Reconciliation, Resolution, and the Political Role of Oklahoma! in American Consciousness

Oklahoma! (1943), this essay argues, helped resolve the conflict between interventionists and isolationists prior to and during World War II as well as the friction between New Dealer and conservative. In his libretto, Oscar Hammerstein, a Jewish supporter of FDR, helps combat America's own wartime anti-Semitism by redefining populism as all-inclusive and by melding nostalgia for a bygone America with assimilationist, interventionist strategies. The Jew, represented by the peddler Ali Hakim, is a liminal figure, who hovers between the acceptable and the non-acceptable, and who works within the walls of the community. Jud, the metaphorical, racialized Other, including both the African American and Native American, works outside those walls, much like the myopic isolationist or closet fascist. Through topsy-turvydom, Oklahoma! demonstrates that fragmentation, in the guise of insularity, enervates the grassroots American values that wartime conservatives believed were menaced by the New Deal.