Cumhuriyet Üniversitesi Fen Fakültesi Cumhuriyet University Faculty of Science

Fen Bilimleri Dergisi (CFD), Cilt:36, No: 3 Özel Sayı (2015) Science Journal (CSJ), Vol. 36, No: 3 Special Issue (2015)
ISSN: 1300-1949 ISSN: 1300-1949

 
“All My Sons”- The Tragic Conflict between Family Loyalties and Social
Responsibilities

Alaeddin NAHVI
Art University, Tehran, Iran

Received: 01.02.2015; Accepted: 05.05.2015

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Abstract. The play “All My Sons” takes its title from the swan-song of Joe Keller, the tragic character in the play.
His sens of guilt drives him to suicide, and before taking his life,he refers to his son Larry’s statement that he was
ending his life to make amends for the twenty-one pilots, who met their end by using the cracked cylinder heads
dispatched from the factory of Joe Keller. Larry’s death brings home to Joe the truth that not only Larry but also those
twenty-one pilots were his sons. The major theme of ”All My Sons” is the tragic conflict between family loyalties and
the social responsibility. Joe Keller is an ordinary fair-to medium individual whose love for his family is boundless.
Being an uneducated man, not given to much reading,he lives in a narrow world consisting of his family and a few
neighbors. A confusion of values overwhelms his mind, for he is obsessed with his own happiness and of those he
loves, but his son Chris speaks of the universe of people to which he has the responsibility. His personal tragedy
triggers from his adherence to the American value system which is antagonistic to social welfare.

Keywords: self-deception, betrayal, guilt, American Dream, responsibility

_____________________________________________________________________________

1. INTRODUCTION

All My Sons, Arthur Miller's first commercially successful play, opened at the Coronet
Theatre in New York on January 29, 1947. It ran for 328 performances and garnered important
critical acclaim for the dramatist, winning the prestigious New York Drama Critics' Circle
Award.

Miller's earlier play, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), had not done well and had
quickly closed; therefore, at the time All My Sons opened, Miller's reputation as a writer was
based almost solely on Focus (1945), his lauded novel about anti-Semitism.All My Sons is now
regarded as the first of Miller's major plays. The work also greatly helped the career of Elia
Kazan, who had first won accolades for his direction of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our
Teeth in 1942 and after directing All My Sons would continue to work with the plays of both
Miller and Tennessee Williams to produce both legendary stage productions and important
films. Most of the reviews appearing in the major newspapers and magazines on All My Sons
(1947) were rather favorable, which is quite understandable considering that the play vividly
depicts the psychological aspects of the United States during and immediately after the Second
World War in a realistic setting.

In fact, it is impossible to understand the problems Joe and Chris Keller, the father and the
son, get involved in without the background of the war. The moral or ethical issue the play
presents through the conflict between Joe, a practical-minded realist and Chris, a militant
idealist, or even Larry, another son not appearing on the stage, becomes apparent with the very
background of the war, per se.
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*Corresponding author. Email address: faridnahvi@yahoo.com

Special Issue: The Second National Conference on Applied Research in Science and Technology

http://dergi.cumhuriyet.edu.tr/cumuscij ©2015 Faculty of Science, Cumhuriyet University

 NAHVI  

2. ARTHUR MILLER’S BIOGRAPHY

Arthur Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in New York City. He spent his early years in
comfortable circumstances, until his father, Isidore, a prosperous manufacturer, lost his wealth
in the economic devastation of the Great Depression. After completing high school, Miller had
to take a job in a Manhattan warehouse. He had not been much of a student, but after reading
Dostoevsky's great novel The Brothers Karamazov he decided that he was destined to become a
writer. He had trouble getting into college but was eventually accepted at the University of
Michigan, where he began his apprenticeship as a writer and won several student awards for his
work. After college he returned to New York and worked briefly as a radio script writer, then
tried his hand at writing for the stage commercially. His first Broadway play, The Man Who
Had All the Luck (1944), closed after only four performances, but it did win a Theater Guild
award and revealed the young writer's potential. He had more success with Focus (1945), a
novel dealing with anti-Semitism. In fact, at the time he wrote All My Sons (1947), his first
dramatic hit, he was better known as a writer of fiction than as a playwright.

