Swords and Plowshares playbill

In: The Arts;

Abstract

The Civic Players of Minneapolis were a community theater group that organized in March 1918. Their stated purpose was "to develop the drama on a broad, democratic basis and to make Minneapolis not so much a city of theaters as a community with a playhouse." In 1919, in the wake of WWI, they performed a historical pageant entitled "Swords and Plowshares" on the steps of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The pageant was intended to theatrically illustrate history's greatest wars and to point out the "indisputable fact . that the ideal of Democracy has been steadily struggling upward through the years of violence and stress." To highlight the success of democracy and civilization at the local level the players included the names and images of notable Minneapolis institutions, landmarks, and businesses in the front and back of their playbill. The playbill provides insight into what the people of early twentieth-century Minneapolis perceived to be their city's finest qualities and is a record of the city's most important buildings and businesses following World War I.