Waiting for Lefty Play Guide

Lorem Ipsum Dolor Spring 2012

The play and the playwright

Clifford Odets………………2 The Group Theatre………...4 The New Deal, The WPA and The Federal Theatre Project…………...5 The Living Newspaper….....6 Response to Lefty………......7

Unions and strikes

Unions…………………….10 Taxis in New York……….12 The New York Taxi Strike of 1934…………...……..13 Strikes in America………..14

Historical context

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Communism in America....16 Hoover vs. F.D.R……..… .17 The Bronx, NY……...…....18 World Events…………….. 19 Script References……….....23 Songs in Lefty…………….. 26

play Guide created by Kelli Marino, dramaturg


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Clifford Odets was born to a working-class family in 1906. Raised in the Bronx, New York, Odets left school at the age of fourteen and pursued an artistic career, much to the chagrin of his father who wanted his son to continue in the family printing business. Young Odets worked as an actor and writer in vaudeville, radio and stage. With the Group Theatre, a socialist and leftist ensemble of artists, Odets first achieved fame as a playwright with his 1935 short play, Waiting for Lefty. Arguably based on the forty-day taxi strike of 40,000 employees, Waiting for Lefty was bold in its simplicity – it was banned in seven cities and circulated under the radar in the Communist Party, of which Odets had been a member. He continued writing until his death with varying success for New York and Hollywood with plays like Awake and Sing, Till the Day I Die, Paradise Lost, and the screenplay, The General Died at Dawn. Odets’ plays are notable for their Depression-era, working-class characters in search of a dream, working to fight against the oppressive injustices existing in their world. His characters are raw and strong, and his language, theatrically biting. Odets stated that his plays are concerned with “the struggle not to have life nullified by circumstances, false values, anything.” In his own way, as a proletariat playwright, he was looking to inspire hope in a desperate time.

Clifford Odets July 18, 1906 Clifford Odets born (prematurely) to Pearl Geisinger Odets and Louis Odets at 207 George Street, Philadelphia.

1908-1916 Family makes three moves; to the Bronx, New York; to Philadelphia; and back to New York. Sister Genevieve born 1910; sister Florence, 1916.

1921-1923 Enters Morris High School; wins first place in declamation contest; acts in schools plays. Leaves school in 1923.

1924-1929 Member of Drawing Room Players; becomes "The Rover Reciter"; acts in Harry Kemp's Poet's Theatre; "youngest drama critic in New York" (Walter Winchell); first disc jockey on radio (WBNY); also recites on various other New York and Philadelphia stations; writes radio play, At the Water-Line, produced by two radio stations in New York and one in Philadelphia. Joins Mae Desmond Players, also acts with Union City Stock Company. Presumably marries Roberta (surname unknown), who allegedly shoots their child, Joan, and commits suicide.

1929-1930 Understudies Spencer Tracy in Broadway production of Conflict; an extra with Theatre Guild touring company. Juvenile lead in Theatre Guild production of Midnight. Early meetings of Group Theatre.

1931 Group Theatre officially formed; Odets invited to be a charter member. Writes plays, 910 Eden

Street and Victory (unpublished).

1932 Understudies Luther Adler in John Howard Lawson's Success Story. Starts writing plays: I Got the Blues, to become Awake and Sing!. Directs and acts in Precedent in Philadelphia.

1933 Has lead in They All Come to Moscow. Second act of Awake and Sing! presented by Group Theatre at Green Mansions, New York (summer camp). Has part in Sidney Kingsley's Men in White.

1934 Commences writing Paradise Lost. Writes one-act play, Waiting for Lefty, in three nights during Group Theatre rehearsals of another play in Boston. Waiting for Lefty wins New Theatre magazine play contest. Awake and Sing! accepted for production by Group Theatre.

1935 January: Waiting for Lefty presented at benefit performance for New Theatre magazine. February: Awake and Sing! Opens at Belasco Theatre. Odets writes Till the Day I Die. March: Waiting for Lefty and Till the Day I Die open as double bill at Longacre Theatre. Waiting for Lefty awarded George Pierce Baker Drama Cup, Yale. April: Publication of Three Plays by Clifford Odets by Covici-Friede. May: Death of mother, Pearl Geisinger Odets. Odets writes monologue, I Can't Sleep (published in New Theatre, February 1936). July: To Cuba with protest group--arrested and deported. December: Paradise Lost opens at Longacre Theatre.

Timeline from Margaret Brenman-Gibson’s Clifford Odets: American Playwright

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1936 Odets to Hollywood; writes screenplay The General Died at Dawn; meets Luise Rainer; commences play The Silent Partner; returns to New York.

1937 Odets and Luise Rainer married in Los Angeles, January 8. Odets writes several screenplays (unproduced). Returns to New York. Writes Golden Boy; opens at Belasco Theatre in November.

1938 New Yorker profile, January 28; Odets commences new play, Rocket to the Moon; to London for opening of Golden Boy; separation and reconciliation from Luise Rainer; Rocket to the Moon opens in November at Belasco Theatre; Time cover story, December 5.

1939 Odets and Luise Rainer separate. Traveling in Cuba and Mexico; working on The Silent Partner (one scene published in New Theatre and Film, March 1937). Publication of Six Plays of Clifford Odets by Random House. Commences new play, Night Music.

1940 Meets Bette Grayson, whom he will later marry. Opening of Night Music at Broadhurst Theatre in February; later writes screenplay in Hollywood. Keeps a daily journal during entire year; commences a new play, Trio, to become Clash by Night.

1941 Finishes first draft of Clash by Night in January; however, most of the year spent rewriting and seeking backing for the play. Odets' withdrawal of this play

from Group Theatre participation marks final dissolution of the Group. After a two-month road tour, Clash by Night opens at the Belasco Theater on December 27.

1942 To Hollywood to write screenplay for Warner Bros. on life of George Gershwin; the Odets screenplay was tabled, but was later revised and used in a film entitled Humoresque. Returns to New York City, and adapts The Russian People by Simonoff, for the stage. The play was produced by the Theatre Guild.

1943 Works on adaptation of Franz Werfel's Jacobowsky and the Colonel, to be produced as a play and later as a movie. Marries Bette Grayson on May 14. To Hollywood to write screenplay None But the Lonely Heart for RKO Pictures, based on the novel by Richard Llewellyn, and subsequently to direct the film.

1944 -1948 Writes screenplay of Deadline at Dawn, based on novel Welcome to the City by William Irish, to be directed by Harold Clurman. Continues living in Hollywood, writing screenplays. For RKO Pictures: Sister Carrie (shelved); The Greatest Gift (after many revisions by various writers, produced as It's a Wonderful Life); Sister Kenny and Notorious (revised further by other writers). For Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: The Whispering Cup, based on Mabel Seeley's novel (shelved); and an original screenplay, April Shower (never produced). Daughter, Nora, born April 18, 1945, and son, Walt Whitman, born February 4, 1947. In October 1947 is named by House Un-American Activities Committee as one of seventy-nine "active in Communist work in film colony."

Clifford Odets continued In December, Odets attacks the Thomas committee in a letter published in Time magazine. Returns to New York City. Writes article for New York Times, "On Returning Home" (April 25, 1948).

1948 -1954 Living in New York City. The Big Knife opens at National Theatre on February 24, 1949; The Country Girl, starring Uta Hagen and Paul Kelly, opens at the Lyceum Theatre on November 10, 1950; The Flowering Peach opens at the Belasco on December 28, 1954. Bette Grayson Odets obtains a divorce in November 1951; dies February 1954. Odets is questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee in May 1952.

1955-1963 To Hollywood with two children to write screenplay for Columbia Studios, Joseph and His Brethren (shelved). For Hecht-Hill-Lancaster: revises screenplay Sweet Smell of Success. For Jerry Walk at 20th Century-Fox writes original screenplay and directs Story on Page One (1958-59), Wild in the Country (1960). For Columbia Studios (1961) works on revision of Walk on the Wild Side, from the Nelson Algren novel. Receives gold medal award (1961) from American Academy of Arts and Letters. Commences revisions of Golden Boy for a musical to star Sammy Davis, Jr. (1962-63). As story editor for NBC-TV dramatic series, "The Richard Boone Show" (1962-63), writes three teleplays and supervises development of story material until death, on August 14, 1963, of cancer.

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The Group Theatre

The Group Theatre was founded in 1931 by Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, people who had been given “leaves of absence” from The Guild Theatre. Their ensemble approach to work, inspired by the Moscow Art Theatre, meant that there were no cast bios in the program, and actors were listed alphabetically. They worked diligently in interviews to never talk about oneself, but rather the entire Group. It was disbanded in 1941 due to policy disagreements. Its influence continued, however, through the work of many former members, several of whom were instrumental in popularizing the Stanislavsky system in the United States.

The Group Theatre developed the plays of Clifford Odets, Sidney Kingsley’s first play, Men in White (1933), Saroyan’s first play, My Heart’s in the Highlands (1939), as well as various plays by Paul Green, John Howard Lawson, Irwin Shaw and Robert Audrey. Among the actors, directors, producers, designers, teachers trained or brought into prominence by the Group Theatre were: Stella Adler, Luther Adler, Boris Aronson, Harold Clurman, Lee Cob, Cheryl Crawford, Morris Carnovsky, John Garfield, Elia Kazan, Mordecai Gorelik, Robert Lewis, Lee Strasberg, and Franchot Tone.

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The new deal, the works progress administration & the federal theatre project

The New Deal focused on the creation of roads, bridges, dams and buildings, promoted American culture (especially through the arts and Federal One), and created the Works Progress Administration, helmed by Harry Hopkins. It worked to build schools, parks, hospitals, playgrounds, courthouses and athletic fields. The New Deal organized the Resettlement Administration, later the Farm Security Administration. It celebrated the American worker, ennobling the talents and diversity of the population. The Works Progress Administration employed 8.5 million Americans, and spent $10.5 billion.

