is in no position to offer him any aid or comfort. She is too much a product of the political machine to be drawn in to his idealistic plan to change the way the federal govern ment is run. The effect of her actions on the plot is practically nonexistent, but what she does not do speaks volumes about the hypnotic control of political power. One gets the impression that the sort of person who would allow this relationship with McClean to wither on the vine before it had a chance to bloom into a full-fledged romance would be content to live a life in emotional isolation, true to no one except her father.

In most respects, McClean’s relationship with Bus, the wisecracking older secretary, is more interesting than the one he shares with Marjorie. The romance between McClean and Marjorie is described and referred to but never really acted upon, while the relationship between Bus and McClean grows right before audience’s eyes. She is a better foil for him: cynical when he is overly idealistic, but then surprisingly idealistic just as he is losing faith in his crusade. By contrast, Marjorie is written as a party insider, but she is not exactly corrupt enough to serve as a lesson in the seductive nature of power. Bus is used to bring out more aspects of Alan McClean, while Marjorie is used to complicate his motives.

Congressman Simeon Gray could also be a more significant figure in McClean’s attempt to right the wrongs of congressional appropriations, but making him a stronger presence in Both Your Houses would dilute Anderson’s message about the unbelievable horror of the political system. Gray functions in the final version of the play as a touchstone, as the one person who is seen the same way by people on both sides of the debate. He is considered by all of the characters, though not necessarily by the author, to be an honest man who has gotten himself into a vulnerable position by trusting his co-workers and by working so hard that he fails to keep track of his own relationship to the bill he is working on. No one in the play— not McClean or even the jaded old politico Sol Fitzmaurice—doubts Gray’s claim that the provision in the bill for construction of a penitentiary in his district appeared there before he even noticed it. Also, there is no debate about whether this penitentiary is needed for the common good, unlike measures requested by the other congressmen, which clearly have no purpose but to siphon cash out of the federal coffers.

Still, audiences cannot accept Gray’s innocence as blindly as his friends and acquaintances do. It is unlikely that an appropriation for a large construction project in his district would have appeared in the bill without his notice, especially when it seems to be the answer to his personal financial dilemma. An argument could be made that Col. Sprague, the steel tycoon who dug up the information about Gray’s failing bank, could have manipulated the situation by having some other congressperson plant the penitentiary in the bill, tempting Gray subtly to cross the line into corruption. There is, after all, a hint that Sprague arranged for the crusading young McClean to find out about the penitentiary, and that the ‘‘mix-up’’ at the detection agency was no mix-up after all. Anderson arranges this situation so that the truth could be either that Gray was cunning or that he was duped; the author leaves the matter open to interpretation.

If McClean were more closely involved with Gray or with his daughter, there would be less room for interpretation; Gray would have to be rendered more clearly, and the answer to whether he is as innocent as he claims to be would have to come into sharper definition. Such clarity would actually defeat one of the play’s main points, that of the uncertainty of trust. It is crucial to the play, and to the view of American politics Anderson presents through it, that McClean not find any strong, dependable ally in Washington. Morality is so vague in Congress that McClean asks for help in his crusade from Sol, who is painted as the most unabashedly corrupt politician of them all. Both Your Houses would be less confusing if Simeon Gray were clearly virtuous or corrupt, but it would not be as true to the complexity that Anderson does succeed in capturing.

One can easily see why Anderson would have originally conceived Both Your Houses as a story of initiation or loss of innocence; an idealistic young man finding out that the woman he loves and the man he admires are as compromised as the worst of the political hacks he is struggling against is an eternal theme. It is often repeated throughout literature because it works, holding audience’s interest while presenting the opposing sides of a conflict. It takes a skillful writer to know that he does not have to frame the issue so clearly, that the situation he presents does not have to boil down to an eternal theme in order for audiences to follow it. Another story might feature McClean’s relationships with Marjorie and Simeon Gray, but for this one, revealing less gives the situation more mystery, and makes the young congressman’s journey into the dark corridors of the government that much more frightening.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on Both Your Houses, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

Maxwell Anderson’s play Both Your Houses, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1933, is a hard-biting indictment of political corruption in the houses of congress. Leavening indignation with acerbic humor, it reveals the disillusionment of a high-minded but politically naïve freshman congressman who arrives in Washington determined to clean things up. Although written more than seventy years ago, the play retains a certain currency; graft and pork barrel spending are as present today as they were then, and the reformist impulse seems to be renewed during each election cycle.

