The Front Page: Amateur Hour Democracy

 The Front Page: How Democracy is Fragile, Exactly

Tuesday, July 25, 2023

 

The first cold reading play I did was The Front Page, by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (1928). It was on the light side: the banter in a courthouse newsroom: a man scheduled for execution that night who has escaped. All the parties in the justice machine, including the reporters, have some motives that are very far from justice: catching the late train, keeping one’s fiancé happy, selling newspapers, rising in the profession, closing the case, winning votes, not making work for themselves. The question is whether a bunch of people with these various motives can come together to do justice: to prevent the death of a man whose guilt has not been established. Put another way: can a bunch of ordinary people, with limited commitment to doing justice, approximate what a brilliant, totally dedicated, authoritarian could accomplish – Batman, or the hero of lots of police shows. The play’s answer: justice is done, but just barely.

 

This reminds me of one of my favorite plays, which I saw in Lumet’s film version, Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose (1954). Again, someone is accused of murder: the action of the play happens entirely in the jury room, after his trial. Again, the jurors have many agendas: getting out in time to go to the ball game, defending the honor of immigrants, fitting in, not rocking the boat, giving their favorite speeches, exercising their bullying muscles. The question this asks: can people with such different agendas come together in this structured activity and actually deliver a just verdict? The alternative is a judge, paid and trained and conditioned to be “above all that” during robe-time. The answer, here also: justice is done, but just barely. The key event: they find the switch for the fan, cool down the jury room a bit, and decide to take another hour to deliberate.

 

Each play enacts the fragility of democracy, of having big decisions made by part-timers with conflicting loyalties, which is one core democratic idea. In Athens, there were rules to keep people from occupying public roles very long, and to force lots of people into governing and decision-making activity – an extension of the jury idea to “water commissioner.” The hunch behind this was that, out of the mess of different motives and experience and conditioning, good government would happen, enough of the time.

 

Drama was important in Athens in a way that might seem foreign to contemporary people. There were huge theatres, and citizens attended these performances, perhaps partly out of religious duty. The plays were a baseline, common experience. (I think of the way television worked in the early days: you could count on people having seen last night’s Lucy episode.) 

 

Antigone, by Euripides (441 BCE), which I encountered most recently in Seamus Heaney’s 2004 adaptation, The Burial at Thebes, is also drama about political fragility. It features two strong characters, Antigone and Cleon, both of whom are right, in a way, and both of whom are unwilling to lose an argument. Antigone wants to properly bury her brother. Creon wants to assert the supremacy of his new government over merely personal concerns, to enact strict justice, by leaving the bodies of traitors to the vultures. The situation very clearly allows each of them options in how vigorously they pursue their projects, and the terrible consequences happen because neither is able to take the off-ramp, to take advantage of opportunities to get most of what they want. This seems to me to be in the same spirit at The Front Page and Twelve Angry Men: here is how our political set-up is fragile, and here is what must be preserved, if it is to work – in Antigone, the possibility of compromise between absolute positions.

 

I have been watching for this kind of political drama, this kind of drama as civic education, in contemporary television, following especially the career of Aaron Sorkin, who gets better from The American President through the West Wing to Newsroom and then to the movies Molly’s Game and The Trial of the Chicago Seven – developing a capacity to communicate what is at stake in American political life and what must be preserved, if it is to be rescued. The 2023 series The Diplomat, created by West Wing veteran Deborah Cahn, seems promising as a continuation of Sorkin’s project – if only it can temper the impulse to do high speed chases and blow things up.

 

This is a thread worth following, in contemporary media: the serious efforts to help people think about the virtues that hold a complex political entity together and the forces that will push for simplification – for martial law and authoritarian saviors and government by decree – as these manifest in communities, in companies, in families, and in great nations.