Cold War Theatre (Routledge Revivals)

John Elsom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317558644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Cold War Theatre, first published in 1992, provides an account of the theatrical history within the context of East/West politics. Its geographical span ranges from beyond the Urals to the Pacific Coast of the US, and asks whether the Cold War confrontation was not in part due to the cultural climate of Europe.

Taking the McCarthy era as its starting point, this readable history considers the impact of the Cold War upon the major dramatic movements of our time, East and West. The author poses the question as to whether European habits of mind, fostered by their cultures, may not have contributed to the political stalemates of the Cold War.

A wide range of actors from both the theatrical and political stages are discussed, and their contributions to the theatre of the Cold War examined in a hugely enjoyable and enlightening narrative. This book is ideal for theatre studies students.

1 The Conscience of a Diplomat

An Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315733661-1

‘I can do anything better than you’

(From Annie Get Your Gun, 1946)

In September 1950, one architect of the Cold War, George Kennan, asked for an indefinite leave of absence without pay from his post within the US State Department, where he was an adviser on foreign affairs to the Truman administration. He was 46, too young to retire, too old to back down when he thought he was right, and a ‘small, inward voice’ was telling him, ‘You have despaired of yourself. Now despair of your country!’¹

The Cold War was with us for so long, and penetrated so many aspects of our lives, that it is tempting to believe that it was an inevitable response to events outside our control, at least in the West, and that if Kennan had not existed, somebody would have had to invent him. In fact, his views were not thought to be self-evident when he first put them forward and they were developed along lines which he neither liked nor anticipated.

Kennan was a career diplomat who returned home from Moscow in 1946, appalled by the chaos in Europe and the strident anti-Americanism of Soviet foreign policy under Stalin. In the United States, he found the public in a state of post-war euphoria, for whom Uncle Joe was almost a national hero. He thus wrote an article for Foreign Affairs (July 1947) under his cipher ‘X’, in which he described the threat of Soviet expansion and how it could be contained and this essay, ‘The source of Soviet conduct’, became the first public blueprint for the Cold War.

Kennan was a strategist on a grand, almost eighteenth-century, scale, of liberal views, educated at Princeton, and blind to neither the political nor the human realities of what he was preaching. He spoke Russian, was a student of Russian history and had witnessed the purges of the 1930s and the misery caused by the collectivisation of the land. He was thus under no illusions about Stalin. He also knew that the Soviet distrust of the West had deep roots, dating back at least to 1919 when fourteen foreign armies fought on Russian soil to overthrow the Bolshevik revolution.² Marxist-Leninism endorsed this fear, and made it intellectually respectable, elevating it as part of the struggle between the forces of capitalism and communism, in which the proletariat would eventually triumph. Kennan did not believe that the Soviet Union, exhausted by war already, would want to invade Western Europe unless it was tempted or provoked into doing so, two possibilities which he was determined to prevent.

He was more alarmed by the thought that the Western Allies might simply give way to Soviet demands from disunity or peace-seeking generosity. Examples of such political weakness were fresh in his mind – from Munich before the war and Yalta six years later where President Roosevelt had allowed Stalin to annex most of Eastern Europe, from the Baltic to the Balkans. Of course, Roosevelt, who was by then a dying man, had merely agreed that countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary should stay within the Soviet zone of influence until the time when, with the war and its aftermath cleared away, they could be returned to their independent governments. Kennan did not believe that Stalin would slacken his grip on the land left in his keeping and he did not want to see the mistakes of Yalta repeated, in Austria, Finland or who knew where.

How should the Soviet threat be met? By military alliances or by diplomatic pressure? By trying to de-stabilise the Soviet Union or by assassinating Stalin? In time, all these alternatives were contemplated, but Kennan thought that containment should be achieved through economic means rather than military ones, with the armed forces standing by for emergencies. He was thus a supporter of General George Marshall who in the midsummer weeks of 1946 was explaining to Harvard students how to regenerate Europe with the help of US dollars. Marshall did not rule out the possibility of giving assistance to the Soviet Union as well, and the countries under its spell in Eastern Europe, whereas Kennan believed that the provision of aid should be tied to political conditions, such as free elections in the countries which received it. By such tactics the Cold War should be conducted.

