[In the following excerpt, Adler analyzes the treatment of American politics in a group of Pulitzer Prize-winning plays, concluding that their authors' lack of inventiveness in dramatic technique reflects their acceptance of the political status quo.]

In his history plays, Shakespeare attempts to define the qualities of the good king, proposing a relationship between the health of the body politic and the moral nature of its rulers. This link was not original with the Renaissance; anthropological studies reveal that ancient societies knew “the king must die” so that the wasteland could be made fertile. Shakespeare's perspective is further characterized, however, by the suspicion he casts upon the ability of the ruler to maintain his personal integrity when it inevitably comes into conflict with his position of power. This question of the relationship between a ruler's personal moral integrity and the exercise of political authority pervades the Pulitzer prizewinning dramas about presidents and mayors and members of Congress, though these dramatists' points of view about the political system's effect upon its elected rulers are generally less skeptical and more sanguine than Shakespeare's. Although audiences much loved the two plays among this group that feature a revered historical figure as their subject—Lincoln and LaGuardia—taken as a whole these political plays are the least substantive of all the Pulitzer dramas, lacking much theorizing about history and the political man, such as readers and viewers continue to receive from Shakespeare's chronicle plays.

What may, in part, account for the relatively unchallenging nature of these works—from both a dramaturgical and an ideological perspective—is the playwrights' hesitancy to criticize the audience/electorate too openly for the lack of wisdom exhibited by the rulers it elects, perhaps out of fear that such criticism would be seen as directed against the democratic system itself. Yet at least the first three plays to be discussed here implicitly espouse a notion of the electorate not unlike that found in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill, both of whom, while prizing individual conscience and character, sensed that majority rule may mean that mediocrity rules. Tocqueville, who seems to have taken over from religious thought into political philosophy the belief in an “inner light” that guides the individual, knows that the majority opinion may be intolerant of the minority viewpoint in its midst, enforcing conformity rather than independence in thought and action. As he writes in Democracy in America, “What is a majority, in its collective capacity, if not an individual with opinions, and usually with interests, contrary to those of another individual, called the minority?”¹ Mill goes further in his suspicion that collective rule by the majority tends to level everything down to a kind of uniformity, an average that prevents the exceptional from flowering except when a society is willing to counter this by permitting and nurturing an indispensable aristocracy of thought and character: “No government by a democracy or a numerous aristocracy, either in its political acts or in the opinions, qualities, and tone of mind which it fosters, ever did or could rise above mediocrity, except in so far as the Many have let themselves be guided (which in their best times they have always done) by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few.”² For most of the playwrights here, this expressed need for exceptional persons to lead society inevitably conflicts with their preception of the audience's predisposition against even righteous individuals who appear to reject the wisdom and will of the collective majority. This timidity in making the audience examine its potential flaws as a citizenry finally constricts the forcefulness of many of these political dramas.

Of Thee I Sing, one of the earliest important American musicals and the first of only a half-dozen to win the Pulitzer, must have seemed at least a quirky and at best a daring and rebellious choice for the prize in 1932, since it received the honor over a number of serious dramas, including O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra. (At that time, no provision was made for composers to share in the drama award, so the citation named librettists George Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind along with Ira Gershwin who contributed the perky and biting lyrics, but not his brother George Gershwin who wrote the music.) Kaufman and Ryskind's farcical book moves in broad strokes, much like a political comic strip. The nature of Of Thee I Sing as an irreverent lampoon can best be seen in the still amusing treatment of the much-maligned and joked-about vice-president, Alexander Throttlebottom; his very name, naturally, occasions malapropisms galore—including “Gottabottle,” “Bottlethrottle,” and “Teitelbaum.” A “hermit” before the kingmaker Fulton picked his name out of a hat to serve as John P. Wintergreen's running mate, Throttlebottom poses a distinct liability to the ticket, sure to precipitate a loss if anyone as much as sets eyes on him. After the ticket wins, he intends to resign so that his mother will not be embarrassed, he loses his pass to the inauguration, he can only gain entrance to the White House by joining a tour, and he cannot obtain a library card because he lacks the necessary references. He is so totally inept that when he does preside over the Senate (confusing the senators with the ball team), he institutes a musical roll call, pays tribute to Paul Revere's long-dead horse Jenny, and fills up his time knitting baby clothes. Yet his historic function—to assume the duties the president cannot in times of incapacitation—and his dramatic role dovetail when he unexpectedly realizes, before anyone else, the solution to the president's romantic difficulties: Throttlebottom can be the essential fourth party who “squares the triangle” by marrying the president's cast-off girl, thus allowing a resolution to the love plot.

