In between the personae dramatis and text of their published play State of the Union, the playwrights Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse inserted a brief note to guide future adaptations or productions of their work. This note conveys what turned out to be a justifiable fear while also expressing, in a secondary context, a misplaced confidence. The note opens with a bare statement: “The political comment in this play reflects the issues of the year 1946.” (The play was, in fact, first produced in the final months of 1945.) It ends with the demand that anyone rewriting the lines must also include a “program note” “absolving Mr. Lindsay and Mr. Crouse of any responsibility for the political implications contained in the revised version.” In between the statement and the caveat, the authors temper their understandable apprehension that their very particular political vision could be transformed by the smallest tampering with a confidence that the fundamental narrative and dramatic structure of the play remain immune to such appropriation: “This [rewriting of lines] would in no way affect the structure of the play or qualify its basic story.”Footnote 1 A mere two years – the play was adapted into a film released in April of 1948 – would prove that the play's political vision would be less dependent on its dramatic structure than it would on a subtle but important revision of individual lines and settings. The film version carefully denudes the play of its immediate postwar brand of internationalism with small deletions; just as importantly, however, it carries over the “basic story” of the play in such a way as to reconcile the play to a new version of internationalism that gives the film – despite the survival of most lines and its faithful retention of its three-act structure – entirely different political implications on the relationship between America's role in the world and its internal political culture.
This remarkably successful ideological appropriation cannot, however, be attributed merely to the adaptive skills of the director, Frank Capra, and the screenwriters, Myles Connolly and Anthony Veiller, both working within a profession increasingly under pressure from government and civic institutions suspicious of Hollywood's loyalty in an emerging Cold War culture.Footnote 2 Their walking the line between fidelity and rewriting would itself not have been possible if the nation's broader universe of discourse had not been involved in some appropriative sleight of hand of its own. As Linda Hutcheon points out in her Theory of Adaptation, the inevitable changes that any act of adaptation brings about do not always depend on many intervening years: “Time, often very short stretches of it, can change the context even within the same place and culture.”Footnote 3 The adaptation of the play State of the Union into a film scarcely two years after its initial production offers a particularly vivid confirmation of Hutcheon's point. The very brief period of time involved here was also a period that saw a dramatic shift in the nation's foreign policy. Especially after the events in 1947 that made the formation of a permanently hostile relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union seem inevitable, this shift put a special kind of pressure on a culture moving toward a new definition of internationalism. There was no time to develop an entirely new political imaginary that could serve as a rhetorical bedrock for the bilateral global struggle: the terms of a recent internationalism, more gradually developed from 1941 to 1945, needed to be taken over for a purpose so new that it in fact reversed most of the implications of the original rhetorical construct. The cultural work required for this ideological and rhetorical appropriation was furiously performed in the universe of discourse around the screenwriter and director as they took Crouse's and Lindsay's text as their own; indeed, the film must be seen as part of that work, as a contribution to the national project to put postwar idealism to the service of Cold War logic. The adaptation of play to film was part of a broader cultural adaptation of the terms by which the nation could imagine support for and dissent from the necessity of a global struggle with players and pathologies detailed and fleshed out in an earlier period.
The play and the film tell the same story: the idealistic industrialist Grant Matthews is recruited by a faction within the Republican Party to run for the presidential nomination. The faction's priority is victory at any cost; Grant's priority is ending the divisions and suspicions that have emerged in the nation – between business and labor, between competing ethnic groups – since the waning of wartime unity. Grant's wife Mary prods him to campaign through an honest promotion of his true principles, while the faction urges him to pander and dissemble. This dynamic is complicated by the fact that, in campaigning as a happily married couple, Grant and Mary are hiding from the public their partial estrangement, itself caused by Grant's likely affair with one of the leaders of the faction, the newspaper publisher Kay Thorndyke. At the level of plot, there are only the faintest shades of difference between the two works; it is only in dialogue and setting that the two texts diverge at key moments. In the case of State of the Union, then, Hutcheon's principle that brief passages of time can radically change the context for an adaptation encompasses the further principle that relatively minor changes in text and production may carry the weight of that shift and its possibly enormous cultural consequences. The play continued to be performed regularly up until the year (1947) when the film began production – appropriately the same year, as Stephen J. Whitfield points out, when “the movie industry was conscripted into the Cold War.”Footnote 4 Even when overlapping in time, however, these two texts were already serving different temporal masters in the rapidly changing ideological environment of 1945–48.