That was Kennan's theory, but he did not know how it would be received in the White House. Harry Truman had the reputation of being a political barnstormer with little interest in foreign affairs. The subtleties of Kennan's approach might be expected to elude him, but this was not so. ‘Containment’ became the new diplomatic watchword and in 1947, Kennan was elevated to the post of Director, Policy Planning Unit, in the State Department, a key adviser to the Secretary of State himself, Dean Acheson.

These were heady times. Kennan had the rare political chance to bring into being his own policies. He could help to implement the Marshall Plan for Europe and comment influentially on other containment strategies, such as the establishment in 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). He also had the grim satisfaction of watching his prophecies come true. The communist coups d’états in Eastern Europe, accompanied by a barrage of propaganda and acts of harassment, demonstrated that Stalin would never grant his buffer states any real independence.

Even while he was being proved right, Kennan sensed that things were not going according to plan. Having alerted public opinion to the Soviet threat, he was alarmed by the fear of the Red Menace which had spread throughout the United States. A scare seemed to have been started for political reasons, just before the 1948 presidential election, by Truman's Republican opponents. Senator Joe McCarthy accused the Democrats of letting Soviet spies into their administration. A Senate Committee was established to investigate Un-American Activities, which claimed the right even to censor schoolbooks.

At first, Truman was able to brush the charges aside as a red herring, and won the election, but McCarthy was a persistent man, who thought that he had the Democrats on the run. He made speeches on radio and television, waving a sheaf of papers, claiming that they proved the existence of some ‘two hundred card-carrying Communists’ within the State Department itself. Kennan's immediate response was one of ‘head-shaking wonder’, but he thought grimly, ‘Now he will have to prove it! Then we will have an end to the matter!’³

But Kennan was wrong. There was a conspiracy and there were spies near the centre of government. Alger Hiss, at Roosevelt's side in Yalta, was acquitted of spying, but given a jail sentence for perjury. The Rosenburgs were sent to the electric chair. Some of Kennan's friends were held under suspicion, including Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who had designed the first atomic bomb and was now trying to live with the consequences.

Kennan discovered that the trouble with democracies was that subtle ideas could become simple-minded, and then mad, in a direct ratio to their vote-winning potential. To sell the idea of containment to the American people, it had been necessary to turn it into something like a Holy War. There was no alternative. It would otherwise have been dismissed as an expensive folly. But can you ever fight a Holy War without sliding into a similar bigotry from which you are so anxious to protect mankind?

In 1948, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was established, with Kennan's approval, to investigate what the Soviet fifth column was doing in the United States and to set up a counter-spy system. The CIA was then asked to undertake black propaganda for the military. Its role had therefore changed, from gathering intelligence in a peaceful way to spreading false rumours. It might even be said that the CIA was trying to de-stabilise governments with whom the United States was not officially at war. It was a reckless step in the wrong direction, for which Kennan blamed the Pentagon. He had never been able to explain his theory of containment to the generals. ‘The American military … abhorred the concept of limited warfare and were addicted to doing things only in the most massive, ponderous and unwieldy manner’.⁴ They still talked of surrounding the Euro-Asian continent with military bases from which they could launch a pre-emptive, and nuclear, strike.

This fearful prospect confirmed the Soviet suspicions of the West. The Cold War was in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Pentagon, in its efforts to contain Stalin, was producing those conditions which encouraged Stalinism to thrive. In 1949, despite US aid, General Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalist army was driven to the offshore island of Formosa (Taiwan) by Mao Tse-Tung's People's Liberation Army. A vast new communist state was brought into being, allied to the Soviet Union. In 1950, almost as a geo-political footnote to the war in China, the Korean war began and there were other regional conflicts on the horizon.

