August Wilson American Century Cycle - September 30, 2021. Day 2, part 2 - Greek and classical themes in the last four plays.
I group two plays together and call them the prequel and the sequel of each other. King Hedley II, set in 1985, is the continuation, a couple generations removed, from the the other, Seven Guitars, set in 1948. But discussions about time lines fade into obscurity when you get to the foundation of the matter. And the foundation of the matter is that these two plays represent something of great significance in the mind and the thinking of the playwright.
Ruben Santiago Hudson, actor in and director of many Wilson plays, refers to Seven Guitars as “August’s Greek tragedy play.” But if we scratch the surface and look beneath the superficial, all the plays at the end of the cycle, from Seven Guitars to Radio Golf, have enough elements of Greek tragedy to place them in that category. Wilson lays the African American experience over top the Greek tragedy model, and perhaps, vice versa, re-adapting the Greek tragedy model to African American experience.
Using Aristotle’s Poetics as a frame of reference, let’s first note the prologue/Greek chorus in Act 1. Scene 1. It takes us forward in time to the funeral of the main protagonist, Floyd Schoolboy Barton. So we know up front what is going to happen. Floyd dies. There are no surprises, we just have to wait and see how the plot develops and how events unravel leading to Floyd’s demise. Even so, and strangely enough, as spectators, we have hope, hope for Floyd, hope for his future as a recording artist, hope for his relationship with Vera. As we read or watch the play we sit on the edge of our seats. Silly us, because the playwright told us up front. Why is there suspense?
Aristotle’s perfect tragedy does not involve the spectacle of a virtuous man brought from prosperity to adversity, nor does it involve a villainous man in a similar condition. It should be a man in between, a guy like Floyd Barton, perhaps. The change of fortune should be from good to bad and should come about not because of some vice, but because of an error in judgement or a similar frailty. Floyd, after several ups and downs, has just enjoyed a successful debut playing his hit song at the local dance club, and is on his way, with Vera, his true love, on his arm, to Chicago to record an album. The success he has hoped and dreamed for is almost within his grasp.
Then by some quirk of fate, Canewell discovers the money Floyd stole and buried in the yard. He later acknowledges “ownership” to Floyd, but right in time for an intoxicated Hedley to show up and assume the buried money is the result of some alcohol-crazed dream he had of his father and Buddy Bolden. Whereupon Hedley retrieves the machete recently gifted to him by Joe Roberts, and uses the machete to whack Floyd in the neck, severing his windpipe and ending his dreams.
Of course, a lot happens in the interim. There is the complication of Floyd’s release from incarceration without access to either finances or the means to earn wealth from his music. His instrument, as well as the drummer’s drum set, are in hock at the local pawn ship and the term for retrieving them has expired. There is the disappointment Vera experienced when Floyd abandoned her earlier for Pearl Brown. Floyd is now challenged to overcome that betrayal, despite negative reinforcements from the Greek chorus, the landlady, Louise. Things are not looking good for Floyd.
Then in an Aristotelian reversal of fortune, Floyd comes into a bit of cash (from illegal activity, nonetheless), buys a new guitar, a new blue dress for Vera, and makes his date at the dance club, all to a rousing success. Collapsed into the same event, there is finally recognition for Floyd’s immense musical talents. Straight from Poetics, the final spectacle collapses pathos and catharsis, for Hedley and Canewell at least, with Floyd, unfortunately, on the losing end.
It is important to recall that Seven Guitars is a prequel of sorts, and many seemingly random threads will establish their significance in the second part, the sequel, the penultimate play in the Cycle, King Hedley II. We should also note the archived information from the era that Wilson preserves, the card games (bid whist and pinochle), the cigarettes smoked (Old Gold, Chesterfield, Pall Mall, Lucky Strike, Camel), the beer brands (Iron City, Duquesne, Black Label, Red Label, and Yellow Label), the menu items for Vera’s dinner (chicken, potatoes and green beans), the four types of roosters, Canewell’s recipe for cooking greens, the blow-by-blow account of the Joe Louis fight, and the mention of Toussaint L’Overture and Marcus Garvey, all preserved for posterity inside the play.
