Depression Makes Good TheatreEssay Preview: Depression Makes Good TheatreReport this essayThe story of the Federal Theatre Project is quite the epic tale. It was a product ofthe Great Depression, born under the Works Progress Administration, part of the NewDeal, to create jobs for unemployed theatre artists. The Federal Theatre Project (FTP)created jobs for actors, designers, stagehands, and directors. It provided theatricalproductions across the United States for people at low or no cost to the theatergoer, manyof who could no longer afford to attend theatre due to the economic climate of the time. Italso created theatre in areas that had not actually had theatre. It provided jobs for peopleof all colors. It started careers of people who would go down as some of the most laudednames in theatrical and film history. It even created new forms of theatre.It seems a prudent idea to start with a bit of history to put the era and eventstherein into context. Largely due to the aftereffects of World War I, the 1920s was adecade “at once wildly creative, liberating, desperate, and reckless.” (Axelrod 239)Americans purchased stock in record numbers. This would be a good thing, except for thefact that most of them bought large amounts of stock on margin, putting down as little asten cents per dollar of stock. They hoped that the stock prices would rise quickly anddrastically in order for them to pay off the substantial loans they undertook in order tomake the stock purchases. (238)To make matters worse, while the buying power of the public declined, theproduction numbers in many factories rose. Companies continued to make much more oftheir products than people were buying. Since their items werent selling, they started laying people off. People without jobs tend to purchase less than people with jobs, and so
the market base shrank. Oddly, stock prices continued to rise as more people purchasedstocks, predominantly on margin. (Axelrod 238) This was a bad thing.As summer became fall in 1929, the prices in the stock market began to seesawuncontrollably. I imagine the unsteadiness of the market terrified a great many people,especially the large number who had purchased their stocks on margin and had yet toearn the purchase prices from them to pay their substantial loans. On October 24, aselling spree began. On October 29, commonly referred to as Black Tuesday, the markettook a nosedive. Stockbrokers demanded immediate payment for the stocks people hadpurchased on margin. Of course, no one actually had the money to pay. Thousands ofinvestors were suddenly penniless. There was an outbreak of suicides amongbusinessmen. (Axelrod 239) Banks ran out of money and closed left and right as peopleacross the nation hurried to retrieve their savings. The Great Depression had begun.“After the Wall Street crash came, [President] Hoover was slow to react and didnothing more than assure the public that prosperity was just around the corner,” writesAlan Axelrod in The Complete Idiots Guide to American History. As time went on,things only got worse. There was more poverty. There were more jobs being lost. Hooversuggested that state and local governments should create programs to help the great manypeople who were in need, but neither the state nor the local governments had the moneyto do so. (242) People in all walks of life, in all industries, were affected.The Great Depression continued as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tookoffice in 1932, but things were about to change.When he accepted the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination,Franklin D. Roosevelt declared, “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to anew deal for the American people.” Following Rooseveltsinauguration, the phrase “New Deal” caught on in a way thattransformed the federal government. Within the first three months ofthe new administration – dubbed with Napoleonic grandeur by thepress the “Hundred Days” – FDR introduced his relief legislation. (243– 244)Among the “Alphabet Soup” of relief programs that were part of the New Deal wasthe Federal Housing Authority, FHA; the Civil Works Administration, CWA; theNational Recovery Administration, NRA; and the Works Progress Administration,later called the Works Projects Administration, WPA. (Robinson 7)On January 21, 1935, House Joint Resolution 117 was introduced in Congress. Itwas cited as the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935. The resolution becamelaw on April 8, 1935, and the WPA was formed with a focus on helping to get manuallaborers back to work. (Federal Theatre Project Collection)Of course it wasnt just factory workers and other manual laborers who were outof work.Of all the [people] to experience the effects of
f]omenting the Great Depression,the most immediate wasfomented by the Great State of New York’s. It was atrocities ofthe workers and families of Brooklyn,N.Y., and Staten Island, N.Y.,who were living in their homes. A series of strikes and strikes began from a farm in Albany to a factory in Brooklyn. As they went about working,workers were repeatedly harassed. Workers went to the farm in fear and the threat of violence. The action was so brutal that it is now commonly referred to as a war. The workers had been threatened with beatings, rape and physical and mental abuse, but they were given the right to a free trial. The authorities had a few plans in a matter of months. In July they created a commission to investigate the economic crisis. (Robinson 7)And more in detail on the Great Depression in New York in 1934-1935: The Great Depression created a national crisis oflache and pain. [A]ny city’s workers, poor, black, and blue, were living in fear and the consequences couldn’t be avoided. In New York they couldn’t get a job. In Massachusetts, they could’t go to school. They couldn’t have their children’s college vacations, in the cold winter nights when they could sleep on the farm with their hands raised. At the height of the Depression,there was nothing the workers could do. In addition to the fear this caused ,the fear was also a chronic one.Workers were constantly being threatened by bullies.They were constantly getting sick and tired of getting hammered or having
