Cultural Context Of Flahooley Rd

Cultural Context of Flahooley

Flahooley is a satirical musical whose writer, Yip Harburg, was blacklisted in 1950 by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the US government. This prompted him to write Flahooley as a thinly veiled anti-Communist commentary. McCarthy and his boys were satirized by a set of puppets and the idea of capitalism is lampooned by a genie from a magical lamp named Ben Atom. There are many references to Iraq and the Middle East, which are also very much current fodder today.

To understand the cultural context of Flahooley, we must first discuss what was going on with current affairs in America in the year 1950 when this show was penned. The year 1950 in America was obviously the beginning of a new century, but also a new beginning for the American people all together. The Second World War had just ended, and the outlook was changing from one of war and tyranny to one of hope and prosperity. However, the fear of Communists infiltrating the US government and basically starting a Third World War weighed heavily on some people’s conscience. Sen. Joseph McCarthy was the main propagator of what amounted to a full-fledged witch hunt of anyone that could possibly have leanings or sympathies towards the Communist regime. People with any degree of influence, i.e. actors, musicians, writers, public figures, etc., that he suspected of supporting communism were essentially black listed and publicly forced into an exile of sorts. Yip Harburg was one such unfortunate person.

Yip Harburg first came to prominence with his first work “Brother Can You Spare a

Dime” a commentary of the bleak circumstances surrounding the Great Depression and his first-hand accounts of standing in line for food hand-outs in NYC. He went on to write all of the music for and helped produce the movie The Wizard of Oz for which he won an Oscar for “Somewhere over the Rainbow”. The movie based on Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz which was a social commentary of the government disguised in a children’s story where the main players were the wicked witch of the East, meant to represent Big Business and the Wizard meant to represent a number of presidents of that time. Dorothy of course was the “common man” with her band of merry men (scarecrow, tin man, lion) in a fight for the American Dream from a lowly little farm town in Kansas. Was it by mere coincidence that Harburg was drawn to this project? Or did he take it one because he admired its hidden meanings? We’ll never know the answer to that, but we can say without a doubt, he wrote Flahooley as a way to put a public voice to an escalating civil rights atrocity that was brewing in the US at the time.

Harburg, in fact, was not a member of the Communist Party. He was a progressive thinker and member of a Socialist Party that sometimes agreed with Communists on certain issues, but not all of them. Nonetheless, he was unable to clear his name and throughout the 1950’s one promising hit project after another was snatched from his hands because of the long-lasting stigmata attached to him. As mentioned previously, Flahooley was his chance to personally lash out at critics and nay-sayers and lyrically stick it to them.

Flahooley is an allegorical tale about a the largest toy manufacturer B.G. Bigelow and it’s quest to find the “it” toy of the Christmas season. Sylvester, an in-love simpleton toy maker, comes up with a talking, laughing doll named Flahooley that when turned upside down exclaims, “Dirty Red!”. The unveiling of the new toy for the board of directors is interrupted by a king from Saudi Arabia. His country is running out of oil and the lamp that houses the genie they rely on in their time of need is broken and needs to be fixed. Bigelow assigns Sylvester to the task and upon his fixing the lamp, the Genie, Abou Ben Atom, appears and grants Sylvester’s wish to become wealthy enough to wed his love, Sandy. However the Genie is confused about the concept of capitalism and creates more dolls than there is demand and begins to just give the dolls away. Before long, a witch appears in pursuit of the Genie to capture him and return him to his lamp.

B.G. Bigelow represents the evil Big Business that was dominating the economic world of the 1950’s. The opening song, “You Can be a Puppet” was meant to speak strongly about Senator McCarthy and the people he scared into supporting his agenda. The genie and Sylvester were meant to represent Harburg and others like him blacklisted at the time. By all accounts, good people that generally meant well, but somehow were interpreted something else than what they truly were. The out of control production of the dolls represented the out of control antics of McCarthy and the US government have just gone completely overboard with their fears and accusations. The witch that comes to hunt down the genie and return him to his lamp is the most obvious of all representing the witch hunts taking place at the time.

All in all, there is a great lesson to be learned from this show, the reason it was written and the ill-fated persecution of mostly innocent people in the 1950’s. This all came less than a decade after the end of the Second World War. It shows just how easily that one can fall victim to the same atrocities as the one’s they just fought so hard against. Harburg, no matter his personal views or shortcomings had the courage to use his art as a platform to cry out against such wrongdoings no matter the cost. Unfortunately for him and many others, it wasn’t enough.