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A TRIBUTE TO BLACKLISTED LYRICIST YIP HARBURG: THE MAN WHO PUT THE
RAINBOW IN THE WIZARD OF OZ  
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Amy Goodman, Ernie Harburg
December 25, 2025
Democracy Now!
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_ His name might not be familiar to many, but his songs are sung by
millions around the world. Today, we take a journey through the life
and work of Yip Harburg, the Broadway lyricist. _

Screen shot from Democracy Now, Democracy Now

 

TRANSCRIPT
_This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form._

AMY GOODMAN: Today, we pay tribute to Yip Harburg. His name may not be
familiar to many, but his songs are sung by millions around the world,
like jazz singer Abbey Lincoln.

ABBEY LINCOLN: Bing Crosby sang it, Ike Quebec played it, and Yip
Harburg wrote it.

[singing] _Once I built a railroad, made it run__Made it race against
time__Once I built a rairoad, now it’s done__Brother, can you spare
a dime?_

AMY GOODMAN: And Tom Waits.

TOM WAITS: [singing] _Once I built a tower way up to the sun__With
bricks and mortar and lime._

AMY GOODMAN: Judy Collins, and Dr. John from New Orleans, Peter
Yarrow.

AL JOLSON: [singing] _Say, don’t you remember,__Don’t you remember
they called me Al__It was Al, Al all the time._

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Al Jolson. And our beloved Odetta.

ODETTA: [singing] _Don’t you remember, I’m your pal__Say, brother,
can you spare a dime?__Buddy, can you spare a dime?_

AMY GOODMAN: “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” may well be a new
anthem for many Americans. The lyrics to that classic American song
were written by Yip Harburg. He was blacklisted during the McCarthy
era. During his career as a lyricist, Yip Harburg used his words to
express antiracist, pro-worker messages. He’s best known for writing
the lyrics to _The Wizard of Oz_, the movie that inspired the hit
Broadway musical and now the Hollywood blockbuster film _Wicked_. Yip
Harburg also had two hits on Broadway: _Bloomer Girls_, about the
women’s suffrage movement, and _Finian’s Rainbow_, a kind of
immigrants’ anthem about race and class and so much else.

Today, in this _Democracy Now!_ special, we pay tribute to Yip
Harburg’s life. Ernie Harburg is Yip’s son and biographer. He
co-wrote the book _Who Put the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz?: Yip
Harburg, Lyricist_. I met up with Ernie Harburg at the New York Public
Library for Performing Arts at Lincoln Center years ago when they are
exhibiting Yip Harburg’s work. Ernie Harburg took me on a tour.

ERNIE HARBURG: The first place is business about words, and one of
them is that the songs, when they were written back in those days,
anyhow, always had a lyricist and a composer, and neither one of them
wrote the song. They both wrote the song. However, in the English
language, you know, you have “This is Gershwin’s song,” or
“This is” — they usually say the composer’s song. I’ve
rarely ever heard somebody say, “This is Yip Harburg’s song” or
“Ira Gershwin’s song.” Both of them would be wrong. The fact is,
two people write a song.

So I’m going to talk about Yip’s lyrics and then lyrics in the
song. Now the first thing we’re looking at here is an expression
really of Yip’s philosophy and background, which he brings to
writing lyrics for the songs. And what it says here is that songs have
always been man’s anodyne against tyranny and terror. The artist is
on the side of humanity from the time that he was born a hundred years
ago in the dire depths of poverty that only the Lower East Side in
Manhattan could have when the Russian Jews, about 2 million of them,
got up out of the Russian shtetls and ghettos, and the courageous ones
came over here and settled in that area, what we now know as the East
Village. And Yip knew poverty deeply, and he quoted Bernard Shaw as
saying that the chill of poverty never leaves your bones. And it was
the basis of Yip’s understanding of life as struggle.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to how Yip got his start.

ERNIE HARBURG: Yip was, at a very early age, interested in poetry, and
he used to go to the Tompkins Square Library to read, and the
librarians just fed him these things. And he got hooked on every one
of the English poets, and especially O. Henry, the ending. He always
has a little great ending on the end of each of his songs. And he got
hooked on W.S. Gilbert, _The Bab Ballads_.

