Freud never asked, “What does a child want?” But in the 44 years since Benjamin Spock published “The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care,” millions of Americans have been nearly obsessed with the question. With changing social climates, they keep coming up with different answers. In the “togetherness” period the museum show focuses on, what kids wanted–more accurately, what their parents, television programmers and others wanted them to want–was cheerful conformity and unquestioning obedience. What the exhibit (which runs until April 30) best illustrates is that during the Wonder Bread years, there was plenty of burnt toast.
As thematic cement for the myth-versus reality show, curator Charles McGovern uses strips from the early days of Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts,” which made its debut exactly 40 years ago. In one, posited next to a Dick and Jane reader that lays out “proper” sex roles, Charlie Brown watches Linus jump rope. He repeatedly yells “Sissy” to the obviously enthralled Linus before conceding, in the final frame, “I’d give anything in the world if I could jump rope like that.” Another, set in a snowstorm, captures kids’ nuclear nightmares:
“It’s happening, Charlie Brown, just like they said it would!” says a frantic Linus.
“Of course it’s happening,” replies Charlie Brown. “It’s snowing. What else did you expect this time of year?”
“Snowing? Good grief, I thought it was the fallout.”
What’s astonishing is how perspicacious those strips were–even to Schulz, who does not consider himself a social critic. After re-examining his early work, the cartoonist said to curator McGovern, “It’s all there, isn’t it?” Nor did McGovern have to stretch a point: “For every one we picked there were four others that could have taken its place,” he says.
Among the 200 objects on display are Captain Kangaroo’s jacket (as well as his puppet pals, Mr. Moose and Bunny Rabbit) and Doctor Spock’s lab coat. There are Roy Rogers cap pistols and the report card of Terrence Roberts of Little Rock, Ark., one of the first black children to attend an integrated school after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case in 1954. The shadow of the bomb is there, too, from chillingly ludicrous Civil Defense films to the toy Atomic Energy Lab, whose accompanying comic book and instruction guide, “Dagwood Splits the Atom,” was written with the guidance of Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project. As McGovern notes, “This is where the cold war came home.”
The post-nuke generation may not have invented nostalgia, but it did turn it into a lifestyle. While still in their teens, the first of the baby boomers discovered the ’30s and early ’40s, particularly the period’s movies, and romanticized the era that gave us Hitler, Mussolini and global economic depression. Not to mention Spam. Now the boomers are romanticizing their own past, paying huge sums for the tattered totems of their own childhood. (McGovern even had some difficulty assembling the Smithsonian show because collectors have hoarded so many items.) The exhibition lets some light in on the dark side of childhood, but McGovern cautions against turning “Peanuts” into a metaphor. “This is a comic strip,” he says. “It’s not a guide to life. Schulz is a chronicler, and for this period of time, he was tapped into the greater currents.”
