The Moral Price of Freedom: Problems of Personal Freedom Reflected in Modern American Drama

286 Pages·011.302 MB·English

by  Bassage, Harold Edwin

Copyright by
Harold Edwin Bassage
1952
THE MORAL PRICE OF FREEDOM
Problems of Personal Freedom Reflected
in Modern American Drama
A Dissertation submitted in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy finder the Joint Committee
on Graduate Instruction, Columbia University.
by
Harold Edwin Bassage
11 Sir. there was a truth named Brotherhood
mixed in with the molten ores when our
still-smoking planet sought a place among
the systems."
(Norman Corwin in
"Psalm for a Dark Year")
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. PROLOGUE.................................... . 1
' II. EUGENE 0 1 NEILL: Tyranny and Freedom in the
Inner Commonwealth......................... 22
1. MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA: Inner
Tyrants ............................... 24
2. STRANGE INTERLUDE: Liberating Forces
in the Inner Commonv:ealth............. 41
III. SIDNEY HOWARD: Freedom through Compromise
in Family L i f e ............................. 54
1. THE SILVER CORD: Despotism in Family
L i f e .................................... 56
2. THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WANTED: The Boon
of Liberty in Domestic Relations . . . 67
3. LUCKY SAM MCCARVER: Enslavement
through Freedom ......................... ?6
4. NED MCCOBB'S DAUGHTER: Liberty through
Compassionate Compromise .............. 87
IV. CLIFFORD ODETS: Explosive Demands for
Freedom in Economic L i f e .....................101
1. GOLDEN BOY: Tyranny in the Economic
S y s t e m .................................... 105
2. PARADISE LOST: Undesirable Results
of Tyrannies in Economic Life............115
ill
PAGE
3. WAITING FOR LEFTY: A Route to Freedom
from Tyrannies in the Economic System . . 12?
h.
AWAKE AND SINGJ Rewards of the Fight
for Freedom from Tyrannies in Economic
L i f e ........................... 133
V. MAXWELL ANDERSON: The Free Individual in a
Free Political Community .................... 1^9
1. BOTH YOUR HOUSES: Freedom for the
Individual— and for Society................ 152
2. WINTERSET: Legal Justice for the Indi­
vidual 156
3.. THE WINGLESS VICTORY: Racial Discrim­
ination I63
4. WHAT PRICE GLORY: Freedom from Y/ar—
an Individual Right ...................... 172
5. THE EVE OF ST. MARK: Freedom for Society
through War ................................180
6. CANDLE IN THE WIND: Fascism and Free­
dom 191
7. VALLEY FORGE: "All men will live free
in a free land.1 1 ........................... 19&
VI* ANDERSON AND O'NEILL: Freedom through Conform­
ity to Ultimate Forces in the Universe . . . 207
■ 1. HELL BENT FER HEAVEN: A preliminary Note
on the Tyranny of Institutional Religion . 207
iv
CHAPTER PAGE
2. KEY LARGO: Freedom and the Moral
Order...................................... 214
3. THE GREAT GOD BROWN: The Ultimate
Tyranny of the Life Force.................. 225
4. DAYS YJITHOUT END: Freedom through
Conformity to Moral Law and the
Primal Force of L i f e ...................... 236
VII. Epilogue........................................ 248
BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................. 263
CHAPTER I
PROLOGUE
American drama of the last three decades echoes with
a persistent demand that brings to mind Caliban's exultant,
reckless cry in Shakespeare's The Tempest: "Freedom, hey­
day! hey-day, freedom! freedom, hey-day, freedom!" Charac­
ters in modern American plays seem to reflect a ubiquitous
and largely uncritical yearning for independence in this
country— a yearning for special forms of liberty, and for
a general sense of overall freedom. A host of writers for
the stage and radio have wrestled with varied facets of the
problem of personal freedom.
Playwrights have explored many aspects of human ex­
perience with new seriousness in plays produced since 1920.
In that year Eugene O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon $ras pre­
sented. This was the first of his plays to catch the
public attention, and it is commonly accepted as a milestone
marking the beginning of a more thoughtfully adult period
in American drama. In the Twenties other dramatists began
to write with a maturity comparable to O'Neill's— "We be­
gan to explore human nature with the lantern of philosophy
and the scalpel of modern surgery," says John Gassner. "In