And then, when he went to Townsend High School, they had them sitting
in the seats by alphabetical order, so Yip was “H” and Gershwin
was “G”, so Ira sat next to Yip. One day, Yip walked in with _The
Bab Ballads_, and Ira, who was very shy and hardly spoke with anybody,
just suddenly lit up and said, “Do you like those?” And they got
into a conversation, and Ira then said, “Do you know there’s music
to that?” And Yip said, “No.” He said, “Well, come on home.”

So they went to Ira’s home, which was on 2nd Avenue and 5th Street
which is sort of upper from Yip’s poverty at 11th and C. And they
had a Victrola, which is like having, you know, huge instruments
today, and played him _H.M.S. Pinafore_. Well, Yip was just absolutely
flabbergasted, knocked out. And that did it. I mean, for the both of
them, because Ira was intensely interested that thing, too.

That began their lifelong friendship. Then Ira went on to be one of
the pioneers, with 25 other guys, Jewish Russian immigrants, who
developed the American Musical Theater. And it was only after — in
1924, I think, that Ira’s first show with George Gershwin, his
brother, that they started writing together.

AMY GOODMAN: The Gershwins’ _Porgy and Bess_ in 1940.

ERNIE HARBURG: Yip’s career took a kind of detour, because when the
war, World War I, came and Yip was a socialist and did not believe in
the war, he took a boat down to Uruguay for three years. I mean, he
refused to fight in the thing. That’s shades of 1968 and the Vietnam
War, right?

AMY GOODMAN: And why didn’t he believe in World War I?

ERNIE HARBURG: Because he was a full, deep-dyed socialist who did not
believe that capitalism was the answer to the human community and that
indeed it was the destruction of the human spirit. And he would not
fight its wars. And at that time, the socialists and the lefties, as
they were called, Bolsheviks and everything else, were against the
war.

And so, when he came back, he got married, he had two kids, and he
went into the electrical appliance business, and all the time hanging
out with Ira and George and Howard Dietz and Buddy De Sylva and
writing light verse for the F.P.A Conning Tower. And the newspapers
used to carry light verse, every newspaper. There were about 25 of
them at that time, not two or three now owned by two people in the
world, you know. And they actually carried light verse. Well, Yip and
Ira and Dorothy Parker, the whole crowd, had light verse in there,
and, you know, they loved it.

So, when the crash came and Yip’s business went under, and he was
about anywhere from $50,000 to $70,000 in debt, his partner went
bankrupt. He didn’t. He repaid the loans for the next 20 or 15
years, at least. Ira and he agreed that he should start writing
lyrics.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about what Yip is most known for:
_Finian’s Rainbow_, _The Wizard of Oz_. Right here, what do we have
in front of us?

ERNIE HARBURG: We have a lead sheet. We are in the gallery of the
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and there’s an exhibition
called “The Necessity of Rainbows,” which is the work of Yip
Harburg. And we are looking at the lead sheet of “Brother, Can You
Spare a Dime?” which came from a revue called _Americana_, which —
it was the first revue, which was — had a political theme to it: at
that time, the notion of the forgotten man. You have to remember what
the Great Depression was all about. It’s hard to imagine that now.
But when Roosevelt said, “One-third of the nation are ill-clothed,
ill-housed and ill-fed,” that’s exactly what it was. There was at
least 30% unemployment at those times. And among Blacks and
minorities, it was 50, 60%. And there were breadlines and —

Now, the rich, you know, kept living their lifestyle, but Broadway was
reduced to about 12 musicals a year from prior, in the '20s, about 50
a year, OK? So it became harder. But the Great Depression was deep
down a fact of life in everybody's mind. And all the songs were
censored — I use that loosely — by the music publishers. They only
wanted love songs or escape songs, so that in 1929 you had “Happy
Days Are Here Again,” and you had all of these kinds of songs. There
wasn’t one song that addressed the Depression, in which we were all
living. And this show, the _Americana_ show, Yip was asked to write a
song or get the lyrics up for a song which addressed itself to the
breadlines, OK?

And so, he, at that time, was working very closely with Jay Gorney.
Jay had a tune, which he had brought over with him when he was 8 years
old from Russia, and it was in a minor key, which is a whole different
key. Most popular songs are in major. And it was a Russian lullaby,
and it was da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And Jay had —
somebody else had lyrics for it: “Once I knew a big blonde, and she
had big blue eyes. She was big blue” — like that. And it was a
torch song, of which we talked about. And Yip said, “Well, could we
throw the words out, and I’ll take the tune?” All right.

