February 18, 2005, 8:01 a.m.
America’s Greatest Play
Arthur Miller didn’t write it.

There's really no getting around the fact that Arthur Miller was one of America's great playwrights. He died last week at the age of 89, and at the very least it must be said that he wrote one of America's best-known plays: The Crucible.

But he didn't write America's best play. He didn't even come close.

Praising Arthur Miller is no easy thing for a conservative like me, because he was one of the country's most dedicated anti-anti-Communists. In The Crucible, after all, the Salem witch trials are meant to serve as a metaphor for McCarthyism. Get it? Just as there were no witches in the Salem of 1692, there were no Communists in the America of the 1950s — but in both places and times there were delusional right-wing witch hunters.

It turns out that there really were Commies among us, so the political point Miller had intended to make was fundamentally wrong, and even downright harmful. Yet The Crucible continues to resonate. A while back, David Frum proposed a list of ten cultural and scientific achievements since 1950 that will still matter in the year 2200. If I were compiling my own list, I'd possibly put The Crucible on it. I suspect our children's children's children will have an opportunity to see it performed on stage, perhaps through whatever virtual reality doohickeys are popular in home-entertainment centers a hundred years from now. Maybe they'll even read it in school, if the schools are still bothering students with reading assignments.

Yet there's another play that may deserve even more acclaim, especially during President's Day weekend. It's called Cato: A Tragedy, and the author is Joseph Addison. It first appeared on the London stage in 1713, and in many ways it is the direct opposite of The Crucible: nearly forgotten and dramatically underwhelming, but also politically penetrating. It is perhaps the most important piece of drama in American history. As Miller himself once noted, in an entirely different context, "attention must be finally paid."

Cato is a paean to liberty. It portrays the plight of Cato the Younger, a Roman senator who refused to submit to the tyranny of Julius Caesar. The play sparkles with freedom-hugging aphorisms, such as this:

A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty

Is worth a whole eternity in bondage.

It should come as no surprise, then, that these words inspired America's revolutionary generation. Perhaps none were as affected by Cato as George Washington, who loved the play so much he had it performed for the troops at Valley Forge in that brutal winter of 1777-78. Washington was hardly the only figure stirred by Addison's work. Benjamin Franklin pored over its passages. John Adams quoted it in letters. And two of America's most famous patriot statements come directly from its lines.

Here's Patrick Henry in 1775: "I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

Here's its antecedent, in Act 2, Scene 4 of Cato:

It is not now a time to talk of aught

But chains or conquest, liberty or death.

And here are Nathan Hale's famous last words, supposedly uttered from the gallows in 1776: "I regret that I have but one life to give to my country."

And here's Cato, Act 4, Scene 4:

What pity is it

That we can die but once to serve our country!

As Forrest McDonald writes in the foreword to an excellent new Liberty Fund edition of Cato: "That most of the founding generation read [Cato] or saw it or both is unquestionable, and that it stuck in their memories is abundantly evident." In the case of George Washington, the play stuck in his memory like superglue. His first recorded reference to Cato came in a 1758 letter. During the American Revolution, he wrote to Benedict Arnold (when Arnold was still one of the good guys): "It is not in the power of any man to command success; but you have done more — you have deserved it." That's ripped right from Cato, Act 1, Scene 2:

'Tis not in mortals to command success,
But we'll do more, Sempronius, we'll deserve it.

In the 1780s, General Washington was still alluding to Cato in speeches to his troops, and in the 1790s President Washington was tipping his hat to his favorite play in correspondence with Alexander Hamilton. (Interestingly, there was no copy of Cato in Washington's Mount Vernon library — he may have known it more from the stage than the page.)

So whatever happened to Cato? Why have so few people heard of it today? Well, it's not the world's most outstanding piece of theater. It bears some resemblance to a closet drama — meant to be read in an armchair rather than executed on stage, like Milton's Samson Agonistes. Its characters are uncomplicated mouthpieces rather than compelling personalities. Samuel Johnson once said that nobody gives a hoot what Addison's stale characters "are doing or suffering; we wish only to know what they have to say." Political-science students are more likely than English-lit majors to learn something from the play's lines. And despite the quotability of Cato, there are also archaic humdingers such as this: "Thou seest not that thy brother is thy rival."

Zounds! That's ye olde school.

But Cato does survive in other ways. Addison's drama didn't only inspire Americans. In Britain, where it was also popular, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon were motivated to use "Cato" as a penname as they compiled a set of documents known today as Cato's Letters, which present an early vision of limited government. An important 21st century organization takes its name from these libertarian pamphlets: the Cato Institute.

Which raises an interesting question: Three centuries from now, will Arthur Miller have an influential think tank named after him? If he does, that will be a real tragedy.

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