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  • The Lost and Found PlaywrightDonald Ogden Stewart and the Theatre of Socialist Commitment
  • Michael Dennis (bio)

Mention Hollywood political activism in the New Deal period and two images usually come to mind: cocktail-quaffing anti-fascists and humorless Stalinist stooges, often combined in the same person. This caricature has, at times, had to share the historical limelight with the persecuted artist valiantly defying the witch-hunting philistines of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the name of First Amendment principles. Historians such as Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, Jennifer Langdon, and Gerald Horne have challenged these stereotypes and presented a considerably more complex interpretation of Hollywood political activism.1

Still, the images persist. In part, this is because they are rooted in a scintilla of truth, however distorted. In addition, they reflect the persistent anticommunist framework through which historians continue to filter this period. While it is essential to acknowledge that the party that championed industrial unionism was egregiously undemocratic and expressed support for a regime that proved to be brutally repressive, it is also important to remind ourselves of the complexities of communist commitment. As historian James Barrett explains, “Stalin might have declared the most important aim to be defense of the Socialist Motherland, but activists in and outside the CP took it to be the development of mass industrial unions and a labor-based social democratic politics and culture.”2 As historian Michael Denning has pointed out, the question of “belonging” continues to dominate the analysis of what Communist Party, obscuring what members and their allies actually did, particularly in the years of the Popular Front.3 [End Page 89]

Focusing on the experience and work of screenwriter and playwright Donald Ogden Stewart, this essay posits an interpretation that challenges the image of Stalinist stooges pirouetting to the tune of the Moscow party line. It argues that Stewart belonged to a segment of Hollywood talent and a stratum of the American middle class that experienced an authentic transformation of political consciousness in the 1930s, one that awakened them to the realities of class inequality and convinced them of the plausibility of socialism. Considering that he has frequently been portrayed as the embodiment of the caviar communists who allegedly populated the film community, Stewart is a particularly salient case study. In fact, he is exhibit A for those historians who consider the discovery of a social conscience by Hollywood types either mildly amusing or abjectly ridiculous.4 Even Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, who present a sympathetic portrait of Stewart’s conversion to the Left, suggest that his desire to bring workers into the “amusement park” of American abundance reflected an immature understanding of socialism and class conflict.5

Stewart may not have excelled in Marxian theory, but he espoused a vision of socialism that was both sincere and attuned to American political culture. Propelled by a confrontation with his own indeterminate class status,6 Stewart developed an acute social consciousness that transformed him into an activist intellectual. Moreover, at a time when Hollywood was turning its energies to the production of wartime propaganda, he struggled to write screen and stage plays that promoted the anti-fascist cause and turned a critical eye on American society. The summit of his efforts to blend political engagement and art was Emily Brady, a play on which Orson Welles held an option but which never saw the light of day. By examining this forgotten work, we deepen our understanding of a period in theatre history in which the commitment to working-class democracy, anti-fascism, and socialist feminism took primacy over personal introspection. Considering its anti-capitalist tone, Emily Brady further complicates the assumptions that communists uniformly abandoned social criticism for wartime unity. To understand the origins of Stewart’s forgotten socialist play, however, we need to examine the curious mix of artistic and political factors that generated his political awakening.

The Making of a Socialist

The son of an accomplished lawyer in Columbus, Ohio, a graduate of Exeter and Yale, and a member of Yale’s exclusive Skull and Bones society, Stewart was intimately familiar with the world of the American elite. It was a world that [End Page...

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