BLUE VOICE

 Busby Berkeley is both famous and notorious for his extravagant dance numbers in movies from the 1930s through the 1950s.  But at least in one instance, two of his musical numbers reflected the times and now attest to their history, though audiences today may not fully understand what they are about.

 “If you want to understand the key to Busby Berkeley’s choreography,” said Berkeley biographer Terry Thomas in a TCM documentary, “you have to consider the military.”

 In 1917, the 22 year-old Berkeley was drafted into the U.S. Army.  By the time he arrived in France as a field artillery lieutenant, the fighting was nearly over and American troops had little to do.  So he was tasked with marching and drilling them, and in the course of inventing new formations and maneuvers, he essentially invented the style that was to characterize the work of his career.  Except instead of just male soldiers, he had armies of beautiful young women, and a camera that found both large geometric patterns and the intimacies of faces and other elements of anatomy.

 After successfully bringing this style to Broadway (minus the camera), Berkeley was drafted by Hollywood.  He soon wound up at Warner Brothers for a series of movies that would revive both musical films and the studio’s fortunes.  He started with two of his most famous, back to back, both made and released in the depths of the Great Depression.

 The first was 42^nd Street, released in 1933.  Warners organized a big publicity campaign involving a train loaded with studio stars touring cities, culminating in the film’s premiere in Washington, D.C.  Jack Warner, head of the studio, was a fervent FDR backer, and he timed the 42^nd Street opening to Roosevelt’s Inauguration. 

42^nd Street was a big hit and a critical success.  It set the template for the series of Warners musicals that starred Berkeley’s choreography: a backstage story about mounting a show, then the featured numbers presented as the opening night.  The music by Harry Warren (with Al Dubin’s lyrics) was innovative in that it included a mix of styles, especially jazz influences.  But it wasn’t a complete break: there were plenty of soporific love melodies.

 Back in Hollywood immediately afterward, Berkeley worked on musical number for the next Warners musical, Gold Diggers of 1933. The story had been the basis for a play and a couple of movies with “Gold Diggers” in the title (and there would be more.)  Directed by Melvyn Le Roy, it was released later that year, and again, it was a major hit.

 Apart from the insipid and cringe-worthy numbers were two that spoke directly to the audience about elements of the Great Depression they had just experienced, and that would continue to affect their lives.

 We’re In The Money

 

The first was the now iconic presentation of the song, “We’re in the Money,” featuring a very young Ginger Rogers belting the tune (and singing part of it in Pig Latin crossed with jive) while seemingly wearing nothing but strategically placed coins (although some shots reveal she was wearing a body stocking.)

 The song is usually interpreted as wishful thinking about post-Depression prosperity, but it has a much more specific meaning that audiences in 1933 would understand.

 Upon taking office in March 1933, FDR first of all had to deal with the banking crisis, to keep money in circulation.  Deposits were guaranteed for the first time. Besides new jobs and relief programs, his administration bolstered the economy with price supports for farmers, a minimum wage for workers and uniform rules for businesses. 

But money was still too tight for economic growth, so FDR essentially took the country off dependence on gold as the backing for currency: the so-called Gold Standard.  Everyone knew about this because everyone in the country was required to turn in their gold coins (which came in various denominations) in exchange for paper money or silver, including silver dollars.  Going off the gold standard meant that the federal government could increase the money supply, and it did.  And that’s what “We’re In the Money” is about.

 It’s right there in the first verse:

 Gone are my blues and gone are my tears/

I've got good news to shout in your ears/

The long lost Dollar has come back to the fold/
With silver you can turn your dreams to gold, oh/

We're in the money/
We're in the money/
We've got a lot of what it takes to get along...

It’s been suggested that in this black and white movie, Ginger Rogers and the chorus girls, as well as the set itself, featured gold coins.  But the point is that they aren’t: the coins feature a caricature of the face on the silver dollar.  Those are the silver coins that represent the new flow of money resulting from FDR’s policies (“with silver you can turn your dreams to gold.”)  All of this would have been instantly clear to the 1933 audience.

