The Making of a Democratic Symbol: The Case of Socrates in North American Popular Media, 1941–1956
How and why have particular figures from Greek antiquity
occasionally become part of the modern popular vernacular?What is the role of
the iconic figure “as a means of transmission and reinvention” of the classical
past, “especially when whole texts are not directly known by most
audiences.”
[1] This
paper considers these questions by way of one exemplary case study, the
mobilizations of “
Socrates” for theatre and
television audiences in
North America in
the early 1950s. I argue that during this period of
acute political stress over issues of national security, Cold War orthodoxies,
and McCarthyism, creative artists developed distinctive interpretations of
Socrates as oblique contributions to the raging political controversies, and in
so doing helped inaugurate the widespread use of
Socrates as a popular symbol of the ideals of democracy.
My approach in this essay is to attend to the rich local contexts within which
writers selected the multivocal story of
Socrates and adapted its elements—philosophical gadfly, trial,
refusal to flee, acceptance of execution—to their own purposes. I start with an
account of the ways in which Socrates was appropriated in American popular
culture in the 1920s and
30s. Next I discuss
John
Steinbeck’s use of
Socrates
to develop the political content of his wartime propagandistic novel
The Moon is Down ( 1941). I
then turn to review the emergence of a wave of politicized uses and adaptations
of the
Socrates character in a variety of
popular media in the early Cold War period. At the center of this study is
a detailed examination of three sustained interpretations of
Socrates for theatre and television audiences
during the heyday of McCarthyism in U.S. politics:
Maxwell Anderson’s
Broadway play
Barefoot in Athens ( 1951),
Lister Sinclair’s
Socrates for the Jupiter Theatre in
Toronto ( 1952), and a CBS television dramatization of “The Death of
Socrates” on their celebrated show
You Are There with
Walter
Cronkite ( 1953). Each of these three original dramatic works
develops a different image of
Socrates and
makes a distinctive comment on McCarthyism. In conclusion, I observe that
academic interest in
Socrates exhibits a
remarkable measure of continuity with these works for general audiences. In
particular, in this period we find the start of a resurgence of scholarly
interest in the capacity of the ancient sources on
Socrates and Socratic philosophy to inform contemporary
democratic theory.
Examination of the “afterlife” of any iconic figure will be methodologically
challenging. The sheer volume of material that animates “
Socrates” makes it especially so in his case. In
this essay I rely on the conceptual vocabulary of the academic study of
“classical receptions” to order my investigations. Accordingly, I have tried to
be alert not only to context, but also to the fact that every modern “point of
reception” of the figure of
Socrates is a
refraction of the intertwined reception histories of multiple ancient “source
texts” by various authors, and of the shifting traditions of meaning that attend
the figure in specific genres of creative production and spheres of intellectual
activity, through time and across different cultural settings. The iconic figure
is an efficient, combinable, and affecting formal vehicle for the expression of
ideas. The precise content of the ideas it conveys is not fixed or even
necessarily persistent. Rather, each use in a new context activates and
highlights some of its condensed associated meanings and ignores or rejects
others. Each one grafts additional associations onto the figure. Deploying a
customized iconic figure can be a highly effective way to convey ideas. The
shifting meanings of the icon also influence perceptions of antiquity.
The Prevalence of Nonpartisan Resonances Before World War II
Four overlapping images dominate the reception history of
Socrates as an iconic figure: the
philosophical teacher/inquirer, the loyal democratic citizen, the victim of
injustice, and the practitioner of unconventional eroticism.
[2] The image most
familiar to early twentieth-century general audiences
in
America is that of the vigorous
questioner and quirky intellectual (though other associations also persist
outside the mainstream). This is evident in the history of appropriations of
Socrates across various spheres of
cultural production (e.g. fiction, journalism, education, art) in
America in this period. For example, in
1908 a mural depicting “The Discussion of Principles of Justice
by
Socrates” was commissioned and
installed in a courtroom in the new
Chicago Federal Building, without any comment on the
possible oddity of using a figure who was executed by order of a democratic
jury to decorate an American courtroom.
[3] In addition, the idea of the
“Socratic method” was used to support reforms in higher education at this
time.
[4] The
introduction of the case method of teaching into law schools also
popularized the idea of a “Socratic method” of learning and teaching.
[5] In the 1920s we also find
both serious and comic accounts of practices of examination in
mass-circulation magazines under the heading “Socratic dialogues.”
[6] In the early 1930s the pioneering journalist
Lincoln Steffens was referred to as a “modern
Socrates” on account of his
relentless efforts to expose corruption and “explode illusions” the public
had about government and certain industries.
[7] Another example is the “
Dr. Socrates” character in a popular crime
thriller serialized in the mainstream
Collier’s
Weekly and adapted into a film entitled
Dr. Socrates .
Dr. Socrates is
the nickname that a gangster gives to his intellectual,
Plato-reading hostage.
[8] All these items suggest that popular
audiences accepted
Socrates as an
exemplar of demanding intellectual inquiry and the search for truth, even
though they likely lacked any familiarity with the ancient sources
themselves.
[9]
Socrates did not in this period readily
symbolize specifically democratic ideals, nor was he used to sanction
partisan political views. That was
Pericles’ territory.
[10] For example, Supreme Court Justice
Louis D. Brandeis turned to
Pericles’ veneration of daring
speech (Thucydides 2:37–42), not Socratic practice, to work out his
reasoning in his concurring opinion in
Whitney vs. California , a landmark free speech case ( 1927).
Brandeis’s opinion introduced into
U.S. jurisprudence the idea that courageous speech is necessary for the
practice of self-government.
[11] Explicitly drawing on
Alfred
Zimmern’s reading of the Funeral Oration in his highly
influential
The Greek Commonwealth ( 1911),
Brandeis argued that
bold speech and civic courage are essential for the health of democratic
government, and that American political life must encourage the development
of such personal character traits among citizens.
Zimmern’s text barely mentions
Socrates, and neither does
Brandeis’s opinion. Similarly, in the mid-1930s it was possible for a celebrated
American dramatist nearly to ignore
Socrates altogether in a play explicitly about democratic
life and set in Greek antiquity.
Robert
Sherwood’s
Akropolis (
London
1933,
New York
1935)
is about the collapse of Athenian politics during the years of
the Peloponnesian War, and by extension,the vulnerability of
democracy under the stresses of war.
[12] It sets up a conflict between
Pericles’ bold building projects on
the
Akropolis, organized by the
brilliant sculptor
Phidias (calling to
mind the New Deal’s public works projects), and the warmongering ambitions
of
Pericles’ rival
Cleon (“the
Hitler of his
Day” according to the New York program notes).
Sherwood was writing in 1932, the
year both
Roosevelt and
Hitler were first elected to office. The drama
presents a contrast between the laudable way in which
Roosevelt’s New Deal programs sought to lift
the
U.S. /A> out of economic distress (likening
it to Pericles’ projects) and the
repugnant way in which
Hitler attempted
to ease economic stresses in
Germany
(likening it to
Cleon’s violent
warmongering). The play focuses on how
Cleon stokes mass suspicion of
Pericles and orchestrates the arrest and execution—by
hemlock—of
Phidias.In the words of one
critic,
Phidias “steals
Socrates’ thunder.”
[13]
John Steinbeck’s Wartime Recovery of
Citizen Socrates in The
Moon is Down (1941-1943)
Playwright
Robert
Sherwood went on to be a speechwriter for
President Roosevelt. In 1941
Roosevelt tapped him to be the first
director of the U.S. Foreign Information Service (FIS, a precursor of both
the CIA and the Voice of America).
Sherwood and his staff set up headquarters in
New York City and broadcast propaganda to
Europe.
Sherwood recruited another giant of American literary
culture,
John Steinbeck, to be a
reporter for the FIS. In that capacity
Steinbeck met refugees from occupied
Europe and learned about the resistance movements. He soon
took it upon himself to write something that would assist the resistance
movements in
Europe and promote popular
support for the
United States’ entry into
the war.
[14] The
result was a slim novel/play,
The Moon is Down , in
which
Steinbeck depicts the military
occupation of a small coal-mining town in an unnamed northern European
country by the forces of an unnamed nation at war with
England and
Russia. The story details the swift invasion of this town
and how the townspeople undertake increasingly bold resistance work. The
story’s tone is relentlessly optimistic—“free people” will prevail over
those who “follow orders” and act as part of a “herd.” Strikingly, the final
chapter features a sustained recollection of
Socrates performed by the main character.
In the closing scene, the novel’s hero, resistance leader
Mayor Orden, speaks with a friend while waiting
for his own execution to be carried out. He wonders whether he should he
regret what he has done since it has cost him his life. To answer himself,
Orden searches his memory for
schoolboy lessons of
Socrates.
Orden asks his old friend whether he remembers
that in school
Orden had once performed
parts of
Socrates’ speech from
Plato’s
Apology . He
asks
Do you remember
Socrates
says, “Someone will say, ‘And are you not ashamed
Socrates of a course of life which is
likely to bring you to an untimely end?’” To him … [
SocratesSocrates says] “a man who is good
for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he
ought only to consider whether he is doing right or
wrong.”