Prior to beginning his long career as a playwright, Anderson worked as a teacher and journalist. He was no doubt well acquainted, through his journalism, with the culture of corruption in our nation’s capital. It is easy to imagine him identifying with the idealistic protagonist of his play and sharing his dismay at what appears to be an intractable problem. The play itself is an exercise in muckraking, exposing the back room dealings and nestfeathering of a congressional committee. The intent is, no doubt, to inspire indignation and a call for reforms. In this it resembles a number of other plays, written during the 1930s, that forwarded strong social messages. There was a marked leftward tilt among a number of the leading playwrights as well as a move towards experimentation in theatrical form. The results varied from kitchen sink social realism to Wellsian spectacle. The impulse behind many of these productions was to radically transform society, sometimes through outright instruction, more often through appeal to the emotions. Anderson, although a liberal, was neither didactic nor formally inventive in his writing. In fact, Both Your Houses is structured along traditional lines, closely observing action, time, and place.

The journalist-turned-playwright took a scientific approach to his plays. After an initial string of dramatic failures, Anderson revisited the classics and analyzed popular contemporary plays to see what made them tick. He also returned to Aristotle’s Poetics and developed a theory of dramatic principles that, not surprisingly, closely resembled Aristotle’s. Anderson even found a way to incorporate Aristotle’s notion of the ‘‘recognition scene.’’ This is a scene wherein a character’s disguise or assumed identity is uncovered and the true identity is revealed. The Greeks and Elizabethans often used this device of discovery, but the demands of realism made it increasingly difficult for modern audiences to accept. Anderson solved this dilemma by turning it into self-recognition; the hero discovers something about himself or his place in the world around him of which he was previously unaware. This is the moment in which the veil is lifted and the truth is revealed. In his book of essays, Off Broadway, Anderson wrote:

When I had once begun to make discoveries of this sort they came thick and fast. And they applied not, as is natural to suppose, to extraordinary plays only—to Shakespeare and Jonson and the Greeks—but to all plays, and to those in our modern repertory as much as any others.

While Anderson did not codify his views until after he had written Both Your Houses, it hews, quite closely, to the basic contours of tragedy (or drama), as first mapped by Aristotle and modified by Anderson. But one can also detect the influence of his previous profession; the dialogue has a nononsense, reportorial sound that is, nonetheless, stylized. More notable is the voice of the writer of liberal editorials, apparent in the character of the protagonist Alan McClean. There is, in fact, a tension between Anderson the editorial writer and Anderson the careful playwright, which makes this work of special interest.

The play is divided into three acts and takes place over the course of three days. Set in the House Office Building, Washington, D.C., it employs two locations: the office of the chairman of the appropriations committee and the committee room itself. The drama, or conflict, is centered on the contest over a spending bill, with the two opposing sides struggling to line up their votes. This compression both helps to unify the play and creates a dramatic tension: there is a deadline, the clock is, in effect, ticking, the gavel ready to fall.

The hero, or protagonist, Alan McClean is an ideal type, representative of decent middle-class American values, hostile to superfluous spending. Newly elected to congress, he is determined to root out wasteful spending. This is a place where the congressmen feather their nests—the world of the backroom deal. It is a place where the congressmen do not pay their taxes. Not a revolutionary but a reformer, McClean has impluses the same as those that will inspire the taxpayer revolts of the 1970s and ’80s. He is fed up with the corruption he sees among the political classes and is determined to clean things up (hence his name).

