© The Author(s) 2020
S. Marino, D. Palmer (eds.)Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First CenturyAmerican Literature Readings in the 21st Centuryhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37293-4_9

9. Approaches to Teaching All My Sons: Making the Play Matter Across the Curriculum

Jan Balakian1  
(1)
Kean University, Union, NJ, USA
 
 
Jan Balakian
Keywords
BrechtDenialThe DepressionFacing History War profiteeringAll My Sons Social responsibilityWriting exercisesMarxismGuiltNew Historicism
In teaching All My Sons as a play about social responsibility, I use an eclectic combination of approaches in order to allow the play to speak to students’ lives, to clarify the play’s historical context and its concerns with ethics and economic vulnerability, to explain Miller’s debts to the Greeks and Ibsen, to explore psychological issues such as denial, guilt, repression, fear, choice, and self-righteousness, to consider the play’s contemporary relevance, and to show its connection to Brecht’s Mother Courage and human rights violations. For pedagogical purposes, this multifaceted approach serves students much better than pouring the play through one theoretical mold or reducing it to one thesis, because it allows them to see the many layers of a literary work. Each approach is a tool for your toolbox, or prompts, to ignite your class discussion and in-class writing exercises. Altogether, these approaches—Reader Response, Marxist, Historical, Intertextual, Psychoanalytic, New Critical, New Historicist—open up the play’s complex moral vision and ask students to reflect on how they will act in the world (Fig. 9.1).
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Fig. 9.1

“A play is about a moment of illumination—the light.” Arthur Miller in conversation with Jan Balakian, Michigan Quarterly Review 1989

(Photograph by Jan Balakian of Douglas W. Schmidt’s set for the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, spring 2019)

To show the relevance of All My Sons to students’ lives, I first ask them the following personal questions.
  1. 1.

    Survival: Have students, or someone they know, compromised their ethics in order to survive academically, professionally, or socially? Was the compromise the result of fear? Was the fear financial? What do they do when their needs conflict with other peoples’ needs? Next, ask students to define “perjury,” “misdemeanor,” and “felony,” to explain the distinction, and to decide which one applies to Joe Keller’s crime.

     
  2. 2.

    Denial: Have they, or someone they know, denied the truth because the truth was too painful to accept? Why do some people construct narratives about themselves or others? Why do some blame others for their own wrongdoing? Does everyone have a blind spot? What happens when we do not accept responsibility for our actions? What happens when we do? Can they point to any national fake news?

     
  3. 3.

    Guilt/Shame: How have they handled guilt? What do they think about the way Larry, Chris, and Joe Keller deal with guilt? What is the difference between guilt and shame? How have students expressed shame—either about themselves or a parent? Would they consider taking their lives as a result of shame?

     
  4. 4.

    Social Responsibility/Consequences: Ask students to write down a decision that has come back to sting them. If we have good intentions or goals, is it ok to achieve them in any way that we can: does the end justify the means? What should people do when idealism conflicts with pragmatism? Are there times when actions are understandable but unacceptable? Can students point to a breach of social responsibility, a case where an individual or corporation chose financial gain over the greater good of the community? If we buy goods from such corporations, or do not protest against them, are we complicit in their wrongdoing? Is it possible to separate the individual from the world?

     

Once students have responded to the above questions in writing and class discussion, they have been introduced to the central issues of the play.

All My Sons dramatizes the conflict between what Miller calls “a biological morality” and the need for social responsibility. While he observed that we do what we do in order to survive, growing up during the Great Depression and learning about the social protest plays of The Group Theater during the 1930s, Miller preferred life to be “a comradely embrace” (Miller 1987, 111) rather than a Darwinian race. Contemporary students do not realize how much the stock market crash of 1929 challenged America’s faith in capitalism, leading many people to turn toward socialism. Miller explained that we improvised our way through the Great Depression with FDR’s social programs (Balakian 1996). These ideas prepare students for consideration of Joe Keller and his business ethics.

The tension between the society and the individual is central in All My Sons. During World War II, Joe Keller told his business partner over the phone to sell defective airplane parts in order to fulfill a sales order from the War Department and to provide for his family, only to realize that his decision killed twenty-one pilots and ultimately destroyed his family. Ask students how often their plans or decisions backfire in ways they could never have anticipated. Aristotle’s peripeteia or reversal: Why is it an essential ingredient of drama?

