CHAPTER FOUR
Realization: The Workers' Musical of the Popular Front--Part I--1936-1937
Leftism During The Popular Front
During the years from 1935 to 1939, the Third Period ended and the Popular Front emerged. Russia's needs changed: it needed an alliance with Western "democracies" in order to combat the fascist threat of Franco, Mussolini, and especially Hitler. Talk of revolution was toned down; even Socialists became valuable allies in the fight against fascism. Earl Browder pleaded with Socialist Norman Thomas for unity, and, by 1936, the Communists had expanded the idea for a united front not only to Socialists, but also to other radicals, liberals, and even some conservatives. The Popular Front had only one requirement: non-Communist nations must favor collective action against Hitler's fascism. American Communists called their programs "Twentieth-Century Americanism" and the New Deal came to be considered "progressive," to such an extent that the Communists supported Roosevelt in the 1936 elections and even more obviously in 1938.
The period from 1939 to 1941 must have shocked many Communists and supporters. On August 23, 1938, Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact, allowing Hitler to attack Western Europe but agreeing that he would stay away from Russia. The Popular Front was replaced by the same old revolutionary rhetoric and militant anti-imperialism. Attacks on Hitler ceased and began anew when America's entry into the war seemed a possibility. For almost two years--from September 1939 to late June 1941--the Communist Party opposed American involvement in the war. As late as June 22, 1941, Communist youths picketed the White House to protest any American help for the Allies. But the next day, everything changed: Hitler invaded Russia.
Johnpoll suggests that the Communist threat in America was not as much actual as apparent; support never exceeded one-fifth of one percent of the American population, and consisted of the least powerful elements of the society: alienated intellectuals, the often foreign and unskilled working class, and students. The party was unethical in its dealings with followers as well as members, was extremely expensive to run, had a huge bureaucracy (perhaps one bureaucrat or functionary for every three members), and used front organizations primarily for the purpose of raising money and creating the illusion of mass support. Each shift of position in the party meant a scapegoat had to be found; intellectuals in the party found the "total inhibition of independent thinking" in the party too restrictive.[310] [Please note: clicking on an endnote in the text will take you to the referenced note. To return to your spot, click your browser's "Back" button.]
The Popular Front policy took over in the theatre as well, and the eventual absorption of workers' theatre into the commercial theatre or the Federal Theatre Project abruptly dissipated the workers' theatre movement. The Popular Front and the urge to be professional made workers' theatres deal more with theatre professionals, since it was now acceptable to communicate with them and to use their techniques. The Federal Theatre Project virtually replaced the workers' theatre movement, giving jobs to many and still enabling some quite socially-conscious plays to be presented. For instance, the Theatre Collective and the Theatre of Action (previously the Workers' Laboratory Theatre) were incorporated into the Federal Theatre Project, the latter as the One-Act Experimental Group, which did only one production; John Bonn of the Prolet-Buehne became head of Federal Theatre Project's German unit; and others moved from the workers' theatre to the Federal Theatre Project. John Gassner said in 1938 that the formation of the Federal Theatre Project was a major cause for the decline of the workers' theatre movement. The assimilation of the movement's objectives by the Federal Theatre Project, and to a lesser extent the mainstream theatre, did away with the uniqueness of the workers' theatre movement.[311]
The formation of the Federal Theatre Project as part of Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, and the collaboration of sorts between the workers' and bourgeois theatres, both helped and hindered the development of the workers' musical. In February of 1936, shortly after the Federal Theatre Project had been formed and before it had produced any shows, New Theatre made a strong call for the use of vaudeville and musical techniques in proletarian theatre. Vaudeville acts should have something for the masses, claimed Philip Sterling of New Theatre; as a valuable social tool, vaudeville can revitalize the American folk flavor of the stage while requiring little education of the audience. He suggested that workers' theatres should follow the example of theatres in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, among others, who are performing proletarian vaudeville experiments.[312] In 1937, the Labor Stage, organized by International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) officer Louis Schaffer, put on what was to become the second-longest-running musical of the thirties, Pins and Needles. Although the show had little connection with the New Theatre League, which had changed its name from the League of Workers' Theatres in February 1935,[313] two sketches by Pins author Arthur Arent and a song by composer Harold Rome had been performed at a New Theatre League-sponsored New Theatre Night in 1935.[314] Ben Irwin, an officer of the New Theatre League, was impressed with the show's use of "native American review and vaudeville" and urged that other workers' theatres follow Labor Stage's example by experimenting with vaudeville, "a native and important theatrical technique."[315]
In November of 1936, a two hundred dollar prize was awarded by New Theatre jointly to Philip Stevenson's What it Takes and Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock. Cradle would soon become the epitome of proletarian musicals. However, the play committee at the time felt that, despite the show's qualities as a propaganda play, it "makes certain demands, in the way of choreography and musical accompaniment, which may limit its usefulness to new theatre groups."[316] In fact, those demands of the musical would persist and continue to limit the frequency of workers' musicals; as late as 1940, Ruth Deacon, the executive director of the New Theatre of Philadelphia, would write to New Theatre News of the difficulty yet enjoyment the company had had working on Tolkin and Davis's We Beg to Differ; they all enjoyed the work, but it seemed hectic and haphazard.[317] Perhaps in reaction to this attitude, the New Theatre School of the New Theatre League in New York attempted to deal with the lack of workers' training in musical theatre by opening a musical theatre studio. In 1937, courses were advertised in musical comedy, revue, operetta, and plays with music.[318] The emphasis on musical theatre forms resulted in many productions of Cradle once the rights to the script and score were released. By June 1938, only two months after the show closed on Broadway, the Flatbush Players, Lou Cooper's musical outgrowth of the Flatbush Branch of the Young Communist League, began performing the show in Brooklyn.[319] The show was also produced in the U.S. by the Philadelphia New Theatre, Chicago Repertory Group,[320] New Orleans Group Theatre, Cleveland Lincoln Players, Detroit Contemporary Theatre, San Francisco Theatre Union, Washington New Theatre, and the Boston Transit Theatre, and outside the U.S. by the London Unity players and the Toronto Theatre of Action, by summer of 1938.[321] By December of that year, the St. Louis Peoples' Theatre and the New York Players had performed or were planning to perform Cradle, as was the Peoples' Theatre of Johannesburg (South Africa).[322] Furthermore, Pins and Needles was planned for production by the St. Louis Peoples' Theatre and by a workers' theatre in Kansas City, Missouri.[323]
Because so many workers' musicals were produced between 1936 and 1941, I will examine them in two different chapters. This chapter will study the workers' musicals produced in 1936 and 1937. During this time, the workers' musical realized its potential and set the stage for an American audience more receptive to musicals with social consciousness. Chapter Five will look at workers' musicals produced from 1938 to 1941, a period during which the workers' musical became assimilated into the mainstream American theatre to such an extent that it lost much of its distinctive qualities and anger. The American theatre audience was more receptive to liberal/leftist ideas presented in the theatre but did not have to attend workers' plays to be exposed to those ideas. Thus, the workers' theatre became more acceptable, yet less necessary, as a means of encouraging social and political change.
Production History and Analysis
The Workers' Musical of the Popular Front -- Part I -- 1935-1941
Who Fights This Battle?
September 20, 1936
Kenneth White, words; Paul Bowles, music.
A typescript of this musical, retitled The Spanish Play, is available at the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center. White copyrighted the play under its original title on September 8, 1936; the play was never published, and White never renewed the copyright.
Who Fights This Battle? was directed by Joseph Losey in what he later called perhaps the first use of theatre-in-the-round in the United States.[324] He had little choice, since the play was written after the hall was hired; with "literally no scenery," the play was performed on a platform that extended into the center of the floor space. There were steps on the side of the platform, the audience sat on three sides, entrances of the actors were aisles that resembled spokes of a wheel, and the balcony had boxes which were also used for performers. No makeup was used and costumes were of the actors' old clothes; however, masks, attached to the end of sticks, were used by some officials, Perico the burro wore a donkey's head, and Gil Robles wore a light frame on his back on which hung a cowl and robe.[325] Earl Robinson was the musical director, and the cast included Nicholas Ray as a son of the Asturian miner who had been killed, Morris Watson as the speaker, and Norman Lloyd as Perico, the burro.[326] The play was presented for five consecutive performances at the Hotel Delano Grand Ballroom[327] and produced by "The Theatre Committee for the Defense of the Spanish Republic," a typical Popular Front group whose members were George Abbott, Adelaide Bean, Heywood Broun, Angna Enters, Joseph Freeman, Charles Friedman, John Gassner, Albert Maltz, Sylvia Regan, Muriel Rukeyser, and Herman Shumlin."[328]
Paul Bowles, who wrote the score, says that in mid-July France invaded Spain, and he and a group of others formed the Committee on Republican Spain and presented Who Fights This Battle? to raise money for the Madrid government. Earl Robinson was musical director (he played the piano and organ and conducted the chorus). A "lively, dramatized documentary on the political situation in Spain," the show "had a staunchly anti-Fascist coloration, as indeed it should have had," and that it "raised something under $2,000," no small amount at that time, which was sent directly to the minister of education in Madrid.[329]
The play covers the period of Spanish history from the 1931 deposition of King Alphonso XIII, following the election of republicans, to the present time, September 1936. Outlining in flashback the events between 1931 and 1936, when Franco became chief of the Insurgent government, abolished almost all political parties, and began a bloody civil war, Who Fights This Battle? tries to clarify for the American audience the events since the beginning of the war and to exhort the audience to condemn fascism and to commit themselves to the Loyalist cause in Spain by, at the least, contributing money. The show is presented from the view of an Asturian miner, who has already been killed by Moors and the Civil Guard during an uprising in Asturia, where he was a member of a "soviet"--"something good," he says. The play shows the struggles of the peasant Loyalist soldiers and the influence of Delores Ibarurri--La Pasionaria ("the Passion Flower")--the Asturian Communist deputy to the Cortes, who persistently exhorted the workers to resistance on radio and at mass rallies during the civil war, and who popularized the phrases, "ˇNo paseran! (They shall not pass!)" and "It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!" as rallying cries for opponents of Spanish fascism.[330] The cruelty of the conservatives in power, the infighting between rival seekers of power--Franco, Mola, and the reactionary priest Gil Robles--and the bravery of the Spanish peasants comprise the major subjects of the show.
As a reflection of and stimulus to the leftist movement in general, Who Fights This Battle? shows the growing concern of many Americans toward fascism abroad--a broadening of the typical leftist concerns during the earlier part of the decade. However, the fact that a Communist is the heroine of the play and that Communist Soviets appear to be one of the answers advocated places the play clearly within the goals of the leftist movement. The script is organized thematically and ritualistically. The build up of events, forcing themselves on the characters in the play, act as a condemnation of the fascist enemy and attempt to provide a sense of urgency for and commitment to action in the minds of the audience. This is the only musical in this study that is set entirely outside of the United States, and it tried to make the struggles of the Spanish people immediate and familiar to the American audience.
As a reflection of and stimulus to the workers' theatre movement, the show employs a variety of theatrical devices--agitprop, realism, symbolism, humor, and music--which assimilate the techniques of the left-wing and mainstream theatre. This musical is quite interesting for its juxtapositions of humor and seriousness and of realism and symbolism. For instance, the characters are still caricatures, as in agitprop. The Miner, the Worker, and the other sympathetic characters are dressed in common clothing, the Miner shirtless. The evil fascists wear costumes or commit actions that describe their duplicity: Robles wears a Jesuit robe over a stick fastened to his back, while Franco and Mola both carry their masks, which are caricatures of their faces and are attached to the end of a stick. Franco's first entrance has him carrying artificial roses, and Mola enters promising "peace and happiness" while firing at the crowd (54-55).[331] Delores is the reticent yet dedicated Communist revolutionary, the Official is the typical capitalist bureaucrat, and the miner and the worker are both characters in the play and "narrators" for the action.
Vaudeville-type humor appears in a number of scenes, usually juxtaposed with a realistic or symbolic serious scene. For instance, a flavor of farcical humor characterizes the scene in which the City Worker and the Miner ask the Official about why the Duke and Juan March, the tobacco tycoon, are in the government box. The official makes the unseen bodies in the government box wave or make noise--treating them almost as puppets. At one point, smoke comes from the box, to signify the presence of the tobacco king, Juan March (who was possibly the richest man in Spain, also a legendary banker with important sidelines in international smuggling);[332] at another point, voices from the boxes howl and hands stick over the railings to indicate the presence of the Duke and others. The official clearly lies to the crowd by saying that the Duke and the tycoon do not mind losing their money to share with the people. The Official calls for the Civil Guard to shoot an old man who suggests that the tobacco king should be in jail instead of the government box, juxtaposing the vaudeville-type humor with drastic and realistic action (11-14). The play has other humorous lines amid serious events. For instance,the Miner tells his sons to get their mother "before she gets rough with those [Civil] guards," and a man, upon hearing the term "private initiative," asks if it is "some new kind of manure" (19 and 54).
