Popular and Culture, World War Broadway, II

This chapter looks at the operations of popular culture during the war, the rise of socially conscious theater in the 1930s, which established the aesthetic and ideological contexts in which theater about the war was produced, the economics and audiences for Broadway theater, and the cultural place of theater in American life in the 1930s and 1940s. The theater of the 1930s was unusually politically conscious, primarily due to the Great Depression, which engendered heightened awareness of class divisions and the distribution of wealth. This social consciousness led to the rise of theater groups like the Theater Guild, the Group Theater, and the Federal Theater Project, which often expressed anti-Nazi or antifascist views.

Empire on the World Stage

This chapter begins with a scene from George White's 1936 “Scandals,” reprised in the 1937 film “You Can't Have Everything,” that featured the dance team known as Tip, Tap, and Toe as Haile Selassie and two of his army's soldiers. Many reviews considered this scene the best one of White's Broadway musical revue, and a photograph from this scene was even included in the cover story of the January 6, 1936 issue of Time magazine, a profile of Haile Selassie declaring him the magazine's “Man of the Year.” With hints of so-called “Ethiopian minstrelsy,” the image of Selassie in the public eye was an odd amalgam of ancient solemnity and slick modernity. Literary and journalistic accounts of Selassie depicted a leader who evinced an attraction to technology and modernization that was undermined by Ethiopian culture and landscape deemed somehow averse to modern life. The chapter also addresses the theatrical representations of Ethiopia with Arthur Arent's censored 1936 Federal Theater Project Ethiopia, which was generically categorized as a “living newspaper,” and an important turn-of-the-century libretto, starring blackface performers Bert Williams and George Walker.

Gerrard, Saida (1913–2005)

Toronto-born Saida Gerrard was one of the first artists to import modern dance to Canada following study in the United States. Her early training included character dancing and Dalcroze eurhythmics in Toronto, and in 1931 she moved to New York City to train at the newly opened Mary Wigman School, where she studied with Hanya Holm and Fe Alf. She later continued her training at the Martha Graham School and danced with Charles Weidman through the Federal Theater Project. Gerrard eventually settled in California where she continued to teach, choreograph, and perform. From 1932 to 1936 Gerrard returned to Toronto for personal reasons and opened The Studio of Modern Dance, teaching adaptations of exercises in absolute dance (Ausdruckstanz) learned at the Wigman School. Her influence is seen through to the professionalization of modern dance in Toronto in the 1960s. Gerrard’s professional career blossomed during her return to Toronto. She performed her own work before crowds as large as 8,000 with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, exposing many to modern dance for the first time. Her article/manifesto "The Dance" explains the artistic and philosophical impetus behind the developing art form. She eventually returned to New York where there was an infrastructure to support a professional dance career, which was not available in Canada at the time.

Miller, Arthur (1915–2005)

With a writing career stretching over six decades, including fiction, memoirs, and journals, as well as over two dozen plays, Arthur Miller’s contributions to American and world literature are significant. However, they are nowhere so strongly felt as in the field of drama, where his groundbreaking, now seminal play Death of a Salesman (1949) had a profound impact, both stylistically and philosophically, on the future of American modernist theatre. Born in New York into a recently immigrant Jewish family who were beginning to live the American dream of success, Miller soon tasted the bitterness of loss as the Great Depression hit and destroyed his father’s prosperous clothing business. This event, later followed by the atrocities of the Holocaust, would strongly influence Miller’s modernist outlook on humanity as deeply flawed, though not without the possibility of redemption if attitudes could be changed. He spent his life trying to change those attitudes through his art. Enthusiastically embracing socialist principles that in the late 1930s seemed to offer a kinder future, he attended the University of Michigan as an undergraduate, winning several prizes for playwriting. After graduation, he joined the Federal Theater Project to work on radio drama shortly before it was closed down. He continued to write radio plays that ran from conventional patriotic war sagas to the more quirky The Pussycat and the Plumber Who Was a Man (1940)—a comic exposé of political corruption. In 1940 he married his college girlfriend, Mary Slattery, with whom he would have two children, Jane and Robert.

Hallie Flanagan and the federal theater project: a critical undoing of management history

Purpose This paper aims to accomplish two things: to build on current research which interrogates the role of management history in the neglect of women leaders and labor programs and to draw attention to Hallie Flanagan and the Federal Theater Project and their lost contributions to management and organizational studies. Design/methodology/approach This paper adopts a feminist poststructural lens fused with critical discourse analysis to capture the role of discourses in concealing a more fragmented view of history. Findings The findings are openly discursive and aim to disrupt current knowledge and thinking in the practice of making history. The paper calls for an undoing of history and an examination of the powerful forces, which result in a gendered and limited understanding of the past. Originality/value The objective of this paper is to help scholarship continue to transform management and organizational studies and management history and to raise the profile of remarkable leaders, like Flanagan and similarly remarkable programs like the Federal Theater Project. Flanagan managed arguably the most ambitious and novel labor program under the New Deal, which resulted in an average of 10,000 workers in the arts being employed over four years, in a project which engaged audiences of over 30,000,000 Americans.