Clarify the influence of the Greeks and Ibsen on Miller’s moral imagination. Both taught Miller about structuring the consequences of actions, linking character to fate. As he says in his memoir:

My mind was taken over by the basic Greek structural concept of a past stretching so far back that its origins were lost in myth, surfacing in the present and donating a dilemma to the persons on the stage, who were astounded by the wonderful train of seeing accidents that unveiled their connections to that past. (Miller 1987, 250)

As in the Greeks’ and Ibsen’s plays, the past reaches into the present, usually destructively, but leaving some illumination behind (Balakian 1989). Miller adopted Ibsen’s retrospective technique: Keller had committed his crime of selling cracked cylinder heads to the Army Air Force three years before the play begins.

By asking students to write the prequel and sequel to the play, as Jane Dominik does with her class, students better understand its action, character, theme, and structure. Have students read their scenes out loud and discuss their discoveries. Only the Edward G. Robinson film inserts a scene in which Chris visits Steve Deever in jail, with the shadows of the jail bars on Deever’s face, and as Deever tells the story, we see a flashback to the day Keller advised him to ship the faulty parts. The new line, “If you want to know, ask Joe,” highlights Joe as secretly omniscient.

Explain that Ibsen’s The Wild Duck—about a businessman’s betrayal of his friend and about life-lies—also influenced the detective-like structure and content of All My Sons. Every scene moves toward making connections between three events: Keller’s crime and betrayal of his partner and friend, Larry’s death, and Chris Keller’s desire to marry Larry’s former fiancée.

When reading act 1, many students are impatient with the slow pace, so it is important to clarify how the slowness facilitates the revelation of the crime—“a horror born of the contrast between the placidity” of an American suburb and “the threat to it that a rage of conscience could create” (Miller 1987, 130). In this way, All My Sons resembles Film Noir of the Forties, in which everyday people became murderers—too fearful to resist crime. As actor Robert Mitchum put it, “America was coming to terms with its dark side” (TCM, Noir Alley). Both Noir and Miller’s American tragedy dramatize the banality of evil. Ask students if they can separate a person’s decisions from their identity. An acting student, Connor McKenna, remarked, “Keller is not a bad person, he just made the wrong decision” (McKenna 2018). Moreover, both Noir and Miller were interested in the informer and the secret. The jingle, “If you want to know, ask Joe,” runs throughout Universal’s production of the Edward G. Robinson film. Joe hides a secret that lands his partner in jail.

Connect the play’s structure to the set of the original production, which was organized around a hump in the backyard. The set designer, Mordecai Gorelik, said, “This is a graveyard play; the son is their buried conscience reaching up to them out of the earth” (Miller 1987, 234). At the begining of the 2019 Roundabout Theatre production in New York, an ominous thunder shakes the theater and lightning strikes, followed by bright sunlight—that’s the play in miniature. The opaque curtain suggested the need to break the membrane between family and world. The apple tree, planted by Kate Keller in memory of Larry, blown down by a storm, represents the son who committed suicide upon learning of his father’s immoral act. So, it also stands for the Biblical Fall, for Keller’s broken connection with his community. Moreover, stage directions read, “the outskirts of an American town…The stage is hedged on R. and L. by tall, closely panted poplars which lend the yard a secluded atmosphere…the poplars cut off view of its continuation downstage” (5). Also, students of architecture, set design, and cultural history can present information about the suburbanization of America in the postwar period, when ranches and colonials followed split-levels, and Levittown provided Americans with the privacy and separateness that the play registers. Kenneth Jackson documents: “Between 1946 and 1956, 97 percent of all new single family dwellings were completely detached, surrounded on every side by their own plots.” They also created economic and racial homogeneity (Jackson, 239–241). So, the Keller home is insolated in every way. In act 2, when Chris saws off the broken tree, there is more light and less illusion.

* * *

A Marxist Play?

