1947
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finian%27s_Rainbow
Typical of the period, Finian’s Rainbow had a strong political message. Written by E.Y. “Yip” Harburg (who later faced the Hollywood blacklist) and Burton Lane, the 1947 Broadway musical used fairy-tale elements like leprechauns and magic wishes to deliver sharp social satire. The plot is set in the fictional southern state of “Missitucky,” where white and Black tenant farmers live and work together. Through numbers like “When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich,” the show satirizes the massive gap in wealth, power, and social standing between the rich and the working class. The multiracial cooperative community of Rainbow Valley acts as a symbolic socialist utopia where people pool resources and resist corporate mortgage holders and greedy land grabbers.
Harburg, a committed socialist, fashioned “Finian’s Rainbow” to score progressive political points. When Finian and his daughter Sharon come to Missitucky, they meet racist Senator Billboard Rawkins. The way that the Senator refers to African-Americans is so shocking to Sharon that she wishes he would turn black so he could see what it’s like. Since she is standing (unawares) over the pot of gold that her father had buried, her wish is granted.
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Capitalism looked so bad — after the Great Depression of the 1930s and the World War of the 1940s — that interest in the socialist alternative was peaking around 1947. The Labour Party had just come to power in the UK. In the US, the International Workers Order (IWO), a Communist Party-affiliated organization founded in 1930, was at its height, having almost 200,000 members. But:
a) reports concerning problems with the implementation of socialism in the Soviet Union were increasing
b) the power-elites of the capitalist countries went on the offensive in their efforts to derail socialist partisanship
The announcement of the Truman Doctrine in 1947 established the US policy of communist “containment.” For leftists, the change in the zeitgeist was similar to what my own generation of social-changers experienced with the “Big Chill” upon the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
