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American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947-1962 By Bruce McConachie University of Iowa Press Copyright © 2003 University of Iowa Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-87745-862-3 Chapter One A Theater of Containment Liberalism
The Broadway theater of 1947 to 1962 played a small but significant part in the dominant culture of the era. Necessarily bound by the profit motive, theatrical producers on the "Great White Way" sought middle- and upper-class attendance for their shows and generally turned their backs on working class families. Audience surveys done by Playbill during the 1950s found that only about 10 percent of the audience identified themselves as working class. Workers stayed away in droves for many reasons. Ticket prices played an important role; a typical show cost about eight times as much as most movies. Second, most workers rightly sensed that they would feel "out of place" in a Broadway theater. As critic and theorist Francis Fergusson noted, Broadway belonged in the "comparatively small 'luxury' class" during the 1950s and early 1960s. "The vision of life which it projects is more like that of the 'after-shave club' than that of the ads, in family magazines, for trusses and detergents," he said. Fergusson's conclusion is confirmed by a glance at the ads in any Broadway program during the period. The playbill for A Hatful of Rain for the week of 28 May 1956, for instance, contained advertisements for luxury cars, expensive women's clothes, air and ship travel, nightclub entertainment, and a variety of other high-priced items from liquor to topcoats. While many workers in New York might have enjoyed Gazzo's play about an Italian American family struggling for economic and psychological security, few ever went to see it. Finally, working-class families usually lacked a playgoing tradition. The grandparents might have gone to live theater occasionally; but for most of the twentieth century, movies and later radio and television provided nearly all the professional dramatic entertainment that workers had ever seen or heard.
In 1955 critic Walter Kerr urged the New York theater to leave behind its elitist attitudes and welcome in the millions, because the drama "was not created by a minority for a minority." Kerr conceded the "risk of vulgarity in turning toward what pleases the common customer" but argued that the theater would "continue to shrivel if we do not do it." Like many cultural commentators, Kerr believed that the New York theater was in decline. Certainly when compared to theatrical activity in the 1920s or during the temporary boom years of 1942-1945, the number of shows available on Broadway during the 1950s had decreased. But by most measurements the Broadway theater of the mid 1950s was about where it had been twenty years before. During an average week in February in both 1936 and 1956, theatergoers could choose from about twenty-five different productions. Although more shows opened in the mid 1930s, the successful ones ran longer by 1955. Further, the proportion of productions that recouped their investment remained about the same from 1927 to 1959-roughly 22 percent. If the off-Broadway scene is factored into the comparison, New Yorkers and tourists actually had many more playgoing opportunities available to them than before. From a mere 875 Off-Broadway performances in 1953/54, the number rose to over 9,000 by 1963/64. (In 1963/64 Broadway itself saw only 7,975 performances.) Overall, professional theater in New York increased dramatically from 1947 to 1962, with most of the increase coming in the last half of the period.
Nevertheless, Kerr was correct in assuming that the audience for professional theater in New York was generally elitist in social orientation. Although the audience increased in numbers during the 1950s, its demographic base remained nearly constant. Most spectators lived in the New York metropolitan area, their average age tended to be between thirty-five and forty-five, and they earned above-average incomes. More significant than residence, age, and income, however, were markers of race and class. A 1960 survey found that 68 percent of the audience had been to college or university, a remarkably high number compared to the general population, where, despite the GI Bill and other inducements, less than 40 percent of the population had attended institutions of higher education by 1960. When asked to indicate their occupations, 47 percent checked "professional, semiprofessional, and managerial," and another 22 percent classified themselves as clerks and salespeople. (Because the survey-takers asked heads of households to answer their questions, women-who constituted roughly half of all theatergoers in the 1950s-were vastly underrepresented. No doubt some of these women worked outside of the home, but most married women in the audience would have been housewives.) Finally, 4 percent of the spectators filling out the questionnaire were students or retired people. Revealingly, the survey did not ask its respondents to indicate their race. For an audience that was probably 98 percent white, this question would have struck most as unnecessary. Nor did the 1960 survey inquire about ethnicity, religion, or political beliefs. If it had, it likely would have discovered a sizable proportion of educated Jews, whose politics were more liberal than those of their gentile cohorts. In terms of class and race, however, over 70 percent of theatergoers in New York in 1960 were white people from the upper-middle class.
