"In a Conventional Dither": Rodgers and Hammerstein's Camouflaged Critique of Race Relations at Mid-Century
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Standard histories of the African-American experience in America like John Hope Franklin's or Manning Marable's agree that in most respects the years 1949-51 fell in the middle of a fallow period. The wave of political and social betterment for American blacks achieved during the New Deal and World War Two had crested, culminating with the 1947 admission of Jackie Robinson to the white major leagues and Harry Truman's 1948 order integrating the Armed Forces. After that, with few exceptions, the movement had reached a "one step back" moment.
The Red Scare was largely to blame. Segregationists could with remarkable success tag all integrationist aspirations as Communistic, via the syllogism that international Communism sought to destabilize the U.S., integration would differ from and hence be destabilizing to the existing state of affairs in much of the country, and hence integration was Communistic.
Moreover, American Communists, who had been, by all accounts, the most principled and consistent foes of Jim Crow laws and segregation in the workplace, were in full flight, being hunted into what would prove a permanent exile from the U.S. labor movement, academia, government, and entertainment. Incidental to that purge was fratricidal infighting on the American left between Communists and anti-Communists which took a particularly heavy and distracting toll on the NAACP and Congress of Racial Equality.
True, Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall were continuing their careful case-by-case assault on the legal citadel of Jim Crow, an assault that would reach its apex in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education, and Brown would change everything. But while some of the five cases consolidated in Brown had already been filed by 1951, it is significant that in four of them segregation was upheld. Fundamentally, Jim Crow laws and what might be called the Jim Crow state of mind, a sense that white privilege was a norm which could never fundamentally be overturned, continued to hold sway in 1949-51.
The anti-Communist hysteria also had well-known implications in the world of entertainment. Though the infamous Hollywood "blacklist" turned out not to affect Broadway employment much, there was so much travel back and forth between the venues that the habits of circumspection the Red Scare brought to Hollywood could hardly fail to affect Broadway productions. And since, as noted, support for African-American civil rights was viewed as a sign of Communist sympathies, it would not in turn be easy to espouse those civil rights on Broadway.
In short, during the three-year stretch in which Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's South Pacific (1949) and The King and I (1951) reached the Broadway stage, theatrical expressions of support for the equality of black and white were a dicey proposition, courting charges of [End Page 420] Communist sympathies. And yet in these two musicals, lyricist and librettist Hammerstein found a way to voice that support. However, in keeping with the times as well as his temperament, he did so by indirection, and also with what might be called camouflage: presenting the "destabilizing" message about race relations in a matrix that included remarkably conventional and reassuring, even retrograde, messages concerning the relations of the sexes and colonialism. The conservative American Weltanschauung was being challenged, but only a little. Both the indirection and the camouflage were bound up with the showmanship and the temperaments of Hammerstein and his collaborator Richard Rodgers.
These two shows came at the fulcrum of R&H's career. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II created eleven musicals over the years 1941-1959. Five of them (Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music) were indisputably great: game-changers as to the whole genre of musical theater, long-running, sources of popular hits and standards, and destined to be revived continually through the changing tastes and mores of the succeeding years.
As chronicled by Jim Lovensheimer, author of the phenomenally well-researched and insightful study South Pacific: Paradise Rewritten (2010), Hammerstein was an inveterate integrationist. He had been part of...
