing. 47, 48, 49, he gets a local comic strip with the St. Paul Pioneer Press that he does once a week. He's also sending out cartoons to all the big publications. And in 1949, he lands a couple of cartoons to be published with the Saturday Evening Post, one of the most popular magazines in America at the time. It was huge for him. He tries to leverage that into getting a full-time daily comic strip in the St. Paul paper, but they don't have the budget for it. They turn him down, and so he walks all together and starts trying to pitch to some of the big syndicates. And in 1950, United Feature Syndicate signed him to a deal to start this new comic strip called Peanuts.

Michele McAloon:

But he never liked the name Peanuts, right? And that wasn't a name that he came up with. Tell us a little bit about that.

Dr. Blake Scott Ball:

Yeah, that's right. I kind of identify in some ways with Charles Schultz in this. You know, he's coming from a Midwestern town or city, and he's dealing with folks in Manhattan, and it's a little overwhelming. He's a little starstruck, and and so he's not really sure at the outset what exactly how far he can push his opinion, you know, on things, how much pushback he has with the editor. Experienced the same thing, a boy growing up in North Alabama and dealing with publishers in New York. It's like, oh, I, you know, I've never even been to New York City. He he was sort of the same way. Well, one of the names for his comic strip in St. Paul was Little Folks.

Michele McAloon:

Right, yeah.

Dr. Blake Scott Ball:

And so he had planned to, hey, let's just turn that into a daily strip and let's just stick with that. In fact, there had already been a character that had appeared a couple of times that he named Charlie Brown in Little Folks. Doesn't look anything like the Charlie Brown we know today, but some of the concepts, there was a little there was a little dog, a little Beagle dog, and you know, some of the concepts are already there, not fully formed yet. And so he's gonna kind of keep going with this. Well, they the syndicate was okay with that, but they run into a legal challenge from one of the Chicago syndicates that says, hey, we've got this other strip that we've published in the past, we're looking at maybe turning it into a radio program. And so we're gonna have to prohibit you from using that name. It's too close. And so rather than reaching out to Schultz out in Minnesota and saying, hey, we need a new title, they sort of workshop it within the office there in New York. They come up with about 10 different names. The one that sticks, the one that the most people go for is Peanuts, in reference to Peanuts Gallery on the Haldy Duty show, which was a big children's show at the time. And Schultz for the rest of his for the rest of his career uh was really offended by it. He said, you know, it it confused a lot of people, and you see it in the letters from fans early on. People would write, confused about which character was Peanut.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, because it actually Peanuts has nothing to do with any of his characters in his comic strip. That's funny, yes. Yeah, that's right.

Dr. Blake Scott Ball:

That's right. One of the sly ways that you can see uh him sort of pushing back against the later on in his career is on the Sunday strips when it would have the big title panel. You know, the Sunday strips had a lot more panels and a lot more art to it, a bigger strip, and uh it would have a big title panel. And so in kind of small, maybe mid-sized letters, he would put peanuts and then it would say featuring, and then in giant letters, good old Charlie Brown.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, I do remember that. Actually, I do. I mean Charlie Brown, but it's funny because it's such a synonymous name with Charlie Brown and Peanuts. It's a lexicon in our American culture, peanuts, and he does not like that name. That is so interesting. Well, you write that the that peanuts represents the ultimate perfection of the comic strip medium. He created a polysemic world, which I think is actually a really big word for wishy-washy, right?

Speaker:

Right.

Michele McAloon:

And that was his hallmark that he was wishy-washy.