To drive home the point of McClean’s lilywhite character, Anderson has him investigate his own election campaign for improprieties. McClean refuses to support a bill that contains provisions beneficial to his own constituents on the grounds that the bill is loaded with pork. He has obviously set high standards for himself; that he is willing to go against his own political interests, on principle, shows that he is serious about his efforts. His intransigence sets in motion the events that ultimately lead to his defeat. What is shown in McClean, in other words, is someone very close to a tragic hero.

McClean finds as his antagonist a character that one would assume to be a natural ally; the chairman of the appropriations committee, Simeon Gray, is known to be personally honest. The chairman occupies a gray area between idealism and realism; accepting compromise of one’s ideals as a necessary condition of doing business. One might imagine that this is terrain that even the most highminded politician must travel. It is made explicit in the play that compromises must be made to get anything done. It is, in effect, the nature of a democracy where many voices clamor to be heard and each voice must be taken into account. Anderson himself does not necessarily disagree with this but seems to find the manner in which it is done distasteful, and the way in which particular or selfish interests are served immoral.

The chairman’s daughter, Marjorie, supplies the love interest. She is being wooed by the freshman congressman, which causes complications late in the play. She is one of three women in the play, the other two being a cynical, straight-talking secretary named Bus and a congresswoman named Miss McMurtry. All three are very close to being mere types; the ingenue, the ‘‘gal,’’ and the spinster. Together, they form a feminine principle, something that is lacking from the congressmen who dominate the play. They represent a humane element, lacking in the guile, duplicity, and self-righteousness that characterizes the male characters. Bus, who joins forces with McClean in an unsuccessful coup, is motivated not by abstract principle but by concrete experience. McMurtry, who in McClean’s eyes is complicit in the pork barrel he is intent on trimming, accepts her slice of the pie to fund a maternity ward. Marjorie, who dotes on her father, is there to remind readers of the potential human costs in pursuing an ideal. Her first loyalty is to her family. These characterizations are consistent with what Anderson believed an audience wanted to see (and no doubt reflect his own bias). As Charles Meister, in his book Dramatic Criticism, has pointed out, Anderson believed that ‘‘theatergoers admire strong conviction in the male characters and passionate faith in the female.’’

To add levity to the proceedings, there is a comedic character, Solomon Fitzmaurice—a dipsomaniac congressman and former idealist who aims to dock the Atlantic Fleet in his congressional district. He is almost a stock character, who functions like a clown or jester, but there is a Falstaffian quality to his fecklessness, which gives him weight. Much comedy is made in the contradiction between his words and his behavior. He, like a clown in Shakespeare, is able to say things that no one else can. As crooked as any of his cronies, he speaks the truth about their venality.

The first act begins just before an important vote on the appropriations bill. Chairman Gray is scrupulously trying to remove the excess fat, trimming the bill to a size acceptable to the president. His is a dignified presence and he stands above his colleagues. They accept that he is honest and he accepts that a degree of graft must be tolerated. A sort of moral equilibrium has been reached until it is upset by the arrival of McClean. Principle soon clashes with pragmatism.

The paternal aspects of Gray’s character are brought out, and it is shown that he is not entirely unsympathetic to the young congressman; yet McClean’s determination to kill a bill that Gray has worked hard to see pass, pits the two men against one another. It is a contest that McClean cannot hope to win, but the long odds increase his determination. By the end of the first act, with the seasoned Bus on his side to mentor him through the ways of congressional politicking, McClean is ready to go head to head.

As McClean tries to gather enough supporters to kill the bill, his opponents dole out more favors to garner the crucial votes. Fat, once carefully trimmed, is added back onto the bill, ensuring its passage. Recognizing his pending defeat, McClean decides that the high road is inadequate to reach his goal. He engages in some duplicity, tricking Fitzmaurice, and decides that the best way to kill the bill is to load it with so much pork barrel spending that the president will be forced to veto it.

