From the Paterson strike pageant to the Popular Front

notes on the workers’ theatre in the USA

Abstract

The intensification of the class struggle worldwide in the early 20th century, due to the growth of the workers’ movement and its organization in mass scale in parties and unions, the First World War and, specially, the successful socialist revolution in Russia and the successive defeated revolutions in Germany also exacerbated political and ideological conflicts in the artistic field. The workers’ theatre brought aesthetic revolutions in Europe, but also in the United States (USA). The Paterson strike pageant has been a pioneer event and the decades of 1920 and 1930 accelerated the development of new scenic forms and the debates concerning those. However, the Popular Front policy adopted by the Comintern and the Communist Party of the USA, with the corresponding integration of it and its supporters in the base of the Roosevelt government, act against these political, aesthetic and organizational advances. This article intends to present some issues that mark this complex process.