Snoopy and the Red Baron

The artist who most influenced my childhood was undoubtedly Charles Schulz.  His Peanuts strip appeared in both of our newspapers – the Detroit Free Press and the Ann Arbor News – and I read them every day.  Peanuts compilations books – Happiness is a Warm Puppy and Good Grief!, for example – were strewn all over our house, especially my bedroom.  The rebroadcast of Peanuts cartoons on Halloween and Christmas were special moments in decades without DVRs, DVDs, or any kind of cable television at all.  And we had Peanuts paraphernalia scattered about the house – in lunch boxes, on backpacks, and even on my sheets.  I loved Peanuts in all its formats, and Charles Schulz was the King of All Media long before Howard Stern.

Peanuts was populated only by children and Snoopy the beagle and the offscreen adults in the cartoons spoke unintelligibly.   Yet Peanuts accurately reflected much of the zeitgeist of the 1950s and early 1960s, including adult topics like depression, psychoanalysis and, in its video forms, jazz.  The strips were funny and cute, but they also dealt directly with issues of sadness and rejection, and the music of Vince Guaraldi that animated the videos was full of those same emotions.  Guaraldi died young in 1974, but he’s still my favorite jazz musician. He’s probably one of yours, too – just listen to the first few bars of “Linus and Lucy”

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Snoopy is an odd character, connected to but separate from the other main characters such as Charlie Brown and Lucy and Linus Van Pelt.  Charlie needs and wants Snoopy to be a warm and loyal presence in his life, but Snoopy is not particularly attached to Charlie and is only really excited when Charlie feeds him.  Snoopy is far more interested in own inner life, which is rich and creative.  The kids around him are interested in baseball, security, or Beethoven, but Snoopy spends most of the day imagining that he’s a flying ace in World War I.  Snoopy’s bete noire is the Red Baron, the real-life German pilot Manfred von Richthofen, and his favorite song is the WWI standard “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”

It was Snoopy who sent me off on a lifelong obsession with World War I.  War is terrible, of course, but there is still something appealingly romantic about WWI duels between pilots with mounts like the Sopwith Camel, the Fokker Triplane, or the Nieuport 28, slow-moving planes made of canvas and bailing wire.  There is a restaurant chain called 94^th Aero Squadron that tries to mimic the feel of a WWI pilots’ club, with goggles and leather helmets decorating the interior of a structure that looks like a French country inn.  I used to go to one often with my Cuban parents-in-law and while the food wasn’t great, I loved the feel.

As a kid I read many children’s books on WWI, especially books about flying aces like von Richthofen and Canadian Billy Bishop, but also books about the rest of the war – about sea battles like Jutland and Dogger Bank, about T.E. Lawrence in Arabia, and about the dreadful trench warfare in France and Belgium that killed millions of young men.  With my older brother I played WWI-themed board games like Jutland and Diplomacy and made plastic models of WWI planes and zeppelins.  And then, when I got into my teens, I read what is still one of my favorite books - Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August.

Tuchman wrote Guns of August in the early 1960s, the years of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Dr. Strangelove, a time of worry that the world might stumble into nuclear war. The guns of Tuchman’s title are the battles of August 1914, the first month of the war in which Germany invaded France and Belgium and nearly won the war.  The book is a fine description of those battles, but I remember more Tuchman’s analysis of what happened in July, the month between the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28 and the start of the war on August 1.  Why, Tuchman asked, did such a terrible event come to pass?

Nothing as huge as WWI admits to a simple explanation, but Tuchman emphasized that politicians and generals were too beholden to pre-existing mobilization plans that, once initiated, could not be stopped. This factor resonated with the liberals of the 1960s, who worried that the U.S. and the Soviet Union had built a nuclear doomsday machine that, like those WWI plans, would be impossible to turn off once it was triggered.  That seemed quite reasonable to me from the viewpoint of my elementary school’s fallout shelter.

I’ve returned in recent years to this childhood interest, re-reading Tuchman’s book and also reading Europe’s Last Summer by David Fromkin, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark, and The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914, by Margaret MacMillan, all books that aim to explain why WWI came to pass.  These books tend to echo Tuchman’s themes of complacency, arrogance, and overcommitment to rigid plans and alliances, to the idea that the war happened even though none of the main leaders really wanted it to happen.  Yet there is one outlier in the dialog, as David Fromkin believed that the German and Austrian militaries wanted a war, that they saw the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo as an opportunity to be embraced rather than a disaster to be avoided.  I think Fromkin’s right.

Why did the German and Austrian militaries want to go to war?  Fromkin argues that both Germany and Austria were worried about demographic overrun, that they would be swamped by the adjacent Slavic populations that were growing faster than their own Germanic bases.  More particularly, the Germans feared the Russians – whose empire bordered theirs at the time -  and the Austrians feared the Serbs who had recently gained independence from the Ottoman Empire.  Nationalism and scientific racism – two new ideas in Europe - had taught these men that the survival of one country must mean the extinction of another. The Germans in power thought that they had better strike right away before their prospective enemies left them demographically vulnerable.

In view of the even more terrible events that happened 25 years later during WWII, it is interesting that the German powers’ fears were largely not driven by antisemitism.  Indeed, many Jews served with honor and success in the armies of both Germany and Austria and, if there were two European countries that were most antisemitic in the years leading up to World War I, they were probably Russia (with its pogroms and its Protocols of the Elders of Zion) and France (with the Dreyfuss Affair).  It was the bitter German loss in WWI that created the need for scapegoats and that left Hitler happy to finger the Jews.  WWI was mostly driven by fears of Slavs rather than Jews.

