In the following essay excerpt, Shuman explores the anti-war sentiment in Idiot's Delight and how Sherwood renders the message in the play.

Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings wrote What Price Glory? in 1924 and concluded it with the words, "What a lot of goddam fools it takes to make a war." Twelve years later, when news of the Spanish Civil War and of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia occupied the headlines, and when Hitler was rattling his saber ominously over his neighbors in eastern Europe, Robert Sherwood presented audiences with Idiot's Delight which reflected the growing anti-war sentiment in the United States in the mid-1930's. Sherwood's message is somewhat different from that of Anderson and Stallings. In the postscript to his play he writes, ". . . let me express here the conviction that those who shrug and say, 'War is inevitable,' are false prophets. I believe that the...