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Peaceful Neighbor
Discovering the Countercultural Mister Rogers
By Michael G. Long Westminster John Knox Press
Copyright © 2015 Michael G. Long
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-664-26047-7
CHAPTER 1
"Isn't Peace Wonderful?"
Against the Vietnam War, for Gandhi
Just three weeks before the national launch of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in February 1968, Ho Chi Minh and his advisers in North Vietnam marked Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year, by carrying out a surprise assault on cities and villages across South Vietnam. The Tet Offensive was massive, with 84,000 pro-Communist troops staging attacks throughout the South, and although U.S. and South Vietnamese forces took just several days to repel the attackers, the sheer power of the assault suggested that President Johnson and General Westmoreland had been less than forthcoming in their earlier assurances that the Vietnam conflict was near its end.
Frustration at home was palpable. "What the hell is going on?" CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite angrily asked. "I thought we were winning the war!" Cronkite's network and other major media outlets had been bringing home the horrors of war by offering daily doses of violent images and death counts. Coupled with this ongoing barrage of negative images, the shock of Tet contributed to the public's growing disapproval of the war and President Johnson's handling of it.
Although only a small minority of citizens were antiwar activists, protests were on the rise, and just two weeks before Mister Rogers' Neighborhood debuted nationally, Martin Luther King Jr. had led 2,500 members of a major antiwar group, Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam, in a silent vigil at Arlington National Cemetery. Far from monolithic, the growing antiwar movement ranged from mainstream protests like King's to violent confrontations at military sites to Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman's mystical efforts to levitate the Pentagon.
Fred Rogers was no Abbie Hoffman — levitating the Pentagon was not his thing — but viewers tuning in to his new national program would have had no doubt he opposed the war. Rogers communicated his antiwar views that first week primarily through a timely storyline in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.
War in Make-Believe?
Rogers typically crafted Mister Rogers' Neighborhood with weekly themes (for example, pets, food, or recycling) that he addressed in his television neighborhood and in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. He devoted the theme of his first week of national programs to war and peace. Rogers's approach to this topic, like his approach to less controversial themes, was not "in your face"; his style was far from dogmatic or confrontational, and he often surrounded the week's theme with lessons that did not seem directly related to the theme. For example, in the series on war and peace, he used "peace balloons" to teach not only about peace but also about the physics of flying balloons. His gentle approach to the theme sometimes belied its hard-hitting message.
In our very first visit to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, we discover that the ever mischievous Lady Elaine Fairchilde, a rather unattractive puppet with a long and crooked nose, has used her magical boomerang to rearrange the landscape, even moving the Eiffel Tower to the other side of the castle. The mischief so angers King Friday XIII — the titular, egotistic, and often bumbling head of Make-Believe — that he establishes border guards so other changes "cannot come in."
When Mister Rogers shares this news with neighbor Betty Aberlin back at his television house, she exclaims, "That sounds like a war!" Distressed and concerned, she dons a burlap cape and leaves to find out what's going on in the normally peaceful Make-Believe. Once there (she's now Lady Aberlin, the niece of King Friday), she discovers King Friday and Edgar Cooke, the singing castle cook, dressed in full military regalia and prepared to use force to turn back anyone seeking to make further changes, although, truth be told, Cooke seems more worrier than warrior.
Sporting a helmet with thirteen stars, King Friday then instructs Lady Aberlin to check the north gate while Edgar checks the castle gardens. When Lady Aberlin protests, saying she was not planning to stay, the king will have none of it. "You have come during a state of emergency," he says, "and I have drafted you!" Unbelievably, the military draft has come to Make-Believe — and so too has resistance. Although Lady Aberlin hesitantly agrees to be drafted, the Neighborhood has had at least one draft-resister along the way, because the oversized uniform she puts on was actually intended for a draftee who dared not to show up.
Unaffected by such dissent, King Friday continues to militarize the castle, even adding barbed wire around the walls. But guards Edgar and Lady Aberlin are not comfortable with either the militarized Neighborhood or their jobs, and it does not take long for Aberlin to ask for a day off. She uses her time away to follow up on a creative idea first suggested by the once-wild-but-now-tame Daniel Striped Tiger: to send peace balloons onto the castle grounds so King Friday will know that "the whole Neighborhood wants peace."
Safe and sound back in Mister Rogers's house, Betty Aberlin talks with Mister Rogers about the plan, showing him a bunch of balloons with little signs tied to them. The signs include words of peace: love, peaceful coexistence, tenderness, and peace itself. Mister Rogers is not entirely sure the idea will work, because the king is in "such a fighting mood." But after he and Betty do a successful test run together, he smiles and says, "I think this can work!"
Back in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, Lady Aberlin joins Daniel and others for the balloon launching at the factory owned and operated by Cornflake S. Pecially. Everyone waits. As the peace balloons float onto the castle grounds, King Friday mistakes them for paratroopers and begins to shout, "Fire the cannon! Fire the cannon! Fire the cannon! Man your stations! Paratroopers! Paratroopers!" Because he's in such a "fighting mood," the king has imagined that paratroopers have invaded his land with dangerous designs to change Make-Believe.
