American History in Drama: The Commemorative Tradition and Some Recent Revisions

American History in Drama: The Commemorative Tradition and Some Recent Revisions THOMAS M. GRANT • "The Past is never dead; it's not even past." - William Faulkner AMERICANS HAVE always thought of histQry as something to make rather than recall, and therefore have been extraordinarily busy doing the first often at the expense of the second. However one defines the past, Americans are sure to have fled from it, in pursuit of dreams of otherworldly fulfilment or worldly success, or just out of some need to get on, feeling perhaps pushed like Huck Finn, or maybe for no reason at all, just an itch to light out for the territory ahead. When the past is recalled, rosy recollections of earlier glories usually spring into view as we collectively speed toward the future through the present - traces of a heritage seen like the old trees uprooted to make way for a gas station in Kunitz's "The War Against the Trees," "caught/In the rearview mirrors of the passing cars." "History was lived," says the politically astute Envoy in Genet's The Balcony, "so that a glorious page might be written and then read. It's reading that counts." Nowadays, though, it's viewing that counts. Historically, the theater has been a prime media for promoting glorified notions about the national past - a fact more significant than nearly two centuries of dull historical plays. Roughly since Burk's Bunker Hill, or the Death of General Warren (1797), theatergoers have witnessed a parade of crude, formulaic and occasionally amusing specta327 328 THOMAS M. GRANT des which have primarily served, whatever their particular subject, to advance the cause of America's special destiny, usually in sentimental uplifting tones calculated to flatter audiences who are the beneficiaries of that destiny. "National plays should be encouraged," said Mordecai Noah, typically, in the "preface" to She Would Be a Soldier, or The Plains of Chippewa (1819): "They ,have done everything for the British nation, and can do much for us; they keep alive the recollection of important events, by representing them in a manner at once natural and alluring." Many, especially in later decades, ,called out for a Shakespeare to sing in high praise of a rich new land. What we received were many George Peeles - no Henry Vbut many Famous Victories. Of course, earnest patriotic sentiments crudely composed were widely acknowledged and much lamented, notably by Poe who felt that dramatic art generally had remained "stationary while all of its sisters have been making rapid progress."1 One would think, therefore, that when the backward sister reputedly grew up into a presentable young lady with the emergence of O'Neill, historical subjects would receive the serious scrutiny beginning to be given to contemporary issues. Instead, the American past remained as the stuff of misty recollection, Great Moments from the national family album - "history" ready to serve the purposes of the moment. The sentimental treatment of the past survives most clearly in heroic dramas about national figures triumphing neatly and instructively over adversity, to name a few: Anderson's Valley Forge (1934), Kingsley's The Patriots (1943), Schary's Sunrise at Campobello (1958) and, of course, the several plays about Lincoln. Predictably, history plays of this kind, in which history seems a virtual future of high hopes fulfilled promised to an approving public, flourish when it is thought that faith in the Republic needs shoring up. "I produced the Holmes play," said Emmet Lavery of The Magnificent Yankee (1946), "as a sort of gesture of faith, and a symbol of loyalties and kindnesses which are, momentarily at a great discount in the world. It is a permanent and abiding enrichment to many people who see it. It is, I feel, like a good friendship, well worth the investment of time, money and labor that has gone into it."2 All this is but to say that the drama of American history from its beginnings to the present, with remarkable lack of exception, forms collectively an essentially commemorative tradition. This tradition survives and flourishes in the new popular media of film and especially television, which supplies, particularly during this Bicentennial year, Significant Episodes in American History. Subjects should...