Although the term "upper-middle" is appropriate, it would be more accurate to define the majority of theatergoers as belonging to what Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich have called "the professional-managerial class." Mostly college educated, these engineers, teachers, managers, accountants, lawyers, writers, and others doing primarily mental rather than physical labor help modern capitalism to function efficiently. This class arose around 1900 as business leaders transformed mostly family enterprises into modern corporations. It found its voice-typically analytical, temporizing, rational, and apolitical-during the Progressive Era and flourished in the large corporations and governmental bureaucracies of the 1920s and 1930s.
The members of the professional-managerial class did not own the means of production, but they distinguished themselves from the working class below them by acquiring a specialized body of knowledge and regulating their careers through professional standards. This allowed them a measure of autonomy from the ruling class, which employed most of them. During the Depression and the war, in fact, progressives in this group of mental workers had often sided with workers in their disputes with capitalists. And many in the professional-managerial group would again ask fundamental questions about the social practices of liberal capitalism in the late 1960s. But the capitalists' victories over working-class interests in the late 1940s, plus the probusiness tenor of public life by 1950, ensured that most professionals, managers, and others in this group would support the ruling class. As historian T. J. Jackson Lears notes, this group was not a class "in any coherent or unified sense." But it was a central part of the dominant "historical bloc" of the 1950s-"a coalition of groups which differed in many ways but which were bound together (up to a point) by common interests, common experiences, and a common worldview." During the early Cold War, then, professionals, managers, and other mental workers joined capitalists in what might be called a general business class. This class constituted the majority of spectators at all Broadway shows.
Several theatergoing practices in New York helped to solidify the different groups within this historical bloc. First, there were the productions themselves, which provided a common ground for conversation and camaraderie across group lines. Within the theater, ticket prices and seating arrangements did little to distinguish ruling-class patrons from others. Gone from all Broadway houses were most of the side boxes for elite auditors, and more than half of the orchestra seats were in the high-price range. Thus professional-managerial husbands and wives mixed easily with members of the ruling class in lobbies and seating areas. For most theatergoers, a Broadway show typically involved a "night on the town," with dinner out and possibly drinks afterward. A survey in 1962, for instance, found that fully 71 percent of playgoers living in New York or the vicinity ate at a restaurant before going to the theater. As at the playhouse, this practice meant that members of the professional-managerial group could often mix with their superiors on an equal footing.
This apparent equality, however, was belied when a new show opened. For these occasions, ruling-class New Yorkers, often joined by out-of-town friends and occasional movie stars, came out in force. These spectators were what one survey called the "active theatregoers"-those with much higher incomes than average who attended Broadway shows more than ten times a year. Though not as dominant as they had been in the 1920s and 1930s, the carriage-trade of active theatergoers filled the houses of new shows on Broadway from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, using them as opportunities to parade the latest dress styles, throw lavish theater parties, and perhaps get their pictures in the paper. Because the first few performances were crucial to long-term success in the hit-or-flop system of Broadway production, the ruling class exercised a kind of veto over all shows. In effect they, together with tastemakers and consumer guides in the press, selected what the professional-managerial group and the rest of the theatergoing public might see. Broadway productions during the Cold War had to pass through the eye of a needle held by a conservative ruling class before gaining success and wide distribution. Little wonder, then, that working-class points of view, which surfaced occasionally on the Broadway stage in the 1930s when the ruling class was more politically fragmented, rarely appeared on the Great White Way after 1947.
Indeed, whole areas of working-class life vanished from the theater during the early Cold War. Among different groups of workers in the late 1940s and early 1950s, roller derbies, "jive talk," bowling, rhythm-and-blues music, and group talkbacks to TV found eager participants and audiences, mostly for their parody of the dominant culture and their celebration of working-class grit and collective action. These trends might get a mention, but they never organized the action of a Broadway play or musical. At the same time, film gris attracted workers by its cynical response to promises of class mobility, the lures of consumerism, and government-sponsored suburbanization that was dispersing working-class urban communities. Unlike film noir, whose paranoiac vision it often shared, film gris typically pointed the finger of blame at society, not criminals or women, as the cause of distress. The Prowler (1951), for instance, featured a handsome policeman who, despairing of middle-class success, turns to robbery and murder. The difficulties of solidarity and marital love in the midst of a mining strike centered The Salt of the Earth (1953). The problems portrayed in film gris were not featured in successful Broadway plays. Like the rest of the dominant culture in the 1950s, the Great White Way also ignored the gradual synthesis of African American blues and southern country music that exploded in the rock and roll of Fats Domino, Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, and Elvis Presley. The best Broadway could do to contain the rampant energies of rock and roll threatening to burst national racial categories was Bye Bye Birdie (1960), a musical set in suburbia that delivered a paternal pat on the head to rock and featured no African American characters. This strategy of containment and condescension followed the earlier pattern of The Pajama Game (1954), which reduced postwar capitalist-labor strife to "Steam Heat" and pretty women in skimpy apparel threatening to strike a pajama factory.
