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Inside
This Issue: Inside This Issue Performing Hawaiian by Kevin Fellezs Interview with Tom Cipullo by Doug Cohen Bernstein in Boston, conference review by Paul R. Laird Celebrating African American Art Song, conference reviews by Naomi André and Ann Sears |
Irving
Berlin’s Musical Theater of War by Jeffrey Magee
The phrase “theater of war” has intrigued commentators throughout the twentieth century. In a chapter by that title in his book The Great War and Modern Memory, historian Paul Fussell took a cue from Ezra Pound and explored the phrase through soldiers’ accounts of “being beside oneself” in battle, of doing something that took them far away from “real life”—in short, of performing a role.1 Theater itself, then, may be an apt forum in which to reveal and explore human thought and behavior during wartime, and few American showmen stand out so clearly for cultivating the theater of war than Irving Berlin. The subject of Americans at war inspired Berlin across five decades. He found in war-related themes a rich wellspring of feeling and observation that pours out in individual songs and in plots and scores for stage and screen. War and its impact mobilized Berlin’s creative energy from his 1911 hit “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” which describes a “bugle call like you never heard before, / so natural that you want to go to war,” to the postwar nostalgia that suffuses the 1954 film White Christmas. Yet it was not war per se that inspired Berlin, since most of his war-related songs aim to identify and articulate the everyday thoughts, feelings, and actions of ordinary people. Far from the Providence-sanctioned jingoism that has attached to the song “God Bless America” since 9/11, Berlin chiefly strove to reflect back to civilians and soldiers alike images of themselves at once heroic and human. Berlin’s focus on the ordinary citizen, whether soldier or civilian, meshed well with the widespread American notion of World War II as the “people’s war” to be fought by and for the “common man,” an idea articulated in speeches by then Vice-President Henry Wallace and embodied in Ernie Pyle’s journalism. No wonder, then, that Berlin regarded his World War II revue This Is the Army as his most outstanding and rewarding achievement. Like its predecessor, Berlin’s World War I revue Yip, Yip, Yaphank!, This Is the Army was developed at the Army’s Camp Upton on Long Island. It opened on Broadway on 4 July 1942 to popular and critical acclaim, later touring the U.S., Great Britain, and, thanks to General Eisenhower’s recommendation, the war’s European and Pacific theaters. In 1943, Warner Brothers produced a film version that became the company’s biggest grossing movie to date, second only to Gone with the Wind in that era. Several features of the production made it unique: it was an army camp show that drew talent from a national search, its touring company was designated an official detachment of the U. S. Army, its actors and backstage staff were given an assortment of military ranks, and its platoon of black talent made it the only racially integrated military unit before the army was officially desegregated. Moreover, This Is the Army, Inc., was set up as a charitable corporation that donated all net earnings from ticket and music sales, as well as song performance royalties, to Army Emergency Relief, a service agency organized to provide short-term financial aid and other support to soldiers and their dependents. By late October 1945, when the touring company staged its final performance in Hawaii, more than two-and-a-half million troops and civilians had seen over 1,200 performances of the show. After the war, President Truman presented Berlin with the Medal for Merit for sustaining military and civilian morale during wartime and raising more than six million dollars for the relief effort. The show has been chronicled by several of Berlin’s biographers, and in a recent book by its stage manager, Alan Anderson.2 Yet despite its remarkable success, the stage version tends to escape historical memory because, aside from a handful of hit songs, it disappeared after the war and did not lend itself to revival. It falls under the radar of most musical theater historians for many reasons: its short Broadway run, the absence of a surviving Broadway script, and because it was a revue unified only by its World War II theme. That is, This Is the Army was a variety-driven entertainment that emerged just before Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! opened in spring 1943 and launched the age of the so-called integrated musical in which dialogue, song, and dance serve to develop plot and character. Cultural historians and film historians tend to treat This Is the Army chiefly as a product of Hollywood, but the film overlaid a sentimental and