Steinbeck 1942:178
Mayor Orden then exclaims, “I had courage then. I was
Socrates!” This final scene features
these two men recounting as much of
Socrates’ speech from the
Apology
and his last conversation described in
Plato’s
Phaedo as they can recall. The novel and play close with
Mayor Orden
reciting
Socrates’ last words to his
friend
Doctor Winter: “
Crito, I owe a cock to
Asclepius, will you remember to pay the debt?” His friend
responds, “the Debt will be paid.” While the film version leaves out the
talk of the debt to
Asclepius, it adds a
scene that explains why
Steinbeck
included
Plato’s account of
Socrates’ last words. The film closes with
Mayor Orden walking to the gallows. As
he dies, furious explosions erupt across town. The remaining resistance
fighters have blown up the coal mine. His execution has not silenced
resistance but emboldened it. As
Orden had
anticipated in a manner that corresponds to
Socrates’ own expectations as expressed in
Plato’s
Apology , his
execution will be the spark that ignites other resisters to burst into
flame.
[15]
In offering
Socrates and
Mayor Orden as exemplars of democratic courage,
Steinbeck calls upon only a slice of
the story of
Socrates available in the
ancient sources—
Plato’s depiction of his
last days. The intent of
The Moon is Down cannot
tolerate any trace of
Xenophon’s
suggestion that
Socrates is actually
suicidal, or of the pedant we find in
The Clouds . But
Steinbeck’s recollection of
Socrates also subtly does something
more. During this period, fascist propaganda frequently marshaled references
to Greek and Roman antiquity to glorify fascist ideals.
[16] In
The Moon is
Down
Steinbeck contests the fascists’ claim
to embody the most laudable ancient virtues and to emulate noble ancient
characters. In Greek antiquity
Steinbeck
finds—and portrays his character
Mayor
Orden finding—an eminently worthy ancient model, widely known
and suited to represent the allies’ own ideals and struggle against the Axis
powers.
Steinbeck not only appropriates
an ancient figure to sanction his politics, but also depicts his character
performing the hard, satisfying work of recollection and appropriation, and
its connection to the practice of resistance.
Steinbeck refuses to allow the fascists to claim antiquity
as their own. Choosing
Socrates as his
vehicle, a figure familiar in some measure to people in many nations and
across social strata, and setting the recollection in an unassuming context
(a grown man’s recollection of his school days),
Steinbeck assures that his meaning is widely available.
Published in March 1942, just three months after the Japanese
attack on
Pearl Harbor, the book sold
more than 500,000 copies within weeks. Later that same year a stage
adaptation played to packed houses on
Broadway. Within a year of the Broadway production,
Twentieth Century-Fox released a major, blatantly propagandistic wartime
film adaptation.
[17] The film proved very popular as well. It opened with a quote from
President Roosevelt, who referred to
resistance in
Norway to explain the very
meaning of the war. The clear Socratic summing up in the closing scene of
the film struck reviewers as compelling.
[18] After the war it was revealed that
the book had been widely read throughout
Europe during the war, having been smuggled into occupied
lands, secretly translated, copied, an d circulated.
[19] Demand for the book increased
after the war’s conclusion.
While we know that
The Moon is Down was based on a
real village in
Norway under German
occupation,
[20] it
may also be that
Steinbeck’s turn to
Socrates activated his audience’s
awareness of specific events in
Greece
as well. In particular,
Steinbeck was
writing very soon after the Nazis overran the Greek army in April
1941, despite the dramatic acts of resistance and resolute
opposition by the Greek government and armed forces ( October 28, 1940) and celebrated initial Greek military
victories ( December 1940).
Steinbeck’s American audiences could have recalled that
before the
U.S. /A> had even entered the war
President Roosevelt, in one of his
most memorable and effective fireside chats, cited the “heroic Greek
resistance” as among the very best reasons for
America to be the “arsenal of democracy” and participate in
the defense of “our civilization.” The association of the Greek nation with
highly visible, dramatic resistance may have supported
Steinbeck’s effort to call upon an iconic
figure from Greek antiquity to symbolize that attitude in general.
[21]
The novel/play/film also generated a major literary and political controversy
in the
United States. Waves of both
vitriolic and celebratory commentary appeared in a wide variety of U.S. major-market and literary publications.At issue was whether the confident
optimism of the story and the humane portrait of individual invaders as
“disillusioned” about conquest and as “martyrs to a cause in which [they
themselves] do not believe”
[22] made the text effective wartime propaganda—or a
frightening indication of American naiveté about the viciousness of the real
Nazi invaders.
[23] The
controversy did not extend to the interpretation of
Socrates in the closing scene.
Steinbeck’s presentation of
Socrates as a resistance hero possessed of “the inner
serenity of a man whose mind is clear about basic things”
[24] was not
contentious.
Steinbeck offered
Socrates as a model of patriotism uncoupled
from belligerent nationalism and held him up as a democratic ideal.
Politically Charged Uses of Socrates
in North American Popular Media, 1951-1953
The political culture of the postwar
United States may look bizarre from the perspective of
European social democracies that managed to accept the legitimacy of
communist parties. But for reasons that are vastly too complicated to
discuss in any detail here, hysterical fear of communist influence in
domestic affairs gripped U.S. politics in the postwar period. Legislators
and public opinion considered communism in all forms so sinister and
dangerous that democratic procedures could be suspended in the effort to
combat it.
[25] Loyalty
oaths and political tests for teachers and workers in various industries,
restrictions on artistic freedom and personal liberties, self-censorship of
major media, purges of textbooks of subversive writings, and official
investigations and prosecutions of individuals for seditious speech and
association with subversives all became widespread. Treachery, espionage,
and informing were regularly in the news. In addition, denunciations of
homosexuals as “security risks” (i.e. vulnerable to blackmail) and of civil
rights and social welfare advocates as “pink” were common.
Government officials and journalists in this period often referred to the
contest between
Athens and
Sparta detailed in
Thucydides’
History of the Peloponnesian
War to frame the Cold War conflict between the
U.S. /A> and USSR
and the stakes involved in the shaking out of post-World War II
alliances.
[26] Secretary of State George Marshall
himself set this in motion in 1947 when he said in a widely reported speech:
“I doubt seriously whether a man can think with full wisdom and with deep
convictions regarding certain of the basic international issues today who
has not at least reviewed in his mind the period of the Peloponnesian War
and the Fall of
Athens.”
[27] In his view,
Thucydides offered a cautionary tale: tragic losses of the
sort endured by the Athenians after the Peloponnesian War await the
superpower unable to effectively manage alliances, exercise leadership in
world affairs, and contain domestic political tensions.
With controversies over the relationship between dissent and disloyalty
dominating public discourse and references to ancient Greek history common
in mainstream political rhetoric, creative artists found
Socrates a relevant subject for oblique
commentaries on the state of American politics. These receptions include
ephemeral as well as sustained and deeply engaging creative works. I cannot
examine all of them in detail, so I offer the following list to convey the
extent of the practice:
- Anthony Quinn’s starring role on
Broadway as Stephen Socrates Christopher , a
Greek-American U.S. congressman advocating world government, in the
comedy The Gentleman from Athens by Emmet
Lavery in 1947
- a dramatization of “The Death of Socrates,” based on Plato and Xenophon,
broadcast on the popular U.S. radio program CBS Is
There in 1948
- an original radio drama by Lister
Sinclair, Socrates, broadcast in 1947 and 1948 on the popular Canadian radio
drama series, Andrew Allan’s Stage
- a Broadway production of an original play by Pulitzer prize-winning
dramatist Maxwell Anderson about the
life of Socrates, Barefoot in Athens,
in 1951
- the production of Sinclair’s
“Socrates” on stage as the
inaugural performance of the ambitious new Jupiter Theatre of Toronto in 1952
- the inclusion of Socrates as one
of ten “immortals” on a 1953 spoken-word recording that imagined historical figures
contributing to celebrated journalist Edward R.
Murrow’s “This I Believe” radio series
- a feature on “The Trial and Death of Socrates” on CBS television’s wildly popular series,
You Are There with Walter Cronkite
- a new play called Socrates’ Wife on NBC television’s “Hall of
Fame” series in 1953
- the appearance of Socrates as a
character in Reuben Ship’s satire of
the McCarthy hearings in his radio play The
Investigator (which was first broadcast in Canada but soon widely bootlegged and
available in the U.S. in 1954)
- a recording of “Serenade After Plato’s Symposium” by composer and conductor
Leonard Bernstein, notable for
the presentation of the interaction of Socrates and Alcibiades (1954)
- two works of historical fiction, The Escape of
Socrates by
Robert Pick in 1954 and The Last of the
Wine by Mary Renault in
1956
- a spoken-word recording of the Apology and
Phaedo read in both ancient Greek and
English, released by Folkways Records in 1956
- an NBC television situation comedy broadcast from 1956–1958, called The
People’s Choice, starring Jackie
Cooper as a contemporary American small-town councilman
named Socrates ‘Sock’ Miller, who
looks after the public interest (and has a talking dog)
- comically giving the name “Socrates” to the (literally) brainless and
(metaphorically) politically naïve Scarecrow character on the 1961 animated television program Tales from
the Wizard of Oz
An anticommunist Socrates:
Maxwell Anderson’s Barefoot in Athens (1951)
Maxwell Anderson
dominated American theatre in the 1930s and continued to be
an important playwright until his death in 1959. He
produced a large body of work distinguished by experiments in verse,
tragedy, and comedy, and a persistent turn to historically significant
settings and densely symbolic figures, distant and recent (e.g.