Dr. Blake Scott Ball:

Yeah, yeah. And he would laugh about this in some of his interviews. People say, you know, we can't really nail it down like where you stand on a thing at times. Not necessarily that he had no backbone or anything, because as you see in the book, you know, there are a number of places where he takes some, he takes some real stands on things that that mean a lot to him and to America. But he had this way, and it's really part of his success. He had this way broaching a controversial topic in a way that didn't dictate to you how you should look at it, but instead encouraged you to respond with your perspective. And so you you see this outpouring in letters to Charles Schultz. It's it's really amazing. You know, it it was one of the last places I would have expected to find Americans sort of pouring out their heart about the various uh uh challenges of of the 50s and 60s and 70s. There's just this comfort that they find in sharing what they see in Charlie Brown and Linus and Lucy with Charles Schultz. And so it's peanuts sort of welcomed conversation. In many ways, it was sort of a pre-social media.

Michele McAloon:

That is so interesting, and it really did abide by the times. Charlie Brown, Lucy, and all the characters were kind of products of their time, and I guess it did allow people to speak. So he begins in the 1950s, and we're really kind of in the midst of the Cold War, and there's anxiety about uh nuclear weapons, there's anxiety about Russia, there's anxiety about that we've won World War II, but there is anxiety in America. And isn't this interesting where we are now, 70 years later? We are in the exact same place. And reading your book, I kept thinking, I wonder what Charlie Brown would say now. You know that I kept thinking that.

Dr. Blake Scott Ball:

It has been really wild, just from a my perspective as a history professor, teaching college students about American history. You know, one of the challenges I found uh early in my career was trying to explain to a generation born since the fall of the Berlin Wall what the Cold War was about. Because to them it seemed like this just big misunderstanding, kind of overblown. Nothing in in their minds, nothing seemed to happen because it, you know, it just the World War III never came. And so it all seems kind of kind of overblown. And and to see in the past year just how quickly this conversation has changed as my students and our world sort of remembers like, oh, the realities of nuclear war and the dangers there are still realities today, even though the Soviet Union is passed away, or maybe, I don't know, maybe it went into hibernation, but you know, but here we are, and it's all so real again. So yeah, these things that I was studying kind of as history are are hitting differently in 2022.

Michele McAloon:

Well, how did Charlie Brown react to the Cold War? What were some of the markers? And there were, and there's a couple things in there that Charles Schultz uses to show kind of the anxiety of America through Charlie Brown and Linus, and I love the security blanket. That's a great story.

Dr. Blake Scott Ball:

Yeah, I think the the heart of it, Charles Schultz, what made him really a breakout success in the 1950s from a cultural standpoint was just his willingness to express these vulnerabilities. This was a time of sort of uh sort of Superman and Dick Tracy and the you know, these kind of powerful heroes that had the problems all figured out, the sitcom, they could solve all the problems by the end of the half hour and all of those sorts of things. And and yet here was this character who was just openly honest about feeling like a misfit, feeling like he always comes up the loser, and in other ways as well. Like you mentioned, Linus and the security blanket. Children with a blanket was not a new concept, mid-1950s, but there wasn't the the name in the popular vernacular of a security blanket. In fact, when you look at the Oxford Dictionary of the English language on this term security blanket, up through the late 1940s into the early 50s, it was actually a military term. It was a term used by the military to discuss a sort of second line of defense in any kind of military action, so that you had a line of reserves ready to jump in in case things got too intense or needed quick support. So it was kind of a blanket of security behind you. Well, Charles Schultz, I don't know for a fact, but perhaps he comes home from World War II having encountered some of this language, some of this idea. And the other thing he's encountering in the night by the 1950s is he's gotten married and he's having kids, and several of his kids suck their thumb and carry a blanket. And so he introduces this with Linus that Linus, his way of engaging with and coping with the anxiety of the world is clinging to this blanket. And as long as he's got his blanket, he's great and stable and secure. And when wash day comes, he is a mess of nerves because he just can't handle being separated from his security blanket. And the incredible thing is that parents all over the country just instantly latch onto this because they're all having the same experience, right? They're all the baby boom. And they're all having this experience of raising children, many of them raising children away from family. They've moved closer to cities or they've moved out to suburbs. This is the day Dr. Spock and all of these things trying to figure out how to navigate these families. And Linus's security blanket just connects. It also really connects in the psychology world. Child psychologists of the 1950s actually, in a number of the major textbooks, write to Charles Schultz and ask, Hey, can we have permission to use some of these comic strips as examples of how children process and cope with anxiety in their young life? Because this is such a perfect analogy. And so Charles Schultz had such a way of expressing exactly what the populace was sensing, but didn't always quite have word or or analogy to express.