overtly patriotic plot starring Ronald Reagan and George Murphy onto a variety show whose creator had striven to avoid maudlin sentiments, star power, and direct expressions of patriotism. For a musical theater scholar, the film’s value is chiefly documentary, for its show-within-a-show motif allows it to preserve many of the songs, sketches, and staging of the original show. The stage version, far from a distraction from the serious business of war, must be seen as a keystone of the war. The American military’s preoccupation, what Fussell has called an “obsession” with morale during World War II, gave rise to a multifarious entertainment system sustained by the Special Service Division.3 And within that system, which included what one wartime theater commentator referred to as “probably the largest single theatrical producing organization, with the exception of the Federal Theatre, that has ever existed,” This Is the Army holds a unique place.4 If, in Studs Terkel’s deliberately loaded phrase, World War II was the “good war,” then This Is the Army was the good war’s greatest show.5 Its international success during World War II—spanning almost the entire period of America’s engagement in the war—suggests that it offers a revealing glimpse of Berlin’s values and contradictions, and by extension those of wartime America. Nowhere are those values and contradictions more apparent than in the show’s reliance on the conventions of minstrelsy. “Common man” rhetoric tended to gloss over the social reality that some men were more equal than others. The first racially integrated army unit reproduced racial images and sounds that had roots in nineteenth-century entertainment. Like many forms of cultural expression in the 1930s and 1940s, including jazz performances at New York’s Onyx Club and Fred Astaire’s film appearances with black musicians, This Is the Army at once both challenged and reinforced racial stereotypes and practices.6 Commentators have criticized or apologized for the use of blackface makeup in the first scene and the reliance on stereotypes in an all-black song-and-dance number, but such accounts simply point to the features that This Is the Army shares with many other films and stage shows of the era. The racial stereotypes represent only the most obvious minstrel conventions in a show saturated in the style and structure of post-Civil War minstrelsy that continued to flourish as Berlin entered American show business in the early twentieth century. Understanding This Is the Army reminds us that blackface performance and minstrelsy are not synonymous. What did minstrelsy mean to Irving Berlin? From one perspective, the genre represents what Eric Lott, in his book Love and Theft, calls “people’s culture,” an idealized view of the minstrel show as a common denominator, an unpretentious democratic entertainment accessible to all, which helps to explain its remarkable resilience. The opposite perspective comprises what Lott calls the “cultural domination” view in which minstrelsy is seen as reflecting and reinforcing beliefs in white superiority and the oppression of African Americans.7 Berlin’s ideology of entertainment, formed early in the twentieth century, clearly stood with the “people’s culture” view and blinded him to—or caused him to underestimate—minstrelsy’s power to reinforce “cultural domination.” Although minstrelsy had faded by World War II, blackface remained its most visible remnant both on Broadway and in Hollywood. Wartime Broadway, starved for young talent and fresh entertainment, was awash in nostalgia, from revivals of older musical comedies and operettas, to hybrid variety shows billed as “vaudeville revues” and featuring veteran entertainers, to “farewell” vehicles for aging stars like Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor, both of whom performed in blackface in their respective shows. Hollywood likewise continued to traffic in minstrel conventions. Berlin’s 1942 film Holiday Inn included a scene featuring a blackfaced Bing Crosby singing in dialect in front of a band wearing raggedy pseudo-plantation garb. Moreover, the military sanctioned minstrelsy as one of several potent sources for camp-show amusement. As the Special Service Division came to realize and exploit the value of entertainment for sustaining troop and civilian morale, it published several manuals for soldiers in army camps who wanted to put on shows, including a book that included two full-length minstrel shows with music. Since minstrelsy represents a historically male domain of entertainment, it offered both a pragmatic solution to the challenge of staging army camp shows and an ideological reinforcement of the dominant American ethos of the war years. That is, the wartime rhetoric of the “common man” and the “people’s war” dovetailed comfortably with the “people’s culture” view of minstrelsy described by