The Life And Times Of Mr. Peanut

Having gathered to mourn his seeming demise, Wesley Snipes, Matt Walsh, Mr. Clean, the Kool-Aid Man, and ten or so unidentified people huddled around the legume-shaped mound of dirt marking Mr. Peanut’s burial site. A flower wreath encircled a framed picture of the monocle-wearing character, and a tombstone reading “Mr. Peanut APR. 1916 – JAN. 2020” featured an etching of his stately silhouette. As Snipes read a eulogy to the nut who had given his life to save him, the Kool-Aid Man let out a somber “Oh yeah,” shedding a single tear onto the grave below.

Much to the surprise of those in attendance, this tear nourished the earth, and a new plant sprouted—a peanut plant. From this rapidly-grown foliage emerged a top-hat wearing, spats-sporting, anthropomorphized baby-sized peanut. Matt Walsh picked up the babbling bean, which proceeded to make dolphin noises before announcing in an adult voice “Just kidding. I’m back.”

Mr. Peanut had returned.

Mr. Peanut, full name Bartholomew Richard Fitzgerald-Smyth, is a paradoxical combination of southern agriculture and Virginia aristocracy. His cane, monocle, and white gloves obscure his ambiguously sepia-toned body. De-accessorized, he is just a product of the earth. But he dresses up, masquerading as a person of capital and social status, characteristics not usually allotted to those who do the labor of cultivating peanuts. Consequently, Mr. Peanut embodies two seemingly-distinct but deeply-connected Virginian worlds: he is a product of the state’s agricultural and aristocratic traditions.

His outward appearance may not suggest an agricultural upbringing, but his origins, genealogy, and reputation—his place in the Virginia aristocracy—depend on his deep-seated connection to the land itself. Early in Virginia’s existence as an English colony, the recently-arrived colonizers established a social hierarchy through which they maintained the wealth and status of their English culture in their newly-claimed environment. They created a landed Virginian aristocracy.¹ Rather than hereditary lords and tenants, however, Virginia’s hierarchy consisted of masters and enslaved people. Europeans, Africans, and peanuts all arrived in what is now the United States as outsiders, brought to the “new world” through international and intracolonial exchange.

It was not European colonizers, though, that brought these nuts (technically legumes) to the land that became the United States; in the seventeenth century, enslaved people brought peanuts with them from Africa, and the nuts eventually became a ubiquitous crop throughout the southeast.² Because of their relative ease of cultivation—a cheap crop that grew in otherwise “poor” soils—enslaved Africans continued to grow peanuts for their own consumption, while those who enslaved them fed the legume to their livestock. In the pre-Civil War South, peanuts were often boiled, in keeping with African foodways, while in the urban North they were roasted in their shell and sold from street vendors. The nineteenth-century saw a growing awareness of the peanut’s usefulness for producing oils and butters, and by the turn of the twentieth century, the market for peanuts was on the rise with southern peanuts leading the industry.³

In the first decade of the 20th century, “the peanut went from a city snack and regional food to a national staple,” with national production, distribution, and marketing.⁴ Italian-born Pennsylvania resident Amedeo Obici founded Planters Peanuts in 1906 with his business partner Mario Peruzzi.⁵ Together Obici and Peruzzi opened their business in a factory in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where they roasted, blanched, and salted Virginia peanuts.

Deceptively, Virginia peanuts, also referred to as goobers and goober peas, are not grown exclusively in Virginia. “Virginias” are a type of peanut harvested throughout the Southeast, and they make up about fifteen percent of the United States’ annual peanut crops.⁶ Fittingly, Virginia (the state) is known for producing particularly nice Virginia-type peanuts. Desiring nuts that were Virginian in both origin and type, in 1914 Obici and Peruzzi established what would become the company’s primary production and processing facilities in Suffolk, Virginia, a peanut-growing town in the southeastern part of the state.

