An Inspector Calls and Oldfashioned Propaganda at the Shaw Festival

On the facial skin of it, how could two plays be more different than An Inspector Calls and The Little Foxes? (Both come in repertory at the Shaw Festival throughout its 2008 season; I review the former in this article and the latter in this article) In one play, a police detective explores the life span and untimely death of a young woman in an English industrial town; the other deals with greed and infighting in an Alabama family.

Yet these plays - a British mystery classic and a classic American drama - were cut from the same cloth. They have parallel plots, parallel themes, even parallel characters.

Two capitalist families

In THE TINY Foxes, Lillian Hellman gives us the Hubbards, a family group of Alabama cotton merchants that has money, but no social position.

In An Inspector Calls, written only six years later, J. B. Priestley gives us the Hubbards' English counterparts, the Birlings, a family of manufacturers within an English industrial town. The Birlings have money, but no social position.

Two unholy business alliances

Each play begins with a dinner party. In THE TINY Foxes, the Hubbards are toasting a proposed business alliance having an industrialist from Chicago. The new partners count on preventing the labor agitation that plagues northern industry because they build a cotton mill in the Hubbards' southern town.

In An Inspector Calls, the Birlings are also celebrating a small business alliance, the engagement of these daughter Sheila to Gerald Croft, the son of their principal business competitor. Arthur Birling and Croft expect the marriage alliance to result in business understandings that may yield higher prices and suppression of labor agitation.

Two lead characters motivated by social ambition

In The Little Foxes, Regina Hubbard intends to leverage her home based business relationship right into a prominent social position in Chicago society.

Similarly, An Inspector Calls finds Arthur Birling angling for a knighthood. With a title and his new connection with the socially superior Crofts, he hopes to vault into the upper echelons of English society.

Two sons

Each family has a dissolute son in his early twenties. Leo Hubbard works in his uncle Horace's bank and embezzles. Eric Birling works in his father's office, drinks, and embezzles. Both teenagers patronize prostitutes.

Two daughters

Each family has a daughter in her late teens. The Hubbards intend to marry Alexandra off to her wastrel cousin Leo to keep all the profit the family. Alexandra is the only member of the family with a moral or social conscience (her aunt Birdie has strong humane instincts, but she is a victim of the Hubbards, not properly a member of family).

The Birlings intend to marry Sheila Birling off to the son of a competitor to consolidate their financial and social standing. Sheila is the only one of the Birlings with much of a conscience; she sees that her father's factory workers "aren't cheap labour - they're people."

Two indictments

Each one of these two plays indicts a capitalist family on multiple counts of crimes both personal and social.

By the end of THE TINY Foxes, we realize that the Hubbards strike their women, teach their sons to steal, search for sport as the poor go hungry, beat their horses, keep mistresses, blackmail each other, cheat black folk, charge usury, corrupt public officials, and beat down attempts by working people to arrange. (I complain about Lillian Hellman's use of the Hubbards as whipping boys for American capitalism in my own earlier post.)

Initially, the Birlings seem much less dreadful. We learn, however (as do the characters themselves), that they are guilty of exactly the same sorts of crimes. Arthur Birling has discharged and blackballed a factory employee for getting the temerity to ask for two shillings more per week (think Oliver Twist) and trying to organize a strike. Sheila Birling gets the same unfortunate girl discharged from a job as a shopgirl for considering her the wrong way. Crofts, the future son-in-law, finds the girl unemployed and hungry, makes her his mistress, then abandons her. Then your Birlings' wastrel son meets her, now a prostitute, uses her, and gets her pregnant. By the end of her rope, the girl seeks charity from the private aid society controlled by Mrs. Birling, who turns her away.

Two soap boxes

Each playwright divides the world neatly into those that take and those that are taken from. In THE TINY Foxes:

Addie: "Well, there are people who eat the planet earth and eat all of the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then you can find people who stand around watching them eat it.

WITHIN AN Inspector Calls:

Birling: "If you don't come down sharply on a few of these people, they'd soon be asking for the earth."

The Inspector: "They might. But after all it's better to ask for the planet earth than to take it."

