Ragged Individualism: America in the Political Drama of the 1930S

By Gholamreza Sami

This book offers a study of the portrayal of America in selected social and political plays of the 1930s and a scrutiny of the intellectual response of the playwrights to the American way of life in the light of socio-political and economic issues in that decade.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9781449089849

Gholamreza Sami

Gholamreza Sami received his Ph.D. from Sussex university, England, in 2004. He has been teaching Comparative Literature in various colleges and universities, including university of Kashan. Dr. Sami has published many articles and books on different topics in the areas of poetry, rhetoric and drama and a text-book for university students entitled, Tropes and Rhetorical Figures (2010).

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© 2011 Gholamreza Sami. All rights reserved.]

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First published by AuthorHouse 1/27/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4490-8983-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4490-8984-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010917760

Printed in the United States of America

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To Fatemeh and Susan

Acknowledgment

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the people who made it possible for me to see this book through completion. I am deeply indebted to the following scholars who read some or all of the book and through their astute and valuable comments nourished me through the past five years and saved me from blunders: Professor David Corker (University of East Anglia), Professor Stephen Fender (University of Sussex) and Dr. Olga Nunez Mirez. I am especially grateful to Professor John S. Whitley (University of Sussex), who shepherded this book through its various stages with his invaluable advice, comments, suggestions and corrections which have contributed immensely to whatever standard of clarity and precision has been achieved in the following pages. I should also like to record my gratitude to the following people: Professor Norman Vance and Margaret Reynolds (University of Sussex) who provided me with financial assistance without which I could not benefit from opportunities to present my work in different seminars and conferences and helped me with my numerous interlibrary loans; members of the Interlibrary Loans Department, the University of Sussex Library, for their assistance with my interlibrary requests; Dr. Lee Grieveson and Nick Eastwood (University of Exeter) for letting me benefit from their collection of films; all the members of the University of Sussex Crèche and Nursery for all the care they showed to my daughter; my daughter whose birth in the middle of this work was an extraordinary gift and whose frequent demands saved me from exhausting myself with my book; and my wife, who gave me strength and confidence during all these difficult years. Finally, I am deeply sorry that my first teacher of literature, Maryam Khozan, did not live to see this work, for, I am sure, she would have enjoyed it very much.

Preface

As the title makes clear, this book offers a study of the portrayal of America in selected plays of the 1930s and a scrutiny of the intellectual response of the playwrights to the American way of life in the light of socio-political and economic issues in that decade. The seeds of this study were sown at one of my graduate courses. The Professor who taught that course would dismiss the thirties’ literature and drama as propagandistic and frivolous. My readings of playwrights such as Odets and Hellman, however, made me think that her statements regarding the artistic values of these works were open to dispute. Therefore, when I was given the chance to do research in England, I decided to embark on this subject, hoping to stimulate more understanding and appreciation of the thirties’ drama.

The introduction of this study provides an examination of the distinction between the individualistic and collectivist features of American ideology and its manifestation in the Depression years. With this distinction in mind, the book moves on to study the political beliefs of some of the dramatists against the backdrop of the debates of the 1930s. Having established the political contexts of the plays in consideration, the book then examines the relationship between the thematic and dramatic structures in an integrated and close-focused study of some of the plays. The book is divided into eight chapters. Apart from the introduction (Chapter One) and the conclusion (Chapter Eight), the six remaining chapters each deal with one particular dramatist. The dramatists were chosen on the basis of their preoccupation with contemporary social issues, their willingness to express the age in which they lived, the quality of their talents, their survival value and the existence of a substantial body of criticism on their works. Chapters Two, Three and Four deal with the plays of Maxwell Anderson, Elmer Rice and Robert E. Sherwood, the dramatists who were already famous in the thirties because they brought a reputation with them from the previous decade. Chapters Five, Six and Seven deal with Lillian Hellman, Sidney Kingsley and Clifford Odets, the young dramatists who arrived in the theater during the thirties and rose to become prominent playwrights of their time.

