A Boy Named Charlie Brown: Comic Strips, Conversations, and American Culture

Starting in 1950, Charles Schulz’s much-loved Peanuts comic strip ran in national syndication every day for fifty years.  Across the United States, adults and children followed the antics of pitiful Charlie Brown, his rambunctious dog Snoopy, and friends like the sassy Lucy van Pelt.  By the early sixties, Peanuts enjoyed universal critical and popular acclaim for its wit and innocence.  Today, it is considered an American classic and one of the greatest comic strips of all time.

Yet, Charlie Brown and his friends were not as innocent as they seemed.  Peanuts consistently critiqued American race relations, religion, and accepted gender roles.  Such content set off numerous national debates including a 1965 best-selling book The Gospel According to Peanuts, which analyzed the evangelical messages presented in the strip.  Schulz stirred controversy in the late 1960s when he introduced a black student, Franklin, to Charlie Brown’s all-white school without a single reference to race or integration.  Schulz was a master of using the innocence of his medium to address sensitive issues in American culture.  Because of his subtlety, historians have largely missed the cultural importance of Peanuts as a serious critique on postwar America.  This poster and slide presentation will use Schulz’s artwork to trace three major themes: race, gender, and religion.  This poster is part of a larger dissertation project on the role of comic strips in postwar America.  It argues that strips like Peanuts were a powerful and inconspicuous catalyst for civil debate in twentieth century America.