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97-524: Labor disputes started during the 1934 textile workers strike when Portland Woolen Mills employees walked-off the job for two days. Two years later works held a strike and were granted representation by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) labor union . The factory filled contracts for the United States Federal Government during much of its history, primarily making blankets for

194-464: A labor union . A three-week-long series of protests involving 500 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) employees of the Portland Woolen Mills, a contract was agreed upon and full productivity was returned. Textile workers strike (1934) The United States textile workers' strike of 1934 , colloquially known later as The Uprising of '34 was the largest textile strike in

291-422: A "victory over repression". Late Victorian and Edwardian melodrama combined a conscious focus on realism in stage sets and props with "anti-realism" in character and plot. Melodrama in this period strove for "credible accuracy in the depiction of incredible, extraordinary" scenes. Novelist Wilkie Collins is noted for his attention to accurate detail (e.g., of legal matters) in his works, no matter how sensational

388-580: A 36-hour incident that resembled a civic insurrection. Casualty figures vary. A granite marker erected at one of the battle sites names four workers who died in the Saylesville conflict. Another picketer was shot to death the following day, about five miles away in Woonsocket, Rhode Island , when guardsmen fired into the crowd attempting to storm the Woonsocket Rayon Plant. Governor Green then asked

485-470: A US$ 300,000 (US$ 10,173,333 adjusted for inflation) profit in 1906. In 1911, a female worker was critically injured when she got caught in a belt which caused her to be hit in the head by the machinery. At its inception, the mill could produce 1,500 yards of wool per day. By 1913, that number was nearly 60,000 yards per day. During a large town-wide fire in 1905, the Portland Woolen Mills suffered US$ 300 worth (US$ 10,173 adjusted for inflation) of damage. In 1913,

582-654: A city on the Alabama border, the Georgia Webbing and Tape Company had been on strike since July. On August 10, 1934 Reuben Sanders was killed in a scuffle between strikebreakers and strikers. "Eight thousand people viewed Sander's body as it lay in state at the Central Textile Hall in the heart of the city on Sunday, August 12." The UTW called a special convention in New York City on Monday, August 13, 1934 to address

679-591: A freer and more imaginative course regarding the plot prerogative. Within the context of the Czech National Revival , the melodrama took on a specifically nationalist meaning for Czech artists, beginning roughly in the 1870s and continuing through the First Czechoslovak Republic of the interwar period. This new understanding of the melodrama stemmed primarily from such nineteenth-century scholars and critics as Otakar Hostinský , who considered

776-947: A fusion of the Hispanic and Asian cultures) the Philippines . Expatriate communities in the diaspora of these countries give viewership a global market. Melodrama films are a subgenre of drama films characterized by plots that appeal to the heightened emotions of the audience . Melodramatic films commonly use plots that involve crises of human emotion, failed romance or friendship , strained familial situations, tragedy , illness , neuroses , or emotional and physical hardship . The stock characters present in melodrama films include victims, couples, virtuous and heroic characters, and suffering protagonists (usually heroines ). These characters are faced with tremendous social pressures, threats, repression, fears, improbable events or difficulties with friends, community , work , lovers, or family. Following

873-444: A means of setting Czech declamation correctly: his melodramas Štědrý den (1874) and Vodník (1883) use rhythmic durations to specify the alignment of spoken word and accompaniment. Fibich's main achievement was Hippodamie (1888–1891), a trilogy of full-evening staged melodramas on the texts of Jaroslav Vrchlický with multiple actors and orchestra, composed in an advanced Wagnerian musical style. Josef Suk 's main contributions at

970-566: A reflection of issues brought up by the French Revolution , the Industrial Revolution and the shift to modernization. Many melodramas were about a middle-class young woman who experienced unwanted sexual advances from an aristocratic miscreant, the sexual assault being a metaphor for class conflict. The melodrama reflected post-Industrial Revolution anxieties of the middle class, who was afraid of both aristocratic power brokers and

