Oakland 1946! – Street Theater from the Labor Movement

More than 60 years after the last mass general strike of a city in the US, a group made up of labor organizers as well as performers from groups such as the SF Mime Troupe, staged a recreation of that general strike: the Oakland “Work Holiday” of 1946. Max Bell Alper, looking more like a picket captain than a theater director with his bull horn and clipboard in hand, introduced the reenactment by telling the audience gathered on the sidewalk at Latham Square that they were in the exact center of where the general strike had occurred in 1946.

The story of the Oakland general strike is the story of how two small strikes of mostly female retail clerks became a mass strike when local business elites and government used scabs and police to try and break the clerks’ strikes. Labor solidarity shut down the city of Oakland, took on the lies of the anti-union media of the Oakland Tribune and eventually led to the defeat of the conservative Republican city government that had ruled the city for a generation.

Nearly 200 people attended the two performances, braving chilly weather and sitting on the sidewalk. The crowd responded with enthusiasm helping to generate an atmosphere closer to a boisterous and festive picket than a historical reenactment. The players elicited audience participation at certain points during the performance, but for the most part the audience offered their own commentary: cheers, strike chants, and heckles (directed at the actors playing the department store boss, scabs, and Oakland police). People driving by honked their horns as if the mock-picket was a real strike.

It’s a story not well known by Oakland residents or even many labor historians. And, as anyone who has tried to organize any political event or collaborative public performance can tell you, drawing a few hundred people to an event is no small task. So how was it that a new group of performers was able to successfully bring an audience out? How were they able to engage scores of mostly young people in the story from one of the high points in US labor history when there has been a generation long attack on labor and decline in union membership? How were they able to balance the historical with the theatrical aspects of this story? To answer these rhetorical questions and more, we sat down with management (L. M. Bogad who played “the boss”) and labor (Kevin Christensen, the trolley driver shop steward) to find out more about how this performance came about and what drew the participants to this story.

The idea for the performance began with a few labor organizers including Kevin Christensen and Max Bell Alper who wanted to revive labor history in the real location so to bring that history closer to people’s daily lives. As Kevin explained to us, their hope was that people who saw the performance would think and feel differently about this location. As an audience member, being in the actual location had the added effect of making a history of class struggle much closer to our daily lives. The idea of a general strike may seem antiquated for the generation that grew up with Regan’s Union-busting and Clinton’s pro-business neo-liberalism, but being in the actual location and basing the performance on the real issues and concerns of the people involved removed any nostalgic glow from the story. There were mistreated retail clerks at the time of the general strike, we have mistreated retail workers now; they had anti-union department stores, today we have Wal-mart; they had anti-labor corporate media empires and we have anti-labor corporate media conglomerates.

The performance was able to be over the top and silly without loosing the underlying reality of the story. Boos and hisses met UC Davis professor Larry Bogad when he made his entrance as a local “boss” telling the audience that there was no strike and soliciting audience members to take jobs as scabs (and after they accepted, using them as his human furniture as he called on city officials to use force to break the picket lines and let the scabs in). He was able to play the character somewhere between The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns and Johnny Rotten or Jello Biafra egging-on an angry crowd in the early days of punk rock. Larry told us that he was proud that they were able to pull-off comic violence for the scab scenes rather than over-emphasize the real violence of a police attack on a picket line. The political basis of the performance allowed them to engage in vaudevillian scenes without making light of the real events. Instead, these comic scenes became a short-hand or symbolic representation of real issues and events just as comic images of rats or clownish effigies of management might be employed on a picket line.

The performers clearly wanted the reenactment to be a combination of theater and labor traditions and were able to bring together people with both backgrounds. They worked out the parts and scenes collaboratively and drew on the cast members different areas of strength. This mixture of skills and backgrounds afforded them the opportunity to work in ways that normally would not even be considered in their fields. For example, the performers coming from a theater background could play out scenes that were more based on historical events than the dramatic needs of a plot. Conversely, for the performers with a labor and activism background, the reenactment allowed them to present labor issues in a broader and more generalized way than they would if they were working on a specific labor campaign. For Kevin, as a labor organizer, street theater or performances are created for a very specific and practical purpose of raising awareness of a strike or piece of labor-related legislation. But because they were creating a historical and dramatic piece they had the chance to present a labor struggle in a larger context.

They decided consciously not to end the play with the end of the general strike or the retail strikes that were its catalyst. “We didn’t want to say ‘yeah we’ve defeated the bosses’ or ‘boo we were defeated,’” Kevin told us about their attitude towards the end of the performance. Instead, they put the strike in context by briefly laying out the general story of labor since the general strike and leading to our time. Once the narrative caught up to the present, the players handed the story and the megaphone over to various labor organizers who told the audience about their own ongoing struggles and what people can do to support their causes. This ending once again shows their intention to ground their dramatic and historical piece in the contemporary realities and struggles of labor. In addition, by providing a space where representatives from various unions and labor struggles, this play about labor solidarity and sympathy strikes has helped local labor culture take a small step towards the type of labor culture that existed at the height of US labor militancy. It was that kind of culture in which labor saw itself united in common struggle, where shop stewards for the trolley driver’s union didn’t think twice about solidarity and not crossing the picket line, that made the general strikes of the 1930s and 40s possible.

If the intention had been to bring art and politics together they succeeded in the sense that the audience seemed to be comprised with supporters of both art and politics. Of the two people we recognized in the audience for the performance we attended, one was a labor organizer for Unite HERE and the other was a street theater director. As much as we enjoyed the reenactment of the general strike and the performances, we were a little surprised that the turnout was as healthy as it was; maybe it’s a hangover from years of trying to get people excited about radical art and politics during the dark, demoralized years of George Bush’s second term, but we were expecting only a couple of dozen people. The weekend of the reenactment was also the week that Republic Windows and Doors workers in Chicago fought back against the closing of their factory and occupied their worksite and so, to us, it seemed as if we were experiencing the opening of a new era of labor militancy. Kevin and Larry told us that turnout exceeded their expectations and we asked if they thought this has something to do with a new mood of militancy especially regarding labor due to both high expectations around a new President and anxieties about the economic crisis. They said that there was no doubt that those were factors in helping them attract an audience and that the possibility of a new era of labor struggle informed the structure of their production. As Kevin explained: “I don’t have illusions that Obama is a radical, but it makes a difference in people’s outlook when you go from a President who is more or less Larry’s character [the evil anti-labor “boss” in the performance]” to something else. He added: “This moment, like any moment: if people don’t organize and push for what they need, there won’t be any progress”.