Wintergreen, lacking a platform on which to run, takes the unsolicited advice of a hotel chambermaid and runs on “love,” complete with a beauty contest to find a Miss White House to become the First Lady. The national committee picks Diana Devereux, a dumb blond sexpot, whom they later try to legitimatize through claiming that she is the “illegitimate daughter / Of an illegitimate son / Of an illegitimate nephew / Of Napoleon.”³ But Wintergreen's heart goes to Mary Turner, famous for her corn muffins made without corn. Diana claims such breach of promise is a “communistic plot,” but the Supreme Court justices, after going into a football huddle, decide in Mary's favor because she is pregnant and so “posterity is just around the corner” (p. 737)—the closest reference to the raging Depression in this piece of escapist fluff.

While this outcome satisfies the demands of the musical comedy audience for a happy union between hero and heroine, it fails to conclude logically the sequence of political satire; it can, moreover, only uphold the inner logic demanded of farce if it is taken as a satiric jab at the audience's own desire for a romantic ending. Wintergreen is, though, a far cry from the typical hero; that Kaufman and Ryskind paint him so darkly at the beginning makes the later shift to greater sympathy implausible. Wintergreen nominated himself as presidential candidate, but not until the sixty-third ballot, and will play dirty in order to force himself down the populace's throats; and only his “delicate condition” as an expectant father prevents his impeachment once elected. Even in these premedia-mad days, image supercedes issues, although they, too, lack substance: a dearth of Chanel No. 5, bringing back black cotton stockings, and changing the name of the Virgin Islands since the connotations prove bad for trade. Of Thee I Sing seems, finally, despite its fun, to have a critical attitude towards the majority hidden beneath its good-natured face: if the electorate is so blind and allows itself to be manipulated by a do-nothing administration, then maybe it gets the rulers—and “heroes”—it deserves.

Perhaps Of Thee I Sing does well not to have a hero, since the next year in Both Your Houses, Maxwell Anderson cannot resist making his hero too good to be convincing, although the playwright intends that his ideas take precedence over character credibility. Anderson, author of such works as Winterset and Elizabeth the Queen, stands as virtually the sole poetic dramatist in the American theatre, yet he won the 1934 Pulitzer for a prose play; ironically, he considers Houses “by all odds his worst” offering.⁴ Essentially a polemical tract parading as political satire, it follows the career of a United States congressman. The transparency of the play's moral conflicts is thrust at the audience through the too-schematic name symbolism. The naive hero-writ-large is named Alan McClean; he is surrounded by a tainted politician named Simon Gray and a wise old politico totally without guile named Solomon (what else?) Fitzmaurice. Although the play boasts a refreshing turn in that the guy does not get the girl—in this instance the daughter of his foe—Alan's idealism is never challenged; because he never finds himself truly on the defensive, there is little internal conflict or possibility for growth. What exists in abundance is authorial commentary, including an unexpected dose of cynicism about the democratic system that faces its greatest challenge because of a disinterested and apathetic electorate—a criticism Anderson can afford to make more explicitly, albeit more heavy-handedly, than Kaufman and Ryskind could within the scope of an entertainment.

Alan arrives in Washington a political neophyte, wide-eyed and uncompromising. Son of a newspaperman, wearer of mail-order clothes, and devotee of Thomas Jefferson, he lost his college job because of his social commitment and now, like an earlier-day Ralph Nader, even has his own election investigated for possible abuse. Assigned to the appropriations committee, he discovers that all the other members are out to get something for themselves and their constitutents by tacking amendments onto a bill for a dam. Alan's instinct to hate the system but maintain faith in the citizenry seems confirmed by the facts at this point. Solomon, as Anderson's raisonneur, does not, however, hold such a complimentary view of the voters; a former radical who is frank about his own motives and about the evils that daily creep into the American system—for example, using taxpayers' money for patrolling the Canadian border to prevent an invasion of Japanese beetles from the Southwest—he counsels Alan that reform is not possible. Better to concentrate on the individual virtue of being fully humane, which in this instance pragmatically means not revealing the former corruption of Senator Gray that would now wreck his life. When one considers the magnitude of the evil (Warren G. Harding was nothing, supposedly, compared to this), the Messianic fervor of youth must naturally buckle under. Alan decides to undermine the system by arranging to have so many extra appropriations tacked onto the bill that it will surely invite a presidential veto. Since the vote is strong enough, however, to override the veto, his scheme backfires. Consequently, Alan has accomplished more harm than good; inadvertently he has taught his unethical colleagues a tactic that will mean even bigger expenditures in the future.

