When Garson Kanin's Born Yesterday first opened, WWII had been over for less than five months. President Franklin Roosevelt had died eight months earlier, and the relatively unknown Harry Truman was now in the Oval Office. Atomic bombs had just ushered in an age of nuclear anxiety and the Soviet Union was swiftly becoming a serious adversary. From an American perspective, despite the well-earned elation of having defeated the Axis Powers, the world was still a dangerous and threatening place.

 

In the fall of 1945, as Kanin was putting the finishing touches on his play, Truman was seen as untested and inexperienced. At the time he was best known for having led the so-called Truman Committee, a series of Senate investigations that exposed profiteers, rooted out corruption, and investigated inefficiency, saving the country nearly $15 billion and very likely thousands of lives as well. His work received bipartisan praise for integrity, thoroughness, and fairness--putting Truman on the cover of Time Magazine in 1943.

 

Needless to say, Kanin must have had President Truman in mind when he wrote his play. Not just as a cautionary tale of politics and corruption, but as tacit acknowledgement of the under-appreciated qualities of the new president. After all, Harry Brock (the play's corrupt junk tycoon) was precisely the sort of shady character that Truman and his committee (embodied in the play by Paul Verrall) regularly faced and defeated.

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 —Peter Davis, Remy Bumppo Ensemble Member