Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 126

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Popular Culture Review
in the 1952 “I Go Pogo” campaign which had spawned political buttons and
even campus riots.24 Pogo had no such campus readership in the late 1960s.
Older siblings of sixties youths perhaps had cheered on Pogo’’s earlier anti-
McCarthyism strips, but in an era of fire-fights, tear gas, and Battles of Chicago,
Pogo's satirical bite was nearly toothless. Even its humor often seemed strained
and tired.25
Despite this, however, and in spite of the relative mildness of the LBJ
sequences in Pogo, a number of American newspapers decided to censor them
or remove them from the comics page. This reaction says a great deal about the
overheated political culture of the era. Some editors dropped the strip while the
steer character was present or they put Pogo on the editorial page of the paper.26
Kelly’s usual response to this type of censorship was mild. He generally
provided non-political strips as substitutes for the offending political satire. This
rather pliant, accommodating policy was offered until 1972, when, as a very sick
man who was only a year away from his death, Kelly refused to supply any
more substitute strips.27 The substitution option, while not well known, still
could add to the general impression of the strip’s loss of critical virtue, even
though Kelly often redeemed himself by reprinting the “banned” sequences in
the next Pogo book.28
Eventually, Kelly did reconcile himself with the nation’s radicalized
and socially conscious youth. In a 1970 article written for the Milwaukee
Journal (February 22), he recreated a link to his own past idealism:
If we identify with possessions and powers that are transient,
how is it possible to scoff at the youth, who for at least this
one young, blinding moment, realizes that these are not the
things he yearns for? We old grumps will remember that one
of the drives of our youth was to “make the world safe for
democracy.” Now, as goblins loom on every side, we are with
George Washington. We can not tell a lie. Youth looks at the
big bomb, big government, big labor, big crime, big britches
and we must admit with him, in the words of a Pogo character,
“We gotta make democracy safe for the world.”29
Kelly had come a long way from his 1965 yearning for the “good old days” of
war and segregation. Still, the era and its divisive issues took a depressing toll
on him, a cartoonist who had always enjoyed his life and work. As early as 1966
he would lament: “As our people move in all directions with great grim purpose,
the safety valve of humor seems to be missing. Humor is not escape. Sleep is
escape. Humor is relief.”30 Because the 1960s were so different from the 1950s,
when problems appeared to be clear and less morally ambiguous and Pogo had
made its reputation, it no longer provided many people with either the “relief’ of