"The Federal Theatre is a pioneer theatre because it is part of a tremendous re-thinking, re-building, and re-dreaming of America....These activities represent a new frontier in America, a frontier against disease, dirt, poverty, illiteracy, unemployment and despair, and at the same time against selfishness, special privilege and social apathy. And in the struggle for a better life, our actors know what they are talking about; the Federal Theatre being their theatre, becomes not merely a decoration but a vital force in our democracy." -- Hallie Flanagan Davis.

In 1935, in direct response to the United States’s Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched the Relief Appropriations Act—the New Deal—and what can be considered the nation’s largest employment agency, the Works Progress Administration. The WPA covered programs from highways to reforestation, but its most innovative was a collective named Federal One, which employed some 40,000 artists in the Federal Arts, Writers’, Music and Theatre Projects.

Educator and playwright Hallie Flanagan was named to direct the Federal Theatre Project, by far the most controversial of the government-funded arts programs. More than 10,000 theatre professionals became associated with this effort that would take productions to the people and tackle social and economic themes of the times.

The Federal Theatre Project reenergized a nation, especially the American working class, many of whose members had believed that theatre was to be enjoyed only by the upper classes. But it also met its adversaries in government officials who thought money was being needlessly spent, and that too many of the plays were injecting communist and socialist agendas into the nation’s awareness.

By the end of the Federal Theatre Project in 1939, the project had produced more than 10,000 jobs, created 1,200 new plays, generated 100 new playwrights, and reached audiences in forty states. Most important of the many thousands of people who saw a government-funded Federal Theatre Project production, between 65 and 80 percent saw the shows free of charge.

"In a changing world, a world of experiment, the stage too must experiment--with ideas, with the psychological relationship of men and women, with color and light--the theatre must grow up." – Hallie Flanagan in response to Roosevelt's experimental approach to public policy.

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‘Agit-Prop’ Style This piece is from a longer document presented at the British Workers’ Theatre Movement’s 1932 National Conference.

This form, which is known in Germany as the ‘Agit-Prop’ style needs no elaborate stage, but an open platform. No scenery that is not easily carried about by hand; no make-up; and a minimum of costume. The propertyless class is developing the ‘property’-less theatre.

The Workers’ Theatre goes out to the workers wherever they may be, at meetings, on the street corners, in the parks; and now has the immediate task facing it of taking their performances to where the workers are actually waging the class struggle, at the factories, the labour exchanges, etc.

There are other advantages of the ‘Agit-Prop’ style:

1. Its flexible, and usually short, form is quickly adapted to meet local and topical situations.

2. It uses the class experience of the worker-player, which convinces a worker audience much more than the studied effects of the professional actor.

3. The direct approach to the audience, together with the fact that their performance is surrounded by and part of the crowd, is of great value in making the worker audience feel that the players are part of them.

The living newspaper Out of the Federal Theatre Project emerged a new movement in America called the Living Newspaper. Inspired by Germany’s Bertolt Brecht and by Erwin Piscator’s Agit-Prop (agitation + propaganda) movement, and sponsored by the New York Newspaper Guild, the Living Newspaper created dramatic documentary pieces from news reports, human-interest stories, editorials and cartoons. These performances illuminated current social problems and controversial issues on the stage in an exciting and often politically charged fashion; artists inserted social commentary to both provoke and educate their audiences.

Flanagan’s argument for the importance of these projects was that “theatre was more than a private enterprise, that it was also a public interest which, properly fostered, might come to be a social and educative force.” Through the Living Newspaper, the story of the ordinary life of the ordinary man—the “little man” as he was commonly called—became art, capable of touching every American through entertainment. It was up to audience members to take what they saw on stage and, in turn, investigate their own existence in relation to the larger world and, it was hoped, to develop the courage to have a voice.

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Theatre Becomes Life

Lefty was one of several works scheduled as part of an evening organized by the League of Workers Theatres to aid New Theatre. […] When the lights went up on the bare stage, with Morris Carnovsky as the corrupt union leader directly addressing the audience as if they were his rebellious membership, no one expected anything except another casual piece of agitprop thrown together for a good cause.

Within moments everyone in the theatre knew better. As the actors began to speak Odets’ stingingly authentic dialogue – so radically different from either the affected patter of the Broadway show-shops or the wooden sloganeering of agitprop-audience members found themselves swept up in a drama they seemed to know intimately, from deep inside themselves, even though they’d never heard a word of it before.

They gasped when Ruth Nelson as the angry wife said, “Sure, I see it in the papers, how good orange juice is for kids…Betty never saw a grapefruit. I took her to the store last week and she pointed to a stack of grapefruits, ‘What’s that!’ she said.” They cheered when Tony Kraber, playing the scientist who refuses to develop poison gas, punches his evil boss (Carnovsky again) in the nose. They murmured sadly when the young lovers Phoebe Brand and Julie Garfield were forced by poverty to part. They jeered at Russell Collins as a company spy and applauded when Gadget Kazan exposed him as “my own lousy brother!” They laughed sympathetically at Bill Challee as a desperate young actor too ignorant to know what a

manifesto is and took Paula Miller to their hearts as the tough producer’s secretary who gives him a dollar to buy some food and a copy of The Communist Manifesto, telling him, “Come out in the light, Comrade.” When Luther Adler, playing a young doctor fired because he is a Jew, closed his scene with the communist salute, more than one person answered him from the auditorium with a clenched fist thrust in the air. It was beyond politics. They used the CP salute as Odets defined it in Lefty’s last scene: “the good old uppercut to the chin,” a rejection of all the forces that hurt people and kept them down, a commitment to fight for a better life.

To Kazan, seated in the auditorium waiting for his cue, the response was “like a roar from sixteen-inchers broadside, audience to players, a way of shouting, ‘More! More! More! Go on! Go on! Go on!’” Swept up by the passion they had aroused, the actors were no longer acting. “They were being carried along as if by an exultancy of communication such as I have never witnessed in the theatre before,” wrote Clurman. The twenty-eight year-old playwright was awed by the emotional conflagration he’d ignited. “You saw theatre in its truest essence,” Odets remembered years later. “Suddenly the proscenium arch of the theatre vanished and the audience and actors were at one with each other.”

As the play mounted to its climax, the intensity of feeling on-and offstage became almost unbearable. When Bobby Lewis dashed in with the news that Lefty has been murdered, no one needed to take

Response to Lefty

from Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America by Wendy SMith

Odets Responds

“What had happened was you were seeing theatre at its most primitive. You were seeing it at its grandest and most meaningful. Because what you were seeing that night in the theatre, when Waiting for Lefty went on, and after each scene the audience stopped the show, they got up, they began to cheer and weep. To my intense embarrassment. With my friend Kazan sitting next to me—we were one of the voices in the audience. What happened there was, as I say . . . the audience became the actors on the stage and the actors on the stage became the audience, the identification was so at one that you saw for the first time theatre as a cultural force, as perhaps in the history of the American theatre it has not been seen…There have been many great opening nights in the American theatre, but not where the opening and the performing of the play were a cultural fact. You saw a unified cultural unit functioning. From stage to theatre and back and forth so that the identity was so complete, there was such an at-oneness with audiences and actors, that the actors didn’t know whether they were acting, and the audience got up and shouted “Bravo! Bravo!” and I was thinking, “Sh, let the play continue,” but I found myself up on my feet shouting, “Bravo, Luther! Bravo, Luther!” In fact, I was part of the audience. I forgot I wrote the play, forgot I was in the play, and many of the actors forgot. The proscenium arch disappeared. That’s the touchstone, the key phrase: the proscenium arch disappeared.”

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an exercise to find the appropriate anger—the actors exploded with it, the audience seethed with it. They exulted as Joe Bromberg, playing the union rebel Agate Keller, tore himself loose from the hired gunmen and declared their independence: “HELLO AMERICA! HELLO. WE’RE STORMBIRDS OF THE WORKING-CLASS…And when we die, they’ll know what we did to make a new world!”

“Well, what’s the answer?” Bromberg demanded. In the audience, as planned, Odets, Herbie Ratner, and Lewis Leverett began shouting “Strike!” “LOUDER!” Bromberg yelled—and, one by one, from all over the auditorium, individual voices called out, “Strike!” Suddenly the entire audience, some 1,400 people, rose and roared, “Strike! Strike!” The actors froze, stunned by the spontaneous demonstration. The militant cries gave way to cheers and applause so thunderous the cast was kept onstage for forty-five minutes to receive the crowd’s inflamed tribute. “When they couldn’t applaud any more, they stomped their feet,” said Ruth Nelson. “All I could think was, ‘My God, they’re going to bring the balcony down!’ It was terrible, it was so beautiful.” The actors were all weeping. When Clurman persuaded Odets to take a bow, the audience stormed the stage and embraced the man who had voiced their hopes and fears and deepest aspirations. “That was the dream all of us in the Group Theatre had,” said Kazan, “to be embraced that way by a theatre full of people.”

“The audience wouldn’t leave,” said Cheryl Crawford. “I was afraid they were going to tear the seats out and throw them on the stage.” When the astounded stage manager finally rang down the curtain, they remained out front, talking and

arguing about the events in a play that seemed as real to them as their own lives. Actors and playwright were overwhelmed and a little frightened by the near-religious communion they had just shared. Odets retreated to a backstage bathroom; his excitement was so intense he threw up, then burst into tears. The dressing room was hushed as the actors removed their make-up. They emerged onto 14th Street to find clusters of people still gathered outside, laughing, crying, hugging each other, clapping their hands. “There was almost a sense of pure madness about it,” Morris Carnovsky felt.