Rationalizing that even honest people are corrupt and that honesty is perhaps impossible under the American system, Gray plays the devil's advocate who receives a partial nod from Anderson. For Anderson hints that something negative infests the very core of the process, some choice made long ago that is partially responsible: the pragmatic robber barons, embodiments of the height of capitalistic enterprise, showed that graft could guarantee prosperity. Yet the voters themselves have a great faith in the promise of the democratic system, and Anderson follows Tocqueville and Mill in suggesting that they must be awakened out of their mediocrity: Solomon claims “no word” or “figure of speech [can] express the complete and illimitable ignorance and incompetence of the voting population.”⁵ Anderson's “Don Quixote” finally realizes that, far from perfect, this is perhaps not even the best method of government and that revolution is long overdue. But neither the ignorant and incompetent voters nor the Congress appear likely to take action to change things. Maybe Anderson is actually warning against allowing an attitude to develop that will make the country susceptible to precisely what was beginning to occur in Germany, where a sleeping, apathetic people were awaking to find that the monster in their nightmares was real and that they themselves had helped to create it.

If Both Your Houses focuses on politicians already in positions of power, State of the Union—loosely based on Wendell Willkie's campaign and the prizewinner for 1946—details that rise to power. The emphases in the two works are, nevertheless, virtually identical, though Union, more comedic, hits less bullishly. As the coauthors Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse comment, they desired “‘to stir the conscience of the individual citizen … to say certain things but to do so amusingly.’”⁶Union, like Houses, is basically an actionless play, though with a slightly less idealized hero who ends, however, in essentially the same stance as Alan. The playwrights siphon off their indignation through Mary, the candidate's wife, just as Anderson does through his character Solomon. Both plays, too, involve questions of ambition versus integrity, of public morality versus personal relationships. The word union in Lindsay and Crouse's title combines a political with a private connotation; the third point in the triangle involving Mary and Grant Matthews is sometimes the political game yet is just as often the other woman, the big-city newspaper publisher Kay Thorndike. In fact, the romantic relationship becomes almost more central than the political conflict in this comedy of manners that only rarely reaches the high level of epigrammatic wit characteristic of the form; about the best the authors seem able to muster are quips such as, “Politics makes strange bedfellows” or “Our personal relations are strictly political.”⁷

State of the Union examines the role of the woman behind the political figure. Kay builds up Grant's self-confidence, while Mary—who bemoans the fate of the politician's wife long before it became fashionable to do so—sees her primary function as keeping Grant's ego in check, her worst days being those when he falls prey to the “big man” complex. For Grant is another “Sir Galahad,” totally untutored in the seamier side of political reality, determined to campaign and win while remaining morally unscathed. Such a “streak of decency” can be a burden since, for the man of conscience, every decision becomes a moral choice. Politics, which initially seems to keep Grant and Mary apart, ironically brings them closer together as she senses the return of the idealistic boy she wistfully recalls from their honeymoon days. If the campaign turns back the clock on a marriage gone stale, it also forces them to confront large ethical issues. Grant is an unassuming and yet charismatic figure, not as pure as Alan (he vaguely admits to having paid hush money in the past), but one who continues to have faith in the American people and insists on appealing to their best rather than their worst instincts—refusing, for example, to trade on the emerging Cold War hatred against the Russians. What does surprise him is the cynicism of the political giants who take advantage of the “lazy … ignorant … prejudiced” people. These lawmakers tend to view politics as a game, and it is in such “political” plays as Of Thee I Sing and State of the Union that the game metaphor so prevalent in political rhetoric of the 1960s and 1970s first enters American drama. As James Conover, the kingmaker, remarks in one of the more obvious expressions of this metaphor: “In this country, we play politics and to play politics you have to play ball” (p. 222). Grant, finally, refuses to cooperate, deciding that he cannot be a candidate on anyone's terms but his own; instead he will be a gadfly from the sidelines—a resolution identical to the one reached by the former political candidate in Robert Anderson's Come Marching Home from the same season. In assuming this role of watchdog, Grant does only what every good citizen must: there can be no such thing as an apolitical stance within a truly democratic society.

