Class Divisions On the Broadway Stage: the Staging and Taming of the I.W.W. by Michael Schwartz (review)

Depending on which history of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) one references, the Wobblies lost political potency in either 1917, following wartime conspiracy and sedition charges, or in 1924, after a schism in the leadership regarding communist affiliation. An altogether divergent chronology is available on the IWW website (www.iww.org). Here, one may browse through the “Minutes of the IWW Founding Convention” from the summer of 1905, all the way through to current advice on sending holiday greetings to incarcerated organization members. The site suggests a fluid trajectory and presents an IWW as robust today as it was in the early twentieth century. This disjuncture between how events are remembered or recorded resides at the core of Class Divisions on the Broadway Stage by Michael Schwartz. The author capitalizes on what he calls the “differences between memory and content” (62) as he analyzes seven twentiethcentury US plays identified with the IWW. Through compelling cultural and literary analysis, this work challenges readers and directors alike to engage the political allusions of canonical playwrights like Maxwell Anderson and Eugene O’Neill, as well as to revisit lesser known or potentially forgotten works by Sidney Howard and Upton Sinclair.

The first chapter of Class Divisions grounds the reader in a succinct history of the IWW and explicates how music, pageantry, and parody were integral to its early operations. Schwartz also includes a cogent, albeit abbreviated description of the stratification of Broadway audiences during the 1920s, and he articulates several foundational tenets of the IWW: the overthrow of capitalism; inclusivity regardless of immigration status, race, or sex; and a unionist platform that resists embracing any one political affiliation. These set up the primary focus of the study, as Schwartz positions the paradoxical nature of producing anti-capitalist Wobbly characters on business-minded stages, noting that “[p]art of the labor struggle that emerged as these plays were presented was the tension between the Wobbly message and the overall message of Broadway” (22).

Class Divisions is ordered chronologically, and subsequent chapters offer insight into the reception of working-class representations in John Howard Lawson’s Processional (1925), Anderson and Harold Hickerson’s Gods of the Lightning (1928), Sinclair’s Singing Jailbirds (1928), and O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (1946), and it concludes with an analysis of the “Fire in the Hole” segment of Robert Schenkkan’s The Kentucky Cycle (1993). The first play addressed in the study is another iconic O’Neill work, The Hairy Ape. Schwartz, somewhat in conflict with contemporary IWW leaders, suggests that by the time a character drawn from the Wobbly oeuvre ever set foot on a commercial stage (1922), the organization was past its political prime. The author positions The Hairy Ape not only as the inaugural example of a Wobbly on Broadway, but also an exceptional one, as references to the IWW in the play are explicit. For example, there is a scene occurring in an IWW office between Yank and a Wobbly leader. Additionally, this chapter serves to complicate the politicization often thrust on works of this (or any) period by juxtaposing liberal and conservative reception of The Hairy Ape with the less-than-political intentions of the playwright.

O’Neill was exasperated by the public reception of The Hairy Ape as a pro-IWW play (148). In contrast, journalist turned playwright Howard was neither attacked nor celebrated for the inherent radicalism of his play, They Knew What They Wanted. The Wobbly aspect of Howard’s piece, which is the case study of Schwartz’s third chapter, arrives in the figure of Joe, a card-carrying member of the IWW and onethird of the love-triangle plot device driving the action of the play. In this chapter, Schwartz calls on David Savran’s concept of how 1920s playwrights “dematerializ[ed] the social” (50) aspects of plays in...