The performance techniques in Who Fights This Battle? are generally presentational rather than representational, stylistic rather than realistic. For instance, Perico the burro, played by Norman Lloyd wearing a donkey's head but with no other distinguishing costume,[333] dances for the soldiers at the end of the show, and he also dances with Robles, who "bullfights" him, in a scene in which Perico represents the symbol of a Spanish people unwilling to fight seriously for its own freedom. "The people of Spain is a donkey," cries Robles, to which Delores remarks, "You cannot coax a donkey without hay" (32). This dance-like scene epitomizes the symbolic stylization of the play. Further stylization comes from the fact that the piano player stays on the stage throughout the show, by the unrealistic costumes of the fascists, by the use of the boxes in the theatre to represent those in power, and, most significantly, by using the Asturian Miner, who is already dead, as the main character and as the narrator for the action.
Historical events are reconstructed but in condensed form, encapsulating five years or so of recent events for the purpose of building to an emotional climax. In an attempt to establish a feeling of communitas, the collective actions of the workers, despite what appears to be a losing struggle, help to fulfill a revitalizing and stabilizing function within the leftist movement. The enemy is portrayed as vulnerable and foolish yet powerful and efficient. As propaganda, Who Fights This Battle? was integrative, since most of the audience members were already partisan in favor of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. The purpose of the show was to accuse fascist leaders and censure them for their actions, and to accuse Western democracies, particularly the United States, of failing to come to the aid of Spain to fight fascism. But its more immediate purpose was to raise money for the Loyalist cause.
As a reflection of and stimulus to the American musical theatre, Who Fights This Battle? continued the use of serious matter handled along with music, which is used to emphasize the emotional content of the Loyalist struggle or the violence of the fascists. Unlike Parade, though, the satire is seldom humorous but serious, demanding not laughter but empathy. Most of the lyrics are set to original tunes and most are inspirational. For instance, in "First Song," the men and women sing of the struggle of the Spanish peasant and the need for unified and immediate action: "We must get a life our hands can't get alone! / We must get food our hands can't get alone! / We can use our heads and with our hands / Make our lives our own" (5).[334]
"The United Front Song" makes the call to action even stronger and reemphasizes the need for unity:
We have been divided
Long enough!
. . . . .
We will rise:
. . . . .
Men and women of all Spain
Together.
United!
United in a People's front
United! United! United! (36-41)[335]
The "Franco and Mola Song" is the major satiric song in the show, designed to parody the duplicity of the fascists not only to the people and to each other, but also to explain the violent infighting that the political climate fostered:
I'm savior Mola,
(pointing) Redeemer Franco:
We've brought the Moors in
To make you Christians--
We bring you order
With sword and murder (58-59)[336]
Finally, "Lullaby," the final song of the show, sung by a woman to wounded and tired Loyalist soldiers (including the Miner's two sons), exhorts the audience to reaffirm their commitment to the struggle against fascism even while they may sleep:
Dream for us
Freedom--
You who fight,
Sleep, and fight.
Sleep, now. Sleep. (62-63)[337]
While some songs and music are integrated into the story, most of the songs are clearly established as songs: they do not help tell the story but act instead as comments on the action or as mood enhancements. Integrated musicals, though, were not to arrive on the American scene until the next decade, but the show may have helped lead the way with its use of song.
While Who Fights This Battle? advocated commitment to a war--literally--against fascism in Spain and in the rest of the world, and used a variety of theatrical techniques to express that view, the only other available workers' musical presented in 1936 used similar techniques to present an entirely opposite viewpoint--that of pacifism.
Johnny Johnson
A Fable of Ancient and Modern Times
November 19, 1936
Paul Green, book and lyrics; Kurt Weill, music.
Published version available in Paul Green, Five Plays of the South (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963), pp. 1-104.
Johnny Johnson, with book and lyrics by Paul Green and music by Kurt Weill, written for and produced by the Group Theatre, arose from an idea of Weill's to do an American version of The Good Soldier Schweik.[338] Running for only sixty-eight performances, the play was directed by Lee Strasberg, who felt that "fantasy, extravagance and dramatic music were intrinsic to such an exciting and ambitious experiment."[339] Mary Virginia Farmer and Jerome Coray, Los Angeles directors of the Federal Theatre Project, which also produced the play in 1938, aptly described the show as "a series of fifteen scenes which vary in style and character from Gilbert and Sullivanesque vaudeville, slapstick, rural sketch, abstract stylization to straight realism--the whole interspersed with songs and musical numbers, some of which are tied to the action of the moment, some standing by themselves."[340] The fact that a musical with leftist leanings would appear in the commercial theatre seems to underscore what Bordman calls the "irresistible drift" during the mid-thirties toward theatre with a left-wing tone. The continuation of state-supported theatre projects with an increasingly left-wing attitude came in part from Roosevelt's election to a second term as President.[341]
Brooks Atkinson called it the Group Theatre's "most ambitious production," a combination of "musical comedy and picaresque story-telling." Every scene contains a song set to music by Weill.[342] Each scene is also titled in the script. No information exists about whether or not the titles were displayed to the audience during the production, a technique typical of Weill's former collaborator Brecht. The first scene is entitled, "How Sweetly Friendship Binds." Other scenes have titles that reflect their themes: "Keep the Home Fires Burning," "Your country needs another man--and that means you," "A light that lighteth men their way," "Lead, kindly Light," "There is one spot forever England," "A new way to pay old debts," "'Tis not so deep as a well--but 'tis enough. 'Twill serve." "In the multitude of counselors there is safety," "Still stands thine ancient sacrifice," "There's many a mangled body, a blanket for their shroud," "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori," "Hail, Mary full of grace," "Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?" "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings," and "Whither have ye made a road?"[343]
Johnny Johnson tells the story of a simple and innocent pacifist who enlists to fight in the First World War out of love for his fiancée, Minny Belle, and because of his belief in Woodrow Wilson's goal to fight a war to end all wars.[344] Overseas, he shoots no enemies; rather, he befriends a young German soldier named Johann, he instigates a movement among German and American soldiers to stop fighting, he impersonates the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and almost calls a halt to the war, and he finds himself shot in the buttocks and arrested "in the name of the armies of Europe and America." He is returned to America and becomes confined to an asylum, diagnosed as having "peace monomania." His fiancée marries Johnny's rival while he is in the asylum, and, after ten years, Johnny is released, to sell toys in a world preparing for another war. He meets the son he never had--the child of his fiancée and her husband--who wears a Boy Scout uniform and wants a toy soldier, which Johnny refuses to sell. When the boy tells Johnny that he wants to be a soldier when he grows up, Johnny suggests that a farmer or a doctor would be of great use to the world. As the boy leaves, Johnny sees a crowd pass by bearing signs saying "America First" and "Be Prepared." He braces himself for this new world and whistles as he walks down the street, "a little more clearly now, a little more bravely" (104).
While Johnny Johnson has a clear enough plot, with some semblance of cause and effect (perhaps more than any of the other musicals examined in this study), each of the scenes is related thematically. Johnny's sanity contrasts with everyone else's insanity, culminating in the last act when Johnny decides to retain his good sense in the midst of nonsense.
Each of the characters is a stereotype of the sort found in turn-of-the-century farce, according to Goldstein.[345] The country people, the greedy and unscrupulous capitalists, the fawning politicians, the over-zealous fighting boys, the war-mongering brass hats, the bumbling doctors--even the naďve Johnny--are under-developed characters.[346] They represent the major factions affected in a war-time atmosphere. Each of the characters strains reality: the naďveté of Johnny, the kookiness of the psychiatrist, the righteousness of German and American preachers, the petty bargaining of the military leaders, the thrill that the woman from the Sister of the Organization for the Delight of Soldiers Disabled in the Line of Duty feels for the large number of wounded soldiers in the hospital, the incompetence of the military doctor, the nonchalance of the Army Captain, the cowardice and dishonesty of Anguish Howington, and the hypocrisy of Minny Belle.
Johnny Johnson is similar to Who Fights This Battle? insofar as much of the play is set outside of the United States, but it differs because most of the characters are American and the show begins and ends in the United States. Green attempted to draw connections between the war-time atmosphere he saw brewing during the middle of the thirties and the atmosphere at the outbreak of World War One.
Performance techniques in Johnny Johnson, according to comments from those who saw it, seem to have retained some fourth-wall realism; however, its combination of theatrical techniques resulted in a production unusual for its time. Goldstein says that the actions in the play are as improbable as the characters; Green relies more on startling stage images than on plot or shifts in mood, which are frequently strained.[347] One of the most unusual theatrical devices involves a song sung by huge guns about the purpose humans have forced them to serve (51-52). Other theatrical devices that strain believability include the use of a huge black wooden statue of Christ as a hiding place for snipers, and the resemblance of some of the mental patients to current members of Congress (53-54, and 92-93).
The show does little to establish a spirit of communitas. While recent history is reconstructed and Wilson's idealistic attempts to form world democracy are seen as foolish at best, and dishonest and dangerous at worst, the enemy seems to be all those who cause war--capitalists, imperialists, industrialists, but, perhaps more importantly, common patriots such as ourselves. If any sense of urgency is conveyed in the show, it becomes dissipated by Green's pessimistic ending of resignation. The propaganda in the show would be considered integrative, since by ridicule it attempts to paint a picture of the war machine as foolish, but it gives the audience little to use as a guideline for behavior. Being sane in an insane world can do nothing, Green suggests, but allow us to live by our own principles until the powers that be destroy us.
The lyrics to the show convey this sense of resignation, although some songs attempt to satirize various aspects of the war attitude. The first song in the show, sung by the mayor and the townspeople, has a satiric and ironic tone: the war is "turr-uble" and America must stay out, as President Wilson has ordered. Shortly, as the audience must realize, America enters the war with the support of most Americans. The song indicates the isolationist attitudes many Americans felt about the European war--an attitude that will go along with the prevailing wind and will shift direction when the air changes (7). Minny Belle's song, "Democracy Advancing," brings the irony of the first song full-circle. She compares Wilson, the pacifist isolationist, with Washington and Lincoln, two Presidents who led this country through violent and destructive wars for "peace and liberty," and expects him to do the same to protect freedom (8-9).
Furthermore, Aggie's song is one of resignation: the wheel goes around without stopping, and things will happen no matter what we wish (18). The love song between Minny Belle and Johnny is similarly ironic: she sings of how much she will miss him--"I die apart from you"--yet she urges him to fight in the war (23-25). The song that the soldiers sing hailing Great Britain praises the imperialism and military strength of the British Empire--that will "further the dominion of freedom's laws" and of England's tea--without realizing the irony in the fact that Germany's attempts at dominion differ little from England's civilized colonization of much of the world (42-45). Harwood's song about the Rio Grande was a parody of cowboy music[348] that seems to have little purpose other than to burlesque the simple American who wants to be at one with his horse (49-50).
Even the guns sing a song of their own, an ironic one of resignation. It is not they who are evil, they sing; rather, the purpose for which they were made constitutes a violation of the human spirit:
Tomorrow under earth you lie.
We are the guns that you have meant
For blood and death. Our strength is spent
Obedient to your stern intent--
. . . . .
We might have served a better will--
Plows for the field, wheels for the mill,
But you decreed that we must kill-- (51-52)
The French nurse's song, also one of resignation, tells of a woman's love for a young soldier who died in his sleep and of her acceptance that she can sing away her sorrow because "life is short and funny" (59-60). The doctor's song mocks modern psychiatry by comparing it to primitive voodoo medicine and religious fanaticism:
Today psychologists agree
The insane man is only sick,
The problem is psy-chi-a-trick,
See Jung and Adler, Freud and me,
And we will analyze.
. . . . .
And from the devils being free,
They all take up psychiatry. (84-85)
Johnny Johnson tried by ridicule, vilification, and pathos to exhort its audience to condemn war as a means to achieve peace. The current events in Europe and reactions in America led Green to believe that a war mentality was brewing in the United States and that our involvement in the war was inevitable if clear thinking did not prevail. Unfortunately, Green's position was so broad and non-specific as to render his message and his propaganda weak. While Johnny Johnson hints that the blame for the First World War, and recent European events, rests on the same factors that the leftist movement condemns--capitalism, imperialism, and oppression--Green's musical seems to be resigned to the existence of those factors as an inherent part of human nature.[349] Johnny Johnson therefore has no solution to offer other than adherence to individual conviction. By the next year, 1937, more workers' musicals were presented that addressed issues important to the left and advocated specific courses of action for audiences to take.
Sit-Down!
April 3, 1937
William B. Titus.
A copyrighted typescript of Sit-Down! is available at the Tamiment Collection of Bobst Library at New York University and at the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center. The play was copyrighted by Brookwood Labor Productions, a Socialist institution in Katonah, New York, in 1937, and the copyright was never renewed.