All My Sons established Miller's standing as a bright and extremely talented dramatist. The
play had a good run and won Miller his first New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. Even the
least favorable commentators recognized the playwright's great promise. Miller followed All
My Sons with three of his most critically and commercially successful plays: Death of Salesman
(1949), The Crucible (1953), and A View from the Bridge (1955). In these works, Miller
attempted to show that tragedy could be written about ordinary people struggling to maintain
personal dignity at critical moments in their lives. With these plays, Miller joined Eugene
O'Neill and Tennessee Williams in what in the post-World War II years was generally
recognized as the great triumvirate of the American theater.

Miller, a political leftist, gained some notoriety in the 1950s when he refused to cooperate
with the House Un-American Activities Committee and was held in contempt of Congress.
From this experience he found thematic material for one of his most famous and controversial
plays, The Crucible, which focuses on the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. After the 1955
production of A View from the Bridge, Miller took a nine-year hiatus from play-writing. In the
interim, Miller married and divorced the famous actress, Marilyn Monroe. He did adapt one of
his stories, The Misfits as a screen vehicle for his celebrated wife but did not complete another
Broadway play until 1964, when both After the Fall and Incident at Vichy were produced. The
former play, considered Miller's most experimental play, is also his darkest work, with many
autobiographical parallels. His last Broadway success was The Price, produced in 1968. After
his next play, The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), failed on Broadway, Miller
stopped premiering works in New York. He continued to write plays, and enjoyed some
success, but nothing that matched that of his earliest works. Many of his later plays were short
one-act plays and works comprised of sketches or vignettes.

His greatest triumphs remain Death of a Salesman and The Crucible. Both have been revived
with great success. In 1999, for example, the New York production of Death of a Salesman
garnered four Tony awards, including one for best revival and one for best direction. At the age
of eighty-four, Miller was also presented with a special, lifetime achievement award for his
great contributions to the American theater.

It was when Miller happened to read Dostoyevesky’s The Brothers Karamazov, presuming it
was a sort of detective story in his high school days, that he began to take an interest in the
subject of the father-son conflict.

I think now it was because of the father and conflict, but something more. It is always
probing beyond its particular scenes and characters for the hidden laws, for the place where the
gods ruminate and decide, for the rock upon which one may stand without illusion, a free man.

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Yet the characters appear liberated from any systematic causation.

This shows us that Miller not only learned the father-son conflict in The Brothers
Karamazov, but also found what he called “the hidden laws,” upon which the conflict is actually
based at a deeper level. It could be said here that what Miller intended in the series of his plays
is to identify “the hidden laws” by setting the father-son conflict as a central issue or theme.

3. JOE KELLER: CHARACTER ANALYSIS

First of all, what kind of person is Joe Keller? He is a so-called “self-made man.” He is also
a “rags-to-riches” type of man who has worked pretty hard and become a successful owner of a
factory. The hardships he has gone through are not mentioned in detail in the play, but we can
imagine them from what he says. He tells his wife, Kate, about Chris, “I should put him out
when he was ten like I was put out, and make him earn his keep. Then he’d know how a buck is
made in this world.” This clearly shows how he started his independent life away from home
when he was very young. The following also tells us how he has established his present position
through difficulties. “You lay forty years into a business and they knock you out in five
minutes, what could I do, let them take forty years, let them take my life away?” (115). In this
scene he is explaining to Chris why he would not like to give up his factory which he has kept
forty long years despite the faulty cylinders the factory produced and shipped to the armed
forces.

Another evidence of Joe’s being a self-made man is found in his night-school education
which was not good enough to read more than classified ads in the newspapers. Actually, social
conditions in the United States during World War II were as follows: In February, 1941 the
United States entered a state of war to a full extent. Production of arms was encouraged as much
as any available resources could be used. How much and how soon they can produce is the
prime question for any factory. Competing for volume and speed fits the American’s character.
Also, companies in the war munitions industry were in harsh competition. Joe’s following
words indicate the situation:

Who worked for nothin’ in that war? When they work for nothin’, I’ll work for nothin’. Did
they ship a gun or a truck outa Detroit before they got their price? Is that clean? It’s dollars
and cents, nickels and dimes; war and peace, it’s nickels and dimes, what’s clean? (125)

What Chris found out is the “solidarity” and “responsibility” between man and man.

