Mr. Rogers Among the Savages

I’ve been spending a lot of time with Fred Rogers lately. Mr. Rogers passed away in 2003, but he lives on in an endless series of television repeats on PBS stations across America. In life, he was celebrated as a secular saint and a national treasure. But now that he’s gone it’s clear he was more than that.

Nicklaus Jarvis

For all of his sweetness, Mr. Rogers was a countercultural figure. His show, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, presented a liberal view of the world that often verged on self-parody. One episode I saw recently featured a nonsexist orange construction sign proclaiming “People at Work.” In another, Mr. Rogers made little bags of homemade granola (“for some of my friends,” he explained) before heading off to tour a tofu factory.

That makes sense, of course. Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood began filming in 1968. The drug culture was unfurling; homeless teenagers were taking over San Francisco; student protesters were rioting. Hijackings and assassinations had become routine. America’s center was failing to hold.

But the hippie aesthetic of Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood was more Society of Friends than SDS. In one episode Mr. Rogers visited Adelia Moore-Gerety, a pretty young woman who sported an ostentatiously hyphenated last name and a fashionable peasant blouse. But Adelia was a homemaker who showed Mr. Rogers how she sewed quilts and stuffed animals for her children.

Part of Mr. Rogers’ mission seems to have been to honor people who work with their hands. In nearly every episode he toured some workplace—a metal-working plant, a factory making rain slickers, a mushroom farm, a paper mill. He approached the workers as though they were artisans, performing interesting and valuable work. Which, of course, they were.