No one wanted to go home. Sleep was out of the question. Most of the Group went to an all-night restaurant—no one can remember now which one—and tried to eat. Odets sat alone: pale, withdrawn, not talking at all. Everyone was too dazed to have much to say. It was dawn before they could bring themselves to separate, to admit that the miracle was over.

There had never been a night like it in the American theatre. The Group became a vessel into which poured the rage, frustration, desperation, and finally exultation, not just of an angry young man named Clifford Odets but of every single person at the Civic Rep who longed for an end to personal and political depression, who needed someone to tell them they could stand up and change their lives. The Group had experienced the “unity of background, of feeling, of thought, of need” Clurman had said was the basis for a true theatre: during his inspiring talks at Brookfield, at the thrilling final run-through of Connelly, in some of the best performances of Success Story. Never before had they shared it with an entire theatre full of people, never before had it seemed as though the lines they spoke hadn’t been written

but rather emerged from a collective heart and soul. Theatre and life merged, as Clurman had promised they could.

Waiting for Lefty changed people’s idea of what theatre was. More than an evening’s entertainment, more even than a serious examination of the contemporary scene by a thoughtful writer, theatre at its best could be a living embodiment of communal values and aspirations. Theatre mattered, art had meaning, culture wasn’t the property of an affluent, educated few but an expression of the joys and sorrows of the human condition as they could be understood and shared by everyone. In a fragmented society of wounded individuals, theatre could bring people together and make them whole. After such a revelation, there was no going back for the Group. They would seek the communion created by Lefty in everything they did. Sometimes they found it, sometimes they didn’t, but they could no longer be satisfied by anything less.

Only one bourgeois newspaper was fortunate enough to have an eyewitness account of Lefty’s historic premier. The Morning Telegraph’s second-string critic, Henry Senber, made a habit of checking out offbeat theatrical events like the New Theatre Nights in search of stores, and on Sunday night, January 6, he was handed the story of a lifetime. The Telegraph ran his review on Tuesday, scooping every other paper in New York. After describing the “earthquakes of applause” that greeted the performance, he told his readers, “One left the theatre Sunday evening with two convictions. The first was that one had witnessed an event of historical importance in what is

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academically referred to as the drama of the contemporary American scene. The other was that a dramatist to be reckoned with had been discovered….It has not been announced just where and when Waiting for Lefty will be presented again, but you can rest assured that it will be---soon. A play like this does not die.”

Indeed it did not. In the days that followed the offices of the League of Workers Theatres and the Group were deluged with calls from workers theatre groups across the country begging for permission to produce Lefty. Moved by the national hunger for the play he had tossed off in three days, Odets allowed amateur groups to use it free of charge and reduced his royalties to semiprofessional organizations in the interests of giving as many people as possible a chance to see it. By June, Lefty had been produced in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Duluth, Harlem (a black production directed by Rose McClendon), Hollywood, Lansing, Madison, Milwaukee, Morristown,

Newark, New Haven, Northampton, Peoria, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Providence, Rochester, Syracuse, and Washington. It won prizes all over: New Theatre’s fifty-dollar award for best short revolutionary play, the Samuel French Trophy in Pittsburgh, the George Pierce Baker Cup at the Yale Drama Tournament.

It was the most widely performed play in America—and the most widely banned. Authorities were outraged by Lefty’s openly communist stance, although that was hardly the primary reason for its wild success. Their usual excuse for forbidding its production was the frank dialogue. (“We have seldom listened to viler language than is here thundered into the face of the public which pays to be amused,” spluttered the New York Enquirer.) In Boston, four members of the New Theatre Group were arrested while presenting Lefty and charged with using profanity; two were eventually fined. Although the John Reed Club’s Unity Players won first prize with it at Yale, the production was banned from a New Haven high school auditorium by the School Building

Committee of the Board of Education, which found it unfit to be seen in public schools. The New Haven police then turned around and allowed the use of another local school building for a fascist meeting. In Newark, where the city council had voted a grant for a Nazi song festival, the mayor banned Lefty on the grounds that it inflamed political passions. When the theatre group went ahead anyway, the police provoked violence by driving the actors from the stage in front of a large and angry crowd; it took police from three precincts to subdue the subsequent riot, and nine people were arrested. Lefty was an event as much as a play.

A scene from the Broadway production of waiting for lefty, 1935

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National Labor Relations Act

Also known as the Wagner Act. The Wagner Act stipulated that workers had the right to collective bargaining, outlawed company unions, listed unfair labor practices, and provided governmental processes for the selection of employee bargaining representatives. Because it prohibited employers from interfering with, restraining, or coercing employees in the exercise of their rights to form unions, to bargain collectively, and to engage in other concerted activities, it also protected employees' right to strike. It prohibited discrimination in employment to encourage or discourage membership in a labor organization but permitted "closed shops" established by collective-bargaining agreements between employers and unions with exclusive bargaining rights. It protected employees who file charges or give testimony under the act from being fired or otherwise discriminated against. It also made it unlawful for an employer to refuse to bargain collectively with the representative chosen by a majority of employees in a group appropriate for collective bargaining. Membership in the AFL had fallen from a high of 5 million in 1919 to less than 3 million in 1933.

Unions

Company Spies Big-business employed labor and company spies to destroy the workers' unions from the inside. See Studs Terkel's Hard Times for personal accounts.

“It is now beyond partisan controversy that it is a fundamental individual right of a worker to associate himself with other workers and to bargain collectively with his employer.” FDR–Address at San Diego Exposition, October 2, 1935

President Franklin Roosevelt insisted that “Meticulous attention should be paid to the special relations and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government….The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” F.D.R. believed that “[a] strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to obstruct the operations of government until their demands are satisfied. Such action looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it is unthinkable and intolerable.” – From the Washington Examiner article Worth recalling: FDR was no fan of public employee unions by Matthew Continetti

American Federation of Labor

Under the leadership of Samuel Gompers (1886–1894, 1896–1924), the AFL developed into the most politically and organizationally conservative trade union center in the industrial world. Gompers had been schooled in the Marxist tradition. He was committed to the working-class.

Gompers and most other officers therefore characterized AFL practices as hostility to socialists, indifference or outright opposition to social reform, and a commitment to an organization largely representing skilled, male craftsmen. AFL affiliates, were seamen, brewers, miners, and metal workers. Although the United Mine Workers (UMW) and the International Longshoremen's Association represented thousands of African Americans, many in the AFL leadership thought of blacks, Mexicans, Asians, and other immigrants as a vast lumpen proletariat, dangerous and unorganizable. --From Dictionary of American History

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collective bargaining A method of negotiations between employers and employees (or union represetntatives). The aim is to set wage scales, working hours, overtime, and rights to participate in company affairs.


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Unions continued Typically, minority employees paid exorbitant union dues—if they were accepted for membership at all. In those rare instances when African Americans were successfully admitted to a union (even skilled labor unions), they were generally relegated to menial tasks. African Americans were “last to be hired, first to be laid off, with least savings from lowest wages, and discriminated against in relief as everywhere else,” according to the labor writer Len De Caux. The situation was not much better for women, black or white. In 1933 some three million women worked. Advocates of their inclusion in unions argued that, if provided the opportunity to join a union, they would. As were African American workers, women were typically relegated to semiskilled jobs and, during strikes, were often targets of company agents, who pressured them to end the strike and to break worker morale. The AFL simply refused to organize women, believing that they “obtained jobs just for ‘spending money,’” according to the labor historian Philip S. Foner. “Soon they married and dropped out of the industry. Why, then, should the trade unions tax themselves and expend undue energy attempting to organize women?” The answer, as the CIO found, was that women were themselves tireless organizers. They were enthusiastic volunteers in times of crisis and stood up to physical abuse on the picket lines.

--From Encyclopedia of Labor History Worldwide

Working Women During the 1930s 11 million women joined the workforce. 3/10 women were employed in some sort of domestic service, while the remaining 7/10 were nurses, teachers and librarians.

Women entered the workforce during the Depression at a rate nearly twice that of men, and employers were happy to hire them at reduced rates and longer hours.

Some women were socially criticized for taking jobs away from men, especially if they were married.

Many women were also prominent in the communist party and labor unions, sometimes taking full control of strike organization.

Everybody has to have something they’re really sold on. Some people go to church. If I’d had anything I’m really sold on, it’s the UAW [United Automobile Workers Union]. I started working at Fisher Body in 1917 and retired in ’62, with 45 and 8/10 years service. Until 1933, no unions, no rules: you were at the mercy of your foreman. I could go to work at seven o’clock in the morning, and at seven fifteen the boss’d come around and say: you could come back at three o’clock. If he preferred somebody else over you, that person would be called back earlier, though you were there longer. I left the plant so many nights hostile. If I were a fella big and strong, I think I’d a picked a fight with the first fella I met on the corner. It was lousy. Degraded. You might call yourself a man if you was on the street, but as soon as you went through the door and punched your card, you was nothing more or less than a robot. Do this, go there, do that. You’d do it.

---Bob Stinson in Studs Terkel’s Hard Times

Working before unions

If you wanted to go to the toilet, you had to have permission of the foreman. He had to find a substitute for you on the assembly line […]. If he couldn’t right away, you held it.

If you didn’t punch that clock at 8:00, if you came in at 8:02, you were docked one hour’s pay. There wasn’t any excuse. If you did this two or three times, you got fired.

I made the mistake of telling the foreman I had enrolled at Northwestern University night school. He said to me, ‘Mr. Ford isn’t paying people to go to college. You’re through.”

