‘Take that Phony Dream and Burn It’

Just a few weeks before Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman premiered on Broadway on February 10, 1949, President Harry Truman elaborated his “Fair Deal” for the American people in his State of the Union address. “We have rejected the discredited theory that the fortunes of the Nation should be in the hands of a privileged few,” he declared. “We have abandoned the ‘trickledown’ concept of national prosperity. Instead, we believe that our economic system should rest on a democratic foundation and that wealth should be created for the benefit of all.” Among other progressive measures, Truman advocated raising corporate taxes, increasing the minimum wage, providing universal health coverage, expanding civil rights protections, and repealing the year-and-a-half-old Taft-Hartley Act that limited the power of labor unions.No doubt these proposals—and the need for them—were still ringing in the ears of Salesman’s first audiences at the elegant, 950-seat Morosco Theatre in the heart of Times Square (demolished in 1982 to make way for the looming Marriott Marquis Hotel). Miller recounted in his autobiography, Timebends, that no one clapped when the final curtain came down on the play’s firs...