1067-429: A scene within a play or an opera. It was only later, in the nineteenth century, that the term lost its association with music and began to be used for plays with sentimental and sensational plots typical of popular Victorian drama . The earliest known examples of melodrama are scenes in J. E. Eberlin's Latin school play Sigismundus (1753). The first full melodrama was Jean-Jacques Rousseau 's monodrama Pygmalion ,

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1164-403: A servant of the aged parent engaged in a sensational plot featuring themes of love and murder. Often the good but not very clever hero is duped by a scheming villain, who has eyes on the damsel in distress until fate intervenes at the end to ensure the triumph of good over evil. Two central features were the coup de théàtre, or reversal of fortune, and the claptrap: a back-to-the-wall oration by

1261-462: A strike, local leaders thought differently. The UTW locals in the northern part of Alabama launched a strike that began on July 18 in Huntsville , then spread to Florence , Anniston , Gadsden , and Birmingham . While the strike was popular, it was also ineffective: many employers welcomed it as a means of cutting their expenses, since they had warehouses full of unsold goods. In Columbus, Georgia,

1358-462: A week, almost 400,000 textile workers nationwide had left their jobs and the textile industry was shut down. Music also played an important role in the strike as radio stations looking for an audience located themselves near mill stations spreading information to workers and giving them a better sense of community. The stations would mainly play music that was popular and well known among the workers. The mill owners were initially taken by surprise by

1455-550: Is also frequently used in Spanish zarzuela , both in the 19th and 20th centuries, and continued also to be used as a "special effect" in opera, for instance Richard Strauss 's Die Frau ohne Schatten . In Paris, the 19th century saw a flourishing of melodrama in the many theatres that were located on the popular Boulevard du Crime , especially in the Gaîté . All this came to an end, however, when most of these theatres were demolished during

1552-410: Is available online, complete with several melodramas, for instance, No. 12 found here. A few operettas exhibit melodrama in the sense of music played under spoken dialogue, for instance, Gilbert and Sullivan 's Ruddigore (itself a parody of melodramas in the modern sense) has a short "melodrame" (reduced to dialogue alone in many productions) in the second act; Jacques Offenbach 's Orpheus in

1649-688: Is nearly always pejorative. The term was first used in English in 1784 (in 1782 as melo drame ) and came from the French word mélodrame ( c.  1772 ), which was itself derived from Greek μέλος ("song" or "music") and French drame ("drama"). The relationship of melodrama and realism is complex. Protagonists of melodramatic works may be ordinary (and hence realistically drawn) people who are caught up in extraordinary events or highly exaggerated and unrealistic characters. With regard to its high emotions and dramatic rhetoric, melodrama represents

1746-509: The Oregon Industrial Welfare Commission in 1919 argued that they should not have to work longer than 8-hour days for a maximum of 48 hours a week. Management countered with a 10-hour a day limit, but the commission sided with the workers by restricting the hours female employees could work per their request. In 1920, management threatened to temporarily close the plant after demand diminished. However, workers negotiated for

1843-746: The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and Lisle's Tennis Court in Lincoln's Inn Fields , the latter of which moved to the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden in 1720 (now the Royal Opera House ). The two patent theatres closed in the summer months. To fill the gap, the Theatre Royal, Haymarket became a third patent theatre in London in 1766. Further letters patent were eventually granted to one theatre in each of several other English towns and cities. Other theatres presented dramas that were underscored with music and, borrowing

1940-625: The United States Armed Forces . They also bid on contracts for Russian soldiers on the Eastern Front . When the war was dying down, production at the plant dropped after demand started to curtail. After failing to meet increasing demand in 1919, the woolen mills added 150 new employees to rectify the issue. During World War II , the United States federal government granted the Portland Woolen Mills contracts for wool blankets. In 1943,

2037-678: The White House , the Department of Labor , the NRA, and Eleanor Roosevelt asking for them to intervene. In what proved to be a dry run of the larger strike to follow, cotton mill workers in South Carolina 's Horse Creek Valley struck to force employers to live up to the code, only to face special deputies, highway patrolmen and a machine-gun unit of the National Guard sent to keep the mills open. When