Michele McAloon:

It's so interesting that he was able to kind of nail this, to that he had almost this sense or this feeling. Also, you said Lucy's psychiatry booth was also born out of this era, which I mean you just love that. You know, she is a hard businesswoman, you know.

Dr. Blake Scott Ball:

I mean, she Charlie Brown, uh, probably the maybe in that time, the only six-year-old who regularly sees a therapist.

unknown:

That's funny.

Michele McAloon:

And you said Charlie Brown was an eternal loser, and that was very much part of the 1950s because I don't understand that psychology, actually.

Dr. Blake Scott Ball:

It's a weird thing. Like the 50s in so many ways was booming. The 50s was television is taken off, you've got Ricky and Lucy, you've got, you know, the the Western is taken off. This is the day of John Wayne, this is the day of McDonald's and the Holiday Inn and you know, and the interstates and Dwight Eisenhower's president, the hero of World War II, you know, all of these things. And yet you've got this kind of flip side of things where blues music is having this sort of coming out in the rock and roll era, you know, expressing the seed and country music as well, Hank Williams, expressing the brokenheartedness, the feeling of loss that these young relationships aren't working the way they're supposed to. You see it in Catcher in the Rye, which connects with so many young uh young people and young adults. So this feeling of just ah, you know, it things are supposed to work and they're just not working for me. And then here's Charlie Brown. And so it really connected with a subtext of 50s culture of these feelings who these people who feel like, man, it's supposed to be great, and yet I don't feel like it's always great for me.

Michele McAloon:

I tell you where, though, Charles Schultz really, I think made his mark and at least from reading your book, was in his evangelization and the Christianity part. And I had never realized this until I read your book, actually, about it was revolutionary then and it would be really revolutionary now. What was he doing in this era about uh you know his Christianity and putting that in the comic strips?

Dr. Blake Scott Ball:

Yeah, one of the earliest things he does to begin expressing his faith and using his talents to help spread the gospel and to encourage Christians, he is actually some of his lesser-known work that he did privately for his church. He volunteered, his church had a denominational publication, and they had a small magazine for the youth and teenagers in their denomination. And so he would do a cartoon strip that was in some ways, some people have almost said it looks like the Peanuts characters all grown up. You can see some of those references when you look at that work. So he's doing those things. But in in 1957, one of his business trips to meet with the syndicate, he gets the opportunity to go to Madison Square Garden and see Billy Graham preaching his New York City crusade. And while he's there, Schultz is influenced with the sense that, you know, I've got this thing that I really strongly believe that has that has made my life better. It's changed my life. And I have a platform that speaks to people all over the country. Why shouldn't I be doing more to express that, right? To use the platform I have in a positive way and in a way that he really believed could help people. This would help with some of the struggles that people were having. And so Linus, who was introduced in the early mid-50s as a newborn baby. So we've seen him grow up from a baby into a toddler, into a preschooler. And Linus emerges as this voice. Some people have often thought of him as sort of the philosopher of peanuts, but really he's the theologian of peanuts. And he expresses a lot of these ideas and thoughts that Schultz is having about religion. Some of them more kind of esoteric and lofty, like for instance, when when Linus, all the kids are getting prepared for show and tell, and they ask Linus what he's bringing for show and tell. He has handmade a duplicate copy of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Yeah. And the children don't, you know, you don't have a clue what he's talking about. But he's adamant about it. Linus also becomes becomes this voice in recurring storyline that Schultz introduces in the late 50s of the annual Christmas pageant that the children are in. And so Linus has a major speaking part in each one of these, each one of these programs. And initially he's so nervous. It's usually a Bible verse. He's talking about the birth of the savior in the city of David. He grows in confidence each year that they do this. In the meantime, Peanuts had gotten involved initially through an ad campaign for Ford Motor Company in the late 50s. Ford had introduced an economy-sized car, which was a real innovation if you're looking at the big Cadillacs of the 1950s. Economy-sized cars, and they think, hey, the Peanuts characters would be perfect for advertising this. And so it's a huge multi-year ad campaign for the Ford Falcon. They developed animation for commercials and for TV programs that Ford is sponsoring, things like this. And so the idea has been out there of making a doing more with this Peanuts animation because this has been a popular ad campaign. Well, in 1965, one of the folks that Charles Schultz had been working with is in contact with some friends of his in the ad industry. And he's trying to sell the idea of a peanuts TV special or documentary about Charles Schultz or something like this. And they say, well, you know, the only thing we've got, Coca-Cola is looking to sponsor a holiday special. And Schultz associate says, Oh, Charlie Brown Christmas would be perfect for Coca-Cola. They say, Charlie Brown Christmas, that sounds great. When could you have a subscript? So we could get it to you by Monday. This is about midweek. So this associate Lee Mendelssohn calls Charles Schultz and he says, Hey, I've got great news. I just sold Charlie Brown Christmas to Coca-Cola. And Charles Schultz replies, What in the world is Charlie Brown Christmas?