The triumph of capital over labor in the years after World War II underwrote and legitimated the business-class orientation of Broadway theater. Many working-class Americans emerged from the war hoping that postwar life would bring economic security, a better life for their kids, and a world free from fear. Politicians, Hollywood, advertisers, and patriotic business leaders had made these promises during the war, and working-class expectations were high. Instead, after the war many female workers found themselves out of jobs, black workers often got demoted, and even white males in the workforce were sometimes shoved aside by returning veterans. For many, family life seemed more stressful than ever, as the feelings of solidarity generated by the war effort gave way to alienation, marital difficulties, and renewed desire for the good life. With the headlines screaming of Soviet aggression in Europe and remobilization at home, the hope for a peaceful world continued to elude working-class Americans.
Soon after VJ Day, unionized workers in many areas of the economy began demanding more control over their lives on the job-the collective means to shape the conditions and pace of work that many capitalists had promised them during the war. When most business leaders refused to deliver on their promises, workers staged mass mobilizations, slowdowns, wildcat strikes, and general walkouts, often in defiance of their union leaders. Longshoremen in New York City struck in 1945, a general strike shut down much of industrial Pittsburgh in 1946, and women workers led a nationwide walkout against Bell Telephone in 1947. ("We're telling the company we're not part of the switchboard anymore," said one striking operator from Connecticut.) In most of these collective actions, workers sought more independence at the point of production, not simply better wages and fringe benefits.
As George Lipsitz, historian of working-class life and culture, relates, business leaders responded to the postwar strike wave with "concessions, containment, and control." Sometimes assisted by corrupt unions, business bought off worker demands for more control with higher pay and benefits. Indeed, real wages rose dramatically in the postwar years for most workers, but the usual tradeoff was less collective autonomy on the job. Many capitalists actually strove to increase the power of unions and their contracts after 1945 as a way of containing worker discontent and spontaneous action. At the same time, business leaders pushed for passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which limited the organizing abilities of unions and banned secondary boycotts, initially a potent weapon in postwar strikes. In the late 1940s, business interests allied with conservative groups to fund an anti-Communist crusade that divided labor's political support, gutted radical labor unions, and moved the national conversation toward values more supportive of big business than it had been since the skewed prosperity of the 1920s.
Lipsitz's conclusion to his narrative of labor's postwar defeat deserves full quotation:
The postwar triumph of corporate liberalism represents a clear case of a successful struggle for hegemony. Corporate liberals secured control over key resources and institutions by unifying antagonistic elements into an effective coalition. They won widespread support for a worldview that made their view of society synonymous with the general interest. They recruited allies from among competitive-sector conservatives and trade-union liberals by making concessions to the material interests of both groups. Most important, by combining countersubversive rhetoric with policies geared toward economic expansion, they found a basis for uniting the interests and ideologies of groups capable of working together to control the key institutions of the economy.
Controlled by the business class, the Broadway stage also helped to unite "the interests and ideologies" of groups that constituted the historical bloc of the dominant culture in the 1950s.
In part this was because Broadway operated at the center of a centrifugal force field that shaped the entire American theater from 1947 to 1962. Producers of off-Broadway shows rarely competed with Broadway offerings; many, in fact, hoped to move their productions to the Great White Way. There were exceptions, of course, including Julian Beck and Judith Malina's work at the Living Theatre, which began in 1951; Joe Papp's Free Shakespeare in the Park, which started in 1956; and many of the productions at the Circle in the Square. The off-Broadway scene produced some genuinely oppositional theater, mostly toward the end of the 1947-1962 period, including Sandhog, a working-class musical by Earl Robinson and Waldo Salt, in 1954; Alice Childress's Trouble in Mind, about racial type-casting in theater and society, in 1955; The Connection, Jack Gelber's potent mix of jazz and drugs, in 1959; Jean Genet's The Balcony and The Blacks in 1960 and 1961; Edward Albee's The American Dream in 1961; and Brecht on Brecht in 1962. But these direct challenges to "corporate liberalism" did not constitute a self-conscious movement, and most had little initial resonance beyond the run of their productions. Off-Broadway barely dented the financial dominance and cultural preeminence of Broadway in the nation until the mid 1960s. While this book notes these oppositional voices, it is important not to exaggerate their significance.
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Excerpted from American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War by Bruce McConachie Copyright © 2003 by University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission.
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