Putting out somebody's talking points

Within an excellent essay in this program for the Shaw Festival's production of An Inspector Calls, Professor John Baxendale softpedals the play's political implications. Far from implicitly condoning violent Soviet-style revolution, he says, Priestley was not even promoting his political party's radical legislative agenda. The essay maintains that Priestley sought just to foster feelings of mutual responsibility among his countrymen.

"The play isn't about social reform [says Professor Baxendale], better healthcare or full employment, important though these things are, but about a vision of how life could possibly be different if we acknowledge the truth that we all have been members of 1 another."

Indeed, at first blush that appears to be what the Inspector is saying (and he speaks with Priestley's voice) in his grand, melodramatic speech:

"One Eva Smith went - but you can find untold thousands and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths quit with us, making use of their hopes and fears, their suffering, and potential for happiness, all intertwined with this lives, with what we think and say and do. We don't live alone. We are members of 1 body. We are responsible for each other."

But warm fuzzy communal feelings and private charity weren't what either J. B. Priestley or Lillian Hellman were about. Nor was the social gospel of "love thy neighbor"; nothing might have been further from Priestley's mind compared to the Christian communalism of the second chapter of Acts.

His message, instead, was that if Britain and America refused to accept socialism, bloody times were ahead, and mercy cannot be expected. Therefore Priestley ended the Inspector's grand lecture with exactly such a grim warning:

"We are responsible for one another. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will undoubtedly be taught it in fire and blood and anguish."

Professor Baxendale asserts that the Inspector's "fire and blood" language refers to the two world wars, instead of to revolutionary violence, but this is not a fair reading. Priestley made no attempt in this play to disguise his admiration for Soviet socialism. In explaining the techniques of the Inspector to her family, Priestley has Sheila Birling allude to Vladimir Lenin's famous boast about capitalist rope when she says, "No, he's giving us rope - so that we'll hang ourselves."

One can almost think that these two extraordinarily talented dramatists, Hellman and Priestley, were working from the list of Marxist "talking points" for his or her plays:

* Portray all capitalists as instinctive monopolists and enemies of organized labor

* Caricature capitalists as holding extreme, selfish, individualist points of view

* Portray them as willing to pimp their own daughters for gain

* Portray their sons as thieves so when sexually ravenous

* Portray private charitable institutions (like Mrs. Birling's) as corrupt and degrading

* Portray private ownership of land as unjust

* Show the world as split into "us" (the worker class) versus "them" (the capitalist class)

Little wonder an Inspector Calls and THE TINY Foxes ended up being practically exactly the same play!

Priestley bought into the party line that capitalists are on the incorrect side of history and that Soviet-style socialism represented the best expect mankind. Early within an Inspector Calls, set in 1912, Arthur Birling complacently tells his family how nicely the world is shaping up. There is no war coming, he says, just "several scaremongers here making a fuss about nothing." Consider the new aeroplanes, look at the automobiles, "bigger and faster all the time," look at the huge new ocean liner set to sail the next week, the Titanic. In thirty years, Birling assures his family, labor troubles is a thing of the past, and the world could have forgotten "all these silly little war scares."

Writing in 1945, Priestley expected his audience to smile sadly at Birling's foolish prophecies. How short-sighted Birling and the capitalists were, we have been to think. And not only that: Birling was predicting "peace and prosperity and rapid progress everywhere - except needless to say in Russia, which will always be behindhand, naturally." Wrong about the Titanic, wrong about Russia!

But Priestley was worse when compared to a poor prophet; he failed to see what was before his eyes. Like so a great many other fellow travelers, Priestley believed that the fantastic socialist experiment in the U.S.S.R. had already succeeded; in fact, the blood of millions in eastern Europe had been shed only to sustain a brutal Soviet regime where the old bosses had merely been replaced by new bosses.

In his preface to Mrs. Warren's Profession (also section of the Shaw Festival's 2008 season, however, not scheduled to open till early July), Shaw was forthright about what he intended to accomplish in his plays: "I am convinced that artwork is the subtlest, the most seductive, the very best method of moral propagandism on the globe . . . ." In An Inspector Calls, J. B. Priestley proved himself Shaw's staunch disciple.