But Lady Aberlin quickly intervenes, pleading with Friday and his soldiers to read the messages "before you start shooting." Guard Negri, one of the king's faithful soldiers, reads the messages aloud and, lo and behold, the surprised king immediately says, "Stop all fighting! Stop all fighting!" Of course, no fighting had ever broken out, but the neighbors of Make-Believe translate the king's directive as an order to stop guarding the Neighborhood and return to their everyday lives. At last, King Friday is very pleased with these peaceful developments, and so are Lady Aberlin and Daniel Striped Tiger. "It worked, Daniel," Lady Aberlin says, with a lovely smile. "Oh," Daniel replies, "It did work. ... I'm so glad, because we wanted everybody to have peace, didn't we?"
Back in his house, reflecting on the exciting events, Mister Rogers admits he was not entirely certain the idea of floating peace balloons around the castle would actually succeed. "Floating things!" he says. "How did we know that that was going to be the way the Neighborhood of Make-Believe told the castle they wanted peace?" But Mister Rogers is just as pleased as everyone else with the way things turned out. "Isn't peace wonderful?" he says.
Peacemaking Works
Fred Rogers has taught us in this inaugural week that peace is indeed wonderful. King Friday no longer needs to draft soldiers, post guards, and shout orders to fire the cannon. Neighbors no longer have to give their name, rank, and serial number when traveling throughout Make-Believe. Henrietta Pussycat can stop worrying about being shot and come out from hiding deep in the roots of X the Owl's tree. X no longer has to promise to protect Henrietta from flying bullets. And no one has to shoot invading paratroopers, or even balloons with peace messages. Everyone can go back to the peace and quiet that marked their lives before the crisis.
Rogers thus deliberately used his storyline to build a rational case against war. Like the rationalist Progressives of the 1920s, he sought to school us in the overwhelmingly negative effects of war: disturbing fear, disrupted lives, and distorted thoughts and actions. By the end of the week of programs, war seemed absolutely crazy — the height of irrationality.
Nevertheless, while he emphasized that peace is wonderful, Rogers was not altogether starry-eyed in this first week. In fact, he seemed quite the political realist in teaching us that peacemaking will be hard work. It will certainly require the most creative thoughts our moral imagination can muster. Like Daniel Striped Tiger, we will have to move beyond typical options and come up with creative strategies that surprise and shock the warmongers we seek to influence. Peacemaking will also no doubt be time-consuming. It will require us, as it did Lady Aberlin, to take time off from our regular work to create and carry out unique plans we would not normally even consider. And peacemaking will lead us into moments of doubt and uncertainty. Like Lady Aberlin and Mister Rogers, we will find ourselves wondering whether our ideas will really work.
But the stronger message from the first week is that peacemaking can indeed work. In emphasizing this hopeful and pragmatic point (Mister Rogers, Lady Aberlin, and Daniel use the word work at least half a dozen times in reference to the peace balloons), Rogers echoed an individual he often identified as one of his personal heroes: Mohandas Gandhi. Unfortunately, Rogers never spelled out the exact ways in which Gandhi influenced him, but it's not too difficult to see his ideas in this first week overlapping with Gandhi's.
Like Gandhi, Rogers depicted political power as derivative. He did not develop this thought, of course, but the first week in Make-Believe certainly showed Rogers's belief that a ruler's power, like King Friday's, is ultimately dependent upon complicity or cooperation from those he or she rules, and that when the governed begin to withdraw their cooperation, as Lady Aberlin and Daniel Striped Tiger did, the power of the ruling authority begins to crumble.
Like Gandhi, Rogers also embraced the practice of civil disobedience and its underlying notion that people should withdraw their cooperation with unwise leaders. Again, he did not expound on this, but the first week clearly revealed his belief that it's good and important when individuals, like Lady Aberlin and Daniel Striped Tiger, peacefully dissent from a ruler intent on using force to impose his unjust or irrational will throughout the land.
Finally, Rogers firmly believed, as Gandhi did, that nonviolent dissent can indeed work. A pragmatic pacifist, Rogers showed us that if the people withdraw their cooperation from a ruler intent on taking them to war, they will ultimately succeed, one way or another, because political power ultimately resides with the people. Particular peacemaking strategies may fail along the way — we won't know whether peace balloons will work until we try them — and rulers may resist dissent in a variety of ways. But if the people remain resolute in their peacemaking, they will win the day, and rightly so, because power belongs to the people.