And if you look at Yip’s notes, which are in the book that I
mentioned, you’ll see he started out writing a very satiric comedic
song. At that time, Rockefeller, the ancient one, was going around
giving out dimes to people, and he had a — Yip had a satiric thing
about “Can I share my dime with you?” You know? But then, right in
the middle, other images started coming out in his writings, and you
had a man in a mill, and the whole thing turned into the song that we
know it now, which is here and which I can read to you. And if you do
this song, you have to do the verse, because that’s where a lot of
the action is.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you sing it to me?

ERNIE HARBURG: All right, I’ll try. It won’t be as good as Bing
Crosby or Tom Waits.

[singing] _They used to tell me__I was building a dream,__And so I
followed the mob,__When there was earth to plow__Or guns to bear,__I
was always there__Right on the job.__They used to tell me__I was
building a dream,__With peace and glory ahead,__Why should I be
standing in line,__Just waiting for bread?_

YIP HARBURG: [singing] _Once I built a railroad__I made it run,__Made
it race against time.__Once I built a railroad;__Now it’s
done.__Buddy, can you spare a dime?_

AMY GOODMAN: Yip Harburg singing in 1975.

YIP HARBURG: [singing] _Once I built a tower__To the sun,__Brick and
rivet and lime;__Once I built that tower;__Now it’s done.__Brother,
can you spare a dime?_

AMY GOODMAN: When was this song first played?

ERNIE HARBURG: In 1932. And in the _Americana_ revue, every critic,
everybody took it up, and it swept the nation. In fact, paradoxically,
I think Roosevelt and the Democratic Party really wanted to tone it
down and keep it off the radio, because playing havoc with trying to
not talk about the Depression, which everybody did. You remember the
Hoover thing, not only “Happy Days Are Here Again,” but “Two
Chickens in Every Pot,” and so forth. Nobody wanted to sing about
the Depression either, you know.

AMY GOODMAN: Yet, Yip Harburg was a supporter of FDR.

ERNIE HARBURG: Yes. But politics are politics, you know, and the thing
was that, in fact, historically, this was, I would say, the only song
that addressed itself seriously to the Great Depression, the condition
of our lives, which nobody wanted to talk about and nobody wanted to
sing about.

AMY GOODMAN: Ernie Harburg, son of Yip Harburg. When we come back from
our break, we’ll talk about _The Wizard of Oz_, _Finian’s Rainbow_
and other shows.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is _Democracy Now!_ I’m Amy Goodman. We continue
with our special, on our journey through Yip Harburg’s life with his
son, Ernie Harburg. Ernie talks about how Yip Harburg wrote the lyrics
to _The Wizard of Oz_, the movie that inspired the hit Broadway
musical _Wicked_ and now the Hollywood film by the same name.

ERNIE HARBURG: Actually, Yip did more than the lyrics. When they were
— when Yip and Harold Arlen were called in to do the score of _The
Wizard of Oz_, it was Yip who had this executive experience in his
electrical appliance business and also had become a show doctor, so he
was — that is, when a show wasn’t working, you would call somebody
and try to fix it up. He had an overview of shows and he had an
executive talent. And so, he was always what they called a “muscle
man” in a show, all right? And he’d already worked with Bert Lahr
in a great song, “The Woodchopper’s Song,” and —

AMY GOODMAN: Wait a second. Bert Lahr, the lion?

ERNIE HARBURG: The lion. Bert Lahr and most of these people were from
vaudeville and burlesque. And Yip knew them in the ’20s, but he
actually worked with Bert Lahr in this light — _Walk a Little
Faster_ and another revue. I forget that name, but he and — Yip and
Arlen gave Bert songs to sing, which allowed him to satirize the opera
world, if you want, or a send-off of rich, you know. And so, they had
that relationship.

Also, Yip knew Jack Haley, the tin woodman. And Yip also worked with
Bobby Connolly as a choreographer in the early '30s on his shows, who
was also the choreographer for _The Wizard of Oz_. So he had a cast
here with Arlen who were, you know, sort of Yip's men. You know what I
mean? So, when Yip went to Arthur Freed, the producer, who was too
busy to work on this musical, and Mervin LeRoy had nothing to do with
it, practically, because he had never done a musical before, so it
became a vacuum in which the lyricist entered, because he was all
ready to do so. Yip was always an active, you know, organizer.