Sit-Down! was performed in New York on April 3, 1937, by the Brookwood Labor Players, and Paul Sporn says, in his article examining working-class theatre on automobile picket lines, that in the course of its career it played in seventy-five cities, primarily to working-class audiences.[350] After the New York premiere, the show played at Pulaski Hall in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on April 8. On April 10 they played at the Labor Lyceum in Boston. The Sunday Post said that 150 people attended and stayed until midnight singing "Hold the Fort" and other "Soviet hymns of the C.I.O." The audience greeted the play with exceptional enthusiasm, according to the Post. Next, they played in Schenectady, New York, for the Local 301 of the United Electrical and Radio Workers of America, workers primarily from General Electric. In Reading, Pa., they ran into trouble when a local school board refused to let the Federated Trades Council use the auditorium at Northwest Junior High School, so they rented Eagle's Hall instead. The United Textile Workers of America, Local 1874, rented the Strand Theatre on April 30 in Cumberland, Maryland, where Sit-Down! was presented with the film Clarence for 35 cents.[351]
The two performances at Flint, Michigan, on May 30 and 31 had added excitement, because the audience had had first-hand knowledge of the strike: Sit-Down! was based on events of the strike by workers against General Motors in Flint. The May issue of the Flint Auto Worker said the play was powerful and was a "true portrayal of the conditions on the auto industry" that caused the strike to occur. A "living document of the turning point in American labor history made by the courageous men and women of Flint and Detroit," it was based on actual events, and the script had the help of many Flint workers.[352] The CIO News said the authenticity and heroic spirit of the play impressed the audience.[353]
An announcement in the Flint Auto Worker says the play was divided into six episodes: "Start of the Strike," "Battle of Bulls' Run," "Capture of Chevy No. 4," "All Night Picket Lines," "Emergency Brigade in Action," and "Final Victory and Evacuation."[354] However, the script has no such divisions labeled. Ends of each episode are indicated by blackouts; apparently scenes went from one to another at an exciting and tense pitch.
Sporn outlines the basic pattern of the play, suggesting that each series of scenes detailing the plant takeovers occurs in similar fashion: "from limited demand to greater demand; from one level of managerial power to a higher one; from skirmish to war." The dialog-song-Loud Speaker pattern and the intensifying struggle is the basic structural and thematic unit of the play and repeats itself as the conflict progresses. In each case, the rights of the worker take precedence over the legal rights of industrial ownership, and in each case the workers' willingness to commit violence to win their battle against what are perceived as the evils of capitalism increases throughout the play: "Without violating the main historical details of what the workers had done, the play gives them their accomplishments in a form calculated to rouse the spirit and demonstrate the heroic, political nature of the sit-down."[355]
As a reflection of and stimulus to the leftist movement in general, Sit-Down! reflected the movement's increasing interest in labor struggles. Still anti-capitalist and anti-Fascist, the show was clearly not pro-Communist but rather all-American, as evidenced by the strongly symbolic use of the American flag during the final takeover (40).[356] The reaffirmation of what had previously been considered a Communist concept--that labor, not management, is the cornerstone of production--is couched in such patriotic and sympathetic terms that Communism is ignored or even rejected. The popular front attitude--the desire of workers to control their own means of production--allows the play to deal with concerns of the Communist party but make them seem like twentieth-century Americanism.
Organized both thematically and ritualistically, the individual scenes of Sit-Down! relate the struggle of the workers to achieve recognition and respect through their suffering and determination to succeed. Each scene builds to the next, resulting in the cumulative effect of an inevitable war pitting the righteous strikers against the evil owners and managers. As Sporn suggests, the content of the dialog becomes more intellectually complex as the play progresses, songs become more lofty in sentiment, actions and counteractions more physical and more violent, and the attitudes of the workers more subversive of capitalism.[357]
As a reflection of and stimulus to the workers' theatre movement, the play shows a combination of various forms. The play has elements of agitprop, in its use of short scenes of stichomythia, new words set to popular tunes, caricatures of management and bosses, and frequent and impassioned calls to action; elements of realism, in its portrayal of the suffering of the strikers; elements of vaudeville farce, in its humorous portrayal of the old woman and the light humor exhibited by some of the workers; and elements of bitter satire, shown in the duplicity of management and government.
The characters in the show are either strikers, strike sympathizers, casual observers, or anti-labor bosses or cohorts. As such, the strikers are stereotypes given some particular characteristics in order to make them appear as individuals. They grouse at each other because of the tension and frustration and uncertainty of the outcome of their action, yet they remain committed to the struggle, as in a scene in which a worker shows annoyance at another's singing (8-9). Those who are anti-union are similarly stereotyped but given distinctive characteristics--paranoia, annoyance, deference, timidity, bombast--all to make the characters, and the struggle they endure, more real and immediate for the audience. The fact that many of the characters represented or mentioned are actual participants in the struggle--Genora Johnson, Evan Parker, Alfred Sloan, Knudson, Judge Edward D. Black, Evelyn Preston, Homer Martin, George E. Boysen, Governor Murphy of Michigan[358]--and the fact that the play is set in the actual locations where the strikes occurred, brought home to the audience the immediacy of the events depicted in the play.
The performance techniques appear to borrow from the Living Newspaper style of the Federal Theatre Project: announcements, direct addresses to the audience, news flashes, flashbacks, and placards all combine with scenes of realism to clarify the significance of and emphasize the build-up to the victorious takeover of Chevrolet Plant Four. The play moves from scenes inside the plant to the street outside the plant, from the planning of the strikers to the machinations of the management, from the strikers separated from their families to the Women's Brigade.
Sit-Down! emphasizes the solidarity of the labor movement. The play commands a sense of urgency and commitment to the movement by its depiction of the violence levied against the strikers and by the strikers' determination to succeed. The enemy, while powerful and supported by the ruling hegemony, cannot defeat the workers, who commit an illegal act but fight in the only way they believe will meet their needs.[359] The strikers even devise an elaborate military plan to use one building's takeover as a decoy for the real objective (35-38).
The major purpose of the play's propaganda was to censure management and praise the workers. Similar to the epideictic or ceremonial speech, according to Smiley, didactic plays of the Depression that had as their purpose to censure would use amplification to praise and diminution to blame those involved in a struggle,[360] and Sit-Down! does both. The workers are honored and praised for their bravery and their righteousness, and most of the play details their activities. On the other hand, the anti-union forces are blamed for their acts and receive less detailed treatment in the script.
Sit-Down! is a reconstruction of recent history through the eyes of the workers, with a point of view that almost mythologizes the strikers and their bravery. Through such veneration of the heroes of the play, and through such vilification of the villains, the play attempts to establish a spirit of communitas in its worker audience, one that would give them a feeling of stabilization, confidence, and determination to continue with the fight. The play shows the state of the worker before gaining concessions as a result of the sit-down strikes, and illustrates the hoped-for, better, and more equitable situation after the strikes.
The songs in Sit-Down! reaffirm the show's display of collective power. The songs build in intensity and in commitment to the cause and become increasingly militant as the play progresses. At first, ridicule and vilification serve the purpose of clarifying for the audience the nature of the enemy. The following verse comes in the early part of the play, after the workers have faced down the manager of Fisher Body 1 and as they decide to challenge all of General Motors:
Knudson's just another man, Parley-Voo
Knudson's just another man, who aught to be
Kicked in the can--Hinkey-Dinkey, Parley-Voo! (4)
Sporn suggests that this seemingly frivolous verse symbolized the decision to take on all of General Motors; Knudson was executive vice-president of G.M., second only to Alfred Sloan, the president, in running the company.[361]
As the play progresses, the songs change from inactive condemnation to direct and positive action, using new words, in some cases, to popular labor songs and folktunes. As unions members are being fired and others fear losing their jobs, they sing that they will fight for their freedom (8). As the Ford "service department" enters the plant with guns and gas to remove the brake dies that the strikers refuse to release and that G.M. needs to continue production, one striker sings "Oh the Union is the Place for Me!" and the rest of the strikers sing "Solidarity Forever," the theme song of the labor movement (11). After they have won the first of their small strikes that precede the larger strike against General Motors, this one against independent parts manufacturer Kelsey-Hayes, the successful workers sing another theme song of the labor movement, with some words modified to reflect the circumstances:
Oh, write me out my union card
Organize, we're fightin' hard!
Boy's we've beatin' Kelsey-Hayes today! (12-13)
As the strikers become more committed to their struggle and more intent on urging others to join them, the song lyrics become increasingly militant. As the strikers begin the second strike, at Fisher Body #2 in Flint, Michigan, the strikers sing a song that was perhaps the one most associated with the sit-down strike:[362]
When they tie the can to a union man,
Sit down! Sit down!
When they give him a sack, they'll take him back,
Sit down! Sit down! (17-18)
After the workers realize that General Motors and the law have recognized their activities as a strike, they sing of their victory:
Oh! We'll hang old Knudson to a sour apple tree!
And watch him wiggle in the wind. (18-20)
After the final and most important victory, during which police fire tear gas and bullets into the plant and strikers retaliate with high-pressure hoses and door hinges, the strikers sing their victory song, full of the sounds of battle:
Tear gas bombs,
Were flying thick and fast;
. . . . .
As in that hot time in the old town last night. (28)[363]
When G.M. double-crosses the strikers and agrees to bargain with Boysen's organization, the strikers reaffirm their commitment to stay on strike by singing "Hold the Fort":
Cheer, my comrades, cheer!
Hold the fort for we are coming!
Union men be strong!
Side by side we'll battle onward,
Victory will come. (34)
Even the Women's Emergency Brigade, organized by strikers' wives and mothers to help their husbands and sons fight if the necessity arose, has its own theme song of unity, "Song of Women up in the Dark," set to the tune of "Marching through Georgia":[364]
The women got together and they formed a mighty throng
Every worker's wife and son and sister will belong (34-35)
After the strikers take over plant number 4, the women cheer the strikers on and reaffirm their solidarity:
Hurrah, hurrah, the Union makes us free!
. . . . .
We'll organize our brothers and we'll win the fight
you'll see!
Shouting the Union forever! (41)
The strikers sing their own victory song after the conclusion of the strike, a reprise of an earlier song (42). The conclusion of the play has the strikers sing a chorus of "Solidarity Forever," after affirming that their victory will become part of a history that is only just beginning.
A discussion of the lyrics to Sit-Down! is important because they play a significant part in the structure and purpose of the show. The play demonstrates that song, although still treated as a separate entity--in other words, songs are not integrated into the plot and could be removed without disturbing the sense of the play--are integrated in such a way as to affect the emotional content of the events. That Titus did not write most of the lyrics to the songs, but rather used songs actually written by the strikers, does not diminish his accomplishment or the effectiveness of the material. On the contrary, using familiar tunes and familiar actions brought the immediacy of the events home more clearly to the audience.
Later in 1937, the Federal Theatre Project would almost present a musical, presented nonetheless without the project's approval, in which the songs are fully integrated into the show--in fact, the entire show is accompanied by music--and in which events, settings, and characters are not specific and based on reality, as was the case with Sit-Down!, but are rather general and cartoon-like. Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock would soon become the most popular musical of the workers' theatre movement.
The Cradle Will Rock
June 16, 1937 at the Venice Theatre Off-Broadway
January 3, 1938 at the Windsor Theatre on Broadway
Marc Blitzstein
Published versions available: Marc Blitzstein, The Cradle Will Rock (New York: Random House, 1938); William Kozlenko, ed., Best Short Plays of the Social Theatre (New York: Random House, 1939).