We cannot overlook the bits of Borges magical realism in the initial and final scenes of the play. Canewell, Vera and Hedley all see the six angels escorting Floyd into heaven. I’ve found no interpretation for why those three in particular see the vision. Vera had accepted Floyd’s marriage proposal, making her perhaps the character closest to Floyd. Canewell survives the prequel and shows up in a later play with a new name, Stool Pigeon, suggesting he is the one who gave up Hedley as Floyd’s killer. Hedley, who “fathers” the next tragic figure, King Hedley II, in the only play in the Cycle named for a character, ultimately slays Floyd.
Finally, my favorite lines from the play, both from Vera, are “I done told you, my feet ain’t on backwards” and “It was two different shades of blue.”
A short word about structure in the play. The first scene of Act 1 ends precisely with the same line as the 9th scene of Act 2, the finale of the play with Red Carter saying, “Floyd Schoolboy Barton.” Thus the two scenes are bookends “housing” the whole play. Also interesting is the way the scenes get shorter, more compact, and more condensed in Act 2, sort of drawing us, pulling us, dragging us through the action to the end, which we already know, while keeping us on the edge of our seats. It is amazing how the structure of the play is used to unwind and unravel the action, almost collapsing linear time.
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The play’s structure with the end up front, followed by the action in the middle and the end at the end, both standard structure for Greek tragedy and a shoutout to Borges, one of Wilson’s principle influencers. Wilson pointed out how Borges tells his readers what is going to happen in advance, yet there is still a sense of suspense. Then it comes about. No doubt this is Wilson’s Greek tragedy play with Borges hints.
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Embedded themes in Seven Guitars
There are many mentions of the number seven in Seven Guitars. Wilson himself said in an interview that the seven guitars are the seven characters in the play, each a musical instrument of sorts. Maybe we should dig a bit deeper. For example, I learned that the guitar itself went through seven distinct stages of evolution over the past thousand years, from the Arabic Oud to the modern acoustic guitar.
There is an interesting thing about the guitar especially if each guitar represents a separate character. When one string is plucked on a guitar, all the rest of the strings vibrate in response. It is called sympathetic vibration, and if the vibration is audible, it becomes sympathetic resonance. Similarly, each actor in the ensemble affects all the other actors, simultaneously and all the time.
There is a separate story about how the guitar became the instrument of choice for blues musicians. It has to do with the standardization of the instrument and the codification of its music. But also related is the popularity of the guitar in Spain, passing on to Mexico via cultural conquest and crossing the border into the U.S. The development of the Sears and Roebuck mail order catalog made cheap guitars available to the masses. The development of both railroad lines carrying freight, and the USPS rural free delivery system that delivered the guitars to people’s homes increased accessibility. And all around the turn of the 19th to 20th century as music was being commercialized and producing music became popular with the common person.
Different types of blue.
Vera describes a dress she was wearing when she met Floyd as two shades of blue or, to be precise, “two different kinds of blue.” I saw this initially as a distinction between the blues of Buddy Bolden, for whom Hedley was named, and the blues of Muddy Waters, the mentor for our bluesman, Floyd Barton. Extending the frame of reference to another Wilson play, there was the “jug-bucket” blues of Ma Rainey vs. the dance music blues of Levee. A short search yields a multiplicity of different kinds and types of blues music, including Memphis Blues, New Orleans Blues, Chicago Blues, Delta Blues, Psychedelic Blues, Country Blues, Texas Blues. and British Blues. Each has its own peculiar sound and its unique performers.
Hedley’s tuberculosis and COVID.
I was struck by the similarities between Hedley’s tuberculosis condition, the testing and treatment of it, etc., and current concerns about COVID. Tuberculosis, like COVID, was not extremely well understood in its early days and often patients were “herded” together in sanatoriums to die, similar to what happened in the nursing home scandals in New York and Michigan. Eventually, the nature of the disease became better understood and medications were developed that eradicated it. We can only surmise what happens in Hedley’s case, though Louise’s descriptions make it sound like his tuberculosis is already in advanced stages.