Speaker:

Hey, sure. Oh my goodness.

Dr. Blake Scott Ball:

He says it's this program we're going to write this weekend. So sure enough, they write this thing, and you know, it's got this great message of kind of anti-consumerism and you know, kind of that Christmas is about more than just the things we can buy and the flashy lights. And at that time, aluminum trees were becoming the Charlie Brown Christmas tree.

Michele McAloon:

Yes.

Dr. Blake Scott Ball:

But one of the things that Charles Schultz insists on putting in this is like, look, okay, it's not just enough for us to say that Christmas isn't about the things that we buy, but we've got to really stake out what is Christmas about. Well, Christmas for Charles Schultz was about the nativity, the birth of a savior in a manger, come to the world, God with us. So he writes in, he insists, we've got to have a scene where Linus quotes Luke chapter 2. Well, his associates are concerned about this. This is a time in American media where you've got three broadcast networks, you've got the major newspaper outlets, and the the emphasis of media is to be as broad, as broadly appealing as possible. So you don't want to get into categories that are going to offend and fracture your audience. And one of those was religion. So oftentimes you would see religion in TV of the time sort of handled very, very vaguely, if referenced at all. Think along the lines, another TV special from the time, How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

Michele McAloon:

Sure, sure.

Dr. Blake Scott Ball:

Very much the same kind of anti-consumerist message, but it's not going to get anywhere close to religion. They say, I do we really want to do this? And Schultz kind of echoing this sense that he's had about evangelizing. He says, if we don't do it, who's going to? Right? If we if we don't put this out there, who's going to do it? Because nobody else in the media is doing it. Coca-Cola and CBS, the network that agrees to run it, when they see this scene, they're very concerned as well that this might get, you know, is this going to get us into denominationalism? Is this going to get us into, you know, some of the Supreme Court battles of the early 60s about whether or not there should be public prayers and Bible reading and all these things? Schultz insists. So they run it. From all accounts, it seems that the executives at CBS were pretty certain that it was going to be a one-off and just kind of put it away. And yet, in the days and weeks afterward, CBS, Coca-Cola, and Charles Schultz are all flooded with postcards, with letters, with people pouring out their hearts saying, I never thought I would see the day where a national television program would make this declaration, right? That Christmas is about the birth of Jesus. You know, it's it seems so simple to a Christian, to a believing community, but it was revolutionary in its time.