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2134-514: The armed forces . For their work in producing blankets during World War II , the Portland Woolen Mills won an Army-Navy "E" Award . The factory closed in 1960 after almost 59 years of service. Founded in Sellwood, Oregon , in 1901, the Portland Woolen Mills relocated to the town of St. Johns in 1904 after a fire destroyed their old factory. Their old factory was a total loss, costing them US$ 150,000 (US$ 5,086,667 adjusted for inflation). The property

2231-666: The labor history of the United States , involving 400,000 textile workers from New England , the Mid-Atlantic states and the U.S. Southern states , lasting twenty-two days. The textile industry, once concentrated in New England with outposts in New Jersey and Philadelphia , had started moving South in the 1880s. By 1933 Southern mills produced more than seventy percent of cotton and woolen textiles in more modern mills, drawing on

2328-399: The rebuilding of Paris by Baron Haussmann in 1862. By the end of the 19th century, the term melodrama had nearly exclusively narrowed down to a specific genre of salon entertainment: more or less rhythmically spoken words (often poetry) – not sung, sometimes more or less enacted, at least with some dramatic structure or plot – synchronized to the accompaniment of music (usually piano). It

2425-454: The 1920s, however, the mills faced an intractable problem of overproduction , as the wartime boom for cotton goods ended, while foreign competition cut into their markets. Although manufacturers tried to reduce the oversupply by forming industry associations to regulate competition, their favored solution to the crisis was to squeeze more work out of their employees through what workers called the "stretch-out": speeding up production by increasing

2522-587: The 1930s until the late 1960s, Hays Code restrictions on the inclusion of "licentious" content in films would restrict the portrayal of female desire in the American film melodrama. During the 1940s, the British Gainsborough melodramas were successful with audiences. In the 1950s, films by director Douglas Sirk , such as All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Written on the Wind (1956), are representative of

2619-760: The 1935 strike in LaGrange to be the last throes of the General Textile Strike. Ironically, President Roosevelt was a friend and frequent visitor of Cason Callaway, President of Callaway Mills at the time. The strike represented the high point for union hopes of organizing textile workers in the South for the next several decades. When the CIO formed the Textile Workers Organizing Committee (TWOC) three years later, TWOC focused on northern manufacturers outside

2716-450: The French term, called it melodrama to get around the restriction. The Theatres Act 1843 finally allowed all theatres to play drama. In the early 19th century, opera's influence led to musical overtures and incidental music for many plays. In 1820, Franz Schubert wrote a melodrama, Die Zauberharfe ("The Magic Harp"), setting music behind the play written by G. von Hofmann. It was unsuccessful, like all Schubert's theatre ventures, but

2813-652: The Gothic, the next popular subgenre was the nautical melodrama, pioneered by Douglas Jerrold in his Black-Eyed Susan (1829). Other nautical melodramas included Jerrold's The Mutiny at the Nore (1830) and The Red Rover (1829) by Edward Fitzball (Rowell 1953). Melodramas based on urban situations became popular in the mid-nineteenth century, including The Streets of London (1864) by Dion Boucicault ; and Lost in London (1867) by Watts Phillips, while prison melodrama, temperance melodrama, and imperialist melodrama also appeared –

2910-469: The NIRA's special board came to Horse Creek, it did not respond to the workers' complaints, but urged them to return to work. When they attempted to do so, the mill owners not only refused to allow the workers back, but evicted them from company housing. The NIRA took no action to stop the employers from violating the codes. When the mill owners made the cotton mill employees' hours larger still further – with

3007-1036: The NTWU in its short-lived attempt to create revolutionary unions. In the meantime, the Great Depression made matters worse. The economic collapse drove a number of New England and Mid-Atlantic manufacturers into bankruptcy , while those employers who survived laid off workers and increased the amount and pace of work for their employees even further. Textile workers across the region, from worsted workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts and silk weavers in Paterson, New Jersey , to cotton millhands in Greenville, South Carolina , engaged in hundreds of isolated strikes, even though there were thousands of unemployed workers desperate to take their places. The election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and