Queen Elizabeth,
Mary of Scotland,
Joan of Arc,
Peter
Stuyvesant’s seventeenth-century New York City,
George Washington at
Valley Forge, the execution of
Sacco and
Vanzetti by the state of
Massachusetts, and the Spanish Civil War). His works
explore contemporary themes of great social urgency, such as the
morality of war, political corruption, collectivist government, and
social injustice. He championed the theatre as an art form of terrific
civic importance in the modern world. He promoted less crassly
commercial work in major market venues like
Broadway, and advocated initiatives such as the
establishment of a national outdoor theatre festival to be called (after
the ancient Athenian archetype) “The Festival of
Dionysus,” complete with competitions for
dramatists.
[29]
Anderson began work on a play about
Socrates shortly after a
professional trip to
Greece in 1947. His 1946 Broadway hit play
Joan of
Lorraine (starring
Ingrid
Bergman) had attracted the attention of the Greek
producer
Theodore Kritas, who
arranged for a production at the Kotopouli Theatre in
Athens.
[30] Anderson attended the performance at
the official invitation of the Greek government.
[31] While in
Greece, he was powerfully moved by what he
referred to as “the plight of the Greek people.” He cabled five reports
on the civil war in
Greece to the
New York Herald Tribune, arguing for U.S. support of the Greek government against the communist fighters in the
north. Two were published.
[32] Other American commentators attacked his position,
citing the corruption of the Greek government.
Anderson was deeply troubled by the mixed reception of
his reports and published a letter to the editor stressing the threat at
hand and again advocating American support for the Greek government
despite its faults.
[33] His biographer reports that his colleagues in
Greece stressed the relevance of
Socrates to the current fight
internationally against communism, and frequently urged him to produce
something about the philosopher.
Socrates’ uncompromising stand against restricting free
inquiry could, they suggested, represent the West’s stand against
Stalinism.
Anderson later described
his play about
Socrates,
Barefoot in Athens, as his gift to the Greek people.
[34]
Barefoot in Athens opened at the Martin Beck Theatre on
October
31, 1951.
[35] It is not simply a compressed dramatization of a
narrative pulled entirely from the ancient sources. Elements of the plot
are, of course, familiar.
Socrates
practices free inquiry, is accused of betraying
Athens, is tried, convicted, and
sentenced to die. Moreover he appears barefoot, as the title suggests,
following the ancient evidence for his embrace of an overly modest
lifestyle. The still photos of the performance show the British actor
Barry Jones as
Socrates, looking ragged. But
Anderson also stages wholly manufactured
scenes and develops new characters, or recreates ones we thought we
knew. In particular, in
Barefoot audiences
witnessed
Socrates conversing with
the Spartan
King Pausanias about
the (false) allure of a Spartan way of life. Reviewers noted that
Pausanias seemed designed to
resemble
Stalin.
[36] And perhaps even more
strikingly,
Barefoot includes scenes of
Socrates’ domestic life with his
wife
Xantippe, in which she is
depicted as a playful, loving, and courageous romantic partner, not a
shrewish nag.
The action is set in
Athens at the
close of the Peloponnesian War. The play starts with
Socrates’ family gathered at their kitchen
table discussing his indictment. Soon a character bursts into his home
with news of the Athenian defeat at
Aegospotami. The intruder declares, “Forget the
indictment … we have lost the war.” And in subsequent scenes of act one
it appears that the demos has indeed forgotten the indictment.
Anderson presents
Socrates doing and saying a series of things that remove
all doubt about his true loyalty to the Athenian democracy. He labors
alongside his friends
Crito and
Phaedo, as well as his Athenian
accusers
Meletus,
Lycon, and
Anytus, reluctantly to tear down the defensive city
walls at the behest of the Spartans. He refuses to arrest
Leon so that the Spartans and their lackey
Critias might steal his property. He pleads with the charming and clever, but ultimately terrifying,
Spartan
King Pausanias to “give
us back our democracy.” And finally, in the closest thing to a display
of Socratic questioning we get in this script,
Socrates coaxes
Pausanias into admitting that his views rest on
delusion:
Sparta professes to
distribute moderate wealth equally to all, but actually sustains a
privileged class of government bureaucrats who live very nicely and
exercise great political control, suppressing the freedom of others.
In act two, the moral and intellectual deficiencies of some of
Socrates’ Athenian compatriots command our
attention. Foolish, narrowly self-interested Athenian accusers in
cahoots with the Spartans have reissued the indictment against
Socrates.
Anderson’s trial scene presents a non-ironic, totally
transparent
Socrates defending
himself with straightforward appeals to the democratic convictions of
the jury.
Anderson’s
Socrates directly praises democracy in
clear and easily understood prose. There is no sign of the hairsplitting
obfuscator satirized in the
Clouds or of the
dialectician who puzzles, confuses, and irritates his interlocutors
every bit as much as, simultaneously, he impresses, inspires, and
delights them. Instead,
Anderson’s
Socrates simply proclaims
Athens to be a city “drenched
in the light of frank and restless inquiry” and announces his own
unswerving commitment to the lofty principle of free speech, a practice
that he praises as at the heart of democratic government. The suspicious
Athenians convict him anyway. Why?
Anderson provides a simple answer. Scheming, corrupt,
and deceitful politicians motivated by personal grievances (
Lycon,
Meletus, and
Anytus)
dazzled the jurors with a specious case of guilt by association with
treacherous others (
Critias and
Alcibiades). The accusers used
demagogic tactic s to assail his character and challenge his loyalty, to
the delight of the accusers’ Spartan handlers. They succeed in
suppressing his activities—they kill him.
Barefoot takes
Socrates’ commitment to “freedom of the mind”
[37] to symbolize
opposition to
Sparta/Communism, and
the background of his story to be “a world situation … analogous with
the present.”
[38]
Reviewers got this easily. Critics praised the play for its timeliness
and its examination of the current state of politics.They embraced the
way the play suggested “deadly parallels” between the time of
Socrates and “the panicky mood of
America today.” And they
recognized the play’s powerful editorializing “on the side of the
angels, pertinent, of course, to the situation in which the
free-thinking man finds himself today.”
[39] Of course they were helped to
this interpretation by advance feature articles about the production
which
Anderson wrote for the press,
in which he explained his aims. He describes the historical period of
Socrates’ life as “a long
quarrel between a communist state and a democratic state.” In his view,
Socrates was a player in “The
Ancient Struggle to Uphold Democracy,” as one headline about the
production proclaimed.
[40]
The play appears to have a simple design. Free inquiry is a signature
issue of democracy, and thus
Socrates, the most celebrated practitioner of free
inquiry, may be fairly cast as democracy’s standard-bearer. But free
inquiry is now under attack in democratic
America. People associated with experimental ideas or
critical views are being labeled subversive and persecuted. The
situation recalls
Socrates’ unjust
prosecution for introducing new gods and corrupting the youth. It seems
that
Barefoot likens proponents of McCarthyism
to the hated prosecutors of
Socrates.The “principal purpose” of
Barefoot thus appears to be “to rebut McCarthyism in its
claim that free thinking and free speech threaten national cohesion,
even national existence.”
[41] The point of the play seems to be to assert that
free inquiry does not necessarily lead to treasonous thoughts and
activity. This is why
Anderson goes
to great lengths to craft scenes that ridicule the suggestion that
Socrates may have actually been
a stealthy seditious rebel (e.g. he argues with
Pausanias, and refuses to abandon
Athens for
Sparta). And so, in this interpretation of
the play, the design of the plot makes sense as follows: act one sets up
our protagonist
Socrates’
anticommunist credentials, and having thus inoculated us, in act two the
playwright can use a story about his commitment to free thought to
challenge McCarthyism, that is to oppose corrupt politicians who act to
suppress free inquiry.
This reconstruction appears coherent. But there is a muddle in the play
that audiences readily perceived and that is instructive for
understanding how this iconic figure is adapted to a specific purpose in
Barefoot in Athens. The play lacks an effective
dramatization of
Socrates’ capacity
to unsettle, unnerve, and trouble decent fellow citizens. The portrayal
of Socratic inquiry in
Barefoot is anemic. He
does not express, as he does in the ancient sources, deep understanding
of the peculiar pathologies that attend democratic forms of power.
Anderson strips
Socrates of any interest in or capacity to
subject democratic institutions like majority rule and rhetorical
contests, and by extension contemporary institutional structures of
liberal democracy, to scrutiny and critique. Nowhere in the play is this
clearer than in
Anderson’s depiction
of
Socrates’ response to the guilty
verdict. He is surprised and puzzled and says, without any trace of
irony, “I thought that it would go the other way.”
The majority of critics observed this weakness in the portrait of
Socrates.The reviews reported
that the play’s dramatization of free inquiry in action was “thin,”
[42] “curiously
gray and disappointing,”
[43] and “flat and uninspired.”
[44]
Anderson’s
Socrates utters praise for free inquiry but does not
perform the part of a critic, dissenter, or nonconformist. The only
extended critical conversation he has in the play takes place with the
Spartan proto-Communist
Pausanias—a dangerous foreign enemy bent on inducing him to
abandon
Athens. It does not
examine how and why
Socrates’
practice of free inquiry is a public good, or why in embracing this
activity he is a public benefactor.