Michele McAloon:

That's amazing. And we need brave men like Charles Schultz again. We really do. You talked about the school prayer, and but there's a very chilling date, and it was September 11th, 1963, where Lucy says the Pledge of Allegiance and then yells Amen. I when I saw that date, I couldn't, I mean I did a double take on that date, and a coincidence, whatever. But it was that was chilling. And that was in response to some of the controversies over school prayer.

Dr. Blake Scott Ball:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Michele McAloon:

That's an incredible date. Absolutely incredible.

Dr. Blake Scott Ball:

Yeah, I thought the same thing. Once again, just such a prescient message of kind of that connection between faith and patriotism, God and country. Both of these things are great importance and in danger of being lost if we don't, you know, continue to pass it on to the next generation.

Michele McAloon:

That Christmas special is amazing because it's 65 years later, it's still here. And 65 years later, we're still talking about religion in school. We're still talking about, we're still debating it. So I mean he really did hit the pulse of America. As we moved into the 70s and 80s, he really tackled the big issues. He tackled women's rights. He tackled, how about Franklin, the character Franklin? And he was one of the first guys to integrate his racially integrate his cartoon. That was such a brave move on his part.

Dr. Blake Scott Ball:

Yeah. Well, you know, again, it's it's a time in in media where there's a real reticence to make daring changes, to take risks, because you don't want to alienate pieces of the audience. There is the whole philosophy of approaching an audience was completely different. You didn't have this sort of direct market finding niche groups. Right, sure. It was a really broad approach. And so there had been a movement in American media by the early and mid-60s, sort of phase out and eliminate insensitive, stereotypical portrayals of black Americans. And so there had been this positive step to realize that, hey, like jokes at the expense of certain racial and ethnic groups is just not, it's just not kind and it's not good. And so that had been phased out. But there had not been anyone to really take the risk of replacing that with a positive image. And so in the mid-60s, you see a media landscape that is largely all white. There is a growing group in the audience who's saying, hey, where's the diversity, right? Where are people that look like my family and my kids and my neighborhood? So some of this reaches Charles Schultz through a particular woman, a housewife in Southern California, who is concerned about the media that her kids are consuming and concerned, she's concerned about violence in some of the media, but she's also concerned about that there's no diversity. There's no, it doesn't look like America. And so she's writing to a bunch of different people, and one of the people she writes to is Charles Schultz. Well, a lot of the folks she wrote to either straight up declined or ignored it altogether. Charles Schultz engages in a conversation. He writes back and he says, you know, I you're right. We do need a more diverse media landscape. And especially in 1968, this is happening just after the assassination of Martin Luther King in April. And so, you know, this is right on everyone's mind. Schultz, although he is on board with this, he he's he kind of ultimately ends up declining. At this moment, he says, you know, I just don't think that I'm the right person, a white man from the Midwest. I just don't think I'm the right person to write the voice for a black character. Well, Harriet Glickman continues kind of pressing, and Schultz continues engaging in this conversation. She says, Well, what if, what if I had some the friends from our community here in Southern California, had them write letters to you about what it would mean for their children, for black families, if peanuts had black characters. He says, Yeah, that would that would be great. I would love to see their thoughts on that. And so ultimately, Charles Schultz does. He decides, you know what, we've got to do this. We've got, once again, we've got to take this platform. We've got to demonstrate sort of a vision of what America should be, right? What America can be.

Speaker:

Right.

Dr. Blake Scott Ball:

And so he introduces Franklin. Initially, on summer vacation, Charlie Brown meets him at the beach, and the two boys play together. It's such a beautiful scene in the week. They're both there in their swim trunks, and they're just the best of friends. It does not matter whatsoever. They're skin color. They just, as children do, they just enjoy playing together. In the months that follow, Franklin moves to town and Franklin begins attending school with the other children. This was the point where Charles Schultz started to get in some real trouble. There were newspaper editors in some of the southern markets that began writing in 69 and 70 to the syndicate and saying, hey, regardless of what we might think about the issue, school integration is a really sensitive issue right now. It's still being fought in the courts and in the communities here in Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia and Louisiana. Either you stop showing Franklin in the school classroom with the white children, or we're going to stop running peanuts. And the editor of United Features Syndicate, the editor actually reaches out to Charles Schultz and says, Hey, we're starting to get some of this mail and some phone calls. Do you think that there's any other way we could kind of handle this that might be a little more sensitive to this issue? And Schultz, who was typically a pretty agreeable person, Schultz puts his foot down and says, Look, either you run these strips with the classroom scenes exactly as I as I write them, or I'll quit and I'll go find somebody willing to publish it.