Marc Blitzstein wrote The Cradle Will Rock "at white heat" during the spring of 1936, according to the show's original producer for the Federal Theatre Project, John Houseman.[365] In 1935 Blitzstein showed Bertolt Brecht a sketch he had written around the song "Nickel Under the Foot"; Brecht approved of the song but said it did not go far enough. "To literal prostitution you must add figurative prostitution--the sell-out of one's talent and dignity to the powers that be," Brecht told Blitzstein. Shortly after the death of his wife, Eva Goldbeck, Blitzstein wrote The Cradle Will Rock in five weeks.[366]
Originally announced to be produced by the Actors' Repertory Company for its season of 1936-37, the show had to be canceled for lack of funds. Hallie Flanagan, national director of the Federal Theatre Project, was invited to hear the piece in the spring of 1937, and she decided that Orson Welles (who had heard Blitzstein audition the piece and had discussed the idea of directing it with Blitzstein) and John Houseman, of New York's Project #891, should produce the show.[367] She felt that The Cradle Will Rock was "music + play equaling something new and better than either."[368]
The show was immediately announced as the next production of Project #891, with the first public preview scheduled for June 16, 1937, and the official premiere two weeks after that. Rehearsals began, with singers and dancers from Project #891 and some singers borrowed or traded from other projects in order to complete the thirty-two-member chorus.[369] Will Geer was brought in to play Mr. Mister, the villain, and Howard da Silva to play Larry Foreman, the hero. The rest of the story is legendary.[370]
Five days before the scheduled public preview, June 11, the national administrator for the four arts projects, Ellen Woodward, wrote a letter to Hallie Flanagan stating that no openings of new productions were to take place until after the beginning of the new fiscal year, July 1, 1937.[371] While the order did have some rationale--"because of pending cuts and reorganization" of Project units[372]--Flanagan felt that it was "obviously censorship under a different guise."[373] Welles went to Washington and declared that he and Houseman would present the show by themselves, and was told that the Federal Theatre Project would no longer support the show.[374] After a preview of The Cradle Will Rock on June 14, federal officials padlocked the Maxine Elliott Theatre on Thirty-Ninth Street. With no costumes or sets, the cast and crew moved up to the Venice Theatre on Fifty-Eighth Street, along with the preview audience. The cast and musicians had been enjoined by their unions not to perform on stage or in the orchestra pit, so they sat in the house while Blitzstein himself played the piano on stage. Houseman had told the actors and musicians that the injunction required them to stay off the stage, but added his own judgment: "There is nothing to prevent you from . . . . getting up from your seats, as U.S. citizens, and speaking or singing your piece when your cue comes." He also, however, urged them not to take any unnecessary chances.[375] Blitzstein began to play the piano, prepared to do the whole show himself, when Olive Stanton, who played the part of Moll, stood up from her seat in the house and sang her part. Other performers followed suit, as did the predominantly Black chorus of two dozen members, taking their cues from conductor Lehman Engel, who was seated in the second row and who had managed to sneak the piano and vocal scores out of the Maxine Elliott Theatre. Even one of the musicians, an accordionist, played his part from the balcony.[376]
The next day, Houseman tried to get the Federal Theatre directors in Washington to let them show The Cradle Will Rock under Federal Theatre auspices in the Maxine Elliott, but they refused. He and Welles managed to lease the rights to Blitzstein's script, to be performed for two weeks at the Venice Theatre, two weeks being the maximum time Project workers were allowed leave from the Federal Theatre without loss of relief status. They then opened the show "professionally" at the Venice from June 18 to July 1. The show was performed as it had for the original performance--with no sets or costumes. One of its most enduring characteristics, the lack of costumes, set, and intricate lighting was an accident. Welles had designed and executed elaborate scenery--involving "a triple row of three-dimensional velour portals between which narrow, glass-bottomed, fluorescent platforms, loaded with scenery and props, slid smoothly past each other" as the scenes shifted[377]--that was discarded when the show was forced to move. The Cradle Will Rock separated itself from its scenery and decor; Brooks Atkinson suggested that the separation helped "more than a conventional production could ever have done."[378]
The Cradle Will Rock became the second production of the Mercury Theatre, formed by Welles and Houseman after they left the Federal Theatre Project. As a part of the Mercury Theatre, Welles and Houseman formed what they called the Worklight Theatre, to present new plays on Sunday nights. The first production of this theatre was The Cradle Will Rock. Houseman says that they wanted to do two things: to get the experimental series off to a good start with an established success and to reaffirm their property rights to Blitzstein's show. Since the Mercury stage and house was so different from the Venice Theatre's, they devised what Houseman calls the "oratorio version" of The Cradle Will Rock, using the set of Julius Caesar (the first production of the Mercury Theatre, which was still running) on which to place two rows of chairs from which the performers would descend to join Blitzstein on the apron. They would perform "in one," like a vaudeville act, then return to their seats.[379] On November 27, 1937, the same night that Pins and Needles opened at the Labor Stage, The Cradle Will Rock began its first of a series of weekend performances at the Mercury.[380] For the December 5 performance, with a New Theatre benefit audience, the press also attended, and the show got its first reviews--the performances in June had made the front page of the newspapers because of the controversy surrounding the show, but no drama critics reviewed it.
Houseman has claimed that he and Welles had no political motive in their presentation of the show against the wishes of the federal government: "as artists and theatre men we felt obligated to honor our commitments." They realized that their "own days with the project were numbered" and, "having nothing further to gain, we might as well make our departure as explosive and dramatic as possible."[381] Richard France, in his book on Welles's contributions to the theatre, claims that Welles and Houseman had already decided to leave the Federal Theatre and that The Cradle Will Rock gave them a ready-made audience--the organized left. "Houseman and Welles managed to turn a rather routine government directive into an act of official censorship," France claims; the events of the opening were not entirely unplanned, and Welles and Houseman had engaged in "mythmaking."[382]
Blitzstein's script calls The Cradle Will Rock "a play with music," while others have called it an "opera comique," a "satiric operetta," a "humorous social cartoon with music," a "propagandist tour de force," and "the most versatile artistic triumph of the politically insurgent theatre."[383] Blitzstein himself acknowledged the difficulty in classifying the show as a musical or a singspiel by once calling it "that Blitzstein--uh--thing."[384] The show achieves its effects through ten scenes and eight locations, all dealing with some form of prostitution.
Most of the show takes place in night court, where the Liberty Committee has been taken after being arrested. Most of the scenes consist of flashbacks, as Harry Druggist tells Moll about corruption in Steeltown, in which everyone is in some way a prostitute. Each scene is a discovery, gradually revealing the relationship of one or more characters to capitalism, as represented by Mr. Mister.[385]
The Cradle Will Rock is organized thematically; every scene develops the theme of figurative prostitution. According to the show's assumptions, prostitution for the sake of money and the good life has caused poverty, war, corruption, mediocre or demeaning art, violence, oppression, and degradation. The first step for the common people will come with mass organization in the form of labor unions, according to the show. However, while advocating unions and union membership, Blitzstein mentioned in a Daily Worker article that the show was "only incidentally about unions," and that its concept of the middle-class and its attitude about work was more important. The "`little people' in the America of today," he claimed, must soon realize that their only allegiance should be to the future and their only loyalty to the concept of true and honest work.[386] In an introduction to a published version of The Cradle Will Rock, Blitzstein stated the message of the play, paraphrased by Smiley: "As the people discover what, and who, is responsible for society's ills, they must and will rise to overthrow the chief capitalists and their middle-class servants."[387] John Houseman, years later, said "the play's only message is that a town run by a boss is not a good town."[388]
The characters in The Cradle Will Rock vary from the upper middle class to the poor and oppressed to the protagonist of the Popular Front, Larry Foreman.[389] Blitzstein ridicules the upper middle-class, such as Mr. Mister and his wife and children, because of their lust for riches and their lack of concern for the welfare of others. He condemns those in power: Reverend Salvation, who preaches whatever Mrs. Mister wants him to preach and is instrumental in convincing his congregation to support America's entry into the First World War; Editor Daily, who slants his newspaper so that it will support any policies Mr. Mister wishes; the artist Dauber and violinist Yasha, who sell out and produce frivolous and meaningless art for the artistically insensitive Mrs. Mister, who will subsidize their efforts; and college President Prexy and Professors Mamie, Trixie, and Scoot, who willingly emphasize the college's military courses at the expense of academic excellence. Blitzstein also shows sympathy, though with a hint of disappointment and disparagement, with the lower and middle classes and the poor--oppressed and humiliated, the lower and middle classes have not yet learned to stand up for their rights and their dignity. For instance, Druggist once failed to act against Mr. Mister's anti-union forces, which caused his son and a young couple to be killed, and even Moll, the street-walker, realizes that she finds it easy to step on the rights of others in order to survive (75-86 and 97-102).[390] Only someone with the commanding presence of Larry Foremen, the union organizer with righteousness and determination in his favor, can help the working classes overcome their oppressors through unified action. In his earliest drafts of The Cradle Will Rock, Blitzstein had given his characters real names--such as J.P. Morgan and John L. Lewis as the principal characters--and had used the name Sickle for a pro-union farmer and Hammer for a worker. Probably influenced by the sketches in Parade, he decided to give the characters cartoon-like names; like characters in a morality play, they were not intended to be realistic.[391]
The setting of The Cradle Will Rock is both general and specific: general because it is any industrial town in the United States, and specific because it is an industrial town--the steel industry, in particular. And the steel industry in a steel town was a ripe target. In 1935, when New Deal reforms quickened and moved more in the direction of helping labor and the common man, Congress passed a number of laws to encourage reform: the Fair Labor Standards Act established a forty-hour week, set a minimum wage, and abolished child labor; the Social Security Act provided insurance for unemployment, old age, and disability; and the National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act) guaranteed workers the right to establish and bargain through unions of their own choice without fear of discrimination by employers, with the National Labor Relations Board to enforce the ruling.[392] The American Federation of Labor (A.F.L.) became reinvigorated and a new organization, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (C.I.O.), organized workers on an industry-wide basis. The Committee for Industrial Organizations, the original name of the group, arose as part of the A.F.L., consisting of energetic labor leaders headed by John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers. Lewis proposed that all workers, skilled and unskilled, unite in "industrial" or "vertical" unions in place of the "craft" or "horizontal" organizational structure of the A.F.L. The strife caused by this disagreement led to the separation from the A.F.L. of the newly-named Congress of Industrial Organizations, which spearheaded many of the strikes that were to follow. Despite the bitter dispute among labor leaders, never before had the economic and political power of a large section of the population grown so quickly.[393] The climate had ripened for Blitzstein's use of a pro-union musical to issue a broad attack at capitalism.
Blitzstein seems to have been attacking "little steel" because "big steel"--the United States Steel Corporation--had by February 1, 1937, already agreed to grant concessions to workers in the C.I.O.'s Steel Workers Organizing Committee, which it now recognized as the bargaining agent for union employees.[394] The fight with "little steel" was a more difficult and violent struggle. In 1937, approximately forty-five hundred strikes took place; union membership would double from 1929 to 1940 and by 1936 totaled between four and five million people.[395] Sit-down strikes had already closed plants in the midwest; the strikes against General Motors had perhaps been prompted in part by G.M. president Alfred Sloan's comment that he would refuse to deal with "labor dictators" or to consider their demands. The forty-four day strike, dramatized in Sit-Down!, had begun in December 1936 and by January 1937 had closed sixty factories in fourteen states. Violence between National Guardsmen and strikers was narrowly averted; General Motors eventually gave in and recognized the United Automobile Workers in seventeen of its plants.[396] The day The Cradle Will Rock went into rehearsal, riots broke out in Akron, Ohio, and Pontiac, Michigan, strikes blocked production at Chrysler and Hudson automobile plants, and in that same week John L. Lewis of the C.I.O. began a drive to unionize the steel industry. Blitzstein could not have made his script more topical if he had tried: by May 1937 the union battle had shifted to the steel industry with the strike of five Republic Steel mills. On May 29 a thousand steel workers marched on a Republic Steel mill in South Chicago and were beaten back by police, and two days later ten strikers were killed and eighty-four injured. During the first week of June, five thousand sympathizers of the C.I.O. invaded the business district of Lansing, Michigan, in order to protest the arrest of picketers, forcing the closing of shops and factories and blocking traffic. In Johnstown, Ohio, later that week, martial law was imposed because of strikes and rioting.[397] The steel industry in The Cradle Will Rock acts as a metaphor for all forms of exploitative and oppressive capitalism.
The Cradle Will Rock calls for semi-realistic and stylized performance techniques, regardless of what Emmet Lavery in his unpublished manuscript on the Federal Theatre calls the "permanent envelope of the piece," the set-less, costume-less production.[398] Characters sing and deliver speeches to the audience, but except for a few songs ("The Nickel under the Foot," for instance), the characters simply use the audience as an imaginary group of people to address. For example, Reverend Salvation delivers his song to the audience but treats the audience as if it were his congregation (44-49). Similarly, Larry Foreman pronounces his speech on "onions" growing throughout the land to the audience, but the audience is only a part of the larger group of workers to whom he speaks (107-112). The episodic and thematic structure of the piece lends itself to stylized production techniques; its lack of causal form requires that each section of the show be self-contained, within, of course, the larger framework of the show's overall theme.
The Cradle Will Rock demonstrates characteristics of a document of a social movement. The enemy--Mr. Mister, the reactionary Liberty League, the fawning artists, the insensitive and vacuous upper middle class--are characterized as simultaneously powerful and vulnerable. Mr. Mister and the power structure have run Steeltown for quite a long time and their rule seems to be unstoppable. Larry Foreman, however, provides the workers in the show--and the audience--with a sense of urgency. He demonstrates that the winds of change will blow away the old order and that the workers must unite to bring about a new order. Blitzstein mocks the anti-New Deal American Liberty League, an organization of businessmen established in 1934,[399] and other anti-labor organizations of "Citizens Alliances" around the country,[400] and counters it with Foreman's own "committee"--of "farmers and city people, doctors, lawyers, newspapermen, even a couple of poets--and one preacher. We're middle class, we all got property--we also got our eyes open" (106-107). Foreman's mentioning of the fact that they have only one preacher acts as a condemnation of the position of organized religion regarding labor organizations. Even if the clergy were not as directly anti-union as Reverend Salvation, or as the real-life Catholic radio priest Father Charles Edward Coughlin, who bitterly and publicly opposed New Deal policies, they were little help in supporting the labor movement. The ending of the show calls for workers--and, of course, the audience--to join with the thousands of people who are protesting present conditions. "Aunt Jessie and her committee" of protesters need all the support they can get from members of the audience. Blitzstein seems to direct his appeal not so much to the workers in the audience--they would likely agree with the show's premises already. Rather, Blitzstein seems to be focusing his appeal and warning to the middle class--they must straighten out their priorities and support organized labor.[401] Blitzstein's play with music uses the growing support for organized labor to construct an appeal for a broad transformation of society--the victory of the worker in the labor struggle is but the beginning of his victory over capitalism.
