For Ladyhouse Blues, the 3 co-dramaturgs looked at the enormous changes occurring in the years up to August, 1919, and how these resonated in daily life—from religion, politics, and the struggle for women’s right to vote to popular music, female fashions, and the drudgery of housekeeping. We brought our findings to special "Immersion" rehearsals to help the cast and creative team more accurately embody the Maddens’ world, and to share that world with you. We hope that the information in this program will color the background of the family portrait you’ll see on stage.

During the Great War, anti-German sentiment had been rampant across America and was particularly strong in St. Louis, with its preponderance of German immigrants. Men with German names volunteered for the armed services to prove their loyalty. In state after state, schools banned the teaching of the German language and local officials forbade music by German composers, including Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. Books by Goethe, Kant and Nietzsche were removed from library shelves. Many German immigrants were forced to register as enemy combatants, and for a short time, sauerkraut was renamed "liberty cabbage.’’

America had come late to the war—which was said to be fought to make the world safe for democracy—but patriotism ran high, and when the Armistice finally came on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, peace was dearly welcome. But as the historian Frederick Lewis Allen wrote, "there came a subtle change in the emotional weather. The torch of idealism that had kindled the revolt of the American conscience burned itself out. People were tired. In particular their public spirit, their consciences, and their hopes were tired.’’ You might say, as Liz Madden sings in the play, people had the weary blues.

Social tensions, which had been kept somewhat at bay by the war, began to emerge. The exodus from the South of African-Americans, the flooding of immigrants from the Old World to the new, and the fear of socialist anarchy imported from abroad stirred animosity. By the summer of 1919, the Red Scare as it was called had taken full possession of the national imagination.

Between 1900 and 1915, more than 13 million people had come to the United States, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe. Many were Jewish or Catholic, which alarmed older Americans who were predominately Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. Some resented the newcomers because they competed for low-wage jobs, others because the new immigrants maintained Old World customs and seemed to resist assimilation into the larger American culture. Throughout the country there spread a religious revivalism and a new kind of Christian fundamentalism with deep emotional appeal. A generation of popular evangelists, most notably the former baseball player Billy Sunday, were barnstorming for salvation and drawing large audiences.

As the nation looked with optimism to changes brought by new technology and industries, many yearned to return a simpler, seemingly more stable past. The tensions in the world of 1919 and the years just previous are reflected in conflicts in the Madden home. Beyond their personal difficulties, the Madden sisters and their mother are caught up by events that profoundly changed America—in ways that seem much like the stories in today’s newspapers.