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3104-477: The National Guard elsewhere in the second week of the strike. Governor Green sent the Guard to Saylesville, Rhode Island after several thousand strikers and sympathizers trapped several hundred strikebreakers in a factory. Governor Green declared martial law in the area on September 11, after picketers armed with rocks, flowerpots and broken headstones from a nearby cemetery battled troops armed with machine guns, in

3201-514: The North, in that the strike was in fact, a number of separate events, commencing at different times in separate industries and in furtherance of local goals. Northern employers were not as ruthless in blacklisting workers and the TWOC made some headway in organizing these plants in the years that followed. Those victories were impermanent, however, as much of northern industry either went South or went bankrupt in

3298-554: The Portland Woolen Mills announced it would cease operations. At the time of the closure, the factory employed 100 people. Carter cited increasing production costs due to foreign competition as the reason he closed the mill. In 1907, the Portland Woolen Mills management donated US$ 300 (US$ 9,810 adjusted for inflation) to buy books for the new St. Johns library. In 1921, management put on a melodrama play for their employees entitled The Fruit of His Folly by playwright Arthur Lewis Tubbs. A bowling team of Portland Woolen Mills workers

3395-487: The Soul (1974). The 1980s saw a resurgence in American "women's" melodramas such as Terms of Endearment (1983), Beaches (1988), and Steel Magnolias (1989). On television, the miniseries was a popular format for lavish, female-centric melodramas such as Scruples (1980), Lace (1984), and Sins (1986). Melodramas like the 1990s TV Moment of Truth movies targeted audiences of American women by portraying

3492-430: The South saw the NIRA as something that "God has sent to them." The NIRA quickly promulgated a code for the cotton industry regulating workers' hours and establishing a minimum wage; it also established a committee to study the problem of workloads. In the meantime, however, the employers responded to the new minimum wages by increasing the pace of work. When the labor board set a forty-hour work week, mill owners required

3589-699: The South, where local government refused to provide any relief assistance to strikers and there were few sympathetic churches or unions to provide support. Although the union had pledged before the walkout began to feed strikers, it was wholly unable to fulfill this promise. While roughly half of the textile workers in North and South Carolina and roughly three fourths in Georgia were on strike at this point, with similar figures in Massachusetts and Rhode Island , workers had started to drift back to work and struck plants were reopening, if with only skeleton crews. At that point

3686-595: The South, while the Cotton Textile National Industrial Relations Board never ceded any authority to any other board. Thousands of strikers never returned to work in the mills. In March 1935, approximately 2,000 textile workers at Callaway Mills went on strike in LaGrange, Georgia , and martial law was declared in the city. At least one striker was killed by National Guardsmen as the soldiers evicted families from mill-owned homes. Some consider

3783-414: The South; it had only shallow roots and few regular organizers in that region. But Southern textile workers had a good deal of experience in confronting management, both by impromptu strikes and other means, and a deep well of bitterness against their employers. Some workers converted their experience into a nearly messianic belief in the power of unionism to take them out of bondage. One labor official made

3880-561: The Underworld opens with a melodrama delivered by the character of "Public Opinion"; and other pieces from operetta and musicals may be considered melodramas, such as the "Recit and Minuet" in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Sorcerer . As an example from the American musical, several long speeches in Lerner and Loewe 's Brigadoon are delivered over an accompaniment of evocative music. The technique

3977-878: The Villain: Six English and American Melodramas. Benjamin Blom, 1967. Booth, Michael, ed. ‘’The Lights O’ London and Other Victorian Plays.’’ Oxford University Press, 1995. Bratton, Jacky, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill, eds. Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen. British Film Institute, 1994. Buckley, Matthew S. ‘’Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution and the Making of Modern Drama.’’ The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Hambridge, Katherine, and Jonathan Hicks, eds. ‘’The Melodramatic Moment: Music and Theatrical Culture, 1790-1820. University of Chicago Press, 2018. Robinson, Terry F. “Deaf Education and

