Gene Bruskin was born to a Jewish working-class family in South Philadelphia and has been a life-long social justice activist, union organizer, poet, and playwright. Since retiring from the labor movement, Gene wrote his first play in 2016, a musical comedy for and about work and workers called Pray For the Dead: A Musical Tale of Morgues, Moguls and Mutiny. In this mini-cast we talk to Bruskin about his life in the the labor movement, the role of art and imagination in revolutionary politics, and about Bruskin’s new musical, The Return of John Brown, which is premiering this month in Baltimore, Washington, DC, and the John Brown Raid Headquarters in Maryland. “In a staged reading of this new musical, John Brown, who in 1859 became the first person in the nation executed for treason, climbs out of his grave where he was hanged, into the present, only to be rearrested and threatened with another hanging.”

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Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Gene Bruskin:

My name is Gene Bruskin and I am a retired union organizer, strategist. I spent 35 years in the labor movement. I retired at the end of 2012, and ended up in being thrown back into the labor movement anyway as a redeployed person. And I’ve spent a lot of time these last few years in particular working with Amazon workers around the country, helping to figure out how to support all these young workers that are taking on the biggest company in the world. But the other thing I’ve done with my retirement, which is really exciting for me, is I went back to an old hobby of mine that I had started before I got into the labor movement and I started writing musicals for workers. And right now, I’m producing my third, The Return of John Brown. But I’ve been doing that work since 2013, 2014, and it’s been very gratifying and very challenging.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right. Welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership With In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network, produced by Jules Taylor, and made possible by the support of listeners like you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. So, if you’re hungry for more worker and labor-focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network. And please support the work that we are doing here at Working People because we cannot keep going without y’all. Share our episodes with your coworkers, leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and become a paid monthly subscriber on Patreon for just five bucks a month if you want to support the show and unlock all the great bonus episodes that we publish exclusively for our patrons.

And also, please support the work that we are doing at The Real News Network by going to the realnews.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the frontlines of struggle around the US and around the world. My name is Maximilian Alvarez, and as you guys heard, we got a special guest, a brother, long time veteran of the labor movement, Gene Bruskin here on the pod today to talk about not only his life and work in the movement, but also, this great musical that Gene is getting ready to premiere, including here in Baltimore and in DC and elsewhere. It’s a musical called The Return of John Brown. And I wanted to have Gene on because, as you guys have probably noticed, things are pretty heavy on the podcast of late.

I mean, not that they haven’t been heavy in the past, but as I continue to go down this route of interviewing more working people living in sacrificed zones around the country, people who are in the direct path of destruction, whether that be at the hands of deregulated industry, government and military, and Department of Defense negligence, Wall Street greed, or people who are directly in the path of the worst and growing effects of manmade climate change. This is a really fucking big issue, pardon my French. And so, that’s why I’m continuing to cover it on this show, that’s why I am doing my next book on this subject, but we’ll talk about that more later.

But the point is that that’s all really heavy and important stuff, but also amidst all of this heavy stuff going on in the world, it’s important to remember that there is still art and beauty, and beauty in the struggle to be appreciated and savored. And it’s the kind of thing that makes life worth living. And I want us to also always make space for that, not only here on the show, not only at the Real News Network, but in our movement writ large. We need to feel joy, we need to express ourselves, we need to participate in the activities of creating beauty wherever we can because that’s what we’re fighting for. That’s why it’s so cool to have Gene on the show today.

And like I said, we’re going to talk a little more about Gene’s background in the labor movement, and we’re also going to talk about how all that work and organizing connects to his playwriting and his art. And I just wanted to set the table real quick before we turn things back over to Gene. We will link to the musical’s website, the website for The Return of John Brown in the show notes for this episode. But I just wanted to read from that website, just to give you guys a sense of what the musical is about.

So, on the website, it states, “In a staged reading of this new musical, John Brown, who in 1859 became the first person in the nation executed for treason, climbs out of his grave where he was hanged into the present only to be re-arrested and threatened with another hanging. As his trial unwinds the past and present merge as Brown’s inspiring story is told through humor, music, mystery, and drama depicting a feverishly-charged moment in history that reverberates in today’s political climate. As the plot twists, Brown’s escape plans lead to an unexpected alliance between white and black farmers hoping to save their land from the Smoke & Mirrors Pipeline company and its CEO King Louis. The playwright, gene Bruskin spent 45 years as a labor union organizer and has written three musicals for and about working class people since his retirement.”