Hedley represents Blacks from the Caribbean who participated in the Great Migration. He is the first character we’ve come across in Wilson’s work who is not from the south like all the other migrants to Pittsburgh. It sets up a different dynamic in personal relations that we see playing out in Hedley’s interactions with other members of the ensemble. This accurately reflects what happened with so many black Caribbean immigrants moving to Northern cities and having to interact with a new country, a new black society unlike what was most prevalent in the south, and in many cases, a new religious order. In effect they, these immigrants from the Caribbean faced separate challenges than southern black migrants - a completely new society. Hedley makes Seven Guitars a special case for studying the Great Migration. Another aspect of the great migration not covered in the American Century Cycle, however, is the rural to urban migration that took place within the south and never crossed into northern states.
Highway 61.
Wilson makes a big deal about Highway 61. I didn’t get it until I looked it up. Highway 61 runs along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Minnesota. It was a major thoroughfare out of the deep south and the subject of many blues songs. In fact, Bob Dylan made a complete album in 1965, “Highway 61 Revisited,” that included much of the music and blues tradition. Interesting that while the earliest blues pieces were about walking, placing emphasis on shoes as a means of mobility, later blues songs described trains and railroads, because railroads were the primary method of conveyance. Later, with the development of interstate highway systems, automobiles and highways become the underpinning subject of blues.
Let’s discuss briefly functional illiteracy as a major obstacle to individual progress and in the aggregate, for community progress. We have instances of Floyd’s functional illiteracy throughout the play. While in prison he paid someone to write letters to Vera. He didn’t understand the words in a letter from the prison detailing the procedure for claiming his pay for each day he was imprisoned. Even Red Carter accuses Floyd of not being able to read. It is not a huge leap to reason that Floyd’s issues with his early recording contract could have stemmed from his inability to read. I wonder how he made it through his enlistment in the Army and how he survived the war without being able to read. We see this issue of the impediments of illiteracy in other characters in the Wilson Cycle.
(Note: 4% of Americans are non-literate and 14% are below basic literacy levels. 34% are barely at the basic literacy level. 52% read under the 8th grade level. These are 2013 levels, from data collected by the OECD every ten years, but levels of illiteracy are sure to rise with the present influx of non-English speakers across the southern border. https://www.wyliecomm.com/2020/11/whats-the-latest-u-s-literacy-rate/). The American Library Association’s Library journal cites a 21% and rising rate of adult illiteracy in the United States.
There are examples of illiteracy across the Cycle. I haven’t seen it mentioned in the literature, but August Wilson often makes a point to applaud literacy, reading and writing, and to decry, if not condemn, illiteracy. This may seem an almost obvious position for a playwright to take, and it may appear that literacy is an automatic “state” to assume in an industrialized democracy like the United States. But a quick look at the statistics tells a different story and highlights the importance Wilson places on literacy in character and plot development.
In Fences, for example, Troy cannot read or write. Could that be the real reason why he wasn’t able to transfer to white league professional baseball? We don’t know and Wilson doesn’t tell us. In Seven Guitars, Floyd is illiterate and it is the cause of many of his woes. He can’t get his daily compensation from his prison time because he couldn’t read to know to keep a certain letter. He failed to negotiate a deal for royalties on his first hit because he didn’t understand the process or the business itself of recording. He is a veteran of WWII, but he didn’t acquire any transferable skills from his army hitch because he couldn’t read, he couldn’t acquire information from texts. His misfortunes, it may be argued, stem more from illiteracy than from poverty, or systemic racial discrimination, or any other cause.
We get the impression from The Piano Lesson that Boy Willie was functionally illiterate. He could farm, but there was nothing he could do, by his own admission, in the city (where literacy skills are required). Boy Willie thought it absurd that Maretha could only play on the musical notes written on paper. In Ma Rainey, Levee was illiterate, though he could read and write music. In the end, he kills the only band member who could read and write, Toledo, acting out a rage he couldn’t contain from a life of trauma and from failing to get a side deal on some music he had written.
Greek tragedy themes in King Hedley II. (check time and delete is needed)
A few things caught my interest in King Hedley II. First of all the Greek Chorus that Wilson has Stool Pigeon provide in the opening of the play. From Wikipedia:
Greek choruses sometimes had a leader known as the coryphaeus. He sometimes came first to introduce the chorus, and sometimes spoke for them if they were taking part in the action. The entrances and exits of the coryphaeus and his chorus served the same way curtains do in a modern theatre.
