Song Lyrics of the Day (Ira and George Gershwin)

“Love is sweeping the country!
Waves are hugging the shore;
All the sexes
From Maine to Texas
Have never known such love before.”—“Love Is Sweeping the Country,” from Of Thee I Sing, book by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, music by George Gershwin)

(The citation above corrects a slight error in the headline—George Gershwin did not, of course, write the lyrics to this musical, but I’ve decided to redress the wrong done him by the Pulitzer Prize committee when they awarded his collaborators the Pulitzer Prize but not him. To their way of thinking, only the words counted. Well, it wasn’t the first time that the board made a mistake, and it surely won’t be the last.

Opening on Broadway in 1931, Of Thee I Sing was the first musical comedy ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Several years ago, I hunted down, at the Paley Center for Media in New York, a 1972 TV version of the show, featuring, among others, Carroll O’Connor, Cloris Leachman, Jack Gilford, Ted Knight, and David Doyle. The show was broadcast on CBS, and when you look at the actors and consider their backgrounds, the most obvious qualification of many of them was that they were stars of then-popular series on the “Tiffany Network.” Of all the actors, the one who came off the best was Michele Lee—not surprisingly, as she had achieved fame on Broadway in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Amazingly, no movie has ever been made of this landmark musical—the Marx Brothers toyed with the idea, only to go with another script, Duck Soup. So the CBS show, for better or worse, is what we have to put up with. I can’t wait until I have the chance to see another version of this musical.

For years, the most relevant part of the show was the character of Alexander Throttlebottom, whose name became synonymous with Vice-Presidents who do nothing but attend funerals in the name of the President. That hasn’t been as much the case since Jimmy Carter made Walter Mondale a significant player in his administration. Over the last decade, however, a more surprising point of similarity was noticed: the President in the musical, John P. Wintergreen, who won the election on a platform of “love,” is sued by a young Southern lady, triggering the threat of impeachment proceedings.

This week, as the Democrats gather in Denver—and later, when the Republicans convene in St. Paul--it’s not a bad idea to remember the acid truths of the Kaufman-Ryskind-Gershwin musical, which showed, in the midst of the darkness of the Great Depression, that chuckling about politics can be as healthy for the battered American psyche as singing.)