SOURCE: Tees, Arthur T. “Maxwell Anderson's Changing Attitude toward War.” North Dakota Quarterly 48, no. 3 (summer 1980): 5-11.

Maxwell Anderson, during his thirty-five year career as a playwright, was generally consistent in his treatment of themes. From first to last he was distrustful of government, although he was not, as a critic once characterized him, an anarchist.¹ Anderson was ever concerned with individual freedom, from the ill-disciplined independent spirit of Flagg (What Price Glory?) to the concern of Emperor Augustus (The Golden Six) that his citizens had lost their desire for freedom. The playwright's agnosticism also persisted, from Kiper's complaint in What Price Glory? that God, if He existed, did not seem able to do anything about the war, to Stephen Kumalo's wail in Lost in the Stars that God, if He exists, had hid Himself and refused to speak to men.

However, on one issue, pacifism, Anderson changed his mind over the years. His first playwriting success was a collaboration with fellow newspaperman, Laurence Stallings, on the anti-war play What Price Glory?, which portrayed World War I as inglorious confusion, a terrible waste of men and material. Toward the end of his career Anderson wrote a letter to the New York Times advocating that the United States provoke a diplomatic crisis with Russia, even to the point of atomic war, in order to force the Soviet Union to end its subversive conquest of East European countries.

Nearly a quarter of a century separated What Price Glory? and the New York Times letter, but the change, although gradual, is no less great. It is possible to trace that change through Anderson's writings.

Although Anderson may not have been a pacifist during his student days, he became one after studying under John M. Gillette, Professor of Sociology at the University of North Dakota. In 1913, when Anderson was a high school principal and teacher of English in the small community of Minnewaukan, North Dakota, he was fired after discussing his pacifism with his high school classes.² His views on war, coupled with his independent spirit, would get Anderson into trouble in the classroom again.

After the Minnewaukan incident Anderson went to California where he received a Master's degree in English at Stanford University and later taught high school English in San Francisco. In September, 1917, he was appointed head of the English Department at Whittier College, a Quaker institution. Given the Friends' long tradition against military service, it might be expected that Anderson's pacifism would be acceptable at Whittier. The following April, however, he was dismissed from the faculty.

Anderson's own explanation of the dismissal, years later, was that he did not wish to sit on the speaker's platform during chapel services as he did not enjoy the prayers.³ However, according to Shivers' well-researched account, the real reason for Anderson's dismissal centered on his attitude toward World War I, then raging. Anderson first angered school authorities by publicly supporting a Whittier student who was under attack for publishing his opposition to the draft in the campus newspaper. He then commented in class on the predicament Heaven would find Itself in if both the Americans and Germans were to pray for victory. This, together with his refusal to withdraw his support for the draft resister, was too much for the conservative college trustees; Anderson was fired in a few days.⁴

Anderson's dismissal from Whittier marked the end of his teaching career. Three months after leaving Whittier he became an editorial writer for the San Francisco Bulletin. Here again Anderson's views on the war caused him difficulty. Soon after the Armistice he wrote an editorial indicating that Germany could not be expected to repay the Allies for World War I. As a result he was fired from the Bulletin.⁵ He then found a job at the San Francisco Chronicle, not as an editorial writer, but at the copydesk. A month later he moved to New York to accept a position with the New Republic, and although he held a number of positions with various New York publications in the years that followed, he was never again fired for his views.

By 1924, when What Price Glory? opened, the war was no longer the emotional issue it had been when Anderson joined the Whittier College staff. The play provided a generally comic look at life at the front during World War I, with American Marines turning to drink and sex to forget a war that could only be described in four-letter words. Anderson had not seen the war firsthand, but his collaborator, Laurence Stallings, had lost a leg in it. Stallings provided much of the local color in the play in addition to all of the second act. The writers agreed that the war was not a glorious effort to make the world safe for democracy; it was a senseless mess. Men on both sides died needlessly, fighting over land of value only to those who lived there. War ruined the men on both sides and the civilian population caught between. What Price Glory? was an immediate success, winning both popular and critical acclaim. Anderson's skepticism about the war was echoed nightly in the audience's applause.