Despite this gulf, the cultural work of the adaptation process for State of the Union should be measured not in its gestures of divergence but in its marks of continuity. Only with these marks clearly in view could the film make the new Cold War internationalism seem the legitimate heir of the more pacifistic internationalism of the immediate postwar era. The mere association of the director Frank Capra with the film seemed to give it a claim to that lineage. The historian Todd Bennett's recent study of Hollywood's cooperation with the nation's war aims of the early 1940s shows how Capra was pivotal in the film industry's campaign to promote a united-front internationalism that included sympathetic treatments of the Soviet Union.Footnote 5 The two-year production and reception history of the play also contributed to the illusion of continuity that Capra's participation fostered. The play was almost universally received as a tribute to the recently deceased dark-horse presidential candidate and paragon of bipartisan internationalism who was the model for the character of Grant: Wendell Willkie. The minor revisions made to the play over 1946 and 1947 tended to be seen as an attempt to loosen this particular association with a view to renewing the play's currency.Footnote 6 The public, then, had become accustomed to hearing of changes to the play as merely a matter of adjusting immediate topical references – with the assumption, reflected in the playwrights' note, that its universal message would remain unchanged in any superficially new environment. In this way, the very resilience under new conditions of the text of the play as the basis for the film seemed to promise that the one-world message of the original would be left untouched.
The casting of the film could only reinforce this impression that through adaptation the play was coming into its own. Partly by accident, the perennial film couple of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn ended up cast as the leads in the film.Footnote 7 This pair's earlier films, even the recent Western The Sea of Grass, tended to represent the nation as torn by the conflicting instincts to pursue selfish interests and to foster the common good – with Hepburn often playing the role of the thwarted proponent of unity and equal treatment for all. Most striking in this oeuvre was the wartime antifascist film Keeper of the Flame, where Hepburn's character in the end exposes her dead husband's plan to foment group hatreds in the nation as part of a conspiracy to subvert democracy. What Keeper of the Flame does implicitly, both the play and the film State of the Union do explicitly: hinge an effective foreign policy on a form of home-front unity whose survival depends on unmasking its domestic enemies. More significant even than the re-pairing of the famous couple was the less last-minute casting of Tracy alone. He had recently performed the lead role in a postwar drama that was at times coupled with the play State of the Union in reviews, partly because his character was also taken as a fictionalized Wendell Willkie: John Sherwood's The Rugged Path.Footnote 8 This play told the story of a principled journalist who becomes a martyr to Soviet-sympathetic internationalism when he is victimized by a reactionary editor. All of these cultural cues surrounding the production of the film State of the Union seemed to promise that it would keep the ideological commitments of Crouse and Lindsay's play. As a result, a new Cold War version of internationalism could poach off its immediate postwar predecessor freely enough to obscure the subtle changes that, if more blatant, would belie the continuity between the two texts and the two worldviews.
The film, then, could remove with impunity the play's frequent satirical references to the survival of a nationalistic pre-Pearl Harbor form of isolationism. While the practical reasons for such excisions are numerous, their ideological effect is nevertheless clear: they make the film compatible with the attempts of the broader political culture to retain the stigma attached to isolationism while overthrowing and reversing the immediate postwar basis for warnings against a revival of that enduring American belief. No longer tethered to particular policy positions, as it is in the play, isolationism roams free in the film's world as a kind of virus that threatens to disqualify the individual and the body politic from reflecting America in its ideal form back to the world. The play, to be sure, is the source for assigning this national burden to the characters' private lives, but the film tightens the bond between personal negotiations and the world-historical role of America in order to bring its implications in line with Cold War necessities. Despite its formal fidelity to the “original,” then, the film's true fidelity is to the very shift that would hollow out and then appropriate for new purposes the play's vision of international cooperation.
I
During the final years of the war and immediately after the victory, the danger of America reverting to isolationism was generally believed to have one particular dire consequence: an end to the cooperation among the wartime Allies that had so successfully won the war and could be expected, if other tendencies did not take over, to re-create this success by building a new world no longer subject to the forces that had brought about that war. As the historian William Carleton has explained, from 1945 to 1947 “Americans clung to the concept of world peace and security through international cooperation.”Footnote 9 Indeed, in the book appropriately entitled One World, which fleshed out his internationalism shortly before his death, Wendell Willkie called for building such ties of cooperation after the war specifically with the Soviet Union. Many Americans hoped that a national consensus in support of this project, forged in the horrors of war, had finally subdued the still latent reactionary forces of isolationism in both parties. A positive sign was the conversion of leading Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg to Rooseveltian internationalism: “our present fraternity of war [must] become a new fraternity of peace.”Footnote 10 The fear remained, however, that the isolationist instinct would reemerge in the body politic once the artificial consensus of war had come to an end.
