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Exit singing: Elise Bryant retires from LHF
by Chris Garlock
“The Founding Fathers of the Labor Heritage Foundation -- Joe Glaser, Joe Uehlein and Saul Schneiderman -- were all musicians, guitar players, singers, songwriters,” Elise Bryant told me on Wednesday, her first official day of retirement after a decade as Executive Director of the Labor Heritage Foundation. “And that was the focus of the Great Labor Arts Exchange for many years. I brought in theater and labor choruses and I'm really looking forward to what you're going to bring to this table with labor radio and podcasts and social media, expanding our fields of interest and influence. That's where we need to be growing.”
Looking back over the last ten years, Elise is especially proud of deepening the relationships with unions, many of which are headquartered in DC. “Attendance at the annual Solidarity Forever awards increased significantly after we streamlined the format,” she said, which was a direct result of her round of personal calls to “every international union president we had honored in our Solidarity Forever awards” asking for their advice.
Today, many of those same leaders are just a call away. “Two years ago, when we wanted to do a labor musical (“Working” based on the Studs Terkel book) in front of the AFL-CIO, I asked the late Rich Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, and he said ‘Yeah, let’s do this,’ without hesitation. In the middle of COVID. And it worked beautifully. And I'm eternally grateful for his support.”
Elise now joins a pantheon of LHF leaders that began with founders Joe Glaser, Joe Uehlein and Saul Schneiderman and was carried forward by Laurel Blaydes, Peter Jones and Darryl! Moch. “I’m looking forward to being able to devote more time to my own work now, like the autographical ‘Queen of the Night’ play,” Elise told me, “and I’m also excited about continuing to be a part of LHF as an active member of the board. As much as has been done, there’s still so much to do to lift up the arts in our movement.”
Stay tuned for details on plans for Elise’s retirement celebration!
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“Women Printmakers of the WPA” exhibit opens Sunday at BMA
A new exhibition, Art/Work: Women Printmakers of the WPA, opens at the Baltimore Museum of Art this Sunday, November 5. The exhibit features 50 works that explore the importance of women artists who captured the human faces of industrial and domestic labor—and its inherent racial, gendered, and class inequities—while they used their art to support important reforms led by the era’s growing communist and socialist movements. “For too long, the work of women has been unrecognized and swept under the rug,” says Asma Naeem, the BMA’s Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director. “In this moment when the topic of invisible labor of women and others is receiving critical attention it deserves, I cannot think of a more apt exhibition to engage our audiences on this issue and its histories.” Admission is free.
graphic: Elizabeth Olds: “Harlem Dancers” (1939)
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Sing Out: Readers Write
“I am interested in the extent to which labor songs (e.g. “The Ballad of Casey Jones”) and folk music/folklore propagated out from the working-class and into the American consciousness,” writes Sajel Patwardhan, an undergraduate student at the University of Maryland, currently doing research into the relationship between railroad unions and pop culture in the early 20th century.
LHF Chair Saul Schniderman suggests two books: A Treasury of Railroad Folklore – “spell-binding tales of iron horses and iron men – the boomers, brass buttons and brass collars, the hoggers, tallow pots and gandy dancers -- by Benjamin Botkin, and Long Steel Rail -- a detailed analysis of eighty-five songs, from "John Henry" and "The Wabash Cannonball" to "Hell-Bound Train" and "Casey Jones" -- by Norm Cohen.
We love to hear from you; email us at info@laborheritage.org
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THIS WEEK’S LABOR HERITAGE POWER HOUR
On this week's show: The Hollywood actors’ strike is 112 days old; Strike for Our Rights Executive Director Sarah Moe talks with actor Kaliswa Brewster (in photo above) about the Halloween picket, the threat of AI, how the strike has built solidarity and how her union – SAG-AFTRA -- saved her life.
| | “Putting America Back on Track: The Case for Public Rail Ownership” is a short (11 minute) overview of the many flaws, pitfalls, and drawbacks of the privately owned rail system in North America. Railroad Workers United (RWU) commissioned this film to educate the public about the need of public ownership and control of our vital rail infrastructure. | | Margaret Lowengrund: Loading Bricks (1936), at the new exhibition, Art/Work: Women Printmakers of the WPA, which opens at the Baltimore Museum of Art this Sunday, November 5. | |
Out of Work Please Help God Bless
Damn turn lane’s backed up --
traffic signal’s busted – all the opening that
panhandler needs to reach our median
and pretty on our bad luck! Annoyance
sends all hands to phones,
leaving our wallets untouched.
