Death of the Liberal Class (16 page)
Read Death of the Liberal Class Online
Authors: Chris Hedges
Tags: #Political Culture, #Political Ideologies, #General, #Conservatism & Liberalism, #Political Science, #Liberalism
“By the late 1920s, for example, you have the emergence of a fairly elaborate social psychological apparatus designed to take the temperature of public emotions, not for the purpose of reporting on what people feel but for the purpose for shaping what people feel,” Ewen said:
That institution, which starts out with the Psychological Corporation in the 1920s, grows into a major polling and survey research industry, which not only permeates the commercial world but begins to permeate academia. On that level, it has become more and more pervasive. Almost every moment of human attention is being subjected to that kind of strategy. The resources that exist to give support to that are enormous. The amount of money that goes into the miseducation of the American people is far vaster and far more enthusiastically spent than that which goes into the education of the American people.
The liberal class, believing it had to fit its ideas into the new sloganeering of mass communications, began to communicate in the child-like vocabulary and simplistic sound bites demanded by commercial media. Intellectual debate, once a characteristic of the country’s political discourse, withered. The liberal class became seduced by the need for popular appeal, forgetting, as Macdonald wrote, that “as in arts and letters, communicability to a large audience is in inverse ratio to the excellence of a political approach. This is not a good thing: as in art, it is a deforming and crippling factor. Nor is it an eternal rule: in the past, the ideas of a tiny minority, sometimes almost reduced to the vanishing point of one individual, have slowly come to take hold on more and more of their fellow men.”
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The cultural embrace of simplification, as Macdonald warned, meant reducing a population to speaking in predigested clichés and slogans. It banished complexity and further pushed to the margins difficult, original, or unfamiliar ideas. The assault on radical and original thought, which by definition did not fit itself into the popular cultural lexicon, saw art forms such as theater suffer.
The radical current in theater of the 1920s and 1930s brought potent new ways of thinking to audiences who had neither the time nor the inclination to read social theory. The theater became one of the last effective ways in which artists could compete with corporate consumerist culture by appealing to emotion and fact. It opposed mass propaganda by using many of the same methods of commercial propaganda. Theater responded to the political upheavals preceding World War I, during the Depression and, in a final gasp, at the height of the Vietnam War with politically charged works that, like the organs of mass propaganda, were designed to make people feel. The Province-town Playhouse in the 1920s performed the early plays of Eugene O’Neil and Susan Glaspell. The New Playwrights’ Theatre, funded by the banker Otto Kahn, included the communist author Mike Gold, who wrote
Jews Without Money,
and left-wing artists such as Francis Edward Faragoh, Emjo Basshe, John Howard Lawson, and John Dos Passos. Lawson, who would become one of the Hollywood Ten, jailed for a year for refusing to answer before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), wrote a jazz play,
Processional,
about labor strife, prejudice, and violence in a Kentucky coal mining town.
Jews Without Money,
and left-wing artists such as Francis Edward Faragoh, Emjo Basshe, John Howard Lawson, and John Dos Passos. Lawson, who would become one of the Hollywood Ten, jailed for a year for refusing to answer before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), wrote a jazz play,
Processional,
about labor strife, prejudice, and violence in a Kentucky coal mining town.
Basshe wrote a manifesto for the New Playwrights, calling for “a theater which is as drunken, as barbaric, as clangorous as our age.” A red flag was hoisted outside the Cherry Lane Theatre, on Commerce Street in Greenwich Village, which the New Playwrights rented for their second season. Dos Passos wrote the manifesto for their second season: “Towards a Revolutionary Theatre,” in which he called for a theater that “draws its life and ideas from the conscious sections of the industrial and white collar working classes which are out to get control of the great flabby mass of capitalist society and mold it to their own purpose.” These radicals sought to change content and theatrical form. The new social theater would be “somewhere between a high mass . . . and a Barnum and Bailey’s circus.”
During the New Deal, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) recruited Hallie Flanagan in 1935 to become the head of the Federal Theatre Project. This effort, which brought radicals and liberals together, became an effective tool for social change and perhaps was the last potent counterweight to the propaganda state. Production costs and scenic effects were limited. Money was used to pay salaries to the artists. Ticket prices were low. Theater suddenly became available to people across the country. The project split theater, as Flanagan noted, between commercial theater, whose aim was to make money, and those in the public theater who wanted to make a new social order. By the end of the first year the project had more than fifteen thousand men and women on its payroll, and by the time the project was shut down four years later, its productions had played to more than thirty million people in more than two hundred theaters and school auditoriums, on portable stages, and in public parks across the country.
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Those working in the project were professional actors, directors, designers, writers, clowns, and musicians left unemployed by the financial collapse. They produced high-quality works that spoke to ordinary lives and the misery that had engulfed the country. Orson Welles and John Houseman directed the Negro Theatre Unit of the Federal Theatre Project in Harlem and set
Macbeth
in the Haitian court of King Henri Christophe. Voodoo witch doctors were recruited to play the weird sisters. The incidental music was composed by Virgil Thomson. The play, which premiered at the Lafayette Theatre on April 14, 1935, was sold out for each of its nightly performances. New plays, classical drama, modern drama, radio drama, puppet plays; Yiddish-, Spanish-, Italian-, and German-language theater; children’s theater, dance drama, musicals, religious drama, vaudeville, and circuses—hundreds and hundreds of productions in every state of the union poured out of the project. It was the high point of American theater.