The historian Robert Messer has usefully defined the Cold War as a kind of waning of a postwar consensus: “As an essentially nonevent – the failure of the United States and the Soviet Union to continue their wartime alliance into the postwar era – the cold war is by definition an abstraction, a subjective process of changed perceptions, expectations, goals, and means.”Footnote 11 This gradual decline allowed for the traditional associations of isolationism to retain their use for a new purpose. In this transitional period, the preexisting critique of a short-sighted American insularity threatening to reverse the accomplishments of the Allies' cooperation could remain a general cudgel to be wielded against Republicans even while it increasingly trained its sights on a recent left-wing opponent of President Truman's foreign policy, Henry Wallace. Wallace, Roosevelt's former vice-president and Truman's commerce secretary, had in September of 1946 in effect broken with the administration by giving a speech warning of a needless and perilous policy of hostility toward the Soviet Union. In a statement that is perfectly in keeping with the play's fear that old reactionary forces within the nation will propel former allies into hostility, Wallace asserted, “We must not let our Russian policy be guided or influenced by those inside or outside the United States who want war with Russia.”Footnote 12 Despite President Truman's initial wavering in his eventual decision to condemn Wallace, the entire political culture immediately saw Wallace's speech as a challenge to the administration's policy.
The historian John Fousek has shown how placing Wallace's views outside the boundaries of permissible discourse was both illustrative of and conducive to the marginalization of dissent in the late 1940s.Footnote 13 As a socialist paper predicted when describing the rhetorical imperative that Wallace's stance would demand, “The development of the cold war against Russia can be depended upon for the supplying of new weapons against Wallace's ‘isolationism.’”Footnote 14 Indeed, the inchoate Cold War culture faced a very pressing task: how could Wallace's dissent be tarred with the brush of a discredited isolationism, when Wallace's principles and rhetoric seemed antithetical to the traditional anticommunist and nationalist flavor of the most recent and familiar iteration of that movement? To accomplish that tricky task, the conservative columnist David Lawrence went deeper into the past to make Wallace, whatever his principles, seem narrow-minded. Conflating Wallace's opposition to Truman's hostile stance toward the Soviets with earlier American retreats from the rest of the world became easy once isolationism was abstracted from the policy of international cooperation and came to be seen as a “habit” or “sentiment”: Wallace “is appealing to the same kind of isolationist sentiment … that Republicans did after World War I.”Footnote 15 While not at all concerned with Wallace himself, the film adaptation of the play takes advantage of this general charge that isolationism rested on the delusion that America could retain its integrity by insulating itself from the rest of the world.
State of the Union, in both its versions, views these matters of foreign policy largely through their reflections and refractions in the internal political relations within the nation. The model of redemption whereby the peace of the world could be ensured by the overcoming of divisions within America came from internationalist war rhetoric, but, despite the loyalty still shown to it by dissenters such as Wallace, could be borrowed by the developing Cold War consensus for a new purpose. Indeed, this formula for redemption is central to the film's appropriation of the play's more straightforward demand that a narrow parochialism within America not endanger a model of international cooperation: the play imagines politicians taking advantage of divisions in America at the cost of the world government that demands a farsighted sense of international purpose from its most important world player; the film imagines politicians brewing dissension within America in such a way as to hinder offering a promising democratic challenge to totalitarianism.
II
Both the play and the film construct their political vision upon a system of nested analogies that invest the most private interpersonal relations with international significance. Girding this system of analogies is the central pun that governs all the action in the drama: the state of the marriage between Grant and Mary ultimately will determine the health of the national Union. The film and play are equally explicit on this matter: Grant's returning to true commitment in his marriage both depends on and will result in his restoring integrity to the nation by refusing the seductions of the political class that seeks to make him an instrument of corruption. As the Capra critic Bill Mistichelli points out, Grant's “own political life and the way he conducts it cannot … be separated ultimately from the intimacy of his marriage.”Footnote 16 Crafty compromise (“playing both sides against the middle”) threatens at once Grant's personal life and his political integrity. The mediating figure linking those two realms is the woman with whom Grant betrays both Mary and the nation, the newspaper owner Kay Thorndyke. Kay demands not sexual fidelity from Grant but fidelity to the plot of which, especially in the film, she is the guiding intelligence: to take advantage of Grant's image of plainspoken honesty to elect an administration through which she can realize her ambitions and exact various kinds of revenge on her enemies. It is not only in the plot, however, that the political economies of State of the Union obey the logic of personal intimacy.