Time’s wasting, and we’re fuming
like our tailpipes in frosty air.
Cruising beyond our windows, is he legit?
A cop’s come to unknot the jam.
The panhandler’s quickened his pace,
probing us with his deep blue eyes --
but the cop’s waving us ahead now,
wants us to go, move it! And we do
cuz we’re all late to work.
Darrell Petska, Middleton, WI, in the Summer 2023 Blue Collar Review
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“I am simply asking when I do work that I'm treated like a human being with integrity. That's all we're asking for.”
Kaliswa Brewster, actor, striking SAG-AFTRA member, on this week's Labor Heritage Power Hour radio show.
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LHF's comprehensive listing of labor's cultural events: music, films, theater, books, history and more...
Click here to add your labor arts event!
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EXHIBIT: Memory in Cloth - Safety and Solidarity for New York City Garment Workers
Thru Nov 17, 2023
Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, 70 Washington Square S, New York, NY 10012, USA (map)
EXHIBIT: Collective Ribbon: The Interwoven Voices of the Triangle Fire Memorial
Weekdays thru Dec 16, 10am – 6pm
Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, New York University, 24 West 12th Street, NYC (map)
EXHIBIT: "We Are One: Honoring Immigrant Garment Workers"
Weekdays (thru Dec 1), 11am – 4pm
The Puffin Gallery 20 Puffin Way Teaneck, NJ 07666 (map)
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Check out this week's Labor History Today podcast, Who “Oppenheimer” left out: the summer blockbuster “Oppenheimer” generated a lot of interest in the history of how nuclear weapons were developed in the United States, but the film leaves out an important part of this history: the sacrifice made by tens of thousands of workers in the production of our country’s nuclear weapons arsenal.
November 3, 1921: Striking milk drivers dump thousands of gallons of milk on New York City streets.
November 4, 1996: After a struggle lasting more than two years, 6,000 Steelworkers members at Bridgestone/ Firestone win a settlement in which strikers displaced by scabs got their original jobs back. The fight started when management demanded that the workers accept 12-hour shifts.
November 5, 2007: Some 12,000 television and movie writers begin what was to become a three-month strike against producers over demands for an increase in pay for movies and television shows released on DVD and for a bigger share of the revenue from work delivered over the Internet.
November 6, 1922: A coal mine explosion in Spangler, Pa. kills 79. The mine had been rated gaseous in 1918, but at the insistence of new operators it was rated as non-gaseous even though miners had been burned by gas on at least four occasions.
November 7, 1917: Some 1,300 building trades workers in eastern Massachusetts participated in a general strike on all military work in the area to protest the use of open-shop (a worksite in which union membership is not required as a condition of employment) builders. The strike held on for a week in the face of threats from the U.S. War Department.
November 8, 1892: 20,000 workers, black and white, stage general strike in New Orleans, demanding union recognition and hour and wage gains.
November 9, 1935: Committee for Industrial Organization founded by eight unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. The eight want more focus on organizing mass production industry workers.
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| Populist humorist Will Rogers was born November 4, 1879: which of these did he say? | | | |
LAST WEEK'S QUIZ: The Gateway Arch, a 630 ft high parabola of stainless steel marking the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial on the waterfront of St. Louis, Missouri was completed on October 28, 1965, after two and one-half years. Although it was predicted 13 lives would be lost in construction, not a single Ironworker died. | |
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"The worker must have bread,
but she must have roses, too."
Please CLICK HERE NOW to pledge your financial support to our 2023 program, which this year includes our annual Solidarity Forever Award, the Great Labor Arts Exchange, the DC Labor FilmFest and much more (check out our website for details!).
Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
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