Next, we discuss Miller’s concern with the way economics shapes and breaks the American psyche, so much so that he became a target for The House Un-American Activities Committee. When All My Sons was supposed to be presented to U.S. troops in Germany, The Catholic War Veterans protested that it was “Communist propaganda.” Yet, when the play was produced, “the Wright Aeronautical Corporation of Ohio had exchanged ‘condemned’ tags on defective engines for ‘passed,’ collaborated with bribed army inspectors, and shipped hundreds of failed machines to armed forces” (Miller 1987, 253). In fact, he told HUAC that, at times, he “believed with moral certainty that Marxism was the hope of mankind” (Miller 1987, 407). Given the exigencies of economics in All My Sons, the play works well to teach students how to apply a Marxist approach—even though Keller owns, rather than works for, his company. He really works for the military industrial complex, whose demands dictated his decision to ship defective parts. In a cultural sense, Miller explained:

I’ve always felt there is a fundamental insecurity in Americans, the fear of falling out of the class they’re in. In later years we have seen a whole class of people thrown out into the street…who no longer have the means to rent space in the city. There’s a subliminal amount of that fear. In some people it makes them greedier”. (Balakian 1989, 45)

If not for the need to make a profit, Keller would not have shipped defective parts, lied about it, or allowed his business partner to go to jail. Ask students: Can you link Keller’s financial vulnerability to fear? Why do some people succumb to fear, while others are not shaken? Can fear be as internal as external? What would cause students to compromise their integrity? What if Keller embraced risk and changed careers? Left the business? What would cause students to leave their jobs? Is his fear connected to his working-class background, where there are no trust funds? Stage directions read, he is “uneducated,” has “peasant-like common sense” and feels college is elitist (6). Instead of reading the news—the superstructure—he reads “the Want Ads” and hears the voices beneath the power structure. Perhaps this is a play about what people should really want—a moral brotherhood.

Simplify Marxist assumptions for students: social relationships emerge when workers produce goods that they cannot afford to buy, disconnecting them from the product they make. Similarly, shipping defective cylinder heads caused twenty-one planes to crash and their pilots to die. Students also need to understand “false consciousness.” Those with money and power create and impose values that do not serve their workers, yet the workers adopt them without understanding their exploitation. Some students link this idea to the 2016 election in which working people voted for President Trump. Some conclude that Joe Keller exemplifies false consciousness: “A hundred and twenty cracked, you’re out of business…. Half the Goddamn country’s gotta go if I go!” (58, 67). He belongs to a national war effort that places profit before people. Joe Keller’s explanation about the incident to his jailed partner’s son, George, rationalizes his own decision to cover the cracks for profit and lends itself to a Marxist reading:

In that shop in the war…it was a madhouse. Every half hour the major callin’ for cylinder heads… The trucks were hauling them away hot, damn near. I mean just try to see it human, see it human. A batch comes out with a crack. …half a day’s production shot…. What’ll I say? Human…human. So, he takes out his tools and he …covers over the cracks…that’s bad, it’s wrong, but that’s what a little man does…. alone he was afraid. But I know he meant no harm. …That’s a mistake, but it ain’t murder…. (28)

Since his decision resulted in soldiers dying, does it matter that he “meant no harm?” For Keller, to be human means to meet the demands of the war by producing your product so that you can feed your family—at the expense of those who are sacrificing their lives to defeat Fascism. Does “little” mean “subordinate to the war,” or does it mean “too weak to do the right thing?” Or, does weakness come from subordination? Introduce students to Hannah Arendt’s term, “the banality of evil.” Can one do evil without being evil? Do ordinary people commit evil deeds simply to advance their careers? As David Palmer says, “the play is about basically ordinary decent people who get overwhelmed by an unexpected crisis and lose their way in life. Miller is asking us to “see it human,” to see the moral complexity of the situation and the ways in which it was so easy for Joe to get lost…. To take the play too much as a moral critique of Joe flattens it out” (Palmer). Ask students whether they read the play as a call for social responsibility that villainizes Joe and heroizes the sons, or whether All My Sons is a modern tragedy that explores deep internal moral conflict (Palmer). (See later section on Chris’ self-righteousness.) In either case, students conclude that morality is often only possible if you can afford it. As Jim Bayliss, the doctor who gave up research to make money practicing medicine, says, “I would love to help humanity on a Warner Brothers salary” (8). Without that kind of salary, Keller lies: “If I’d gone in that day, I’d a told him—junk’em. We can afford it.” Miller recalls,

