Arthur Miller's America: Theater and Culture in a Time of Change

Arthur Miller and the Drama of American Liberalism

Mike Sell Arthur Miller and the Drama of American Liberalism Though it is generally acknowledged that Arthur Miller is a Liberal, that his writings consistently reflect Liberal concerns, and that his plays find their dramatic sources in the Liberal tradition of modern drama initiated by Ibsen, little has been said about exactly what kind of Liberal Miller is.1 He’s a very stubborn and active one, certainly, as his refusal to name names when called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956, his work with PEN after being elected president in 1965, his vocal opposition to the American military presence inVietnam, his public support of Soviet dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s,and his opposition to censorship in all forms and at all times demonstrate.That said,we need to draw distinctions within the liberal political tradition, a tradition that is as varied ,rich,and contradictory as any long-lived vital tradition will tend to be. Liberalism is a complex, contested, and situated set of political and social beliefs.The complexity and flexibility of this belief system were the traits that allowed it to survive and ultimately win its running battles with feudalism, anarchism, fascism, socialism, and communism. For example, the term Liberal (the general category here indicated by capitals) can be applied to both “conservatives” and “liberals” (subcategory indicated by the lower case) in the United States.The majority of American conservatives and liberals would appropriately characterize themselves as the heirs to a tradition of political thought born from the bourgeois revolutions of the late eighteenth century, a tradition that emphasizes the rights of the individual against state and society, an egalitarian vision of the human species,and a meliorist philosophy of history.In other words,both American conservatives and American liberals are “Liberal” despite their often intense disagreements about the status of specific individual rights, the role of the state and/or social mores in expanding or hedging those rights, the limits of egalitarianism, and the mechanisms that promote and conserve the achievements of historical progress.2 23 Struggles over the meaning and destiny of Liberalism were particularly acute during the Cold War (1945–91), no more so than in the first two decades of the conflict, when Miller established himself as both a significant playwright and as a public intellectual. Needless to say, as a Liberal playwright and activist for many decades, Miller has repeatedly found himself on treacherous, shifting terrain—terrain that has forced him periodically to reassess and reshape his role in the American Liberal society of which he is a committed and undaunted citizen.“This desire to move on,” he writes,“to metamorphose—or perhaps it is a talent for being contemporary—was given me as life’s inevitable and rightful condition .”3 It’s difficult to find examples of Liberal schools of thought in which metamorphosis has been viewed as not simply something to be avoided or overcome, but to be claimed as the very principle of political thought and action. In this respect, Miller’s comments mark him as an original Liberal thinker, a decidedly dramatic Liberal thinker.Thus, I call Miller a “Liberal playwright,” using the capital, to indicate that, though he has generally refused to toe the line of any specific variant of Liberalism, he has continually sought not simply the rights due to the citizen but also the aesthetic and experiential foundations of a truly vibrant , dramatic Liberalism, a Liberalism that would goad and prod society to embrace fully and finally individual freedom, universal empowerment , and progress. What I wish to explore in this essay is the critical relationship to American Liberalism that Miller maintains.Specifically,I wish to explore how Miller’s dramatic texts attempt formally—dramatically—to solve the problems faced by American Liberalism during the Cold War. Throughout this period, the basic principles of Liberalism—individualism , universalism, progressivism—underwent a profound depressurization , threatening to become simply irrelevant to political struggle. Stalinism and the reduced militancy of the American working class seemed to put the lie to the well-worn myth of progress, for example, since progress cannot occur without an agent of progress; moreover, the equally well-worn myth of technological progress proved mated to annihilation , whether that of the Nazi camps, of nuclear missiles, or of the poisoning of the environment.The Liberal individual was no less threatened in an era of mass marketing, mass media, and mass man. Lastly, the “end of ideology” pronounced...