History
Knickerbocker Holiday is both a romantic comedy and a thinly veiled allegory equating the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt (whose ancestor is one of the characters on the corrupt town council) with fascism. As is apparent from the preface he wrote for the play, as well as the play and the songs themselves, Maxwell Anderson was a rugged individualist, but not a full-blown anarchist. Anderson believed that government was necessary in society, but that government must always be watched because government is just as selfishly interested as any of the individuals that compose it. He saw the New Deal as another example of the corporatism and concentration of political power which had given rise to Nazism and Stalinism.
His animus toward the state is more soberly revealed in one of his two tragedies about the Sacco and Vanzetti execution, Winterset. That play, coincidentally, starred Burgess Meredith, who was originally to star in Knickerbocker Holiday. Meredith, a friend of Weill's, was to play the romantic young lead Brom Broek, but he left when he saw the villainous Peter Stuyvesant character growing into a more and more lovable and important role, upstaging his.
Read more about this topic: Knickerbocker Holiday
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)