Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940-1960 (review)

Since the house of Atreus, the family has been central to Western drama; and the canonical American playwrights—O'Neill, Williams and Miller—wrote their greatest works about their own families, artistically disguised and transfigured. But in the 1940s and 1950s, some distinctive political and cultural pressure points were applied to make the saga of the American family reflective of the needs of a nation at war—first against the Axis, then against the Communists. The result, as Judith E. Smith argues in this meaty and very well-researched book, was a more varied and inclusive definition of citizenship, which presaged the even more expansive recognition that would be granted—beginning in the 1960s—to Blacks, white ethnics, women and homosexuals.

Smith's previous volume traced immigrant Jewish and Italian families in Providence, Rhode Island from 1900 until 1940. Visions of Belonging picks up where its predecessor left off, and switches to cultural history without forfeiting an attentiveness to the larger context within which radio dramas, novels, movies, plays and television programs addressed their audiences. Thus the imperatives of national unity during World War II ensured that mass culture would pay its respects to immigrants and their native-born progeny—even if they were ensconced in the working class (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I Remember Mama), and even if they were Black (Strange Fruit, Deep are the Roots).

Jews presented a special problem, however. They were not a "race"—a term (if not necessarily a category) that Nazism had thoroughly discredited. They were white. Their religious faith had become so attenuated that no obvious barrier seemed to impede full absorption into American life. What blocked that process could only be irrational prejudice; and therefore Smith has noticed how interchangeable the Jewish minority seemed to be with others. In Arthur Miller's novel Focus (1945), a gentile puts on eyeglasses, and is taken for a Jew. In Laura Z. Hobson's novel Gentleman's Agreement (1947), a gentile journalist pretends to be a Jew, and the stunt succeeds, as it also does in the Oscar-winning film adaptation, released that same year, as was RKO's Crossfire, based on a novel in which the victim is a homosexual. Without breaking stride, Crossfire makes him a Jew. No wonder then that when Garson Kanin, the director of Broadway's The Diary of Anne Frank (1955), chose to confront the Holocaust, he insisted: "The fact that in this play the symbols of persecution and oppression are Jews is incidental." If audiences are to see Anne Frank as wise beyond her years, Kanin added, she must be "pointing out that through the ages, people in minorities have been oppressed" (quote on 254). Even Paddy Chayefsky, whose 1950s television dramas were so emphatic about the ethnicity of the white urban proletariat, made his Jews, Irish and Italians interchangeable—an approach that Smith labels "trading places."

Chayefsky became a writer by catching Death of a Salesman (1949) a week after it opened on Broadway; he wept, and was inspired. So powerful a reaction illustrates why Miller is integral to Visions of Belonging; he is the only writer discussed in the book who influenced both decades. Though about antisemitism, Focus has little to say about Jews, and thus exemplified the universalist ethos of the left, which challenged racial and religious discrimination and wanted to de-legitimate difference. All My Sons (1947) exposed the corruption to be discovered even in the heartland, where too narrow an allegiance to the family subverted the ethos of social solidarity. Smith adds little to the debate about ethnicity that continues to swirl around Death of a Salesman, but she does see its critique of individualist striving as a progressive perspective from which Miller felt compelled to detach himself as anti-Communist fevers swept through the 1950s. Thus his masterpiece came increasingly to be interpreted as a tragedy of the common man, as a short-circuiting...