Anderson’s play thus does not even gesture toward what a
democratic community loses when it prevents citizens from exploring
challenging ideas among themselves. It does not interrogate the panicky
mood in U.S. public culture. Instead, it offers up platitudes.As one
critic put it, “
Maxwell Anderson has
chosen
Socrates and his ancient
Athens as the instruments for
a
reaffirmation that democracy is a wonderful thing.”
n.45
Barefoot fails to get traction on the problem
of McCarthyism because it strays too far from what should be its main
topic, “which is that
as dangerous as free inquiry may be to a
democratic state , its suppression is far more perilous.”
[46]
In what direction does it stray? In my view, it strays right into the
thicket of the contemporary politics of suspicion. In
Barefoot in Athens,
Anderson turns to
Socrates to navigate, not attack,
McCarthyism. To
Anderson,
Soviet-sponsored conspiratorial threats to national security were real,
and required vigorous government activity aimed at rooting out the
dangerous subversives wherever they might be. He had argued this in his
essays on the civil war in
Greece
for American newspapers. When
Anderson was back in the
U.S. /A> writing Barefoot in Athens, fear of communist
infiltration of American society gripped the nation. The House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) held high-profile hearings
targeting the Hollywood film industry. The Senate Internal Security
Subcommittee, headed by
Senator Patrick
McCarran, conducted investigations.
[47] U.S. State Department and U.N. official
Alger Hiss was prosecuted and
his appeals to the Supreme Court denied.
Senator Joseph McCarthy delivered his speech claiming
that there were numerous communist sympathizers and Soviet spies inside
the U.S. government and throughout American society.
[48] Earlier the same year
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were
convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage (attempting to pass nuclear
secrets to the Soviets). The Hollywood Ten, a group of writers and
directors who, citing constitutionally protected rights of free speech
and assembly, had refused to testify before the HUAC about their
political beliefs and associations were convicted of contempt of
congress. When
Barefoot was in the theatre some
of the Hollywood Ten were serving prison terms. A blacklist of suspected
communist sympathizers plagued the entertainment industry, causing some
luminaries, for example
Charlie
Chaplin, to choose exile, and destroying the careers of
many lesser-known artists working in all spheres of the industry. In
this context,
Maxwell Anderson broke
with colleagues in the theatre and refused to join with other members of
the Playwrights’ Company (which included
Robert Sherwood) and the Dramatist’s Guild to defend
people identified in
Red Channels , a
publication that fueled the blacklist.
[49] Anderson reveals his view of
Socrates’ relevance for
contemporary affairs in a letter penned to explain himself to a friend:
“
Socrates maintained the right
of anybody to speculate and converse on any subject.He did not defend
those who betrayed their country.”
[50]
Anderson shapes
Socrates into his view of a model patriot
for his times. His strategy is twofold. First, he divests
Socrates of any connections with thoughts
or actions that could signify communist sympathies to an American
audience. This purpose guides his approach to the ancient sources for
his raw material. Second, he presents
Socrates as an exemplar of the patriotic response to
false accusations: constancy and magnanimity. He willingly gives an
account of himself, never considers exile, and recognizes the injustice
visited upon him as an error to be endured with as much generosity as
possible. The play suggests that the inevitable shortcomings of liberal
democracy do not warrant sedition or justify desertion. Some
contemporary reviewers read it this way.One found the “lesson” of the
play to be that “though the democratic system may err at times, it is
worth preserving with all its faults.” In this critic’s view, “
Socrates is represented as being glad to
die to get over this point.”
[51]
Anderson molds
Socrates into an unassailable
anticommunist most obviously by putting strong words of praise of
democracy in his mouth and having him express, over and over, contempt
for the Spartan way of life. He also makes him invulnerable to the
designs of communist propagandists. For example, though
Socrates is poor (as the title of the
work, his tattered costume, and his wife’s complaints about their meager
resources in the opening scene stress), he is no easy mark for Spartan
talk of economic justice. Additionally, in
Barefoot
Socrates is a robust heterosexual
who enjoys the pleasures of conventional domesticity with his wife
Xantippe.
Anderson cleanses
Socrates of the taint of homoeroticism. Any hint of such
an association (common in non-mainstream uses of
Socrates to signify “Greek love”) would
have been a problem for
Anderson,
given how commonplace at the time it was to link sexual and political
“perversion.” Consider, for example, that in 1950 the U.S.Senate issued a “Report on
the Employment of Homosexuals and Other Perverts in Government.”
[52] Furthermore,
Anderson’s picture of
Socrates’ trial displays his willingness
to give an account of himself, contrasting with contemporary
controversies over refusals to testify before government hearings.
Socrates’ rejection of exile in
Sparta contrasts with the
high-profile acts of desertion in the news (e.g.
Brecht’s abandonment of the
U.S. /A> for East
Germany on October 31, 1947, and the gossip
circulating concerns about whether
Charlie
Chaplin would return to the
U.S. /A> to testify before the HUAC—he did not and chose
exile in 1952). In Anderson’s telling, Socrates’
accusers are Athenians manipulated by Spartan authorities. Furthermore,
Socrates’ resistance to Spartan
designs stands in sharp contrast to
the
Rosenbergs’s attraction to the Soviet cause on display at
their recent trial for conspiracy to pass nuclear secrets to the
Soviets.
In
Barefoot ,
Socrates stands for democracy and free inquiry and
exemplifies true patriotism.
Socrates’ accusers
stand for the threat to American democracy posed by domestic
procommunist conspirators. These correspondences, especially the
likening of
Socrates’ accusers to
the “subversives”
McCarthy sought to
expose, proved difficult for
Anderson to convey. This is probably because the analogy
clashed with the powerful contemporary associations of
McCarthy, not the “subversives” he
targeted, with the hurling of accusations. Perhaps this confusion is
behind
Barefoot ’s failure to connect with
Broadway audiences. Or perhaps
Anderson’s politics were too clear, and the absence of a
soaring defense of toleration of dissent was too disappointing. In any
case, the play was not a commercial success. It closed after only a few
weeks.
For those audience members familiar with the ancient sources or moved to
peruse them,
Anderson had a special
message: beware of
Plato.
[53] He made his utter distrust of
the Platonic dialogues as a source for the views of the historical
Socrates very clear in a long
prefatory essay entitled “
Socrates
and His Gospel,” published with the script in 1952.
[54] As the reference to
Jesus and the
New
Testament in the title of his essay suggests,
Anderson is passionate in this piece. In
Anderson’s view, “
Plato was an aristocrat and a homosexual. He
hated democracy and toward middle life became convinced that a communism
controlled and governed by a specially bred and trained workers class
could produce the ideal state.” In his view, the strict limitation on
private property, advocacy of eugenics, and provision for a
philosopher-king in the
Republic spoke for
themselves.He wrote: “
The Republic posits
little more than a brutal Communist dictatorship.… If we boil it down,
[it] is something very much like
Russia under the Politburo.”
[55] By placing such a doctrine in
the mouth of
Socrates, he believed,
Plato betrayed his teacher.
Anderson is of course following
the views of
Karl Popper, in his
diatribe
The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume One:
The Spell of Plato. Composed during the war when
Popper
was living in
New Zealand (having
left
Austria to escape the Nazis
only to find himself close to the raging war in
the Pacific[56] ),
The Spell of Plato argues that
Plato was the archenemy of democracy and the
originator of totalitarian styles of thought and politics.
Popper’s aim in his study was to liberate a
“historical
Socrates” from this
Platonic frame and set him up as an exemplary practitioner of a kind of
open criticism that is the basis of an “open society” and “the very life
of a democracy.”
[57] In
Popper’s view,
Plato fairly represents
Socrates in his youthful early writings
(
Apology and Crito ), but later betrayed his
teacher by using
Socrates’ persona to advocate for
abhorrent, communist political views, in effect portraying
Socrates as a Spartan sympathizer and
proto-communist.
Plato was the Spartan
sympathizer,
Popper submits, not
Socrates.
Anderson encountered
Popper’s work months into writing
Barefoot, when he was preparing the final
script.
[58] Following
Popper,
Anderson sees his own efforts to contest
Plato’s defamatory fabrications as
a political act of resistance to totalitarianism. His contribution is to
give modern audiences a moving, dynamic symbol of democracy’s excellence
and persistence suited to difficult times.
[59]
Some of
Anderson’s most notable jabs
at
Plato mark the playwright’s effort
to distance
Socrates from all
association with homoeroticism. For example, in
Plato’s
Phaedo
Xantippe falls apart at the
realization that the execution is imminent and is led away lamenting and
beating her breast (60a);
Socrates
then turns his attention to his young male associates.
Anderson offers a far different image of
Xantippe’s place in his final
hours. Drawing on the suggestion in
Xenophon’s
Symposium (17–19)
that
Socrates enjoyed
Xantippe’s intellectual company (he took
her nagging to be a sort of sparring and good practice for philosophical
work),
Anderson’s play ends not with
Socrates surrounded by admiring
men, but instead with a scene of
Socrates in the company of his calm and thoughtful wife,
anticipating his death and together reciting poetic verses celebrating
the cause of free inquiry for which he is about to die. The curtain
comes down with
Socrates in his
wife’s embrace, his head resting in her lap.
[60]
Anderson also takes a stab at the
picture of
Socrates in
Plato’s
Symposium . First, he plays with the well-known image of
Alcibiades bursting in on the action.
[61] In the
Symposium , a group of men are gathered to
celebrate
Agathon’s victory in a
dramatic competition. All the characters come forward to deliver
speeches in praise of
Eros. Toward the
end,
Alcibiades bursts into the
scene drunk, eager to confess his love for
Socrates. In the opening scene of
Barefoot , in contrast,
Socrates is home with his family when a civic-minded
fellow Athenian rushes in to inform him that the Athenians have lost the
war.