Psychologically situated as I was – a young, fit man barred from a war others were dying in, equipped with a lifelong anguish of self-blame that sometimes verged on a pathological sense of responsibility – it was probably inevitable that the selfishness, cheating, economic rapacity on the home front contrasted the soldiers’ sacrifices and the holiness of the Allied cause. I was a stretched string waiting to be plucked, waiting, as it turned out, for All My Sons. (Miller 1987, 223)

In that context, we examine Chris’s words to Annie, which convey some survivor guilt:

They didn’t die; they killed themselves for each other…a little more selfish and they’d’ve been here today…Everything was being destroyed. See, but it seemed to me that one new thing was made. A kind of… responsibility…And then I came home. There was no meaning in it here; Because nobody was changed at all. It seemed to make suckers out of a lot of guys. I felt wrong to be alive, to open the bank-book, to drive the new car, to see the new refrigerator. I mean you can take those things out of war, but when you drive that car you’ve got to know it came out of the love a man can have for a man, …. Otherwise, what you have is loot, and there’s blood on it. I didn’t want to take any of it. (31)

Did American boys die to make America safe for shopping? Chris finds what George, the son of the business partner, now a lawyer, finds; “outside there doesn’t seem to be much of a law” (44). Keller’s airplane parts supply the military–industrial complex that shapes our foreign policy. While he is not officially the proletariat, he pledges allegiance to the Air Force for whom he supplies P40s. The play exposes a flaw in postwar Capitalism in which “a man’s becoming a function of production or distribution to the point where his personality becomes divorced from the action it propels” (Miller 1979, 131). Do students feel Keller is a victim? Some blame him, while others blame the system. Explain that in theory, Miller opposes the determinism of nineteenth-century Naturalism, because he believes a play must embrace both the given and the willed (Miller 1979, 170). The fish is in the water, and the water is in the fish. Does the play match this idea?

Students often wonder whether the play is “about Marxism” or the broken promise of capitalism. We agree with Christopher Bigsby that the play is not calling for a subversion of the American economic structure, but for ethical liberalism. When the Daily Worker said the play was a “specious apology for capitalism,” Miller responded that the play did not intend to prove a Marxist argument: “Chris Keller would not become a revolutionary in real life, and that’s not what the play was about. …The play would not have been written at all had I chosen to abide by the Party line, for during the war the Communists pounced on anything that would disturb national unity” (Miller 1987, 237–38). In a critical approaches to literature class, it is important to remind students that creative work cannot be reduced to a singular theory.

Michael Moore’s Capitalism A Love Story about the 2008 foreclosures resulting from subprime mortgages personalizes capitalism’s exploitation for students whose parents have lost their homes. Our conversation about the unequal distribution of power and wealth leads students to ask whether shared prosperity is possible. I also read them Miller’s utopian revelation about Marxism during a 1930s Brooklyn handball game when he heard that “things would be produced for use rather than for someone’s personal profit, so there would be much more for everyone to share, and justice would reign everywhere” (Miller 1987, 111). Ask students to select lines from the play that reflect this worldview or its opposite. They find: “This is the land of the great big dogs, you don’t love a man here, you eat him! The world’s that way, how can I take it out of him” (100). How do students feel about taking a cut in their future income for a greater good—free college, health care or public parks? Do they want a share of the profits from the organization for which they work? Should actors and theater practitioners receive a share of the profits from the productions that they create?

Next, ask students why Marx views family as part of capitalism’s problem. Joe Keller tells his son, “The whole shootin’ match is for you!” And, “there’s “nothin’ Chris could do I wouldn’t forgive. Because he’s my son. Because I’m his father and he’s my son” (96). By definition, family is a private enterprise, living on private property, needing resources that compete with others. Joe cannot see beyond it: “If there’s something bigger than family, I’ll put a bullet in my head” (120). In an American Drama survey course, students remember “abolish the family” from Odets’ Awake and Sing. They wonder uncomfortably whether family and a free market are un-American. Point them to Chris’ idealized view of family: “If I have to grub for money all day, at least at evening I want it beautiful. I want a family, to build something I can give myself to” (69). Clarify that in exposing corruption, the plays advocate a more humane system that includes family. In fact, Miller was not writing so much about an American problem, as the House Un-American Activities Committee claimed, but about a flawed humanity. Finally, in a play about fathers and sons, we must ask, if women were running businesses in 1947, would Kate’s decision have been any different than her husband’s? Is the play pointing to a patriarchal problem or to a flawed humanity?

