“Journey Up Seventh Avenue to Infamy: The Cradle Will Rock”

Abstract

sending the country into mass unemployment, despite President Hoover's feigned optimism that it would soon be over. Food riots had broken out, with grocery stores looted and immigrants accused of stealing jobs from "real" Americans, resulting in mass deportations. In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was overwhelmingly elected president, promising the American people to be their "present instrument" for "discipline and direction," and he soon appealed to them to banish fear in his first of many radio "fireside chats" ("Inaugural Address"). Working with Congress, Roosevelt created many "New Deal" initiatives to help the nation recover, including the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Civil Works Administration, and in 1935 he signed into legislation the Works Progress Administration (WPA). This program would employ more than 8.5 million people across the nation for the standard salary of $41.57 per month, not only to improve highways, bridges, and airports but with the Federal Project Number One, which employed artists to create under five areas: Art, Music, Writing, Historical Records, and Theatre. 2Hallie Flanagan, a professor at Vassar, theatre director, and a Guggenheim Fellowship winner, directed the Federal Theatre Project. Under her leadership, the Project employed up to 15,000 theatre artists who presented over 1,200 plays in four years, introducing over one hundred new playwrights. One of the most politically consequential openings of the Federal Theatre Project, and in modern American theatre, occurred on 16 June 1937. On that night, Marc Blitzstein's labor opera, The Cradle Will Rock, did not premier at its intended theatre, the Maxine Elliot on West 39th Street in New York. Instead, a defiant procession of the cast, audience members, and the press marched twenty blocks up Seventh Avenue to the Venice Theatre on 58 th Street. The infamy of The Cradle Will Rock's premiere would likely have not occurred except for the confluence of three crucial figures at the beginning of their artistic "Journey Up Seventh Avenue to Infamy: The Cradle Will Rock" Miranda, 25 | 2022 careers: director Orson Welles, producer John Houseman, and composer Marc Blitzstein. This essay will trace their career trajectories to the opportunity to work together, which created the firestorm that would characterize this rebellious opening.George Orson Welles was born in 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to a father who would invent a popular bicycle lamp that made him rich and a mother who was a pianist; they separated and moved to Chicago when Welles was just four years old. By the time he was nine, his father had become an alcoholic, his brother was institutionalized, and his mother died of hepatitis. After years of traveling the world with his father, who died of kidney and heart failure when Welles was fifteen, Wells landed at the Todd Seminary for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois. There he was placed in an atmosphere of creative experiment, encouraged by his teacher Roger Hill, and he created a ra...