The propaganda in The Cradle Will Rock is accusatory and censorious, using satire to scorn and deride certain segments of American society, as in his condemnation of artists who have little regard for social significance, of the mainstream press that slants the news, of organized religion that attempts to placate the masses, and of the brutality that accompanies a lust for power and riches. Blitzstein does not seem satisfied in simply calling for a united front against anti-union forces; the play is indeed "only incidentally about unions," as he said. He uses the subject of unions for a general condemnation of the entire mainstream of American culture, politics, and economics. The propaganda in the play is agitational and the protest more collectively social: unions were becoming an accepted part of American life; and belief and participation in organized labor will lead the American middle class worker to examine the very tenets by which his incorporation into American society is based and will thus lead him toward change.
Ritualistically, The Cradle Will Rock reconstructs recent events of the Depression era and focuses on the struggle of labor, thus encouraging a sense of communitas in the audience. Gordon points out the parallel between Harry Druggist being asked to join a druggists union and the efforts to organize a druggists union that had begun in 1932 and would later evolve into a left-wing unit of the C.I.O as the powerful National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees. Gordon also notes the parallel between the store explosion scene and the case of labor organizer Tom Moody, imprisoned since 1916 on a frame-up charge of setting an explosion; the case was still pending at the time The Cradle Will Rock was produced, and Moody would not be freed until 1939.[402] The confidence exhibited by Larry Foreman, and thus by Blitzstein, that "onions" are growing and will inevitably continue to grow, helps to develop a feeling of communitas by fulfilling a stabilizing and revitalizing function for members of the labor movement, reaffirming that their struggle has not been in vain. The play clearly advocates a change in the social order, with the defeat of Mr. Mister and his Liberty Committee and the rise of the organized masses.
The lyrics in The Cradle Will Rock are variously serious, comic, and satiric, some of them all at the same time. For instance, "The Gus and Sadie Song," "Joe Worker," and "Nickel Under the Foot" are serious in tone, one touching, one incendiary, and one cynical (82-85, 132-137, and 107-102). Many of the other songs are satirical in tone. "Croon Spoon" and "Art for Art's Sake" mock the world of creative art, "Freedom of the Press" and "The Rich" mock cherished institutions, and "The Cradle Will Rock" takes the most agitative tone of any song in the show (52-58, 96, 59-61, 90-92, and 107-112). In fact, the whole play consists of lyrics set to music, so it is not productive to discuss them as something separate from the play itself. Few references to current events, persons, places, or things appear in the lyrics, in keeping with Blitzstein's tendency to make the show more general than specific. Mr. Mister does mention a 1933 strike in Aliquippa, a steel town in western Pennsylvania which the National Guard was called in to control, and Foreman mentions the Black Legions and the Ku Klux Klan, but otherwise, topical references are limited.[403] This makes Blitzstein's show similar in many ways to earlier agit-prop musicals in its use of symbolic and satiric characters, but makes it different from some later workers' musicals because of its lack of specific topical references.
The next workers' musical presented during the thirties would place its focus as much on topical satire as The Cradle Will Rock placed on general satire. Pins and Needles would end up becoming one of the longest-running musicals of the thirties.
Pins and Needles
November 27, 1937
Harold Rome, words and music, mostly; additional material by various other writers and composers.
The script of Pins and Needles no longer exists; I have reconstructed the show from the available published songs, contemporaneous secondary sources, programs and other primary material, and material from a road company stage-manager's production book that is available at the research department of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in New York City.
Pins and Needles was the brainchild of Louis Schaffer, the director of the cultural and recreational division of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (I.L.G.W.U.). When the American Federation of Labor (A.F.L.) voted at its 1935 convention to sponsor labor drama, I.L.G.W.U. (whose parent union was the C.I.O.) acquired the old Princess Theatre, renamed it the Labor Stage, and soon held classes in the performing arts. Under the guidance of its executive director Schaffer, the I.L.G.W.U. Players was soon formed for the purpose of producing plays on a non-profit basis. The Labor Stage did only two shows, however: John Wexley's Steel was the company's first production, to be followed by Pins and Needles, which was intended to be just another production in a series of productions. Pins and Needles, however, ran for nearly four years and was the only other production of the Labor Stage.[404] Acted at first by amateurs chosen from the ranks of the union and presented only on weekends, Pins and Needles became an astonishing success; its actors had to join Actors Equity and the Labor Stage became a professional producing organization, with three different companies eventually presenting the show in New York and on the road.[405]
Schaffer had come up with the idea for a labor theatre with David Dubinsky, president of I.L.G.W.U., and Julius Hochman, vice-president and head of the union's education committee, at the A.F.L. convention in 1935. Although I.L.G.W.U. thereafter encouraged its locals to organize drama groups to present plays centering around trade unionism, all the unions except I.L.G.W.U. withdrew support from the idea. Labor Stage was established as a non-profit, semi-professional group with all profits to be returned to the I.L.G.W.U. Educational Department. After the Princess Theatre had been leased and renovated, Labor Stage had to find a show to produce.
Schaffer had intended to gather material suitable for performance at labor meetings, conventions, or play festivals after first being presented at the Labor Stage. He hoped to produce a new kind of theatre, alive and responsive to American life. His attitude differed from those of most existing leftist theatres: when the worker goes to the theatre, he felt, "he wants to be entertained. He wants his theatre to be a pleasure, not a duty. He doesn't want to go to the theatre just because it is a labor theatre."[406] None of the many proletarian scripts sent to Schaffer satisfied him, and he decided on the idea of a labor musical--nothing solemn, as had been done before, but a lively satirical musical revue. Harold Rome auditioned some material for Schaffer, and Schaffer signed him to a contract. Schaffer also solicited some help from some of the writers of Parade.
When he presented the I.L.G.W.U. Players with the first draft of the songs and sketches called Pins and Needles, many of the players objected.[407] They wanted more serious material: the labor movement was in too precarious a position, they felt, to laugh at itself. Schaffer managed to get them to agree on a production of the show so that its worth could be evaluated. He hired the Contemporary Players to present the show for an invited audience on June 23, 1936, with Philip Loeb as the director and Rome and Earl Robinson at the two pianos.[408] The performance proved a success, convincing the I.L.G.W.U. Players to do the show and causing Schaffer to receive offers from several Broadway producers. Schaffer refused the offers, feeling that the show would be even better served with an amateur I.L.G.W.U. cast.
Goldman describes the program for the original production of November 27, 1937, directed by Charles Friedman and produced by Louis Schaffer. The program was as follows:
1. First Impression
Lyrics by Harold Rome and Charles Friedman
Music by Harold Rome
2. Why Sing of Skies Above!
Music and lyrics by Harold Rome
3. Mussolini Handicap
Sketch by Arthur Arent
4. Public Enemy Number One
Music and lyrics by Harold Rome
5. The General is Unveiled
Staged by Benjamin Zemach
Ballet music by Harold Rome
6. We'd Better Be Right
Sketch by David Gregory, lyrics by Arthur Kraemer
Music by Harold Rome
7. The Little Red Schoolhouse
Sketch by Emanuel Eisenberg
8. Sunday in the Park
Music and lyrics by Harold Rome
9. Dear Beatrice Fairfax
Music and lyrics by Harold Rome
10. Economics I
Sketch by Charles Friedman
Music and lyrics by Harold Rome
11. Men Awake
Music and lyrics by Harold Rome
Conceived and staged by B. Zemach
Intermission of ten minutes
12. Lesson in Etiquette
Music and lyrics by Harold Rome
13. Vassar Girl Finds a Job
Music and lyrics by Harold Rome
14. FTP Plowed Under
Sketch by Marc Blitzstein
15. What Good is Love?
Music and lyrics by harold Rome
16. One Big Union for Two
Music and lyrics by Harold Rome
Dance routine by Gluck Sandor
17. Four Little Angels of Peace
Music and lyrics by Harold Rome
18. Slumming party
Music and lyrics by Harold Rome
Dance by Gluck Sandor
19. We've Just Begun
Lyrics by Harold Rome and Charles Friedman
Music by Harold Rome[409]
A program from December 1937 lists the director of Pins and Needles as Robert H. Gordon,[410] and the order of numbers had changed from what Goldman says was the order in the original of November 27. The following are the only changes in the order of numbers: "FTP Plowed Under" was the thirteenth number, "What Good Is Love?" was the fourteenth, "One Big Union for Two" was the fifteenth, and "Vassar Girl Finds a Job" was the sixteenth number. The sixth number, which Goldman calls "We'd Better Be Right" in the opening night program, is called "We'd Rather Be Right" by December of 1937.[411] Pins and Needles, in fact, went through many changes that from time to time prompted a slight change of name: Pins and Needles 1939 opened on April 21, 1939, and New Pins and Needles opened on November 20, 1939.[412]
The New York Times review for the first studio performance of Pins and Needles called it uneven, but announced the good news: "Since the social theatre's satire is usually more blunt than funny, the principal news about Pins and Needles is that it is often very funny indeed."[413] The only thing the leftist press did not like about the show after its studio performance was Eisenberg's parody of Brecht's Mother, a play that Daily Worker had supported.[414] Two days after the official opening at the Labor Stage, Jack Gould's revue in the Times called the show "a revue out of the ordinary and one which only occasionally droops to the level of the things which it is satirizing," and he said that the show should be "accepted in the good-natured spirit in which it is offered."[415] Other reviews from the mainstream press came the same day. Richard Lockridge said that, although the I.L.G.W.U. players "have their moments of heavy-handedness and dead-pan propagandizing, . . . they can also laugh. And probably for the first time in labor stage history, they can laugh at themselves, as well as at their antagonists."[416] The other major New York reviewers had similar comments. Burns Mantle, while somewhat cool--he described the I.L.G.W.U. players as "variously talented and they have been faithful at rehearsals"--called the show "good-natured"; John Mason Brown felt that "by turning its propaganda into good entertainment, its message is doubly insured, and doubly telling as propaganda"; Sidney Whipple felt that "it has merriment in it which is usually not associated with `causes,' and best of all, it has no bitterness"; and Richard Watts called Pins and Needles "social propaganda in its most winning fashion."[417] In early 1938, after having time to reflect on the show, Brooks Atkinson was able to offer some comments in one of his longer analyses for the Times: "most of the wit, humor and sentiment that the revue makers have assembled spring logically from the culture of the union garment workers who play it. . . all the satiric sketches are freshly and impishly written, and Mr. Rome's music and lyrics are so sparkling."[418] In April 1939, Pins and Needles 1939 opened, and Atkinson panned "I've Got the Nerve to Be in Love" as counter-revolutionary, as smacking of uptown, and as being the new show's "only concession to mediocrity," but he praised the rest of the new numbers, particularly "Britannia Waives the Rules," "Papa Lewis, Mama Green," and the "Red Mikado."[419] New Pins and Needles opened in November 1939, and Jack Gould lamented its paucity of new material, most of which had "gusto," particularly "The Harmony Boys," "Mene, Mene, Tekel," and "Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl."[420]
As a revue, Pins and Needles, in all its variations and incarnations, was clearly organized thematically, with its major themes focusing on the labor struggle, the growing fascist threat in Europe, and reactionary attitudes at home, but surrounded by an air of good humor. Rome's songs chide not only those who do not hold Popular Front attitudes, but they also rib the left-wing in a good-natured manner. Organized Communism no longer favored ultra-leftism by this period of the thirties, according to Goldstein,[421] so leftism meant an acceptance of attitudes that supported labor unions, racial equality, fair justice, commitment to freedom, rejection of fascism and oppression, and concern for the common worker. Dubinsky was an ardent New Dealer, so the show's content is solidly of the Popular Front. The left wing, in Pins and Needles, was finally able to laugh at itself and acknowledge some of its own human frailties.