Lott and wholeheartedly embraced by Berlin. That view helps to explain why minstrelsy proved to be a strangely apt medium in the theater of war. Within and beyond its opening scene, entitled “A Military Minstrel Show,” This Is the Army used several minstrel conventions: (1) a large, uniformed male ensemble on risers, a remnant of the post-Civil War minstrel extravaganza, (2) rapid-fire dialogue between characters of unequal status in the manner of minstrelsy’s endman-interlocutor banter, (3) a tenor spotlighted in the role of a romantic balladeer, (4) a hefty dose of female impersonation, and (5) a balance between contemporary references and nostalgia for the past. Minstrelsy offered Berlin a broad, flexible vocabulary of theatrical and musical conventions that helped to rein in two tendencies he wanted to avoid, especially for his soldier audiences: maudlin sentiments and overt patriotism. The first scene sets the tone with the image of 150-uniformed men in minstrel formation on risers, in front of which a motley crew of selectees enters and begins to sing the song “This Is the Army, Mister Jones.” The scene, captured on film, creates a sharp contrast between the minstrel-soldiers (whom Berlin had initially hoped to present in blackface), with their matching uniforms, straight posture, lockstep movements, and stentorian singing; and the selectees, who dress in mismatched underclothes, stumble around and slouch, and sing in weak, shallow tones. After the selectees sing the song, the minstrel-soldiers surround them and repeat the chorus, while the selectees change into uniform and march off the stage. The theme of clothes as a marker of identity recurs like a leitmotif in Berlin’s show, and ultimately provides a key to the source of his wartime entertainment aesthetic. A minstrel show drew much of its energy and appeal from the interaction of the wise-cracking, lowly endmen and the dignified, sometimes pompous, interlocutor. In this, it embodied the form of American comedy practiced by what Constance Rourke, in a classic study of American humor, identifies as the “Yankee fable,” whose protagonists were “popular oracles.” These marginalized but quick-witted figures speak up for the common man in encounters with their cultural or economic (sometimes European) superiors.8 That model fit hand-in-glove with the attitude Berlin saw among the soldiers while working on the show at Camp Upton, and it comes out in scenes whose writers fitted it to Berlin’s conception of the show. The minstrel first part features a run of banter and boasting between the endman Dick Bernie and the interlocutor, Alan Manson, who has summoned him “front and center.” In classic endman fashion, Bernie acts as a disruptive figure who trades brisk dialogue with Manson on his left as he tries to crack the stony façade of the guard on his right, which he succeeds in doing with the line: “You heard of the March of Time? There’s his brother, Waste of Time.”9 As the scene progresses, Bernie’s pace quickens and the boasts grow. In the end of the scene as filmed, he willingly surrenders to the guard for his verbal trespassing, an act that reinforces the interlocutor’s superiority even as it gets Dick Bernie the endman’s ultimate reward: the last laugh.10 A minstrel show offered respite from manic humor in the form of a romantic balladeer, typically a tenor who starred in the minstrel first part. This, too, fit well into a wartime show, for it allowed Berlin to develop an impulse he viewed as universal to the common soldier: yearning for the girl he left behind. To satisfy this convention Berlin wrote “I’m Getting Tired So I Can Sleep,” a musical love letter in which a soldier looks forward to dreaming as the best way to reunite with his faraway loved one. The concept of the romantic ballad on the “girl I left behind” also stands behind two later numbers, including a song that became the show’s hit ballad, “I Left My Heart at the Stage Door Canteen.” Here a soldier pines for the hostess he met at the famous army nightclub, and Berlin aims to keep overblown sentimentality in check with an image of doughnuts and coffee. Beyond yearning for women, the men in This Is the Army also impersonate them. Toll has noted that female impersonation emerged in the post-Civil War era as “minstrelsy’s most important new specialty role,” whose performers “excited more interest than any other minstrel specialist.” 