The central paradox of both the play and the film is that the spirit of isolationism, which held that America could stand apart from the corruptions of the wider world, in fact seeks to re-create European divisions within America and in the process not only destroy what makes America exceptional but also doom it to endless war abroad. Mary's joke in both versions that a senator about to be deprived of a roommate in Conover's hotel was an isolationist and therefore “ought to be isolated” (23) reflects how State of the Union attributes personal qualities of self-defeating resentment to those who wish a completely independent and cautious American foreign policy. Hence the two versions give approximately equal weight to the danger of ethnic and class politics that threaten to return America to the very traditional European evils the founding of the nation was meant to renounce – what Willkie in One World had called “a multitude of individual nationalisms, with the consequent manipulations of power politics.”Footnote 17 Such reversions become heavily implicated in a failure of national purpose that would make a coherent national foreign policy – either the international cooperation celebrated in the play or the Cold War solidarity celebrated in the film – impossible. In both the play and the film, the illusion of an unencumbered American independence is fed by a political class that stirs up the ancient grudges of the Old World, what columnist Thomas L. Stokes called “old instincts in the blood going back through the centuries,” in order to win party control.Footnote 18 The play's contention that this strategy relies specifically on recharging old wartime resentments of America's intervention on the side of the Allies is close to absent in the film. The film's call for a kind of unity that transcends group loyalties is more idealized and abstract than the play's. But in both versions the ideal must struggle for survival within contested spaces that give all three acts their structure.
Each act is set in a domestic space appropriated for the purpose of political maneuvering, and in each Mary must struggle to restore that space to its authentic purpose of rebuilding Grant's integrity from material taken from the first years of their marriage. The ambiguity that makes Grant's “tour” with Mary both a sham staged for public consumption and a genuine attempt at reconciliation, both a promising return to the republic's founding principles in the form of the couple's original honeymoon journey and a cynical act of self-promotion disguised in folksy democratic and family garb, charges those spaces with their own ambiguity. Mary and the politicos compete to resolve that ambiguity for their own purposes. In both play and film, those spaces in the first and second acts are hotels – Conover's unofficial Washington hotel (technically his private residence) that he uses for political networking in Act One and a Detroit hotel room briefly housing Grant and Mary in Act Two. Mary's attempts to make those spaces authentically domestic cannot be distinguished from her mission to redeem Grant politically by promoting his organic growth.
Mary's program of gradual organic growth in particular explains the domestic dynamics of the second act. In his hotel room, Grant frantically tries to ward off various interest groups while he plans, with Mary's encouragement and Conover's opposition, to follow up on a provocative speech in Wichita with an equally blunt speech urging business to abandon selfish profiteering for a more patriotic model of success. In both the play and the film, the competing pressures buffeting Grant in the Detroit hotel room are comically interwoven with his often baffled attempts to eat the hotel meal sent up for him. This pattern in the action gains its significance from the identification of Mary as Grant's nurturer – not just of his body but of his political conscience. Thus in the film Kay attributes Grant's having recklessly antagonized labor union leaders to his wife's domestic care: “It's that woman … She's been feeding him that ‘to-your-own-self-be-true’ diet.” In Act Two, Mary struggles to keep him on that diet while she guards his food from the others' attempts to snatch it. Her ally in the film on both fronts is the waiter Emile, who presses the food upon Grant while he urges him to keep up the truth-telling in his impending Detroit speech. The question the second act raises is whether Grant can be politically nourished by his otherwise merely formal reconciliation with his wife.
The play suggests that the last-minute secret intervention of Kay in Detroit returns the spaces in which Grant must operate to an even more deadening rigidity, formality, and expediency than had hung over Conover's hotel. The third act of the play is set in the Matthews's private residence on the day, coincidentally, of the couple's wedding anniversary. The spaces within that residence have, even before the action begins, been entirely taken over by the need to line up the political power players and interest groups that Grant needs to win the nomination. Having been usurped in her role as domestic supervisor, Mary facetiously alludes to the politicos' control over the seating of guests as a necessity brought on by Grant's capitulation in Detroit, as if his apostasy could be reduced to the innocent, but passing, flirtations of a pre-adolescent party: “Well, I thought that after what you didn't say about profits and high prices in Detroit, you and Sam might want to hold hands under the table” (67). Here the erotic and marital reconnection on which the play had always hinged Grant's return to integrity has been commandeered by Grant's need to devote his affectionate energies to his ambitions. This kind of intimate connection implies a polity that, while claiming to base its insularity on patriotism, expresses love of nation only in the passionate pursuit of divisive group interests that reduce each citizen to an “unpatriotic, selfish, grasping bastard” (94). Charged with these international implications, the strategic seating arrangements of the party break up when Grant abandons the scheme of sublimating his principles to the desires of an America carefully carved up and structured around fixed patterns of power and influence. When Grant rededicates himself to the cause of international cooperation, he simultaneously abandons the sham tour arranged by his party bosses and plans an authentic reenactment of their honeymoon tour. “Doing it all over again” with his wife promises a new order through which the politicos' manipulation of the people's selfishness will be relegated to a dead past. This republican return to origins finally dissolves forever the allocated spaces of Conover's hotel and restores the couple's affectionate energies to the nation and to the world. No wonder an inspired Spike jokingly asks Grant, “Will you marry me?” (94). Despite the breadth of this resolution, the film abandons it. The film offers a different mechanism for restoring republican space, and that mechanism is heavily implicated in Cold War constructions.
