As I figured would happen, Bernie Sanders is the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. Whatever one feels about Bernie or about socialism, it can't be denied, leftist belief has inspired some truly great art, in America and all around the world. If Bernie's momentum continues, there will be plenty of occasion to talk about so much of it.
Part of what is fascinating about the Bernie Sanders phenomenon is that while his modern followers are largely inspired, whether directly from reading or from cultural osmosis, by modern concepts of intersectionality and Frankfurt School critical theory, Sanders himself, or at least his outward rhetoric, is clearly inspired by the New York socialist movements of the 1930s, and leaders like Henry Wallace and Eugene V. Debs. It was the era after the Great Depression beset America, when the Roosevelt administration seemed, for a hot second, to embrace the best of socialism while letting in none of the worst, and by World War II, it was all over. By 1937, the government passed a balanced budget amendment. By 1942, the Civilian Conservation corps was disbanded. By 1943, the Worker's Progress Administration was no more. By 1945, the Tennessee Valley Authority, thought by so many a model for the redevelopment of countries decimated by World War II, was decried by Republicans as socialist overreach and prevented from becoming a model for structuring recoveries abroad.
Hardly anyone's situation improved from Rooseveltian recovery more than artists, and hardly anyone stood to lose more if Roosevelt's governmental stimuli were discontinued. But even at its height, there were some dreams that were too progressive even for the Roosevelt Era, and in such an incubator of idealism against the forces of corrosion was Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock formed.
It was auspiced by the Federal Theater Project, a program from 35-39 to fund live theater around America for the employment of artists of every trade. It was to be directed by none other than the 22-year-old Orson Welles, and produced by his longtime collaborator John Houseman (sadly best remembered by people today as the Driver's Ed instructor in The Naked Gun). Highly influenced by the musicals of German communists Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill, the musical is set in Steeltown, USA, and tells an archetypal story of corruption and greed by the ruling class. The villain is a rich man named Mr. Mister, who holds a town wide monopoly on all the means of production, including the press and the church, and uses these means of production to attempt the destruction of a resilient union.
The premiere has long since passed into such legend that the musical is a landmark of American culture. There's even a movie about the premiere directed by Tim Robbins. Under pressure from conservatives who saw Cradle Will Rock (perhaps correctly) as agitprop, the WPA shut the production down just a few days before its premiere. But government restrictions only specified that the play could not be staged, so Welles found an unused theater, Blitzstein played the piano onstage in place of an orchestra, and the cast declamed their lines from the audience seats. Welles's Mercury Radio Theater later recorded an abridged version of the musical for radio broadcast, but unfortunately I can't find the recording on youtube. Shortly before Welles's death, Welles himself wrote a screenplay for a meta-movie about the play's premiere, the script was published nine years after his death.
Instead of the Mercury Theater recording, here's a bunch of scenes from the 1964 revival directed by original cast member Howard de Silva (best known today as Ben Franklin in the movie version of 1776), and starring Jerry Orbach (yes, THAT Jerry Orbach) as Larry Foreman. Attempts to move audiences to social action have been a huge quotient of theater's purpose since Henrik Ibsen, but in many ways, The Cradle Will Rock is the climax in the entire story of theater as social action.
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