The methodology of the study includes a detailed analysis of plays in their socio-historical context. Since drama is both literary and theatrical, secondary sources such as reviews which reported on the performances of the plays and aspects of theatrical production are also discussed. In order to gain a total understanding of the plays, they are examined chronologically.

Gholamreza Sami

University of Kashan

Contents

Acknowledgment

Preface

I. Introduction

Ii. The Individualist Rebel: Maxwell Anderson

III. The Utopian Socialist: Elmer Rice

IV. The End Of Rugged Individualism: Robert E. Sherwood

V. The Southern Socialist: Lillian Hellman

VI. Literary Naturalist: Sidney Kingsley

VII. The Marxist Rebel: Clifford Odets

VIII. Conclusion

Bibliography

About the Author

End Notes

I. Introduction

Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia; do by these presents, solemnly and mutually in the Presence of God and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation […].

William Bradford, The Mayflower Compact (1620)

We are all animated with the spirit of an industry which is unfettered and unrestrained, because each person works for himself.

St John de Crèvecoeur, What Is an American?, Letters from an American Farmer (1782)

Vernon Louis Parrington, Sr., explains the evolution of modern society as the disintegration of a corporate feudal order into unregimented individual members of society, and the struggles of those free individuals to regroup themselves in new social commonwealths […]. Parrington believes that the Reformation was one of the forces that broke up the traditional solidarity of church and state by creating a revolutionary philosophy of individual rights that purposed to free the individual from a hierarchical system, subjection to a restricted, aristocratic code of commerce and the feudal spirit of corporate unity (vol.1, 5-8). This philosophy of individualism, with its democratic principles, clashed with an authoritarian system when landed in the newly-discovered America. The Calvinistic and theocratic foundation of the Puritans were shaken by the Lutheran and Congregational spirit of the liberal Separatists such as the Seekers. The tension between theocratic Puritanism and religious democracy became an important factor in shaping American intellectual history. Protestantism in America became a mixture of ingredients that included ideas fostering individualism and others supporting collectivism. The rivalry between these opposing ideologies and their different conceptions of the role of man and the state resulted in the strain between a religious theocracy and the spirit of democratic individualism in the New World that existed side by side and continued to inform American culture and literature for the years to come. As one writer agrees, the conflict between individualism and communalism lies at the very center of American history (Fellman). American individualism has always been balanced by a drive towards some sort of communitarian impulse, be it religious, ethnic, professional or athletic. The individualistic elements of American Protestantism provided the ground for American capitalist democracy to flourish and its sacerdotal elements provided a moral foundation for a more collectivistic ideology to take shape in American history.

In fact, long before the New World settlement, one of the earliest literary users of the discovery of America, Thomas More, in his Utopia (1516), apart from satirizing the Old World, opened up the idea of a new, orderly commonwealth based on reason in which people not only enjoy justice, peace and equality but they also unselfishly pursue the good of the public. More depicts his imaginary Utopia free of private property, inequity, class distinction and religious bigotry. In this communal system the destructive individualism of sinful human nature is held in check. The individual is seen as an irrational and dangerous creature in society that, at any moment, may get out of hand and bring about destruction to the community unless kept under strict surveillance.

In the early colonial encounters between the Native Americans and the Europeans, the colonizers competed with each other in plundering the wealth of America and in bringing the New World under the domain of their countries. The Spanish, who went to America as conquistadors, looters and slave traders, resorted to all possible means such as slaughtering, raping, burning, scalping and disembowelling of the natives of America in order to expand their settlements and make themselves rich. Then they established a serfdom for the Natives, with the Spanish acting as the landed gentry, as a result of which many of the Native Americans were forced to work themselves to death (see Las Casas and Stannard).