Although the success of What Price Glory? prompted Anderson to give up his newspaper work and try to make a living writing plays, he did not dwell on the war theme again in the decade of the twenties. Buccaneer, a 1925 collaboration with Stallings, centers on the seventeenth-century piracy of Henry Morgan; it contains no condemnation of Morgan's acts of war. Capraro, the railroaded anarchist in Gods of the Lightning (1928), speaks out at his trial against the murder that is war, but Anderson's views on battle do not find significant expression again until 1930 in Elizabeth the Queen.

In a discussion with Queen Elizabeth, Lord Essex realizes that, had he been on the throne instead, he would have waged war far more than she, leaving the country bloodied and in debt. Her way of peace and security was better than his would have been. Essex reasons that a woman makes a better ruler than a man because of her natural cowardice, and, as Anderson's spokesman, Essex concludes that war is a waste.

Anderson's anti-war sentiments wavered early in the thirties as he examined the Revolutionary War in Valley Forge (1934). There the skeptic's role on war is given not to the hero of the play but to General Howe, commander of the British forces. An old fighting man, the General has no illusions about why men go to war. Howe says that the common people are always willing to fight for impossible political or religious principles; the real reason for most wars is an economic one. The Revolutionary War, he asserts, is for trade advantage. Anderson, who might have endorsed the General's views with regard to a different war in an earlier decade, sides with Washington in this play. The American commander sees the Revolutionary War as basically a struggle of the colonists for the right to elect and control their own government. Washington has no illusions about the current Continental Congress nor any great hopes for the probity of future governments, but he and his men will fight for the right to choose their own governing fools.⁶ War, in this instance, is a just cause, even though the conditions under which Washington's men fight are no better than those chronicled a decade earlier in What Price Glory?

Thus in 1934 Anderson had sanctioned the Revolutionary War, but his convictions about other conflicts were less clear. The Indian in High Tor (1937) advises against fighting those who would take the mountain for development. In his view no land was worth fighting for as long as a man could move on and find peace elsewhere.⁷

While the Indian counseled pacifism in High Tor, the Emperor Franz Joseph had other advice later the same year in Masque of Kings. The Austrian Emperor's son, Rudolph, objects to war on the grounds that it only benefits kings; he urges his father to let the people choose peace instead. The Emperor replies that there is no choice, that rapidly expanding populations, no longer held in check by famine and disease, must soon cause nations to battle each other for living space. In such battles only the strong will survive. The war which the Emperor foresaw in 1889 was World War I, although he incorrectly predicted that Germany would oppose Austria-Hungary in it.

The Indian could avoid conflict in High Tor by moving west; the European had no such choice. (It is questionable whether the Indian did either; there were other tribes to the west who might resent his intrusion, but that is not a concern of the play.) But Masque also demonstrates Anderson's changing attitude in another way. Rudolph is one of a long line of Anderson's idealistic young reformer-heroes, a line that stretches from Andrew Jackson in First Flight, through Capraro in Gods of the Lightning, to Felipe in Night Over Taos and Mio in Winterset. Each has his ideals by which he lives and for which he is willing to die, if necessary. Rudolph, too, has ideals of how to rule; he gains the opportunity to take the Empire from his father and to apply these ideals. But as he begins to rule he learns that the ideals cannot be applied if he is to stay in power. Discouraged by this failure, disheartened by the realization that everything must be compromised even as his mistress earlier compromised herself by spying on him for his father, Rudolph commits suicide. The idealist is defeated by his ideals, something that had not happened to previous Anderson heroes. By the close of the play the compromising father has become a more sympathetic figure than the disillusioned son. Perhaps this is one reason why the play was less than successful on Broadway.

Anderson's pacifism did not quite die with Rudolph, but it may have suffered a mortal blow. Knickerbocker Holiday, a year later, has the young hero, Brom, eulogizing his friend Tenpin. Brom asserts that most soldiers die young in needless wars as a result of some politician's ambition or ignorance.⁸Masque, however, may have been the turning point, because by 1939 Anderson had clearly changed from pacifist to activist in Key Largo.