The disintegration of the old European empires – British, French, Belgian, Dutch and Portuguese – accounted for many of them. The patterns were often very similar. A rebel force, armed with old Soviet weapons, would start a guerrilla campaign in the hills against a colonial government, which appealed to the US and its allies for support. It was often hard to tell whether this was some machiavellian plot to de-stabilise the West or if it sprang from genuine injustice, or both, or neither.

Kennan warned that if the West believed that every little local difficulty were masterminded by Moscow, the West would find itself propping up some unpleasant regimes and dragged into disastrous wars. His prophecies fell on deaf ears, which was why, having watched helplessly the early reverses of the Korean war as General MacArthur tried to take on China and failed, he declared himself redundant at the State Department and ventured into that wilderness from which only Princeton travellers readily return.

He had a family to support and no private income, but he wanted to take a long, hard look at the civilisation he was trying to save. He travelled by train across the mid-West, irritated by the canned music in his carriage, playing ‘Ave Maria’ and selections from ‘Rose Marie’. He did not like what he saw. St Louis was ‘a grim waste of criss-crossing railroads, embankments, viaducts, junk lots, storage lots, piles of refuse, and the most abject specimens of human habitation’.⁵ In Pennsylvania, he was asked to run for the Senate as a Democrat, although he was not a party member. Flattered, he accepted; and his county chairman gave him some advice: ‘If you’re a drinkin’ man, keep on drinkin’. If you’re chasin’ women, keep on chasin’ women. They’re goin’ to know it anyway.’⁶

Eventually, he had to withdraw his nomination, because he could not afford the costs of his campaign. ‘The lesson was a severe one’, he recorded.⁷ The American political system was not as open and democratic as he had been led to believe. Money mattered more than morals if you were running for office. Mr Smith could rarely go to Washington, except on a coach trip, and if he were black, he might have to go on a separate bus.

All this depressed Kennan mightily, but the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton offered him a home and an income, where he could think about world affairs and how his personal intervention in them had gone wrong. He wrote a second article for Foreign Affairs (April 1951) in which he tried to dispel the thought that the West could actually win the Cold War. That should not even be its aim. His hope was that in time ‘gradual, peaceful change’ would come over the Soviet Union itself, if it could be helped by a positive example from the West.⁸

If only the necessary alternatives could be kept before the Russian people in the form of an existence elsewhere on this planet of a civilization which is decent, hopeful and purposeful, the day must come – soon or late, and whether by gradual process or otherwise – when that terrible system of power which has set a great people's progress back for decades and has lain like a shadow over the aspirations of all civilization will be distinguishable no longer as a living reality, but only as something surviving partly in recorded history and partly in that sediment of constructive organic change which every human upheaval, however unhappy in its other manifestations, manages to deposit on the shelf of time.⁹

He must have hoped that the elevated tone of this article, with its long sentences and rolling, parenthetical phrases, would strike a chord in the hearts of his fellow-citizens. But, sadly, they were more likely to be glued to their television screens by the proceedings of the House Un-American Activities (HUAC), which had turned its attention to Hollywood. There was a parade of supposed ‘fellow-travellers’ who had innocently signed petitions in the 1930s and who, eager to ingratiate themselves, laid charges against others. Some protested, some stayed silent, but the purge continued and McCarthy's power increased, until by 1954, he was prepared to take on the Pentagon itself. After harassing a Brigadier-General, he enraged President Eisenhower, was condemned by Congress and then declined into insignificance.

Joe McCarthy died in 1957, but McCarthyism went on, leaving, according to Kennan, a ‘lasting mark on American political life’.¹⁰ In 1954, President Eisenhower outlawed the Communist Party of the United States, although by that time it was scarcely necessary. Unless somebody had been caught with a membership card, or forced by fair means or foul to confess, it was hard to tell whether he or she was a communist. Civil rights workers, uncooperative trade unionists and troublemakers in general were tarred with the same brush. They were suspected of being communists or fellow-travellers unless they could prove otherwise, and was this how a free society should behave?