---Mike Widman in Studs Terkel’s Hard Times

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1890 By the end of the 19th century, automobiles began to appear on city streets throughout the country. Although these electric-powered cabs were slightly impractical (with batteries weighing upwards of eight hundred pounds), by 1899 there were nearly one hundred of them on New York's streets. On September 13th of that year, a sixty-eight year-old man named Henry H. Bliss was helping a friend from a street car when a taxi swerved and hit him, making Bliss the first American to die in an automobile accident.

1900 Eight years later, the New York Taxicab Company made the bold decision to import six hundred cars from France. Powered by gasoline, these red-and-green-paneled cars were the first in a new generation of city transportation. With the accessibility of gas-powered cars and the introduction of the taximeter (used to gauge miles traveled and time elapsed) the taxi industry flourished. By the teens, there were half a dozen large fleets, and thousands of independent owner/drivers. However, at fifty cents a mile, cabs were still geared toward the relatively wealthy.

1920 By the 1920s the largest fleets were primarily owned by the major automobile manufacturers like General Motors and the Ford Motor Company. By far the biggest and most successful was the Checkered Cab Manufacturing Company. Founded by Morris Markin, a young Russian immigrant, Checker Cabs produced the large yellow and black taxis that would become one of the most recognizable symbols of mid-20th century urban life.

1930 As companies like Checker grew, so did the need for enforceable regulations. Cabbies were often the victims of unfair labor practices, and passengers the victims of price gouging. Neither the police nor the Taxicab Commission could temper the corruption. With the increase in drivers during the Depression, cabbies found themselves fighting for every fare. General unrest over driving conditions and salaries was exacerbated by news that the Checker Cab Company had been bribing the then Mayor, James J. Walker. Tensions grew and in 1934 more than 2,000 taxi drivers took over Times Square in strike.

1937 In response to this unrest Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia signed the Haas Act of 1937, which introduced official taxi licenses and the medallion system that remains in place to this day. Medallions are small plates attached to the hood of a taxi, certifying it for passenger pick-up throughout the city. Providing a limited number of medallions, the government could keep a closer watch on the quality and quantity of taxis in the city. While attempting to assure better wages for the drivers, many of whom at the time were Irish, Italian, or Jewish immigrants, the new medallion system gave increased power to a handful of large fleet owners.

Taxis from the PBS Special Taxi Dreams Facts In 1913 a taxi ride was fixed at $.50 per mile. In 1923 there were 16,000 taxicabs. In 1925 the first woman became a taxi driver in New York. The average weekly pay for a taxicab driver in 1929 was $26. In 1933 there were 19,000 taxicabs in New York. In 1933 there were 75,000 taxicab drivers in New York. The average weekly pay for a taxicab driver in 1933 was $15. In March of 1934 2,000 striking taxi drivers seized Times Square. The average number of rides per 12-hour shift is 30. The average fare is approximately $6. The average number of miles driven per 12-hour shift is 180. The total number of consumer complaints against yellow cab drivers in the year 2000 was approximately 13,000.

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The 1934 New York Taxicab Strike An excerpt from Gerald Weales Clifford Odets: Playwright

When Waiting for Lefty was published in New Theatre it carried the subtitle, “A Play in Six Scenes, Based on the New York City Taxi Strike of February, 1934.” It has been customary in general comments on the play to repeat the easy label, one that gives a suggestion of historicity without the need to be specific. The 1934 taxi strike however, was a somewhat complicated one, likely to place Odets’s play in an oblique light.

It began on February 2 in a quarrel over the dispensation of a five-cent fare tax which had been declared unconstitutional. Fiorello LaGuardia, then mayor, had suggested that the five-cent charge remain and be given to the drivers whose tips had dropped after the tax was put on; the companies suggested a 60-40 split in their favor. Within the week (February 8), the drivers settled at 50-50, but the strike was far from over. The taxi men had no organization when they went out but from the strike itself emerged the Taxi Drivers Union of Greater New York, a confederation of drivers’ groups from the various boroughs. A second demand, for the recognition of the union, was not granted in the first settlement. It was this demand that triggered the second strike, March 10, although the ostensible cause was the firing of a driver by the Parmelee System.

By this time, there was a fight within the TDU between the men who had run the February strike and the new leaders, of which Samuel Orner, head of the Manhattan union, and the organizer, Joseph Gilbert, were the most important. Burnshaw’s review of Lefty reports that, at the second performance, Gilbert stepped from the wings “to say that just such a meeting as Odets presents took place last March when the members of the Union met in the Bronx and overwhelmingly voted to strike.” Not that Sam and Joe, as they were called in New Masses (line drawings of them accompany Joseph North’s “Taxi Strike” in the April 3 issue), ever had the full support that a theatre “STRIKE” cry implies. For the moment dominant, they called a general strike on March 17, but it was not nearly so effective as the February strike had been. The situation was further complicated by the formation of a Parmelee

company union (headed by “Mr. Irving ‘Rat’ Robbins,” as North called him) and, as the trouble spread, similar organizations in the other companies. Violence began, according to the New York Times, when one thousand striking drivers marched through midtown, wrecking cabs that were still in service. While LaGuardia’s office and the Regional Labor Board tried to work out a plebiscite on union representation (which no one—the companies, their house unions, the TDU—seemed to want), the violence continued.

There were charges of gangsterism on both sides. LaGuardia warned the strikers that there were gangsters among them and implied that the companies were using “Chicago strong-arm men.” Orner had earlier denied that he was using “guerillas.” “The drivers are pretty good with their fists and know how to use them, I have found. We don’t need any gangster to help us.” North, celebrating the ingenuity of the striking hackies, described “the Education Committee…which is a guerilla picket line well adapted to the needs of a big city strike of this sort…the scab finds his car doorless or even in flames.”

One of North’s hackies said that the scabbing taxis were driven by “Chicago gunmen wit’ soft hats,” and there was apparently some truth to the charge. In I Break Strikes!, Edward Levinson mentions casually, as though everyone knew, that Max Sherwood’s Eagle Industrial Associates—one of whose hoods was called Taxi Murray—helped break the 1934 taxi strike.

The taxi strike was broken. The TDU accepted defeat. Orner tried to put a brave mouth on it, promising a stronger union to come, but he and Gilbert, among others, were expelled from TDU, accused of “conducting the strike for the benefit of the Communist party, rather than for the union membership and of having caused the loss of the strike by this action.” This thumbnail history of the taxi strike indicates the distance between the simple, black-and-white world of the propaganda play and the gray reality which it presumable reflects and certainly serves.

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The Textile strike In 1934, there was a 22-day national textile strike involving 400,000 workers from Alabama to Maine. The textiles were primarily cotton and woolen. During the 1920s, the mills were over-producing and coming into conflict with their overseas competition. To get the most out of their workers, companies called for an increase in looms, shorter breaks and lower wages. F.D.R.'s National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 called for business owners to regulate and control working conditions and pay; business owners did not live up to these standards. By 1934, the textile

workers were fed up and organized with the United Textile Workers to enforce the regulations by the NIRA. But the board of the NIRA was populated with textile business owners, so when the Union took up with the NIRA, union supporters lost their jobs. While some mills in the north made a few changes to their systems, and the southern mills made none at all, this strike ultimately failed the textile workers.

Strikes! In America

Beginning on May 9, 1934, the strike by the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) developed into a citywide general strike and soon closed ports along the Pacific Coast. Harry Bridges led the ILA. By the end of May almost all maritime workers had stopped working. After much violence and a failed attempt at mediation by the Roosevelt administration, the strike reached a peak.

In the San Francisco strike police, strikebreakers, and workers viciously battled with baseball bats, bricks, and tear gas on July 3, and the violence culminated on July 5, or "Bloody Thursday." The battle lasted the entire day, many bystanders were injured. In the end the poorly armed workers could not withstand the power of the police, and by nightfall

two workers were dead and sixty-seven others were seriously injured. The governor of California, Frank E. Merriam, sent in the National Guard to restore order in the city. The two victims, Howard Sperry and Nick Bordoise, became martyrs for labor's cause, and their funerals drew more than ten thousand workers.

On July 16, sixty-three unions voted to walk off in support of the

The san Francisco tie-up

longshoremen. For several days over 130,000 workers in San Francisco engaged in a general strike, closing down much of the city. The seventy-nine-day strike ended on July 27. The strike was a victory for Bridges and the ILA; the longshoremen were awarded wage increases and a thirty-hour workweek.

For more information, see the American Decades film Bloody Thursday.

For more information, see The American Documentary film The Uprising of ’34.

General Strike A concerted strike by workers in all or most of the important trades and occupations of a country with a view to securing some common object by the stoppage of business. -- OED

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The Steel Boys

Strikes! In America

Odets biographer Gerald Weales cites The Steel Strike Collapses, by Louis Adamic. In the book, Adamic explains that "the conservative labor leaders, in order to forestall the Communists and the radicals, started an organization drive of their own and helped out a possibility of action, only to take shelter in William Green's call for mediation and to kill the expected strike."

Referring to the Great Steel Strike of 1919. The Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers (AA) had lost much of its strength prior to World War I. But the War and inflation also allowed for employees to demand an increase in their wages. With the help of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) federal unions began recruiting the local unions like the AA, but problems with jurisdiction and retrieving funds soon arose. In Pittsburgh, steel companies began harassing and interfering with union meetings, and steel workers who were members of the unions (especially those with large families) became targets for dismissal by their companies, thus stifling the unions' strength and actions. When the AFL met in Pittsburgh in May 1919 to find a solution for their unanswered demands, they refused to let the workers strike, but on September 22, 1919 the strike commenced. Steel companies began targeting their immigrant workers (with help from the post-war Red Scare) and soon, the strikers were not as favored by the American public. As the strike went on, steel companies employed unskilled African-American and Mexican-American workers, spread rumors through company spies to the picketers, and soon after the strikers were fighting amongst themselves. The strike collapsed on January 8, 1920. Many workers were back at the jobs by the end of the year; the American workers had lost to the big companies.