Set in the Florida Keys, with a Prologue on a Spanish Civil War battlefield, Key Largo revolves around the adventures of yet another young reformer, King McCloud. King, an American, has talked a group of friends into going to Spain to help fight Franco. Now the idealism that brought them to the war fades in the harsh glare of combat. For King it vanishes completely as he learns, accidentally, that their group has to cover the retreat of other Loyalist forces who are even now negotiating an eventual surrender to Franco. The lives of King and his friends are to be wasted in a lost cause, although their efforts will spare others in the retreat. King encourages the others to join him in deserting the post and in trying to make their way through the darkness to safety behind the lines, but one, Victor d'Alcala, refuses. The rest follow Victor's lead. They know that even if their cause had been successful a Loyalist government would have been imperfect; nevertheless they believe their side to be the lesser of the two evils. By staying and dying they can prove to themselves that there is something in man that hates tyranny, loves justice, and makes man master of a godless universe.

King alone leaves the outpost. He later changes his mind and attempts to rejoin them, but he is cut off from his companions and alone escapes to America. There he reports to their families how the young men died. His last stop is on Key Largo at Victor d'Alcala's home. There, under the influence of Victor's father and sister, King comes to realize that Victor was right, that there is something in a man that makes him want to struggle against cruelty and arbitrary power. Given a second chance to stand up against tyranny in the form of a gangster, King does not run this time, even at the cost of his life.

The essence of Anderson's new view on war is in the Prologue, although the remainder of Key Largo gives him a chance to explain his philosophy more thoroughly than in any of his previous dramas. Key Largo is the mature Anderson. Whatever its weaknesses as theatre (it ran 105 performances, a modest success and the median of his productions in terms of length of run), it is the most thoughtful of all his dramas.

The playwright continued to support war as a legitimate part of the struggle against evil. In Candle in the Wind (1941) the struggle was against the advancing German forces in Europe. This highly romantic story of the efforts of an American actress to free her lover, a French Navy officer, from a Nazi prison depicts the actress's change from neutrality to active opposition to the Fascist tyranny. Clearly Anderson felt that America should follow her example. The play opened three weeks before Pearl Harbor.

Candle in the Wind is notable primarily for its preface. In it Anderson explained his change from pacifist to activist. He had shared the general mood in America after World War I that viewed all wars as foolish ways of resolving disputes. Non-violence was to be the approach of the future. Furthermore, there was no need to struggle against evil; both evil and good were temporary, and each in time turned into the other. The battle between good and evil was futile and unnecessary. Americans would refuse to fight it.⁹

Anderson went on to explain that, as he worked in the theatre watching some of his plays succeed while others failed, he found a new set of beliefs in the decade of the twenties which came to him partly as rules for playwriting. He discovered that a play must depict a struggle within a character between the forces of good and evil and that the good must win if the play is to be successful. An audience will not tolerate the victory of evil over good, nor will it accept a hero who refuses to fight the battle between good and evil. (Was Rudolph the final part of this lesson?)

Clearly Anderson's change of heart towards war is rooted in his recognition of the validity of the struggle between good and evil, a struggle which he had rejected during and after World War I. The language of the Candle Preface suggests that this recognition occurred in the twenties; however, it is not reflected in his plays until at least Valley Forge in 1934 and more certainly in Key Largo in 1939. It is likely that Anderson began the discovery process in the twenties, but that the discovery was not complete until some time in the next decade. Even allowing for a lag between theory and practice, it seems probable that Anderson changed from pacifist to activist in his playwriting in the middle to late thirties.

Anderson remained a staunch supporter of World War II throughout the conflict. The Eve of St. Mark (1942) warmly endorsed those who enlisted in the armed forces and gave their lives in the struggle. Storm Operation, in its brief 1944 appearance, looked with favor upon the Allied effort in North Africa. The radio play Your Navy (1942) and the one-act Letter to Jackie (1943) also reaffirmed his belief in the rightness of the Allied cause. Such support continued despite the loss of two nephews in military service.¹⁰

Anderson's post-World War II plays make only passing reference to the ethics of war and reflect no departure from his activist position. Joan of Arc, in Joan of Lorraine (1947), is applauded for her armed struggle to free the French from British rule. Henry VIII, in Anne of the Thousand Days (1948), reflects on the Christian's dilemma regarding war:

Withdraw your guards,
make no wars,
strike no man down who strikes you,
and how long will you be there, you or your nation?(11)

For a more definitive statement of the playwright's post-war position there is the 1948 letter in the New York Times referred to earlier. It is evident that Anderson would go to great lengths to oppose the Russians.

