Thursdays Till Nine: Left-wing Unions on the Stage

Abstract

This was not a one-off, but was one of thousands of plays written and sponsored by American unions, and performed by American union members. One quote explains the union movement’s support of drama: “In the case of the individual, culture may be just personal pleasure and enjoyment. But when groups, social classes, the people, are involved, culture is a tool. It serves them to strengthen the base and to extend the scope of their organisation.” The American union movement’s use of theater has a history of over a hundred years. In the past two decades, the traditional concerns of labor historians—studies of industrial action, trade unions, and working-class struggles—have been widened to include a rich array of artistic and intellectual themes, and this has served to extend the boundaries of labor history into cognate fields of inquiry, including cultural and artistic studies. A notable example is Michael Denning’s masterly 2010 work The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. Whilst this new agenda has brought life to studies of various types of culture, scholarship on union theater as a component of the culture of labor has been thin on the ground. Until recent years, single studies of the more popular union productions have emerged, such as the well-known Pins and Needles, a play by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILWGU) that reached Broadway. Scholars have also studied the broad area of American workers’ and left-wing theater, as well as the short-lived Federal Theater Project, which sometimes intersected with union culture. This is despite the fact that