In 1916, Obici put out a call for logos that would help build a brand for his goobers. He wanted an image to differentiate his product from the peanut’s popular associations with poverty, farming, and the cheap “peanut gallery,” but even more importantly, from his competitors’ product. His nuts were not to be mistaken for any other average goober.

But Mr. Peanut was not originally imagined as a fancy nut—at least not by his creator. Fourteen-year-old Antonio Gentile, from Suffolk, Virginia, submitted a series of sketches of an anthropomorphized peanut. His peanut with legs won him the contest and the five dollar prize.⁷ But Gentile’s drawing was not identical to the red-carpet-ready Mr. Peanut known today. Instead, his sketches showed “Mr. P. Nut Planter,” a working-class nut. Named for what he does rather than what he is, Mr. P. Nut Planter was depicted serving peanuts, jumping over a produce sale, or otherwise participating in the peanut industry as a worker.⁸ Gentile designed him to represent both the product and the laboring members of the peanut-growing community of Suffolk, Virginia.

Mr. Peanut’s first appearance, Planters [Public domain]

Guided in the 1910s and 1920s by their new well-dressed Mr. Peanut, Planters launched both “The Nickel Lunch” campaign and the cocktail peanut, products that targeted two different classes of consumers. In these efforts, they attempted to position their product as one that held associations with lower-class production and consumption, while also being a product of status, desired by members of high-society.

Mr. Peanut in 1917, Planters [Public domain]

Even as his appearance remained dependent on his very existence as a peanut, an agricultural product, Mr. Peanut embraced an English style of men’s formal “full dress.” This styling included a black top hat, white gloves, and spats, and it relied on conventions of distinction, leisure, frivolity, and impractical wealth. The monocle was no longer standard fashion in England or the US when Mr. Peanut was created, but he embraced it as a marker of classic style and emblem of the “great English aristocrat.”¹⁰

Appearing in campaigns for the “nickel lunch” and cocktail peanuts, Mr. Peanut was positioned as a character who could speak and market to his social equals and those without his apparent means. In colonial Virginia, “planter” referred not to the people who did the labor but those who controlled the land and labor; Mr. Peanut’s attire made clear which group he was supposed to belong to.

Whether you still call him Mr. Peanut or have embraced the name Baby Nut, the thirty-second “rebirth” commercial exposes the agricultural roots of the Planters mascot more than the advertisements from the preceding 104 years. For the first time, the character comes from the ground. Like real, edible peanuts, he grew out of dirt. Baby Nut emerged from behind a veil of green, oval-shaped leaves with a midrib (line) up the center—actual peanut leaves.

From The Encyclopedia of Food, 1923, Artemas Ward [Public domain]

While non-anthropomorphized peanuts grow underground, not resting amid the foliage like Baby Nut, the visual inclusion of a peanut plant is a reminder of the very real agricultural origins of the peanuts that Planters dry roasts and sells across the country. And this particular peanut plant in the commercial is massive, perhaps a reference to Mr. Peanut’s identity as a Virginian. The sandy soil of southeastern Virginia is known to produce particularly large and crunchy Virginia-type peanuts, making the state home to the “Cadillac” of peanuts.¹¹ The seemingly nutrient-rich dirt on the grave may, then, identify the otherwise ambiguous setting for the funeral as Mr. Peanut’s home state of Virginia.¹²

In this moment of the peanut character’s triumphant return, Planters had the opportunity to rebrand. And, in some ways, they did. They introduced an instantly meme-worthy animated Baby Nut whose large eyes and generally-accepted cuteness was immediately compared to Baby Yoda, found copying Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” dance, and depicted on a slew of merchandize available for purchase. Baby Nut was born to be a viral internet sensation.

Mostly, though, the “new” character is the same. His nursery—visible on a “live stream” available on Twitter immediately after the commercial aired—is outfitted with a peanut-shaped bassinet, botanical prints of peanut plants, framed copies of “Mr. Peanut’s Guide to Tennis” (1969) and “Mr. Peanut’s Guide to Nutrition” (1970)—and peanut and monocle patterned wallpaper.

