"On The Bum, or The Next Train Through" by Neal Bell

The Great Depression

The armistice of 1918 marked the end of what was then assumed to be the most terrible war the world would ever see.  Many of the European nations, which provided the real battleground for the war, spent the decade of the 1920’s not only recovering their ravaged landscapes but in a cautious struggle to rebuild their war torn economies.  The United States, however, seemed not to suffer in like manner. Profits for American corporations soared for several years, and Americans were blissfully optimistic that such prosperity would continue unabated.  These rapidly escalating corporate profits not only swelled the personal fortunes of some American entrepreneurs but a great deal of such revenue was also swiftly reinvested in new acquisitions and other speculative moves intended to reap even greater dividends. At that moment in time the stock market seemed to offer such fast and ample dividends to bold investors that stock prices soared.  Ever expanding companies produced more goods than American workers could even afford to buy.  By the late 1920’s it’s estimated that more than one third of the nation’s assets were owned by less than one percent of the population.  This complex network of quickly evolving circumstances resulted in a climactic crash of the stock market in October of 1929.  As one of the characters in On The Bum points out “Two years before the crash my mother cooked weeds from the yard. The crash was just when the rich folks began to notice. “  The economic hardship to follow was severe and wide spread. Unemployment became a plague as everywhere Americans were thrown into desperate straits.

 

 

The Mann Act

The Mann Act was a commonly used name for a Federal law passed early in the 20^th century.  The title comes from the name of the Congressman who authored this law and may be responsible for its original wording.  The law, as written, made it a criminal offense to transport a woman across state lines “for the purpose of prostitution, debauchery, or any immoral purpose.”  The law was originally meant to be directed toward those running prostitution rings.  However, there soon began a long history of the law being interpreted in a very broad fashion and used to indict and convict men on circumstances having nothing at all to do with prostitution.  Men traveling across state lines with any women to whom they were not related were often subject to the unfair application of this statute, as ever widening interpretations of what the term “immoral purposes” meant were upheld by the courts. In many cases the wielding of this law with its twisted interpretations may have derived from deeply held prejudices against the ever growing independence of women; in some cases the law was used to target certain men whom law enforcement officials and others considered undesirable.  A number of famous individuals were indicted under this law including Charlie Chaplin (likely targeted because F.B.I. director J.Edgar Hoover thought Chaplin held communist views), musician Chuck Berry, and most notably Heavyweight Champion Jack Johnson whose interracial marriage angered many whites. The most well-known judicial travesty stemming from the Mann Act was the conviction of The Scottsboro boys. They were a small group of young black men who were indicted under the Mann Act for the alleged gang rape of a white woman who had stowed away in the same freight car in Scottsboro, Arkansas. The rape allegation was recanted by the accuser, yet the young men were still convicted even though there was no conclusive evidence that they had any inappropriate encounter with the woman in question. The law has never been repealed but has been amended more than once to address its former misuse.

 

The WPA

Franklin D. Roosevelt took office as President of the United States in 1933 and in that first year of his presidency Roosevelt and his cabinet introduced a number of sweeping programs intended to address the pervasive poverty into which Americans had been thrown. The most famous of those programs is the WPA: Works Progress Administration.  This agency was given the task of creating thousands upon thousands of federally funded, low wage jobs.  The rationale was that it was better to put as many Americans as possible back to work – even through government funded projects – than to have the government faced with those same many thousands upon thousands of people on welfare rolls.  WPA projects were funded all over the country and workers who were accepted into one of these projects were employed in tasks that otherwise would likely never have been initiated just to give people a regular, though modest, paycheck.  Here in Charleston there are artifacts of numerous WPA projects; noteworthy among them is the restored Dock Street Theatre on Church Street which was rescued from deterioration by a WPA construction effort.

 

 

 

The Federal Theatre Project

Within the WPA there were various divisions devoted to separate trades.  One such division that was funded by the government was the Federal Theatre Project.  The FTP, like its counterparts throughout the WPA, offered low wage jobs to qualified applicants, in this case, to experienced theatrical craftspersons: actors, directors, playwrights, costume designers, etc..  Since the Federal government would be paying for the project, it was stipulated that its activities should be spread throughout the country, in large cities and small towns, and its member units should remain mindful of regional interests in choosing plays while also making certain that admission was free to those who could not afford a ticket.

