{"id":3558,"date":"2015-03-19T13:32:33","date_gmt":"2015-03-19T17:32:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/groups.etown.edu\/news\/?p=3558"},"modified":"2015-03-24T12:25:38","modified_gmt":"2015-03-24T16:25:38","slug":"new-book-shows-mr-rogers-as-quiet-political-pacifist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/2015\/03\/19\/new-book-shows-mr-rogers-as-quiet-political-pacifist\/","title":{"rendered":"New book shows Mister Rogers as quiet political pacifist"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"book\"<\/a>When you conjure memories of \u201cMister Rogers Neighborhood\u201d flashing gently on your TV screen, remembering visits from the Queen, Trolley, Daniel Tiger and Officer Clemmons, you probably aren\u2019t thinking about the bold political and social statements made in many of the programs. But, Fred Rogers, in his soft signature cardigan, was one of the most radical pacifists of modern history.<\/p>\n

In his new book, \u201cPeaceful Neighbor: Discovering the Countercultural Mister Rogers,\u201d released March 13, Michael Long, associate professor of religious studies and director of Elizabethtown College\u2019s peace and conflict studies, explores a level of Fred Rogers that most don\u2019t consider.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wondered what his vision of peace looked like,\u201d said Long, \u201cso I went to Fred Rogers Archive in Latrobe, out near Pittsburgh, and went through his emails, his sermons, his papers\u2026\u201d What Long found was an undeniable correlation between significant historical events and the theme of Rogers\u2019 shows.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cHis mission, which wasn\u2019t so obvious, was to make peace makers out of his audience.”<\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If you decontextualize, the show seems sappy and shallow, he said, but if you place the programs in their historical context, you can see that at volatile times Rogers did not run away but, rather, he dealt with war and peace, racial politics, economic injustice, gender equality, vegetarianism, ecological ethics and the environment.<\/p>\n

To the children and parents who watched, the show was simple wise council for caring for one another and for treating each other with dignity; however, it seems, there were much deeper purposes for his stories. \u201cHis mission, which wasn\u2019t so obvious, was to make peace makers out of his audience,\u201d said Long. \u201cIf we connect the program to its historical context we can see that it’s a sharp political response to a society poised to kill. He was deeply political.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rogers, from Latrobe, Pa., first appeared on WQED in Pittsburgh, but on Feb. 19, 1968, Mister Rogers Neighborhood went national on public television. In the first week he ran an anti-war series; the programming continued through 2001, two years before Rogers died.<\/p>\n

Rogers believed that the vision of peace was not just absence of war; it also means love and compassion — not just for people but for animals. In the early 1970s Rogers became a vegetarian. \u201cHe said he could never eat anything that had a mother,\u201d Long said. When his programs showed people eating in restaurants, there was no meat in the scenes and, Long said, Rogers talked a lot about granola, tofu and beets.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe also had a beautiful ecological ethic,\u201d Long said of the gentle performer. He would go out on a boat and say ask the audience how they would feel if they were fish. \u201c\u2018Would you want people dumping things in your home?\u2019,\u201d he\u2019d ask.<\/p>\n

His statements were powerful. Families paid attention. One of his shows featured Rogers visiting killer whale Shamu. When a rerun of the show ran soon after the release of the movie \u201cFree Willy,\u201d Rogers got angry letters from children asking him why he didn\u2019t release Shamu. On another show, Rogers had a visit from Margaret Hamilton, the actress who played the Wicked Witch from Wizard of Oz. Rogers mentioned in the show that witches aren\u2019t real, which led to reactions from the Wiccan community.<\/p>\n

During the \u201cwhite flight\u201d of the late 1960s, in which whites began to exit racially mixed urban regions, Rogers featured a show in which he invited African Americans into his home, and he goes to their homes. \u201cHe was staking out a position with Martin Luther King,\u201d said Long. \u201cHe was a racial integrationist.\u201d Not long after the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Rogers brought a black police officer character to his show, which, said Long, \u201cshowed glimpses of progressive racial politics.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though he wasn\u2019t \u201cthe type to march on the streets, grab a bull horn and stand on a soap box,\u201d Long said, \u201chis activism occurred in the quiet of the studio and in front of a camera.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rogers had what Long called a Freudian instinct\u2014to positively channel destructive emotions. \u201cHe\u2019d say \u2018it\u2019s OK to be angry as long as we don\u2019t hurt ourselves or one another\u2019,\u201d Long pointed out.<\/p>\n

As an ordained Presbyterian minister, Rogers saw part of his mission as showing parables. \u201cHe had a sense that Jesus was a Prince of Peace,\u201d Long said. \u201cHe wanted his followers to take up virtues of peacemaking.\u201d Rogers, however, was asked to not talk about faith on the show.<\/p>\n

In Latrobe, Pa., Rogers earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, which recognized his contribution to the well-being of children and a career in public television that demonstrates the importance of kindness, compassion and learning.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe tried to change the hearts of people, not the just the politics of federal government,\u201d Long said of Rogers quiet pacifism. \u201cHe tried to make children into peacemakers at an early age.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When you conjure memories of \u201cMister Rogers Neighborhood\u201d flashing gently on your TV screen, remembering visits from the Queen, Trolley, Daniel Tiger and Officer Clemmons, you probably aren\u2019t thinking about the bold political and social statements made in many of the programs. But, Fred Rogers, in his soft signature cardigan, was one of the most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":3560,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8,764],"tags":[144,197,865,868,165,871,867],"class_list":["post-3558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-research-and-academics","tag-e-a-harvey","tag-elizabethtown-college","tag-fred-rogers","tag-latrobe","tag-michael-long","tag-mister-rogers-neighborhood","tag-peace-studies","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3558"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3558\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3573,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3558\/revisions\/3573"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}