Kennan's sharpest attack on McCarthyism was delivered in 1953 in a speech made at the opening of a centre for the fine arts at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. In it, he complained about the narrow chauvinism of the American right, which ‘looked with suspicion both on the sources of intellectual and artistic activity [in the United States] and upon impulses of this nature coming to us from abroad’.¹¹ Strong cultures, he argued, depend upon the free exchange of ideas and upon the relationship between past and present values that the arts embody. If anything could keep communism at bay, and fascism too, and other violent swings to the left or right, it was the presence of sturdy, critical instincts, fostered by the humanistic traditions of Western art.

This is where this book really begins.

My aim is to consider the impact of the Cold War upon the cultures of various countries, taking the theatre as my point of departure, and to speculate about whether the Cold War itself may not have been affected by the cultural climates in which it was being conducted. Some readers may instantly suspect that I am giving show-business a status that it does not deserve. The theatre is a game, nothing more, and what most people want when they go to a show is a good night out.

But why, if this is so, should Joe McCarthy and his allies have wasted time in persecuting actors? The answer could be that by doing so HUAC gained useful publicity for its cause. How many Americans would recognise their local Congressman in the street, or fail to recognise Ethel Merman? The theatre may not deliver profound messages for mankind, it may not alter the direction of political events (except rarely), but it could command a deal of public attention and influence the mood within which politicans had to operate. The impresarios of Broadway had close links with Hollywood and television, and promoted stars whose faces were known wherever there were screens to display them.

Stars are seen in roles, and roles help to develop plots, and audiences all over the world seem to want the good guys to win and the bad ones to lose, although it may not be so easy to decide which is which. In the B-feature Westerns in which Ronald Reagan used to appear, the hero was the white man with short hair who had a long-standing relationship with his horse, but elsewhere the moral framework might be more complicated. The expectation that right will win in the end has always been a powerful and somewhat mysterious theatrical force. Audiences may like to feel re-assured that they live in a just world under a benevolent God or perhaps this may simply be the way in which we have come to write plays. The aim of Greek tragedy, on whose principles much Western drama has been modelled, was to encourage virtue and to discourage vice. If justice is expected to triumph, audiences look for clues in the plot as to what constitutes ‘goodness’. These may not be moral in a Christian sense. They could be fashionable, patriotic or racial, but if the public fails to be convinced, its reaction may be one of unease, even outrage, although it is more likely to avoid the show.

In the Broadway musicals of the early 1950s, the innocent girl usually married the hero, while the flighty one got stuck with the no-good gambler. By such means, audiences could be persuaded that these were the norms of behaviour, whether they tallied with real life or not. It could be described as a kind of moral massage and in those days, the best masseur on Broadway was the director, George Abbott, who has since become a super-veteran who turned 100 in 1987.

Abbott was born in 1887 and first acted on Broadway in 1913. He started to direct in the 1920s, mainly tough-guy melodramas and comedies. He became a producer, a play-doctor and dramatist, a director of musicals, the supreme professional who became guru to the young Harold Prince. He had a dry wit, an imposing presence and was more of a technician than a theorist. He liked to make each scene tick like clockwork and scorned the inward, symbolic stuff which he left to amateurs and eggheads.

One of his favourite words during rehearsals was ‘phony’, which he applied to anything which rang false to his scheme of values. This might mean something as slight as a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 THE CONSCIENCE OF A DIPLOMAT: AN INTRODUCTION
• 2 THE TRIAL OF ARTHUR MILLER
• 3 BINKIE BEAUMONT’S WEST END
• 4 THE HEAT IN BRECHT’S COOLNESS
• 5 AT THE BACK OF THE MIND
• 6 OLIVIER PASSES THE BATON
• 7 THE VELVET PRISON
• 8 THE SECULAR BAPTIST
• 9 THE AGE OF AQUARIUS
• 10 THE FLOATING ISLAND
• 11 TOWARDS MUSIC
• 12 THE NATIONAL THEATRE IS YOURS
• 13 BROADWAY BABIES
• 14 THE UNRAVELLING
• 15 THEME AND EXPOSITION
• Notes
• Index