And so, the first thing he suggested was that they integrate the music
with the story, which at that time in Hollywood they usually didn’t
do. They’d stop the story, and you’d sing a song. They’d stop
the story and sing a song. That you integrate this — Arthur Freed
accepted the idea immediately. Yip then wrote — Yip and Harold then
wrote the songs for the 45 minutes within a 110-minute film. The
munchkin sequence and into the Emerald City and on their way to the
wicked witch, when all the songs stopped, because they wouldn’t let
them do anymore. OK? You’ll notice then the chase begins, you see,
in the movie.

AMY GOODMAN: Why wouldn’t they let them do anymore?

ERNIE HARBURG: Because they didn’t understand what he was doing, and
they wanted a chase in there. So, anyhow, Yip also wrote all the
dialogue in that time and the setup to the songs, and he also wrote
the part where they give out the heart, the brains and the nerve,
because he was the final script editor. And there was eleven
screenwriters on that. And he pulled the whole thing together, wrote
his own lines and gave the thing a coherence and a unity, which made
it a work of art. But he doesn’t get credit for that. He gets
“lyrics by E.Y. Harburg,” you see? But, nevertheless, he put his
influence on the thing.

AMY GOODMAN: Who wrote _The Wizard of Oz_ originally, the story?

ERNIE HARBURG: Yeah, Frank L. Baum was an interesting kind of maverick
guy, who at one point in his life was an editor of a paper in South
Dakota. And this was at the time of the populist revolutions or
revolts, or whatever you want to call it, in the Midwest, because the
railroads and the Eastern city banks absolutely dominated the life of
the farmers, and they couldn’t get away from the debts that were
accumulated from these. And Baum set out consciously to create an
American fable so that the American kids didn’t have to read those
German Grimm fairy stories, where they chopped off hands and things
like that. You know, he didn’t like that. He wanted an American
fable.

But it had this underlay of political symbolism to it that the farmer
— the scarecrow was the farmer. He thought he was dumb, but he
really wasn’t; he had a brain. And the tin woodman was the result
— was the laborer in the factories. With one accident after another,
he was totally reduced to a tin man with no heart, all right, on an
assembly line. And the cowardly lion was William Jennings Bryan, who
kept trying — was a big politician at that time, promising to make
the world over with the gold standard, you know? And the wizard, who
was a humbug type, was the Wall Street finances, and the wicked witch
was probably the railroads, but I’m not sure. All right?

So it was a beautiful match-up here with Frank Baum and Yip Harburg,
OK, because in the book, the word “rainbow” was never once
mentioned. And you can go back and look at it. I did three times. The
word “rainbow” is never once mentioned in the book. And the book
opens up with Dorothy on a black-and-white world, that Kansas had no
color. Just read the first paragraph in it.

So, when they got to the part where they had to get the song for the
little girl, they hadn’t written it yet. They had written everything
else. They hadn’t written the song for Judy Garland, who was a
discovery by one of Yip’s collaborators, Burton Lane. And nobody
knew the wonder in her voice at that time. So they worked on this
song, and at that time, Ira, Yip, Larry Hart and the others thought
that the composer should create the music first. Now, they were both
locked into — the lyricist and the composer were locked into the
storyline and the character and the plot development. So they both
knew that at this point there was a little girl in trouble on the
Kansas City environment, all right, and that she yearned to get out of
trouble, all right? So Yip gave Harold what they call a “dummy
title.” It’s not the final title, but it’s something that more
or less zeroes in on what the situation is all about and what — this
little girl is going to take a journey, all right? So Yip gave him a
title: “I Want to Get on the Other Side of the Rainbow.”

YIP HARBURG: Now, here’s what happened, and I want you to play this
symphonically! OK, I said, “My god, Harold! This is a 12-year-old
girl wanting to be somewhere over the rainbow. It isn’t Nelson
Eddy!” And I got frightened, and I said, “I don’t — let’s
save it. Let’s save it for something else. But don’t — let’s
not have it in.” Well, he felt — he was crestfallen, as he should
be. And I said, “Let’s try again.” Well, he tried for another
week, tried all kinds of things, but he kept coming back to it, as he
should have. And he came back, and I was worried about it, and I
called Ira Gershwin over, my friend. Ira said to him, he said, “Can
you play it a little more in a pop style?” And I played it, with
rhythm.