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4074-708: The Western world. However, it is still widely popular in other regions, particularly in Asia and in Hispanic countries. Melodrama is one of the main genres (along with romance, comedy and fantasy) used in Latin American television dramas (telenovelas), particularly in Venezuela , Mexico , Colombia , Argentina and Brazil , and in Asian television dramas, South Korea , Japan , Taiwan , China , Pakistan , Thailand , India , Turkey and (in

4171-503: The blessing of the NRA – without raising their hourly wage rates in May, 1934, the UTW threatened a national strike. This talk was largely bluster; the union had made no preparations for a strike that size. When the NRA promised to give the UTW a seat on the board, balanced by the addition of another industry representative, the UTW canceled the planned strike. While the UTW called off its plans for

4268-567: The characteristics of melodrama, his best-known work The Woman in White being regarded by some modern critics as "the most brilliant melodrama of the period". The villain is often the central character in melodrama, and crime was a favorite theme. This included dramatizations of the murderous careers of Burke and Hare , Sweeney Todd (first featured in The String of Pearls (1847) by George Dibdin Pitt ),

4365-504: The connection in Biblical terms: "The first strike on record was the strike in which Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt. They too struck against intolerable conditions". Textile workers in the North went out on strike in great numbers as well, although they were spread more evenly across different industries and had more diverse grievances than the Southern cotton mill workers. Within

4462-532: The context of a private home. Its intended audience is a female spectator, but a male viewer can also enjoy its presentation of resolved tensions in a home. Melodrama generally looks back at ideal, nostalgic eras, emphasizing "forbidden longings". Melodrama was associated with the rise of capitalism in the 19th century. French romantic drama and sentimental novels were popular in both England and France. These dramas and novels focused on moral codes in regard to family life, love, and marriage, and they can be seen as

4559-552: The cotton industry. TWOC's successor, the Textile Workers Union of America , faced similar problems organizing in the South; the CIO's postwar organizing drive in the South fell apart chiefly because of its inability to organize textile workers there. The union might have escaped this disaster if it had characterized the strike as a first step, rather than attempting to pass it off as a victory. That, however, would have required that

4656-445: The crisis. The UTW drew up a list of demands for the industry as a whole: a thirty-hour week, minimum wages ranging from $ 13.00 to $ 30.00 a week, elimination of the stretch-out, union recognition, and reinstatement of workers fired for their union activities. The delegates, especially those from the southern states, voted overwhelmingly to strike the cotton mills on September 1, 1934 if these demands were not met. They planned to bring out

4753-440: The days of Ludwig van Beethoven ( Egmont ) and Franz Schubert ( Rosamunde ). (This type of often-lavish production is now mostly limited to film (see film score ) due to the cost of hiring an orchestra. Modern recording technology is producing a certain revival of the practice in theatre, but not on the former scale.) A particularly complete version of this form, Sullivan's incidental music to Tennyson's The Foresters ,

4850-447: The effects of alcoholism , domestic violence , rape and the like. Typical of the 90's melodrama is Anjelica Huston 's 1999 film Agnes Browne . Todd Haynes ' films Far from Heaven (2002), Carol (2015), and May December (2023) are more recent takes on the melodrama. Contemporary director Pedro Almodovar has also taken many inspirations from the melodramatic genre and directors like Sirk. Booth, Michael, ed. ‘’Hiss

4947-493: The factory in March 1914 causing US$ 600,000 (US$ 1,825,116 adjusted for inflation). In 1917, the plant reported a US$ 700,000 (US$ 1,664,727 adjusted for inflation) profit. Several orders came in that year from automobile manufacturers who were using wool upholstery in their vehicles. The rebuilding began a few days after the disaster. During World War I , the Portland Woolen Mills were contracted to manufacture clothing and blankets for

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5044-565: The factory won an Army-Navy "E" Award for their production. By 1950, the Portland Woolen Mills had become the largest wool manufacturer in the United States west of Cleveland, Ohio . In 1951, the Portland Woolen Mills won a US$ 200,000 contract for the United States Armed Forces. From its 1935 to 1952, the Portland Woolen Mills were led by executive director Charles H. Carter, who died two years after his retirement. His son Charles H. Carter, Jr. succeed him in that position. In 1960,