Michele McAloon:

Wow. And he by that time he had the clout to do it, and he was, I mean, that's courage. That is a profile in courage to do something like that. That is amazing. One of the things that's very interesting in what you write is sort of how his career ended and how peanuts really lost its popularity. But you attribute that to our divisiveness and our inability to kind of come together to see, to understand his wishy-washiness as we put it. Can you talk to us a little bit about that? I think that's very poignant. And I think even in that, that observation is very, very observant of our society and where we were by the year 2000.

Dr. Blake Scott Ball:

Yeah. Yeah. I, you know, I think in some ways we look back at the year 2000 and and we might go, oh, how quaint. Right, sure. You know, but yeah, but in a lot of ways, what was happening through the late 80s and through the 90s, it's happening in these media circles in which in which Schultz and Peanuts were operating, but it's really reflective on the bigger trends in American life, this sort of fracturing, this stratifying uh American culture where now there's real questions. What is the the family segment of media anymore, right? Because Junior has his TV show that he watches, and our teenager has their MTV that they're absorbed in, and mom and dad have their programs. Everything sort of caters to these sort of isolation bubble of media. And of course, in the social media age, we've seen this just taken to 110%. People can live in worlds completely detached from their neighbor in the next house. In some ways, this change in culture you see by this period was I think leading some to see Peanuts and Charles Schultz as sort of quaint, sort of outdated and outmoded. But I, you know, I think in a lot of ways, through a number of different developments, through the republishing of the Peanuts comic strips by Fanagraphic Comics starting in the mid-2000s, they published the entire 50-year run out there, and it was a very popular run, including introductions from President Barack Obama talking about the significance of peanuts still in the 21st century. But also 2015 film, the Peanuts Movie that came out and did well. And Apple has done a deal that is now, you know, doing new Snoopy programming and things like this. My sense is that there is still people in the culture today who are looking for that sort of sincerity, looking for that sort of family orientedness, that innocence that seems to be missing from a lot of our news and pop media today.

Michele McAloon:

Oh, I think so. I have a 20-year-old, and we just had a conversation about comics. Now he's a comic fan, but he said, I am tired of some of the big name comics, and we know them, the Spider-Mans and all that. He said, They're all lecture you now. It's all social, moral, social justice warrior medium. And he said, you know what? You get tired of it, and it's not that good. He said, but peanuts is always there. And I thought, oh my gosh, I can't believe it. When yeah, I said, wow, yeah. So this is a 20-year-old child born after Mr. Charles Schultz has died in 2001. Charlie Brown's innocence, his humor, Lucy, Peppermint Patty. I think it is perennial. And I hope Lucy never lets Charlie kick football.

Speaker:

So that's a fantastic book.

Michele McAloon:

It really is. And I cannot encourage people enough to go and get this book simply because it's also a great slice of what happened in the second half of the 20th century. It was a great observation, and you do a really nice job. I'm so glad that Oxford University Press published this book because that's a very serious publication. Very impressive at your age that you have been have this publication with this publisher, Charlie Brown's America, The Popular Politics of Peanuts, published by Oxford University Press. You know what? You're young, so I hope you have some other great works out there ahead of you. I really do. You've been listening to Crossword where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. I am Michelle Macklin, your host. You can find my podcast and other great Catholic radio programming on archangelradio.com, and you can find me at Twitter at Michelle Macklin.