In November, 1947, five months before the Times letter, Maxwell Anderson visited Greece. The trip was in connection with an Athens' production of Joan of Lorraine. While in Greece he turned journalist once again, talking with a wide range of people in that country. He cabled his observations to the New York Herald-Tribune, which printed two of his reports on the conflict between the Communist-led guerrillas in the north and the elected government in Athens.¹² Anderson clearly felt that the Athenian government deserved support. He admitted that the election had been marked by irregularities and that the government was corrupt, but he believed that it was more legitimate and offered more freedom to its citizens than would any regime backed by the Communists. To prevent Communism's forceful expansion in Greece and elsewhere, he was willing as his Times letter indicated, to risk war with Russia, which he felt was waging war on Greece through its support of the guerrillas.¹³

The plays of Anderson's final decade do not address the subject of war although they often touch on the matter of individual freedom. Lost in the Stars (1949) was an eloquent cry against racial tyranny. Barefoot in Athens (1951) showed the darker side of Athenian democracy in the death of Socrates. Bad Seed (1954), the least philosophical (and most popular) of all his plays, underscored melodramatically the durability of evil. The Golden Six (1958), his last play, reminded his countrymen that the danger of tyranny was ever present, even for a free people. But nothing more is said about war, preventive or otherwise.

Years earlier, Pablo Montoya in Night Over Taos (1932) and Judge Gaunt in Winterset (1934) had cautioned the young reformers in each play to beware of old men. The young alone love truth and justice, they said, while old men are savage, violent, and often mad in their devotion to a cause.¹⁴ It would be easy to describe Anderson's progress from pacifism to activism as an example of the changes which Montoya and the Judge warned age brings. But Anderson's change had a solid philosophical basis, and he accompanied it with no illusions about the governments that he supported in America or elsewhere. He did not divide the world into simple categories of the good and the bad; as he pointed out in Barefoot, even democracies can be unjust. Yet Anderson felt that the democratic process was more likely than any other form of government to give the human drive towards truth and goodness a chance to express itself. So he argued for the use of force, if necessary, to preserve democracy and allow the progress of the race to continue.

Notes

1. Vincent Wall, “Maxwell Anderson: The Last Anarchist,” Sewanee Review 49 (July-Sept., 1941), 339-69.

2. Robert P. Wilkins, “Editor's Notes,” North Dakota Quarterly 38 (Winter 1970), 4.

3. From a typescript of an oral interview with Anderson conducted by Louis M. Starr, Oral History Office, Columbia University, May 10, 1956, reprinted in Laurence G. Avery, ed., Dramatist in America: Letters of Maxwell Anderson, 1912-1958 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 306.

4. Alfred E. Shivers, Maxwell Anderson (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976), 25.

5. Ibid.

6. Maxwell Anderson, Valley Forge (Washington: Anderson House, 1934), 163.

7. Maxwell Anderson, High Tor (Washington: Anderson House, 1937), 128.

8. Maxwell Anderson, Knickerbocker Holiday: A Musical Comedy in Two Acts (Washington: Anderson House, 1938), 99.

9. Maxwell Anderson, Preface to Candle in the Wind (Washington: Anderson House, 1941), v.

10. Avery, Dramatist, 116, 188-89.

11. Maxwell Anderson, Anne of the Thousand Days (New York: William Sloane Associates, Inc., 1948), 73. By permission of William Morrow and Company, Inc.

12. Avery, ed., Dramatist, 218-21.

13. New York Times, March 8, 1948, 22.

14. Maxwell Anderson, Night Over Taos (New York: Samuel French, 1932), 107, and Winterset in Eleven Verse Plays, 1929-1939 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1940), 93.