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In the United States, Communism began in 1919 when a left faction of the Socialist Party, dissatisfied with their inability to gain control at a Chicago convention, left the Party and formed the Communist Labor Party (10,000 members) headed by John Reed and Benjamin Gitlow.

Also at the Chicago Socialist convention another faction left the Party to form the Communist Party of America (24,000 members).

The Communist Party viewed the American Federation of Labor as an enemy and wanted nothing to do with industrial strikes; they were focused on bringing down the larger opponent.

In 1921, under the stress of the United States government’s persecution, the CPA and the CLP lost many members, but joined forces to create underground American and foreign newspapers and to appoint organizers.

The Industrial Workers of the World, an international union that united all industries into one single union shifted their ideals to those of the current Communist Party. In December of 1921, the Workers Party of America (the legal party) was created. It was later renamed to the Workers (Communist) Party of America in 1925, and in 1929 renamed the Communist Party United States of America.

During this time, the CPUSA began aiding in strikes in mining and textile unions, though they

lost most of them.

The rise of Stalin’s power in Russia soon came to the United States. At first the CPUSA denounced President Roosevelt and named him as a “social fascist,” but once the New Deal took shape in 1935, the CPUSA (now with more than 26,000 members) joined it forces, emphasizing alliances with reformers and other leftists. The passing of the National Industrial Recovery Act was also a catalyst for the CPUSA as workers ran to unions in hopes of representation. The act gave employers equal labor demands, was progressive with preventing strikes, and aimed to protect the rights of workers.

The CPUSA played secret roles in many organizations and trade unions such as the American League for Peace and Democracy, the National Negro Congress, the American Writers Union and the America Youth Congress.

In 1936, the Congress of Industrial Organizations hired more than fifty communist organizers and brought several communist-led unions into the CIO.

Before the beginning of WWII in 1939, the CPUSA had 66,000 members mostly made up of immigrants of the impoverished working class.

Communism in the u.s.a.

Communism

1. A theory that advocates the abolition of private ownership, all property being vested in the community, and the organization of labor for the common benefit of all members; a system of social organization in which this theory is put into practice.

2. A political doctrine or movement based on revolutionary Marxism, seeking the overthrow of capitalism through a proletarian revolution, the social ownership of the means of production, and the creation of a classless society. -- OED

The Communist Salute The red salute is the act of raising one arm in the air with a clenched fist; images suggest that the thumb overlays the fingers.

The red scare

1917 Bolshevik Russian Revolution: Soviet workers overthrew the Provisional government.

Afraid of an American version of the Russian Revolution, President Wilson signed the Sedition Act of 1918, which forbade all peoples to speak undesirably of the United States government, the flag or its armed forces, in hopes of keeping Americanism and safety in tact during WWI.

In 1919 a plot to mail 36 bombs to prominent U.S. citizens was uncovered. On June 2, 1919, in eight cities, eight bombs placed by anarchists simultaneously exploded.

Any strike or uprising, especially in industry work, was seen as a radical threat.

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Hoover vs. Roosevelt The differences in their administrations

Herbert Hoover Franklin D. Roosevelt

Republican; elected to President in 1928. Democrat; elected to President in 1932. Worked his way through life; a self-made man. Born on the sunnier side of the street.

Did not want people to rely on the government for jobs; it could cause problems in government

spending too.

Believed employing people could solve the depression. Wanted the government to take an

active role in helping America. Cut taxes in the depression. Decreased tariffs. Refused to give out welfare. Wished to aid people through direct

government funds. Encouraged people to return to spending and

businesses to keep expanding. Re-opened the closed banks of New York and

Chicago. Wanted people, themselves, to heal the

economy. Put people to work, no matter the job or its

importance. Refused the bonuses due to Veterans. Ensured public works, welfare, and increase the

peoples' faith in banks. Encouraged private charities to help ease the

depression. Non-intervention; Good Neighbor Policy.

Stock Market Crash of 1929; deregulation of business.

New Deal; federal mobilization.

Farmers' Relief: to avoid mortgage foreclosures and stop overproducing.

Aided farmers, helped the unemployed, and repealed Prohibition in America.

Hoovervilles. As government expenditures increased, so did the public debt.

"Hoover would loan money to farmers to keep their mules alive, but wouldn't loan money to keep their children alive. This was perfectly right within the framework of classical thinking. If an individual couldn't get enough to eat, it was because he wasn’t on the ball. It was his responsibility." -- Gardiner C. Means in Studs Terkel's Hard Times

"The New Deal said: Anybody who is unemployed isn’t necessarily unemployed because he's shiftless. Roosevelt was building up new ideas in a milieu of old ideas. His early campaign speeches were pure Old Deal. He called for a balanced budget. When he got to office, the whole banking system collapsed. It called for a New Deal." -- Gardiner C. Means in Studs Terkel's Hard Times

"In the last days of Hoover, it was very gloomy. The financial collapse had just dampened everything. They didn't know which way to turn. Mr. Hoover, as a man, took a good deal of this blame personally upon himself." -‐-‐David Kennedy in Studs Terkel's Hard Times.

"The first New Deal was a radical departure from American life. It put more power in the central government. At the time, it was necessary, especially in the farm area of our economy. Left to itself, farming was in a state of anarchy. Beyond that, there was no need to reorganize in industry. We merely needed to get the farms prospering again and create a market for the industrial products in the cities." -- Raymond Moley in Studs Terkel's Hard Times

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In 1904, the first subway connecting the Bronx to Manhattan was built, and hundreds of thousands during the first third of the twentieth century left Manhattan for spacious new apartments in the Bronx. Yugoslavians, Armenians, and Italians were among those who made the move, but the largest group was Jews from central and eastern Europe. Many apartment buildings and commercial buildings were soon erected. In 1923, Yankee Stadium was opened at 161st Street and River Avenue as the home of the New York Yankees, who became known at the "Bronx Bombers" because of the large number of home runs hit in the following decades by such players as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Reggie Jackson.

The onset of the Depression ended the period of tremendous growth that had begun in 1888, but privately financed apartment buildings continued to be constructed. About 49% of the inhabitants in 1930 were Jews, most of whom worked in Manhattan. By 1934, the housing in the borough had many more amenities than that of the other boroughs: almost 99% of residences had private bathrooms, about 95% central heating, more than 97% hot water, and more than 48% mechanical refrigeration. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company undertook the largest housing development of the time, Parkchester. The New Deal secured public funds to repair streets and build the county jail and the central post office, as well as neighborhood parks.

The Bronx, NY

Crotona Park is a New York park in the South Bronx. The appointment of Robert Moses as the head of the newly unified New York City Parks Department in 1934 led to an explosion in park development. The federal Works Progress Administration funded a $10 million 330-foot long, 120-foot wide swimming pool (it holds 925,000 gallons of water), a 39,000-gallon wading pool, a 450,000-gallon diving pool, and a bathhouse—designed by Aymar Embury II—that is an art deco impression of a French castle. The Crotona Park pool was one of ten

Olympic-size pools opened in 1936 by Moses and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. In the 1930s, Works Progress Administration employees also built the present boathouse on the east side of the pond and entirely rebuilt the area around the lake. Other projects during this time included the construction or renovation of five baseball diamonds, twenty tennis courts, twenty-six handball courts, nine playgrounds, four comfort stations, and picnic and sitting areas. Today, this area is almost 50/50 African-American and Latino.

Crotona park

Life in 1935 $1.00 in 2011 has the same buying power as $0.06 in 1935. A new car cost $625. (1/3 of a yearly salary)

A gallon of gas cost 10 cents.

A loaf of bread cost 8 cents.

1 pound of hamburger cost 11 cents.

A new home cost $3,450.

To rent a home, monthly, cost $22.

The average annual salary was $1,600.

from the Crotona Park Urban Forest Management Plan

from WNET, NY Public Media

174th Street is located in the West Farms neighborhood of the Bronx. Historically, the population in this neighborhood lives at or below the poverty line and receives some sort of public assistance.

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1919 Prohibition added to the U.S. Constitution. Race Riots in Chicago. New York dockworkers go on strike. First experiments with short-wave radios. "Black Sox" bribery scandal rocks baseball. President Woodrow Wilson receives Nobel Peace Prize. Treaty of Versailles signed. General strike in Berlin. Wave of strikes begin in Britain by miners. Irish Republican Army founded in Ireland. 1920 Democratic convention nominates James M. Cox for the President with Franklin Delano Roosevelt as his running mate. Vsevolod E. Meyerhold opens his own theatre in Moscow. Eugene O'Neill: The Emperor Jones and Beyond the Horizon (Pulitzer Prize for drama). American surgeon Harvey Cushing develops new techniques for brain surgery. "Babe" Ruth sold by the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees for $125,000. Coal production in US: 645 million tons. Licensed motor vehicles in US: 8,890,000. World population: 1,811,000,000. New York population: 5,620,000. End of Russian Civil War. Gandhi emerges as India's leader in its struggle for independence. Swiss psychiatrist Herman Rorschach devises the "inkblot" test. German astronomer Max Wolf shows the true structure of the Milky Way for the first time. Unemployment insurance introduced in Great Britain and Austria. Result of U.S. Census population: 117,823,165.