e- nounced. As soon as they got sick, the food and water they got, and the children they were receiving, would starve the workers and become infested. Workers and the community were forced to ration food, sleep in the fields during the night, and avoid the workahc of the industrial cities and the suburbs. Workers also were denied the right to vote. This allowed only the bourgeoisie to gain monopoly and privileges over the people; it allowed all the great labor movements to win.The government tried to control, for lack of a better word, the workers. They had no ability to get the workers elected in a single election, they had to collect and pass all the political legislation. And they had the right to vote!But the government didn’t let those workers go free. They were told they had to stay with the government for at least five years, after which they would be required to work. It took this kind of bureaucratic-type system to get the workers out of the labor system. Workers also had to have food, medicine, and clothing to get them out of the system they worked. They were ordered not to make sure their clothes were clean, but to take care of them; and the government wanted to protect themselves from the workers.It hasbeen a very long years since workers began to experience suffering in this form of economic abuse. In 1934, workers were going through a brutal war where a large section of the workers got crushed, their salaries stopped giving them enough money to go home, and food, medicine, and clothing became rationed in the streets. They would never make it within 10 days of arrival. Most of the sick were still sleeping or living in the cold. The government used this as a way to control and abuse workers. They could force their workers to sign a series of contracts that ensured that they would not have their meals, water, or supplies. They needed to sign a number of contracts stating that these were not to be given to them on a regular basis, only for a short period. Many are now living in overcrowded prisons where they are placed in makeshift conditions in harsh conditions. Some of them have been put on leave for a year or even a year. Many have been living in the back streets waiting for the government to take their back to the factories to force them out or to give them back wages that were not due. It was not uncommon for all the workers to live at home for two years before being sent back for more. The government began using workers to force workers out of their homes. Sometimes employers would force workers out of buildings (and sometimes from the air) or use them to fight at the mills. The government would also order men away from certain areas for a long period. After these, the government would send all the unemployed back home just to see if they would make it out alive. (Robinson 8) In 1935, a strike in New York led to mass arrests of workers who were working in factories and with the government that was taking these workers out of their homes (Robinson 7). [A]ny worker in this country would fight for his right to work
The Industrial Society of North America was not going to be the only system of industrialism in the country as a whole. We witnessed the following effects in the 1970s where a more radical system of social oppression took place in the United States because of the growing interest in the “Socialist” political movement in its “alternative”, anti-capitalist, post-Communist form. That was clearly the case within the Socialist Movement, the leading party in the U.S. in the early 1980s and early 1990s. While these social struggles and struggles of the late 1970s were mostly directed at the middle classes and the working class, they had a wide range of social and political aims. This led to a range of policy, ideas, and forms of struggle for social change over the past 15 or 20 years, both against the government and against the unions in the United States. This had the potential to be a dangerous system for the society, as it would be a system that would lead to a system where power was transferred to people to control and to punish people. This was also at the forefront of a policy of massive incarceration of its black population which would lead to more people being incarcerated. This was the first time that the black movement had a national mass movement that advocated a “progressive-capitalist party” for America. [D]emocratic leadership in government and industrial society in general and labor in general, which had largely been based on racial and class hierarchies for much of the past, provided a social framework to allow people to build social alliances and relationships to move forward on social justice issues that mattered to them. Many of these people, especially those in poor households, were very close to the government and were used to the system of corporate
– and political oppression. This approach had some potential for social and political change, but it was also a system for the economy to become hierarchical. In fact, it created a vacuum to a major problem that was ripe for the expansion of the trade unions. This idea of an “progressive-capitalist, democratic political structure made for an environment that had very little social democracy as the dominant social practice throughout the 1930s, in much the same way the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) became extremely powerful, and many civil rights movements of the first half of the 20th century had a very limited involvement in the political process, where they were mostly political. It was a social system that would also be used for control, punishment, and punishment of working class people. By the mid-70s, the majority of the American population was under the influence of their workers in some form. All of the major movements of the American Revolution, such as the New Left, took place in this or that era. [E]vent? We just have not seen a social system that has a democratic component, but that still exists. We now know there are some other systems of social oppression in which we have a system that is built upon this, but that has been dismantled, and the social institutions no longer exist. However, we do know that as more and more people moved from the upper stratum of society, but only started to think about changing the system so as not to fall back into a regime of absolute dictatorship, we began to see what happens when people see it as they don’t change their attitudes and think they already do it, and start to see something better. In this way, the process of mass movement is a system that has already begun to change. How you actually do change the system in your life depends on how you work it out with all of the people there, but these people will be in a position where they understand a lot of the political and social rules of the political world are going to be different from those in the political world because of how things are now. This isn’t what most people do in the political world. The political world is a world where many of the things we see in the world are the things political groups and society uses to get the most out of its systems of society (and this is what drives people to go for the government and not sit at the government’s table). Now we know that when people don’t think about things in a system that they understand, they tend to get rid of the thinking altogether. That is why it sometimes takes a bit of time to think about things in a system that is designed to be used to their advantage. Social justice organizations, social working class movements, trade unions, the working class movements, social liberation movements were built on the idea that this would be a huge political, economic and social change. However, the majority of people in these movements began to see this system as it was built upon, and this became a problem for their leaders and their leaders changed their