III
Many of the scenes added in the film State of the Union do little more than offer a blatant physical equivalent to the choice Grant faces between transcendence and degradation. Most prominent of these are the two airplane scenes that frame the pivotal decision Grant makes in Detroit. In them, the film quite schematically reflects first Grant's attempt at transcendence through daredevilry and then, after the Detroit speech, his cowardly reduction of the heavens to a mere pathway toward his final ambition (equivalent to the “Destination White House” that Kay later coyly whispers to him). The scene that is so key to the ideological mutation of the film shares some of the airplane scenes' metaphoric dualities: it too depicts an attempt to integrate work and play, high flight and groundedness, sweeping vision and domestic nurturing. Unlike the airplane scenes, however, it fundamentally changes Mary's ideological and narratological role.
The scene is the first to be set in the Matthews's home. Spike has come to persuade Mary to invite Kay to the radio broadcast in order to quash the rumors of an affair between her and Grant. What gives the scene its ideological charge is also what delays Spike in his mission: Mary is supervising her children's project of collecting aid packages to Europe, which include not only food and clothing (even the clothes of the butler, who emerges shirtless) but also amenities of the kind Spike eventually hands over, comic books. Spike's cooperation seems to bolster Mary's trust in him, and the very frank discussion of the evils of the political system that follows does not prevent Mary from, at the final moment, agreeing to do her part by feigning peace with Kay. Spike's successful ambassadorial mission thus stands in uneasy juxtaposition to the children's wholly unselfish attempts to act as American emissaries serving the cause of human dignity and peace in Europe.
Such projects to aid a war-battered Europe had, of course, been common since the Allied victory; they had particular resonance by early 1948 thanks to the systematization of the government efforts on that front in the Marshall Plan. The Truman administration and its allies in both parties openly promoted the plan as both the most humanitarian and the most effective way to end further communist encroachments in Europe (the plan was finalized shortly after the decision to send military aid to Greek and Turkey to crush pro-Soviet movements there). In State of the Union, this common assumption that hunger and deprivation were communism's most loyal allies had come out in the second act of both play and film when Spike, thwarted in his attempts to steal Grant's food, had quipped, “Okay, but that's how you make Communists.” This joke highlights that the details of the Marshall plan are less important to the film than how the practice of European aid had come to reconcile for the nation what would otherwise be seen as conflicting approaches to the European crisis.
Although, at the level of official policy, the Marshall Plan was openly presented as the other side of the Truman Doctrine coin, at the level of discourse the two facets of Truman's Cold War policy stood in an ambiguous and contradictory relationship with each other. At times it seemed as if aid to Europe, however much it was meant to serve realpolitik purposes, offered a kind of relief from the realpolitik necessities that inevitably raised anxieties in a nation accustomed to hearing promises of postwar comity. John Fousek has pointed out that many Americans alarmed by Truman's confrontational policies in relation to the Soviets were supportive of the Marshall Plan as a “positive, peaceful alternative.”Footnote 19 Even those, however, who were entirely in line with all of Truman's program represented the Marshall Plan as, yet again, a rebuff to the isolationism whose twin heads were raised in Republican nationalism and Wallace-like appeasement. Thus many national columnists, Thomas L. Stokes in particular, rebuked those Republicans who hesitated to commit to massive aid to Europe when the communist bogey was not directly involved, as it had been in the question of military aid to Greece. “Is there the suspicion of nationalism and isolationism in such an attitude?” Stokes asked rhetorically. Stokes made this charge almost in the same breath that he celebrated the plan of aid as the only real defence against the Soviet menace.Footnote 20 Clearly, the Marshall Plan allowed a newly emergent Cold War culture to recruit the idealistic call for one-world mutual security and mutual prosperity into an all-consuming world campaign against communism. Apart from this particular rhetorical opportunity presented by the program, the actual practice of European aid involved in the Marshall Plan also interpellated the individual citizen as an agent of the plan's goals, largely in the spirit of that older one-world idealism. President Truman cast the people's obligations in these terms, and many others took up the call.