 Remember My Forgotten Man

 A more poignant and equally specific reference is made in the last big production number, “Remember My Forgotten Man.”  The Depression is not a subtext: it is the text, and is dramatized.  There’s the obvious reference to FDR’s  “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid” from a 1932 radio address.  But as Joan Blondell continues to sing about her specific forgotten man, he turns out to be a veteran of World War I. 

  The number features a solo by Etta Moten (who also dubbed part of Blondell’s singing), a distinguished Black singer whose Gospel background emphases the bluesy spiritual feel of this elegy.  

Again, the feeling was even more specific to the times, for the plight of World War I vets had been dramatized for all the country to see just the previous spring and summer of 1932.

 In the spring, thousands of American World War I veterans gathered in Washington, D.C. to petition Congress to pay them the war bonus they’d been promised for 1945, because they were in desperate straits.  They remained there in makeshift encampments, many with their families, through the summer, continuing to lobby Congress.  The press covered the story extensively, dubbing them the Bonus Army.

 The veterans organized themselves into units, led by officers.  In contrast to the armed forces in both world wars, their units and their camps were racially integrated.

 Things were at an impasse in late July, with Congress failing to provide the bonus and with President Hoover opposed to it. It was then that a police officer trying to clear away a crowd from the entrance to the Treasury Department panicked and shot a veteran dead.  Hoover called out the Army to settle things down.  Instead, General Douglas MacArthur decided to make war on the Bonus Army.

 MacArthur, with his officers including Major Dwight D. Eisenhower and Major George Patton, deployed tanks and tear gas, routing the veterans and burning down their camps with gasoline. (This was probably the first time tear gas was used by Americans on other Americans.)

  Patton led a cavalry charge with drawn sabers against unarmed men, women and children.  In a deadly irony pointed out by historian William Manchester, among those that Patton’s forces attacked was a World War I veteran decorated for saving the life of Patton himself. 

 Many of the veterans were literally run out of town, in trucks that took them west to Ohio and beyond.  Though newspaper stories of the day tended to support the government line that the Army had thwarted dangerous criminals and radicals, many Americans knew men who were there. Hoover never recovered his political reputation.  If he’d had any chance of winning the election that fall, it probably ended with his administration’s treatment of the Bonus Army. 

All of this could not have escaped the attention of that era’s veterans, like Busby Berkeley.  But the Bonus Army had also inspired a great deal of sympathy and support among the people who would be watching this movie. When they saw and heard “Remember My Forgotten Man,” they would likely remember the Bonus Army.  Even in this dubious context, this song was as close to a memorial that it would get.

Talking Great Depression Blues

I posted this on my Stage Matters blog, in connection with a Dell'Arte School original production here on the North Coast about the Great Depression. But since it's about family and history, and what I learned on my summer vacation, it seems to me it also belongs here...

I saw the Dell'Arte original show about the Great Depression, called The Body Remembers, shortly after returning from a visit back home to western Pennsylvania. While I was there, my sisters and I sorted through several boxes of photos and documents, some unopened since each of my parents died (my mother in 1974, my father in 1990.) There were some photos from the 1940s and 30s, and also three letters my father received at his CCC Camp in 1940--one from a hometown buddy who was in another CCC camp, and two from his mother--my paternal grandmother, who died several years before I was born.

My father rarely talked about his past, but whenever there was an economic recession or other economic problem in the news, I could pretty much count on him saying that what they ought to do is revive the CCCs. I've since read about the CCC and other New Deal programs, but those letters provided something more specific: the role they played in my father's life, part of which led to me.

The Civil Conservation Corps was a program that employed young men (starting at 17 or 18) in conservation projects all over America. The projects were developed by the Interior Department, but the Corps was run by the Army. Young men lived in Army-style camps, were provided with food, clothing and shelter, and paid a small wage, most of which was automatically sent back to their families. Between 1934 and 1943, some 3 million men cumulatively worked in more than 4,000 camps.