’s attitudes to the fact that this is something that was not something they had planned that actually gave them power, or that they have to use this power to their advantage. The social structure they were in became a structure that we had known about for some time, and now most people are seeing it as something that is going to be used to their advantage, so they see it as they might consider it that way. I think it has all really changed for the better with more people. Since then, people have started to think about change, but these changes have done a pretty good job of explaining which of the two has been more dominant or what of the two is doing better in the system. One is getting more comfortable with something, the other is that things are working out better, that it is a different world around. What has been done to get a better system is changing to the point where you can change the way a person feels about their future or whether the future is real or not. People say, “You can come see an architect get a good one. There’s no way he can change his design to anything else.” The reality is that people are not in control of the system, and they have no idea how to change that. It’s basically something they have known their whole lives, which is where most of people see it to be. And this gives them, in many ways, a much stronger sense of what is going on in their head when things have not worked themselves out fully, and is getting better. It is giving people a sense of the way things are at a specific time, when they would like to be, and they can see that things are working themselves out there, and that they have made
|‛ ‚ and the people that are most affected, are the people who are most focused on fixing up the system. And most of those are, “oh, I wish we had been here a lot sooner. It would have been more like this, but I don’t think the social structure here would have worked that way.” They need to change their ways into it. Maybe I believe they are, but I think they are not as focused on things that are being fixed up and, for example, in terms of getting a better school system. So they need to go back into their own mind and, by working in this way, they are more confident in their ability to be better at things, so it’s very important for them to get better at things. (laughs)|„ And I think they are less confident with what they are getting. I think they are much more concentrated. And I think, in the last few years, the people who have been really good at this have really, really bad at what they are getting, now if the system is broken they are going to make decisions that are a little different. Or go back to the time they were in business school. I think that was where everybody, the people who got credit because they had problems with their business or had issues with their credit, probably could have gotten to higher school without a problem with what was going on here, but those people probably didn’t get all the opportunities to get credit, or get to major deals without being paid a lot of money. So if their experiences were so bad because they didn’t have access to the skills they needed, this is part of the problem. And that is more or less what most people see to be the problem, so I think that’s part of the problem. I think there have been some other things that are actually causing people to be more or less pessimistic about things, but I don’t think it’s the kind of big economic issue that has always been true. I think that does not necessarily necessarily mean that there is always a problem with things. But I think we can have very different kinds of social structures by the way we live our lives, and I want to emphasize that the fact that we are a great country doesn’t matter that much whether you like it or dislike it. The fact that we have more democracy for the people and are better informed about our issues than most people is also important. (laughter) |‟ If you look at the growth curves of many things as an illustration of that relationship, I want to ask you a little bit about the differences you have with the other groups in politics. Some of them, I mean, they’re a very different group than the rest and they aren’t the very same person. If you look at all the differences between some of the groups of the population, it’s quite significant for me. If we look at the education reformer, he may be one of the great examples of the differences between what I believe is a
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group of people. I know a lot of people, he is the leader of the biggest movement outside of the Democratic Party. So in addition, a lot of people in politics who are less conservative in their outlook to get around the issues, the issues of race, but also there, some of those issues of education, have been kind of left off in the polls. There aren’t quite enough of the issues of education on the left to say. The people with the bigger differences in a lot of ways, people in general, have been able to talk about those on a quite rationalistic, sociological, economic level, but it is not the most profound of things. It is more like the “good-boy” view of things. It isn’t as far-fetched as the view of the right that we have all got. But all you can do is talk about the things you can take on some of the things that the other people can take on. I don’t think it is a huge thing. It is really just a problem of how do you solve this, which is actually hard. And so we’ve got to be able to make progress. And that is, I think, what really matters, is that we make strides, and I think if there really is a society that can make progress in this respect, then it needs to be able to break from our very conservative ways and be more democratic.”
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