Culture as strategy: Workers' theatre and the American labor movement in the 1930

This dissertation examines the creation of a shared identity among working women and men in the 1930s. Theatre produced by and for workers, a focal point of the lively culture that developed around the labor movement of those years, reinforced among participants and audience members, the commonality of their experiences and the importance of unions in improving their working and living conditions. This was especially important in the 1930s as the labor movement attracted women and men of different ethnic backgrounds and races, many of whom had no prior experience with unions.;Workers' theatre contributed to building the labor movement through the process of producing theatre, as well as through the plays themselves. Theatre engaged working women and men in union activities, and the productions presented models of successful multi-ethnic, interracial labor action. These plays promoted unionism by portraying unions as contributing to all aspects of workers' lives, not only on the job, but in their leisure time as well. Finally, by adopting various forms of popular entertainment--such as vaudeville and the musical revue--workers' theatre identified unionism with the mainstream of American culture, and reinforced the American identity of workers who had been relegated to the margins of American society. This thesis argues that the cultural life surrounding the labor movement, particularly workers' theatre, was central to reinforcing the shared values and interests upon which the labor movement was built.;Workers' theatre and workers' culture could not, by themselves, however, build or sustain a labor movement. In the post-war years, when red-baiting, both internal and external to the labor movement, created a great need among working people for positive associations with unionism, the workers' theatre movement no longer had the institutional or political support that had allowed it flourish in the 1930s. Ironically, then, the effectiveness of culture as a strategy for building the labor movement was limited to those phases in labor history when union militancy and activism were already on the rise.