Anderson also cleanses
Socrates of all association with
homoeroticism by naming his antagonist “
Pausanias.” For audience members familiar with Greek
history and
Plato’s dialogues, the name
Pausanias would have set a
curious set of associations in motion. The name suggested not only the
Spartan
King Pausanias II active
at the close of the fifth century (and who
thus could be the loosely historical basis for
Anderson’s wholly made-up scenes of conversations
between a Spartan King and
Socrates), but also two other figures: a Spartan general
active in the first part of the
fifth century who was known in antiquity for betrayals and
adopting Persian customs (a turncoat), and the lively advocate of
pederasty in
Plato’s
Symposium (a pervert).
Anderson sets
Socrates up as the enemy of political and sexual
subversion.
Anderson’s
Barefoot
in Athens does not
find in the tale of
Socrates’ trial
and death a parable about regrettable—and regretted—intolerance. The
play does not illuminate the philosophical grounds for a defense of free
speech in a democratic society and set out to arouse resistance. The
press releases about the play issued months in advance of its opening
confirm as much.One reports that
Anderson is at work on a play about “the domestic crises
in the household of
Socrates and the
philosopher’s trial and death.”
[62] Another promises that
Anderson’s treatment of the
material will feature the “domestic side of the philosopher’s life.”
Anderson’s play focuses on the
personal predicament of an individual falsely accused by his beloved
city of seditious intent and subversive activity. What will he do? How
strong is his attachment to his country? What will he endure? How will
he steel himself and with what measure of grace? What will others learn
from him?
Anderson finds in the
story of
Socrates and
Athens (and
Socrates and
Plato) a
parable about loyalty and betrayal.
An independent Socrates by Lister
Sinclair at the Jupiter Theatre of Toronto (1952)
Four months after
Barefoot
closed, an ambitious new
Toronto
company, the Jupiter Theatre, had a huge success with a
play about
Socrates written by
Lister Sinclair, a young
Canadian author already well known for radio dramas.
[63] The founders of the Jupiter
Theatre aimed to establish a fully professional theatre company in
Toronto and to encourage “the
emergence of a truly Canadian voice in the theatre.”
[64]
Socrates
was the biggest hit of their first season. Almost a thousand people had
to be turned away in the last two days of its one-week run in February
1952.
[65] The play had wider exposure than this short run suggests: earlier
versions of the script had been produced for the popular CBC radio drama
series,
Andrew Allan’s
Stage , and the Jupiter Theatre’s production was widely
reviewed in print and on radio.
[66]
The Jupiter Theatre had a political as well as an artistic agenda. The
producers aimed to stage experimental, challenging, and whenever
possible new Canadian plays instead of British standards and London
imports.
Sinclair’s Socrates was the
first Canadian-authored script produced by the company.
[67] But in
addition to embracing a Canadian nationalist project, Jupiter’s founding
members also openly sympathized with blacklisted American artists. The
other two productions of their first season were, pointedly, works by
major authors who had been targeted by the House Un-American Activities
Committee in 1947:
Bertolt
Brecht’s Galileo and
The Biggest
Thief in Town by
Dalton
Trumbo.
Brecht had
left the
U.S. /A> rather than testify. Trumbo was one of the Hollywood
Ten. When the Jupiter’s season started,
Trumbo had only recently been released after serving a
ten-month prison term as a result of a conviction for contempt of
congress.
Despite the partisan political context of being produced at the Jupiter,
Sinclair’s Socrates seems
rigorously nonideological. Like
Anderson,
Sinclair
compresses (and reorders) events of the years 404–399
BC and uses material from different sources in anachronistic
ways for dramatic effect. Unlike
Anderson, however, he draws upon
Plato’s
Symposium and
Aristophanes’
Clouds, as well as
Plato’s
Apology , Crito , and Phaedo and the
writings of
Xenophon.
Sinclair does not fashion scenes out of
whole cloth (as with
Socrates’
kitchen table in
Barefoot ).
Sinclair’s script creates scenes that
allow him to deliver precisely what
Anderson’s play lacked: multiple depictions of playful
and exacting Socratic questioning in action. Front and center in
Sinclair’s work are
Socrates’ unsettling, irritating,
unnerving examinations of others—and his practice of taking up such
examinations on every occasion and with all comers. The result is that
the play conveys a strong condemnation of both Cold War rival
orthodoxies—dogmatic communism and liberalism—and of the polarizing,
rigid manner of argument characteristic of contemporary political
discourse in the
United States and
Canada.
Sinclair recollects the story of
Socrates to focus attention on the
importance for democratic citizenship of the kind of independent
thinking that is possible only when one stands apart from traditional
orthodoxies. The play’s sensational success at the Jupiter likely had to
do with the resonance of that message as much as with the clever
plotting, witty writing, strong acting, and the novelty of an ambitious
new theatre company’s first season.
[68]
The opening scene provides a good example of
Sinclair’s approach to
Socrates’ broad meaning for contemporary audiences.
Sinclair draws attention to
Socrates’ questioning and its
deeply disquieting effects on individuals and cultural norms. He shows
that his practice inspires suspicion and aversion as well as delight and
attraction. The play opens with a clever scene adapted from the ancient
sources. A crowd in the agora awaits news of the Oracle’s answer to
Chaerephon’s inquiry, “Who is
the wisest man?” The audience watches as the answer, “
Socrates,” makes it way through the
gathering. We witness the varied reactions of
AristophanesA,
Agathon,
Crito,
Alcibiades,
Phaedo,
Meletus,
Lycon, Anytus,
and a set of figures
Sinclair
creates to represent the attitudes of segments of the demos (named for
strong historical sovereigns and signifying, it seems, political power):
Philip,
Cyrus, and
Triptolemus.
Sinclair
includes not only
Socrates’ well-known response to the Oracle, “I am
wisest because I know that I know nothing,” but also his own
interpretation of its meaning: “The Oracle is a rebuke to complacency.”
Every dramatized encounter with
Socrates drives home this same point. Once the
indictment for subversive thought and activity (corrupting the youth and
introducing new gods) is reported,
Sinclair presents members of the demos wondering aloud
about whether the charges will resonate beyond a small circle of
accusers. They talk of the relationship between Socratic questioning,
dissent, and disloyalty. One citizen is puzzled. He asks, “
Socrates is always saying that the idea of
law is sacred. He says almost nothing else. How can he be guilty of
sedition and blasphemy?” to which another citizen quickly counters,
“Anybody worth talking to for five minutes is guilty before the law of
blasphemy and sedition.”
Every turn in the plot and all the dialogue highlight
Socrates’ nonconformism. For example, in a
scene in act two that both draws on and takes liberties with
Plato’s
Symposium ,
Sinclair presents
Socrates attending a symposium at
Agathon’s home on the eve of his
trial. Satisfying the expectations of audience members familiar with
Plato’s
Symposium and
Socrates’
unconventional eroticism,
Alcibiades
bursts in. But
Alcibiades does not
join the party and give a speech. Instead, he announces that guards are
on their way to arrest
Socrates and
urges him to flee.
Socrates chooses
to wait, calmly, and it comes to pass that
Socrates strikes up a conversation with a guard who does
not realize with whom he is speaking. Without revealing himself,
Socrates asks the guard, “Why is
this
Socrates character so
dangerous?” They talk for a while and
Socrates leads him to draw some highly unconventional
conclusions. When
Socrates reveals
himself the guard expresses the theme of the play: “I hope you realize
that you’ve got to be found guilty for the sake of peace and quiet.”
Questions of guilt or innocence, justice and injustice, will yield to
the demands of security. Nonconformity will be contained within
boundaries.
This theme drives the presentation of the trial. The prosecutor Anytus rebukes
Socrates for having undertaken a radical form of
questioning, that is for crossing an unwritten though generally known
and rigorously policed limit.
Anytus
says, “The Assembly knows that some kinds of criticism are permitted;
but not
your kind.”
Socrates’ response only reiterates the point that
serious questions can be unsettling. He says, “Only the kind that leaves
the wrongs untouched [is permitted].” In a scene close to the conclusion
of the play
Sinclair seems to draw a
parallel between
Socrates’ accuser
Anytus and those who, in the
spirit of McCarthyism, would label Socratic questioning “treason.”
Anytus says, “Open your eyes,
Socrates, before you die; look
at your city, and all she is, and learn what you were about to destroy.”
Anytus’ words perversely echo
Pericles’ entreaty to citizens,
in the Funeral Oration, to gaze at
Athens and love her. He is accusing
Socrates of seeking to harm the city.
Socrates of course understands
his actions differently.
Socrates
says, “I look but what do I see? Living flesh is rotting off the bone. The
Athens that I see is dead; a
marble skeleton mounted in a life-like attitude in the museum of
imagination.” What can give
Athens
life, in his view, is impatience with dogma and a demand for challenging
thought and speech. That is what
Socrates offers his city.
Sinclair’s
Socrates relentlessly
presents him as a symbol of contempt for smug orthodoxies. In so doing,
the playwright spoke to
Toronto
audiences impatient for conceptual tools fitted not only to the task of
standing up to McCarthyism and its ilk in
Canada, but to the task of interrogating Cold War
orthodoxies altogether and imagining the contours of a more satisfactory
vision of democratic citizenship.