Some English colonizers and settlers of the New World so vehemently pursued their personal and colonial dreams of seizing opportunities and encouraged the spirit of competition that they undermined the idea of an idealized and peaceful community of mutually helpful individuals espoused by the Elizabethan utopists and pastoralists.[1] The first English colonies in North America were purely commercial ventures. Walter Raleigh, Arthur Barlow and Thomas Hariot, among others, actively promoted the colonization and exploitation of America and wrote propagandistic descriptions in which they described America as the land of abundance and opportunity. The desire for riches became the main motive behind the colonizers’ exploration of America. To use James Truslow Adams’s words, these explorers were most interested in the little rings of gold which the natives, otherwise stark naked, wore in their noses (11). In this colonial stage of America’s discovery, Europeans’ conception of America appeared to be positive because at this stage the subject was the exploration and settlement of America (Fender 29). The colonizers’ tracts and the travelers’ accounts exaggerated the romantic attractions of the New World (Parrington, Jr., 5). The vast and abundant resources of the New World were admired, in a propagandistic and persuasive discourse. The Puritans and the colonizers wrote exaggerating accounts of their adventures to lure Europeans over to the New World. Mourt’s Relation (1622), for example, was written to make life in Massachusetts sound like a venture in a plentiful land. It ignores the hardship of the Puritans’ first winter by concentrating on the rich resources of Massachusetts.

After the emigration of Protestant religious dissenters from Europe to America and after noticing the rapacity and greediness of the settlers, the Puritans began to voice their concern. They declared that an unquenchable desire for land and worldly accomodations had driven the people away from the church (Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana vol. II, 324). In early New England the Protestant ethic was preached to restrain the capitalistic spirit (Weiss 23).[2]

These moral principles were, in fact, derived from the Puritan Fathers who set forth ethical maxims for the conduct of the new settlers in their so-called ecclesiastical paradise. In Of Plymouth Plantation (1620-1647), William Bradford, for example, wrote about a chosen people who struggled against forces of corruption to work towards the general good of the public by creating the city of God in the American wilderness with the help of a civil government. In 1620, under the threat of mutiny and inhospitable Nature, Bradford, in a covenant outlining their decision for unity, urged the pilgrims to combine themselves together into a Civil body politick (Mayflower Compact). This document provided the fundamentals for a civil government based on the general good, the tenets of which would reappear many times in the future of the country. The Pilgrims’ belief that people could form compacts in the sight of God as a basis for government without the approval of a higher authority provided the groundwork for a democratic republic in the New World. The Plymouth’s government was first put in the hands of a body of freemen who met in a General Court to appoint a governor along with his assistants, enact laws, and levy taxes. Afterwards, the expansion of the colony required that the colonists replace the annual assembly of freemen with a representative body of deputies elected by the existing towns. This became the harbinger of the democratic system of government in America.

The concept of community permeates Bradford’s writing. As one writer observes, commitment to community was a feeling that the Puritans carried with themselves over to the New World. They were extremely successful in making local life communal in the villages they established, a communal life that was even more enduring than those they left in England. Towns were established by signing covenants and emigrants were admitted on a spiritual and pragmatic basis. Local communities provided a focus for the economic, political, social, and religious lives of the townspeople and appeared as a miniature of the commonwealth (Bender 63-5). Bradford’s history of the Plantation demonstrates the problems concerning the safeguarding of the national covenant, the community’s collective dedication to live by the purity of God’s ordinances. The commonwealth that Bradford envisaged did not last long, however. Bradford could not maintain his communitarian ideals because, as the church split up and the settlers moved out in search of more land, they went astray from their elders’ original communal vision, although they did not reject community, family and feeling of companionship. Their migration was, in effect, an expression of community and a way through which they could protect themselves in the face of land shortage (Bender 72).