The characters in Pins and Needles vary according to the sketch presented, but in general they consist of workers, the poor, the middle-class liberal, American reactionaries, revolutionaries, non-class-conscious workers, foreign leaders, and the rich--in other words, typical members of the Popular Front society in America or typical stereotypes the left wing had about pseudo-liberals, reactionaries, and political leaders. The opening number establishes the cast members as garment workers, "everyday men and women who work hard for a living," while the second number indicates the light-hearted humor forthcoming in the show as the girls demand that the boys sing songs that have "social significance."[422] However, each of the skits either clarifies the situation of the common American worker or satirizes the political or economic domestic or international scene. Characters satirized include, among others, an Italian peasant woman unable to give birth to more than one child, contrary to Mussolini's proclamations to "Pro-DUCE!! and Repro-DUCE!!" in order to increase the birth rate;[423] an American army general who pits man against man;[424] overly chauvinistic and reactionary Americans who learn how to attack anything they do not agree with, including anything with French or Russian dressing--"Call It Un-American";[425] a female American consumer who laments that "Nobody Makes a Pass at Me" even though she bought all the products she saw advertised to improve her love life;[426] a society matron who tells picketers that "It's Not Cricket to Picket";[427] bureaucrats of the national office of the Federal Theatre Project;[428] a Vassar girl who is unable to find any job other than at Macy's, where she becomes a "Chain Store Daisy";[429] the leaders of the Axis powers in Europe and Asia and those who appease them, promoting themselves as "Four Little Angels of Peace";[430] American reactionaries who dance a little "to the right" in "Do the Reactionary";[431] American labor leaders caught in a struggle for power, represented by the feuding "Papa Lewis, Mama Green";[432] American right-wing leaders, who, as "The Harmony Boys," are all the same, even though they try to appear different;[433] Republicans, who have been asleep since Hoover's nomination;[434] and F.B.I. agents, for whom "there's nothing illegal."[435]
Other sketches attempt to clarify and reinforce for the audience the oppressed condition of the American worker and the solidarity of organized labor. For instance, in "Sunday in the Park," the family of four go to the park every Sunday because they cannot afford a "fashionable resort," only to be confronted with an assortment of city characters and forced to take cover from the rain under a tree.[436] "Economics I" demonstrates, with a Rube Goldberg-type process, how the capitalist system exploits the American consumer.[437] "Men Awake," suggested by a Langston Hughes poem, consists of a chant by the cast members about the struggle of workers and their oppression by the capitalist system, ending with a call for the audience to unite and take action: "Men Awake!! The time is coming./ Men look up! A world that's free/ Is yours if you can see/ For you've the powers that be/ AWAKE!!!"[438] The finale of Pins and Needles, "We've Just Begun," makes another attempt to unify the audience members with the labor movement: ". . . We've just begun!/ Together we know the song to sing/ The words are ours--ours is the tune/ We the many and the strong/ In the future to be built/ We intend to have a voice."[439] "Back to Work," which replaced "Men Awake" in March 1939 for Pins and Needles 1939, shows the happy celebration of a group of union workers after their successful strike: "We gave a little, and we took a little,/ It was quite a fight,/ But things came out all right!"[440]
Some sketches parody--sometimes light-heartedly, sometimes not--the labor movement and workers' theatre. For instance, "Why Sing of Stars Above" parodied itself and the very idea of left-wing musicals by mocking the requirement that songs must have "social significance." "One Big Union for Two" uses the terminology of a union campaign to turn romance into a labor-management struggle, in which "We'll add a member union made,/ Who looks like me and like you/ In One Big Union For Two."[441] "Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl; or It's Better with a Union Man" contains the lament of a class-conscious girl who regrets having eloped with a non-union polygamist: "You'll live to regret it if you ever forget/ This motto proletarian./ So always be on your guard;/ Demand to see a union card."[442] The workers' theatre is lambasted in "The Little Red Schoolhouse," written by one of the writers for Parade, Emanuel Eisenberg. The sketch mocks the obvious symbolism and burlesques the presentational style--the "alienation effect"--of Brecht's social theatre. Originally titled "Mother; or Let Freedom Wring,"[443] the sketch explicitly ridicules the type of theatre exemplified by Brecht's Mother, which had been produced unsuccessfully by the Theatre Union in 1935 and which had been treated with ambivalence or even downright hostility by much of the workers' theatre audience because of its blatant and almost condescending didacticism. For instance, the characters speak directly to the audience, hold up placards for the audience to see ("We're not taking any chances on your intelligence," says one character), and chant meaningless slogans: "Now that we have found out about a strike/ Now that we have found out about a union/ . . . Maybe we can give up chanting. . ."[444] Pins and Needles also ridicules the frivolous lyrics of some contemporary love songs in "I'm Just Nuts About You," in which a "stray" member of I.L.G.W.U. enters and practices her song: "Vo-do-de-o, and Hi-de-ho,/ Also poop-poop a-doo!/ . . . I'm goofy, batty, utsnay, crazy/ . . . Sightly daffy too/ . . . Love's just around the corner/ I'm just nuts about you."[445] One song points to the seriousness that Pins and Needles places on "social significance," however much the show teases itself and the labor movement. "What Good is Love?" reflects the disillusioned and pessimistic attitude many young people felt during the Depression as a young girl sings about what she really needs: "Love may be the truest thing, the finest and the greatest thing/ But I want a job and something to eat."[446]
The settings of the sketches in Pins and Needles vary according to each sketch's subject, and they do not have any particular bearing on the messages presented, except insofar as they reflect the left wing's attitudes about domestic and international events. Most of the scenes take place in the United States, particularly New York City, but some scenes ("Mussolini Handicap" and "Four Little Angels of Peace," for instance) take place in other areas of the world.
The performance techniques in Pins and Needles are by necessity presentational rather than representational; after all, the show is a musical revue. "The Little Red Schoolhouse" laughs at Marxist theatre while it maintains a standard revue style, one that introduces no particular innovations. The content of the numbers in the show, and the immediacy of its political and social satire, made the show the a success.[447]
Marc Blitzstein's contribution to Pins and Needles was a satire of the Federal Theatre Project, showing Blitzstein's bitterness toward the censorship that had prevented the official opening of The Cradle Will Rock the previous summer. Hippity Bloomberg, apparently representing Blitzstein, meets with officials from the Federal Theatre, including Mrs. Clubhouse, apparently representing Hallie Flanagan, the head of the Federal Theatre Project,[448] to discuss the production of his play, "Workers Also Love." The bureaucrats insist that Bloomberg change the title because it is too inflammatory, cut the romantic aspect of the play because the taxpayers' money cannot be spent on anything having to do with sex, eliminate a barefoot walk in a brook, avoid dances because the dancers on the project are trouble-makers who go on sit-down hunger-strikes, and delete any mention of a strike or radicals. Little of the play remains after Bloomberg follows their directives, but Mrs. Clubhouse tells him that the play "works right in" because of recent budget cuts on the Project: "No actors, no stagehands, no musicians, and--next to no play. . . We will simply have a very intimate production of--practically nothing." Saying that he thought censorship did not exist on the project, Bloomberg sardonically suggests that his play, which now consists only of the words, "The Curtain Rises," should be performed for no audience. The bureaucrats agree, but ask, "Now why can't our play open SMACK like that? Do we have to have a curtain?"[449]
Originally, the "Four Little Angels of Peace" were Hitler, Mussolini, an unnamed Japanese, and Anthony Eden, the British foreign minister who resigned in 1938 in opposition to Neville Chamberlain's appeasement to the Axis powers,[450] but by December 1937, Eden had been replaced by Chamberlain, who became Britain's prime minister in 1937,[451] and by April 1938 the Japanese was listed as a general.[452] In early September, the four angels became three as the British angel was dropped from the sketch, and near September 25, 1939, the skit was withdrawn. August and September had seen rapid changes: the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact had been signed on August 23, Hitler and Stalin had invaded Poland by September 18, and France had declared war on Germany in early September. In place of the sketch was an announcement that "rapid changes in the international scene had driven the author insane. He had been able to write only nursery rhymes:
Little Joe Stalin sat at the Kremlin,
Eating a Nazi pie.
He stuck in his thumb and pulled out a Polish plumb
and cried, "What a smart boy am I!"[453]
On November 29, 1939, for the opening of New Pins and Needles, the number was put back in the show as "Five Little Angels of Peace," Stalin having been added as a character.[454] Wearing wings, the angels sing of their cooperation while they all vie for power. The Englishman and the Japanese are eliminated, and Mussolini and Hitler battle it out: Mussolini swings at Hitler but fails because of Hitler's protective arm, and Hitler bangs Mussolini over the head, but Mussolini does not feel it. At the end, the Englishman and the Japanese rise and bang Hitler and Mussolini over their heads, falling in a heap on top of them. They sing a reprise: "Four little angels of peace are we,/ Reeking with odor of sanctity;/ Though we slaughter the meek, we confer ev'ry week/ And we talk it over peacefully. . ./ With shot and with shell we give each other hell/ Just for peace! peace! peace!"[455]
In December 1938, and running until September 4, 1939, was a sketch written by John Latouche and Arnold Horwitt with music by Bernece Kazounoff called "Britannia Waives the Rules." In September 1938, the Munich Crisis--three weeks of meetings among England's prime minister Neville Chamberlain, France's premier Edouard Daladier, Mussolini, and Hitler, in response to Hitler's demand that the Sudetens (Germans of Czechoslovakia) be given the power of self-determination to join the German Reich--demonstrated the peak of the European democracies' policy of appeasement. France and Great Britain granted Hitler's request to annex the Sudetenland area, with an agreement that the rest of Czechoslovakia would be left alone. Chamberlain returned to England saying that he had helped bring about "peace in our time." "Britannia Waives the Rules" parodies what the conferences might have been like, with Chamberlain saying, "If at first you don't concede, fly, fly again."[456] A program flyer for a later version of Pins and Needles contains a photograph of this sketch, in which representatives of the Allied powers join the German ambassador in a Nazi salute.[457] "Four Little Angels of Peace" was also changed to reflect the events of the Munich crisis: the character of Eden was changed to Chamberlain, who was given a new lyric, and Hitler's lyric was changed.[458]
"Papa Lewis, Mama Green" ridicules the power struggles between John L. Lewis of the C.I.O and William Green of the A.F.L., bringing them down to the level of a family struggle in which Papa and Mama fight all the time. The conflict between the A.F.L and the C.I.O. began around 1935 and increased until late 1938, when Lewis announced that his organization would withdraw from the A.F.L., headed by Green. The two organizations differed in basic philosophy: the A.F.L was organized vertically by craft (such as the union of carpenters or electricians), while the C.I.O was horizontally organized by industry, so that all those working in the same industry belonged to the same union. The Committee for Industrial Organization was soon renamed the Congress for Industrial Organization. I.L.G.W.U. was part of this struggle, since its president, David Dubinsky, was one of the original proponents of the C.I.O., but he disapproved of its actions and took I.L.G.W.U. out of the C.I.O. This sketch, added in March 1939, involves Papa Lewis and Mama Green and their two children, Rank and File. Played in the style of a newspaper cartoon, with characters labeled in front of a two-dimensional setting in black and white, the children (labeled "Labor")[459] sing about how the family quarrel upsets everyone, including Uncle Frankie (Roosevelt) and Big Brother Dave Dubinsky: "Papa don't love Mama any more. . ./ So Pa went off and made himself a brand new family./ Uncle Frankie sends them a message every day,/ Big Brother Dave Dubinsky got so peeved he ran away!/ . . . Papa likes it vertical and he won't change his mind,/ Ma likes it horizontal, she says it's more refined. . ."[460]
Two sketches direct their attention to the proliferation of pro-fascist organizations in the United States, and to their leaders. Extreme reactions against liberalism arose in the thirties--primarily in the persons of Father Charles E. Coughlin, who advocated anti-semitism and the nationalization of banks and natural resources; Fritz Kuhn, a personal friend of Hitler who organized the Amerikadeutscher Volksbund, the American Nazi Party, centered in the Yorkville section of New York City, and who was arrested in 1940 for stealing Bund funds; and southern Senator Robert Reynolds, who organized a vigilante band in his home area--are satirized in "The Harmony Boys." Rome and Schrank gave the characters the names of Coggie, Bob, and Fritzie. Fritzie dances the "Flat-foot Fuerher with the Floy-Floy," Bob calls himself the "goose-stepping pixie from Dixie," and Coggie suggests that they should get together as the Harmony Boys, since they have so much in common. They sing their theme song: "We're the Harmony Boys from Demagogue Lane/ Come get on board our gospel train/ Though we've taken different paths to fame/ Turn us upside down and we all look the same."[461] A piece of business was added the night of Kuhn's arrest: a policeman entered at the end of the sketch, tapped Fritzie's shoulder, and led him off. This business continued throughout the run.[462]
For the 1939 edition of Pins and Needles, many changes were made. One included a long sketch based on the Mikado framework that was so prevalent that season. "The Red Mikado" was a general satire on domestic and international events that was added to the show in June 1939. The D'Oyly-Carte Opera Company had appeared in January with Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, on March 1 the Chicago Federal Theatre unit produced The Swing Mikado, a Black jazz version which soon opened commercially in New York, and later in March Michael Todd presented his version, The Hot Mikado. The version in Pins and Needles begins with an announcer commenting on the number of Mikados that season and suggesting that "The Red Mikado" will be the last. A chorus of seven men wearing dirty American overalls and Japanese hats introduce themselves, then the High Executioner enters to sing about his "little list":[463] "There's that flabby Yorkville fuehrer/ By the name of Fritzie Kuhn/ And all bund members goose-stepping/ To Adolph Hitler's tune./ . . . They'd none of 'em be missed." Three little maids wearing Japanese kimonos and American bonnets and carrying fans marked "Made in China," enter and sing to the audience: "Three little D.A.R.'s are we;/ Filled to the brim with bigotry. . ." The High Executioner sings about what he will do to various fascist elements in America. He will put all "prosy dull Congressional fellows" on "projects where talk's forbidden, . . . cut out their wages/ And let 'em eat old pink slips." Strikebreakers and industrial spies will walk "in their birthday suits" through militant picketers. "And Nazi sheets like Social Justice/ That specialize in abuse,/ Must print up each issue/ On soft rolls of tissue/ And be put to proper use."[464]
Three sketches satirized the American way of advertizing consumer goods. In "Nobody Makes a Pass at Me," sung in the "Dear Beatrice Fairfax" sketch, a young woman has used all the advertized products yet still fails to attract men. She uses over twenty advertized products but the men still stay away: "Just like Ivory soap, I'm pure."[465] Similarly, "Cream of Mush," added to Pins and Needles 1939 in April 1939, spoofs commercials, with a jab at broadcast censorship. As a performer sings a sloppy love song, the sponsor finds each line objectionable, until the performer has nothing to do but slurp the sponsor's cereal.[466] Finally, "The Pluto Boys," performed during the second road tour after the close of New Pins and Needles on June 22, 1940, and never seen in New York, satirizes commercials. Three devils play "the ads" that are designed to "scare the daylights out of you":[467] "You'd better use our super soap,/ Or else your boss will smell you./ . . . Your icebox isn't this year's mode,/ The temperature's not arctic,/ Your leaky pistons will corrode,/ You use a harsh cathartic."[468]
Two other numbers reflect changing views about the war in Europe. "Stay Out Sammy" reflects the isolationist sentiment that appeared before the war, especially in leftist circles. Added on November 20, 1939 for the opening of New Pins and Needles and replaced on June 17, 1940, this scene shows a mother cautioning her young son not to enter a street brawl:[469] "Get away from that there fight!/ Don't go near now, just sit tight!/ . . . Better stay out, Sammy, though all the others fight,/ Stick to your side of the street,/ You know that fighting's not right!/ . . . There's plenty to do at home!"[470] The song that replaced this isolationist sentiment was "(Sitting on Your) Status Quo" (or "History Eight to the Bar"), which draws parallels between the present war situation and the American Revolution, urging the audience not to let the appeasement policies of the English Tories hamper America's determination to support the fight for freedom: "When they say: Let's stand still a bit,/ Give up some rights, no harm in it/ Remember those are just the tricks,/ That did not work in sev'nty six."[471]
The leftist movement had been assimilated by this time into the mainstream of American life. Pins and Needles was politically "pro-union and somewhat left of center without leveling any truly radical social criticism," Gordon claims.[472] Like the leftist movement in general and leftist theatre in particular, the Labor Stage was, as Goldstein puts it, "the victim of its own success."[473] As a driving social movement, the workers' theatre had become so much a part of American life that much of the political and social satire was tame. And because the show was able to laugh at itself, and thus encourage the audience to laugh at the foibles of the movement, the show may have helped lead the workers' theatre away from any possible hope of establishing a truly radical artistic organ. As a matter of fact, Pins and Needles was just about all the leftist theatre most people needed. Despite the fact there was not much of a movement for the show to encourage, Pins and Needles did demonstrate some characteristics of a social movement.
