American Portraits Leonard Bernstein Orchestra
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Consider: J. B. Priestley, playwright for An Inspector Calls. One of England’s leading radical socialists from the 1930s through the 1950s, a politician as well as a writer. A founder of the socialist Common Wealth Party, even further to the left than the Labour Party. Favored permanent wage controls, nationalization of industry, and public ownership of land. Lillian Hellman, playwright for The Little Foxes. More than a mere “fellow traveler.” Openly admired Stalin and his methods; indifferent to the effective brutality with which he annihilated opponents; approved the Soviet occupations of Finland and Poland. Traveled to Russia in the late 1930s while Stalin was deliberately starving millions of Ukranians; found not one thing in the U.S.S.R. to criticize and much to admire. George Bernard Shaw, playwright for Getting Married. Britain’s leading socialist thinker from 1890 until his death in 1950. Admired Lenin, Stalin, and Mussolini; praised the U.S.S.R. Opposed Britain’s involvement in both world wars. Not only promoted radical socialism, but attacked through his plays the essential cultural and economic foundations that kept England together: the Christian religion, the establishment of marriage, private ownership of property, the free enterprise system. Leonard Bernstein, composer for Wonderful Town. The high priest of ’60s radical chic. Notorious as an uncritical supporter of left-wing causes for the duration of the 1960s; his high-society parties to raise cash for the Black Panthers were lampooned by Tom Wolfe in his essay “These Radical Chic Evenings.” Bernstein gets a pass, since the script and the lyrics to the songs in Wonderful Town were written by others, since the music is glorious, and since it’s hard to find anything ideological in this terrifi musical (the Shaw’s production of which I enthusiastically recommend). But the Priestley, Hellman, and Shaw plays in a positive manner burst with leftist cant. And Shaw’s anti-capitalist Mrs. Warren’s Profession is yet to come in the Shaw Festival’s 2008 season! If I took account of a playwright’s personal reputation and principles in settling whether to see a play, I might have given The Little Foxes a pass. But the play had a high reputation, and we had enjoyed Hellman’s The Autumn Garden at the Shaw a couple of years ago. This was the show in this year’s Shaw Festival season I was looking forward to the most. My, how that woman hated our country! The Little Foxes is a rant versus American capitalism and a hardly dissembled call for violent revolution. In The Little Foxes, the already wealthy Hubbard family (Southern merchants and bankers) are attempting to round up capital to build a cotton mill in their town. But the Hubbard brothers and their sister, we learn, are as each bit as rapacious and corrupt as the French aristocracy before the French Revolution, or the Russian nobility before the October Revolution of 1917. In Hellman’s object lesson, the Hubbards, and the world of American business and finance that they represent, is worthy of the same fates as those ill-fated French and Russian aristocrats. Let’s take inventory of the unworthy characters in Hellman’s play: The Hubbards were the children of slave-owners, just as galore of the Russian aristocracy murdered by the communists in 1917 had owned Russian serfs. (The Little Foxes was devised in 1939), but the story takes place in the deep South around 1900.) Hellman has Ben Hubbard make the offensive comment that he’d put his aging cook out to pasture “if we hadn’t owned her mother.” The Hubbard brothers got rich as merchants by cheating black humans on staple goods and by charging them usurious interest. The Hubbards plan to use their political muscle, in all likelihood through bribes, to get water rights for the new mill for practically nothing. Illustrating the classic Marxist propaganda point that capitalists grind the faces of the poor by turning them versus each other, the Hubbard brothers brag that they’ll be capable to keep wages low at a new cotton mill by playing the poor whites off versus the poor blacks. They assure their new business collaborator from Chicago that no labor union will ever be permitted to get a foothold in a cotton mill in their town. An exquisite touch borrowed from Les Miserables: Just as the French aristocrats famously applied to put mantraps in their forests to maim peasants who might hunt little game to feed their starving families, Oscar Hubbard goes out hunting each morning in his privately owned disseminate and leaves his dead game to rot, even even though malnourished townspeople haven’t had meat in months. He promises to have the law versus trespassers. To support her audience discern the Hubbard siblings with the