The Tartan

Editorials featured in the Forum section are solely the opinions of their individual authors.

There is a television show called “Smiling Friends” that I encourage you to watch. It has episodes that tell surprisingly coherent stories despite most of the scenes being insane. 

It’s about two vaguely people-looking characters that work for a company, this company assigns them to cheer people up. Every episode details some such wacky adventure, and it’s a good watch all around. 

This show is shockingly 21st-century oriented, and it is one of the first pieces of media I’ve experienced that pays homage to what I feel is a slowly developing “zoomer canon.” They have highly detailed and uncomfortable close-ups on characters’ faces, which I feel must certainly be a nod to this animation trope in Spongebob. They reference popular internet memes in a way that doesn’t feel cringey. 

Remember how we got a reference to “what are those” in “Black Panther” and the “spiderman-pointing” meme in “Into the Spiderverse”? Both of those felt like very insincere references to youth culture made by older movie executive types who only think of these things in terms of market appeal. 

But “Smiling Friends” feels like it’s just made by people roughly our age who like these jokes, and who want to produce stories and jokes that their audience will like. The show’s weirdness and strange messaging makes it feel a lot more like a passion project than a purely market-oriented endeavor. 

There is an episode in which the company that employs our two main characters starts to lose business (I don’t think the company has a name, but I will not deign to do any amount of research for this article). This is because a competitor opened up across the street. The boss, named Boss Man, is in his dark office consulting three great capitalists. A sniveling Warren Buffet tells the boss to invest in more stocks; Ronald Reagan tells the boss, in raspy hushed tones, that he just has to “win back the marketplace with a more competitive business model.” 

The third individual being consulted is a bit more of a mystery at first glance. 

He is an odd, short humanoid with a veiny, crescent-shaped head and sallow skin. He wears a tuxedo, top hat, and monocle. We soon surmise he is a cartoonist depiction of the loathsome capitalist, the late Mr. Peanut. In a nasal, impish voice, he tells Boss Man the story of how he distracted the American public from the revelation that he used “toxic pesticides” in his peanuts by going on the Dick Cavett show and doing a “peanut jig.” 

What is a peanut jig? This very question was asked by user queso_hervido_gaming on Reddit, who laments being unable to parse this joke on Google translate, because English is not their first language. One comment clarifies that it is “an American tradion to be danced at the end of each peanut season,” and that “Harry Trueman was the first american president to do the dance on tv, don’t believe me? look up ‘Harry Trueman’s nuts.’” 

Is this the correct interpretation of the peanut jig?

In 1892, the workers of the Homestead Steel Mill enacted a violent labor riot after Andrew Carnegie and his lap dog Henry Clay Frick (of Frick Park notoriety) decided not to renew their contract with the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. The Homestead plant was the only major plant in Carnegie’s empire with significant union membership, and the above-industry average wages paid to the workers were a consistent thorn in his side. 

While summering in Skibo castle, Carnegie sent vague affirming telegrams to Frick about the riot, including telling him: “You can get anything right with your ‘mild persistence.’” This is perhaps one step above a Mafia boss telling his lackey to make a problem “go away,” but Carnegie’s clever wording allowed him to mostly skirt direct responsibility for the disaster which followed.

After workers and townspeople broke in and occupied the factory, they fired shots at two barges of Pinkerton mercenaries sent by Frick to invade the plant and break the strike. Seven steel workers and three Pinkertons were killed in the violence. 

The conflict was only quelled when the governor of Pennsylvania, Robert Pattison (not the “Twilight” guy) sent in the national guard to force the workers out. For the rest of his days, Carnegie would lament what happened.

According to David Nasaw in his book “Andrew Carnegie” (not to be confused with “Andrew Carnegie” (1970) by Joseph Wall), Carnegie spent “the rest of his life declaring in one form or another that he would have handled the Homestead strikers differently had he been on site. He knew from the very beginning that Frick intended to call in the Pinkertons and had no objections.”

Sending in armed mercenaries to violently retake your steel factory is, arguably, quite a bit worse than putting toxic pesticides into your peanuts. This requires much more than a little jig to make the public forget. So what did Carnegie do? 

By the time the Homestead riot happened, Carnegie already had one foot out the door of U.S. Steel. He was training Frick to be his successor, hence his boss-from-a-distance approach to the conflict. 

Interestingly, he and Frick had a falling out in the years that followed. (Frick also experienced an unsuccessful assassination attempt a few days after the Homestead strike by Alexander Berkman, an anarchist whose girlfriend lived down the street from my house. Small world.) 

Carnegie was getting older and richer, and realized he only had so much life in which he could spend his inconceivable fortune. So he started to build libraries and schools. Thanks for those, by the way, the libraries are quite nice.

Saying that the Homestead strike is the reason we have a university is a bit reductive (though some, like this hack, still try to argue it), but it certainly seems like the negative public reaction to the riot caused Carnegie’s reputation to take a hit. Perhaps it even weighed on his soul. He had many good reasons to fund the creation of a school (preserving his name certainly being one), but in many respects, Carnegie Mellon University can be understood as one of the first peanut jigs. An “American tradion,” indeed.

It is sometimes hard to step away from the peanut jigging when our very school is a reminder of it. In every action we take, we are defining the reputation of our school and furthering the lifespan of Andrew Carnegie’s biggest and longest-lasting peanut jig. Take the time to reflect on whether your choices are an authentic expression of your interests and desires, or whether you are merely doing the peanut jig for Andrew.