Class Divisions on the Broadway Stage

The Staging and Taming of the I.W.W.

M. Schwartz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137353054
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

Examining twenty-five years of theatre history, this book covers the major plays that feature representations of the Industrial Workers of the World. American class movement and class divisions have long been reflected on the Broadway stage and here Michael Schwartz presents a fresh look at the conflict between labor and capital.

1. To Stop the World: The Most Stupendous Impossibles

James Jones, writing through the character of James Malloy in From Here to Eternity, might well be addressing the general reader of this study:

You don’t remember the Wobblies. You were too young . . . There has never been anything like them, before or since. They called themselves materialist-economists, but what they really were was a religion. They were workstiffs and bindlebums like you and me, but they were welded together by a vision we dont [sic] possess. It was their vision that made them great. And it was their belief in it that made them powerful. And sing! you never heard anybody sing the way those guys sang! Nobody sings like they did unless its [sic] for a religion. (Jones 640)

Novelist Jones has his character begin an important speech with “You don’t remember the Wobblies.” The character is speaking in 1941, and he is not asking if the listener remembers the workers who made up the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.), an organization formed some 36 years previously—he is assuming that the Wobblies, as the I.W.W. were popularly called, are indeed forgotten. And by 1941, to a large degree, he was right. Times, fears, labor conflicts, and unions had all undergone considerable shifts since the days the Wobblies were most enterprising and active.

In fact, a researcher can find many examples of putting the Wobblies in the past tense sooner than James Jones’s former radical character does. For example, Susan Duffy, in her study American Labor on Stage, analyzes a 1931 Provincetown Playhouse production (one that was not performed in New York) of the play Strike!, by Mary Heaton Vorse and William Dorsey Blake, concerning a strike in the south. A character named Roger offers a comparison between Wobblies and contemporary union organizers: “In circumstances like these the Wobblies were hell-raisers. We don’t seem to have any cussing hell-raisers in the labor movement any more. There isn’t a hard loined son of a gun among them all” (qtd. in Duffy 68).¹ Wobblies, even by the early 1930s, for many both within and outside of the working class, were cussing, hard-loined sons of gun from another era—a Wobbly was someone one’s parents and grandparents remembered, most likely with a faint sense of amusement: “Those Wobblies. I remember. Always singing. Mostly regular fellows, but always mad about something or other.”²

At one time, however, the I.W.W. loomed large in the public consciousness, even if the public was not entirely conscious of what the I.W.W. was and what it stood for—“public imagination” might be a better description. The I.W.W. was, in many ways, a highly theatrical, highly colorful (and, as Jones points out, highly musical) organization.³ In some ways, perhaps, their stories, songs, and overall flair for entertainment were a natural fit for the world of Broadway, or so it would appear. Rather, more accurately, the Wobblies were a natural fit for theatre, but perhaps not commercial theatre.⁴ In a real sense, the strongly anticapitalist ideals and agenda of the I.W.W. were dragged, kicking and screaming, onto the business-minded Broadway stage. These areas of agreement and tension will be the primary focus of this study. Just as there has never been anything like the Wobblies before or since, there has never been anything like the “Wobblies on Broadway” before or since. As mismatched as the Wobblies and Broadway might well have been, the theatrical and artistic results provide an interesting and revealing way to look at American class, labor, and theatre history.

This monograph is not a history of the I.W.W., even a brief one, although it does draw from I.W.W. history. Nor is this study meant specifically to advocate Wobbly causes—the reader is welcome to make the determination for him or herself whether or not our current century would be an opportune time for a Wobbly resurgence. This study does not also intend to argue for the martyrdom of certain key Wobbly figures, although the extent to which such figures became “folk heroes” is a significant point. What this study is meant to accomplish is to provide an examination of how the I.W.W. was staged on Broadway through the relatively small number of plays where such staging took place, and to place these stagings within the context of labor and class development that, in many ways, “directed” these productions.

Appropriately for a theatre study, this work is primarily concerned with stories and storytelling. The Industrial Workers of the World, popularly known as “Wobblies,” were the subjects and creators of a considerable body of stories both positive and negative, heroic and villainous, constructive and destructive. These stories, even the most inflammatory and the most hagiographic, were based, at least to some degree, on facts. While it is certainly true, as Paul Brissenden noted in his landmark dissertation-turned-book The I.W.W.: A Study in American Syndicalism, that “even what the Wobblies say about themselves must be taken with a certain amount of salt” (9), it is also true that in the case of the I.W.W., the truth of the mythmaking and legend-building brings as much to bear on this study as the “cold, hard facts” do. Further, to get a sense of what the “Wobblies on Broadway” meant in terms of class distinctions and class movement, we need to get at the truth of perception—how did Broadway playwrights present their Wobbly characters, and how did audiences of the time see them? To go further, what did these plays ask of their audiences? Understanding? Sympathy? Support? These levels and layers of truth—sometimes complementary, and sometimes contradictory—form the often fluid foundation of the staging of the I.W.W. on Broadway.