“The musical tale connects yesterday’s battles to the need to challenge the enduring destructiveness of racism today.” “The first show will debut on April 26th in Baltimore, followed by a show on April 27th in Washington DC the next weekend on May 4th and 5th, the play will be featured at the Kennedy Farm, the Harpers Ferry, West Virginia area location where John Brown staged his famous anti-slavery raid.”

All right. So, Gene, let’s bring you back in here, man. I want us to of course talk about the play itself and what you are hoping to accomplish with it, and give folks a little more of a taste of what they’re going to see when they go check this musical out. But before we get there, let’s dig a little deeper into your backstory. So, we can’t go like a full hour here and I know you can’t sum up 40 years of life in the movement in 10 minutes. But I’m curious, just tell us a little more about yourself, your life in the movement, how you got into that work, and how you eventually found your way to writing musicals for and about working people.

Gene Bruskin:

Thanks, Max. It’s really a pleasure to be on your show and to have a chance to talk about this. I grew up as a working-class Jewish kid in South Philly. Although my father had been very political in the ’30s, he actually was a young member of the Communist Party. He got discouraged for a variety of reasons. He went fought in World War 2, and then he just had to make a living the rest of his life. Although, he was always reading and he was an intellectual, I just wanted to play basketball and that got me to college and all this stuff. So, I was very much a child of the ’60s. I was a jock who got politicized by all the stuff that was happening around me, fighting, resisting ultimately that I was going to be sent to Vietnam, which changed my life that in order to not go there and die and kill people.

And ironically, at that moment you could get a deferment if you were willing to teach in the New York City schools. It was considered worse than Vietnam.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Jesus.

Gene Bruskin:

I went to teach as a fourth-grade teacher with no training whatsoever in the South Bronx, and that was of course transformational for me. I had grown up in a working-class neighborhood, but I’d never seen that level of poverty and oppression. And so, that sort of factored into my life. And I ended up in Boston in the ’70s, trying to make a living, participating in the various anti-war and other things. And through some quirk of fate, hooked up with a friend of mine who like me, had musicals as part of his growing up in our house playing all the time. My father even drove us up in the station wagon to New York from Philly to see a musical and drove us back because we couldn’t stay in a hotel. But working-class people used to be able to go to Broadway, so it was sort of in my blood.

So, we did a couple very local-based, community-based shows that were political. One was about busing and one was about theft in America. And to get a job in order to help support this work, I got a job driving a school bus. Well, that was in the middle of 1977. That was in the middle of the intense busing fights in Boston, which were very similar in some ways to Alabama in terms of the violence and the attacks on, in this case, African-American children. And our job as bus drivers was to drive the kids from the black community into the white community and vice versa.

But when we picked up the black children and drove them into South Boston, we were violently attacked on a daily basis. And in the end, we drove in and out of that community surrounded by a police escort, and that went on for 10 years. So, during that period, the drivers organized. And ironically, all the sectors of the city, anybody that wanted a job was driving a bus. It didn’t matter whether you were pro-busing, anti-busing, you were pro-paycheck. And so, we were all there. They cut our pay, we went on strike. I went to jail. We won a contract, and we formed a very militant, multiracial community-based union for 10 years and won great contracts.

We had many strikes. Just by accident, I walked in there thinking I was going to do theater in between the runs, and I ended up the local president and chief steward at different times. And so, that launched my labor career, but for the moment, killed my theater career because you can’t do both on an intense level. And eventually, I got an offer to move to DC and work for the National Postal Mail Handlers Union, along with my good buddy Bill Fletcher. So, all of a sudden, I was in Washington DC. And eventually, I was Jesse Jackson’s labor deputy for a couple of years in the ’90s at the National Rainbow Coalition.

And I went on to just work for a variety of national unions on different kind of campaigns, the biggest of which was the Justice at Smithfield campaign, where we organized a 5,000-person local unit in rural South Carolina against Smithfield Foods. And it was one of the biggest wins, this was USCW in the South, in many years. And then, I ended up retiring, working for the American Federation of Teachers, helping them develop strategies to fight the charter industry. And then, since I retired, I ended up going back to my theater roots. I’d written three musicals, and in the meantime, I was also working with the railroad workers, DMWE with ATU over time. And eventually, these last few years, doing a lot of work with Amazon workers in a lot of different locations.