Fiorello! (the 1960 Pulitzer winner) raises the identical question asked by the other prize plays discussed so far in this chapter: namely, is it possible for the public servant to retain his high ideals and moral values and still succeed politically? The play answers the question uncharacteristically, however, by providing a resoundingly affirmative response in the person of the title character. Since this musical appeared at the tag end of an age of relative stability and optimism—after the second World War and the Korean conflict and in a nation led by a popular and revered hero—it is not surprising that it dwells on a man who was one of America's best-loved politicos rather than on the issues. Selected by the advisory board and not the choice of the drama jury (which gave its nod to Hellman's Toys in the Attic), Fiorello! can in no way be considered a landmark American musical; rather, it is an old-fashioned, if thoroughly professional show with a score by composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick—later of Fiddler on the Roof fame—and a book by George Abbott and Jerome Weidman.

The man affectionately known as “the Little Flower” first appears, in a frame that inexplicably occurs only at the beginning, reading the comics over the radio to his adoring constituents. If he possesses an ingratiating political style, complete with theatrical props and costume, he evidences as well a real empathy and concern for the common people. His enemy and theirs is the Establishment: the exploiters who murdered his father during the Spanish-American War, the owners of the sweatshops who take advantage of women workers, and the ward bosses of Tammany Hall. But amidst the corruption of the political machine and even of the courts, as exposed in the memorably satiric number, “A Little Tin Box,” Fiorello remains totally incorruptible, always “on the side of the angels.”⁸ Along with this incorruptibility runs a strain, however slight, of self-righteousness; his aide Ben warns him against being totally uncompromising and falling prey to the great-man syndrome or, worse still, to self-aggrandizement. For Fiorello, without any power base except the people, must merchandise himself through the media, as later politicians will become masters at doing. If Fiorello as showman capitalizes on the theatrical aspect endemic to politics, that remains preferable to reducing politics to a game (as described in the lyric “Politics and Poker”) in which “usually you can stack the deck!” (p. 26). Fiorello, nevertheless, stands by his principles: he is independent, anti-isolationist—he even enlists in the Army—slightly Marxist in his economic theory of money as the root of all evil, and tentatively revolutionary in his insistence on placing the individual citizen over and above the law.

Like virtually every musical, Fiorello! involves a love triangle and includes a comic subplot. The latter, between Dora and Floyd, a policeman turned sewage treatment entrepreneur, underlines the corruption of Tammany Hall, which Floyd finds synonymous with “tyranny” because it runs on patronage and protection. In the main love plot, Fiorello first marries Thea, a political activist, realist, and something of a New Woman; after her death, he marries his secretary Marie, a confirmed romanticist. Thea first attracts Fiorello because she is the underdog, spokeswoman for the put-upon garment workers; he associates her courage in standing up against those who say women should stay in their place and in sacrificing herself for a cause with that of “Joan of Arc,” just as she regards his commitment to causes as the actions of a “Sir Galahad.” If Thea is the public person, Marie is the private one for whom the laws of love and family reign supreme and for whom marriage is the only role; she would “outlaw bachelorhood,” “rid the country / Of contempt of courtship” (p. 50), and “marry the very next man who asks [her]” (p. 33) before it becomes too late. This elegiac tone pervades Thea's song, “Til Tomorrow,” which ritualizes the passing of time in a foreboding way. When Thea dies, Fiorello has just been defeated in his bid for mayor, so his political and personal misfortunes mesh. He must pick himself up and begin anew, through hard work and determination. Marie forces him to take hold, in her traditional role as the woman behind the man, and he emerges victorious.

Not all American musicals express an elemental faith in America and American savvy and self-reliance, but Fiorello! assuredly does, for it looks back nostalgically at a period of war and Depression and suggests that these can be overcome. It remains a too sanguine and sentimental look, though, with the tension between public and private morality never translating into a real conflict for the central figure.

