Shmoo-B, Shmoo-Know: The Silly History of UB’s Society of the Shmoo
- Randy Laist
- 17 hours ago
- 6 min read
Writer, historian, and UB professor Eric Lehman manages the voluminous archives of the University of Bridgeport. In a recent keynote talk about UB’s 100-year history, Professor Lehman proudly recounted the many profound and memorable episodes in UB’s past: visits from Martin Luther King and Eleanor Roosevelt, for example, and the founding of the world’s first school of dental hygiene. But Professor Lehman pointed out that, as with any history, there are also episodes that are less inspirational, historical curiosities that are more “silly” than great, but that these stupid episodes are also part of the university’s rich background and deserve to be acknowledged. One such “silly” piece of UB-ana, Professor Lehman suggests, is the founding on UB’s campus in early 1949 of the Society of the Shmoo.
The Shmoo has been largely forgotten by history, but there is an argument to be made that, at the time of its runaway popularity, the Shmoo was the first symbol of a post-war American society where pop-culture properties would express values of freedom, novelty, and prosperity. The Shmoo was introduced to American newspaper readers in a story arc from Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner, which was the most popular comic strip at a time when comic strips were at the height of their pop-cultural predominance. Li’l Abner depicted the adventures of a dimwitted rural strongman and his girlfriend Daisy Mae, who were drawn in such a way that they provided the closest thing to pornography that you were likely to find in a 1940s newspaper, providing a softcore titillation that likely accounts for a large part of the strip’s popularity.
At one point, Li’l Abner stumbles upon “the Valley of the Shmoon.” The Shmoos are an extraordinary race of walrus-like critters that are devoted to fulfilling all human needs. When a Shmoo senses that you might be hungry, it gladly drops dead so that you can eat it. Fried, they taste like chicken, and broiled they taste like steak. They not only lay eggs, but they also lay bottles of milk and birthday cakes. Their skin can produce leather or cloth depending on how it’s cut. Their eyes make great buttons, and their whiskers make great toothpicks. They don’t eat anything themselves and they reproduce prolifically, so the introduction of the Shmoos transforms society by eliminating the need for the poverty-wracked populace of Dogpatch to work to feed and clothe themselves. In short, the Shmoos represent superabundance, prosperity, and effortless wish-fulfillment.
Al Capp has said that he conceived the Shmoos as a visual symbol of the Earth itself:
“Cartoonists don’t think like people. They think in pictures. Little pictures that will fit into a comic strip. And so – in my mind – I reduced the Earth down, in size, eighty or ninety billion times (I forget which), reduced it down to the size of a small critter that would fit into the “Li’l Abner strip – and it came out a shmoo” (6-7).
But, in an ironic twist in Capp’s narrative, Shmoos turn out to be bad news for big business. The corporate fat cats who profit from selling meat and eggs to Li’l Abner’s neighbors declare a “SHMOO CRISIS” and hire a “Shmooicide Squad” to eliminate the pesky critters, which is both easy to do (since they drop dead whenever they sense that human wants them to do so) and also very difficult because of how quickly they multiply. Eventually the Shmoos are repressed and order is restored, but lingering economic, political, and philosophical questions remain.
Within the fraught Cold War politics of the late 1940s, it was easy for people to read the Shmoo as an allegory for Communism and its promise of eliminating privation through the mobilization of the proletarian revolution. It was just as possible to see the Shmoo as an embodiment of a dawning age of capitalist prosperity, an explosion of consumer empowerment that naturally threatened the prevailing economic order of the pre-war period. The Shmoos not only supply people’s material needs, but also their emotional and even sexual desires as well – they signify the end of all want, all hardship, all privation. The Shmoo raises questions about the value of human labor itself that were initially raised by Plato in his allegory of the City of Pigs, a society where everyone has what they need, so there is no occasion for struggle and hardship. For Plato, and for an influential strain of Anglo-American Protestantism, such a society deprived people of the motivation to improve themselves, to cultivate a work ethic, and to pursue social progress.