OK, I said, “Oh, well, that’s great. That’s fine.” I said,
“Now we have to get a title for it.” I didn’t know what the
title was going to be. And when he had [sings] dee-da-dee-da-da-da-da,
[talking] I finally came to the thing, the way our logic lies in it,
“I want to be somewhere on the other side of the rainbow.” And I
began trying to fit it: “On the other side of the rainbow.” When
he had a front phrase like daa-da-da-da-da — now, if you say
“eee,” you couldn’t sing “eee-ee.” You had to sing
“ooooh.” That’s the only thing that would get a — and I had to
get something with “oh” in it, see: “Over the rain” — now,
that sings beautifully, see. So the sound forced me into the word
“over,” which was much better than “on the other side.”

JUDY GARLAND: [singing] _Somewhere over the rainbow__Way up
high,__There’s a land that I heard of__Once in a lullaby._

ERNIE HARBURG: Anyhow, Yip — Arlen worked on it. He came up with
this incredible music, which, if anybody wants to try it, just play
the chords alone, not the melody, and you will hear Pachelbel, and you
will hear religious hymns, and you will hear fairy tales and
lullabies, just in the chords. No one ever listens to that, but try
it, if you play the piano.

And at any rate, on top of these chords, then Harold started the thing
off with an octave jump: “Somewhere” — OK, and Yip had no idea
what to do with that octave jump. Incidentally, Harold did this in
_Paper Moon_, too, if you remember. Let’s see how did that start?

YIP HARBURG: [singing] _It’s only a paper moon__Sailing over a
cardboard sea__But it wouldn’t be make-believe__If you believed in
me_

ERNIE HARBURG: And Harold was a great composer. So Yip wrestled with
it for about three weeks, and finally he came up with the word. You
see, this is what a lyricist does: the word, to hit the storyline, the
character, the music. It’s an incredible thing. “Some-where.”
All right, and then when you put in an octave, you get
“some-where,” OK, and you jump up, and you’re ready to take that
journey. All right? Where? “O-ver the rainbow.” OK? And then
you’re off!

It’s not a love song. It’s a story of a little girl that wants to
get out. She’s in trouble, and she wants to get somewhere. Well, the
rainbow was the only color that she’d see in Kansas. She wants to
get over the rainbow. But then, Yip put in something which makes it a
Yip song. He said, “And the dreams you dare to dream really do come
true.” You see? And that word “dare” lands on the note, and
it’s a perfect thing, and it’s been generating courage for people
for years afterwards, you know?

JUDY GARLAND: [singing] _Somewhere over the rainbow__Skies are
blue,__And the dreams that you dare to dream__Really do come true._

ERNIE HARBURG: That’s the way that the whole score came.

AMY GOODMAN: Was it a hit right away?

ERNIE HARBURG: No, it wasn’t. This was supposed to be an answer,
MGM’s answer to _Snow White and the Seven Dwarves_, and of about 10
major critics at that time when _The Wizard of Oz_ came out, I would
say only two liked the show. The other eight said it was corny, that
it was heavy, that Judy Garland was no good, and so forth. Oh, yeah.
You could read again in the book, _Who Put the Rainbow on The Wizard
of Oz?_, by Harold Meyerson and Ernie Harburg. But it persisted, you
know? And then, in 1956, when television first started saturating the
nation —

AMY GOODMAN: More than 20 years later.

ERNIE HARBURG: More than 20 years later. I don’t think they even had
their money back from the show, see? MGM sold the film rights to CBS,
who then put it on. And it hit the top of the — it broke out every
single record there was, and it’s been playing every year since
then. And, of course, it went around the world, and it’s become a
major artwork, which is, I must say, an American artwork, because the
story, the plot with the three characters, the brain, the heart, the
courage, and finding a home is a universal story for everybody. And
that’s an American kind of a story, all right? And Yip and Harold
put these things into song.

AMY GOODMAN: Who did the munchkins represent?

MUNCHKINS: [singing] _We represent the Lollipop Guild__The Lollipop
Guild, the Lollipop Guild.__And in the name of the Lollipop Guild…_

ERNIE HARBURG: Oh, you mean political thing? I think they represent
the little people, you know, the people. And that’s they way they
were — it came on in the book. You see, the book, if you’re a
purist, you wouldn’t like the film. It’s just like anything else.
There are societies of people who meet and discuss the books. OK,
there’s even a society for the winkies, which are the guards around
the wicked witch’s, you know, castle. There really is! They meet
once a year. And they’re serious! They don’t like the picture,
because it didn’t follow the book, see, because Yip and the writers
changed it, as Hollywood will.

