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State of the Union: The Play, the Film, and the Progress of the Isolationist Bogey
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2015
Abstract
This article argues that the adaptation of the play State of the Union into a film made the changes to the original that were necessary in a rapidly developing Cold War political culture. Helpful in this project was the way in which a Cold War culture had borrowed from an earlier form of postwar internationalism. In particular, it appropriated the demonization of isolationists as breeders of a corrupt domestic American political system that threatened republicanism and world peace alike. Indeed, the continuity in the representation of isolationists in the immediate postwar period of the play and the very different period of the film helped to lend legitimacy to the otherwise new Cold War rhetoric. The film, therefore, was able to make only minor revisions to the play and yet serve entirely different ideological purposes.
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References
1 Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, State of the Union: A Comedy in Three Acts (New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1946), 4. Further page references are given parenthetically in the text.
2 Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 127–51.
3 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2013), 144.
4 Whitfield, 127.
5 Todd Bennett, One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 170–71, 193–94.
6 Leonard Lyons, “The Lyons Den,” New York Post, 19 Feb. 1946, 22; “At the Summer Theatres,” Chatham [NY] Courier, 7 Aug. 1947, 1.
7 Joseph McBride, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2011), 537.
8 Arthur Pollock, “Now We Have Two Adult Plays about the State of the Nation,” Brooklyn Eagle, 18 Nov. 1945, 30.
9 William G. Carleton, The Revolution in American Foreign Policy (New York: Random House, 1963), 119.
10 This interpretation is distinct from Vandenberg's own anti-Soviet motives, which have been shown by the historian Hill, Thomas Michael, “Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Politics of Bipartisanship, and the Origins of the Anti-Soviet Consensus,” World Affairs, 138, 3 (Winter 1975–76), 219–41Google Scholar. At the time, Vandenberg's speech was seen as support for Rooseveltian internationalism. See, for example, Elizabeth Donahue, “Democrats Hail Vandenberg's Break with Isolationism,” New York PM Daily, 11 Jan. 1945, 11.
11 Robert L. Messer, The End of an Alliance: James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman, and the Origins of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 187.
12 Henry A. Wallace, “The Way to Peace,” in Selected Works of Henry A. Wallace, New Deal Network, at http://newdeal.feri.org/wallace/haw28.htm.
13 John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism & the Cultural Roots of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 120–21.
14 Untitled, [New York] Weekly People, 28 Feb. 1948, 1.
15 David Lawrence, “Isolationism Ingrained in American Thinking,” Arizona Republic, 23 March 1947, 6. The historian John Lewis Gaddis has emphasized how the events of the 1940s were governed by the commonly shared belief that the United States had mishandled the immediate post-World War I period. John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 1–2, 354.
16 “ The State of the Union: Capra, Altruism, and the Sociobiologists,” Journal of Popular Film and Television, 25, 3 (Fall 1997), 118–29Google Scholar, 121.
17 “European Unity Takes Shape,” [Auburn] Citizen-Advertiser, 16 Feb. 1948, 4; Wendell Willkie, One World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943), 173.
18 Thomas L. Stokes, “National Affairs,” Boston Traveller, 2 Nov. 1946, 4.
19 Fousek, 141.
20 “National Affairs,” Boston Traveler, 21 May 1947, 22; 16 Ma. 1947, 22.
21 Drew Pearson's Washington Merry-Go-Round, 25 Nov. 1947, 21 Nov. 1947, 18 Nov. 1947, at www.aladino.wrlc.org/gsdl/collect/pearson/pearson.shtml.
22 “Truman's Problem: To Carry Out His Words in Actions,” El Paso Herald Post, 8 Jan. 1948, p. 4. Middletown [NY] Times Herald, 10 Jan. 1948, 4.
23 “National Affairs,” Boston Traveler, 8 Jan. 1948, 18.