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.
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“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”
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“To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.”
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