Pins and Needles vilified its enemies, even while mocking its friends, but it did so with humor--heavy-handed at times but still enough to elicit laughter--which may have limited its radicalism and its effectiveness in instilling a sense of urgency and commitment in the audience. The propaganda in Pins and Needles was thus integrative rather than agitative or dialectical: it hoped the audience would laugh at important persons and events while still managing to find enough about life to enjoy. Rome's lyrics and music contain too much wit and playfulness to allow an audience to dwell on the ideas they contain: even when dealing with serious matters of principal world importance, Rome always allows some emotional or intellectual outlet to diffuse the serious content. Blitzstein's and Eisenberg's pieces for the show are the most biting and bitter, although even they allow enough humor to show through.
But this use of humor demonstrates a change in the American public and its views about leftist concerns. Peters and Sklar had tried humor in Parade but had not succeeded because the humor was so bitter; Blitzstein had been more successful with The Cradle Will Rock partly because his humor and his vernacular lyrics and music were so arresting. Pins and Needles capitalized on a trend that was affecting many during the popular front era--relief at the easing of the Depression, a feeling of moving forward, and a desire to find humor in a confusing world. Pins and Needles was an institutionalized workers' musical, written by writers now accepted in spite of their political views, or perhaps because of them, performed by members of an institutionalized organization, I.L.G.W.U., and viewed by audiences whose members could be said to have accepted the American way of life in some way or another. Pins and Needles drew upon the American dream, which historian Carl Degler believes has served as a substitute for socialism in the eyes of most Americans and helps account for the failure of socialism to win the hearts of the American working class:
The opportunities for talent and the better material life which socialism promised were already available in America and constituted the image in which America was beheld throughout the world. The freedom and equality which the oppressed proletariat of Europe craved were a reality in America--or at least sufficiently so to blunt the cutting edge of the socialist appeal.[474]
The major purpose of the propaganda in Pins and Needles was to depict and ridicule anti-union and reactionary forces, to bring the leftist movement down a notch, and to allow as many members of the audience to feel that their goals and the goals of the left were one and the same, which, except in the case of devoted doctrinaire Communists, was the case.
Pins and Needles reinterprets history and current events, and it suggests changes in the social order, but the spirit of communitas it establishes, if any, is that which will help the audience join together as Americans for the purpose of fighting fascism and reactionism. As a stabilizing and revitalizing function, Pins and Needles fulfilled a need in the audience to reaffirm their commitment to the American dream.
The lyrics in Pins and Needles are comic and serious, satiric and humorous. Many references to current events appear in the songs, and specific consumer products--some that remain on the market today and some that one hopes are forever gone--take their place in the audience's consciousness. Stressing primarily personal concerns within the framework of societal, cultural, political, and economic beliefs, the songs deal with the effect of outside forces on the inner feelings of individuals. For instance, the story of Bertha, of the Vassar girl, of the family in the park, of the one big union for two, or of the socially significant courtship all deal with individuals confronted with forces from the outside--but the essence of each song deals with the inner feelings of each.
Pins and Needles ran from its opening until 1940 in New York and until 1941 on tour. It was the most successful and the last successful workers' musical of the thirties--commercially, at least, and in terms of granting legitimacy to popular front ideals. The musicals that followed the opening of Pins and Needles and which will be discussed in Chapter Five would not be granted the same legitimacy nor would they gain the same popular acceptance, in part because of the fluctuating goals of the Communist party and its relationship to popular front ideals, in part because of the decreasing need for a socially-significant musical theatre that could be found just as easily in the mainstream theatre,[475] and in part because the workers' theatre had tried so hard to become successful that its success became a liability and its message commonplace.
[312]Philip
Sterling, "Vaudeville Fights the Death Sentence," New Theatre
3, no. 2 (February 1936): 17, 30-31.
[317]Ruth
Deacon, "Philadelphia New Theatre Comes Through with a Hit," New
Theatre News 1, no. 6 (January 1940): 4-5.
[319]Eric A.
Gordon, Mark the Music: The Life and
Work of Marc Blitzstein (New York:
St. Martins Press, 1989), 174.
[320]Ibid.;
Louis (Studs) Terkel played Editor Daily and the production had the support of
the United Mine Workers.
[321]N.Y. Sun,
July 16, 1938, from clippings, Theatre Collection of the New York City Public
Library at Lincoln Center; although the
Settlement Players of Cleveland wanted to do it too, the release of the musical
stipulated that only one group could produce the play in each city.
[322]New
Theatre News 1, no. 2 (December 1938): 20, 22; New Theatre News 1,
no. 3 (January-February 1939): 22.
[323]New
Theatre News 1, no. 2 (December 1938): 22; "Shifting Scenes," New
Theatre News 1, no. 3 (January-February 1939): 22.
[326]Flyer,
Lincoln Center; while the flyer lists Watson as the speaker, no such character
appears in the script.
[328]Goldstein,
174; the flyer for the production, however, calls the organization the Theatre
Arts Committee for Spain.
[330]Anthony
Beevor, The Spanish Civil War (New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1982), 132; Newsweek 20, July 2,
1962, p. 10; "Milestones," Time 134, no. 22, November 27,
1989, p. 58.
[331]Page
numbers in parentheses refer to the typescript of Kenneth White, The Spanish
Play, New York City Public Library at Lincoln Center, call number NCOF+
p.v. 319.
[333]White says
in "Note on Production," ii, that a complete costume with one or two
men would have been more successful.
[339]Lee
Strasberg, "Showing the Movie Screen a Thing or Two," Daily Worker,
5 January 1937, p. 7; found in Goldstein, 313.
[340]Quoted in
John O'Connor and Lorraine Brown, Free, Adult, Uncensored: The Living History of the Federal Theatre
Project (Washington, D.C.: New
Republic Books, 1978), 175.
[342]Brooks
Atkinson, New York Times, 20 November 1936, p. 26; Cecil Smith,
165, claims, however, that the show contained only incidental music and
hesitates to classify it as a musical.
[343]Paul Green
and Kurt Weill, Johnny Johnson, in Paul Green, Five Plays of the
South (New York: Hill and Wang,
1963); any page numbers in parentheses refer to this edition.
[344]Paul Green
chose the name Johnny Johnson because more people who fought in the first world
war had that name than any other; O'Connor and Brown, 175.
[346]Ibid;
Goldstein claims that Green's Johnny is genuinely simple, whereas Hasek's
Schweik is naďve only to beguile others.
[349]According
to Bragdon and McCutchen, 617, Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota headed a committee
in 1934 and 1935 that investigated the munitions industry; the study revealed
that American armaments manufacturers and bankers had made large profits by
supplying arms and money to the Allies during the years 1914-1917, leading to
the notion that American participation in the war had been arranged by
"merchants of death" aided by British propagandists; increased
pacifism resulted in part from knowledge of this study, including a short-lived
organization in colleges, the Veterans of Future Wars, which ridiculed the idea
of military service and demanded veterans' bonuses in advance. Gordon, 131, says the study was conducted in
1934 and confirmed that J.P. Morgan and the Du Pont interests had propelled the
country into war; the same conclusion had been reached in Anna Rochester's Rulers
of America, an examination of finance capitalism that explained the 240
percent increase in steel prices by 1916 from their pre-war level and the 370
percent rise by the time the U.S. entered the war.
[350]Paul Sporn,
"Working-Class Theatre on the Auto Picket Line," in McConachie
and Friedman, 155-170, at p. 160; much of the information in the
following few paragraphs comes from Sporn's examination of this show on
pp. 160-164.
[352]Flint Auto
Worker, quoted in Sporn, 161, (fn. 12, p. 169); from Henry Kraus
Collection, Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Box 96, Series IV,
Folder: 96-13.
[356]Page
numbers in parentheses refer to the script of Sit-Down!, available
at the Tamiment Collection at Bobst Library of New York University; the script
can also be found at Lincoln Center, call number NCOF + p.v.198.
[358]Genora
Johnson was the 23-year-old wife of Chevrolet #4 strike leader
Kermit Johnson who initiated the idea of the Women's Emergency Brigade as an
offshoot of a Women's Auxiliary to contact and support strike wives; Evan J.
Parker was plant manager of Fisher Body #2; Evelyn Preston was president of the
League of Women Shoppers in New York; Homer Martin was a former Baptist
minister and the dynamic president of the United Automobile Workers; and George
E. Boysen, former G.M. paymaster and former mayor of Flint, led the
strikebreakers; according to Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936-1937
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan,
1969), 78, 90, 200, 344, and 187-189.
[359]Sit-downs
were eventually abandoned because they were illegal and because they caused
public resentment, according to Bragdon and McCutchen, 603.
[362]Fine, 164,
says that this song, with lyrics by Maurice Sugar, a U.A.W. attorney, was most
frequently associated with sit-down strikes.
[363]Ibid., p.
8, says that these lyrics were written by two strikers; his version uses
"Parker" instead of "Knudson," and instead of "we had
quite a corps" he uses "they had quite a chore." Fine also
includes a fourth verse:
Now this scrap is o'er
The boys are sticking fast
We'll hold our Grounds [sic]
and fight here to the last
And when the strike is o'er
We'll have our contract fast
We'll have a hot time in the old town
tonight. (pp. 8-9; from Bud Simons Papers, Labor History Archives).