Those are noble ideas which Chris learned in his war situations. When he dared apply them to
actual society, however, problems occurred. To Chris who had this war experience, it is quite
natural that he found actual society “incredible.”

And then I came home and it was incredible, I - there was no meaning in it here; the whole
thing to them was a kind of a - bus accident. I went to work with Dad, and that rat-race again. I
felt - what you said - ashamed somehow. Because nobody was changed at all. It seemed to make
suckers out of a lot of guys. I felt wrong to be alive, to open the bank-book, to drive the new car,
to see the new refrigerator. I mean you can take those things out of a war, but when you drive
that car you’ve got to know that it came out of the love a man have for a man, you’ve got to be a
little better because of that. Otherwise what you have is really loot, and there’s blood on it. I
didn’t want to take any of it. And I guess that included you. (85)

As we have already seen, the war experience has made Chris aware of his ego or self.
However, his experience was gained in an unordinary situation and it is not applicable to the
realities of everyday life. In a way, Chris’ tragedy lies in the fact that he has not realized this.

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The feeling of “solidarity” and the sense of “responsibility” he learned in the war has its true
meaning in the army where military cooperation and union count as a harmonious whole. In the
dog-eat-dog American society of the war industry during the war, those words didn’t mean
anything. Naturally Chris can never get along with Joe because of his unrealistic ideas.

I was dying every day and you were killing my boys and you did it for me? What the hell do
you think I was thinking of, the goddam business? Is that as far as your mind can see, the
business? What is that, the world - the business? What the hell do you mean, you did it for me?
Don’t you have a country? Don’t you live in this world? What the hell are you? (116)
Richard L. Loughlin views All My Sons as a moral play dealing with biblical themes such as
“brotherhood” and “love of one’s neighbor,” and also as a Greek drama.18 This interpretation
puts the play in the Western tradition and would be a good clue to think about its universality.
To begin with, he asks why Miller picked “All My Sons” as a title and explains the relationship
between the play and the biblical themes: “What did he [Miller] hope to accomplish by calling it
All My Sons?

Obviously, he is preaching brotherhood, using the Old Testament as both his text and his
texture.”

Miller apparently chose the title from Joe’s words at the end of Act III, “Sure, he [Larry]
was my son. But I think to him they were all my sons. And I guess they were, I guess they
were” (126). Joe expresses these words after he learns of the suicide of the missing Larry and
the motivation behind it. He was too concerned about his family to pay attention to the outside
world. Those words imply the brotherly love taught in the Bible. It is revealed that Larry sent
the following letter to Ann just before his flight to his death.

It is impossible to put down the things I feel. But I’ve got to tell you something. Yesterday
they flew in a load of papers from the States and I read about Dad and your father being
convicted. I can’t express myself. I can’t tell you how I feel - I can’t bear to live any more. Last
night I circled the base for twenty minutes before I could bring myself in. How could he have
done that? Every day three or four men never come back and he sits back there doing
business..... I don’t know how to tell you what I feel. .... I can’t face anybody. ..... I’m going out
on a mission in a few minutes. They’ll probably report me missing. If they do, I want you to
know that you musn’t wait for me. I tell you, Ann, if I had him there now I could kill him. (125-
26)

Joe firmly believes that Larry is the one who has understood Joe’s situation, but he is
shocked to learn that Larry committed suicide due to his wrongdoing and this led Joe to his
suicide.

The brotherly love recognized by Joe at the end of the play is one of the major biblical
themes regarding two brothers in the Old Testament. The story goes like this: Cain, the older
brother who is a farmer, and the younger one, Abel who is a shepherd, gave offerings to God
and God preferred Abel’s. Cain became disappointed and envious toward Abel, and killed him
despite God’s warning. This is the first murder the humans had ever committed. “Am I a keeper
of my brother?” is considered a typical example of selfishness seeking one’s own benefits, “the
root of all evils.” Cain and Abel represent humanity in general and the Bible here teaches that
it’s precious for us to love each other like brothers.

