Busby Berkeley is both famous and notorious for his extravagant dance numbers in movies from the 1930s through the 1950s. But at least in one instance, two of his musical numbers reflected the times and now attest to their history, though audiences today may not fully understand what they are about.
“If you want to understand the key to Busby Berkeley’s choreography,” said Berkeley biographer Terry Thomas in a TCM documentary, “you have to consider the military.”
In 1917, the 22 year-old Berkeley was drafted into the U.S. Army. By the time he arrived in France as a field artillery lieutenant, the fighting was nearly over and American troops had little to do. So he was tasked with marching and drilling them, and in the course of inventing new formations and maneuvers, he essentially invented the style that was to characterize the work of his career. Except instead of just male soldiers, he had armies of beautiful young women, and a camera that found both large geometric patterns and the intimacies of faces and other elements of anatomy.
After successfully bringing this style to Broadway (minus the camera), Berkeley was drafted by Hollywood. He soon wound up at Warner Brothers for a series of movies that would revive both musical films and the studio’s fortunes. He started with two of his most famous, back to back, both made and released in the depths of the Great Depression.
The first was 42nd Street, released in 1933. Warners organized a big publicity campaign involving a train loaded with studio stars touring cities, culminating in the film’s premiere in Washington, D.C. Jack Warner, head of the studio, was a fervent FDR backer, and he timed the 42nd Street opening to Roosevelt’s Inauguration.
Back in Hollywood immediately afterward, Berkeley worked on musical number for the next Warners musical, Gold Diggers of 1933. The story had been the basis for a play and a couple of movies with “Gold Diggers” in the title (and there would be more.) Directed by Melvyn Le Roy, it was released later that year, and again, it was a major hit.
Apart from the insipid and cringe-worthy numbers were two that spoke directly to the audience about elements of the Great Depression they had just experienced, and that would continue to affect their lives.
We’re In The Money
The song is usually interpreted as wishful thinking about post-Depression prosperity, but it has a much more specific meaning that audiences in 1933 would understand.
Upon taking office in March 1933, FDR first of all had to deal with the banking crisis, to keep money in circulation. Deposits were guaranteed for the first time. Besides new jobs and relief programs, his administration bolstered the economy with price supports for farmers, a minimum wage for workers and uniform rules for businesses.
It’s right there in the first verse:
Gone are my blues and gone are my tears/
I've got good news to shout in your ears/
The long lost Dollar has come back to the fold/
With silver you can turn your dreams to gold, oh/
We're in the
money/
We're in the money/
We've got a lot of what it takes to get along...
Remember My Forgotten Man
A more poignant and equally specific reference is made in
the last big production number, “Remember My Forgotten Man.” The Depression is not a subtext: it is the
text, and is dramatized. There’s the
obvious reference to FDR’s “the
forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid” from a 1932 radio
address. But as Joan Blondell continues to sing about her specific
forgotten man, he turns out to be a veteran of World War I.
Again, the feeling was even more specific to the times, for the plight of World War I vets had been dramatized for all the country to see just the previous spring and summer of 1932.
In the spring, thousands of American World War I veterans gathered in Washington, D.C. to petition Congress to pay them the war bonus they’d been promised for 1945, because they were in desperate straits. They remained there in makeshift encampments, many with their families, through the summer, continuing to lobby Congress. The press covered the story extensively, dubbing them the Bonus Army.
Things were at an impasse in late July, with Congress failing to provide the bonus and with President Hoover opposed to it. It was then that a police officer trying to clear away a crowd from the entrance to the Treasury Department panicked and shot a veteran dead. Hoover called out the Army to settle things down. Instead, General Douglas MacArthur decided to make war on the Bonus Army.
Patton led a cavalry charge with drawn sabers against unarmed men, women and children. In a deadly irony pointed out by historian William Manchester, among those that Patton’s forces attacked was a World War I veteran decorated for saving the life of Patton himself.
Many of the veterans were literally run out of town, in trucks that took them west to Ohio and beyond. Though newspaper stories of the day tended to support the government line that the Army had thwarted dangerous criminals and radicals, many Americans knew men who were there. Hoover never recovered his political reputation. If he’d had any chance of winning the election that fall, it probably ended with his administration’s treatment of the Bonus Army.