5141-559: The federal government to send federal troops; the Roosevelt administration ignored the request. Maine deployed the Guard in a more tactical manner, sending them to Augusta and Lewiston to discourage wavering employees from joining the strike. That tactic did not work, however, everywhere: workers at Pepperell Mills' plant in Biddeford and York Manufacturing's plant in Saco went out even though

5238-432: The film melodrama: those with a female patient, a maternal figure, an "impossible love", and the paranoid melodrama. Most film melodramas from the 1930s and 1940s, at the time known as "weepies" or "tearjerkers", were adaptations of women's fiction, such as romance novels and historical romances. Drawing from a shared history with women's fiction, melodramatic films often concentrate on female perspectives and desires. From

5335-467: The first season of the Henry Wood Proms in London. It was probably also at this time when the connotation of cheap overacting first became associated with the term. As a cross-over genre-mixing narration and chamber music, it was eclipsed nearly overnight by a single composition: Schoenberg 's Pierrot Lunaire (1912), where Sprechgesang was used instead of rhythmically spoken words, and which took

5432-408: The fourth quarter of the 18th century. Georg Benda was particularly successful with his duodramas Ariadne auf Naxos (1775) and Medea (1775). The sensational success of Benda's melodramas led others to compose similar works. Mozart, for example, spoke approvingly of Benda's music and later used two long melodramatic monologues in his opera Zaide (1780). Later and better-known examples of

5529-502: The genre to be a uniquely "Czech" contribution to music history (based on the national origins of Georg Benda , whose melodramas had nevertheless been in German). Such sentiments provoked a large number of Czech composers to produce melodramas based on Czech romantic poetry, such as the Kytice of Karel Jaromír Erben . The romantic composer Zdeněk Fibich in particular championed the genre as

5626-657: The genre. Many later melodramatic filmmakers cite Sirk and his works as significant influences. In the 1970s, Rainer Werner Fassbinder , who was influenced by Sirk, contributed to the genre by engaging with issues within the cultural subconscious, addressing class in The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971) and Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975), sexual orientation and codependency in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) and racism, xenophobia, and ageism in Fear Eats

5723-580: The guard was sent to prevent the arrival of flying squadrons rumored to be coming from New Bedford, Massachusetts . Governor Wilbur L. Cross of Connecticut also mobilized the Guard, but did not declare martial law. Instead the state labor commissioner met with picketers during the second week of the strike and brought about a reduction in tensions by urging strikers to respect the law and not hurl epithets at strikebreakers. Things were different in Georgia , where Governor Eugene Talmadge declared martial law in

5820-469: The hero which forces the audience to applaud. English melodrama evolved from the tradition of populist drama established during the Middle Ages by mystery and morality plays , under influences from Italian commedia dell'arte as well as German Sturm und Drang drama and Parisian melodrama of the post-Revolutionary period. A notable French melodramatist was Pixérécourt whose La Femme à deux maris

5917-468: The impoverished working class "mob". Melodrama arose in the second half of the 18th century as a genre intermediate between play and opera. It combined spoken recitation with short pieces of accompanying music. Music and spoken dialogue typically alternated in such works, although the music was sometimes also used to accompany pantomime . If there is one actor, the term monodrama may be used; if there are two— duodrama . It also sometimes appeared as

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6014-479: The latter typically featuring the three categories of the 'good' native, the brave but wicked native, and the treacherous native. The sensation novels of the 1860s, and 1870s not only provided fertile material for melodramatic adaptations but are melodramatic in their own right. A notable example of this genre is Lady Audley's Secret by Elizabeth Braddon adapted, in two different versions, by George Roberts and C.H. Hazlewood. The novels of Wilkie Collins have

6111-582: The massive strikes that began in Gastonia, North Carolina , and Elizabethton, Tennessee , which were violently suppressed by local police and vigilantes. Here again, workers were often more militant than their trade union leadership: to take one striking example, the workers at the Loray Mill in Gastonia walked out under the leadership of the communist -led National Textile Workers Union . The Communist Party founded

