Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [49]
The liberal class, believing it had to fit its ideas into the new sloganeering of mass communications, began to communicate in the child-like vocabulary and simplistic sound bites demanded by commercial media. Intellectual debate, once a characteristic of the country’s political discourse, withered. The liberal class became seduced by the need for popular appeal, forgetting, as Macdonald wrote, that “as in arts and letters, communicability to a large audience is in inverse ratio to the excellence of a political approach. This is not a good thing: as in art, it is a deforming and crippling factor. Nor is it an eternal rule: in the past, the ideas of a tiny minority, sometimes almost reduced to the vanishing point of one individual, have slowly come to take hold on more and more of their fellow men.”26
The cultural embrace of simplification, as Macdonald warned, meant reducing a population to speaking in predigested clichés and slogans. It banished complexity and further pushed to the margins difficult, original, or unfamiliar ideas. The assault on radical and original thought, which by definition did not fit itself into the popular cultural lexicon, saw art forms such as theater suffer.
The radical current in theater of the 1920s and 1930s brought potent new ways of thinking to audiences who had neither the time nor the inclination to read social theory. The theater became one of the last effective ways in which artists could compete with corporate consumerist culture by appealing to emotion and fact. It opposed mass propaganda by using many of the same methods of commercial propaganda. Theater responded to the political upheavals preceding World War I, during the Depression and, in a final gasp, at the height of the Vietnam War with politically charged works that, like the organs of mass propaganda, were designed to make people feel. The Province-town Playhouse in the 1920s performed the early plays of Eugene O’Neil and Susan Glaspell. The New Playwrights’ Theatre, funded by the banker Otto Kahn, included the communist author Mike Gold, who wrote Jews Without Money, and left-wing artists such as Francis Edward Faragoh, Emjo Basshe, John Howard Lawson, and John Dos Passos. Lawson, who would become one of the Hollywood Ten, jailed for a year for refusing to answer before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), wrote a jazz play, Processional, about labor strife, prejudice, and violence in a Kentucky coal mining town.
Basshe wrote a manifesto for the New Playwrights, calling for “a theater which is as drunken, as barbaric, as clangorous as our age.” A red flag was hoisted outside the Cherry Lane Theatre, on Commerce Street in Greenwich Village, which the New Playwrights rented for their second season. Dos Passos wrote the manifesto for their second season: “Towards a Revolutionary Theatre,” in which he called for a theater that “draws its life and ideas from the conscious sections of the industrial and white collar working classes which are out to get control of the great flabby mass of capitalist society and mold it to their own purpose.” These radicals sought to change content and theatrical form. The new social theater would be “somewhere between a high mass . . . and a Barnum and Bailey’s circus.”
During the New Deal, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) recruited Hallie Flanagan in 1935 to become the head of the Federal Theatre Project. This effort, which brought radicals and liberals together, became an effective tool for social change and perhaps was the last potent counterweight to the propaganda state. Production costs and scenic effects were limited. Money was used to pay salaries to the artists. Ticket prices were low. Theater suddenly