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Those working in the project were professional actors, directors, designers, writers, clowns, and musicians left unemployed by the financial collapse. They produced high-quality works that spoke to ordinary lives and the misery that had engulfed the country. Orson Welles and John Houseman directed the Negro Theatre Unit of the Federal Theatre Project in Harlem and set
Macbeth
in the Haitian court of King Henri Christophe. Voodoo witch doctors were recruited to play the weird sisters. The incidental music was composed by Virgil Thomson. The play, which premiered at the Lafayette Theatre on April 14, 1935, was sold out for each of its nightly performances. New plays, classical drama, modern drama, radio drama, puppet plays; Yiddish-, Spanish-, Italian-, and German-language theater; children’s theater, dance drama, musicals, religious drama, vaudeville, and circuses—hundreds and hundreds of productions in every state of the union poured out of the project. It was the high point of American theater.
The productions—which took on factory owners, bankers, coal mine owners, government bureaucrats and industrialists—led to howls of protest from the power elite.
It Can’t Happen Here,
a drama that illustrated how fascism could take hold in the United States, was based on the novel by Sinclair Lewis. It opened in twenty-one theaters in seventeen states on October 27, 1936. The
Hollywood Citizen-News
reported that “the project has been the target of criticism from sources holding the play will antagonize sympathizers of the Hitler and Mussolini regimes.” Welles and Houseman were preparing to mount a production called
The Cradle Will Rock,
a musical written by Marc Blitzstein—who would be blacklisted in the 1950s—set in “Steel-town, U.S.A.” The musical followed the efforts of a worker, Larry Foreman, to unionize steel workers. His nemesis is the heartless industrialist Mr. Mister, who controlled the press, the church, the arts, the local university, politics, the community’s social organizations, and even the local doctor.
The Cradle Will Rock
spared no one, from Mr. Mister’s philanthropic wife and spoiled children to Reverend Salvation, who used religion to bless war and capitalism, to the corrupt editor of the local paper, Editor Daily. Mr. Mister, a trustee of the local university, forced the college president to fire professors who did not laud the manly arts of war and capitalism to students. The artists Yasha and Dauber, considered themselves too “cultured” and dependent on the largesse of Mr. Mister’s family to engage in politics. They sang with Mrs. Mister:
It Can’t Happen Here,
a drama that illustrated how fascism could take hold in the United States, was based on the novel by Sinclair Lewis. It opened in twenty-one theaters in seventeen states on October 27, 1936. The
Hollywood Citizen-News
reported that “the project has been the target of criticism from sources holding the play will antagonize sympathizers of the Hitler and Mussolini regimes.” Welles and Houseman were preparing to mount a production called
The Cradle Will Rock,
a musical written by Marc Blitzstein—who would be blacklisted in the 1950s—set in “Steel-town, U.S.A.” The musical followed the efforts of a worker, Larry Foreman, to unionize steel workers. His nemesis is the heartless industrialist Mr. Mister, who controlled the press, the church, the arts, the local university, politics, the community’s social organizations, and even the local doctor.
The Cradle Will Rock
spared no one, from Mr. Mister’s philanthropic wife and spoiled children to Reverend Salvation, who used religion to bless war and capitalism, to the corrupt editor of the local paper, Editor Daily. Mr. Mister, a trustee of the local university, forced the college president to fire professors who did not laud the manly arts of war and capitalism to students. The artists Yasha and Dauber, considered themselves too “cultured” and dependent on the largesse of Mr. Mister’s family to engage in politics. They sang with Mrs. Mister:
And we love Art for Art’s sake,
It’s smart, for Art’s sake,
To Part, for Art’s sake,
With your heart, for Art’s sake,
And your mind, for Art’s sake,
Be Blind, for Art’s sake,
And Deaf for Art’s sake,
And dumb, for Art’s sake,
They kill, for Art’s sake,
All the Art for Art’s Sake
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Mr. Mister and Reverend Salvation, who preached peace and love before World War I was declared and blessed the war once it began, sang a duet:
War! War! Kill all the dirty Huns!
And those Austro-Hungarians
War! War! We’re entering the war!
The Lusitania’s an unpaid debt!
Remember Troy! Remember Lafayette!
Remember the Alamo! Remember our womanhood!
Remember those innocent unborn babies!
Don’t let George do it, you do it,
Make the world safe for democracy!
Make the world safe for liberty!
Make the world safe for steel and the Mister family!
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“Of course it’s peace we’re for,” Reverend Salvation added. “This is the war to end all war.”
“Amen,” sang the chorus.
“I can see the market rising like a beautiful bird,” Mister shouted.
“Collection!” Reverend Salvation announced to the congregation.