But my passion beyond the labor movement is figuring out how to make culture a part of the movement. Because if you try to imagine the Civil Rights movement in the United States succeeding if they weren’t allowed to sing, it’s hard to imagine… If you try to imagine the anti-apartheid movement in Africa winning without a note being sung, you can’t imagine it. And we had a vibrant political labor and other kind of culture coming into World War II in the ’20s and ’30s, but commercial television and the commercial movies just overwhelmed it, with a few exceptions. And so, I’ve been trying to make my small contribution to bring it back, and it’s been very well-received to the point that I’ve been able to do it without having a Broadway budget. And I’m back now with The Return of John Brown opening in Baltimore the 26th of April.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Man, so first I’m just going to say, that’s quite a career in the movement. That’s quite a life in the movement. So, we’re going to have to have you and maybe some of the folks from Boston on together to… I want to unpack that whole period and hear from you guys what it was like to work and organize in that moment. That’s just wild to hear. But before we go to The Return of John Brown, I have to ask as someone who, like you said, just kind of through chance encounter, luck and being in a certain place at a certain time, you got into this job and that kicked off a life of organizing and working within the labor movement.

Looking back now, as someone who spent all those decades in the movement, even if you didn’t intend to from the beginning, for my generation of folks who have just been really getting into that movement in recent years, I mean, I think a lot of left-leaning millennials and progressive millennials after Bernie Sanders’ 2016 run, a lot of those folks went into the labor movement, and a lot of them are working for unions. A lot of them are salts trying to unionize different facilities. That’s one way in which I think the Bernie phenomenon did have an aftereffect, and I’ve seen and heard it firsthand from a lot of folks. But we’re still kind of in the early stages of our lives in that movement. And so, I guess I was just curious to ask, as a veteran of that movement, what do you wish you had known back in the day or what would you say to younger folks getting into that movement now about how this is a life’s work and what you wish you had known when you were getting into it at the beginning?

Gene Bruskin:

Great question. When I got into the labor movement in the ’70s, it was sort of part of a resurgence of the left, and also, the working-class left. Going beyond the SDS days of the ’70s, a lot of those people came out and went to work somewhere. And so, when I started getting into the labor movement, it never occurred to me to go back and talk to the veterans who had been through the ’30s and the ’40s, and they were alive. But we sort of had this idea that what did they know? And we were going to form a new left-wing parties and all this stuff, and I just never asked, and that was a huge mistake. That was a huge mistake. And we sort of had to learn a lot of things over again. And over time, I became more and more a student of history and realized the incredible valuable lessons.

What’s really exciting to me now is that young people are coming to me and a lot of other veterans in the labor movement and inviting us in as mentors, as friends, to share our experiences, to back them in all kinds of different ways. And there’s an openness and an understanding that there’s a lot to learn, even though we don’t have all the answers, and if we did, things would’ve been very different. But we did learn a lot. And to me, I just encourage all the younger workers that I’ve had a chance to work with, to study that history, to talk to people who’ve lived it, and then to do your own thinking. And so, that combination is what we really need.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. No, I think that’s so important and well-put. It’s something that we talk about a lot here at the Real News Network because I’m lucky enough to get to work with… We’re a very generationally-diverse crew. We’ve got folks like Mark Steiner who’s been in the Civil Rights movement, intersecting with the labor movement for 50 years. We had Eddie Conway, legendary Black Panther and founder of Rattling the Bars here. And now, his show after Brother Eddie’s passing is hosted by Mansa Musa who was locked up for 48 years. We have Chris Hedges and Dave Ziron. And so, getting those folks to talk more to our younger folks, and also vice versa, I think is one of the things that makes what we do at the Real News special.

And it’s also expanded to the broader field, like you were saying, taken in terms of the movement. That intergenerational dialogue is so critical, whether we’re talking about the labor movement, the prison abolition movement. Just having those direct linkages to the past and learning from the experiences and successes and failures of our movement ancestors is really important in the same way that, as always, it’s really important for the elders in the movement to welcome in the young people, and always approach each other with this spirit of openness like we all have something to learn from each other, like you said. That’s the secret sauce. That’s, I think, so critical and why it’s so cool that you and I are talking right now. So, let’s talk about how culture, like you said, plays into that. The role that you see culture and musicals and plays and art, why that’s so essential for our movement and how you’re approaching that with this new musical, The Return of John Brown.

