With very few exceptions, the successful Broadway and film musicals of the genre’s so-called “golden age”—with their romance-driven plots, often nostalgic settings, and (mostly) happy endings—were notable for their lack of political content. Hence the recent and rapturously received Broadway revival of Finian’s Rainbow came as a surprise to those unfamiliar with the show, which has not been seen on the Great White Way since the original production closed in 1948. For not only is the subject matter of Finian’s Rainbow frankly political, but the plot—in which a biracial community of poor sharecroppers thwarts a racist senator by persuading a leprechaun to turn him into a black man and is in turn corrupted by wealth that turns the “idle poor” into the “idle rich”—amounts to an openly left-wing critique of the United States and capitalism.
The man who put the politics into Finian’s Rainbow was E.Y. “Yip” Harburg (1896-1981), who wrote the lyrics and collaborated with Fred Saidy on the book. An inspired craftsman who was universally esteemed by his colleagues for his crisp wit and fluent command of rhyme, Yip Harburg was the only one of the major lyricists of the golden age of American popular song who regularly addressed political themes in his work—as well as the only one who would openly describe himself as a socialist. In fact, Harburg was affiliated with numerous Communist front groups, and a biography co-written by his son acknowledges that his political positions “moved in and out of alignment with those of the Communist party by a calculus that he alone professed to understand.”1
Even though he wrote the lyrics for such beloved standards as “April in Paris,” “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” “Over the Rainbow,” and “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe,” Harburg is not nearly so well remembered today as are the other prominent songwriters of his generation. One reason for his comparative obscurity is that he collaborated with an unusually large number of composers. The only golden-age lyricists who are widely known by name today are the ones who forged permanent partnerships with individual composers (as Lorenz Hart did with Richard Rodgers), wrote their own music (as did Irving Berlin and Cole Porter), or became known in their own right as professional singers (as did Johnny Mercer).
Harburg’s lack of latter-day name recognition is also related to his politics. His radical ties were so extensive that in spite of his work on such commercially successful films as The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Cabin in the Sky (1943), he was blacklisted by the Hollywood studios in 1951 and did not work there again until 1962.2 As a result, Finian’s Rainbow, his greatest stage success, was not filmed until 1968, in an awkward and lumbering production (directed by, of all people, Francis Ford Coppola) whose disastrous failure cast a shadow over the show and its name.
But the main reason why Harburg is not generally known by name today is that Finian’s Rainbow is the only stage musical on which he worked that continues to be performed. The others, like most of the films to which he contributed lyrics in the 30s and 40s, are now forgotten—and their failure to hold the stage says much about the artistic limitations of the otherwise greatly gifted man who helped bring them into being.
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Though Harburg was a limousine leftist who lived a life of bicoastal comfort, he came by his politics honestly. Unlike the vast majority of his fellow golden-age songwriters, he was born into a proletarian family of Russian-Jewish immigrants who worked in sweatshops on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. And though he soon rose from poverty to affluence, he would never forget the experience of growing up in a sixth-floor cold-water flat, sleeping on chairs because his parents were too poor to buy a bed.
Harburg’s youthful poverty radicalized him, and years later he would discuss the connection between his politics and his art:
The lyricist, like any artist, cannot be neutral. He should be committed to the side of humanity. He should be concerned for the rights, potential and dignity of his fellow man. He should also be able to express these ideals with a proper concern for the rights of the human ear, the potential of the human brain and the dignity of the English language.
For Harburg, the second half of this credo was as important as the first. He was a master craftsman who, like his childhood friend Ira Gershwin, had discovered the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan as a boy, and his style would forever after bear the mark of W.S. Gilbert’s technically flawless, emotionally neutral versification. Though both men were capable of writing with deep feeling, they preferred as a rule to keep passion at arm’s length, opting instead for the same clever wordplay at which Gilbert had excelled (Harburg would never be more brilliant than when writing for such comedians as Bert Lahr and Groucho Marx), translated into the pungent vernacular of what H.L. Mencken had only recently dubbed “the American language.”
