Nothing small was ever going to be performed on the steps of the MIA, the neoclassical columns perfect for tales of Samson and Delilah, gods and their oracles. In July 1919, it was Swords and Plowshares, an epic morality play about war and peace, that was staged out front by the Civic Players of Minneapolis, involving numbers that would be the envy of any theater today: 2,500 performers, 17,000 spectators.
The name came from Biblical prophecy: “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” But it wasn’t as hippie as all that. The year before, as World War I raged, the community troupe took to the steps to perform its first annual pageant, The Torchbearers, which actually seemed to justify war. “Under the stimulus of war excitement,” the museum reported, “15,000 spectators were stirred by the troops and sailors who participated in the production.”
By the time that Swords and Plowshares was staged, the War to End All Wars was over. But the story didn’t suggest that hostilities would—or even should—forever cease, rather that the motives had become more high-minded. It traced the evolution of war, beginning with Lot and Abraham quarreling over pasture—“the most primitive form of disagreement over the question of thine and mine,” the MIA noted. This was followed by Roman conquests and the American Revolution—you can see where this is going.
Finally the players arrived at the fresh memory of what the museum called “the great war for world democracy” and what we now largely think of as the most asinine war of our time, if not all time. In the wake of millions dead, the “Spirit of Civilization” solemnly emerged onstage to keep the peace. At least until Hitler.
But it wasn’t all noble sacrifice. There were hundreds of beautiful dancers, like the ladies on the left, who cavorted amongst the bloodshed of the Roman era in “bacchanalian revels pictured with such glory of color and charm as to obscure the vulgarity of the drunkenness and license,” the MIA noted with the proper moralizing tone, “and to make them almost attractive.”