Nixon got a song about how the poor can be conned to vote for rich interests cut from a film [View all]

[muriel_volestrangler]

1776: spinning the Congressional record

In the song Cool, Cool, Considerate Men, Pennsylvania delegate John Dickinson and his chorus of pompadoured Brit-loving conservatives sing about how the poor majority can be conned into supporting the privileges of the extremely wealthy. "Don't forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor," Dickinson snarls. It's unexpectedly incisive, and by far the best moment of the movie (apart from the line about dysentery). When this film was released in 1972, President Richard Nixon himself asked his friend Jack L Warner, the producer, to cut this song. Too close to the bone, apparently. Warner complied. It's a wonder that Mount Rushmore didn't patriotically launch itself into the stratosphere, and land with a splat on the pair of them. The song has been reinstated for the DVD version.

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/aug/12/1776-congress-musical-jefferson-reel-history

That line? Abigail Adams beseeches her own husband to return to Boston: "Just tell the Congress to declare independency/Then sign your name, get out of there and/Hurry home to me/Our children all have dysentery."