Pair with Brecht’s Mother Courage

Family and war profiteering link the play well to Brecht’s Mother Courage, so I teach the two plays in sequence. Though All My Sons does not practice Brecht’s “Theory of Estrangement,” because it is a well-made play, observing Aristotelian unities of time, place and action, its goal is the same—to provoke the audience to humanize the world. Like Keller, in order to provide for her family, Mother Courage sacrifices her family to the war by trying to bargain the price of her goods: “I’ve haggled too long.” Although set during the Thirty Years war, Mother Courage was written in 1939—the year Hitler invaded Poland. So, in a cultural-poetic way, Brecht also writes with the blood of WWII on his pen. Do students think that Keller is pushed into an economic trap, or does he choose to walk into it? While Mother Courage foregrounds a rapacious society, All My Sons exposes both sides to the story—Joe chooses within an economic matrix.

Use Tony Kushner’s documentary about making Mother Courage in Central Park with Meryl Streep and ask students to respond in class to the following questions:

*What attracts you to what destroys you?

*Does your job take your labor from you?

*Are you shaped by ends that do not benefit you?

*How does that situation affect you? How could you create your destiny?

*Is being part of a collective a solution?

*How does class form your personality? (Kushner, Walter)

Once students respond personally, they apply the same questions to Keller and other characters in the play.

Engage students about the role of choice by asking them to respond in writing to the following philosophical ideas: In Being and Nothingness, Sartre says, “by choosing, an individual commits not only himself, but the whole of humanity” (Sartre, 553). The Dalai Lama notes “…so much of our stress depends on seeing ourselves as separate from others, which perhaps returns to the loss of our sense of communal connection” (Dalai Lama, 99). Theologian Paul Tillich reflects, “In collectivist societies the courage of the individual is the courage to be as a part…. Self-affirmation within a group includes the courage to accept guilt and its consequences as public guilt….” (Tillich, 92). In terms of history, locate Joe Keller as a product of the Depression, whose realization is New Deal liberalism, which, as Chris Bigsby says, “challenged essential American myths about self-sufficiency and individual acquisitiveness” (Bigsby, 82). In the 2015 Lee University production, available on You Tube, Joe and Kate Keller listen attentively to FDR’s address to the nation after the attack on Pearl Harbor with sounds of planes and machine-gun fire, a bomb detonating, followed by a radio announcement from 1945 celebrating V- Day (Lee). Finally, what do they believe is the best way to “Make America Great” today? Should we build walls or bridges?

A Human Rights Play

Because of its concern with a moral conscience, All My Sons fits well into a Human Rights curriculum. Use the vocabulary of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Sociologist Helen Fein defines a “universe of obligation” as “the circle of individuals and groups toward whom obligations are owed, to whom rules apply, and whose injuries call for amends” (Facing History, vii). Guilt and responsibility are as integral to a discussion of genocide as they are to Joe Keller’s crime. While Keller’s crime is not based on the eradication of a particular group, and “his intent is not to destroy,” as Raphael Lemkin defined genocide in Article 2 of the 1948 United Nations (Facing History), both cause mental and physical harm. Moreover, similar vocabulary can be used to discuss Keller’s moral crime: collaborator, perpetrator, bystander, victim, universe of obligation, upstander—a person who takes a stand against injustice—and bystander—a person who looks on—resister, and rescuer—one who attempts to save victims of violence (Facing History). Joe would be a perpetrator, for allowing his business partner to take the blame for his orders over the phone. In his complicity with evil, is his deed like that of the concentration camp—“the final expression of human separateness?” (Miller 1979, 289). Kate would be a collaborator in sustaining the lie, and her guilt prevents her from sleeping. In the film, she takes sleeping pills. Not until act 2 does she tell her husband, “Make clear you realize what you did. Tell him you’d go to jail” (120). Chris would also be a collaborator, for suspecting his father but remaining silent, until he resists him verbally in the climax of act 2:

