Struggling over Politics and Culture: Organized Labor and Radio Station WEVD during the 1930s
By the early years of the Great Depression, corporate-controlled national radio networks, Hollywood-centered motion picture producers, and large-circulation daily newspapers appeared to dominate the means of ideological and cultural production in the U.S. Labor, progressive, and radical leaders correctly perceived the mass media as an integral part of the larger social and economic relations of production. Echoing the insights of Karl Marx, they warned of how the nation’s dominant propertied classes would seek to control society’s “governing ideas and motives” by manipulating the mass media to justify, among other things, “great inequalities in wealth in the community.” Edward Nockels of the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL), for example, protested that network radio reinforced the luster of consumption, the holiness of the marketplace, and the infallibility of business. The Socialist Party contended that commercial radio programs were as standardized as anything rolling out of a Ford factory. Nockels described such shows as bland entertainment “when not outright propaganda or delusive special pleading.” Such criticisms foreshadowed the arguments of émigré European intellectuals who, by the late 1930s, would denounce mass culture for its bourgeois “consumerism, intellectual vapidness, and political complacency,” and contend that ruling groups used it “to manipulate, pacify, and control” the general public. In recent decades, historians have come to comprehend popular culture as a complicated arena of social, political, and cultural con ict. One component of this reconceptualization of popular culture has been an emphasis on the active role that workers and working-class organizations themselves played in “consuming” and “producing” cultural goods. Michael Denning has gone the furthest in arguing that the decade of the
Revising labor history for the cold war: The ilgwu and the film, with these hands
‘A New Kind of Entertainment Thrill!’ ‘The powerful . . . personal . . . passionately true story of a man whose heart and hands helped forge a great chapter in our history!’ So read the promotional material for the film, With These Hands, made in 1950 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU). Union President David Dubinsky had pushed for the production of a movie that would recount the history of the union and explain—for members and the general public—the vital services and goals of the trade union movement. The resulting 50-minute film was a historical documentary drama that told the story of the ILGWU through the eyes of a garment worker who applies for benefits under the union’s retirement fund. As he fills out the paperwork, he flashes back 40 years to the union’s early developments: to the ‘great revolt’ of 1910, the infamous Triangle Waist Company factory fire in 1911, the internal battle with Communists during the 1920s, and the dramatic expansion of the union during the New Deal era. The film debuted at the union’s Jubilee Convention held in Atlantic City in May 1950. Soon thereafter it opened at a commercial theater in New York City and later played in Chicago. American audiences subsequently viewed the film in union meeting halls, educational institutions, or on local television stations. ILGWU officials made the film available for showings to foreign trade unionists under the auspices of the Department of State and the U.S. Information Agency. With These Hands was neither the first nor the last film produced by American labor unions in the post-World War II era. But it represented one of organized labor’s most successful efforts, as Elizabeth Fones-Wolf has suggested in a similar context,
Documentary expression and thirties America
"A comprehensive inquiry into the attitudes and ambitions that characterized the documentary impulse of the thirties. The subject is a large one, for it embraces (among much else) radical journalism, academic sociology, the esthetics of photography, Government relief programs, radio broadcasting, the literature of social work, the rhetoric of political persuasion, and the effect of all these on the traditional arts of literature, painting, theater and dance. The great merit of Mr. Stott's study lies precisely in its wide-ranging view of this complex terrain."-Hilton Kramer, "New York Times Book Review" "[Scott] might be called the Aristotle of documentary. No one before him has so comprehensively surveyed the achievement of the 1930s, suggesting what should be admired, what condemned, and why; no one else has so persuasively furnished an aesthetic for judging the form."-"Times Literary Supplement"