11 Berlin’s show uses two kinds of female impersonation. One features a group of men embodying a generic stereotyped femininity, with frilly dresses, batting eyelashes, and mincing steps. This is the minstrel type evoked in the number “Ladies of the Chorus,” which Berlin recycled from Yip, Yip, Yaphank. In this scene, the humor is supposed to arise from the contrast between a dainty female ideal and the ungainly, hairy masculinity it cannot conceal. Another kind of female impersonation became a minstrel art form. Earlier in the “Stage Door Canteen” sequence, fascination vies with humor as a soldier does a striking parody of a specific woman, actress Lynn Fontanne, then breaks the illusion with a masculine shout. The minstrel first part culminates in a scene featuring a mock-wedding number called “Mandy,” a song closely connected with Berlin’s vision of an army show, and it remained a favorite that he revisited. It appeared first in Yip, Yip, Yaphank in 1918, again in his score for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1919, and This Is the Army in the 1940s, and once more, without blackface, in the 1954 film White Christmas. As late as 1967, Berlin still recalled the “Mandy” number in the Follies as “the high spot” of that show and “one of the thrills of my memory.”12 The version for This Is the Army features the soldier chorus on risers, plus several performers in blackface. Five of them stand in the back encircled by a large banjo image on a backdrop and others dance in the foreground, where we see the double masquerade of white men in both drag and (as the film makes clear) a light shade of blackface that used to be called “high yallow.” Racial stereotypes also surface in a number for the African American performers called “What the Well-Dressed Man in Harlem Will Wear.” As in the opening number “This Is the Army, Mister Jones,” Berlin presents the conversion from civilian to soldier as a matter of dressing up, as the Harlem “dude” sheds his “Lenox Avenue clothes” for a uniform marked by a “suntan shade of cream / Or an olive-drab color scheme.” A reference to Berlin’s earlier song “Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails” notes what the civilian has given up. The last line evokes an image of boxing legend Joe Louis as “Brown Bomber Joe,” and the film (but not the stage version) matches it with the appearance of Louis himself. The number begins with a contemporary musical signifier of Harlem nightlife: a phrase of scat followed by a swing-style melody and band arrangement. Finally, like a minstrel show, This Is the Army combined nostalgia and contemporaneity. Minstrel nostalgia, Robert Toll has noted, points to minstrelsy’s own past, and so it is that Berlin adopts his World War I hit, “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” for use in the new war. This, perhaps Berlin’s single most beloved wartime song, has never been viewed in the context of minstrel conventions, yet given so many other minstrel elements in the show, it now seems impossible not to see it as a kind of minstrel number. In it, the show’s creator, dressed in a uniform from the first war, lends his raspy, impish voice to a common army gripe of the ordinary soldier. The ensuing finale jolts the audience back into the present, suggesting that the first war’s business has not yet been completed. In a number called “This Time,” the uniformed minstrels of Scene I have now become full-fledged combat soldiers with rifles. For the film, Berlin added a verse featuring the lines “dressed up to win,” which further reinforces the sartorial keynote. My interpretation here has emphasized ways in which This Is the Army derives its structure and themes from minstrelsy, partly because my research on Berlin’s shows keeps turning up evidence of how he drew energy and inspiration from this distinctively American entertainment form throughout his career. It amplifies cultural histories that explore the ways in which urban immigrants flourished in the early decades of the twentieth-century by adapting and transforming minstrel elements, especially what has become the historiographically privileged generation of New York-based, Russian-Jewish immigrant entertainers such as Berlin, George Gershwin, Al Jolson, and Eddie Cantor. And it connects with historian Andrew Heinze’s study of turn-of-the-century American Jewish immigrant culture, Adapting to Abundance, which emphasizes the ways in which that generation of immigrant Jews, in particular, saw clothing not just as a way to win social respectability, but “as an important symbol of cultural transformation.” 13 Such observations bring us dangerously close to dredging up old anti-Semitic stereotypes linking Jews and clothes, stereotypes in which Berlin himself trafficked in his early career, as in his song about a Jewish tailor who sets up shop in an Irish neighborhood: “Abie Sings an Irish Song” (1913). When analysis approaches ethnic and racial generalization, historian David Hollinger has noted, the scholar risks entering what he has termed the “booster-bigot trap,” a quandary marked by two uncritical tendencies on opposite ends of an interpretive spectrum.14 The way out, according to Hollinger, lies in historical particularity, a focus on specific times, places, communities, and circumstances. Whether or not Berlin’s emphasis on sartorial transformation in so many songs, especially in This Is the Army, echoes the particular world-view of a Russian-Jewish American, I can no longer ignore the ways in which Berlin’s linkage of minstrelsy and the military in This Is the Army reflect a sensibility forged in the broader crucible of turn-of-the-century immigration, extending the framework in which Charles Hamm brilliantly analyzed Berlin’s early songs.15 Meanwhile, considerin g the fraught nature of the issues, I am happy to report that something Berlin himself wrote makes the point more clearly than I could. In 1956, Berlin wrote the opening scene of a show he called This Is America, which was only recently published in a book of his lyrics. 