Where do you live, where have you come from? Is that as far as your mind can see, the business? What the hell do you mean you did it for me? Don’t you have a country…Don’t you live in the world?” Kids were hanging in the air by those heads! (115)

For Miller, this was the scene that would make or break the play (Miller 1987, 272), which echoes Odets’ “Life should not be printed on dollar bills.” Ask students when and how they challenge their parents’ values. Do some live out their parents’ stories? Actors from The Group Theater played in the original production of All My Sons, so it is helpful to show students a clip from the PBS documentary about The Group Theater. In concluding the Facing History element of the discussion, students identify Larry, the son who commits suicide from outrage toward his father, as a resister without being a rescuer. Ask whether Steve Deever is a victim, or a conformist by obeying his partner’s orders during “times of fear and crisis” (Facing History).

New Historicism—Contemporary Business Crimes

New Historicism is also helpful in understanding how All My Sons naturally explodes its 1947 setting and speaks to contemporary war profiteering. Introduce students to Stephen Greenblatt’s definition of New Historicism: “[challenge] the assumptions of a literary foreground and a political background, between artistic production and others kinds of social production that are made up and redrawn by artists, audiences, and readers” (7). Students are not aware of contemporary examples of war profiteering by Turkey ($118 million), Central Asia ($22 million), by Lockheed Martin, Boeing or by Dick Cheney’s company, Halliburton, which gained $39.5 billion in federal contracts from the Iraq war, while costing American and Iraqi lives (Chatterjee). How do we hold businesses accountable for crimes against humanity? Should there be incentives for businesses to protect human rights? Ask the students if they are familiar with “peace profiting”? Do students think the Trump family exploits the presidency to promote their business interests? (NY Times, July 22, 2018).

Guilt, Shame, and Denial Groups

Since social transgression leads to guilt, you can assign small groups to discuss different kinds of guilt. One group presents Jung’s view of guilt: the unconscious suffers from repressed moral conflicts, without the person being aware of the way these conflicts generate guilt. A second group defines Martin Buber’s existential guilt based on actual harm done to others, while a third explains the Freudian notion of guilt based on internal conflicts. A fourth group looks up defenses against guilt: repression, blaming the victim, sharing guilt, and self-harm (Wiki, Guilt). Students often conclude that Keller and his family fit all criteria. He wants his partner to “move back on the block” (81), and he wants to offer him a job. They come to understand that Keller’s guilt is the backbone of the play and why he offers to help the partner he betrayed. Try to view the Elia Kazan production in which Kazan highlights the guilt by casting Ed Begley as Keller, a reformed alcoholic, who identified with Keller’s guilt. Then show students the London and, if possible, Israeli productions that emphasize Kate’s suppressed guilt (Miller 1987, 135). The Kellers, however, are not the only ones feeling guilty. Ann Deever discloses Larry’s letter about killing himself in response to the news of Joe’s crime because she feels guilty for being silent about both her father’s and Keller’s immoral actions and for not communicating with her father since his imprisonment.

How does the Keller family deal with their guilt? Denial. When students look up denial, they realize that it not only means “the refusal to accept a past or present reality,” but that it is a defense against negative traits, memories of negative actions, and an avoidance of one’s guilt for past actions, thoughts or feelings in order to protect one’s emotional and psychological wellbeing (Wiki). Joe says, “I’ve gotta ignore what I gotta ignore” (82). The Keller’s live by alternative facts. Chris tells his father, “We’ve made a terrible mistake with mother. Being dishonest with her…It’s time she realized nobody believes Larry is alive. We’ve got to say it to her” (67). Kate Keller perpetuates the life-lie, and Jim Bayliss says, she has “a certain talent for lying.” As David Palmer notes, Kate has been played “quite like Lady Macbeth, a figure who was smarter in a pragmatic and self-serving sense than Joe and who dominated him” (Palmer 2018). New Critic Edward Murray judged that “Kate is static, while Chris grows, and Joe is made to grow” (Murray, 10). Yet, in act 3, Kate wants Keller to offer to go to prison, if Chris asks him (120), but Joe disapproves of that plan, since he made his decision for his family. Students confuse two facts about Kate: She knows that her husband is guilty, but she believes that her son is alive and therefore not affected by Joe’s unethical decision.

