“Persuasive Americanism”?: The Reactionary Promotion and Reception of Warner Bros.’ The Music Man (1962)

Writing about The Music Man in a 1962 letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the Soviet émigré film composer Dimitri Tiomkin endorsed US popular music and motion pictures as two of the country’s greatest “assets” for fostering “international good will,” “making friends and influencing foreigners” during the Cold War.¹ He saw a potent combination of those assets in The Music Man, which Warner Bros. had recently—and faithfully—adapted from Meredith Willson’s popular stage musical.² Reviewers had praised the distinctively nationalistic qualities of Willson’s book and score since The Music Man’s Broadway debut on December 19, 1957. They admired its overt displays of patriotism, its nostalgic evocation of life in small-town Iowa before World War I, and its use of vernacular US musical idioms such as band marches, barbershop quartet numbers, and ragtime dances. According to Tiomkin, “No propaganda could approach the persuasive Americanism of such a picture as The Music Man.” Tiomkin’s claim invoked familiar assertions about the musical’s nationalist qualities while suggesting heady new opportunities made possible by the medium of film: no longer constrained by the situational and spatial limits of live theater, the musical’s idealized vision of life in the USA could be easily reproduced and distributed to audiences around the globe.

Published and archival sources reveal that Tiomkin was not the only contemporary to frame the film adaptation of The Music Man as a vehicle for political persuasion, nor was its persuasive value limited to international relations. Numerous movie critics, newspaper editors, and syndicated columnists agreed that the film musical could and should be used for cultural diplomacy. Even the United States Information Agency (USIA), the government unit charged with “promot[ing] a better understanding of the United States in other countries,” indirectly endorsed The Music Man.³ The youthful energy and small-town setting of the film’s press premiere-cum-band festival accorded with the USIA’s ideological objectives, so agency officials featured the event in their overseas Voice of America broadcasts.⁴ Tiomkin’s interest in “making friends and influencing foreigners” through peaceful channels was a timely concern in the summer of 1962. The United States and the USSR had been vying for the political allegiance of so-called Third World nations since decolonization accelerated in the mid-1950s, and President John F. Kennedy’s attempt to forcefully intervene in the Cuban government had failed embarrassingly in the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. In October 1962—just six weeks after the publication of Tiomkin’s optimistic letter—escalating US-Soviet tensions led to the thirteen-day Cuban Missile Crisis and the brink of a nuclear war.

Improving the United States’ national image was, for some reactionaries, a moral as well as a political imperative. In newspaper and magazine articles, cultural conservatives expressed their hopes that the new musical film would inspire a return to respectability, decreased violence and sexuality in motion pictures, and more elevated musical taste throughout the United States.⁵ Similar rhetoric accompanied the musical’s stage version in 1957. As Carol Oja has observed, The Music Man’s nostalgic depiction of a seemingly simpler and more innocent era seemed to be an “antidote” to the gritty darkness of its Broadway contemporary, West Side Story, as well as to an accelerating rise in a rebellious youth culture, rock ’n’ roll, and the civil rights movement.⁶ When the musical’s film adaptation premiered five years later, the United States had grown even further removed from the lifestyle and culture of 1912. In particular, the relaxation of Hollywood’s restrictive Production Code in the late 1950s and early 1960s led to a surge in the production of more graphically sexual and violent films, as well as films that addressed social problems in the United States. Warner Bros.’ new release offered, at least for some, a wholesome, family-friendly alternative to pictures such as Lolita and Sweet Bird of Youth in 1962; Splendor in the Grass, The Children’s Hour, A Raisin in the Sun, and West...