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]
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, "¡No 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 naïve Johnny--are under-developed characters.[346] They represent the major factions affected in a war-time atmosphere. Each of the characters strains reality: the naïveté 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]<