16 In the production, several “immigrant couples” strip off their old-world clothes and put on “American dress of the period” while surrounded by what Berlin’s scenario describes as “members of the minstrels as in ‘This Is the Army, Mister Jones.’” By modeling the ritualistic opening scene of This Is America on the opening of This Is the Army, Berlin makes explicit something that had been latent in his work for at least four decades since he created Yip, Yip Yaphank: the conflation of three seemingly unrelated phenomena—American immigrant assimilation, military induction, and minstrelsy. All three, for Berlin, require wearing clothes and playing roles that allow the immigrant, the citizen, and the performer to become assimilated into a larger community. Minstrelsy, in this view, may be seen as the medium for Berlin’s theater of war and peace, a theatrical style through which the immigrant becomes a citizen and the civilian becomes a soldier, and thus, for better or worse, through which both become more thoroughly American. —University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Notes This article is adapted
from a paper presented at the “Cultural Impacts of World War II”
symposium sponsored by the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American
History at Harvard University in March 2007. It is also an excerpt from
Magee’s forthcoming book on Irving Berlin and the theater, to be
published by Yale University Press in its Broadway Masters series. 1 Paul Fussell, Understanding and Behavior
in the Second World War (N.Y.: Oxford, 1988). 2 Alan Anderson, The Songwriter Goes to
War: The Story of Irving Berlin’s World War II All-Army
Production of This Is the Army (Pompton Plains, NJ: Limelight, 2004). 3 Fussell, 143. 4 N.a., “The Theatre and the Armed
Forces” in Theater Arts (March 1943): 150. 5 For reflections on World War II as a
“good war,” see, for example, Studs Terkel,“The Good
War”: An Oral History of World War II (New York: Pantheon, 1985),
and Michael C. C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1994), especially chapter 1 (“Mythmaking and the
War”). 6 See, for example, Patrick Burke,
“Oasis of Swing: The Onyx Club, Jazz, and White Masculinity in the
Early 1930s,” American Music 24, no. 3 (Fall 2006):
320-46, and Todd Decker, “Where Jazz Meets the Musical: Fred
Astaire’s Solo Dances with African-American Musicians
(1937–1968),” paper presented at the annual meeting of the
Society for American Music, Pittsburgh, PA, March 2007. 7 Eric Lott, Love
and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (N.Y.:
Oxford, 1995). 8 Constance Rourke, American Humor:
A Study of the National Character (1931).
I’m indebted to Larry Hamberlin for his discussion of Rourke in
his forthcoming book, tentatively titled That Operatic Rag (N.Y.:
Oxford). 9 The British script of the show (in a
blue folder dated 1942 in the Irving Berlin Collection, Library of Congress,
Box 204, Folder 2) includes the scene between Bernie and Manson, with some
dialogue that the film preserves and other dialogue that was not. 10 In the British script, Bernie simply states
the last line and exits. The script
gives no indication that the guard leads him off. 11 Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The
Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America (N.Y.: Oxford, 1974), 139, 144. 12 Letter from Berlin to Gus Van, of Van and
Schenk, quoted in Irving Berlin, The Complete Lyrics of Irving
Berlin, ed. by Robert Kimball and Linda Emmet (N.Y.: Knopf, 2001), 184. 13 Andrew R. Heinze, Adapting
to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumptiion, and the Search for
American Identity (N.Y.: Columbia, 1990), chap. 6, “The Clothing of
an American,” esp. 90 (quoted passage) and 103. 14 David A. Hollinger, Science, Jews, and
Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual
History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton, 1996), chap. 1, especially pp.
12-14. 15 Charles Hamm, Irving Berlin: Songs from
the Melting Pot: The Formative Years, 1907-1914 (N.Y.: Oxford, 1997). 16 Berlin, Complete
Lyrics, 464. ISAM home Who we
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