1921 Warren G. Harding inaugurated as 29th President of the United States. Luigi Pirandello: Six Characters in search of an Author. Bernard Shaw: Heartbreak House. First radio broadcast of a baseball game made by Graham McNamee from the Polo Grounds in New York. Division of Ireland. U.S.S.R. population: 136 million. U.S. population: 107 million. Gasoline production in U.S.: 472 million barrels. Edvard Munch: The Kiss Pablo Picasso: Three Musicians Die Walkure becomes the first Wagnerian opera to be staged at the Paris Opera since before WWI. Ku Klux Klan activities become violent throughout southern U.S. 1922 U.S. and Japanese naval agreement signed. Gandhi sentenced to six years imprisonment for civil disobedience. Mussolini's March on Rome Mussolini forms Fascist government. Bertolt Brecht: Baal and Drums at Night. John Galsworthy: The Forsyte Saga. James Joyce: Ulysses, published in Paris; U.S. Post Office burns 500 copies upon arrival in U.S. Trade Labor Union in Britain; outlaws sympathetic strikes and picketing. Stock market "boom" starts in U.S. Emily Post: Etiquette. U.S. Government revenues: $4,919 million.; U.S. Government expenditures: $4,068 million. Soviet states form U.S.S.R. Eugene O'Neill: The Hairy Ape. Stanislavski goes on a tour of Europe with the Moscow Arts Theater. Films: Nosferatu; Last of the Mohicans. Insulin, prepared by Canadian

physicians Banting, Best, and Macleod, is first administered to diabetic patients. 1923 Value of German mark drops to rate of four million to one U.S. dollar. Hitler's coup d'état (the "Beer Hall Putsch") in Munich fails. Wilhelm Marx becomes German chancellor. Elmer Rice: The Adding Machine. Vincent Youmans: No! No! Nanette. Sigmund Freud: The Ego & the Id. End of the Dada Movement. George Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue. Aeroflot, largest airline in the world, founded in the U.S.S.R. First birth-control clinic opens in New York. London dock strike. U.S. President W G. Harding succeeded by Vice President Calvin Coolidge. Martial Law established in Oklahoma to protect people and property from attacks by the Ku Klux Klan. Briton Hadden and Henry R. Luce found the weekly newsmagazine Time. Registered Trade Union membership in U.S.: 3,600,000. 1924 Founder of U.S.S.R., Lenin, dies. Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the U.S. dies. Hitler sentenced to five years imprisonment; released after eight months. First elections in Italy under Fascist methods; 65% favor Mussolini. Ford Motor Company produces 10 millionth car.

World Events: 1919-1939 From A Visual History of the World and The Timetables of History

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Pan-American Treaty signed to prevent conflicts between nations. U.S. bill limits immigrants; excludes all Japanese. Calvin Coolidge wins U.S. Presidential election. J. Edgar Hoover is appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation (renamed the FBI in 1935). Eugene O'Neill: Desire Under the Elms. K.S. Stanislavsky: My Life in Art. Gandhi fasts for 21 days in protest against the political and religious feuds of the Hindus and Moslems in India. Films: The Ten Commandments; The Navigator. Pablo Picasso's abstract period. Insecticides used for the first time. The first Winter Olympics held at Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, France: 8 sports, 16 events, 293 participants, and 16 nations. U.S. coal production: 485 million tons. 2.5 million radios in use in U.S. 1925 Unemployment insurance enacted in Great Britain. Hitler organizes the Nazi Party (27,000 members) and publishes volume one of Mein Kampf. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby. The New Yorker magazine begins. Films: The Gold Rush; Lady Windermere's Fan. Jazz, Chicago style, arrives in Europe. John T. Scopes, schoolteacher, goes on trial for violating Tennessee law that prohibits teaching of the theory of evolution; defended by Clarence Darrow. Scopes is convicted, the acquitted on technicality. The Charleston becomes a fashionable dance. The Chrysler Corporation founded. Female fashions feature straight dresses without waistline; skirts above the knees. U.S. Railroad mileage: 261,000.

1926 Queen Elizabeth II of England is born. General strike called in Britain. Films: Metropolis; Ben Hur; Don Juan. Kodak produces the first 16mm movie film. U.S.S.R. population: 148 million. U.S. population: 115 million. Petroleum production in U.S.: 771 million barrels. 1927 "Black Friday" in German--the economic system collapses. Socialist riot in Vienna; general strike takes place following acquittal of Nazis for political murder. Trotsky expelled from Communist party. Jean Cocteau: Oedipe-Roi. Upton Sinclair: Oil! Films: The Jazz Singer (the first talkie); King of Kings; Wedding March. Edward Hopper: Manhattan Bridge. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II: Show Boat. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart: A Connecticut Yankee. Kurt Weill: Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny. First exhibition for Space Flights in Moscow. Harlem Globetrotters basketball team organized by Abe Saperstein. Babe Ruth hits sixty home runs for the New York Yankees. Slow fox trot is the fashionable dance. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences founded. Popular Songs: Ol' Man River; My Blue Heaven; Blue Skies. 15 millionth Model "T" Ford produced. Holland Tunnel opens as first vehicular tunnel linking New York and New Jersey. 1928 Herbert Hoover elected U.S. President. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur: The Front Page.

Eugene O'Neill: Strange Interlude (Pulitzer Prize for drama). Virginia Woolf: Orlando. Films: The first Mickey Mouse films; The Passion of Joan of Arc. Stalin forces Farm Collective. George Gershwin: An American in Paris. J.L. Baird demonstrates color T.V. Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin. Olympic Games in Amsterdam. Amelia Earhart is first woman to fly across the Atlantic. 1929 Trotsky expelled from U.S.S.R. Herbert C. Hoover inaugurated as 31st president of the U.S. Hitler appoints Himmler "Reichsfuhrer S.S." Jean Cocteau: Les Enfant terribles. Elmer Rice: Street Scene. Thomas Wolfe: Look Homeward, Angel. Talkies kill silent films. Museum of Modern Art opens in New York with exhibition of works by Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat, and Van Gogh. Construction begins on Empire State Building in New York. The term "apartheid" used for the first time. "Black Friday" in New York; U.S. Stock Exchange collapses on October 28; world economic crisis begins; U.S. securities lose $26 billion in value. The Bell Laboratories in the U.S. experiment with color television. Percentage of worldwide industrial production: U.S.: 34%; Great Britain: 10.4%; Germany: 10.3%; U.S.S.R.: 9.9%; France: 5%; Italy: 2.5%. St. Valentine's Day Massacre: six notorious Chicago gangsters machine-gunned to death by a rival gang. Cole Porter: Fifty Million

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Frenchmen. Film: Singin' in the Rain. Astronomer Edward Hubble measures large red shifts in the spectra of extragalactic nebulae. 1930 Heinrich Bruning forms right-wing government in Germany. Boston bans all works of Leon Trotsky. The Society for Space Travel successfully tests a liquid fuel engine; referred to as jet propulsion. Noel Coward: Private Lives. Dashiell Hammett: The Maltese Falcon. Films: All Quiet on the Western Front; Anna Christie; Murder; Hell's Angels. Comic strips grow in popularity in the U.S. ("Blondie" series). Photoflash bulb comes into use. U.S. population: 122 million. Production of an American industrial worker per working hour: 80 cwt. (per acre) Planet of Pluto discovered by Clyde Tombaugh. Weekly movie visitors in the U.S.: 115 million. Congress creates Veterans Administration. Popular Songs: Georgia on My Mind; I Got Rhythm. South African microbiologist Max Theiler develops a yellow fever vaccine. German boxer Max Schmeling names world heavyweight boxing champion. 1931 Collapse of Austrian Credit-Anstalt leads to financial crisis in Central Europe. U.S. President Hoover suggests a one-year moratorium for reparations and war debts. British naval force at Invergordon mutinies over pay cuts. William Faulkner: Sanctuary. Eugene O'Neill: Mourning Becomes Electra. Films: Frankenstein; Flowers and Trees (Disney's first color film). George Gershwin, George S.

Kaufman, and Morrie Ryskind: Of Thee I Sing (Pulitzer Prize). Star-Spangled Banner, words by Francis Scott Key, music from Anacreon in Heaven, officially becomes U.S. national anthem. Thomas Alva Edison dies. Mrs. Hattie T. Caraway (Democrat, Arkansas) becomes the first woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate. World Car production: 36 million. Unemployment in U.S.: 4-5 million. Unemployment in Germany: 5.66 million. Henri Matisse: The Dance Building of Rockefeller Center, New York, begins. Empire State Building is completed. George Washington Bridge in New Jersey completed. 1932 Indian Congress declared illegal; Gandhi arrested. U.S. Federal Reserve System reorganized. Presidential elections in Germany: Hindenburg--18 million; Hitler--11 million; Communists--5 million. Hindenburg elected in second election. Hitler refuses Hindenburg's offer to become Vice Chancellor. Franklin D. Roosevelt wins U.S. Presidential election in Democratic landslide. Famine in U.S.S.R. In May and June, 17,000 ex-servicemen arrive in Washington, D.C., to urge passage of law permitting cashing of their bonus certificates; bill defeated by Senate; government offers expenses for return home, but troops led by General Douglas MacArthur finally drive out last 2,000. Reconstruction Finance Corporation established by Congress to lend money for rebuilding of U.S. economy, provides $1.5 billion by year's end. First unemployment insurance enacted in Wisconsin. Erskine Caldwell: Tobacco Road.