The more dictatorial and domineering next-door neighbors of the Plymouth Plantation Separatists, the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who thought of themselves as the chosen people of God who were responding to a call from Him to save the world from vice, set out the task of building their ideal and spiritually harmonious community in New England. They cast gloom over the liberalism of their Plymouth brethren. They brought the class prejudices and aristocratic parochialism of the Old World over to America. Their Utopia has been described as a close-knit church-state, with authority reserved to the aristocracy of Christian talent (Parrington, Sr., vol.1, 18).

Their leader, John Winthrop, who began to study law in his thirties in order to be able to manage his estate and collect rents and fines, had to struggle between his individualistic impulses to look after his own self-interests and the communal desire to join forces to further the cause of the Puritans (Morgan, Puritan Dilemma 14-15). When conditions became unbearable for the Puritans to live under Charles I, and when it appeared that England offered fewer opportunities for worldly success than America he considered moving to the New World if there was a chance that they could achieve economic success and worship God in their own way (Morgan, Puritan Dilemma 39). In Massachusetts, he helped create a just economic system that was to prevent prices and wages from skyrocketing in a dizzy spiral (Morgan Puritan Dilemma 67). He helped put the legislative power of the colony in the hands of a few who received their authority from God, not from the people (Morgan Puritan Dilemma 94). Since he believed that they were singled out by God to be an example to others, he helped suppress any selfish private motives to interfere with their plan (70) while he himself relied on the income from various lands he had acquired, mostly by gift of the General Court (Morgan Puritan Dilemma 174-5).

Winthrop, who helped shape a theocratic policy and a religious oligarchy, explained the feeling of exceptionalism, which has become part of American national character, to his fellow-travellers in the Arbella sermon, A Model of Christian Charity (1630), and told them that they were about to set up an example for all people by building a city upon a hill, a model of Christian charity, a community of love working towards a moral and collective welfare. This community of love was supposed to be a highly class-conscious community in which the rich and the poor accepted their destiny, knit together as one body, co-existed in the bonds of brotherly love and bore each other’s burden. Winthrop’s version of government was both civil and ecclesiastical in which the care of the public was of paramount importance and people abided by God’s hierarchical plan for the society and strived for the salvation of their souls. But the liberty that he envisaged in his Christian commonwealth was not, as he put it in his The Journal of John Winthrop (1630-1649), a natural liberty but a civil or federal liberty by which he meant the liberty that is subject to the authority of the Church (On Liberty). The darker sides of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, such as witch-hunts, snobbishness, fanaticism, religious uniformity and harsh punishments, reveal that Winthrop’s ideal of an ecclesiastical commonwealth was far from perfect and was sorely compromised in practice. It also serves as an example for understanding and explaining moments of its reappearance within American society.[3]

When the New England minister, Cotton Mather, later recounted the history of the Puritans in order to defend the old order of church authority against the intrusion of a secular world, he expressed how the Puritans changed the wilderness into a congenial community in which people were encouraged to cooperate with one another to create a harmonious religious society (see Magnalia Christi Americana). He stated that the aim of the first settlers was to create a unique Christian Commonwealth. In Bonifacius (1710) he asserted that doing good is a way of praising God. He wrote about a world of self-denial and called on people to seize opportunities to do good to their neighbors and rejoice in theirs (Bonifacius 59).

Despite all this, the intrusion of secularism and democratic individualism into the fabric of the Puritan community proved to be inevitable. Thomas Morton, the rebellious and freethinking individualist who challenged the authority of the Puritans, began to entertain a group of anarchists who posed a serious threat to the Puritans’ religious utopia. By setting up a Maypole to celebrate the Spring he revealed his Bacchanalian beliefs and carpe diem attitude which could not be tolerated by the religious oligarchy of New England. (see New English Canaan). [4]