The pattern of two very different women and their impact upon a public figure from Fiorello! and State of the Union appears even earlier in Robert E. Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois, which won the 1939 Pulitzer. Sherwood reportedly admired John Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln, which (complete with verse prologues) premiered in New York in 1919 and began where Sherwood's would leave off, with President-elect Lincoln preparing to leave Springfield for Washington. Had Drinkwater been American rather than British, his work would probably have won the prize over O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon; the advisory board, in fact, issued a statement “record[ing] their high appreciation” of Drinkwater's play and “regret[ting] that by reason of its foreign authorship, [it] was not eligible for consideration.”⁹ Sherwood's main source, however, was Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (1926)—itself disqualified from consideration for the history award because of a prohibition then in effect against honoring books about Washington and Lincoln—with a lesser debt to works by William H. Herndon, Nathaniel Wright Stephenson, and Albert J. Beveridge, as well as to Lincoln's own writings.

The action of Sherwood's episodic but economically handled chronicle play is less important than the characterization of Abe, which reveals a psychological complexity missing from the portraits in the other “political” plays, making the work most compelling in those scenes that attend to Abe's inner life. Sherwood's Abe is a Hamlet-like creature: rootless, and so thrown back on the elemental influences in his life; a loner with a low opinion of himself; melancholic and misanthropic, yet, like Swift, someone who “likes people one-by-one, but not in crowds, mobs, or armies.”¹⁰ His virtues arise from and are inextricably bound up with his frailties and flaws. John Keat's poem, “On Death,” which Abe reads aloud at the end of scene 1, serves as a leitmotif for the work; not only does it establish a somber tone that presages the deaths of Ann Rutledge and (outside the play) of Abe himself, but it also relates as well to Abe's instinctive desire to retreat from the burdens of public life and succumb to a death wish. His political leanings, in fact, are not towards withdrawing but from never entering the arena in the first place. Abe seems at times more than half in love, even obsessed, with easeful death; oftentimes he gloomily repeats the phrase, “If I live. …” Yet since Keats firmly places his emphasis on awakening from “a life of woe” that “is but a dream” to immortality, man's “future doom” will actually be a respite from pain and a dying in order to rise. Part of Abe's immortality, that he could only vaguely have guessed at, comes from the process whereby his life enters the realm of myth. To win Ann, who frees his emotional or romantic side, would have made a reality of all that Abe read about in books of poetry; she helps him have faith in the beauty and purity of people and solidifies his belief in God. She would have distracted him, however, from the call to duty and so not have been a positive influence on his political career. The sketchily characterized Mary Todd, a disillusioned and mentally unstable woman, exerts just the opposite influence; she succeeds in being the shaping force behind Abe's life, not so much directing his ambition as instilling it. But a gulf exists between them, her emotional reticence matching his own. Winning the highest office in the land does not guarantee contentment; in fact, duty and personal happiness seem incompatible. That it is Mary, and not Ann, who is temperamentally more suited to becoming a president's wife only underscores this.

In writing about Abe, Sherwood pens his own intellectual and spiritual autobiography, and a biography of the nation as well. As he remarks, “Lincoln's life … was a work of art, forming a veritable allegory of the growth of the democratic spirit.”¹¹ Abe as the common man is also Everyman, the protagonist of a morality play; there is, he admits, a civil war “going on inside [him] all the time. Both sides are right and both are wrong and equal in strength” (p. 326), since the struggle is between two imperatives, a hatred of force (war) and an equally intense hatred of slavery (life under dictatorship). Abe's private battle reflects the public one in 1938, mirroring for the audience not so much the Civil War as the trial facing the American people on the eve of World War II. Sherwood employs the history play for a traditional purpose: to present the past as lesson for the present. As much as Americans in 1938 hate war, they must hate even more the threat to humanity's freedom posed by the Nazi tyranny. Man, like Abe, “cannot go on to the end of [his] days avoiding the clutch of his own conscience” (p. 325); he must decide that a “wrong” law “must be changed, if not by moral protest, then by Force!”—and that “some ideals are worth dying for” (p. 333). Lincoln, “who is against slavery, but even more opposed to going to war,” must declare war; by doing so, however, he becomes a timeless model for the audience, in the same way that he inspired Sherwood to understand that “a natural, intellectual, and moral world must be cultivated” (p. 353). Sherwood underscores Abe's role as an example for all seasons when the crowd at play's end bids Lincoln farewell by singing the chorus from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” interpolating a line from the earlier “John Brown's Body,” which, significantly, has its source in a Negro spiritual: “His soul goes marching on” (p. 353). This apotheosizes Abe, confirming his place on the level of ahistorical myth.

