Preaching To The Masses:
Strike Up The Band And War
By John Mueller
Strike Up the Band was most unusual for its time in that it attempted to deal with an important social issue in a musical comedy context. However, its target – war – was an easy one in the 1920's.
In the decades before World War I, a debate had raged in Europe and the United States over the value of war as an institution. Throughout the centuries individual voices, some of them very eloquent, had been raised against war, but the first dedicated peace groups in history were organized only in 1815, and they achieved substantial public notice and momentum only by the 1880's or so. That is, as a significant political issue, the notion that war is a bad idea and ought to be abolished is only about a century old.
Although the antiwar movement, with its protests, peace prizes, solemn congresses, and disarmament and arbitration schemes was burgeoning before 1914, it was also ridiculed (particularly for lacking "manliness"), and its voice was largely drowned out by those who still held war to be a method for resolving international disputes that was natural, inevitable, honorable, manly, invigorating, necessary, and often progressive, glorious, and desirable.
Such sentiments were by no means restricted to noisy Prussian militarists. Indeed, a popular pose among intellectuals of the era was that war was not only necessary and exciting, but redemptive. As British novelist Hilaire Belloc enthused, "How I long for the Great War! It will sweep Europe like a broom." Oliver Wendell Holmes told the Harvard graduation class of 1895 that war's message was "divine." British art critic John Ruskin proclaimed war to be "the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of men," as well as "the foundation of all great art." Emile Zola found war to be "life itself," while Igor Stravinsky believed it to be "necessary for human progress." And Winston Churchill concluded that in civilization, "joy" is sacrificed to "luxury" whereas in battle, life is "at its best and healthiest" as one "awaits the caprice of the bullet."
The debate was substantially resolved by the cataclysmic war of 1914-1918 which clearly changed attitudes toward war in favor of the anti-war argument. Obviously this change was not enough to prevent later wars, but by the 1920's, especially in Britain, France, and the United States, the notion was widely accepted that war – particularly war among the advanced countries – was an evil that ought to be expunged. In 1919 the League of Nations was formed to prevent international disputes from degenerating into war, and in 1928 a pact outlawing war, soon signed by virtually every nation on earth, was fabricated.
By opposing war, then, the authors of Strike Up the Band, like most wise satirists, were basically preaching to the choir. Nor were they the first popular artists to deal with the subject in a critical way. In the theatre, What Price Glory?, a play by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings, had become a huge hit in 1924, and King Vidor's 1925 epic The Big Parade (alluded to in the lyric of Strike Up the Band's title song), proved to be Hollywood's biggest moneymaker of the decade.
Many war critics have found that the institution is most vulnerable at the bottom and, in part to deflate its glorifiers, war opponents have often emphasized the death, destruction, dislocation, and dismemberment that war inevitably brings. That's not the usual stuff of comedy (though Voltaire was not deterred when he wrote Candide in 1759), and it is not surprising that in creating a musical comedy about war, George S. Kaufman and his collaborators concentrate instead on the top end of war, satirizing war's initiators and commanders for their venality, pettiness, selfishness, and self-importance.
In suggesting that wars are brought about by the nefarious machinations of profit-seeking businessmen, the show fits into a tradition that continues to the present day. Marxists and Leninists believed war and capitalism to be inextricably linked, and those less doctrinaire have often argued that wars are variously inspired by manipulative businessmen – usually arms manufacturers (Shaw's 1905 play, Major Barbara), financiers, overseas investors, or members of the military-industrial complex. This explanation for war enjoyed great favor in the 1920's and 30's.
But the message of Strike Up the Band is richer than its rather glib anti-capitalist premise. The satire is most incisive when it deals with the hoopla and hype of war: the striking up of bands, the mindless parading and flag-waving, the consensual suppression of unpopular views in the name of patriotism, the unquestioning certainty of divine guidance, the eager, thoughtless, lemming-like embracing of war as the "supreme theatre of human strenuousness," as pacifist William James once put it with grudging admiration. Thus the substantial appeals of war as spectacle are deftly ridiculed in another theatrical form - one that does not require people to die and in this case comes equipped with far better music.
War survived the onslaught launched by Strike Up the Band, but the power of ridicule should not accordingly be casually discounted. Formal dueling, an enterprise at least as absurd and theatrical as war, died out during the course of the nineteenth century, partially because of the ridicule heaped upon it by Mark Twain and other satirists. The institution had long been condemned by church and secular law, but its demise came about only when, as one study puts it, "solemn gentlemen went to the field of honor only to be laughed at." Even slavery, an institution that was once as central to the human experience as war, died out in part because of ridicule: Brazil, the last country in what was then known as "Christendom" to abandon slavery, did so in 1888 in considerable measure because its European-oriented elite was made to feel embarrassed at tolerating such an uncivilized custom.
Unlike formal dueling and slavery, war still persists. But it has all but vanished from most of Europe, a continent that was once the most warlike in the world. People have often insisted that war is somehow required by human nature or by the forces of history, but many Europeans have now lived quite well without it for nearly five decades. A German who today advocated a war against France for status or for advantage, as many did only a few decades ago, would be treated not as wrong-headed but as foolish. In this, the Swiss proved to be harbingers: the only war they have fought in nearly two centuries has been the fictional one waged in Strike Up the Band.
War will die out not when it is considered to be stupid, but when it is held to be absurd. Strike Up the Band seeks to hurry that day along a bit.
John Mueller is professor for political science and film studies at the University of Rochester. He is the author of War, Presidents and Public Opinion, Retreat From Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War, the prize-winning Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films, and the scripts for two musicals.