Thomas Hooker, Congregational clergyman and the founder of Connecticut, who set up the religious democracy of Hartford, was another dissenter who planned for a religious but democratic popular government which is regarded as the first constitution of modern democracy. He repudiated the Boston autocracy and declared that the foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people (Parrington, Sr., vol. I, 58-9). In a famous sermon in May, 1638, Hooker asserted that people (excluding the Indians, Quakers and non-believers, of course) have the right not only to choose their public magistrates but also to limit their power. This sermon, a communal framework of self-government that appealed to the power and the consent of the people, has been credited with having been instrumental in the creation of the Fundamental Orders (1639) when the leaders of the three towns of Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor met at Hartford to create a commonwealth based on Hooker’s democratic principles. The Fundamental Orders declared that the choice of governors belonged to the people. The Fundamental Orders also made it clear that the welfare of the community was of paramount importance and that the individual always had to give way to the needs of the community at large.

Another Separatist, Roger Williams, who arrived in the New World in 1631, emphasized the individual’s freedom of conscience, which enraged the governing Puritans. Just as the French Protestant, Petrus Ramus (1515-1772) had put it, he believed that the universe is intelligible through ratiocination rather than revelation. He was the advocate of religious liberty in the colony and asked his Salem congregation to withdraw from other churches in Massachusetts because of their dictatorial views. Thus he jeopardized the religious leadership of the Puritans and was banished from the ecclesiastical paradise, which resulted in his setting up the first American colony where complete separation of church and state was to be practiced. He envisaged a commonwealth in which people of all religions could practice their faith without fear of authorities. He compared society to a ship whose passengers must obey the command of the captain and must abide by the common laws of the ship. He left the Massachusetts Bay colony with twenty followers for Rhode Island and developed a friendly relationship with the Indians, trying to convert them to Christianity. He raged against the unjust manner in which early New Englanders obtained Indian land. He was one of the forces that helped defeat Puritanism as a principal political force. Thus New England Calvinism began to be weakened by currents of dissent, most of which opposed the authority of the clergy and stressed the need for individual practicality and freedom (see Miller, Perry).

John Wise was another member of the democratic group who broke with the archaic theocracy and illiberal dogmatism of the Puritans. He was the proponent of the democratic principles of modern Congregationalism, stating his reasons in two pamphlets, The Churches Quarrel Espoused (1710) and A Vindication of the Government of New England Churches (1717). These pamphlets on church democracy supported the theory of natural rights and equality upon which the fabric of American democracy has been built (see Cook).

Hardly had the affair of Roger Williams been settled when the colonists found it necessary to deal with another religious individualist and rebel. Anne Hutchinson began to hold religious meetings in her own house in a society in which only men were allowed to hold such meetings. She threatened the stability of the Massachusetts Bay Colony during Governor John Winthrop’s term. In her meetings she discussed theological questions and put forth views at odds with those of the Puritans. What the Puritans faced in Hutchinson, or, later, in the Quaker idea of inner light which allowed every person direct access to God, was an outbreak of dangerous individualism. Hutchinson’s belief that the Holy Ghost dwells in a true believer was similar to a belief in immediate personal revelation that jeopardized the basic doctrines of the Puritans which stated that God’s will could be discovered only through the Bible (Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma 139).

About twenty years after the Hutchinson episode another significant affair disturbed the peace of Massachusetts oligarchy. The Quakers, a religious sect newly founded in England, began coming to Massachusetts in 1656. The Puritans regarded the Quakers as a serious threat to their religious community. The Quakers’ individualistic beliefs expressed in their idea of the Inner Light which states that God exists among everyone and can know every individual on a personal basis challenged the religious authority of the Puritans. The first arrivals were sent back because of their unorthodox and heretical beliefs. The Puritans passed laws to prevent them from coming. A law was passed pronouncing the death sentence upon any Quaker who, having been once banished, should return to the colony. Surprisingly, a few of the banished ones returned and demanded the withdrawal of the cruel law but were finally sent to the gallows. The Quakers’ beliefs, however, grew stronger with their persecution.