This act represents growth in McClean’s character; new to the system, he has matched wits with—and apparently bettered—his superiors. Bus has mentored him too well. The pupil has now surpassed the teacher. At the close of act 2, scene 1, she says: ‘‘I resign, Alan. I abdicate. Take my hand and lead me. I’m a little child!’’ Yet, this statement represents a moral compromise of which McClean seems insufficiently aware. He is so convinced of the righteousness of his cause that he does not properly weigh the implications of his design. The question is never raised as to whether the ends justify the means. This is the fateful decision, the one that sets in motion a chain of events that threaten to undermine the protagonist’s integrity.

The contest between Gray and McClean intensifies. There will be an unintended consequence if the bill is ultimately defeated; Chairman Gray will be implicated in an impropriety for which he is only partly culpable. The gray in his character proves a shade darker, yet he remains sympathetic. The two antagonists, who, up until then, have shared a mutual respect, now square off. McClean continues to fight for a principle. Gray fights for survival.

Sympathy falls to the threatened chairman, despite his impropriety. His involvement in a potential bank scandal also occupies a gray area: he is neither wholly guilty, nor wholly innocent. His relationship with his doting daughter, and his concern for his constituents, humanize him. McClean’s unwavering principles seem cold, inhumane. For a principle, people are forgotten.

McClean’s strategy works well; the bill is fattened with pork, and a presidential veto seems inevitable. McClean seems to have won. Gray’s only hope is to have an overwhelming majority that can override a presidential veto. Fitzmaurice appeals to McClean to release a bloc of voters he controls in order to save Gray. Marjorie tells McClean that his victory will send her father to prison. His crusade has brought about some unintended consequences. Simeon Gray appears to be collateral damage. And so, apparently, is McClean’s relationship with Marjorie. He refuses to help. As he says to Marjorie, ‘‘I’m not fighting you or your father. I’m fighting this machine!’’

This is the recognition scene, where McClean realizes the human cost of what he has brought about and is either unable or unwilling to stop it. He denies Marjorie’s request. ‘‘Don’t ask it of me and don’t tell me what I’ve lost!’’ he says. ‘‘I know what I’ve lost from all of you. And it’s not my choice to lose it—but I’m in a fight that’s got to be won—and you’re asking for something I’ve no right to give!’’

In the end, McClean’s stratagem proves selfdefeating. The bill passes with a large majority, which makes it veto-proof. Through his efforts to correct an ill, he has only magnified it. Yet sympathy shifts towards McClean as the victors indulge in a celebration of their venality. The shift is from tragedy to satire with a biting edge. Fitzmaurice articulates the mood: ‘‘Graft, gigantic graft brought us our prosperity in the past and will lift us out of the present depths of parsimony and despair.’’ Gray’s words are more to the point: ‘‘Our system is every man for himself—and the nation be damned.’’ Embittered, McClean announces his intention to resign from office and continue his fight from the outside, warning that the tide will turn against the old guard: ‘‘Anything else but this.’’ In this scene, Anderson seems to be speaking through McClean; it is the voice of the liberal editorial writer. The tension between Anderson the journalist and Anderson the playwright is not so much resolved as exhausted in this scene. The message, which may have been buried by the high drama of the penultimate scene, stands out amidst the clamor of the victory celebration. If the scene seems inconsistent with the overall tone of the piece, it is nevertheless consistent with the author’s intention; Both Your Houses is, in essence, a political editorial in dramatic form.

Source: Kevin O’Sullivan, Critical Essay on Both Your Houses, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

Both Your Houses (note the Shakespearean echo) exists in two complete versions—the 1933 published one which we shall look at first, and the 1939 unpublished one. These two versions illustrate Anderson’s changing attitude toward democracy and the possibilities of individual fulfillment. Barrett Clark and George Freedley praise. Both Your Houses as ‘‘the first play of any moment written by an American that dealt exclusively or largely with political crookedness in the federal government’’; but its main predecessor seems to have been Harrison G. Rhodes and Thomas A. Wise’s A Gentleman from Mississippi (1908) which was also concerned with the loading of a Congressional appropriation bill with graft.