So while the assassination of Franz Ferdinand on June 28 really did create a crisis, it was a crisis that the generals of Germany and Austria wanted, an opportunity to knock back the Slavs at their doorstep before they were overwhelmed and before the Germans and Austrians became “a beaten race.”  That’s not to say that the generals got they war they wanted – no, they thought it would only last a few months, rather like the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and that their soldiers would soon be back parading in their capitals.  But as the United States has learned in wars like Iraq and Vietnam, nobody ever gets the war they want.

I wish that more people had Fromkin’s logic in the front of their mind.  Fears of demographic overrun are as old as humanity and, while social Darwinism and nationalism had stoked those fears to a boil, the basic emotions are not peculiar to the Europeans of the 1910s.  Indeed, I think that such fears are at the heart of right-wing populism evident in Canada, the U.S., and virtually every rich country in Europe.  There are other issues, ranging from taxes to gay marriage, but in every country the issue of mass immigration is at the heart of right-wing populism.

American populists’ fears of demographic overrun is often dismissed by the Washington Post and other progressive journalists as quack “replacement theories.”  And, to be fair to the Post, the part of such theories that attributes replacement to cabals of Jews or Masons is indeed crazy and dangerous.  American immigration policy was reset in the mid-1960s by acts of Congress, and Congress continues to set immigration policy, for better or worse, to this day.  There is no independent cabal – comprised of either Jews or large corporations - that is pulling the strings of immigration policy behind a curtain.

Yet the Post itself is gaslighting its readers because some of the the facts behind the replacement theory are quite true.  American rates of immigration – primarily from Asia and Latin America – really have exploded in the past 60 years, and that immigration really has driven the share of the population that is non-Hispanic white from 90 percent to 60 percent during that time.  I would prefer to call those “augmentation facts,” not least because I have an Hispanic spouse and Hispanic children, but it’s still true that, as a share of the population, non-Hispanic whites really are being replaced.  The Post often trumpets these facts while, on an adjacent page, denying their existence.  It’s dishonest.

As I’ve argued earlier in this blog (https://subgameperfect.substack.com/p/the-melting-pot), the U.S. needs continued immigration in light of our low birth rates and aging population, and I personally enjoy – both economically and culturally – the wider range of cultures and people in the U.S.  Yet I think demographic change would meet wider acceptance if we leaned much more heavily into the melting pot metaphor in which all groups are going to ultimately merge into one “American” ethnic group, if we leaned into ethnic/racial identifiers like asian american and hispanic american, for example, rather than the Post’s preferred analogs of Asian and Hispanic; and if we chose to highlight rather than minimize the extent to which so many of the next generation, including my own children, will be a mix of backgrounds.

One of the odd things about recent American politics is that it is now the Left rather than the Right that wants to essentialize race and ethnicity, to deny the existence of a melting pot.  Proponents of that approach argue that Americans are already essentialized – defined on the basis of their race and ethnicity – and that, for example, the Post’s move to capitalizing its racial classifications (i.e. “Asian” instead of “asian american,” is just acknowledging a pre-existing reality.  There is an element of truth to this view, but it’s also a needlessly pessimistic approach that ignores how much “melting” continues to occur and that, what is worse, elicits the kind of paranoia that led Germans to launch World War I.

Some readers might dismiss any move towards melting pot rhetoric as kowtowing to racism, xenophobia, and other unacceptable emotions and views.  We should demand a world, the thinking goes, where those emotions are not tolerated and have no impact on policy decisions.  I think this view is misguided, and that it assumes that enough hectoring can extinguish emotions that are widespread throughout humanity (including non-Europeans).  Progressives ask the white majority to celebrate their own diminished importance and yet, while some white Americans will roll with this view, I think that it will continue to elicit counterproductive events like WWI and the current wave of right-wing populism growing in what used to be called “The West.”

If my readers were right-wing populists, then I would emphasize a different lesson from the start of WWI. German demographic fears were surely heightened by the fact that so many of their military and political elites were from Prussia, the state that had unified Germany into a nation just 50 years earlier.  Prussia comprised the rural, easternmost portion of Germany, and its junker class, because it lived adjacent to Poles and other Slavs, was particularly concerned about overrun by the Tsar and his hordes.  Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg was the German Chancellor during WWI and, earlier, when he had acceded to his father’s Prussian estate, he had refused to plant trees because he thought they’d soon be burned by Slavic invaders.

For those of this class who survived to 1945, it must have been a bitter irony to see their country’s borders shrunk hundreds of miles to the West, for their former estates to be occupied by Slavs, and for previously German cities like Danzig and Konigsberg to be turned into Polish or Russian cities like Gdansk and Kaliningrad. Despite seeking more lebensraum for its volk, the Germans ended up with a national footprint that was much smaller than that of 1914. The von Bethmann Hollweg estate is on the very eastern edge of modern Germany, and the Red Baron’s birthplace is now in Poland.  Nobody gets the war they wanted.

Charles Schulz’s parents grew up in the Midwest, but his father had been born in Germany before being brought to America as a baby.  Schulz himself was born in Minnesota in 1922, four years after the end of WWI, and though he served in WWII, it was the earlier war that his imagination grew up with and so perhaps it’s no surprise that he placed Snoopy in that time, too.  Charles Schulz was a hardworking optimist, but he and his strip also had a strain of depression and misanthropy, and the music of Peanuts was full of minor chords, too. I took from Schulz a belief that humanity is neither perfect nor perfectible, that we’d all be better off if we learned to compromise with the human failings of both ourselves and our compatriots.  I still love Peanuts.