The basic story, or stories, of the I.W.W. were well established by the time a Broadway play put a Wobbly onstage for the scrutiny of an audience in the 1920s. Since their cause and identification were radical, “they were attacked with all the weapons the system could put together: the newspapers, the courts, the police, the army, mob violence,” as sympathetic historian Howard Zinn notes (332). The stories, songs, myths, and folklore that came from the I.W.W. themselves, their supporters, and their detractors, became a greater part of the popular culture than its relatively small membership would indicate.⁵

The Wobbly agenda was simple and direct, rooted in a firm belief in solidarity and sheer numbers in a time of terrible labor conditions. As organizer Joseph Ettor put it: “If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop” (qtd. in Zinn 331). The Wobblies, with the force of free speech, strikes, and other forms of what they referred to as “direct action,” as well as with songs, skits, satire, and legend-building, set out to stop the world. While the obvious observation that the industrial world most certainly did not stop would indicate failure on the part of the Wobblies, the notions of “success” and “failure” when approaching this subject are not as clear as one might imagine. Where Wobblies did succeed was not necessarily on the Broadway stage, but on the international stage in terms of projecting their character to a wide audience. On the other hand, however, it can fairly be said that how audiences of all kinds received the character of the Wobbly was fraught with distortions and exaggerations. As Brissenden pointed out, writing in 1918, “though nowadays well aware of the existence of the I.W.W., the public still knows little about the organization and its members. Moreover, a great deal of what it does know is false. For thirteen years, the I.W.W. has been consistently misrepresented—not to say vilified—to the American people” (Brissenden 8). The Broadway audiences who encountered stage Wobblies would bring a great deal of this wrong information and misinformation to their reading of the plays featured in this study.

In the extremely colorful case of the I.W.W., history, legend, and fearmongering merge in ways that create the popular picture of the “Wobbly.” The way the Wobblies saw themselves and the way they were portrayed by the mainstream press play a large role in how audiences read the idea of I.W.W. Indeed, a good part of the I.W.W.’s self-promoting and self-mythologizing was theatre-based; many Wobbly leaders were skilled orators who often used theatres to deliver their inspirational speeches. Mother Jones, for instance, took to a packed theatre in Pittsburgh (a city known in Wobbly lingo as “The Big Smoke”) in May of 1913 to promise on behalf of the striking miners: “I’m going back to West Virginia. If I can’t go on a train, I’ll walk in” (“Mother Jones Is Defiant” 2).

Besides speaking in packed theatres, the Wobblies also used performance techniques to spread their message in a way that was meant to educate the “scissor bills” and the “Mr. Blocks” (Wobbly names for workers who unthinkingly did whatever the bosses told them to do) to the way to create the “One Big Union” that was meant to break the back of the capitalists. The evidence of this performance is abundant, including the Little Red Songbook—full of songs meant to spread the word, often featuring parody lyrics of already familiar songs, to encourage sing-alongs. As the I.W.W. website notes—interestingly, without precision: “Since the early 1910s, the IWW has published at least 38 editions of this famous collection of labor hymns and anthems, and yes, always with a bright red cover!” (“IWW Cultural Icons”). Creation of the songbook is credited to Wobblies from Spokane, Washington, then in the midst of one of many free-speech fights, who put together what was originally known as Songs of the Workers, on the Road, in the Jungles, and in the Shops: Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent (“Industrial Workers of the World Photograph Collection”). While the Wobblies, as will be noted, directly eschewed violence, their rhetoric, rife with fiery and revolutionary imagery, was often taken literally by fearful middle- and upper-class participants in the world of corporate capitalism, and American corporate capitalism in particular.⁶ Worth noting also is the fact that Wobblies did get a genuine kick out of flame-fanning, and getting into what they colorfully referred to as “scraps.”

The creation and implementation of songs, along with skits, poems, and monologues, even served the Wobblies in prison. To take one example, the Wobbly prisoners put together an evening of entertainment on 2 December 1917, at the Cook County Jail in Chicago. The program, scrawled in pencil, included skits, chorus numbers, stories, readings, and monologues “given by class war prisoners in the Cook Co. Jail” (Kornbluh Rebel Voices 330). Entertainment and performance were a large part of Wobbly persuasive strategy—simultaneously making fun of the (presumably doomed) capitalist class while proving that the Wobblies were so hardy that even in confinement, they were never far from singing another song and cracking another joke at the expense of the employing class. The folk songs and folk singing combined to create folk heroes and heroines.