The Shmoos’ polysemous perversity also betokens a superabundance of metaphorical possibility, enabling Shmoos to become one of the first pop-culture icons to leap out of one medium to suddenly become a kind of zeitgeist or symbol of the times, a forerunner of R. Crumb’s “Keep on Truckin” logo, or of Bart Simpson, or of Pepe the Frog. Ultimately, the most salient feature of the amorphous Shmoo is its Rorschach-like ability to represent people’s own preoccupations and anxieties.
And this is the energy that UB students in 1949 were responding to when they embraced the Shmoo as the emblem of a post-war order of unimagined affluence for middle-class Americans. Postwar American global hegemony did seem to magically produce the fruits of everyone’s dreams, not only of ample food and labor-saving devices, but also of sexual liberation and even spiritual emancipation from the strict ideologies of the past: the gospel of original sin, of the protestant work ethic, of the inevitability of suffering, the elevation of repression and self-abasement to sacred duties.
Al Capp himself adopts a wry stance in his reflections on how the Shmoo had proliferated – in true Shmoo fashion – from a drawing in a comic strip into stuffed animals and toys, clocks, games, record albums, apparel, beverages, nicknacks, its own spin-off comic book, an animated series (“The New Shmoo”), and “guest” appearances in other comic strips and television shows. At the height of the Shmoo’s popularity, Capp, in his definitive statement about his feelings about his creation, explains that:
“In a New England University, a society has been formed – “The Society for the Protection of the Shmoo from Al Capp.” They didn’t threaten me. They merely sent me a group picture – twenty lads – all big, all muscular, all facing the camera with the peculiarly homicidal expression of the fanatic. On the back of the picture were written these pointed words: “We travel – FAST.”
It is almost certain that the New England University Capp refers to is the University of Bridgeport. Al Capp was apparently on the UB campus “on the night the Shmoo was picked up nationally” (Harris interview). But it is also important to peel back the layers of Capp’s irony here. The Society was simply called “The Society of the Shmoo,” but Capp’s reworking of this incident as a veiled threat is his comic way of explaining his feeling that he had lost control of his creation, and that he felt surprised and maybe even threatened by the way that his creation “went viral” and took on meanings that he had never explicitly intended.
The actual motivations that led UB students to adopt the Shmoo so fervently as a mascot for their hopes and dreams were eloquently recalled by UB alum and Shmoo Society founding member Bud Harris, who, in a 1986 interview, reflected:
“Well again, I think, you know, you have to understand the times in an historical sense, and after WWII, because of the dearth of manufacturing in the early 40s there wasn't really much to be had by people. They needed something to believe in, and the Schmoo [sic] filled that thing. The Schmoo [sic] was odorless, colorless, tasteless, he could turn himself into a porkchop, if you were hungry, he was your pillow if you wanted to sleep, he was your friend if you needed a companion, and it was a symbol of hope to people. It meant that the world was going to get better. You know, when they did get better, then there was no need for the Schmoo [sic] any more. You had the other things now, you refrigerators and your cars, and washing machines, and you could get whatever you wanted, so you didn't need the Schmoo [sic] any more.” (1986)
One could argue that the UB students who founded the Society of the Shmoo were inspired by ideals that are intrinsic to UB’s institutional culture then and now – a commitment to a broader vision for our human future, a global perspective striving toward the flourishing of humanity. The Society of the Shmoo represents a dream of “un-exterminating” the Shmoo and following those joyful and loving critters into a utopian era of limitless opportunity. Considered from this perspective, the Shmoo is more than just a “silly” footnote in the annals of UB, but a kind of metaphor for the new world of inspirational possibilities that UB students have always aspired to build.
References
Capp, Al. “I Don’t Like Shmoos.” Al Capp’s Shmoo: The Complete Comic Books. Dark Horse Books, 2008.
Harris, Roswell T. “Bud.” Interview. Oct. 26, 1986. Transcript in the archives of the University of Bridgeport.
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