Both Your Houses reached the stage of the Royale Theatre on March 6, 1933; but, if it had arrived when Anderson first wanted it to and if a producer had not kept delaying its presentation until the Hoover administration, the original target of the satire, was out of office, the point would have been sharper and the stage run perhaps longer than one hundred and twenty nights. There is the consolation, however, that the Pulitzer Prize committee recognized with its award for the 1932–33 season that the work had certain values which were presumably not completely dependent upon ‘‘timeliness.’’ However belated in its production, the play was not altogether useless as social criticism: it made a valuable appeal to the new federal administration, containing one hundred and twenty-seven new members, that was readying to assemble in Washington at the crisis of the Depression and correct the wrongs of the Hoover era. But whether any such politicians attended or read the play is a matter about which I have no information.

The narrative illustrates once more Anderson’s stance of despair. An idealistic freshman congressman, Alan McClean, whose surname is an apt characteronym for his sterling makeup, learns that an omnibus House appropriation bill is laden with ‘‘pork barrel’’ as well as graft which will cost the already over-taxed public many millions of dollars. One of the congressmen, Sol Fitzmaurice, has even tagged on a measure that will anchor the Atlantic fleet off his private resort area rather than Hampton Roads. Alan opposes the bill despite its inclusion of funds for a dam project in his own district, for he has recently learned about the dishonest bidding for the contract, a bidding engineered by his backer and campaign manager.

Meanwhile, most of McClean’s fellow congressmen have no scruples whatever in using skulduggery; in fact, dishonesty is so routine that they are surprised that Alan raises any objections. Sol, a somehow likeable old rascal and the most individualized figure in the play, candidly asserts that the processes of government absolutely depend upon graft and that this very nation was built by brigands who looted the treasury and the national resources. In Alan’s research about the tainted appropriation bill, he encounters a moral dilemma: he learns that the committee chairman, Gray, an essentially honest man and the father of the girl he is courting, has innocently compromised himself by owning stock in an insolvent bank which the money in the bill would probably save. But Alan chooses to follow his conscience and try to defeat the bill, even at the risk of ruining the man he admires. Unable to block the legislation in committee, he loads onto it such flagrantly colossal riders that the whole thing will, he hopes, fail when it comes to a vote in Congress. Astonishingly, it passes anyway.

Of the various technical excellences in Anderson’s construction of this play, a critic would have to concede the advantage of subordinating the love relationship to the drama of ideas: at the end, there is no forced or sentimental reconciliation between Alan and Marjorie, at least on stage; indeed, no more than two lines are devoted to the whole business. Moreover, Alan is also not portrayed as a knight in shining armor (he exposes his own campaign), otherwise he would differentiate the forces of good and evil either too neatly or too obviously. Still, he is clearly and believably a heroic figure, even though, like many of the Shaw and the Ibsen male creations, he lacks well-roundedness. John H. Lawson has sharply criticized the conception of McClean because he is not made to ask himself. ‘‘How can I live and achieve integrity under these conditions [?]’’; because he has no rational solution for the dilemma of government in which he finds himself; because he admittedly has no conviction as to what the best type of government is; because, therefore, he has no specific proposal for reform; and because ‘‘the very condition against which McClean is fighting is brought about by the apathy or uncertainty of people as to ‘the best kind of government.’’’

In countering Lawson’s first point, I contend that McClean has had, at least for the time being, his bridges burned behind him: if he stayed in, as Lawson seems to suggest, and publicly denounced his colleagues as dishonest, this legislator who had won his office under a cloud of suspicion would cut a sorry figure! But, it seems to me that Alan McClean might become more successful at winning sympathy and support for his exposure of the others as the voluntarily resigned congressman that Anderson plans him to be—providing he could write a book or afford a lecture tour. As the novice legislator that we find him to be at the end of the story, he realizes that he has already cost the country a vast amount of unnecessary money in trying to outwit the crooks; for him, then, it seems wise to choose a field of combat in which the public will not have to pay through the nose for his inexperience.