Aldous Huxley: A Brave New World. The Folger Library opens in Washington. Films: Grand Hotel; The Shanghai Express; Red-Haired Alibi (Shirley Temple's first film). James Chadwick discovers the neutron. Amelia Earhart is first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. "Social Realism" movement in Russia. Expression "New Deal," used in Roosevelt's speech accepting the Democratic nomination for President. Olympic Games in Los Angeles, California. Winter Olympic Games in Lake Placid, New York. Unemployment in U.S.: 13.7 million. Unemployment in Great Britain: 2.8 million. Trade Union membership in Great Britain: 4.44 million. Florenz Ziegfeld, American theatrical producer, dies. 1933 Adolf Hitler appointed German Chancellor. 20th Amendment to U.S. Constitution: presidential inauguration on January 20. F.D.R. inaugurated as 32nd President of the United States. American banks close March 6-9 by presidential order. The first concentration camps erected by the Nazis in Germany. Federico Garcia Lorca: The Blood Wedding. George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein found the School of American Ballet. Philo Farnsworth develops electronic television. Nobel Prize for Physics: American Thomas Hunt

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Morgan for his discovery of the heredity transmission functions of chromosomes. Approximately 60,000 artists (authors, actors, painters, musicians) emigrate from Germany. First baseball all-star game played. Boycott of Jews begins in Germany. German labor unions suppressed. U.S. Congress passes Agricultural Adjustment and Federal Emergency Relief Acts. Chicago World's Fair opens. U.S. National Industrial Recovery Act & Farm Credit Act made law. Public Works Administration created in U.S. U.S. recognizes U.S.S.R. and resumes trade. Fiorello H. La Guardia elected Mayor of New York City. 1934 U.S. Gold Reserve Act authorizes the president to revalue the dollar. Civil Works Emergency Relief Act passed in U.S. U.S. Congress grants F.D.R. the power to conclude agreements for reducing tariffs. Hitler and Mussolini meet in Venice. U.S.S.R. admitted to League of Nations. Leo Szilard patents the idea of the atomic bomb and had recently proposed the idea of the chain-reaction neutron. Cole Porter: Anything Goes. F.B.I. shoots John Dillinger, "Public Enemy No. 1." 1935 F.D.R. signs Social Security Act. Wealth Tax Act passed in U.S. Clifford Odets: Waiting for Lefty; Paradise Lost; Till the Day I Die. Films: Anna Karenina; David Copperfield; The 39 Steps. Gershwin: Porgy and Bess. Jazz becomes "Swing." Hayden Planetarium opens in

New York City. Radar equipment to detect aircraft built by Robert Watson Watt. Alcoholics Anonymous organized in New York City. 1936 Spanish Civil War beings in July. King George V of England dies. Mussolini and Hitler proclaim Rome--Berlin Axis. F.D.R. reelected President of the U.S. by a landslide. Trotsky exiled from Russia. Kaufman and Hart: You Can't Take it With You. Boulder (Hoover) Dam on Colorado River completed. Dirigible "Hindenburg" lands at Lakehurst, New Jersey after transatlantic flight. Ford Foundation established. Max Schmeling (Germany) defeats Joe Louis (U.S.) in 12 rounds. U.S. population: 127 million. U.S.S.R. population: 173 million. Baseball Hall of Fame is founded at Cooperstown, New York. Floods sweep Johnstown, Pennsylvania. 1937 George VI crowned King of Great Britain; broadcast is first worldwide program heard in the U.S. F.D.R. signs U.S. Neutrality Act. Wall Street stock market decline signals U.S. economic recession. U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of minimum wage for women. U.S. government statistics show that one half-million Americans were involved in sit-down strikes between September 1936 and May 1937. Italy withdraws from the League of Nations. Strike against Republic Steel. John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men. Films: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; Life of Emile Zola; Camille. Insulin used to control diabetes. The first jet-engine built by Frank Whittle.

Lincoln Tunnel provides second major vehicular tunnel between New York and New Jersey. 1938 Hitler appoints himself War Minister. Martin Dies (Democrat, Texas) becomes chairman of newly formed House Un-American Activities Committee of U.S. House of Representatives. Thornton Wilder: Our Town (Pulitzer Prize drama). Orson Welles's radio production of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. Frank Lloyd Wright builds Taliesin West, Phoenix, Arizona. General strike in France. Benny Goodman's band brings new style to jazz music. Lajos Biro (Hungary) invents ballpoint pen. 40-hour work week established in the U.S. 20,000 television sets are in service in New York City. Howard Hughes flies around the world in 3 days, 19 hours, and 17 minutes. 1939 World War II begins. F.D.R. asks Congress for $552 million for defense and demands assurances from Hitler and Mussolini that they will not attack 31 named states. John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath (Pulitzer Prize novel--1940). Igor Sikorsky (Russian-American) constructs first helicopter. Baseball game is first televised in the U.S. Nylon stockings first appear. After 1938 recession, U.S. economy begins to recover and, by autumn, is booming from orders of European countries for arms and war equipment. U.S. Supreme Court rules sit-down strikes are illegal. Films: Gone with the Wind; The Wizard of Oz; Stagecoach.

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"The man in the White House" FDR and the New Deal. See other sections.

"If this was the Hoover regime, would I say don't go out, boys?" See Hoover vs. Roosevelt section

"Not your tintype." Tintype: to put a glossy surface on a print by pressing while wet, on a metal sheet; a photo.

"That Wop's got more guts than a slaughter house." WOP can stand for "Without Papers", or it is slang for an Italian immigrant.

“It's as plain as the nose on Sol Feinberg's face we need a strike." This is a slightly anti-Semitic remark, meant to remind audiences (and the characters in the play) that although people may come from a variety of backgrounds, the purpose for which they are fighting is universal.

"Why, the palookas, we paid three-quarters." "Palookas is another word for a stupid, clumsy, or uncouth person; a lout. The word was popularized by the comic-strip character Joe Palooka, a well-meaning but clumsy prizefighter first drawn by Ham Fisher in 1920, but not regularly published in newspapers until the late 1920s or early 1930s. From the 1930s he was also the subject of a number of films and a television series." – OED

"Tell it to the A & P!” The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company: a supermarket store.

"Roses in Picardy" Written by Frederick Weatherly (a former army officer), “Roses of Picardy” is a World War I ballad.

"You got two blondie kids sleeping in the next room." A Blondie is another word for someone of Irish-English descent.

"But we're stalled like a flivver in the snow." Flivver: a small, inexpensive automobile.

"He's giving your kids that fancy disease called the rickets." Rickets: a child's disease characterized by the softening of the bones due to a lack of vitamin D and other vitamins.

"The Pollacks" A derogatory term for people of Polish descent.

"He's in the Meuse-Argonne Cemetery." Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery and Memorial in France holds 14,246 of World War I's military. It is 150 miles northeast of Paris, France.

Queen Marie Queen Marie of Romania (1875 – 1938): notable for her work in government and her work as a volunteer Red Cross nurse during WWI. It would seem that this reference is noting the famous furniture, tapestries, silverware and jewelry which she kept in her home (and remained with her heart after her death in 1938).

The French and Indian War A war between France and Britain for control of North America (1754–1763); this was part of the Seven Years War (1756–1763) in Europe. England prevailed over France and doubled its North American land, and France lost power in North America, as well as other parts of their global empire.

Pat Rooney Not sure as to which Pat Rooney Odets is referring, because there are two: a father and a son, both of whom were performing at this time. Pat Rooney, Jr. was the son of Broadway's dance legend Pat Rooney. The elder Rooney's signature act was a tap routine set to the song hit "The Daughter of Rosie O'Grady". Rooney trained his son Percy (nicknamed Pat Jr., although he was really Pat III), and father and son danced in vaudeville and films. In 1935, Rooney and son toured in vaudeville with violinist-comedian Herman Timberg and his son. The Timberg and Rooney kids hit it off, and formed their own vaudeville act. They were signed by Educational Pictures for 10 musical-comedy short subjects. Herman Timberg, Jr. quit the series in 1937 to produce stage revues, and later became a character actor as Tim Herbert. Rooney retired to a New Hampshire farm in 1940. -- IMDB

Rosy O'Grady A song written by Maude Nugent in 1896.

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"See what happened when the hacks walked out in Philly three months ago?" Referencing the taxi strike in Philadelphia. Union officials and the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company made an agreement for collective bargaining; 400 drivers were immediately reinstated, and 900 drivers were taken back over a period of time. This was a violent strike, and many taxi cabs were burned in protestation to the working conditions.

"Right now he's working for that Bergman outfit on Columbus Circle who furnishes rats for any outfit in the country before, during, and after strikes."

Edward Levinson’s book I Break Strikes! : The Technique of Pearl L. Bergoff claims Bergoff as a self-styled “King of the Strikebreakers.” “The line in Lefty about ‘that Bergman outfit on Columbus Circle’ is probably a half-remembered reference to Bergoff, who once had offices at 2 Columbus Circle and who would certainly have been one of the villains in any Leftist strike-lore. Bergoff was a detective and industrial spy.”

Columbus Circle is a major landmark in Manhattan. It is located at the intersection of Eighth Avenue, Broadway, Central Park South, and Central Park West, at the southwest corner of Central Park. "Say you had two years with the Group, two with the Guild."

The Guild Theatre: Beginning in 1918, it set out to "civilize" Broadway with highly literate plays from writers such as Shaw, Tolstoy, Strindberg and O'Neill. It

continued with much success through the 1970s by promoting book musicals by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Meredith Willson, and the Gershwins.

For information on the Group Theatre, see earlier section.

"One of the old families of Virginia?" Being part of an Old Family is a reference to the settlers of areas of the United States, who upon arrival, built industries or had plantations. These families became the wealthy elite, but also highly respected because they owned much of the industry in their cities/regions.

"Tank Town stock is different." A small, unimportant town, originally one at which trains stopped to take on water. -- OED

"You try Russia, son. I hear its hot stuff over there." A reference to the Moscow Art Theatre in Russia, whose theatrical styles were the inspiration for The Group Theatre and much of the trends during the 1930s in the dramatic form.

"Tell the nigger boy to send up a bromo seltzer." An effervescent mixture used as a sedative.

The Communist Manifesto In the words of Marx and Engles, the Manifesto is about “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” It calls for class-consciousness. Edna speaks to Joe in a voice reminiscent of the Manifesto: “I don’t care, as long as I can maybe wake you up!” Agate quotes from the last line of the Manifesto: “Workers of the

World Unite!”