“Guerilla warfare against McCarthy
in a public medium”: Socrates on
television (1953)
In 1953, CBS television sought to adapt a hit
radio program that recreated historical events from around the world as
if they were breaking news stories.
[69] They enlisted a young
Walter Cronkite to star as the
“news anchor” of each program. Unknown to
Cronkite and CBS officials at the time, the producer
Charles Russell and director
Sidney Lumet secretly employed
three blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters—
Walter Bernstein,
Abraham
Polonsky, and
Arnold
Manoff—to write the teleplays. These writers relied on
impostors to deliver their scripts to CBS and to pretend to be the
writers in meetings with the station managers.
[70] The writers found the format
presented a huge opportunity. “History,”
Polonsky later recalled, could “serve us well.” He
continued, “We had no need to invent conflicts to serve our purposes. They were there for the taking and we happily … took them.… In that
shameful time of McCarthyite terror, of know-nothing attempts to deform
and defile history, to kill any kind of dissent, we were able to do
shows about civil liberties, civil rights, artistic freedom,” and
more.
[71] Accordingly, the writers chose subjects such as
Joan of Arc, the trial of
Galileo, the
Salem
witch trials, the
Boston Tea Party,
the signing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and the rise of
Hitler.As
Polonsky put it in an interview in 1970,
this show was “probably the only place where any guerilla warfare
against
McCarthy was conducted in a
public medium.”
[72]
The episode on “The Death of
Socrates” is widely considered
You Are
There ’s best, owing to the sheer quality of the writing.
[73] But it was
also the one that most intensely resonated with contemporary
politics—and viewers—and that thus remained memorable for some time.
Cronkite explained in an
interview on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the show that
the people involved with making the
You Are
There programs found history “rich with striking parallels
for thinking about dissent and intellectual freedom” and that,
stunningly, “the farther back in time we went the more contemporary the
parallels became.”
Cronkite singled
out the episode about
Socrates. “
Socrates was the perfect hero
for the 1950s,” he recalled, not only because he
effectively engaged the free speech issue, but mostly because “he did
not back down.”
[74]
The appeal of the
You Are There show was its
claim to provide audiences with an accurate account of notable episodes
from history, based on primary sources, through the device of imaginary
“live” interviews by known reporters with key figures from history.
[75] The producer
Russell made this clear to all. Every episode was to be a “dramatic recreation of a specific personal
moment in history.Authentic and specific, no speculation.”
[76] To help create
the show’s aura of historical authenticity, the producers set up a
strong visual allusion to
Cronkite’s
enormously successful coverage of the 1952
national political conventions (nominating
Eisenhower and
Stevenson) live from a newscasters’ box in the hall. On
You are There ,
Cronkite appeared on camera only from behind a desk at
the start and end of each episode. To get around the potentially tricky
problem for a visual medium of having twentieth-century reporters interact
with historical figures (e.g. put the reporters in period costumes?),
correspondents conducted their fictionalized interviews as off-camera
voices. The show opened each week with a booming voice declaring, “All
things are as they were then except, you are there.”
Cronkite’s closing tag line stressed the
importance of turning to historical events to inform reflection on
contemporary matters: “What sort of a day was it? A day like all days,
filled with the events that alter and illuminate our times, and you were
there.” The art direction also aroused a feeling of “historical
authenticity,” though it did so by activating viewers’ notions of
historicity and not by presenting a scholarly re-creation of the
setting. In the important death scene, for example, the costumes, the
positioning of the actors around a couch, and the gestures performed by
all the actors vividly recall the well-known
Jacques-Louis David painting of 1787,
The Death of Socrates , on display in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New
York since 1931 and widely reproduced.
[77] The show’s
studied effort to present a meticulously researched product worked with
the choice of subject matter subtly to ridicule
McCarthy’s practice of promulgating reckless,
unsubstantiated accusations.
The script packs a number of references culled, indiscriminately, from
Xenophon,
Aristophanes,
Plato, and
Plutarch
into this half-hour long program. The casting invites a direct
comparison with
Anderson’s
Barefoot, since
Barry
Jones played
Socrates
in both. But not many viewers could have made that comparison, given
Barefoot ’s lack of commercial success. In
contrast to the
Anderson and
Sinclair adaptations, the
You Are There show manages to convey the
tremendous controversy in the sources over the meaning of
Socrates. We see the irritating
intellectual that
Aristophanes’
Clouds pokes fun at. We witness an
expression of the public sentiment that he might be a genuinely
dangerous influence in the city. We are able to consider that the
impiety charge is an unsubstantiated lie, concocted as part of a plot to
circumvent the amnesty in place after the conclusion of the
Peloponnesian War, and thus illegally attack
Socrates for his past association with now-disgraced
politicians like
Critias. Even
evidence of regret on the part of the Athenians after the execution
finds expression in this production. The controversy that Socrates
sparked in his own day is front and center.
In the opening scene, a group including
Aristophanes and
Plato
waits for news of the verdict. This scene includes an exchange between
an off-camera correspondent and
Aristophanes (played by
E. G. Marshall) that is remarkable for its self-deprecating and
ironic allusion to the blacklist in the entertainment industry. The
reporter asks
Aristophanes whether
his plays give credence to the accusations against
Socrates as some have suggested.
Aristophanes tells the reporter, “The
politicians blame us [artists] , when it is a group of stupid men who
have managed to get the city into this predicament.” He continues,
directly into the camera, “it was only a play.” In the ancient sources
it is
Socrates himself who suggests
that the Aristophanic comedy can be viewed as his early accuser. The
show proceeds to portray
Socrates in
prison, calmly examining his companions’ beliefs regarding the current
situation, that is his unjust conviction, impending execution, and
refusal to flee; and shows his capacity even now to be a good
philosophical interlocutor, good friend, family man, and civic
benefactor. This is followed by a somber depiction of the administration
of the hemlock, moderated only by illustrations of
Socrates’ own legendary cheerfulness. This
presentation of
Socrates elicits
feelings of loss, remorse, and regret. The show’s creative team
successfully uses
Socrates to focus
attention on how abuses of democratic authority can be difficult to
curtail and can enfeeble democratic discourse and perpetrate injustice
on individual citizens. The show challenges viewers to see a parallel to
their own time and to recognize that McCarthyism is damaging the polity
as well as victimizing individuals.
As a whole, the episode presents the prosecution of
Socrates as illustrative of a pathology
that can infect democracy, or of the capacity of an admirable, even
exemplary city to blunder badly.
Cronkite’s concluding comments as anchor suggest that
this is precisely what the creative team was going for. He speaks of the
enduring symbolic import of the “cup of poison” as a “test and symbol”
of a gap between principles and actions that will last in the public
memory, activating “grief and sorrow” and initiating painful
examinations in the years to come. The contemporary parallel was
palpable. When this episode first aired in May of
1953, the recent election had delivered control of Congress
back to the Republicans, and
McCarthy grew more powerful as he now became chairman of
the Senate Committee on Government Operations.
[78]
Conclusion
I have argued that the reception history of the iconic
figure of
Socrates in North American
popular media from the immediate postwar period to the early
1950s includes a story of the making of a democratic symbol. This
does not mean that the specific political meaning of
Socrates came to be fixed in a partisan way. Rather, I have shown that in this period a set of writers for mainstream
fiction, theatre, and television audiences all found
Socrates an appealing, compliant, and resonant
resource for developing their distinctive and contrasting accounts of the
demands of democratic citizenship.
The Cold War era reception of
Socrates in creative media encouraged new perceptions of
classical antiquity to take hold in both academia and popular opinion. For
example, scholarly interest in
Socrates
and democracy, apart from the controversies around
Popper, develops in this period.
[79] For example,
Hannah Arendt delivered a lecture on
Socrates and democracy at Notre Dame in 1954. In it
Arendt was at pains to retrieve from the Platonic corpus a
specifically Socratic understanding of citizenship to set alongside the more
familiar Platonic image of the philosopher-king. Her main aim was to mine
Socrates’ form of political
engagement to forge a compelling model of democratic citizenship suited to
contemporary times.
Socrates was
exemplary, she wrote, not because he “possessed any special truth from which
the multitude was excluded, but because he remained always ready to endure
the pathos of wonder and thereby avoids the dogmatism of mere opinion
holders.” To conduct oneself this way, to both think and act in the world,
Arendt urged, requires a sort of
courage that
Socrates epitomized.
[80] Also in this
period
Gregory Vlastos began to frame
what became his extremely influential account of the continuities between
Socratic philosophy and ancient democratic ideals and practices.In 1956 he published an introduction to the Protagoras in which he
argued that “
Socrates democratizes
courage.”
[81] Over
the next few decades work in ancient political philosophy reexamining the
historical
Socrates’ relation to
Athenian democracy, as well as work on Socratic philosophy’s capacity to
speak to issues in contemporary democratic theory, surged.
[82] Similarly, the
Cold War-era adaptations paved the way for
Socrates’ availability for additional, wide-ranging, and
specifically political adaptations in later years. For example,
Martin Luther King called upon the figure of
Socrates to ground his civil
disobedience in a love of country in his 1963
Letter from a Birmingham Jail, and organized
advocates for the legalization of assisted suicide to turn to
Socrates to root their work in a moral
viewpoint (the Hemlock Society). “Socratic citizenship,” as well as Socratic
questioning, became part of the popular lexicon.