Echoing Gandhi, Rogers gave voice to the 1968 peace movement in the United States. Context matters, and when placed in its historical context, Rogers's message from the Neighborhood of Make-Believe packs a punch: The power of President Lyndon Johnson, like King Friday's, depends upon the people he rules. If peacemakers withdraw their cooperation from the president's commitment to Vietnam, they will succeed. They may not succeed in the short term, but if they remain resolute and identify the right strategies, they will ultimately win. And their hard efforts will be worthwhile because peace, as the people know, is always far more desirable than war.
Fred Rogers was no wild-eyed Abbie Hoffman during the Vietnam War. Mystical levitation wasn't his forte. Nor, for that matter, was he a Martin Luther King Jr. Marching for peace in noisy streets wasn't his chosen method, either. But in the quiet of a television studio, behind the staring eye of a camera, Rogers was a leading peace activist in his own right, intent on showing the beauty and power of peacemaking to children and adults mired in a war with no end in sight.
CHAPTER 2
"War Isn't Nice"
Against the Arms Race, for Peaceful Imagination
Many opponents of the Vietnam War were not pacifists. John Kerry, for example, was a leading activist in the peace movement of the 1960s, but in the 1980s he was not a prominent voice in popular campaigns opposing nuclear weapons or various U.S. military excursions. Fred Rogers, by contrast, was opposed not just to the Vietnam War but also to all wars. He was a dyed-in-the-wool pacifist who saw war and its preparations as always wrong — yesterday, today, and tomorrow. As a committed pacifist, Rogers continued to broadcast his antiwar views long after the conclusion of the Vietnam War. When he did so in the 1980s, he intentionally offered a counterpoint to the militaristic foreign policy of President Ronald Reagan.
The Context: War and Weapons
In November 1983, Rogers aired a remarkable weeklong series of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood on the theme of conflict. The series resurrected themes from the 1968 programs on war and peace but also advanced them in new and creative ways. The episodes of November 7–11, 1983, remain the most concerted antiwar effort of Rogers's entire television career, and there has since been nothing like it in all of children's programming.
War and weapons, as usual, were in the air in 1983. PBS was using the new fall television season to broadcast its thirteen-part history of the Vietnam War, or, as media critic John Corry aptly characterized it, "the longest and most misunderstood war that Americans ever fought."1 The somber documentary resurrected old images of body bags and soldiers wading through muddy waters and rice paddies, and many viewers no doubt saw the footage as a ghastly reminder of the dangers of U.S. foreign policy run amok.
They also would have seen the footage as timely. Once again, the American public was debating the wisdom of employing U.S. military might to combat communism abroad. This time the focus was on Central America — Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador — and President Reagan's fervent commitment to using U.S. forces there to conquer communism and establish U.S.-styled democracy. John B. Oakes, a New York Times editor during the Vietnam War, snorted at that mission, speaking for many liberals when he warned that summer that unless Congress stopped him, "Ronald Reagan could plunge this country into the most unwanted, unconscionable, unnecessary, and unwinnable war in its history, not excepting Vietnam."
But the most significant military event occurred in October, just before Rogers's weeklong series, when the virulently anticommunist Reagan authorized a U.S. military intervention in Grenada, a small Caribbean nation whose Marxist leader, Maurice Bishop, was overthrown by members of his own party. At the request of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, Reagan sent U.S. troops to the tiny island to restore order, safeguard American students, and prevent Cuba from establishing control over the nation's politics. It took U.S. forces only a few days to accomplish their mission, and the successful intervention received widespread support from the American public, including John Kerry.
Finally, worldwide protests of nuclear weapons also set the backdrop to Rogers's special series on conflict. On October 22, ten days before U.S. cruise missiles were set to arrive at an airbase in Great Britain (compliments of the Reagan administration's policy of selective nuclear proliferation), nearly 250,000 people converged in London to stage massive demonstrations against nuclear weapons on British soil. Just a week earlier, 10,000 protestors had held a protest rally at a nuclear weapons plant in Denver, Colorado, even attempting to form a human chain around the facility. And in early November, antinuclear groups shouted enthusiastic support for both Lynne Littman's Testament, an artsy film depicting the horrors of nuclear war, and ABC's The Day After, a widely publicized television series about the same topic.
While the media devoted sustained attention to these various types of protest, President Reagan seemed unfazed by the "antinukes" and continued to support the proliferation of U.S.-controlled nuclear weapons. Eight months before Rogers's series aired, for instance, Reagan had traveled to Orlando, Florida, to speak to the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), and in what is now known as "the evil empire speech," he sharply criticized those who "speak in soothing tones of brotherhood and peace" while failing to recognize the ferocity of our godless, aggressive, and totalitarian adversaries. He had the Soviet Union in mind, of course, and he cautioned against "those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority." Setting the immediate background for his thoughts was the NAE's plans to devote some of its discussions to the topic of halting the production of nuclear weapons. "I urge you," Reagan added, "to beware of the temptation of pride — the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Peaceful Neighbor by Michael G. Long. Copyright © 2015 Michael G. Long. Excerpted by permission of Westminster John Knox Press.
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