The columnist Drew Pearson, so well known that he is jokingly compared to Spike in both the play and the film, explicitly represented aid to Europe as a symbolic domestic practice: through it, American citizens would open up new modes of cooperation and in the process shield themselves from the danger of a postwar reversion to insularity. In his columns on a citizen movement to aid Europe, we see individual efforts similar to Mary's represented with the same combination of one-world idealism and Cold War triumphalism examined earlier: the Special Friendship Train is both a “spontaneous movement toward world brotherhood and friendship” and a brilliant counter to the “Communist desperation to stage revolution while stomachs are still empty.” But in Pearson's columns a vision of national unity through individual emancipation also emerges from the utopian descriptions. The attempts at brotherhood made by the charity blend together the individual energies of diverse citizens, dissolving regional identities and narrow group interests. The Friendship Train does its work as much in “the heart of the Chicago Tribune's isolationist area” as in major Eastern cities. The movement binds the nation together by tapping the humanitarian instincts of its citizens behind the backs of the politicians who depend for their power on breeding various divisions. The charity can be assigned the task of “dramatiz[ing] the story of American generosity” only because the stage of America itself has been redesigned before any European eats a morsel of food.Footnote 21
In this way, individual efforts to aid Europe presupposed the version of American solidarity and unselfishness that in State of the Union Mary hopes Grant will continue at once to espouse in his speeches and to embody in his integrity. In the added scene, the film puts the corrupt alternative directly up against this utopian dream: Mary continues to supervise the children's efforts while Spike lays out for her a vision of America torn apart and thrust into its worst instincts by the party operatives now controlling her husband. Since Spike openly seeks Mary's cooperation with that gang, she is given a double charge of responsibility – one her character does not bear in the play – for the kind of international cooperation that will contain world communism only if it oversees a new kind of patriotic fusion of energies at home.
The added scene also relocates, in various senses of the word, Mary's role as nurturer of a wholesome body politic. Grant is no longer necessary as agent or vessel for Mary's world mission; her own choices begin to determine how the internal workings of the American political system will shape, both causally and analogically, the freedom of the world. It is as if the film's Mary had intervened in the play's trajectory toward a politically stultified distribution of nurturing resources by reconciling the careful apportioning with the free circulation of those resources: her packages are systematically organized and then freely sent out to the anonymous needy who can offer no immediate political return for the benefit. However, Mary's capitulation to Spike's pressure in the same scene exposes the danger lurking in her new role: she herself could become a leading agent in the nation's further corruption. Allowing the same domestic space that she had seemed to consecrate to selfless world aid to be appropriated for politically expedient deception is the first step in this downward trajectory. Indeed, Mary gives up her very home in cooperating with campaign stagecraft: in the third act the house is partitioned and reorganized for the radio broadcast. The makeshift parlor then becomes a quite literal “back room” where Mary first witnesses, then satirizes, and then rails against the newly visible springs of her husband's divisive campaign. Immediately after her tirade, she receives from Spike what is given to her by Conover in the play: a personal motive for cooperating with Grant's scheme to win the White House by gulling the people. In that motive lies the temptation for Mary to insert herself into the film's nested analogies by joining a competition that prefigures the world disunity that her family Marshall Plan had meant to forestall.
IV
In her momentary apostasy, Mary accedes to the logic that the White House can become a citadel of virtue that will protect the nation from its enemies without requiring any further engagement with the outside world, no matter what means are used to build that supposed refuge from corruption. In both the play and the film, Mary is persuaded to suppress her objections to ugly politicking on the grounds that in trying to defeat Grant's pursuit of the nomination she is playing Kay's game: the White House is the one place that Kay cannot get at him. In the play, in making this case, Conover urges her to be a “little selfish, and a little intelligent” (85). She has the chance to become “the First Lady – in more ways than one.” Conover thus invites her to participate in the “power politics” whose full baleful blossoming on the international stage is anticipated in the demands made on Grant, now with the cooperation of Mary, by his ruthless advisers. Her love of Grant, once the key to his redemption, thus becomes implicated in the political scheming that will ultimately plunge the world into war.