The fact that dissenters such as Hutchinson, Williams and the Quakers were banished from the Puritans’ paradise and were persecuted for their challenging ideologies suggests a major factor in the evolution not only of the Puritan theocracy but of American national identity in general. The tension between religious community and the idea of individual salvation created the conflict between those who, like Winthrop, would attempt to rule over the people from the top, and those who would see morality coming out from common people in the process of forming communities. Later on in American history, people like Benjamin Franklin and St. John Crèvecoeur further undermined the Puritans’ authoritarian system by resorting to individualistic ideologies. As Edmund S. Morgan notes, The New World, with a three-thousand-mile moat on the one hand and boundless free land on the other, offered strong temptation to adventurous spirits to kick over the traces and defy every kind of authority (The Puritan Dilemma 96).

European Enlightenment was also responsible for the growth of the philosophy of individualism and the secularisation of the religious ideas of the Puritans. It stressed the importance of the individual and his rights. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Scientific Revolution challenged the medieval scientific beliefs of the Church. Scientists discovered the laws governing natural phenomena. They tried to detect these laws using deductive reasoning. Thus Enlightenment thinkers began to trust the power of the individual mind and realized that the key to understanding human society was to understand the needs of the individual. Thomas Paine explained the deistic natural religion of Enlightenment theorists such as John Bolingbroke and the Scottish Enlightenment moral sense philosophy to the American public and denounced the Calvinistic idea of predestination that condemns certain people to eternal damnation and urged people to see God in the harmonious order of the universe. He admired man’s individuality and his power of reasoning and laid the foundation of a profound individualistic and rationalistic political and intellectual theory (see Fruchtman).

The rise of Parliamentary government was another factor affecting the American way of thinking. In 1649, the English Civil War and the execution of King Charles I resulted in the establishment of a republican dictatorship for a ten-year period. Although the British Commonwealth soon turned back to monarchy, the re-established monarchy had limits placed on its absolute power.

During and after this period of turmoil, political thinkers of the Enlightenment supported systems in which the individuals controlled their own actions and played a role in establishing communal values. The most important political theories that provided a basis for the political doctrines set forth in the Declaration of Independence were derived from John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1690) that were written to justify the British Whig Revolution of 1688. In his theory of contractual government Locke argued that people are equal and endowed with natural rights in a state of nature in which they live free from external control. He attacked the theory of divine right of kings, arguing that the power of the state lay in the power of the people. The government exists to help people and can be changed if it deviates from this principle. This idea of the natural rights of the people was the idea of the Enlightenment. It should be noted here that Locke was also concerned with the idea of property right. He was a strong advocate of the sacred triad of Life, Liberty and Property.[5] He believed that both society and civil government exist to protect the natural right of man to private property (see Kendall).

Benjamin Franklin is the incarnation of the Enlightenment in America. Franklin’s rational morality, practicality, shrewdness and his belief that the mind’s rational powers enable us to explain the riddles of life and that education can free us from the oppression of the church were reflections of European Enlightenment that struck severe blows at America’s Presbytarianism. With his pragmatic and capitalistic individualism Franklin became the spokesman for the new commercial-minded class that rendered the outmoded Puritans and aristocrats obsolete. In his self-help book, Autobiography (1868), he explained how, through determination, perseverance, hard work, and reliance on a sound code of ethics, he achieved success and rose from obscurity to eminence and wealth. In this book Franklin teaches us that acquisition of wealth is necessary for the individual because it enables them to shape their own destiny (Barbour, Brian M. 25). Franklin’s material individualism is also revealed in the maxims of such essays as The Way to Wealth (1757). To him labor, accumulation of wealth, frugality, and self-discipline become of primary importance. As Max Weber notes, Franklin embodies the spirit of capitalism when he defines concepts such as time and credit as money (15).

Franklin’s capitalist ideology did not remain unchallenged, however. The dream of Christian brotherhood, benevolence and harmony espoused by some religious dissenters counterbalanced the rhetoric of material individualists