“American Homespun Fascists”: Seán O’Casey and the Returning Veteran at the American Negro Theatre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores four works produced by the American Negro Theatre (ANT) for stage and radio between September 1945 and July 1946 – Arthur Laurents’s The Face (1945), Samuel J. Kootz’s Home Is the Hunter (1945–46), Erik Barnouw’s The Story They’ll Never Print (1946), and Seán O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1946) – arguing that they collectively constitute a coherent, if uneven, set of responses to what ANT co-founder and director Abram Hill had called in September 1945 “one of the most pressing questions facing the world today: What is the reaction of the returning Negro GI to his land of democracy?” This essay identifies the interrelatedness of these four works and draws on archival sources to pay close attention to the production of Juno (which has never previously been discussed at length or in connection with the ANT’s other returning veteran dramas). Analysing the ANT’s Juno as an oblique “returning Negro soldier drama” that critically retools what Judith Smith terms “trading places” stories of the immediate post-war years, this essay further contends that the company trod a fine line between an explicit and an implicit critique of the United States, protesting against “American homespun fascists” and asserting the ordinariness of African American soldiers. While this strategy sometimes risked opacity, it invited astute audiences to make connections that were inferred rather than asserted and thus circumvented accusations of anti-Americanism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".