This is exactly what Chris learned from his comrades in the battlefields and reminds us of
“solidarity” and “responsibility.” Loughlin explains the relationship between All My Sons and
the Old Testament. In Miller’s modern version and underscoring of the biblical story, Joe is
Cain; Larry and the twenty-one P40 pilots who have lost their lives are Abel. Chris elicits from
Joe the realization that all men are his sons, that there are no missing links in the chain of
humanity. In this respect, All My Sons is a morality play, because each of us is Everyman.

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What we should take note here is that Loughlin regards All My Sons as a modern “morality”
play. Joe committed a crime out of his selfish motives, saying he did it all for his family.
Humanity could not escape from ‘original sin’ and in that sense he is not different from
anybody, and Joe is ‘Everyman.’ That’s Loughlin’s point. As we have already seen, this
interpretation is based on Western thought and should be highly appreciated.

Loughlin’s second point is the relationship between All My Sons and the Greek tragedies,
another traditional observation. In the first place, he discusses the so-called traditional three
units of action, time, and place in the play.

Although a modern, naturalistic play, All My Sons is rather traditional in theme and in some
other respects. It observes what are called the unities. Aristotle said that unity of action occurs
when the parts are “so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them
will disjoin and dislocate the whole.” All My Sons is solidly structured. It also satisfies the unity
of time, because it unfolds over a brief period of time; the unity of place, because the action
occurs in Joe Keller’s back yard.

Steve R. Centola regards All My Sons as a play of “bad faith.” By “bad faith” he means
selfishness, self-interestedness, irresponsibility. According to this critique, almost all of the
characters including Larry and some minor characters lend dramatic credence to Miller’s ideas
on bad faith. Centola especially discusses Miller’s intention concerning his portrayal of Joe’s
downfall:

With his portrayal of Joe Keller’s downfall, Miller suggests that every individual has the
power to make free choices and the obligation to convert those choices into responsible actions
toward society. When one refuses to accept his freedom and denies his responsibility to society,
he lives in bad faith. All My Sons shows the danger of such bad faith by exploding what Miller
calls the “exclusiveness” of private life in America.

In fact, Joe as well as others have failed to transform guilt into responsibility, even though
they had a chance to. Centola concludes: “The collapse of the Keller family is not just a private
affair; it is emblematic of a deeper, broader disintegration of humanistic values that could spell
disaster to a world trapped in its own bad faith.”38 We can take this as proof that All My Sons
is a “universal” play.

4. CONCLUSION

Arthur Miller’s plays depict the human tendency of self-deception, betrayal and guilt which
leads to the deterioration and the collapse of human values. According to Miller, the American
Dream creates false hopes that prevent people from being proud of what they have
accomplished to make their lives better than they would be elsewhere, and eventually fail at
achieving anything.

Keller tries to convince himself that the people who used to call him “Murderer” (I, 31) are
the same who play with him: “Every Saturday night the whole gang is playin’ poker in this
arbor.

All the ones who yelled murderer takin’ my money now.” (I, 31) Joe Keller, an escapist,
wants to run away from reality. To safeguard himself, he has prepared around him a web of his
false assumptions. He asserts that the power of money makes people forget his indulgence in

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crime.

The truth seems surrendered to almighty money. The family is his only justification for the
crime he has committed. He is able to stave off guilt by telling Chris and Kate and, ultimately,
himself, that he only did it for the family: “Chris... Chris, I did it for you...For you! A business
for you.” (I, 15) And “I’m his father and he’s my son, and if there’s something bigger than that
I’ll put a bullet in my head!”(III, 83) He is willing to put all other ethics aside for the integrity of
taking care of the family, and he lies and cheats by covering up the cracked airplane parts. Joe
indicates this fact: “What could I do! I’m in business, a man is in business; a hundred and
twenty cracked, you’re out of business …”. (II, 67) The only outside world for Keller is his
business. Therefore, he is reflecting the values of this world. The business world does not have
human values. Thus Miller puts part of blame for Keller’s action on the society and business
world whose values are fake. In this kind of world, human values are discarded.