“From Genesis to Revelation, Comrade Philips! 'And I saw a new earth and a new heaven; for the first earth and the first heaven were passed away; and there was no more sea.'" From the book of Revelation 21:1 -- The New Heaven and Earth.

"They're doing splendid work in brain surgery these days." The 1930s were the heyday of psychosurgery. In 1935, the first lobotomy was performed with the help of a neurosurgeon. In 1936, George Washington University began a psychosurgery program. Later developments in the 1940s involved the lobotomy procedure done with an ice pick, sans the neurosurgeon.

"Turn your gimlet eyes elsewhere, Doctor." Gimlet: a sharp, piercing glance.

"An old disease, malignant, tumescent." Tumescent: pompous or pretentious.

“But I’m a Jew!” At the beginning of the century, the U.S. was home to nearly one million Jews, and New York held half of them. Between 1900 and 1924, 1.75 million Jews immigrated to the U.S.; by 1930 America’s population was 3.5% Jewish.

During F.D.R.’s first few years in office, his administration upheld the Hoover ban on immigration

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from 1917; the ban stated that immigrants (while capable to work) would not be allowed to enter the country because there were so few jobs, unless the immigrant had a guaranteed job upon arrival. This ban included the Jewish people who were coming under attack as Hitler rose to power during the 1930s. With immigration stunted, American Jews began working on making a life in America, starting families and businesses.

Between the Wars anti-Semitism peaked in America. The Depression continued to bring about feuding over jobs “rightly belonging to Americans”; thus shunning any outsider who would take an American’s job.

Throughout the 1930s, few Jewish immigrants were able to come to America, and it would not be until 1938 when F.D.R. and America would take in more Jewish refugees. Between 1900 and 1940, the following Jewish Americans were employed in U.S. politics.

Cabinet Members or Senior Officials Oscar Straus, Secretary of Commerce and Labor (1906–09) Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury (1934–45) Senators Isidor Rayner (D-MD: 1905–12) Simon Guggenheim (R-CO: 1907–13) Representatives Adolph J. Sabath, (D-IL, 1907–52) Victor L. Berger, (Socialist-WI: 1911–13, 1919, 1923–29) Meyer London, (Socialist-NY: 1915–19, 1921–23)

Emmanuel Celler, (D-NY, 1923–73); long-time Judiciary Committee chairman Florence P. Kahn, (R-CA, 1925–37); first Jewish woman representative

Microbes Bacteria

Saul Ezra Benjamin—“a man who's read Spinoza all his life.” Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza was a Dutch Jewish philosopher during the 1600s. Spinoza was best known for his Ethics (1677), which laid out in geometric form arguments for the existence of an impersonal God, the identity of mind and body, determinism, and a way of overcoming the dominance of the passions and achieving freedom and blessedness. His Theological-Political Treatise (1670) was a landmark in the history of biblical criticism. He was also, in that work, the first major philosopher in the Western tradition to argue for democracy and for freedom of thought and expression. Spinoza completely rejected free will and considered the notions of good and evil as mere fictions of the imagination. He conceived these only in relation to the end, which for him is only the last term of the activity that is developed independently of man's free will.

"I wanted to go to Russia. Last week I was thinking about it--the wonderful opportunity to do good work in their socialized medicine." Socialized Medicine: A means of government funded medical care where recipients pay little or no money for services. It was adopted by the Soviet Union in the 1920s and it provided free health care to all of its citizens. It was initially

very effective, but slowly, the caliber of doctors and capabilities waned.

"On their fat little ass from sitting on cushions and raking in mazuma." Mazuma: Yiddish for money.

"Yep, the old celluloid was makin' the most god-awful stink…" Celluloid: A motion picture film.

Proletariat The working class; people who earn a living through manual labor.

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Rosie O’Grady

My dear little Rose, She's my steady lady, Most ev'ryone knows.

And, when we are married, How happy we'll be;

I love sweet Rosie O'Grady, And Rosie O'Grady loves me.

I never shall forget the day she promised to be mine,

As we sat telling love tales in the golden summer time.

'Twas on her finger that I placed a small engagement ring,

While in the trees, the little birds this song they seemed to sing!

Sweet Rosie O'Grady,

My dear little Rose, She's my steady lady, Most ev'ryone knows.

And, when we are married, How happy we'll be;

I love sweet Rosie O'Grady, And Rosie O'Grady loves me.

Roses in Picardy She is watching by the poplars Colinette with the sea blue eyes

She is watching and longing and waiting Where the long white roadway lies

And a song stirs in the silence As the wind in the boughs above

She listens and starts and trembles 'Tis the first little song of love

Roses are shining in Picardy In the hush of the silver dew

Roses are flowering in Picardy But there's never a rose like you

And the roses will die with the summer time And our roads may be far apart

But there's one rose that dies not in Picardy 'Tis the rose that I keep in my heart

And the years fly on forever

Til the shadows veil their sighs But he loves to hold her little hand

And look in her sea blue eyes. And he sees the rose by the poplars Where they met in the bygone years For the first little song of the roses

Is the last little song she hears

She is watching by the poplars Colinette with the sea blue eyes

She is watching and longing and waiting Where the long white roadway lies

And a song stirs in the silence As the wind in the boughs above

She listens and starts and trembles 'Tis the first little song of love.

Just down around the corner of the street where I reside,

There lives the cutest little girl that I have ever spied;

Her name is Rose O'Grady and, I don't mind telling you,

That she's the sweetest little Rose the garden ever grew.

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Selected Bibliography

Fall 2011

"Bloody Thursday." Bloody Thursday - A Documentary Film.<http://www.bloodythursdayfilm.com/historybloodythu.html>. Brenman-Gibson, Margaret. Clifford Odets, American Playwright: the Years from 1906 to 1940. New York: Atheneum, 1981. Print. Brostrom, Jack, ed. National Geographic Visual History of the World. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2005. Print. “Clifford Odets.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2001. Gale Biography in Context. Web. “Clifford Odets.” Encyclopedia of World Biography. Detroit: Gale, 1998. Gale Biography in Context. Web. “Clifford Odets.” International Dictionary of Theatre. Vol. 2. Gale, 1993. Gale Biography in Context. Web. Clurman, Harold. "Introduction.” Famous American Plays of the 1930s. New York, NY: Dell, 1977. 7-17. Clurman, Harold. The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre & the 30's. New York: Da Capo, 1983. Print. "Crotona Park." New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. Web. <http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/crotonapark/highlights/11153>. Engels, Frederick. "The Communist Manifesto." Marx/Engels Selected Works. By Karl Marx. Vol. 1. Moscow: Progress, 1969. 98-137. Print. Flanagan, Hallie. "Introduction." Federal Theatre Plays. Ed. Pierre De Rohan. New York: Da Capo, 1973. Vii-Xii. Print. "The Great Depression, the 1930s, and the Roosevelt Administration." New Deal Network. Web. <http://newdeal.feri.org/index.htm>. Grun, Bernard, and Werner Stein. The Timetables of History: A Historical Linkage of People and Events. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Print. Guthu, Sarah. "Living Newspapers: One Third of a Nation." University of Washington Departments. 2009. Web. <http://depts.washington.edu/depress/theater_arts_living_newspaper_onethird.shtml>. “Industry and Labor.” American Decades. Ed. Judith S. Baughman, et al. Vol. 4: 1930-1939. Detroit: Gale, 2001. Gale Virtual Reference Library. “The Labor Movement: World War I and Beyond.” American Social Reform Movements Reference Library. Ed Carol Brennan, Kathleen J. Edgar, Judy Galens, and Roger Matuz. Vol 2: Almanac. Detroit: UXL, 2007. P. 219-265. "The Living Newspaper." American Studies at The University of Virginia. Web.

<http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA04/mccain/audiohist/intro.htm>. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto. February 1848. Print. McCarten, John. "Revolution's Number One Boy." The New Yorker 22 Jan. 1938: 21-27. Web. "The New Deal Stage: Selections from The Federal Theatre Project." Memory. The Library of Congress. <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fedtp/fthome.html>. Paulson, Linda D. "Millworkers' Strike." Encyclopedia of Labor History Worldwide. 621-26. Print. "PBS - Taxi Dreams." PBS: Public Broadcasting Service. Web. <http://www.pbs.org/wnet/taxidreams/>. Rathbone, Charles. "Taxis and San Francisco Labor History." Taxi Library. Web. <http://www.taxi-library.org/history.htm>. Smith, Wendy. Real Life Drama: the Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940. New York: Knopf, 1990. Print. “Strikes Against Big Business in the 1930s.” American Decades. Ed. Judith S. Baughman, et al. Vol. 4: 1930-1939. Detroit: Gale, 2001. Gale Virtual Reference Library. "Strike-Breaker Number One." New Deal Network. Web. <http://newdeal.feri.org/nation/na35568.htm>. "Strikers Renew Violence." New York Times 2 Jan. 1934: 12. Print. Taxi Library. Web. <http://www.taxi-library.org/index.htm>. "Taxi of Tomorrow." Taxi of Tomorrow. NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission. Web. <http://www.nyc.gov/html/media/totweb/taxioftomorrow_history.html>. "Taxi Strike Settled in Philadelphia." New York Times 9 Jan. 1934: 8. Print. Terkel, Studs. Hard Times: an Oral History of the Great Depression. New York: New, 1986. Print. "The Uprising of '34 by George Stoney, Judith Helfand and Susanne Rostock | a Presentation of American Documentary Inc. and National Educational Telecommunications Association." American Documentary. Web. <http://www.amdoc.org/projects/truelives/pg_uprising.html>. Weales, Gerald Clifford. "Already the Talk of the Town below the Macy-Gimbel Line." Clifford Odets: Playwright. New York: Pegasus, 1971. 35-55.

Waiting for Lefty Play Guide

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