short, we achieved a criticism of life without which the
1
drama is nothing but evanescent showmanship*"
Obviously, human experience was seriously scrutinized
in some American plays written before 1920— such as Eugene
Walter’s [Che Easiest Way and Edward Sheldon’s Romance» And
writers after 1920 turned out many plays as trivial and
artificial as the popular pieces of the years before the
first World War— many playgoers, who are expert in seeking
out popular entertainment in the theatre, are chiefly famil­
iar with the sentimental, frivolous and vulgar plays that
enliven the American stage. But sobriety and stature, rare
before O’Neill appeared, have been much more common in the
drama since 1920. This is not to say that plays of the last
thirty years will, in the future, loom up among the loftiest
peaks on the landscape of dramatic history— but they are
well above the level of many century-wide lowlands of play-
writing.
Modern playwrights are spokesmen for a wide range of
American thought about freedom and other subjects. Most of
the best dramatists write for a limited public, of the
Broadway theatre and ’the road,’ and therefore have a rela­
tively scant influence upon national attitudes. But these
authors bring to their plays the questions, convictions and
aspirations of all sorts and conditions of men. Some of
^■John Gassner in his introduction of Twenty Best
Plays of the American Theatre. p. vii.
3
them have had prolonged formal education, and some have had
little. Some of them have been dominated by conservative
Influences, and some by liberal traditions. Besides writing
plays, these men and women have written poetry, done police
reporting, and taught philosophy to university students.
They have been hoboes and have held important government
posts, they have been actors and Sunday School teachers and
soldiers, they have amassed fortunes and walked in picket
lines. They have been old and young, black and white. They
have reflected the attitudes of men in the street whom they
have known outside the theatre— and they have tapped the
thinking of philosophers, theologians, psychologists, econo­
mists, sociologists and moralists. Writing what they know,
modern American playwrights speak for America— for its di­
vergent people, and for an age marked by two great wars.
When we turn widely encompassing attention to Ameri­
can drama of the last thirty years, we see an amalgam of the
quality and thinking and dreams of American people since
1920. In characters in these plays, we can scrutinize rest­
lessly inquiring citizens of this country, and what they
have been trying to achieve, how they strive, and wherein
they fail. We can observe many of these citizens making
eager, blundering efforts to gain personal freedom.
The lively creatures of imagination who populate the
drama grapple with life, elbow to elbow, and many of them
are, in varying degrees, aware of the great moving stream of
h
total experience which is their ultimate habitat* Many plays
glow with ethical quandaries and decisions, as well as, to a
lesser degree, religious questions and convictions*
Years of experience as a theatre director, persistent­
ly seeking meanings and motivations that lie beneath the
surface of dramatic writing— this has helped me appreciably
in deciphering the moral and religious inquiries and con­
cepts that are implicit in plays of the last three decades*
Modern American drama presents a complicated maze of
moral attitudes— assuming that the word 'moral* refers to
men's concern for each other's welfare.
In plays written since 1920, the soliloquy is a
rarity. A character alone on the stage evokes a kind of
uneasy tension in the audience: how long can this fragment
of solitude last?— there* s not much a character can do to
maintain audience interest except to talk on the telephone,
or carry out some big, showy piece of stage business.
Surely, any second now, the suspense will be broken by the
entrance of another character: (Enter Lady Fairchild).
Thus modern drama defines a norm of human experience
— especially in the Twentieth Century. It is commonly
acknowledged that man is by nature a social being, made for
community, for sharing with other men the process of living
— and it's said to be characteristic of denizens of our
nervy century that they find solitude intolerable. So,
plays take on an air of basic reality from the fact that the