#BabyNut here, back and cuter than ever! Now what should I do next? Tell me in the replies and I’ll try to do them in real time! And yes… suggestions that are a little nutty are ok. https://t.co/UWFWzPURht

— Peanut Jr. (@MrPeanut) February 3, 2020

Just in case we aren’t convinced by the bedroom decorations or the little goober’s oversized top hat, white gloves, and spats that he is, in fact, the second coming of the sophisticated nut who died in January, the commercial ended with the baby saying “Where’s my monocle?”

Even if just rhetorically, Planters has maintained the iconic accessory that firmly asserts Mr. Peanut’s position not as an agricultural laborer, but as an aristocratic Virginia planter. And while the original Mr. Peanut, with his ambiguous origins, could have been born into the working class and achieved his elite status by pulling himself up by his spats, Baby Nut is shown to be privileged from birth, born into a world of wealth without ever having to work.

1. Louis B. Wright, The First Gentlemen of Virginia: Intellectual Qualities of the Early Colonial Ruling Class, (San Marino, CA: Henry E. Huntington Library & Art Gallery, 1940), 38–39; “Virginia’s Colonial Dynasties,” Virginia Historical Society, accessed Nov. 30, 2015.
2. Andrew F. Smith, Peanuts: The Illustrious History of the Goober Pea (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 12; Jon Krampner, Creamy and Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter, the All-American Food (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 4.
3. See David S. Shields, Southern Provisions: The Creation and Revival of a Cuisine, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 305–20.
4. Shields, Southern Provisions, 305.
5. Smith, Peanuts, 49; “Amedeo Obici and Bay Point Farm History,” The Obici House at Sleepy Hole Golf Course, accessed May 6, 2016.
6. Krampner, Creamy and Crunchy, 9.
7. “Amedeo Obici and Bay Point Farm History“; Tracy Agnew, “The father of Mr. Peanut,” Suffolk News-Herald, October 18, 2013; Smith, Peanuts, 53; Kathleen Franz, “Mr. Peanut and Antonio Gentile: A trademark that defined a life,” O Say Can You See?: Stories from the National Museum of History, May 6, 2014.”
8. Franz, “Mr. Peanut and Antonio Gentile.”
9. “Introducing ‘Mr. Peanut,’” Barre Daily Times (VT), Sept. 6, 1917, p. 2; Franz, “Mr. Peanut and Antonio Gentile.” Most sources I came across referenced a Chicago art firm as the source of Mr. Peanut’s transformation from Gentile’s sketches into the monocle-wearing figure known today. Robert Slade adds some uncertainty to the origin of the fancy Mr. Peanut. He recognizes two theories: one that Chicago artist Andrew Wallach did the redesign, and another that Frank Krize Sr., a Planters employee in Suffolk, VA was the one who spruced up Mr. Peanut. Slade personally believes it to have been the latter of the two, but his belief contradicts the more popular version of Mr. Peanut’s evolution. Tracy Agnew, “Mr. Peanut legacy lives on,” Suffolk News-Herald, July 12, 2016.
10. Rose Eveleth, “Why Do Rich People Wear Monocles?,” Smithsonian Magazine, Dec. 28, 2012; Kathleen Drowne and Patrick Huber, The 1920s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 112; David Blanke, The 1910s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 96.; Marius Hentea, “Monocles on Modernity,” Modernism/modernity 20 (April 2013): 217.
11. “Peanuts,” Virginia.gov, accessed Nov. 30, 2015
12. Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, also makes claim as Mr. Peanut’s hometown, but I’m functioning under the premise that having been sketched in Suffolk, Virginia, makes him undeniably a Virginian.

Rachel Kirby

Rachel C. Kirby is a PhD Candidate in American Studies at Boston University. She has an MA in Folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her dissertation examines representations of agriculture and place in the twentieth-century South.