Both in its setting and in its principals, the film pairs Mary's signing on to this devil's bargain with the earlier added scene of European aid. In the role of supplicant, Conover is replaced with the earlier scene's Spike; more significantly, Spike's last-minute appeal takes place in the backyard where the children had been preparing the packages to Europe. The significance of this spatial echo lies in the assumptions Mary concedes to Spike in her conversion: fundamentally, she accepts his view of the nation's spaces as the repository of scrupulously guarded and horded values that had been won in a zero-sum competition whose outcome then organizes the world in a fixed allocation of places and positions. The alternative is leaving Grant vulnerable to Kay's pursuit, out, in Spike's telling phrase, “where the hunting is open.”
The manipulation of Mary runs parallel to the conduct of the political campaign. Spike's plea glosses over the fact that Kay had all along wanted to include Mary and Grant's marriage in the system of competition and resentment by which she means to gain political power: “I want her fighting for him!” A Mary whose goals have been thus fired up by jealousy is no less deluded than the hapless ethnic and economic groups the campaign has inflamed. In both cases, the manipulated party's enlightened self-interest (to use a phrase that Conover invokes to make his similar case to Mary's in the play) cannot conceivably be served in a White House scarred in advance by the national dissension and bitterness that gave its occupant place there. Once she is spurred toward the national home by ignoble passions, Mary's marriage will carry that taint into the most intimate workings of the place. Grant as such an occupant will always belong to Kay (as she assures him when he frets about treating her like a cad). Indeed, Mary's plan symbolically brings to an end her original domestic mission: to win loyalty to her cause by an organic development that closes off the possibility of a collapse into a rigid demarcation of spaces. That had been her modus operandi in the Detroit hotel room, and she had extended the reach of that method to Europe in her aid campaign. Now seeing her only chance as a withdrawal back into a kind of Fortress America, like the isolationists Mary reverts to a selfish and ultimately self-defeating faith that in insulation lies true sovereignty. Growth, according to this faith, merely offers the material by which to feather one's nest. Were she to carry out her plan, Mary would be committing on a grander scale the desiccation that, in one of her drunken barbs, she had accused Grant's ally in the farm interest of planning: “making hay in the capital lobby.”
This prostitution of the organic implicit in Mary's new scheme to enter the political world's system of competition by setting up house with Grant comports with the prostitution of Mary's present home along lines that seem to make the film's final act the demonic inversion of her domestically fostered program of aid to Europe. The private gesture of a united nurturing community degrades as it makes its way toward the mummeries of public performance: the radio broadcaster shilling for Grant over the air speaks of the candidate as “of the earth and of the people”; the Matthews children enter dolled up in costumey pseudo-European garb that inverts the butler's self-sacrificing stripping down in the earlier scene; Mary ingratiates herself to her radio audience, before Grant intervenes, with a cute breakfast story about her husband's selfishness on trivial domestic matters. All of these mockeries of Mary's sacrificed ideals prove that there is no room for a distinct realm of integrity in the campaign apart from its representations. They thus puncture Grant's illusion that Mary will redeem in the White House the corruptions attendant on his efforts to occupy it (“Mary! Not you”). Under that shock, he gives his climactic speech; significantly, it begins not with an account of his own wrongdoing or of the corrupt American political system, but with a statement on how America's new role in the world will fail if American abundance does not unlock the mystery of a kind of growth that need not involve cannibalization and stake-claiming.
Indeed, given Mary's capitulation to mechanical cultural reproduction, it is particularly telling that Grant finds in the promise of internal organic growth the nation's chance to pose a coherent countermodel to the world. If a foreign nation is not shown that promise in action, no one could blame it for bargaining away its freedoms:
And I should have said that this country has just begun to grow. The secret to its plenty is freedom. And we have to share that secret and that plenty with the world, where people are promised bread for freedom by fascists and communists and given neither.
Here Grant provides the final key to the film's nested analogies. While it is quite distinct from the play's straighter line between jockeying for ethnic votes and eventual war abroad, it also goes beyond even the official claims made for the Marshall Plan, which rested on a similar assumption that only a desperately deprived people would turn against the American system. According to Grant, the “plenty” at home must be the result of the secret that can generate the only sustainable version of that boom. The benefits of a surplus will be lost if that surplus does not bear the trace of the dynamic principle that created it. To use the columnist Drew Pearson's terms, the story of American generosity cannot be “dramatized” simply in the act of giving; it must be performed at all levels and stages so that the American system breathes through its pores.