As for McClean’s supposed fault of not having any rational solution to the dilemma of government. I believe that Lawson is simply unfair in asking such a newcomer, already a disastrous failure in politics, to have figured out on short notice what has eluded for centuries the most eminent philosophers, social scientists, and statesmen. Anyway, no playwright is or should be required to offer a solution to the social problems he presents; it is quite enough to lay forth the problem in an entertaining manner. Apropos Lawson’s last objection, the hero in this play does not, I maintain, act apathetically or uncertainly about what he wants done, which is clearly a public exposure leading to reform. It would be grossly unfair to equate Alan McClean’s patriotic state of mind with that of the general electorate who tolerate Sol Fitzmaurice and his hoggish breed. At worst, McClean is an idealist who is unwilling to accommodate himself to working out in the hurly-burly of ‘‘dirty politics’’ the kinds of rewards that Congressman Gray finds and is satisfied with.

Though mainly a drama of ideas in which there is scant physical action, the narrative nevertheless grips the attention from the moment Alan enters in Act I to his angry exit in Act III. Unquestionably, the amusing secondary characters go far to sustain this interest; and these include Alan’s fast-talking but honest secretary, Bus, and the eloquent old tippler and jovial antagonist, Sol Fitzmaurice. The dialogue is crisp throughout, and Maxwell Anderson illustrates in this dialogue his special and muchoverlooked gift for lifelike vernacular in plays with contemporary settings.

Both Your Houses (1933), notwithstanding its gloom, is a shade lighter on the scale of optimism than is typical of Anderson’s plays of the 1930s wherein the ideal is impossible of attainment in social institutions and human affairs. The pessimism of this published version was, incidentally, still more intense in the three preliminary drafts that now survive. These drafts start near the close of Act II to emphasize McClean’s moral struggle about whether to save Gray or to remain true to the national interest; but the published version emphasizes throughout the external struggle between McClean and the sponsors of the bill. In the early drafts, McClean is unable to stay true to the national interest because, upon learning of Gray’s predicament with the bank, he is so conscience-stricken about the possibility of ruining the honest Gray that he decides to endorse the bill to protect this man even at the loss of his own professional ideals. At the end, after McClean’s realization that the prestigious United States House of Representatives does not by any latitude of thinking embrace the good of the nation, he resigns his post to return to teaching. The upshot is that, as an idealist trying to make the actual world over into his own image, he had no choice but to fail one way or the other.

Consequently, the preparatory drains of Both Your Houses are stained with that very spirit of hopelessness which permeates other early Anderson dramaturgy. But late in rehearsals significant changes were introduced—most likely at the suggestion of other theater people engaged in the production—which sharpened the satirical point considerably. These changes allowed at least the possibility of public altruism and constructive reform despite the consuming self-interest that allegedly motivates leaders in government. As such, the published version of Both Your Houses is evidently a compromise, scarcely to be regretted on our part, between what Anderson felt in his heart about government and what the production staff felt was expedient in order to secure a viable drama.

Fortunately, however, the slightly revised Both Your Houses that Anderson prepared for a staging at the Pasadena Community Playhouse, Pasadena, California, during July of 1939, has never seen print. The new writing consists of two new speeches for McClean that are, sad to relate, inconsistent with the tone of what had gone before; but they do reflect the author’s latest convictions at that time to defend democracy from the threat that Hitler’s Germany was making to the free peoples of the earth. And so, after staring at the totalitarianism that was spreading like cancer over the body of Europe, Anderson now viewed our imperfect democracy as a relatively healthy system that was well worth saving.

Source: Alfred S. Shivers, ‘‘Of Sceptred and Elected Races,’’ in Maxwell Anderson, Twayne, 1976, pp. 101–31.