The show was scheduled to open June 17, 1937, at the Maxine Elliott Theatre on Broadway, with an elaborate set and a twenty-eight-piece orchestra. But at the last minute, Washington, bowing to complaints, announced that no new shows would be funded until after the beginning of the new fiscal year. The Maxine Elliott Theatre was surrounded by WPA security guards on June 14, since, the government argued, props and costumes inside were government property. Welles, Houseman, and Blitzstein rented the Venice Theatre and a piano. They met the audience outside the shuttered theater and marched the audience and the cast twenty blocks to the Venice. The procession invited onlookers to join them, and by 9 p.m., the Venice’s 1,742 seats were filled. Actor’s Equity had forbidden the cast to perform the piece “onstage.” Blitzstein, who sat alone at the piano, was prepared to play and perform all the roles. Olive Stanton, a little-known relief actress who depended on her small WPA check to support her mother and herself, stood up from her seat when Blitzstein began and sang her opening number. It was an act of singular courage. The rest of the cast, scattered throughout the audience, stood and took over their parts. The poet Archibald MacLeish, who attended, thought it was one of the most moving theatrical experiences of his life. Houseman was promptly fired by the project and Welles quit. The two men would go on to found the Mercury Theater.
“This was obviously censorship under a different guise,” Flanagan noted at the time.
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The Cradle Will Rock,
like much of the popular work that came out of the Federal Theatre Project, addressed the concerns of the working class rather than those of the power elite. It excoriated greed, corruption, the folly of war, the complicity of liberal institutions in protecting the power elite, and the abuses of capitalism. Mr. Mister ran the town like a private plantation. “I believe newspapers are great mental shapers,” he said. “My steel industry is dependent on them really.”
like much of the popular work that came out of the Federal Theatre Project, addressed the concerns of the working class rather than those of the power elite. It excoriated greed, corruption, the folly of war, the complicity of liberal institutions in protecting the power elite, and the abuses of capitalism. Mr. Mister ran the town like a private plantation. “I believe newspapers are great mental shapers,” he said. “My steel industry is dependent on them really.”
“Just you call the News,” Editor Daily responded. “And we’ll print all the news. From coast to coast, and from border to border.”
“O the press, the press, the freedom of the press,” Editor Daily and Mr. Mister sang. “They’ll never take away the freedom of the press. We must be free to say whatever’s on our chest—with a hey-diddle-dee and ho-nanny-no for whichever side will pay the best.”
“I should like a series on young Larry Foreman,” Mr. Mister told Editor Daily, “who goes around stormin’ and organizin’ unions.”
“Yes, we’ve heard of him,” Editor Daily informed Mr. Mister. “In fact, good word of him. He seems quite popular with workingmen.”
“Find out who he drinks with and talks with and sleeps with, And look up his past till at last you’ve got it on him.”
“But the man is so full of fight, he’s simply dynamite, Why it would take an army to tame him,” Editor Daily said.
“Then it shouldn’t be too hard to tame him,” Mr. Mister answered.
“O the press, the press, the freedom of the press,” the two sang. “You’ve only got to hint whatever’s fit to print; If something’s wrong with it, why then we’ll print to fit. With a he-diddly-dee and a hononny-no. For whichever side will pay the best.”
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The kind of commercial censorship imposed on
The Cradle Will Rock
has been the favored tool, briefly disrupted by the Federal Theatre Project, used to dominate the theater and the arts since the era of World War I and the rise of the corporate state. Money, as in the rest of the liberal establishment, rewarded those who behaved and did not write or speak from the bottom up. For its four years, the Federal Theatre Project drew huge segments of the population, for whom the arts were often seen as elitist and inaccessible, into new and empowering forms of self-expression. But the power of art to shape and explain reality was something the power elite did not intend to extend to the working class.
The Cradle Will Rock
has been the favored tool, briefly disrupted by the Federal Theatre Project, used to dominate the theater and the arts since the era of World War I and the rise of the corporate state. Money, as in the rest of the liberal establishment, rewarded those who behaved and did not write or speak from the bottom up. For its four years, the Federal Theatre Project drew huge segments of the population, for whom the arts were often seen as elitist and inaccessible, into new and empowering forms of self-expression. But the power of art to shape and explain reality was something the power elite did not intend to extend to the working class.
“The most unique achievement of Federal Theatre, and the one that paradoxically was most responsible for its demise, was the creation of the
Living Newspaper
,” said playwright and director Karen Malpede,
Living Newspaper
,” said playwright and director Karen Malpede,
an indigenous form of documentary drama dramatizing hot-button subjects of national debate
. Triple-A Plowed Under, Power, One-Third of a Nation, Spirochete,
were researched by journalists, written by dramatists, acted by huge casts with full orchestras and explored the struggle of farmers, the debate over the Tennessee Valley Association’s plan to bring subsidized electricity to the rural South; the reasons behind the housing crisis—“One-third of the nation is ill-housed, ill-fed,” President Roosevelt had said—the race for the cure for syphilis. Labor intensive, provocative, using and inventing all sorts of non-realistic acting and staging techniques, the Living Newspapers, a new form of theater, were precursors of American 1960s experimentalism, documentary and collectively created political theater.
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