May 10, 2006
Of Thee I Sing Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 05:30 PM EST In yesterday’s New York Sun (not available online), Will Friedwald writes: “Gershwin’s 1931 show ‘Of Thee I Sing,’ which will be revived by City Center Encores this week, is surprisingly prescient.” (He means “the Gershwins’ 1931 show” rather than “Gershwin’s 1931 show,” but let that pass; and for the record, the book is by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, who go unmentioned in Mr. Friedwald’s piece.) In support of this supposed prescience, he mentions the show’s “silly senators” and “a goofy, spoonerism-spouting president.” This is the sort of thing that critics say when inspiration fails them, which is most of the time. Portraying authority figures as buffoons is hardly unusual in drama, and since it’s a situation that often accords with real life (Warren Harding was in office less than a decade before the show was written, for example), it can hardly be called prescient. I could write a play about a senator who takes bribes, for example, or gets involved in a sex scandal, and the next time either of those very common things occurred, someone could revive it and say, “That Schwarz was a regular Nostradamus.” Mr. Friedwald probably reads the horoscopes in the paper and thinks, “Wow, it’s like this guy knows me.” I’m reminded of the time a couple of years ago when I was reading my college’s alumni magazine (yes, I know—my fault) and one student remarked on the timeliness of an ancient Greek play they were studying: “It’s about a king whose father was king and who is fighting a controversial war.” And I thought: Let’s see, many ancient plays were about kings, war was a popular topic, wars tend to be controversial since people die in them, and due to the hereditary principle, most kings’ fathers were also kings. The notion that this not exactly striking set of coincidences might somehow make the play more illuminating than reading the newspaper is the sort of ludicrous idea that only a college student could propound with a straight face. (Okay, or a college professor—or a critic.) But that’s not what I came here to talk about. In the same paragraph as the sentence quoted at the start of this item, Mr. Friedwald goes on to say that the dim-bulb President in the show “mangles familiar expressions, as when Roosevelt’s slogan, ‘prosperity is just around the corner,’ becomes ‘posterity is just around the corner.’” He then states in parentheses, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Encores throws in a reference to duck hunting or the ‘Decider.’” This illustrates the time-honored journalistic principle that if you are criticizing someone else for being stupid, you should check your own facts, grammar, and spelling extremely carefully. If he is referring to Vice-President Cheney’s shooting accident, the intended target there was quail, not ducks. That makes three mistakes in a single paragraph. (And by the way, the prescience of the show’s writers failed them when it came to their Vice President. The word “Throttlebottom,” named after the VP in “Of Thee I Sing,” has become shorthand for, as one dictionary puts it, “a harmless incompetent in public office.” Neither his friends nor most of his foes would describe the current Vice President that way.) Mr. Friedwald’s attribution of “prosperity is just around the corner” to Roosevelt is worse than simple sloppiness, because twice in the article he mentions that Of Thee I Sing opened in 1931. I’ll admit that I skipped over the mistake the first time I read it, but when I saw 1931 again, I thought: Wait a minute—FDR in 1931? In fact, the statement is usually attributed to Herbert Hoover, although, as Hugh Rawson and Margaret Minor write in the American Heritage Dictionary of American Quotations, there is no record of his saying it: “This was the popular distillation of various statements of assurance made by Hoover and others following the 1929 stock market crash. . . . Eventually the phrase became an ironic joke, used mockingly as a political attack phrase by the Democrats.” My point, which I seem to be approaching rather circuitously, is that if I were teaching American history, I would make my students memorize all the Presidents along with the dates they entered and left office. I know that memorization is out of fashion these days (I’ve written on this subject before; see this), and concentrating on Presidents can distort one’s understanding of American history. But to me, learning the presidential chronology is like learning the names of the elements when you’re studying chemistry, or learning conjugations and declensions when studying a language—it’s the basis on which you build everything else. When you’re familiar with American history and you hear that something happened on a certain date, the first thing you usually think of is who was President at the time. (This can be carried too far, like the other day, when I bought some items in a store and the register showed a total of $18.81, so I thought, “Ah, James Garfield!”) When you know who was in power, you have an idea of what the background for the event was, and you can make much better sense of the chronology. Without this framework, events and trends swim about in a haze. Then it’s much harder to place things in context, and the pursuit of pedantry becomes much more treacherous. P.S. Here’s the link if you want to see the show, by the way:
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