The making of folk heroes and legends, the belief in a greater cause with what could be taken to be religious fervor (as James Jones emphasizes in his novel), and the mocking of organized religion itself, perhaps, best come together in a Joe Hill song, “The Preacher and the Slave,” which first appeared in the third edition of the Songbook (Kornbluh Rebel Voices132). Joe Hill himself, a tireless organizer, songwriter, and leader (and, it might be added, canny self-promoter), became the key Wobbly folk hero and martyr, following his execution in 1915, notoriously for a crime where evidence seemed severely lacking.⁷ The song, sung to the tune of the hymn “In the Sweet By and By,” became central to Wobbly identity, and Hill is credited for contributing a key expression to the American vernacular: “pie in the sky,” the implication that life on earth is to be accepted without thinking, while one is meant to patiently await one’s reward (pie) in heaven (in the sky).⁸ Both Maxwell Anderson (with Harold Hickerson) and Upton Sinclair employ the song in their plays at appropriate dramatic moments. Hill’s memorial service in Chicago attracted some nine thousand people—according to a special report to the New York Times, roughly three thousand managed to get inside, while six thousand more also tried to enter. The reporter noted, with no particular desire to disguise contempt, that “Anarchists, Nihilists, some Socialists, ‘bums’ and hoboes generally, of whom less than 10 per cent were American, assembled for the ceremony in the West Side Auditorium” (“Hillstrom is Cremated” 7).⁹ The attitude of the reporter gives us considerable information on the regard (or lack thereof) for the Wobblies and those who supported them, which will be important to consider when we look at the Wobblies onstage.

THE FIRST WOBBLIES ON BROADWAY: THE PATERSON SILK STRIKE PAGEANT

Strictly speaking, if we want to begin with the Wobblies on Broadway, we learn that they actually presented themselves on the Big Stem first. The show they presented had a venue no less prestigious than Madison Square Garden—the famous (or infamous) Paterson Strike Pageant of 7 June 1913. The strike itself had begun in the industrial New Jersey city of Paterson in February of that year. The workers lobbied for, among other rights, an eight-hour work day, a more reasonable number of looms for each operator, and fairer wage scales. As I.W.W. historian Joyce Kornbluh notes, “The strike became industry-wide on February 25 when several thousand workers left their looms and held a mass meeting, addressed by I.W.W. organizers Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca, and Patrick Quinlan. Within the week, 25,000 workers were on strike, virtually all the silk workers in Paterson. Close to 300 silk mills in Paterson shut down” (Kornbluh Rebel Voices 198). The strike proved long-lasting and costly for the Wobblies and their members, so a novel money-raising scheme came into being.

The strike needed money and publicity, and John Reed, who would later write the landmark firsthand account of the Russian Revolution Ten Days That Shook the World, conceived a pageant in six scenes, training workers to recreate scenes from the strike. In this way, the revolutionary ideal of the Wobblies was staged with the direct simplicity of one of the oldest of theatrical devices.¹⁰ Despite the best efforts and support of Reed’s friends and the well-to-do divorcee Mabel Dodge, the pageant production team could only rent Madison Square garden for one night. Some 15 thousand persons came to the event, many at reduced prices, and many others free with the presentation of their I.W.W. cards. (The decision to be lenient regarding admission would prove costly to the Wobblies later.) In utilizing the format of the theatrical pageant, the workers were able to present scenes that included a reenactment of Valentino Modestino’s funeral (an innocent bystander shot by detectives firing on the strikers), revolutionary songs, parades, and strike meetings (Kornbluh Rebel Voices 201–202).

Fascinated newspaper reviewers were often impressed with the conveying of emotional weight and message, even if they were at odds with the I.W.W. agenda. Certainly the New York Times reporter was impressed with the sheer scale of the enterprise: “It is doubtful if Madison Square Garden, even at the close of the bitterest political campaigns, ever held a larger audience than that which packed that great auditorium last night . . . 1,029 Paterson strikers of many nationalities and ages played the leading as well as all of the minor parts” (“Paterson Strikers Now become Actors” 7). Progressive writer Randolph Bourne, who would die five years later in the flu epidemic following the Great War, wrote of the pageant, “Crude and rather terrifying,” but that it was also “something genuinely and excitingly new” (Blake, “A New Social Art”).

Nevertheless, the agenda and content did not go unnoticed, to put the matter mildly, and the criticism and fear of the I.W.W. message was an important element of the public perception of the union. A particularly pointed New York Times editorial blasted the I.W.W. and its motives for presenting the pageant: “Under the direction of a destructive organization opposed in spirit and antagonistic in action to all the forces which have upbuilded this republic, a series of pictures in action were shown with the design of stimulating mad passion against law and order and promulg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1.  To Stop the World: The Most Stupendous Impossibles
• 2.  Where Do I Get Off? The Wobblies I.W.W. Spurn The Hairy Ape
• 3.  No Kick Coming: The Romantic Wobbly of Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted
• 4.  Jazzing the Wobblies: John Howard Lawson’s Processional
• 5.  Dead Hand of the Dead: Anderson and Hickerson’s Gods of the Lightning
• 6.  “We Even Sing ‘em in Jap and Chink”: Upton Sinclair’s Workers’ Theatre Contribution
• 7.  You I-Won’t-Work Harp: I.W.W. Elegy in The Iceman Cometh
• 8.  Postscript: Not Time Yet
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index