Abstract
While Robert Edmond Jones’s design for The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife looms large over American theatre history, one of his earlier designs arguably occupies a larger place in American cultural history. Before his Broadway debut, Jones designed the Paterson Strike Pageant (1913), a performance including many Greenwich Village (Village) artists and sponsored by the International Workers of the World (IWW). Working in collaboration, artists and union organizers held the event in New York’s Madison Square Garden (Garden) to bring attention to the strike by silk mill workers in Paterson, New Jersey. Jones not only designed the large-scale scenery for the pageant, but also the publicity image printed on posters and programs, a forceful symbol of worker solidarity (see fig. 3.1). Later adopted by the IWW to publicize subsequent events, the image became an icon of the US labor movement and its struggle to secure workers’ rights during the early twentieth century.
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Notes
Patricia Hills, Modern Art in the USA: Issues and Controversies of the 20th Century (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2001), 4–5.
Jacqueline Jones, A Social History of the Laboring Classes: From Colonial Times to the Present (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1999), 175.
Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996), xix–xx.
Jan Cohen-Cruz, Local Acts: Community-BasedPerformance in the United States (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 1–2.
Orville K. Larson, for example, writes that the communist John Reed “conscripted” his friend Bobby after finding him sleeping on a park bench, insinuating that the former took advantage of Jones’s poverty and political naïveté. “Robert Edmond Jones, Gordon Craig, and Mabel Dodge,” Theatre Research International 3, no. 2 (1978): 126.
Dana Sue McDermott notes that the designer “was never known to be involved in political activity at any other time,” characterizing his contribution as merely a favor to his friends Reed and Dodge. “The Apprenticeship of Robert Edmond Jones,” Theatre Survey 29, no. 2 (1988): 201.
See Arthur Feinsod’s discussion of Jones’s contributions to the Washington Square Players and Provincetown Players in The Simple Stage: Its Origins in the Modern American Theatre (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992), 143–44.
See Brenda Murphy’s The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Robert Karoly Sarlos’s Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982).
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Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), 41.
George Chauncey writes that the neighborhood was called the “Ninth Ward” by the Italian immigrants who inhabited it at the turn of the century and only became known as the Village after the “self-styled bohemian ‘Villagers’ who moved there.” Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of a Gay Male World 1890–1940 (New York: Basic, 1994), 228.
Joyce L. Kornbluh, ed., Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1964), 199.
Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories: The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan, ed. Lois Palken Rudnick (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 188.
Linda Nochlin, “The Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913,” in Theatre for Working Class Audiences in the United States, 1830–1980, eds. Bruce A. McConachie and Daniel Friedman (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985), 88.
Anne Hurber Tripp, The IWW and the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 141.
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“The World’s Greatest Labor Play,” in “Paterson Strike Pageant,” ed. Brooks McNamara, The Drama Review 15, no. 3 (1971): 67.
Allen Churchill, The Improper Bohemians: A Re-creation of Greenwich Village in Its Heyday (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1959), 80.
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Scott M. Cutlip, Public Relations History: From the 17th to the 20th Century (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995), 187.
Steve Golin, The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike 1913 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1988), 161.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography, My First Life (1906–1926) (New York: International Publishers, 1973), 169.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “The Truth About the Paterson Strike,” address, New York Civic Club Forum, January 31, 1914, reprinted in The Drama Review 15, no. 3 (1971), 70.
Carole Klein, Aline (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 62.
Linda J. Tomko, Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890–1920 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 85.
John P. Harrington, The Life of the Neighborhood Playhouse on Grand Street (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 120.
Pamela Cobrin, From Winning the Vote to Directing on Broadway: The Emergence of Women on the New York Stage, 1880–1927 (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2009), 132.
See Cheryl Black’s chapter “Designing Women” in her book The Women of Provincetown, 1915–1922 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2002).
Irene Lewisohn, “The Playhouse as Laboratory,” The Settlement Journal (March-April 1915): 14.
Don Stowell, “Unionzation of the Stage Designer—Male and Female,” Theatre Design and Technology 38, no. 10 (1978): 8.
Suzanne Stutman, ed., My Other Loneliness: Letters of Thomas Wolfe and Aline Bernstein (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 61–64.
Mike A. Barton, “Aline Bernstein: A History and Evaluation,” PhD diss., Indiana University, 1971, 15.
Elmer Rice, Minority Report: An Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 328.
Scott Miller’s Rebels with Applause: Broadway’s Groundbreaking Musicals (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2001).
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Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 20.
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Arthur Arent, “The Technique of the Living Newspaper,” Theatre Arts 22, no. 11 (November 1938): 821.
Barry B. Witham, “The Economic Structure of the Federal Theatre Project,” in The American Stage: Social and Economic Issues from the Colonial Period to the Present, eds. Ron Engle and Tice L. Miller (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 201.
Jerry Leon Davis, “Howard Bay, Scene Designer,” PhD diss., University of Kansas, 1968, 193.
Howard Bay, “Testimony of Howard Bay, Accompanied by His Counsel, Ephraim London,” Before the Subcomm. on Un-American Activities, 83rd Cong. (January 18, 1954).
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© 2012 Christin Essin
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Essin, C. (2012). The Designer as Activist. In: Stage Designers in Early Twentieth-Century America. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137108395_4
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