From the letters we learned that my father was in a camp in Blain, Pennsylvania, a few hundred miles from his home in United, PA. Some guys got sent thousands of miles away, often to the West, but that may have mostly been earlier in the program. His friend was in a camp even closer to home, in the Laurel Highlands, not far from where one of my sisters now lives. There were apparently about 150 guys at my father's camp (though 300 was the norm), and they were building Big Spring state park. The camp was very isolated, probably as far into the woods as he'd ever been (or ever would be again). But besides a military schedule and discipline, they had activities--sports teams that competed with other camps, for example. His friend was closer to a town (Somerset) and so seemed to have a lively social life. (Here's another good source on the CCCs in this region.)

My father's hometown was built by the United Coal and Coke Company, and his father and grandfathers were (or had been) coal miners. Mines were closing in the 30s, and there were big and violent strikes in the 20s and 30s, that got the miners essentially nothing. There were few jobs, no money and no future there.

The plight of the miners in the area was so severe that the FDR administration built one of a few experimental communities there. They built new houses (with a novelty in the area: indoor plumping) and started cooperative farms and eventually a small garment factory. It came to be called "Norvelt," the last syllables of Eleanor Roosevelt's name, after she came to visit it. Locals apparently just called it the homestead.

The homestead is mentioned in my grandmother's letters, though they didn't get to live there. They were still in United. By 1940 Norvelt was changing, and people who lived there were being asked to buy their houses rather than rent them. But I also learned about Norvelt on this trip because there was an article in the local newspaper while I was there: this summer was Norvelt's 75th anniversary. And as it happens, one of my sisters now works for a small business that's housed in the very building that used to be the Norvelt coop garment factory.

At issue in the letters in 1940 was what my father was going to do next. Apparently his hitch was up, and there was anxiety about losing the money he was bringing in. The family was saving to buy their house. The letters left the matter unresolved, but they fit with something else I saw many years before. It was a mimeographed, stapled newspaper, and inside it was my father's name, as editor-in-chief. Probably my mother dug it out and gave it to me, when I started my string of editors jobs in junior high. My father never mentioned it. I've examined it since, though at the moment I've lost track of it again.

It was the publication of the "self-governing community" called Armor City, a National Youth Administration work experience project in South Charleston, West Virginia. It was another federal project under the umbrella of the Works Project Administration. It seemed to be very much like the CCCs, except this was for slightly older young men, and it's purpose was to train them for jobs in industry, not the woods. Eventually it was training them for jobs in national defense, and judging from other information about South Charleston at the time, that's what my father was probably doing. There was a big naval munitions plant in South Charleston, which FDR visited.

My father was at Armor City in 1941 and apparently still there in 1943, when he was called home for his mother's last illness. (He was found physically unfit for the draft. As children we were told it was because of color-blindness, but it may actually have been because of a deformation in his back, perhaps the result of a fall in infancy.) Soon after, he got a good paying job in industry, in a plant in Youngwood, PA that made military instruments. That's also where he met the young woman who would become his wife and my mother.

I grew up with some tales from the Depression, on both sides of the family, as well as from the lives of parents and grandparents of school friends, and total strangers. I got more interested in it all in the 60s, thanks in part to Bob Dylan being so interested in Woody Guthrie. And of course, Arlo. I've heard stories since--Steve Allen told me a few--and read many more. It's important in terms of what individuals and families went through, though I would stop short of calling those who lived through it and are still alive "Depression survivors," as some of the Dell'Arte publicity did. It sounds too much like "Holocaust survivors," which is a different order of experience.

It also tends to distance us from it. Books like the Stud Terkel volume that inspired this production are one way to get close to it, or even recollections in memoirs--I was especially interested in Malcolm Cowley's, with his Pittsburgh connections. But of course the best of all is family memories, and letters like these.