[364]Ibid.,
200-201, says the brigade was ready for action by January 20; fifty volunteers
joined at first, and the eventual number was 350, and that the song was their
theme song.
[366]Ibid.,
245-46; the sketch, called "Sketch Number 1" and which included
"Nickel Under the Foot," had been performed in February 1936 for a
Composers' Collective concert presented by the New Theatre League, according to
Blitzstein's biographer, Eric A. Gordon, 116.
[368]Hallie
Flanagan, Arena: The History of the
Federal Theatre (New York: Benjamin
Blom, 1940; rpt. 1965), 201.
[370]Houseman,
249-81, details the story of the show's opening performance; more recently, the
story is retold in the New York Times, 1 May 1983, sect. 8, pp. 6,
18.
[371]Jane De
Hart Mathews, The Federal Theatre, 1935-1939: Plays, Relief, and Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), 123.
[372]Houseman,
255; apparently the project workers did not hear of the order until the next
day, June 12.
[378]Brooks
Atkinson and Albert Hirshfeld, The Lively Years, 1920-1973 (New
York: Associated Press, 1973), 121.
[382]Richard
France, The Theatre of Orson Welles (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1977), 100-102.
[383]Lehman
Engel, The American Musical Theatre (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 148; Atkinson and Hirshfeld, 120; New York Tribune,
quoted in Houseman, 277; John Mason Brown in New York Post, quoted in
Houseman; Atkinson, "The Cradle Will Rock," New York Times, 6
December 1937, p. 19.
[386]Blitzstein,
"Author of `The Cradle' Discusses Broadway Hit," Daily Worker,
3 January 1937, p. 7; quoted in Goldstein, 190.
[387]Smiley,
134, paraphrasing Blitzstein, The Cradle Will Rock, in Best Short
Plays of the Social Theatre, ed. William Kozlenko (New York: Random House, 1939), 166-67.
[389]Goldstein,
189, says that because Foreman is genial, all-American, and propertied,
he becomes a "young leader" at the end.
[390]Page
numbers in parentheses refer to Blitzstein, The Cradle Will Rock (New
York: Random House, 1938).
[392]R. R.
Palmer and Joel Colton, A History of
the Modern World, 3rd
Edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 788-89; the N.L.R.B.
was found constitutional in 1937 by the U.S. Supreme Court, according to
Bragdon and McCutchen, 604.
[395]Robert G.
Athearn, The American Heritage New Illustrated History of the United States,
Vol. 14: The Roosevelt Era (New
York: Dell, 1963), 1183-84, 1223;
Palmer and Colton, 788.
[398]Emmet
Lavery, The Flexible Stage: The
Federal Theatre in Profile, unpublished manuscript, 130, found at the
Federal Theatre Project Collection at George Mason University Libraries,
Fairfax, Virginia; Flanagan cites this
book as having been published by Samuel French in 1941.
[403]Blitzstein
did insert several lines about Mayor Hague of Jersey City, after Ella Reeve
("Mother") Bloor told him that The Cradle Will Rock seemed to
be about Hague; Gordon, 165.
[404]Goldstein,
207-208, claims that the Labor Stage presented one other show, a cantata by
George Kleinsinger and Alfred Hayes called I Hear America Singing, based
on poetry of Walt Whitman; the show was presented at an I.L.G.W.U. convention
in 1940 but was otherwise never presented publicly.
[405]Harry
Goldman, "When Social Significance Came to Broadway: Pins and Needles in
Production," Theatre Quarterly
7, no. 28 (Winter 1977-78): 25-42, on
pp. 25-26; much of the information in these first few paragraphs comes
from this article. Goldman, in "Pins
and Needles: A White House Command
Performance," Educational Theatre Journal 30, no. 1 (March 1978):
90-101, on pp. 90-91, says that Pins and Needles officially opened
at the Labor Stage on November 27, 1937, moved to Broadway's Windsor Theatre on
June 26, 1939, had two national road tours--one from April 1938 to January
1939, and the other from July 1940 to May 1941--and closed in New York on June
22, 1940, after 1,108 performances.
[406]Louis
Schaffer, Pins and Needles program, December 1938; quoted in Goldman,
26, who uses the British spelling, "labour."
[407]The New
York Times, 30 January 1938, p. 30, noted that the revue was named Pins
and Needles, in favor of Max Danish's suggestion, rather than other
proposed names: Labor Follies, Hooks
and Eyes, Piece Work, and Shears and Thimbles; found in Gary
L. Smith, "The International Ladies Garment Workers' Union's Labor Stage,
A Propagandistic Venture," (Ph.D. dissertation, Kent State University,
1975), 124.
[408]Goldman,
"When Social Significance Came to Broadway," 27. On p. 40, footnote 24, Goldman cites
information from the New York Times, 6 August 1939, sec. 9, p. 4,
saying that the show always had a two-piano accompaniment; even after it
went to the Windsor Theatre on Broadway, the full orchestra the Labor Stage had
to pay for played only during the intermission and when the audience was
entering the theatre; Himelstein, 77, says that the try-out performance was
held on June 14, 1936; so does a program from a performance at Baltimore's
Biltmore Theatre, dated May 16, 1941; and the first New York Times revue
of the "studio performance" is dated Monday, June 15, 1936, and
refers to the performance "last night."
[411]I believe
Goldman, or his typesetter, is incorrect in calling the number "We'd
Better Be Right"; in his other article in Educational Theatre Journal
he calls it "We'd Rather Be Right," and all subsequent programs that
include the number list it as "We'd Rather Be Right." The Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, George S.
Kaufman, and Moss Hart musical I'd Rather Be Right had opened on Broadway
on November 2, 1937, and the title of the sketch from Pins and Needles
is an obvious take-off on that musical's title; perhaps the writers of Pins
and Needles did not decide to mimic that title until after the opening of
the show.
[412]Goldman,
"When Social Significance Came to Broadway", 34; David Alan Rush,
"A History and Evaluation of the ILGWU Labor Stage and its Production of Pins
and Needles, 1937-1940," (Unpublished Masters Thesis, University of
Iowa, 1965), 80; the show appears to have briefly called itself Pins and
Needles 1940, as reflected on a Windsor Theatre program from November 6,
1939, but within two weeks, according to a program dated November 20, 1939,
began calling itself New Pins and Needles. Jack Gould (J.G., New York Times, 21 November 1939,
p. 19) says that Pins and Needles 1940 officially ended on
Saturday, November 18, 1939.
[414]Ben Irwin,
"The A.F.L. Theatre Presents," Daily Worker, 17 June 1936,
p. 7; found in Goldstein, 207-208.
[416]Richard
Lockridge, "Pins and Needles, Leftist Revue, Opens at the Labor
Stage," New York Sun, 29 November 1937, p. 49.
[417]Burns
Mantle, "Labor Stage Troupe Romps Through New Pins and Needles,"
New York Daily News, 29 November 1937; John Mason Brown, "In Praise
of Pins and Needles," New York Post, 6 December 1937; Sidney
B. Whipple, "The Rich Cleverly Satirized:
Pins and Needles on Labor Stage Has Critic's Approval," New
York World-Telegram, 30 December 1937; Richard Watts, "Proletarian
Fun," New York Herald Tribune, 13 December 1937.
[418]Brooks
Atkinson, "Garment Specialty--Pins and Needles, Being a Night Out
for Thirty-Two ILGWU Members," New York Times, 23 January 1938, sect.
11, p. 1.
[422]Citations
from the show will come from various sources.
Kendall Cole, stage manager for the road company production from April
18, 1938 to January 28, 1939, prepared an unpaginated production book which can
now be found in the Education Research Department of ILGWU in New York City; I
will refer to this source as "Promptbook." I will also be citing material from the show from the published
version of the songs, copyrighted 1937 by Florence Music Company and Chappell
and Company, Inc.; I will refer to this source as Rome, Pins and Needles. I will also cite material reprinted in
Rush's thesis and in articles by Goldman.
Therefore, this citation refers to "First Impressions," found
in Rush, 131; Rome, Pins and Needles, "Sing Me a Song of Social
Significance," 4-6; Promptbook, "Social Significance."
[423]The programs
for Pins and Needles, as late as 1939, after which this sketch and song
were apparently dropped from the show, call the song "Public Enemy No.
1," and so does Goldman, in "Pins and Needles: A White House
Command Performance," 91; however, the published collection of songs, pp.
7-9, uses the same title as the promptbook, "Room for One"
(copyrighted 1968 by Harold Rome), and has an asterisked footnote explaining
that "This poor girl has a tendency to pronounce her R's like
W's." Rush, 131, calls the song
"Public Enemy Number One; or Womb for One."
[426]"Dear
Beatrice Fairfax," Promptbook, and program, 1937; Rome, Pins and Needles, "Nobody
Makes a Pass at Me," 59-63.
[427]Harold
Rome, Pins and Needles, "Not Cricket to Picket," (Florence
Music Company, Inc., 1938); copyright renewed by Harold Rome, 48.
[429]Harold
Rome, "Chain Store Daisy," Pins and Needles, 30-35;
"Daisy Chain," Promptbook; "Vassar Girl Finds a Job,"
program, 1937.
[432]Information
about this sketch is found in Rush, 71-72; the lyrics are found in Rush, 148,
and Goldman, 34.
[436]Rome,
"Sunday in the Park," Pins and Needles, 50-52;
Promptbook; Goldstein, 209, says this was the only number from the show to make
the Hit Parade.
[437]Harold
Rome, "I'm Just Nuts About You," Pins and Needles (1937,
renewed 1968), 24; "Economics I," Promptbook.
[440]Rome,
"Back to Work, Pins and Needles, 36-39; Rush, 73, 148, he
claims that "Men Awake" was withdrawn in June 1939 yet also lists
"Back to Work" as replacing it in March 1939, just before the opening
of Pins and Needles 1939 on April 21.
[441]Harold
Rome, "One Big Union For Two," Pins and Needles, 12-14;
copyright renewed by Harold Rome; Promptbook.
[443]Goldman,
"Pins and Needles: A White
House Command Performance," 92; I have also seen this sketch referred to
as "Let Freedom Wrong."
[446]Harold
Rome, "What Good is Love?" Pins and Needles, 21-23; copyright
renewed by Harold Rome; Promptbook.
[447]Smiley,
85, however, holds that the long run of Pins and Needles, and of Tobacco
Road and Dead End, resulted more from the "exaggerated emphasis
on their theatrical, comic, and sensational aspects rather then their social
comment."
[448]Mrs.
Flanagan apparently thought Mrs. Clubhouse was intended to be a representation
of her; she even mentioned the connection when she responded in 1947 to
Blitzstein's request for her side of the The Cradle Will Rock story;
Gordon, 161.
[452]The
promptbook, dated April 1938 to January 1939, calls the character a Japanese
general; the published lyrics refer to the Japanese as Hirohito, in Harold
Rome, "Four Little Angels of Peace," Pins and Needles (New
York: Florence Music Company, Inc.,
Chappell and Company, Inc.; copyright 1938 by Mills Music, Inc.), 28.
[454]Rush, 77;
Goldman, "When Social Significance Came to Broadway," 38; Goldstein,
212, says the addition of Stalin to the number horrified the Communist press.
[460]Information
about this sketch is found in Rush, 71-72; the lyrics are found in Rush, 148,
and Goldman, 34.
[461]Pins and
Needles, program flyer, date unknown; Coughlin, Hugh S. Johnson, and
Huey Long had already been criticized in Parade's "Bon
Voyage"; Johnson had resigned as head of the N.R.A. in 1934 and Long had
been assassinated in 1935.
[464]Pins and
Needles program flyer, date unknown; "Social Justice" was the
Nazi party's newspaper in the United States.
[466]Rome,
"Cream of Mush Song," Pins and Needles, 10-11, copyright 1968;
the description comes from Rush, 73.
[471]Rome,
"(Sitting on Your) Status Quo," Pins and Needles, 66,
copyright 1947 by Florence Music Co. Inc.
Rush, 87, claims that this number was added for the second tour, after
the closing of New Pins and Needles, and was therefore never seen in New
York; however, he (and also Goldman, 37) also dates its first appearance in the
show on June 17, 1940, shortly before the close of the New York production.
[474]Carl
Degler, Out of Our Past: The Forces
that Shaped Modern America (New York:
Harper and Row, 1984), 271-72; quoted in Hirst, 31.
[475]Sherr examines
the following Broadway musicals of the later thirties for their significant
content: Hooray for What?
(1937) has a plot concerning poison gas and a war in Europe, Leave it
to Me (1938) ends with a scene in Red Square, Knickerbocker Holiday
(1938) explores the dimensions of leadership and power, Red, Hot, and
Blue (1936) mocks contemporary society and politics, and I'd Rather
Be Right (1937) playfully honors the foibles of Roosevelt and the New
Deal, and Louisiana Purchase (1940) is a thinly veiled satire of
Huey Long.
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