If this play were a Greek tragedy, and some may argue that it may be, Stool Pigeon fulfills the role of the Greek Chorus, and of Coryphaeus, the leader of the Greek Chorus, in the Prologue, and everywhere he speaks in the play. Let that sink in for a minute, then go back through the play and attribute all Stool Pigeon’s speaking parts to the Greek Chorus, beginning at the very end of Scene 1, “Lock your doors! Close your windows! Turn your lamps down low! We in trouble now. Aunt Ester died! She died! She died! She died!“
In brief, the function of the chorus in Greek Drama is to provide commentary on actions and events occurring in the play, to allow time and space to the playwright to control the atmosphere and expectations of the audience, to allow the playwright to prepare the audience for key moments in the story line, and to underline certain elements and downplay others.
So Stool Pigeon, who was Canewell in Seven Guitars, now doubles as Seer, Spirit Guide, Supporter of Aunt Ester (like Holloway in Two Trains) and coryphaeus in Wilson’s attempt to connect to Greek classical drama (my spin). Canewell said in Seven Guitars, “If I could put the music down I would have been a preacher. Many times I felt God was calling. But the devil was calling too, and it seem like he called louder. God speak in a whisper and the devil shout.”
Additionally, Stool Pigeon gets his Bible quotations wrong every time - unless his recitations represents the promotion of a new synthesis of religion/mythology, a blending of Christian concepts with local African American spiritualism and all combined with African ideas of philosophy and religious belief. This would align with characters in earlier Wilson plays that touted African spiritual concepts (Turnbo in Jitney, Toledo in Ma Rainey, Bynum in Joe Turner, ultimately Berniece in Piano Lesson, and Holloway in Seven Guitars).
What if Stool Pigeon really is the Greek Chorus? And what if he is speaking to a specific audience or saying things that no one else could say and still preserve their theatric credibility? Taking it a step further, what if Ruby represents the Greek Siren, luring unsuspecting sailors to shipwreck on a rocky coast? Could August Wilson be using these classical “motifs” subconsciously to establish his chops and links to the classical and neoclassical tradition? Wouldn’t that be something? The death of Aunt Ester is an additional climax in the play, as is the accidental death of King at the play’s end. The play has overlapping and intersecting climaxes, in fact.
King Hedley II is one of only two plays in the cycle that contains a formal prologue, another element of Greek tragedy, the other being Gem of the Ocean. Seven Guitars has a first scene that plays the role of a prologue, though it is not formally named as such. Similarly, four plays, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, The Piano Lesson, and Fences have very beautifully written scene setters and “The Play” introductions. Rounding out the cycle, neither Two Trains Running nor Radio Golf have prologues or scene setters and, instead, plunge the reader or playgoer directly into the action of the first act.
Additionally, the presence of the Prologue in King Hedley II connects us by theme or by content to four other plays in the cycle, Two Trains Running (mention of ham bones), Gem of the Ocean (the prevalence of “Aunt Ester” mentions), Seven Guitars (Stool Pigeon, the narrator, exists as younger Canewell in Seven Guitars), and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (the narrator sounds peculiarly like Bynum).
Finally, Stool Pigeon foreshadows in the Prologue that something less than pleasant is about to befall the cycle’s heroine, Aunt Ester, a Borgesian technique. As readers and playgoers, we are placed on warning of ominous things to come.
A separate theme altogether might be the tragic end of King Hedley and his possible redemption. As an illustration, please bear with me as I reimagine George Floyd as King Hedley II (and vice versa).
King Hedley is a complicated character. He seems to have an anti-Midas touch, i.e., nothing he touches turns to gold. A good way to understand him is by comparing him to George Floyd, another complicated character. Floyd, like Hedley, was a seeming ne’er-do-well with a predilection for violence and criminal activity. Floyd even exceeded Hedley when it came to fathering five children across the country that he in turn abandoned. He was a failed athlete and a failed hip-hop artist, spending most of his adult life in and out of prison. He served eight jail terms for various minor charges and convictions. He was stopped for passing counterfeit money. His toxicology report revealed his illegal and illicit drug use.
