The Great War with Germany, 1890-1914 Book

This book relates how the American theater--plays and radio plays--reflected the socio-political attitudes and cultural values of the United States between 1934-1945: in which a gap in theatrical (playwriting and theatre) scholarship had previously existed. It focuses chiefly on how World War II was perceived, presented, and endured as shown through an analysis of Broadway plays, military plays, and radio plays created and produced to entertain and educate Americans at home and abroad. U.S. military fighting in European and Pacific theaters of war, but also, the U.S. Army staged "a playwriting competition among the troops and selected, for production in New York and around the country, the five best one-act play submissions" (xii).

First of all, radio not theater was more successful at encouraging the American public to go to war; it was more immediate, it was experienced in the home (not the theater) and it more successfully scared people about the dangers of pacifism, isolationism, and apathy (47). However, playwrights had an increasing anxiety about the war and predicted and prepared Americans for the inevitable war they'd be drawn into. The threat of Germany eventually invading America was the main draw to war'rather than Jewish and gypsy persecution. "Clearly for Broadway as well as for Washington, the sense was that Americans might go to war over the threat to democratic principles but not over the oppression of European minorities" (53). Military HQs, battlefields, and Asia in general were off the radar until the bombing of Pearl Harbor (Dec. 7, 1941) and only then were those settings and issues brought to the stage (53).

The Patriots (federal Period-Thomas Jefferson) and Harriet (Civil War-Uncle Tom's Cabin) are two WWII era plays set in historical times to reinforce the righteous virtues of democracy. The war saw a questioning of and transformation of sexuality norms (sexual orientation, gender, racial questions too). All of these issues and more can be mapped out for testing and exploration on the American stage during WWII. Full ugliness of concentration camps remained unknown till wars end. In 1944, the play "Decision" fell on deaf ears or at least "American audience members [were] not yet ready to act upon what they heard. It may well be that works such as these began the process of undermining the racist monolith that informed the thinking and assumptions of a great many Americans" (103). As the war drew to a close, theater began to examine the hard questions about life after the war. Not returning to the 1930s (exactly). Men were coming back physically and mentally scarred. "Having done men's work during the war, women would not easily slide back into homebound domesticity." Also race problems and lingering anti-Semitism, and how to prevent WWIII (Foxhole in the Parlor asks this very question) (125).

The John Golden-Second Service Command One-Act Prize Play Contest garnered 115 original play scripts from American soldiers at army camps around the nation: the 5 winning "folk-plays" survive . They were presented on Broadway and earned funds for the Soldiers and Sailors Club'opening performance brought in $100,000 (126). The Army Play by Play "provides a unique glimpse into wartime military life and the war effort as seen and dramatized by servicemen" (127). The plays set in barracks and "the portrayal of a military unit as an American microcosm, an American cross-cultural snapshot. …African Americans were segregated into their own units…" (128).

During and after the war, Broadway plays broached the issues of anti-Semitism and racism, but they largely sanitized and softened their realities. Instead, they were recognized as problems that just seem to happen among humans with arbitrary beginnings and changes in time. Another aspect of the book that is particularly interesting is how the radio was known as a "weapon" during the war. Radio plays reached a sizable audience in ways (conquering time and space) Shakespeare's theatre never could. Radio plays were propaganda; though American producers argued that this propaganda was allegedly good because it was promoting the "right" values--a rather slippery slope in reality.

"What so often happens after trauma is that participants need to domesticate that trauma so that they can come to grips with it and begin to recover. if that is what happened in the years when men came home from World War II and the country returned to life under peacetime conditions, then the American theatre served as an important means for allowing it to do so. It provided the scripts not merely for actors but for a nation" (289).