Chris also lives in denial. After his father kills himself, Chris says, “Mother I didn’t mean to…” (69). Kate further undermines it. “Forget now. Live” (69). In denying her son’s death, she denies her husband’s responsibility. Her final words contradict the point to which the play builds: social responsibility. Do students agree with Bigsby that “the son who brings down the wrath of the moral god remains inside the system that has created this immorality”? (Bigsby, 171). Chris says, “…if I knew that night what I know now, he’d be in the D.A.’s office this time…. I could jail him, if I were human anymore, but I’m like everybody else now. I’m practical now” (66). Ask students: Why has Chris’ integrity disappeared? Why does he earn a living from a business that he knows is corrupt yet refuse to add his name to the family firm? When Chris leaves home the night he finds out that his father is responsible for shipping faulty parts, his neighbor, Dr. Bayliss, who gave up medical research because it was not as lucrative as practicing medicine, says, “[Chris’ll] come back. We all come back. These private little revolutions always die. The compromise is always made” (61). After his fight with George, Chris disappears into the night to watch “the star of his honesty” go out. Earlier, he tried to convince Bayliss to abandon his practice for research. Sue Bayliss, his wife says, “Chris makes [Dr. Bayliss] feel he’s compromising…as though Chris or anybody else isn’t compromising…I resent living next door to the Holy Family” (38). Chris’s idealism, like Greger’s “rectudinal fever” in Ibsen’s Wild Duck, is partly guilt (Bigsby 1984). How many students know someone who destructively imposes their values on others? Is the real moral force the son who never appears but kills himself in shame? Or is it Chris, who tells his father:

You can be better! Once and for all you can know there’s a universe of people outside and you’re responsible to it, and unless you know that you threw away your son because that’s why he died. (69)

Chris’ demand for a moral brotherhood is an occasion to introduce students to Facing History’s term, “a universe of obligation” and to the neuropsychiatric term, “moral injury”—an injury to an individual’s moral conscience resulting from an act of perceived moral transgression which produces profound emotional shame. Moral injury emphasizes the psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual aspects of trauma (Feinstein). Each character is morally injured, including Joe. At the same time, Chris is self-interested. Does he want his mother to acknowledge his brother’s death in order to marry his brother’s fiancée, or because he insists on truth? Is he a phony idealist or the real deal? After his argument with George, he wants to leave town because he cannot bear to be around his father now that he knows the truth. Miller was fascinated by the guilt of the idealist. Chris is ambiguous and not just a moral hero.

George and Ann Deever also feel guilt and shame. When visiting his father in jail, George discovers that he and his sister wrongly shunned their father, and he is angry about Keller’s betrayal of his father:

You’re not going to marry him, because his father destroyed your family…. Joe told him on the phone to weld, cover up the cracks…and ship them out. Joe promised to take responsibility. On the phone you can’t have responsibility! In court, you can always deny a phone call, and he did. (102)

Both Keller and his partner were arrested and convicted, but Keller won an appeal that overturned his conviction. He claimed that Steve did not call him when he “called in sick,” (108) that he was unaware of the shipment. Have students imagine, write, and then act out this critical scene that we do not see on stage. It helps them better understand exposition.