Because of the circumstances surrounding his death, George Floyd’s memory has been lionized and the sins of his prior life forgiven and forgotten. Peaceful protestors demanded stern punishment for the police officer associated with his passing. Floyd’s death has been co-opted by politicians for political fundraising and support for calls to reform and defund police departments across the country.
King Hedley did time on a murder conviction and was involved in a series of petty crimes following his release. But his death was an accident and not in the commission of a crime. His spilled blood flowed to a place in the yard where Aunt Ester’s cat had been buried. We are led to believe in the play that the blood offering gave the cat a new life, a resurrection of sorts, that in turn would provide new spiritual life to Aunt Ester, who had recently died. Another bit of Borgesian magical realism tossed in the cooking pot.
For NaPoWriMo, I wrote a poem I called “Hedley’s Blues,” highlighting these and other similarities. In the end, Hedley’s unwilling sacrifice provided unforeseen opportunities of renewal for his community. Here is the poem:
Hedley’s Blues
They ask us to require this sacrifice.
Eye for eye. Tooth for tooth. Blood for blood.
This sacrifice will somehow make us whole,
Cure our ailments, fill the gaps you left
When they sold you down river for a song.
Those who bought you never knew stolen goods
Was all you were, living on borrowed time
And leaving casualties in your wake.
You were the sacrifice, the fatted calf,
Your unwilling blood a fitting offering
To the gods. Once. Spilled on the seeded ground
Of hopes and dreams – your intoxication.
There’s no balm in revenge. So there’s no need
For a present value calculation.
Gem of the Ocean
Gem of the Ocean is one of two plays in the cycle to have a prologue. Why might a Wilson play have a prologue?
Euripides invented the prologue. He prefixed a prologue to the beginning of his plays to explain upcoming action and make it comprehensible for his audience. Other dramatists in Ancient Greece continued this tradition, making the prologue a part of the formula for writing plays. Greek prologues generally explained events that happened in time before the time depicted in the play. Roman dramatists carried the prologue to a new level, giving even greater importance to this initial part of their plays.
American poet William Cullen Bryant makes a cameo appearance in Gem of the Ocean with recitation by Solly of lines from one of his epic poems, Thanatopsis. William Cullen Bryant is supposed to have written the poem at age 17. Thanatopsis, a poem written in the neoclassical style was very popular at the time of its publishing. A year later, when Bryant went away to law school, his father found the poem and submitted a draft of it to the North American Review, a publication still in print. Critics doubted the authenticity of the poem, much like Wilson’s 9th grade teacher doubted his authorship of his paper on Napoleon. Later in life, critics accused Wilson of borrowing heavily from the playwright Arthur Miller, or at least emulating his style. A portion of Thanatopsis appears in Act Two Scene Two and is echoed at the very end of the play.
From William Cullen Bryant, Thanatopsis:
“So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.”
Columbia, Gem of the Ocean, the song, has its own interesting authorship story twists. Was it an original or was it copied by/from Britannia, Pride of the Ocean? Was its author Thomas A’Beckett, David Shaw, or George Willig? And what is the significance of its revival in the 1957 Broadway hit, The Music Man, a musical about a fraudulent band director and a con man?
One final post-discussion idea is the meaning of the title away from the above idiosyncracies of the song. Perhaps the actual “gem” is the City of Bones itself, and not just the name of a ship. “It is a beautiful city,” Aunt Esther describes, where “the people made a kingdom out of nothing.” What if Columbia is not the lady holding the lighted torch in the Columbia Pictures logo, nor her antecedent in Roman mythology, Minerva, nor her antecedent in Greek mythology, Athena, all representative of Isis, of the great Egyptian pantheon, but an actual submerged city, maybe even the mystical Atlantis?
And maybe, to extend the metaphor even further, the submerged City of Bones represents not necessarily an ancient underwater city, but the promised destiny of America, a ship lost at sea by a mean and selfish sea captain, but resurrected and revived by its inhabitants.
And finally, Radio Golf.
Look, here is the deal (words used by President Biden to reassure us and put our minds at ease) . . .
The ancient Greeks pioneered the use of masks in classical drama, masks for tragedy looked sad, masks for comedy had a smile, and masks for shock or surprise had a big open mouth and raised eyebrows.