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Footnotes
Note 1
I borrow some language from Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray
(2008:9).
Note 2
For overviews of the broader reception history of “ Socrates” cross-culturally and in a wide
variety of media (history of ideas, academic philosophy, visual arts,
literature, and more) see Trapp 2007, Wilson 2007, Lane 2001, and
Ahbel-Rappe and Kamtekar 2009.
Note 3
“A Socrates for Chicago,” Harper’s Weekly , June
12, 1909.
Note 4
An experiment at Rollins College in Florida is a good case in point. In the 1920s this liberal arts college reorganized
the entire academic experience for its undergraduates to reduce its
reliance on lectures and recitation. College administrators officially
called the new model “the conference plan” (after a program developed by
the philosopher and education reformer
John
Dewey). But in order to articulate the shape of this
controversial plan to prospective students and the public, they turned
to the phrase “Socratic method.” Rollins President
Hamilton Holt explained: “The [conference plan] method
in its perfect expression combines the two functions of tutor and
professor; [it is] Socratic pure and simple.…
We have resurrected
Socrates, and set him to
work on an eight-hour shift .” Reported by John Palmer Gavit
(1931:247–249; emphasis in original).
Note 5
The pioneering reformer of law school teaching, Christopher Langdell, did not rely on the terminology of
“Socratic method,” though he did refer to Socratic questioning to
describe rigorous classroom discussion. However, law schools that
adopted this new plan certainly did rely on precisely the appellation
“Socratic method” to convey its intellectual credibility to the legal
profession, prospective students, and the public. See Kimball
2006:192–247.
Note 6
For example: Baring 1927:347–349; Myers 1929:250–253; Tunis 1930:347;
“Do Servants Need a Code? A Socratic Dialogue,’ Forum
and Century 92.1 (July 1930) 34–; Kaufman and Ryskind
1933:403–.
Note 7
Shapiro 1972:319. See also Nock 1931.
Note 8
W. R. Burnett, “Doctor Socrates” (serialized in Collier’s Weekly , March 16–April 20, 1935), adapted for the
film Dr.
Socrates , directed by William Dieterle (Warner Brothers, 1935).
Dr. Socrates was remade as
King of the Underworld , directed by
Lewis Seiler and starring
Humphrey Bogart (Warner Brothers,
1939).
Note 9
The strength of that association may explain the absence of adaptations
of The Clouds in major theatres during this
period of great interest in Greek drama on the modern stage. News
coverage of the recovery of material artifacts also raised interest in
Socrates in this period. See
“Americans to Unearth Athenian Agora, Plans Under Way to Reclaim Glories
of Ancient Marketplace Where
Socrates Was Tried,”
New York
Times , August 29, 1926; “
Socrates Statuette in British Museum,”
New York Times , August 10, 1926. On popular familiarity
with the story of
Socrates consider
novelist
Babette Deutsch’s
explanation of her reasons for writing a work of historical fiction: “A
charge of blasphemy may well be brought against an author who presumes
to retell the story of
Socrates.
That it deserves a more general audience than
Plato commands is my apology” (Deutsch 1933, “Author’s
Note”).
Note 10
By this time the record of Athenian democracy had become an admired
example of political experimentation. Alfred
Zimmern’s celebratory
The Greek
Commonwealth ( 1911, reprinted 1931) was instrumental in popularizing this shift in
attitude. In the pre-Civil War era it was more common
for
Athens to serve as a
cautionary tale about mob psychology and the need for institutional
checks and balances on demotic power. For example, see
Federalist No. 55 ( 1787/88, written
to advocate for the ratification of the U.S. Constitution): “Had every
Athenian citizen been a
Socrates,
every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” The interest of
Greek antiquity for democratic theory develops after the war. See
Havelock 1957.
Note 11
See Blasi 1988:681–682.
Note 12
Sherwood was a three-time Pulitzer
Prize-winning dramatist. His nonfiction work recounting his time in the
Roosevelt administration,
Roosevelt and Hopkins , won a remarkable fourth
Pulitzer in 1949. The original playbill is in the
Akropolis Program File, Billy Rose Library
for the Performing Arts Theatre Research Collection, New York Public
Library (hereafter “Rose Collection, NYPL”). The critic’s comment
appeared in “Greek Play at the Hecksher,”
New York
World-Telegram , December 13, 1935 (
Akropolis clippings file, Rose Collection, NYPL).
Note 13
“Greek Play at the Hecksher,” New York
World-Telegram , December 13, 1935 ( Akropolis clippings file, Rose Collection, NYPL). Cf.
Costa Varnali’s turn precisely
to
Socrates to satirize contemporary
Greek politics in his
The True Apology of Socrates (
Athens, 1931, English trans. 1955). Writing from exile in
Denmark in 1938,
Bertolt
Brecht turned to the image of
Socrates in battle (at
Delium with
Alcibiades) to develop a Marxist and pacifist commentary
on the looming war in
Europe. See
White 2007:119–140. Note that American Marxist scholars in this period
also opposed turning to
Socrates;
see Winspear and Silverberg 1939. In
Britain,
Clifford Bax’s
1930 production for the London stage,
Socrates , seems to have been an exercise in
historical dramatization. Critics did not identify resonances with any
contemporary politics but found it striking largely for the effort to
represent theatrically the practice of intellectual conversation. See
“Entertainments,”
London Times , March 25,
1930.
Note 14
Reported in Coers 1991:10–11.
Note 15
“There will be more people to test you whom I now held back, but you did
not notice it” ( Apology 39c, trans. Grube).
Note 16
See for example Hardwick 2003:1, 43–50.
Note 17
Wartime propaganda also mobilizes the image of Socrates as a demanding intellect. For
example, in October 1942 the BBC broadcast a radio
drama entitled Socrates Asks Why , by
Eric Linklater (who at the time was also
commanding a fort in the
Orkneys in
northern
Scotland), which features a discussion
set in
Elysium among deceased great
men—
Lincoln,
Voltaire,
Doctor
Johnson, and
Socrates. These “immortals” are watching television news
reports of the desperate fighting on the
Bataan
Peninsula, an enormous U.S. investment in the war
effort.
Socrates asks the group
whether they think the Allies actually know what it is that they are
fighting for, and why they are willing to suffer so terribly to achieve
it.
Socrates reminds them that in
peacetime citizens of these nations frequently criticized their
societies as flawed, even as perpetrators of injustices at home. Midway
through the piece, two recent casualties of war—a U.S. marine and a
British flying officer—join the conversation in
Elysium.
Socrates
challenges them to explain how it is possible for a soldier to go to war
to support a nation that, before the war, he had thought was full of
“slothful people and unfit rulers?” Their conversation includes
recollections of
Socrates’ own
willingness to face death for his city (both in battle and by refusing
to flee from prison) even though he was himself certainly a relentless
critic of Athenian democratic culture and politics.
Linklater takes all kinds of liberties
with the ancient sources in constructing
Socrates’ viewpoint. But in the end, his radio play
conveys the idea that there not only is an answer to the question, “What
are the Allies fighting for?” but a profound and compelling answer—that
is an answer that can stand up to rigorous scrutiny from the soldiers
who fight and die, as well as from great minds (
Lincoln,
Voltaire,
Johnson). In short, there is an
answer that can satisfy even
Socrates. Note that the setting of “
Socrates Asks Why” alludes to
Plato’s
Apology
41b–c, where
Socrates delights in
imagining conversations with great “men of old” upon his death.
Note 18
Thomas Crowther, New York Times , March 27,
1943.
Note 19
See Coers 1991.
Note 20
King Haakon of
Norway awarded
Steinbeck the Haakon VII Cross in 1946 specifically because he had written
The Moon is Down . “In the judgment of the king of
Norway himself, that novel had
bolstered the morale of his entire war-ravaged nation” (Coers 1991:30).
Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1962.
Note 21
On October 28, 1940, the Greek government
dramatically rejected an ultimatum from Mussolini demanding the occupation of Greek territory.
By mid-December 1940, Greek troops had
forced the invaders back into
Albania. The strong Greek stand against
Mussolini (celebrated as “Ochi Day” in
Greece to this day) and the
initial December 1940 victory (the first Allied land victory of
World War II) were celebrated, morale-boosting events. See “The Hour of
Greece,”
New York Times , October 29, 1940 and
Roosevelt Fireside Chat 16, December 29, 1940.
Note 22
Atkinson 1942.
Note 23
For a collection of reviews representative of the controversy see
McElrath et al. 1996:215–255.
Note 24
Atkinson 1942.
Note 25
Whitfield 1996:15.
Note 26
For discussion see Tritle 2006.
Note 27
Address at Princeton University, February 22, 1947.
Note 29
Anderson to
Ray Lyman Wilbur, President of Stanford University,
December 9, 1937, in Avery 1977:64–66.
Perhaps inspired by the Hearst Greek Theatre in
Berkeley, California ( 1903, modeled on
Epidaurus)?
Note 30
With Vasso Manolidou and
George Pappas starring and many members of
the Greek diplomatic corps in attendance. “Greek Critics Praise
Production of ‘Joan,’”
New York Times , November
14, 1947.
Note 31
“Anderson to see Athens ‘Joan,’” New York
Times , October 13, 1947; “Greek Critics Praise Production of
‘Joan,’” New York Times , November 14, 1947.
Note 32
“An American Observer in Greece,” New York Herald
Tribune , November 28, 1947, p. 26 and “The Plight of the
Greek People,” New York Herald Tribune ,
December 1, 1947.