Kate denies Joe’s complicity in his death by insisting that Larry could be alive. “Your brother’s alive, because if he’s dead, your father killed him” (114). The play’s original title was The Sign of the Archer, because Kate wants to know if “November 25 [the day Larry went missing in war] was a favorable day for Larry; if so, he’d be alive” (62). She places faith in the stars and in God, rather than in human will, even though she has always known Larry was dead. “Certain things have to be and certain things can never be…. That’s why there’s God” (78). As Miller continued to write, psychology overtook astrology (Miller 1987, 132). For Kate, late at night, Larry “is so real, I could reach out to touch him and could hear him like he was in the room” (74). She sustains the illusion by keeping Larry’s clothes and shining his shoes. In her book Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman writes, “Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense.” If that fails, “the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. And if he cannot silence his victim, he tries to make sure no one listens by denying or rationalizing his crime.” Both Kate and Joe do not assume blame. Joe says he “thought they’d stop ‘em before anybody took off” (115) and defends his actions, using Steve’s name. The Lee University production made the house look like a prison of their lie, so the top of the house disintegrated into a prison cell, and the trees looked like prison bars. Faux paneled walls diminished into an open space of nothingness, suggesting the disintegration of the top of the Keller home—mirroring the collapse of the walls of deceit in which Keller had enclosed himself. In act 2, audiences heard birds chirping, cars passing, the sound of crickets (Lee, 165). The action moves from insular to inclusive.

Do students think Larry’s death is also denial, as Steve Centola argues? By killing himself, instead of coming home to his father’s guilt, he escapes responsibility (Centola, 56). Is suicide weakness? Studies research moral injury and find that suicide can accompany it (Kelley/Bravo). If no one is in touch with the truth, then the play speaks well to our “Post-Truth” America in which fact checkers have never been busier. Michiko Kakutani’s The Death of Truth examines how Trump’s lies signify a drift toward authoritarianism. Truth becomes whatever you say or believe. The court gets the truth wrong when it imprisons Steve rather than Joe. How exactly did Joe get exonerated?

Playwriting/Criminal Justice Exercise

Since Joe clearly framed Steve Deever, yet was exonerated himself, how did Joe, or his defense, convince the jury of his innocence, while Steve landed in jail? Having students imagine the unseen testimony is more interesting than Joe and Chris’ already articulated conflicting values. Kean student-teacher, Shontisha Haynes, suggests having students write the trial that we never see by formulating questions and answers (Haynes). Divide the class in three: one third formulates Keller’s testimony, another writes Deever’s testimony, while the final group weighs the evidence and arrives at a verdict. If we evaluate facts carefully, why do juries sometimes imprison the wrong person if both sides have equal access to the evidence? How do words manipulate facts and persuade an audience, causing the difference between freedom and jail? For Miller, a play is a piece of jurisprudence. This exercise especially interests students of Criminal Justice. Have the class write Steve Deever’s monologue in jail—first spoken to the cold steel of prison bars—and then to his children who visit. Is there a difference between what we say in solitude and what we tell our families?

Divide the Class in Five

Since truth is subjective, divide the class into five groups, each assigned to a character from the play. According to student Victoria Matthies, each group reads or interprets the play from the perspective of their character by writing down why that character believes what they do. Then they exchange their reasons with every other group. Viewing the same situation from five perspectives, students learn to see human behavior in the context of other peoples’ situations and backgrounds. In effect, they put each character on Freud’s couch.

Conclusion

All My Sons transcends 1947 and any one critical approach because it is about how to live in the world. As Miller says, “There could be no aesthetic form without a moral world, only notes without a staff…” (Miller 1987, 160). Impress upon students that with choice comes responsibility for the survival of the human race. Read them this statement by Miller:

I have wondered if the real issue is the return of the repressed… Whenever the hand of the distant past reaches out of its grave, …we tend to resist belief in it, for it seems rather magically to reveal some unreadable hidden order behind the amoral chaos of events…But that emergence is the point of All My Sons – that there are times when things do indeed cohere. (Miller 1987, 134–35)

The play reminds us to serve something bigger than ourselves, to rebel against injustice, to find a career to which we give our talents without losing them, to think about our connection to each other when making decisions. The final Reader-Response writing assignment comes from Miller’s “The Family in Modern Drama,” which I ask students to apply to themselves: “All great plays are about how to make of the outside world a home. How must we struggle, what must we strive to change and overcome within ourselves and outside ourselves if we are to find safety, love, ease of soul, identity, or honor?” (Miller 1979). With Keller’s bad choice on their minds, students write about how they will make the world a home professionally and personally. In keeping with the definition of drama, they write about an internal and external conflict and how they will deal with it most ethically. When placed under pressure, will they allow their panic buttons to be pushed, or will they do the right thing? Will they speak truth to power? This final writing instills in students the importance of thinking more carefully about their choices before covering up the cracks in the world.