Gene Bruskin:

Yeah, thanks. There’s a lot there. One thing I’ve noticed in Boston, we sort of started this impromptu song group called Red Basement Singers because there was a store called the Red Book, and we used to practice in the basement there. And we used to just go around the rallies. We’d get on the subway in Boston and sing Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh and things like that. And what I noticed is that when people are singing, they smile. It’s hard to be sad while you’re singing. And so, it just felt like that music and culture is a way to get people to feel and to be inspired and to enjoy the kind of things that they’re doing because the seriousness and difficulty of organizing, making 50 phone calls, getting beaten up by the police, whatever it is, it’s intense. But the joy, like you mentioned before, and the love, you can’t always feel it. But with the music, you can feel that.

When I retired at the end of 2012, I was trying to absorb thousands of different kinds of workers I had engaged with during my life. The meatpacking workers, the nurses, the nurses’ aides, and of course, the bus drivers, the laundry workers. And these are all these incredible people, most of whom don’t ever get noticed. Who’s responsible for this pork chop that’s on your table? Who cleaned the sheets that you’re lying in in the hospital? And so, I wanted to do culture that was for and about them. And so, just taking all the faces and the people and the situations that I had, I started constructing stories and started doing some historical research and then trying to figure out how to fill the seats with the same people who the play is about. And so, my first show was called Pray for the Dead: A Musical Tale of Morgues, Moguls and Mutinies. And it was a fantasy of an uprising in an unknown country led by morgue workers, who went on strike because a funeral home was going to close.

And what I did is knowing that if I set it up in a church or a theater and asked unions to bring members to a musical, people would’ve said, “What?” Because theater and musicals in this country are like operas to the average bus driver or waitress or whatever, because they’re too expensive. The $40, $50, $100, Hamilton, $1,000. And so, I arranged with the unions, mostly in the Maryland area,, to put this show on at the union halls. And it was great. Unfortunately, at the end of when… This was done as musical stage screenings, at the end of that time, Trump got elected and I couldn’t move it to the next level because everybody was in a panic.

My second musical was staged in Baltimore. It was called The Moment Was Now, and it was staged in a church in Baltimore in 2019, 2020. It was about reconstruction, and that’s a period of history which I was inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois to tell the true story of it and the story that linked the working-class movements of the National Labor Union with the women’s movements, the suffragette women’s right to vote movements, the Susan B. Anthonys of the world, with the freedom movements coming out of the Southern struggles and with the black workers that were organizing into unions at the time and center it in Baltimore.

And I just went to the Central Labor Council in Baltimore to the State Federation of the AFL to 1199 retirees, and the Baltimore Teachers Union, we filled the theater most nights with a musical that was a historical piece with poetic license. I took the actual words of a lot of these characters and made them into songs. So, for example, there’s a black worker organizing in the shipyards in Baltimore where Frederick Douglass escaped from where they were attacked by the Irish, driven out of the shipyards at one point. He gets invited to speak to a national meeting of the National Labor Union by William Silvers, the president, and he says, “You have to explain to them why they need the black workers.”

And that speech got on the front page of the New York Times the next day. Probably the last labor speech that was ever on the front page there. He sings a song, “Does your we include me?” With his actual words from his speech. Any rate, that was shut down in 2020 by COVID, our last performance was March 8th, 2020. There’s a tremendous film that was done of it, high quality that people have been watching since if anybody ever wanted to see it. Anyway, during COVID, I started on another play and that’s turned into The Return of John Brown. And that’s because I was thinking if there’s one white person, being white, Jewish, European American, who people know of who stood up against racism, and in this case slavery, besides Abe Lincoln, it’s probably John Brown.

So, I went back, did a lot of homework. I read Du Bois’ book on Brown. And what I decided is not to spend all the time talking about what John Brown did then, that’s the opening of the play, but I just decided to bring him into the present. So, after the sort of historical moment at the beginning of play when he’s hanged, he magically climbs out of the ground right where they hanged him in Charlestown, Virginia. And they re-arrest him and hang him again and put him on trial. And so, the story of race and history and all that comes out in the trial itself, and there’s a lot of comedy, they threaten to hang him again and he sings a song, “You can’t hang the same man twice.” And there’s a lot of comedy in it, there’s a lot of history, and there’s a lot of drama, we hope.