Note 33
Anderson to the editor of the
New York Herald Tribune , published as “An American
Playwright Looks at Greece: Maxwell Anderson’s Views of the Present
Government and Dangers of Red Guerilla Victory,” January 18, 1948.
Reprinted in Avery 1977:218–222.
Note 34
Shivers 1983.
Note 35
Programs, press clippings, photos, and other materials are available in
the Rose Collection, NYPL. The cast featured the British actor Barry Jones as
Socrates.
Maxwell
Anderson’s son
Alan
had his directorial debt with this production.
Note 36
Watt 1951. For discussion of Anderson’s identification of
Athens with contemporary liberalism and
Sparta with communism see Hershbell
1970.
Note 37
Clippings File (October 31, 1951; November 19, 1951), Barefoot in Athens , Rose Collection, NYPL.
Note 38
Sam Zolotow, New York Times . Clippings File,
Barefoot in Athens , Rose Collection,
NYPL.
Note 39
Brooks Atkinson, “Socrates of Athens,” New York
Times , November 11, 1951; The New
Yorker , November 10, 1951.
Note 40
“Notes on Barefoot at Athens,” New York Times ,
October 28, 1951; “The Ancient Struggle to Uphold Democracy,” New York Tribune , August 12, 1951. These feature
stories formed the basis of an essay “ Socrates and His Gospel,” attacking
Plato for attributing his communist doctrines
to
Socrates (in the middle and late
dialogues), published with the script (Anderson 1951). His debt to
Karl Popper’s
The Open Society and Its Enemies (1966; first published in
1945) was acknowledged with gratitude.
Note 41
Lane 2007:214.
Note 42
Atkinson 1951.
Note 43
Brown 1951.
Note 44
The New Yorker , November 10, 1951.
Note 46
Watt 1951 (my emphasis).
Note 47
It was in response to the McCarran
committee “investigations” that the renowned classicist
Moses Finley was driven from the faculty of
Rutgers University and immigrated to
Britain. See Tompkins 2006.
Note 48
McCarthy proclaimed in a February 1950 address to the Ohio County Women’s Club:
Note 49
Reported in Shivers 1983:238. Red Channels (New
York, 1950) “was compiled by the editors of the anti-Communist
newsletter Counterattack , which, along with the
various updates emanating from diverse groups, served as a who’s who for
those doing the blacklisting.” Leab 1983:405.
Note 50
Anderson to
Elmer Rice, February 13, 1952, in Avery 1977:255.
Note 51
Jack Gaver, “New Play Lacks Dramatic Values,” Dallas
News , November 1, 1951.
Note 52
See Johnson 2006 and Sherry 2007.
Note 53
Some commentators have noted this but fail to set the argument with
Plato in the broader context of
Anderson’s concerns in the play
as a whole; e.g. Wertheim 1982.
Note 54
Anderson also dismisses the
unflattering portrait of Socratic teaching in
Aristophanes’
Clouds as
“demonstrably an inaccurate burlesque.”
Note 55
“Socrates and His Gospel,” page xii. Excerpts appeared in the New York Times under the title, “Notes on
Barefoot at Athens,” October 28, 1951 (accompanied by a large Hirschfeld
drawing of a scene from the play), and in the New York
Tribune as “The Ancient Struggle to Uphold Democracy,”
August 12, 1951.
Note 56
See Gombrich 1999.
Note 57
Popper 1966:189. By the mid-nineteenth
century European scholars interested in the conflict between
the apparently liberal precepts of “Socratic philosophy” and the
purportedly illiberal qualities of Platonic metaphysical and political
theory in which that depiction uncomfortably sits had extensively
explored whether a distinctly “historical Socrates” could be teased out of the ancient literary
sources (that is, freed from
Plato) and
put to use in liberal philosophy. (See esp. Schleiermacher 1973 and
Grote 1865.) In the
U.S. in this
period, however, worries about
Plato’s
“illiberal” qualities were tempered by the fact that his metaphysics,
utopian political streak, and complex characterization of
Socrates’ persona appealed to leading
progressive northern intellectuals.
Ralph Waldo
Emerson, for example, argued in a widely quoted essay
that “
Socrates and
Plato are the double star which the most
powerful instruments will not entirely separate” (Emerson 1850). The
transcendentalist
Emerson found
Plato and
Socrates (and their literary fusion) inspiring forces in
support of the struggle for abolition and female suffrage. In the
antebellum U.S. context,
Aristotle
was a hero of the pro-slavery ideologues and
Plato was regarded as more progressive. See Wish
1949.
Note 58
Maxwell Anderson “Diary,” Maxwell Anderson
Papers , University of Texas, Austin.
Note 59
One of Popper’s contemporary critics,
Ronald Levinson ( 1953), cites
Anderson’s
invocation of
Popper in his essay,
“Socrates and his Gospel,” as an example of the ease with which
Popper’s arguments can be misused
outside academe.
Popper discusses
Levinson’s reading of
Barefoot in Athens in his 1961 “Reply to A Critic”
(Addendum III to Popper 1966:336).
Note 60
Still photo. Maxwell Anderson Program File, Billy Rose Library for the
Performing Arts Theater Research Collection, NYPL.
Note 61
Stunningly captured by Leonard
Bernstein in his “Serenade After
Plato’s
Symposium ” ( 1954).
Note 62
“Theatre Gossip,” Barefoot in Athens clippings
file, Rose Collection, NYPL. (Press Releases, February 2, 1951 and
August 2, 1951, Barefoot in Athens file, Rose
Collection, NYPL.) The politics of Barefoot in
Athens thus resembles the politics behind Anderson’s treatment of the
Sacco and
Vanzetti case in two plays produced in the 1920s.
Sacco and
Vanzetti
were accused of crimes they claimed not to have committed, and were
widely thought not to have received a fair trial because they were known
anarchists. They were executed by the state of
Massachusetts in 1927. In
his two commercially successful dramatic works based on this case,
Anderson focused on the
injustice of their conviction as well as on how and why it happened (to
the delight of leftist compatriots), but pointedly did not advocate
collective action as a response (to the consternation of the same
leftists). The two plays are
Winterset (1927)
and
Gods of Lightning (1929). For discussion
see Wall 1941:353.
Note 63
For a selection of Sinclair’s radio
plays broadcast between 1944 and 1946 see Sinclair 1948.
Note 64
Reported in Partington 1997:63.
Note 65
Partington 1997:66.
Note 66
Andrew Allan’s
Stage , CBC radio, February 1947 and January 1948. See
Globe and Mail reviews reported in Partington
1997.
Note 67
The script was later published: Sinclair 1957.
Note 68
The cast featured Frank Peddie as
Socrates and included
Christopher Plummer as
Alcibiades.
Note 69
Horowitz 1983:80.
Note 70
Walter Bernstein’s screenplay for
the 1976
film
The Front (starring
Woody Allen and
Zero
Mostel) was based on this group’s work on
You Are There . See
Walter
Bernstein 1996 and
Walter
Bernstein’s Interview with Edward Summer, “Written By”
(February 2002), Writers Guild of America.
Note 71
Schultheiss 1997:13.
Note 72
Abraham Polonsky, “How the Blacklist Worked in Hollywood,” Film Culture (Fall/Winter, 1970), p. 47, cited in
Polonsky 1997:32. This line was reproduced often in later appreciations
of the series; e.g. the program notes to To Illuminate
Our Time: You Are There , Film Society of Lincoln Center,
January 16–17, 1998. For discussion of the cultural politics of the
period see Denning 1997.
Note 73
It was released on DVD in 2005. The credited writer for the You Are There episode on “The Death of Socrates”
is the front, Kate Nickerson. The
true writer was
Arnold Manoff. For
discussion of the assignment of the
Socrates episode to
Manoff see “Interview with
Abe
Polonsky,” July 6, 1999,
Archive of
American Television , Polonsky (Part 5).
Note 74
Walter Cronkite interview,
All Things Considered , National Public Radio,
October 27, 2003.
Note 75
They did not hire professional historians as advisors but the show did
employ a full-time research staff. They did not consider how far an
account of the historical Socrates
could be drawn out of the suspicious literary sources, but treated all
the ancient sources as equally useful. See Horowitz 1983:82.
Note 76
Charles Russell, unpublished ms. Reported in Schultheiss 1997:11.
Note 77
“Met Gets Rare David Canvas,”
New York Times ,
June 14, 1931.
Note 78
McCarthy’s decline began when
Edward R. Murrow decried his
tactics and evident disregard for truth on his March 9, 1954 CBS show,
See It Now . The public response to the live television
broadcasts of the attacks on the loyalty of U.S. Army personnel in the
senate hearings he ran later that same year undermined him further.
Note 79
Critical responses to Popper included
contrary readings of
Plato (e.g.
Levinson 1953) and efforts to recover controversial aspects of
Socrates’ politics in the ancient sources
and history of ideas (e.g. Montgomery 1954; see also
Levinson’s review of Montgomery in
Levinson 1955).
Note 80
Arendt 1990. See Villa 2001 for discussion of this essay in a similar
light.
Note 81
Jowett 1956:l–li.
Note 82
This literature is large. Important markers include Vlastos 1983, Stone
1988, and Euben 1990 and 1997. Note that Arendt’s 1954 lecture on
Socrates was published only in 1990, in the midst of this wave of
scholarly attention to his interest for democratic theory.