American society which recognizes and honors the material success attained by betraying the
character-ethic.

Chris Keller is responsible for his family’s dilemma. The idealistic youth who energetically
professes to detest dishonesty is as guilty as his parents for attempting to hide from reality.

Though he persists in pushing his mother toward an acceptance of his brother’s death, he does
so for his own selfish reasons and not because he thinks it is in her best interest to be able to
face reality. Likewise, even though he adopts a high moral tone and energetically indicts his
father for his criminal irresponsibility, Chris knows that his words ring hollow because he has
long suspected his father’s guilt but deliberately avoided confronting the truth— again for
purely selfish motives: “I suspected my father and I did nothing about it.” (III, 87) Ann Deever
suspects Keller's guilt and betrayal because of the letter she received from Larry before his
suicide; however, she refrains from impeaching Keller until she feels compelled to do so in
order to save her relationship with Chris. Her motives are selfish, governed primarily by a
fundamental drive for self-preservation.

Kate knows very well her husband’s deed. When Joe Keller plays a game with the
neighbor’s children, Kate warns him that he must stop “the whole jail business!”, Joe replies,
“What have I got to hide?” (II, 74) This indicates that there is something to hide. According to
Stephen Centolla, Joe and Kate are “uncomfortable together because of their shared guilt and
shame.”

One is over-confident and the other is anxious. Joe and his wife live in fear of bad news,
About their son and about the crime they have conspired to deny, the two inevitable connected
in their minds. All the characters are drawn together by love, but that love becomes the source
of a certain corruption.

Harold Clurman blames Kate Keller for being the “the villain in the Keller’s home.” She is
fully aware of Joe’s crime from the very start, but she never openly speaks of it in order to keep
“her brood safe and her home undisturbed.” Instead of encouraging her husband to face his
responsibilities honestly, she protects him against prosecution by defending Joe and tells George
that Joe was staying home from work on the day the cracked engine heads were shipped out.

On the other hand, Kate denies her son’s death by desperately trying to freeze the moment of
Larry’s disappearance. In this way, it is her silence and her selfishness that partly causes Steve
Deever’s imprisonment and his family’s breakup. Therefore, she is also guilty by being an
accomplice in the crime, while Joe commits it. Accordingly, “the play shows that Kate, as much
as Joe, destroyed George’s family” and “she [Kate] must be condemned along with Keller
because of her active cooperation with the crime” In her mind, Kate connects Joe’s criminal act
with the absence of their son. Joe has been morally misled by the ‘mores’ of an abhorrent
society, a society that Chris comes to describe as “the land of the great big dogs.” (III, 87)

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Keller has been taught that it is the winner who continues to play the game and that society can
turn a blind eye to moral concerns so long as the production line keeps rolling, this is the
essence of capitalism. In All My Sons, Miller makes it clear that society in general values
money and profit more than human life.

The play is a bitter criticism of the popularly accepted American values of success. Miller’s
characters illustrate that good and evil are inextricably mixed in this world. Man is a creature of
circumstances, and he cannot, therefore, give a wide birth to evil. A man reaches the acme of
civilized life by recognition of his responsibility to the universe.

REFERENCES

[1] All My Sons in Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays (New York: The Viking Press, 1967) 120
[2] Arthur Miller, “The Shadow of the Gods.” American Playwrights on Drama, ed., Horst
Frenz (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965) 138. Bigsby,90.
[3] Frenz (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965) 138. Genesis (4:8-16)
[4] Harold Clurman, Lies Like Truth: Theatre Reviews and Essays, (New York: Macmillan
Press, 1985) 67.Loughlin, 23.
[5] Richard L. Loughlin, “Tradition and Tragedy in ‘All My Sons,’ The English Record, Vol.
XIV, No. 3 (February 1964) 23-27.
[6] Steven R. Centola, “Bad Faith and All My Sons” in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, 123-33.

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