So, now we’re getting ready to try it out as a musical stage reading. We’ve got some great actors. It’s not fully staged with the scenery and all that. So, we’re taking it to the people we want them to come, it’s free. Then we want them to stay afterwards, discuss John Brown, discuss the play we’re doing, make suggestions, be part of the process, and help us move it to the next stage, literally, and put the page to the stage, maybe even in a Baltimore theater. As you mentioned, we have a website, www.thereturnofjohnbrown.com, you can get free tickets. It starts at the end of this month. And the last two performances in the beginning of May are at the actual location of the John Brown farm. It’s called the Kennedy Farm, in Sharpsburg, Maryland, right near Harpers Ferry where John Brown staged the raid. We’re going to be on the grounds, the backdrop to the stage is going to be the cabin, and there’ll be a live tour before the show.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Man, that’s so badass, and it makes me think of… I was with some brothers and sisters from the labor movement at the end of last year. We were all down in Matewan, West Virginia at the Museum of the West Virginia Mine Wars, and we saw some reenactments from the locals there, the famous Battle of Blair Mountain and stuff, walking on hallowed ground, thinking about that history and thinking about how it connected to us all being there. That’s so powerful that you guys are going to be doing that there on that ground. And for listeners, again, this is going to have to be a teaser for y’all so that you go and check out the musical itself because there’s so much here we could unpack, but we want y’all to go partake of it and let us know what you think.

But I guess just by way of a final teaser, and by way of a final question before I let you go, Gene, this of course is a tradition, a literary tradition of resurrecting key historical figures in contemporary times, right? I’m thinking of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s famous bringing Jesus back to what was then contemporary Russia, and how would society respond to Jesus’s teachings today? So, I was just curious, you started working on this amidst COVID, we know the George Floyd uprising happened the same year. So, I guess I just wanted to ask, why John Brown and why now? What you really feel folks should be thinking about, about that scenario that you’re painting of why this felt like such a profound artistic question to ask at this moment?

Gene Bruskin:

Yeah, thank you. And I’m just going to say quickly, because I have found that because of the failure of our public education system, even at the college level, many people don’t know who John Brown is and that his claim to fame was that, among a lot of other things he did, in 1859, he staged a raid with a group of black and white people on the armory in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia in an attempt to get guns and hand them out to enslaved people and begin an insurrection, and it didn’t work. He was hanged. He was captured and hanged. But at that moment, that story played on the front page of every newspaper in the country, and his final words were printed on the front pages. The South was terrified. The North’s conscience was pulsated. And John Brown said that the, “Slavery cannot be ended except by violence.” People thought that was questionable, but it turned out Abe Lincoln had came to the same conclusion, and 700,000 people died.

So, that story, when watching the Black Lives Matter movement happened and watching the difficulty from people have talking about race and racism, I wanted to do a show that shows the impact of racism and watch one of the protagonists in this show who changes is the racist white farmer who gets educated during this process about his own confusion when he’s losing his land to a pipeline company because he won’t talk to the black farmers. And John Brown intervenes, brings them together and that story unfolds. So, I have found that if you’re sitting in the audience and you got some of these attitudes, but you’re watching them play out on the stage, no one’s coming at you in your class or whatever. And you can sort of think about it.

And then, afterwards we sit around, you can talk about it. I think that that’s a way to sort of get to this. And so, I’m happy for all the audiences, but I’m happy for some white working-class people there who they didn’t like John Brown, but they’re curious. And so, I think this is the right moment right now. We have to learn our history and you can’t understand the present if you don’t understand the past.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank our guest, Gene Bruskin. And as always, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. If you want to learn more about Gene’s new musical, The Return of John Brown, go to thereturnofjohnbrown.com or use the link in the show notes of this episode. And again, the first show is going to debut on April 26 here in Baltimore, followed by a show on April 27th in Washington DC, and the details you can find on the website. And then, the next weekend on May 4th and 5th, the play will be featured at the Kennedy Farm, the Harpers Ferry, West Virginia area location where John Brown staged his famous anti-slavery raid.

We’ll see y’all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you cannot wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the awesome bonus episodes that we’ve got there for all of our patrons. And of course, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News Newsletter, so you never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

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Editor-in-Chief
Ten years ago, I was working 12-hour days as a warehouse temp in Southern California while my family, like millions of others, struggled to stay afloat in the wake of the Great Recession. Eventually, we lost everything, including the house I grew up in. It was in the years that followed, when hope seemed irrevocably lost and help from above seemed impossibly absent, that I realized the life-saving importance of everyday workers coming together, sharing our stories, showing our scars, and reminding one another that we are not alone. Since then, from starting the podcast Working People—where I interview workers about their lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles—to working as Associate Editor at the Chronicle Review and now as Editor-in-Chief at The Real News Network, I have dedicated my life to lifting up the voices and honoring the humanity of our fellow workers.
 
Email: max@therealnews.com
 
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