This group of Pulitzer plays seems not to look too hard or too critically at the conduct of America's leaders. Given the almost inevitable conflict between maintaining private integrity while wielding public power, these playwrights could potentially have drawn protagonists open to tragedy, but only Sherwood's Abe, forced to choose between two morally good objectives—union and an end to slavery—approaches that possibility. If Abe is a secular saint, he is a troubled one; public service not only exacts the price of personal happiness, but to follow one's conscience in the political arena means waging a war within oneself. Perhaps partly because of the play's facticity and because of what an audience cannot help but bring to it, Abe's battle seems compelling in a way that the heroes' conflicts in Both Your Houses and State of the Union do not. With their idealists under fire for their integrity, those two plays bear a relationship to works such as the populist filmmaker Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. They offer their audiences the comfortable facade that they are doing some hard, sophisticated thinking about complex issues and that the “other man” is the guilty one while they are “on the side of the angels.” These are not, however, serious social problem plays. They cater to the vague discontent everyone experiences with any imperfect—because human—political system. Although they may mildly criticize the system, especially the corrupt, or at least morally compromised, power brokers, they might also, albeit unintentionally, help to buoy up the status quo, creating an even more deeply rooted and insidious complacency among an audience generally disinclined to admit that what Tocqueville and Mill feared about the majority within a democracy might be true. Furthermore, the naiveté of the hero in Both Your Houses is hardly less unappealing than his near perfection, and the self-righteous attitude Anderson assumes towards his audience results in a rather dour play. State of the Union, of course, appeared in the aftermath of one of America's greatest victories, during a period of national euphoria when any questioning of the system's goodness was not yet in fashion; but such uncritical acceptance fed directly into the tyrannical rejection of the least ideological difference during the Joseph McCarthy years.

Of Thee I Sing, with its government that trivializes the issues and depends solely on image—and is permitted to do so by the gullibility of an unenlightened electorate—might have been the Doonesbury of the Depression; instead, it offers little except the escapist medicine of laughing the country's troubles away. Fiorello!, too, though bright and snappy, is little more than an exercise in nostalgia for a simpler time, as if its writers intuitively sensed that political and social turmoil were just around the corner and that theatergoers would not want to confront those in their entertainment. In Fiorello!, State of the Union, and Both Your Houses, moral principles comfortably survive, if they do not completely triumph. Sherwood alone dares to leave his audience with the darker possibility that the leaders of the nation and her citizens might indeed have diminished since the days of the Declaration. As Abe states the challenge: “We gained democracy, and now there is the question of whether it is fit to survive. Perhaps we have come to the dreadful day of awakening, and the dream is ended” (p. 352). That these “political” Pulitzer plays generally lack the technical variety and virtuosity of so much of the best American drama may help account for their thinness. Their authors' unwillingness to question the spectators' traditional aesthetic assumptions about how drama works, to break down the invisible barrier between stage and auditorium, characters and audience, mirrors their hesitation to challenge—as Tocqueville and Mill were not afraid of doing—the spectators' long-held but probably unexamined political views. Unadventuresome techniques and timidity in ideas are, for these Pulitzers at least, two sides of the same coin.

Notes

1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 231.

2. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. David Spitz (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), pp. 62-63.

3. George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, and Ira Gershwin, Of Thee I Sing, in Pulitzer Plays, p. 729. Further references appear in the text.

4. Quoted in Toohey, History, (see chap. 2, n. 6), p. 109.

5. Maxwell Anderson, Both Your Houses, in Pulitzer Plays, p. 773.

6. Quoted in Cornelia Otis Skinner, Life with Lindsay and Crouse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), p. 200.

7. Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, State of the Union, in 50 Best Plays, Vol. III, pp. 185, 200. Further references appear in the text.

8. Jerome Weidman, George Abbott, and Sheldon Harnick, Fiorello! (New York: Random House, 1960), p. 9. Further references appear in the text.

9. Hohenberg, Pulitzer, (see chap. 3, n. 4), p. 48.

10. Robert E. Sherwood, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, in 50 Best Plays, Vol. II, p. 309. Further references appear in the text.

11. Quoted in John Mason Brown, The Worlds of Robert E. Sherwood: Mirror to His Times 1896-1939 (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 370.