AMY GOODMAN: Was the book a little bit more favorable to the winkies?

ERNIE HARBURG: No — well, yes! The winkies were good people, and
they were played up there. If you go back and read the book, you will
see that they were a lovely, decent kind of people, yes. That was one
thing. I guess it wasn’t PC there, you know?

But, nevertheless, when you read a good novel, and you see the film,
there’s hardly any relationship between the two. All these lines
from the film have entered the American language in a way that people
don’t even know where they came from. You know, “Gee, Toto, looks
like we’re not in Kansas anymore.” Or, you know, “Come out, come
out, wherever you are,” which in the ’70s started taking on, when
the gay movement started, this line started meaning different things,
you see?

GLINDA: [singing] _Come out, come out, wherever you are__And meet the
young lady, who fell from a star._

ERNIE HARBURG: So the songs keep growing with the times. People
interpret them, you know?

AMY GOODMAN: How did Yip feel in the late 1950s, when it was a hit,
when people started hearing it all over the world?

ERNIE HARBURG: Well, I think they were quite surprised, along with the
film moguls, you know, and the fact that — years and years later, he
and Harold both said that they did not know what depth and strength
that that song “Over the Rainbow” had. And also, one other one,
the song “Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead” is a universal
liberation, a freedom, a cry for freedom, you know, which isn’t seen
like that, but it — one time, when some tyrannical owner of an
airlines company stepped down, all the employees started singing
“Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead.”

So people use these words. And during the war, World War II,
“We’re Off to See the Wizard” was sung by troops marching, you
know? But nobody knows that Yip wrote the words, you see. Now, Harold
wrote the music, and the songs were Yip and Harold. That’s it.

AMY GOODMAN: Ernie Harburg, son of the blacklisted lyricist Yip
Harburg. This is _Democracy Now!_

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is _Democracy Now!_, democracynow.org, _The War and
Peace Report_. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue on our tour through
the life of lyricist Yip Harburg with his son Ernie Harburg. Yip
Harburg wrote the lyrics to _The Wizard of Oz_, the movie that
inspired the hit Broadway musical and now Hollywood blockbuster
_Wicked_.

ERNIE HARBURG: We’re walking through the gallery here at the Lincoln
Center for the Performing Arts, which has “The Necessity of
Rainbows,” dedicated to the works of Yip Harburg, the lyricist. And
we’re now looking at the various exhibitions.

And while we’re looking for _Finian’s Rainbow_, I want to tell you
that in 1944, Yip conceived and co-wrote the script and put on a show
called _Bloomer Girl_, which was way ahead of its time, because
_Bloomer Girl_ was Dolly Bloomer, who was an actual suffragette in
1860 who stood up and invented pants. And it was radical in those
days. And the show was about Dolly Bloomer, and she ran an underground
railroad, bringing slaves up, and she had an underground paper, and
she was an incredible woman. And this was a political show. Some great
songs in there. Maureen McGovern does “Right as the Rain” in a
great way. Lena Horne does “Eagle and Me,” which was the first
song on Broadway that wasn’t a blues lamentation about the
black-white situation. It was a call to action. “We gotta be free,
the eagle and me.” OK? And Dooley Wilson, who was in _Casablanca_,
sang that.

So, again, Yip managed to get his philosophy into his show, which was
the second truly integrated American musical after _Oklahoma_. And
while, you know, it hasn’t been played around, it’s still marked
that historically. After that came _Finian’s Rainbow_.

AMY GOODMAN: You mean Blacks and whites playing in the cast.

ERNIE HARBURG: No, not in there. In _Finian’s Rainbow_, I mean that
it was a political statement. _Bloomer Girl_ was a political
statement, and it was a smash hit. In 1946, Yip conceived the idea,
the story, the script for _Finian’s Rainbow_, which was meant to be
an antiracist and, in a certain sense, anti-capitalist show also.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s find it.

ERNIE HARBURG: All right, let’s go.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s find _Finian’s Rainbow_.

ERNIE HARBURG: Here’s _Cabin in the Sky_, which is the first
all-Black Hollywood film in the '40s, which Yip and Harold did also.
“Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe.” Here's _Bloomer Girl_ that
I’m talking about. So, we should be, somehow, coming onto
_Finian’s Rainbow_. But here’s Yip here. There’s a video of Yip
talking, if you want to meet the man.

