ABSTRACT
On 27 August 1937, after months of planning and preliminary paperwork, Kurt Weill and his wife Lotte Lenya re-entered the United States from Toronto, Canada, each on a newly granted immigrant's visa. Weill was near so ardent an admirer of Walt Whitman as were Franz Werfel and Paul Hindemith. Weill contributed directly to the war effort, composing for films, broadcasts, and recordings made by the Office of War Information and the War Department. Weill's comments in the script of I'm an American! So closely match his private expressions of affirmation and assimilation, and are so specific in their references to his own work, it's clear that he was no ventriloquist's dummy on this occasion. Weill's plan to make a symphonic suite from his opera Street Scene would seem unrelated to the Whitman project.
