The Politics of Culture

Abstract

On April 23, 1918, two thousand of the nation’s entertainers and entrepreneurs jostled for seating in New York’s famous Palace Theatre, each ready to offer his or her services to the war effort. The month before the German offensive had broken through Allied lines. The considerable American war propaganda machine was at full strength, sweeping away the dissident voices in the call for national purpose that few could resist, none less than the nation’s entertainers. From center stage, the producer Winthrop Ames, just back from a fact-finding trip to France, assured the entertainers they were not marginal to the war effort: “I can tell you, as a factor beyond dispute, that entertainment is not a luxury to the modern man. Once deprive him of it, even for a little time, and he learns that it is a necessity as vital to him as sugar in his food. We actors make something that is needful in this war as overcoats or shovels. And at last our opportunity has come to serve … to fight side by side with out soldiers, to enter actively the service of America’s Army in France.”¹

The biggest job in the War is to send the boys over the top with a smile. It is the men who go over the top with a song in their hearts who keep their wits about them, and come back—and you’ve got to provide the songs.

—Sgt. Arthur Guy Empey, in James W. Evans and Captain Gardner L. Harding, Entertaining the American Army: The American Stage and Lyceum in the World War