INTERVIEWER: You got into political trouble in this country at a time
when a lot of people got into political trouble, during the McCarthy
years. Were you blacklisted?

YIP HARBURG: Thank God, yes.

INTERVIEWER: During that McCarthy period, were they actually going
through your lyrics with a fine-toothed comb looking for lines that
might be subversive, that might show Yip Harburg’s true political
colors?

YIP HARBURG: Yes. I wrote a song for _Cabin in the Sky_, which Ethel
Waters sang and was part of the situation in the picture. Here was a
poor woman who had nothing in life except this one man, Joe, and she
sang, “It seemed like happiness is just a thing called Joe.”

One of the producers, with not a macroscope, but a microscope, found
in this lyric that “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe” was a
tribute to Joe Stalin. We’re kidding about it now, but the country,
this was the blackest, the blackest and darkest moment in the history
of this beautiful country.

ERNIE HARBURG: Now, here we are at _Finian’s Rainbow_ at last. And
this was — Yip conceived this in 1946. And Fred Saidy, who was his
co-script writer — and Harold Arlen demurred from writing this,
because he felt that Yip was too fervent in his political opinions,
and he wanted — Harold wanted to do something else. So Yip got Burt
Lane and then came out with this great, great score from _Finian’s
Rainbow_, “Old Devil Moon.”

“How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” etc. But the theme of
_Finian’s_ was a total fantasy, and it was an American fable in
which an Irishman and his daughter come from Ireland, search around
and find Rainbow Valley in “Missitucky.” OK? And he believes that
if he plants the crock of gold, which he stole from the leprechaun, in
the ground, that it will grow, just like at Fort Knox, right? The
whole thing was fabulous!

And then, the Southern white senator, a very stereotypic part, finds
out that Finian has this land, and tries to run him out of town,
because there’s Blacks and whites living together, and, you know,
they’re sharecroppers. And they claim that Finian’s daughter is a
witch, and they’re going to burn her at the stake, and all sorts of
incredible things that say something about the American scene.

But the score was so great that people who see it do not see it as a
socialist tract, which the only one on Broadway; they see it as a
very, very entertaining musical and unique in American musicals,
because, in the first place, there are very, very few musicals which
are original. Most musicals are adapted from books, and this was just
conceived by Fred Saidy and Yip as a satiric send-off on American
society. So, you’ve got this great song in here, “When the Idle
Poor Become the Idle Rich,” how are you going to know who is who or
who is which? OK, you know, like that.

And so, _Finian’s Rainbow_ has become a classic. Now, it’s
interesting that _Finian’s_ has not had a tour, a national tour,
since 1948. But they play it in every single high school in the United
States, three or four times a month in every state of the union.

So, _Finian’s_ was, at the time, 1947, when the Cold War was
beginning and the House Un-American Committee was starting up, and
they were searching for lefties. And by 1951, Yip had been blacklisted
from any chance to do any of the wonderful shows that they did in
Hollywood, _Dr. Doolittle_, _Treasure Island_. He was blocked from
working there. And then he was blocked from going into radio and into
TV.

So — and this is an historical fact which Yip himself says —
Broadway and the American theater in New York City was the only place
where an artist could stand up and say whatever he wanted, provided he
got the money to put the show on. So, for _Finian’s Rainbow_, they
had to have 25 auditions, because they said it was a commie red thing.
And finally, they got the money up, and they put the show up. But by
that time, Yip was blacklisted.

And his next show was _Jamaica_ with Lena Horne, with an all-Black
cast. One other thing, in terms of Yip’s drive for racial and ethnic
equality, and that is that _Finian’s Rainbow_ in 1947 was the first
show on Broadway where the chorus line consisted of Blacks and whites
who danced with each other, and the chorus was an integrated affair.

AMY GOODMAN: What happened to him during the McCarthy era?

ERNIE HARBURG: Well, he could not work on any major film that they
wanted him to work on from the major studios in Hollywood. The setup
was that Roy Brewer, who was the head of the IATSE union — I’m
sorry to say that — was the one who —

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?

ERNIE HARBURG: Well, I mean this is a stagehands’ union. I’d like
to say good things about unions, but they get bureaucratized, and they
go right-wing, you know? They get bad. This was a bad leader, and he
terrorized all of the Jewish moguls who were being accused of
communism by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and they
yielded to whatever he said to them, out of fear that they would get
branded as communists or that they’d boycott the film, all right?

