Late Capitalism and the United States in The Apple Cart

Late Capitalism and the United States in The Apple Cart

In his biography of Bernard Shaw, Michael Holroyd makes a noteworthy claim about Shaw's relationship with the United States. Assessing a disjointed, antagonistic speech Shaw made to the Academy of Political Science in New York in 1933, Holroyd claims that Shaw's "ringing warfare against the United States sounds like an echo from within his disunited self . . . mak[ing] his objection heard to the feted progress of G.B.S. around the world. Was not the spell of money on G.B.S. an American spell; his trick of overstatement 'an American trick; his gift for monologue, an American gift,' as Blanche Patch was to suggest?" ¹ Shaw's public bashing of the United States reached its sardonic height in a newsreel he recorded in 1931. In "A Little Talk on America," Shaw calls Americans "dear old boobs" and America "a most awful country," even as he claims immense popularity with American readers. ² He appears, as Holroyd notes, "at his most child-devilish encircled by immense lights like furnaces welcoming Americans into hell." ³ That Shaw mocks from a position he imagines he shares with his audience lends support to the claim that the author suffered internal divisions. It also reminds us of Shaw's savvy about the media environment in which he operated.

Shaw's relationship to the film industry further illustrates this position. In 1933 he visited Hollywood and pronounced it "the most immoral place in the world." ⁴ At the same time, he actively sought ways to make money through the industry and to increase his fame. Shaw even stayed with William Randolph Hearst, who, though primarily a newspaper owner, represented many of the excesses of the new media Shaw enjoyed mocking. His theatrics were clearly intended to goad his American audience, but in each case they were performed on platforms associated with the United States—the well-paid American lecture circuit, the press, and the budding film industry. During these public appearances Shaw inhabited a paradoxical critical posture: on the one hand, he denounced his hosts and audience while, on the other, he took full advantage of the resources they offered. Hollywood, and America more generally, provided an appropriate venue for performances of the irascible "G.B.S.," the critic-author.

In Shaw's plays, we also find figures who appropriate, or are appropriated by, commercial or ideological interests. Turn-of-the-century works such as John Bull's Other Island and Major Barbara feature characters who act as the mouthpieces of capital or a capitalist social vision. The "discussion" articulated in these discussion plays involves weighing the negative impact of capitalist production against its real benefits. In later work, however, these figures lack the redeeming qualities of their predecessors—capitalist and, as I will argue, late capitalist forces have gained hegemony, and attention shifts to how to promote ideals such as conscience, virtue, reason, and humanitarian social policy. Instead of considering the costs and benefits of capital development, Shaw focuses on the internal disunities and the necessary compromises of critics of economic and political modernization.

This essay examines the ways in which The Apple Cart (1929) explores both the factors necessitating Shaw's disunited critical posture and the limited political potential of that stance. The political and economic conundrums that characterized Shaw's relationship to America are revealed in the key problems at work in The Apple Cart: mass politics, the growth of late capitalism, and America's succession of Britain as a dominant imperial power. While these destructive forces have achieved hegemony, Shaw's hero—the British king, Magnus—exposes their influence and maintains a vestige of authority as an obstructionist to the further appropriation of British power for private and American gain. By offering resistance in the form of critique, Magnus attains some of the aims of Shaw's lectures and other public...