For about four years during the height of the Great Depression thousands of theatre workers were employed in units sprinkled across the U.S. and carried out their charge under the leadership of a woman named Hallie Flanagan who was both an experienced theatrical director and a teacher of theatre arts. As with other WPA projects, government inspectors were dispatched to observe and report on the activities on which federal resources were being spent.  In the case of the Federal Theatre Project, while assiduous stewardship of financial resources by those employed was typically evident, some WPA inspectors gave unfavorable reports regarding the content of some of the plays. There were FTP productions that explored many of the causes and the brutal effects of the nationwide depression and enthralled many audiences who were suffering from these circumstances.  WPA officials came to view such productions not as examples of lively cultural civic engagement but as public gatherings likely to sow further unrest among a populace already strained by economic deprivation.  Hallie Flanagan remained stalwart in her defense of the rights and duties of theatre artists to create what was in their hearts without fear of censorship, and to present provocative material to American audiences, especially where the material touched on issues currently at stake for everyone.  After roughly four years during which Hallie Flanagan and her colleagues in the Federal Theatre Project were frequently in conflict with Congressional oversight committees over the content of its plays, the FTP was suspended by Congress.

While the particular events that occur in our play’s locale of Bumfork are entirely fictional, the plot mirrors some of the incidents that really did mark the brief four year history of the Federal Theatre Project.

Communism in the U.S.

There are quite a few different terms associated with this topic, a topic pertinent to a number of aspects of On The Bum.  Some people are confused about what some of those terms mean; others, perhaps, have some  confusion about the timeline of events related to the topic; and, perhaps, there are other misunderstandings which are actually prejudices – either for or against – that some people hold whenever a term related to communism is introduced.  Following is a very rudimentary explanation of some historical events which influenced American perceptions about various ideas and acts related to Communism.

By the late nineteenth century, a movement had grown within Russia.  It was a movement that included many intellectuals who were frustrated that capitalist societies contained within them such a high population of impoverished and marginalized people.  The most prominent group of persons in Russia who discussed and wrote about the increasing social ills they saw was a group called Social Democrats.  Many of the 19^th century ideas that inspired them came from the work of theorists like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx, in particular, espoused an historical view that declared societies had evolved beyond certain phases already, such as the various slave holding societies that were, by that time, disappearing; therefore, Marx and others declared, capitalism could be viewed as just another such phase that we needed to leave behind.  This viewpoint called for the world’s nations to switch from the capitalist model to a new one in which personal fortunes would be virtually eliminated and, instead,  everyone, especially workers, would share in the benefits to be derived from farm and factory production. This “communal” model for society was imagined, discussed, and advocated by intellectuals within the Social Democratic movement, but some members believed that the “talk” about replacing a capitalist system with a communist system should be replaced by “action” that would force such a change.  Such revolutionaries came together as a political party known as Bolshevik, and these Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, seized power in Russia in a violent revolution in 1917.  The new Russian flag boasted a field of red symbolizing the sacrifice of blood that was made by many to bring about this revolution.  In the decades to come several Communist revolutions in other countries would also use the color red in their new flags as a reference to the bloodshed they believed was a necessity of their own revolutions, hence the term “reds” became a nickname widely used as a synonym for anyone who held Marxist beliefs.

Bolsheviks and their sympathizers often espoused the notion that the 1917 revolution was only the beginning of what they felt needed to be a global destruction of capitalism in favor of this new model.  With the encouragement and aid of Russian Bolsheviks, an American Communist Party was formed.   American Communists not only championed the causes of laborers, and advocated limitations on those who would amass personal fortunes; but they also were among the early voices on behalf of civil rights for African-Americans. The avowed interest that Russian Communists held in the eventual overthrow of the U.S. capitalist system, and the early communication between some American Communist Party members and those in Russia, caused escalating fear that Americans who attended Communist gatherings or even admitted to views compatible with Communist ideals should be seen as potentially dangerous revolutionaries.  When The Great Depression created such widespread misery among the American populace, it seemed an ever more realistic possibility that frustrated Americans would eventually turn to revolutionary violence – such as had happened in 1917 in Russia.

On The Bum is peopled with characters who have a keen sense of irony and give evidence of it with clever comic banter in almost every scene.  But the play is also built around scenes which exemplify that some cultural conflicts of great prominence in our country today became apparent as early as the 1930s.  At various moments in the play we are presented with examples of the conflict between those who stood with workers and saw entrepreneurs as exploiters vs. those who stood with business owners and saw labor advocates as Russian pawns; the conflict between those who wanted progressive action to replace modest study vs. those who felt personal wealth to be endangered by concerns for social welfare; and the conflict between those who saw artists as providers of something vital to our civic health vs. those who saw artists as irresponsible freeloaders.  All of these are depicted against the backdrop of Neal Bell’s comedic tale of the tiny town of Bumfork and the calamitous flood of its fictional history.

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