And so, when, you know, they called Yip in to do _Huckleberry Finn_
with Burt Lane, then Roy and the guys said, “No, he’s on our
blacklist, OK? And you can’t hire him.” And then Yip went away.
And they wanted him to work on _Dr. Doolittle_. “No, you can’t
hire him.” And the same thing for radio and TV. And that was known
as a, quote, “blacklist,” which wasn’t — that wasn’t the
first use of the term, because in small towns we had company
corporations going, if you did something that the company didn’t
like, you were blacklisted from town. You couldn’t get a job in
town. But this was the first time, due to the technology, that a
blacklist was national and accompanied by a loaded word,
“communist,” that could get you fired anyplace.

For Yip, it was horrible, because his friends, who were artists,
suddenly had no income. And there were suicides. There was divorces.
There were people who left the country. There were people whose lives
were just ruined. And so, Yip supported some of them. Dalton Trumbo,
who was one of the Hollywood Ten who were first picked out by the
House Un-American Activities Committee to go to jail for a year, a
citation. “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the
Communist Party?” You know, Yip fronted him with money, and so
forth. It was a horrible time.

AMY GOODMAN: How long couldn’t Yip work for?

ERNIE HARBURG: For about from 1951 to 1962. He came back to Hollywood
in 1962, when he and Harold Arlen did _Gay Purr-ee_, which is with
Judy Garland. She asked them to come back. And it’s a cult animated
cartoon now, which you can get in your video. And I remember him
putting on a show at the Taber Auditorium. “Welcome Back, Yip,”
you know? And he — in ’62.

AMY GOODMAN: But that means that _The Wizard of Oz_ made it big during
the time that he was blacklisted. That was — and when you consider
the social commentary that it was making, that’s pretty profound.

ERNIE HARBURG: Yeah, but I don’t think hardly anyone knows the
political symbolism underneath _The Wizard of Oz_, because, again,
it’s a thing that happens in _Finian’s Rainbow_, even though as
Peter Stone, a noted playwright on Broadway, said, “It’s the only
socialist tract ever on Broadway,” all right? People don’t hear
the political message in it, OK? They are vastly entertained. The same
thing happens with _The Wizard_. You know, nobody would even think of
such a thing.

YIP HARBURG: My songs, like “When the Idle Poor Become the Idle
Rich” and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” caused a great deal
of furor during a period in Hollywood when a fellow by the name of Joe
McCarthy was reigning supreme. And so, they got something up for
people to take care of us, like me, called the blacklist. And I landed
on the enemy list.

And in order to overcome the enemy list — what was the enemy list?
Well, it’s, one, that you were a red; another one, that you were a
bluenose; and the other one, that you’re on the blacklist. Finally,
I thought the rainbow was a wonderful symbol of all these lists. In
order to overcome the enemy list and this rainbow that they gave me
the idea for, I wrote this little poem:

_Lives of great men all remind us__Greatness takes no easy way,__All
the heroes of tomorrow__Are the heretics of today.__Socrates and
Galileo,__John Brown, Thoreau, Christ and Debs__Heard the night cry
“Down with traitors!”__And the dawn shout “Up the
rebs!”__Nothing ever seems to bust them_ —_Gallows, crosses,
prison bars;__Tho’ we try to readjust them__There they are among the
stars.__Lives of great men all remind us__We can write our names on
high__and departing leave behind us__Thumbprints in the FBI._

AMY GOODMAN: The words of Yip Harburg. And that does it for today’s
program, which was actually produced for radio in 1996 with Errol
Maitland and Dan Coughlin. Special thanks to Gary Helm, Brother Shine
and Julie Drizin. _Democracy Now!_ is produced with Mike Burke, Renée
Feltz, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena,
Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John
Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud, Hana Elias. Our executive
director is Julie Crosby. Special thanks to Becca Staley, Jon
Randolph, Paul Powell, Mike Di Filippo, Miguel Nogueira, Hugh Gran,
Denis Moynihan, David Prude, Dennis McCormick, Matt Ealy, Anna Özbek,
Emily Andersen, Dante Torrieri and Buffy Saint Marie Hernandez. I’m
Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.

_The original content of this program is licensed under a __Creative
Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United
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