Grant's campaign had flouted that secret of growth by assuming that the voters could be appealed to only as ghostly heirs of Europeans rattled by the horrors of war. Interpellating a people already in chains, the campaign had reduced the wealthiest nation on earth to one organized in European-like “packs,” to use Grant's words, struggling with each other for a fixed number of resources. An America divided into selfish and segregated camps will be mirrored in the collapse of citizenry in Europe, where people will clutch at the last scraps remaining, once the secret of open and cooperative production has been hidden from them. If America delivers to Europe according to the logic of scarcity, only scarcity can result. The spatial demarcations that result from this division had become clear to him only when Mary herself envisages using the nation's ideal domestic sphere as a means by which to outmaneuver and exclude a hated rival. Spurred on by this final capitulation, Grant demands that the closed system of the nation's political parties be broken down – with the metaphorically suitable instruments of opening doors and smashing windows. More than a plea for bipartisanship – though the policy of cold war depended on bipartisanship – Grant makes a prophetic call for clearing out the ossified institutions and instrumentalities by which Americans expressed the deeper divisions that had built up the psychic blocks to united action. The organic metaphor, as it had done for centuries in the traditional republican paradigm, holds out the hope of a nation that does not permit internal systems of competition to define its capacities as a collectivity. The specter of a truly spontaneous rallying of the American people will not only facilitate aid but become itself the symbolic aid that Europe most sorely needs.
This is not, of course, the foreign-policy speech that the play's Grant had planned to give after the action onstage comes to an end. Yet, by the third act, the film had already tamed and absorbed that prospective speech from the play in the speech that Grant is persuaded not to give to the Detroit business audience, but outlines for Conover. As Soviet objections to the UN grew in the soil of various Cold War disputes, the world government that the film's Grant had planned to call for no longer rested on the assumption of permanent postwar cooperation among the victorious Allies. Indeed, the film's Grant tellingly endorses agencies of world government “with or without the Russians.” With this token support out of the way in the second act, Grant's final triumphant speech can subordinate world government to clean American politics. His final speech echoes the priority set by President Truman in his presidential address at the beginning of 1948: “The faith of our people has particular meaning at this time in history because of the unsettled and changing state of the world.”Footnote 22 Thomas Stokes described this presidential speech as expressing a “faith in a dynamic, expanding America,”Footnote 23 and it is through just such a vision that Grant promises to dissolve the internal obstacles to organic unity. The ultimate aim of that unity is to present a single face to the world. In restoring the faith of the people in a nation not sliced up by faction and interest and thus rendered impotent, the film's Grant points toward not world government but a victory in the Cold War.
What is most culturally telling about the adaptation of the play State of the Union is not how much of the original was changed but how much was left unchanged, not how the shift to an entirely different ground on relations with the Soviets demanded an entirely new story but how easily the play's story could be adjusted to that ideological necessity. That the one-world rhetoric of the play could be so smoothly incorporated into Grant's call for a permanent ideological struggle with communism speaks volumes about how the nation's dominant discourse attuned itself to the relatively sudden shift into a cold war – not by abandoning an earlier construct for one of its own, nor by rehabilitating a discredited isolationist discourse (though isolationism had indeed been associated with anticommunism), but by modifying, at times almost invisibly, the figures and associations of the prevailing model of international responsibility so that they could serve the new purpose. According to one such traditional trope, the nation carried a special responsibility to restore a pure domestic political system that could present a hopeful model and a united front to the world.
In the process of appropriating this demand, the nation's burgeoning Cold War discourse took advantage of the reality that a fully fledged critique of isolationism had survived, in all its potency, the shift to a new foreign policy. It is not surprising that such a critique could be hollowed out of its specific content in the same way the film excises the references to residual pro-Axis grudges within the United States. For the case against isolationism had never rested primarily on specific policies; isolationism had for years been seen as harboring within itself a fallacy about how to avoid corruption within the confines of the nation. To retain an internal political culture true to its founding principles, America must express those principles abroad. The taint of insularity could survive a variety of shifts in circumstances. When a politician so fully associated with the internationalism of the war and immediate postwar years as Henry Wallace could be tarred with the isolationist brush, it begins to appear that almost any position could fall under that anathema. Capra's film contributes to the cultural work that broadened further the already wide perimeters of the epithet and hence helped to consolidate a Cold War discourse that needed from the start to have various marks of legitimacy inscribed onto it. Already deemed legitimate were warnings against a pressing national danger: the reversion to an America closed off from the vital principles that must, as a precondition of their operation, extend to the rest of the world to survive. The Cold War becomes in the film State of the Union not an attitude of hostility to a foreign foe but a release from the internal evils that a political system bent on reenacting within its own borders the fallacies of isolationism would keep in place.