It is characteristic of Harburg that the most compelling of his early songs should have been about poverty, not love. “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” (1932) is the harrowing lament of an unemployed engineer who once was “building a dream/With peace and glory ahead” but now finds himself “standing in line/Just waiting for bread.” No other songwriter of the 30s had dared to engage so forthrightly with the harsh realities of Depression-era life, and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” became one of the decade’s biggest hits.
What is most striking about “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” is that it is far more emotionally direct than any of Harburg’s other early successes. When he wrote about love, by contrast, it was usually in the distanced language of the vers de société with which he had launched his career, as in “April in Paris” (“This is a feeling/No one can ever reprise”) and “What Is There to Say?” (“My heart’s in a deadlock/I’d even face wedlock/With you”). Only in “Last Night When We Were Young,” his first great collaboration with the composer Harold Arlen, does Harburg rise fully to the emotional occasion, and even there he portrays love as a matter of romantic idealism rather than ardor: “Life was so new, so real, so right/Ages ago, last night.”
No less characteristic is The Wizard of Oz, in which Harburg and Arlen collaborated on a children’s fantasy in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan, elevated and ennobled by the expansive lyricism of a single song, “Over the Rainbow.” To be sure, The Wizard of Oz is still one of the supreme American musical achievements, a masterpiece whose virtues would be more widely recognized had it been conceived and written for the stage rather than as a film. Yet it remains at heart an old-fashioned operetta rather than a modern-style musical, and though it is far more dramaturgically advanced than any American stage musical of the decade, a revolutionary new way of writing musicals was in the offing—one with which Harburg never quite managed to come to terms.
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A year after The Wizard of Oz was released, Rodgers and Hart collaborated with John O’Hara on Pal Joey, a musical whose sexually frank subject matter was matched in contemporaneity by the theatrical sophistication with which the authors melded the book and songs into a seamless whole. Three years later, Rodgers joined forces with Oscar Hammerstein II to write Oklahoma! The phenomenal success of this musical led to the general acceptance on Broadway of the “book show,” whose songs are integrated into a more or less naturalistic plot rather than interrupting it randomly.
Because the sketch-comedy revues on which Harburg had cut his theatrical teeth had gone out of fashion by 1943, he was determined to return to Broadway with a book show that made dramatic sense—and since Popular Front–style Communism and the New Deal had brought his radical views into the mainstream of American popular culture, he was no less determined to write a hit musical that wore its politics on its sleeve. His first attempt, Bloomer Girl (1944, music by Arlen), was a 19th-century feminist tract set on the eve of the Civil War that ran for 657 performances but subsequently disappeared from the stage, mainly because of its heavy-handed book. Then, in 1947, Harburg struck a better balance between art and politics with Finian’s Rainbow, which had an even longer run—725 performances—and was hailed by critics as a classic of American musical comedy.
The limitations of Harburg’s approach, however, are clearer in retrospect than they were to his contemporaries. Like The Wizard of Oz before it, Finian’s Rainbow is an operetta-style fantasy, this time set not in the never-never-land of Oz but in an imaginary southern state called Missitucky. The book is a mishmash of pseudo-Irish charm and smug Popular Front sanctimony that is only partly redeemed by the virtuosity of the comic lyrics, whose political point-making is far too often enervatingly obvious (“They begat the Babbitts of the bourgeoisie/Who begat the misbegotten GOP”).
The real strength of Finian’s Rainbow lies in its ballads, one of which, “Old Devil Moon,” sounds a note of passion rarely heard in Harburg’s work: “You and your glance/Make this romance/Too hot to handle.” Here the lyric meshes with the repeated rising figures of Burton Lane’s sensuously harmonized melody in such a way as to illustrate the truth of one of its author’s most acute observations about the craft of songwriting: “A great composer brings out the best in a lyricist: the melody acts as a discipline on his wit and invention.”