doomed French and Russian monarchy, Hellman names the sister “Regina.” Preoccupied with fashion and spending money, like Marie Antoinette, she is the both the strongest-willed and the most heartless of the siblings. Regina doesn’t hesitate to blackmail her own brothers to get a more spectacular interest in the new cotton mill. In one of the play’s crudest scenes, Oscar Hubbard inspires his own son, Leo, to steal a packet of valuable bonds from a safe deposit box. Reminding us again of those inbred monarchical families: the Hubbard brothers and Regina connive to marry Leo to his 17-year-old initial cousin, Alexandra. Fortunately, Alexandra despises Leo because of his remorseless cruelty to animals, among other reasons. When Oscar’s wife, Birdie, warns the girl of the matchmaking plot (“don’t you see, they’ll make you marry him, Zan”), Oscar strikes his wife – perhaps the most shocking scene in the play. And in the end, how do the Hubbard brothers get the cash for the new cotton mill? Like all capitalists (according to Hellman), they steal it! Wife-beaters, corrupters of children, animal-abusers, cheats, thieves, swindlers, and usurers, bribers, blackmailers, oppressors of the poor, oppositions of the working man! True to Marxist stereotype, Hellman takes care that the only characters in the play with any moral sense are the “oppressed” characters. Oscar’s ill-usage of his wife Birdie has beaten her down and driven her to drink, but she still has sufficient spirit to become indignant over the way her in-laws “made their cash charging awful interest to poor ignorant n***s and cheating them on what they bought.” The Hubbards’ black servant Addie, the moral center of the play (as one would suppose in a leftist piece), lays out the moral justification for a class-based revolution: Well , there are persons who eat the world and eat all the humans on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. (Softly) Sometimes I think it ain’t right to stand and watch them do it. At the end of Hellman’s play, the spunky Alexandra remembers Addie’s remark, flexes her youthful muscles, and sets off to mount the barricades: Addie said there were people who ate the world and other people who stood around and watched them do it. And Uncle Ben said the same thing. (Tensely) Well, tell him for me, Mama, I’m not going to stand around and watch you do it. Tell him I’ll fighting as hard as he’ll be fighting numerous place where humans don’t just stand around and watch. Hellman wants us to comprehend that the Hubbards are not just small-town types, but are cut out of the same cloth as the wealthy industrialist tycoons of the day. Driving home the connection, she has Ben Hubbard invoke Henry Frick, the steel magnate (also a noted art collector) in a toast to the success of the cotton mill venture: It was Henry Frick who said, “Railroads are the Rembrandts of investments.” Well, I say, “Southern cotton mills will be the Rembrandts of investment. The Little Foxes is a fundamentally dishonest play, a libel. Of course, there has always been sharp exercise in business. But merchants succeed in the main by being honest, by living up to their contracts, and by giving clients what they promise. The industries founded by Andrew Carnegie, Henry Frick, and Henry Ford dramatically bettered the lives of all Americans, and as philanthropists they gave much of their fortunes back to the public – which may still view Henry Frick’s Rembrandts, Vermeers, and Van Dycks at the public art museum (The Frick Collection) he built on Fifth Avenue. Why didn’t Hellman give us an honorable picture of a representative slice of the business world? It still could made for a good play (like Harley Granville Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance, invented at the Shaw various years ago, among a lot of examples). But it never would have served her purpose. She knew that revolution would never come in America unless Americans came to view each capitalist, from Andrew Mellon down to the local cotton merchant, as a useless leech, irredeemably corrupt. But isn’t The Little Foxes plainly a portrait of an unusually corrupt (and colorful) Southern family? Many playgoers will see the play in those simplistic terms. But that is not what Hellman intended. She wanted to use her formidable dramatic achievements to instruct that not one thing short of revolution was necessitated to end the reigns of the black-hearted capitalists who – she was telling us – were raping America. She wanted us as fellow revolutionaries. The Hubbards are never brought to justice; in Hellman’s worldview, social justice will never come in a capitalist society. Instead, her play ends with the little foxes still on the loose. Not by accident, Hellman leaves the task of bringing them to bay, and setting on the dogs to tear them to pieces, to us. |
