A few months ago, I had the privilege to see Allegiance in theaters with its original cast. I say “privilege” and not “pleasure” because in all honesty, it wasn’t that great, but that’s besides the point. For those not in the know, Allegiance is a musical starring Japanese-American George Takei of Star Trek fame about the experience of several people either born in Japan or to Japanese parents, living in America during World War Two, facing anti-Japanese discrimination and having to suffer through the unjust internment of all Japanese people living on the West Coast. As far as musicals are concerned, it’s not bad, sporting a great cast and some nice numbers, but the writing is definitely subpar and the plot pretty bare bones. As it relates to our class of Class And American Culture, I see Allegiance as something of a mirror of Manhattan Transfer: The former takes place on the West Coast during the early Forties, the latter in New York in the Roaring Twenties. One is fairly optimistic with some perhaps overly patriotic tones, the other written by a bitter communist with a bone to pick. A toe-tapping musical versus an all-over-the-place modernist text. Most importantly, the focus of this post, is that Allegiance is largely about race in America with a little hint of economic class, whereas Manhattan Transfer is by and large a book about social class with some suggestions of racial conflict. While it’s perhaps unfair to compare the two head-on, on the basis of their analysis of early twentieth American society alone, Manhattan Transfer is a lot more stinging and arguably a lot more accurate. Allegiance arguably not enough of either. Between the two, I believe there must be a balance of criticism that fairly and truthfully considers both the negative aspects of American society and the positives, without being biased in either direction for whatever purpose.
The main problems with Allegiance are that they dilute the tragedy with convoluted plots of true love and family drama and that it manages to both make the experience seem worse and bleak than it really was yet at the same time make the people experiencing it more hopeful and patriotic than they really were, giving it a very sentimental “proud to be an American!” feel even when a true critique of the Japanese internment camps would emphasize the anger and disillusionment felt by people coming out of the camps. No one would think to make a Holocaust story that ends in anything more than a somber, grim acceptance of a cruel reality, so why wouldn’t the same hold true for internment camps on the other side of the war? George Takei himself lived through the internment camps as a young boy, so it confuses me that the musical paints a picture of such unquestioning faith.
On the other hand, John Dos Passos was a Harvard graduate who travelled all over Europe during his youth, yet has almost nothing good to say about the American society that gave him such luxuries. In Manhattan Transfer, the happiness people feel is portrayed as shallow and meaningless, with a character’s understanding of the world around them inversely related to how happy they are. White, wealthy, educated people such as Dos Passos himself feel unfulfilled and lacking in purpose, drifting around New York aimlessly. But the fact that they can do so is a luxury few enjoy, the speciality of the idle rich. Had they the tiniest understanding of what a minority, be they black, Asian, Catholic, Jewish, etc. faced at the time, they’d never complain again. Yet Dos Passos does. The son of a trust lawyer thinks himself worse off than a man who lived through the Japanese internment camps. Perhaps oppression is a state of mind. Or perhaps those with privilege construct self-imposed tragedies on themselves, what one might call “first world problems”, to shield themselves from accusations of privilege and that those at the bottom of society, be it socially or economically, downplay the severity of their suffering as to feel less crushed by the weight of their hardships. In that sense, these stories tell us that while physical oppression is forced upon by others, mental oppression is self-inflicted.
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