But the book of Finian’s Rainbow lacks the immediacy of its best songs, attempting instead to say serious things in a queasily whimsical way. For unlikely as it may sound, Finian’s Rainbow is in point of fact a Marxist commentary on modern American life: Harburg himself described the show as an economic parable in which he sought to show how “the idle rich manipulate our society so that consumption consumes the consumer.” That he and Lane chose to illustrate this commentary with such ballads as “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” merely underlines the fundamental instability of their concept.
Never again would Harburg have any luck at writing a dramatically coherent stage musical. Flahooley (1951, music by Sammy Fain), his follow-up to Finian’s Rainbow, is a messy, unfocused satirical fantasy about McCarthyism that ran for only 40 performances on Broadway. By that time, Harburg’s political convictions were interfering with the soundness of his theatrical judgment, and though one of his later shows (Jamaica, 1957, music by Arlen) had a long run, its success was due almost entirely to the presence of Lena Horne in the cast.
After Jamaica, Harburg’s career was thrown off course by the coming of rock, and like the other golden-age songwriters who remained active into the 60s and beyond, he became increasingly embittered, publishing volumes of dull light verse in which, among other things, he railed in vain against the “tasteless, violent, and unmelodic” songs that had brought his career to an untimely close, dismissing them as “destined for the ages—/Like, I mean, from five to ten.” He died in 1981, soured by artistic and political disillusion, a man who had outlived his popularity.
Yet Harburg was ahead of his time in one way: his preachiness. Today a new generation of musical-comedy writers is turning out shows with frivolous plots that incorporate overtly political content, albeit with a socio-political slant rather than an economic one. Such shows as Hairspray (2002), Tarzan (2006), and Shrek the Musical (2008) all contain the same starchy sermonettes on behalf of tolerance, both racial and (less explicitly) sexual, that also figure prominently in most animated feature films.
The obvious reference point for these shows is South Pacific, in which Oscar Hammerstein warned his audiences that racism has to be “carefully taught”: “You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late/Before you are six or seven or eight/To hate all the people your relatives hate.” But they owe at least as much to the Yip Harburg of Finian’s Rainbow, who thought it his job not merely to entertain his audiences but also to make them more “progressive.”
This aspect of Harburg’s work, which at one time led to its eclipse, has since become attractive to those artists and critics who believe, as he did, that art and politics cannot and should not be separated. Nowadays the authors of an admiring history of radicalism in Hollywood can declare with straight faces that “Ding-Dong, the Witch Is Dead” “has the feeling of liberation that Harburg and his fellow Popular Front artists dreamed for a Europe free of fascism and for colonial citizens across what became known as the Third World.”3
Yet the near unanimous enthusiasm with which New York’s drama critics greeted the revival of Finian’s Rainbow failed to persuade theatergoers to embrace the show, which posted its closing notice just before New Year’s Day, two months after opening night. Even in the high-minded Age of Obama, it seems, romantic ardor honestly expressed continues to trump progressive politics.
1 Who Put the Rainbow in ‘The Wizard of Oz’: Yip Harburg, Lyricist (1993). Harold Meyerson, who co-wrote the book with Ernie Harburg, is a left-wing political journalist and a longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
2 Though Harburg claimed to have been nothing more than a “Franklin Delano Roosevelt Democrat,” he worked for Henry Wallace’s Communist-infiltrated 1948 presidential campaign and served as vice-chairman of the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (HICCASP), which started out as a genuinely independent Left-liberal group but came under Communist control in 1946. In 1950 he declared himself to be “outraged by the suggestion that somehow I am connected with, believe in, or am sympathetic with Communist or totalitarian philosophy,” but he made this statement to an MGM executive in a deliberate attempt to clear his name. Whatever the exact nature of his earlier relationship to the Communist party, he appears to have shed his Communist ties by the mid-50s.
3 Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America’s Favorite Movies (2002).
