Living Words

Playwright Robert E. Sherwood is largely forgotten in 2008. In 1938, however, his play Abe Lincoln in Illinois was the toast of Broadway and Sherwood was one of America's foremost public intellectuals. Although his plays never joined the likes of Our Town, Death of a Salesman or Streetcar Named Desire in the popular canon, Sherwood was a skillful, respected, earnest craftsman who consistently achieved commercial and critical success and won several prestigious awards, including four Pulitzers, an Oscar, and the Bancroft Prize. Sherwood's life also functions, in the words of one biographer, “as a mirror to his times.” Fully subscribing to President Woodrow Wilson's idealistic rhetoric, Sherwood volunteered for World War I. But the war and its aftermath disillusioned the playwright. He felt bamboozled by propagandists and exploited by bankers and industrialists. Such feelings were not unique to Sherwood. The Nye Committee (1934–1936) responded to and reaffirmed such sentiments, creating a groundswell of support for the Neutrality Acts and the notion that the United States should avoid entanglement in future wars. These beliefs informed Idiot's Delight (1936), Sherwood's first Pulitzer Prize-winning play. In its postscript, Sherwood implored the world to ignore the seductive words of “megalomaniac leaders” and the self-serving “armament industry.” War was neither inevitable nor necessary, he insisted. Japanese, German, and Italian aggression could be deterred through a policy of “calmness, courage, and ridicule” (1). Soon after, as he brooded over the deepening political crises in Asia and Europe, he rethought his assumptions. In doing so, he looked to Lincoln for guidance. He believed that Lincoln's “living words” held “the answers—or the only conceivable answers—to all the questions that distract the world today” (2)

Art history · Courage · German · Media studies · Neutrality · Political science · Rhetoric · Sociology · Theology · Cinema and Media Studies · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Theater, Performance, and Music History · History · Law · Philosophy

• Memory as a Cultural System

  Barry Schwartz•American Sociological Review•1996

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