Let’s recall the use of masks in Gem of the Ocean, European face masks worn by Solly, Eli and Black Mary during the well-rehearsed drama as they conducted Citizen’s voyage to the City of Bones.
The equivalent technique in American stage culture of the mask, historically, is the blackface, though its use has fallen into disrepute in recent times. In the 19th century where it first appeared and in the early 20th century, blackface was all the rage.
So American blackface is the extension across time of the classical Greek mask.
Writers and critics have pointed out the use of a type of blackface in Radio Golf.
Roosevelt Hicks has a minority interest in a new urban radio station, WBTZ, in partnership with Bernie Smith, a local white businessman Harmond does not trust. Hicks is the “blackface’ that enables the purchase of a radio station at a deep discount with an FCC Minority Tax Certificate. Hicks is the front man, in charge of day-to-day operations, even though he has no radio experience. And because he loves golf, he produces a radio program where he offers golf tips.
It’s also a symbolic representation of an attempt by Wilson, in sharp departure to the other nine plays in the cycle, to portray the black middle class: Harmond the real estate developer/attorney running for mayor, Roosevelt, the banker/real estate developer, and Mame, the loving wife/government bureaucrat, whose name may be considered a play on the Mammy stereotype in American blackface.
Roosevelt, the literal black face of the radio deal he is running with Bernie Smith, is a fraud in many ways. He admits he is barely two paychecks away from not being able to pay his rent and the note on his and his wife’s expensive cars. He appears to be in a token position at Mellon Bank, where he works as VP, a position he eventually quits because of performance issues. He is unfaithful to his wife, and ultimately, he is unfaithful to his friend. Though well educated, he comes across as being quite the buffoon, while Old Joe, another name borrowed from the silent film and vaudeville blackface era, who should be playing the buffoon, actually comes across as being quite profound at times. A bit of a role reversal as the opposites face off repeatedly in Greek drama fashion.
Harmond, for his part, masquerades in the black face of respectability politics until events shift and he gets bought out by his partner. Then, recognizing that he has in fact been wearing a mask, a mask the proto-Harlem Renaissance poet Paul Laurence Dunbar says “that grins and lies,” he aligns himself with his newly discovered distant cousin Old Joe, and the handyman, Sterling, and puts warpaint on his face to enter the battlefield, yet another mask.
Roosevelt puts up a poster of Tiger Woods in the campaign headquarters signaling his love for golfing. But beneath the surface, one is reminded that Tiger Woods has never self-identified as a black man (his father was African American, his mother was Asian).
Wilson scholar Harry Elam gives us much food for thought in his article, “Radio Golf in the Age of Obama.” He tasks us to examine the incongruity of “radio” with “golf,” a combination in the play’s title that does not quite fit. He calls our attention to a vision of black pragmatism that Wilson crafts in the play and that vision’s lineage throughout the plays in the series. He mentions the creation of “Barack Obama as a political juggernaut dependent on manipulations of reality and the play of incongruity.”
But here the writer leaves out an interesting detail. The actor who played Harmond Wilks as Radio Golf toured the coast on its way to Broadway, Harry Lennix, is the same actor who claims in real life to have “taught” Barack Obama in the 90’s the articulations and gesticulations of an educated black Chicagoan before his first foray into state level politics. Lennix said in a press account, “He mimicked me, he followed me for years, and they wanted me to train him and teach him how to act . . . . like an educated south side African-American.” Life follows art.
Then, finally, and in the ultimate insult, Sterling identifies Roosevelt derogatorily as “a Negro,” and Harmond (harmony) refers to Roosevelt as “the shuffling, grinning nigger in the woodpile,” a throwback to a 1904 silent film still available on Youtube, yet another blackfaced, masked actor. And to add insult to injury, Harmond asks Roosevelt if he is a hundred dollar, a three hundred dollar, or a thousand dollar whore paid for by his white business partner Bernie Smith.
The use of the mask in Wilson’s plays, manifesting itself as blackface minstrelry in the black “front” for white interests serves multiple purposes. As Rankine alludes, the mask use in Radio Golf establishes Wilson’s chops in a theatrical tradition that dates back to ancient times while making a significant though coded comment on current social and political times. It is a fitting culmination to Wilson’s American Century Cycle.