6208-493: The mediation board that Roosevelt had appointed in the first week of the strike issued its report. As was typical of federal commissions of this era, the board temporized, urging further studies of the economic plight of the employers and the effects of the stretch-out on their employees. It urged the President to create a new Textile Labor Relations Board to hear workers' complaints and urged employers not to discriminate against strikers. President Roosevelt announced his support for

6305-543: The melodrama genre was at the time a popular one. In an age of underpaid musicians, many 19th-century plays in London had an orchestra in the pit. In 1826, Felix Mendelssohn wrote his well-known overture to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream , and later supplied the play with incidental music. In Verdi 's La Traviata , Violetta receives a letter from Alfredo's father where he writes that Alfredo now knows why she parted from him and that he forgives her ("Teneste la promessa..."). In her speaking voice, she intones

6402-501: The melodramatic style in operas are the grave-digging scene in Beethoven's Fidelio (1805) and the incantation scene in Weber's Der Freischütz (1821). After the English Restoration of Charles II in 1660 lifted the Puritan ban on theatre, most British theatres were prohibited from performing "serious" drama but were permitted to show comedy or plays with music. Charles II issued letters patent to permit only two London theatre companies to perform "serious" drama. These were

6499-501: The mill constructed a new 80 ft. by 200 ft. building on the site which cost US$ 600,000 (US$ 1,849,697 adjusted for inflation). Vents in the roof were added to the entire building during the renovations. Lewis I. Thompson was the architect who designed the new building. During this time, the company decided to install a cafeteria and library for their employees. The renovations allowed management to add 500 new workers which doubled their overall productivity. A fire broke out in

6596-490: The mills. Governor Ehringhaus of North Carolina followed suit on September 5. Millowners persuaded local authorities throughout the Piedmont to augment their forces by swearing in special deputies, often their own employees or local residents opposed to the strike; in other cases they simply hired private guards to police the areas around the plant. Violence between guards and picketers broke out almost immediately. The major known incidents include: Authorities ordered out

6693-418: The murder of Maria Marten in the Red Barn and the bizarre exploits of Spring Heeled Jack . The misfortunes of a discharged prisoner are the theme of the sensational The Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863) by Tom Taylor . Early silent films, such as The Perils of Pauline had similar themes. Later, after silent films were superseded by the 'talkies', stage actor Tod Slaughter , at the age of 50, transferred to

6790-439: The new factory was on consisted of four buildings over five acres of land. The main factory was a 100 ft. by 200 ft. brick and concrete two-story. Other buildings on the site included a 45 ft. by 50 ft. boiler and engine room and a 40 ft. by 100 ft. wool weaving warehouse. The total cost of the new St. Johns plant was US$ 600,000 (US$ 20,346,667 adjusted for inflation). The company reportedly turned

6887-524: The number of looms assigned to each factory hand, limiting break times, paying workers by piece rates, and increasing the number of supervisors to keep workers from slowing down, talking or leaving work. The stretch-out sparked hundreds of strikes throughout the Southeast: by one count, there were more than eighty strikes in South Carolina in 1929 alone. While most of them were short-lived, these strikes were almost all spontaneous walkouts, without any union – or other – leadership. That year also saw

6984-608: The passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) appeared to change things. The NIRA, which Roosevelt signed in June 1933, called for cooperation among business, labor and government and established the National Recovery Administration (NRA). It was to oversee the creation of codes of conduct for particular industries that would reduce overproduction, raise wages, control hours of work, guarantee

7081-553: The payroll to be cut by nine percent to keep the factory open. One-hundred workers for the Portland Woolen Mils walked off the job in September 1934 in solidarity with textile workers who had been striking across the United States. The walk-out had little effect as workers returned to their positions in the factory after two days. Two years later, workers had a three-week strike which was successful in getting them represented by

7178-404: The plot. Melodramas focus on a victim. For example, a melodrama may present a person’s struggle between good and evil choices, such as a man being encouraged to leave his family by an "evil temptress". Stock characters include the "fallen woman", the single mother, the orphan, and the male who is struggling with the impacts of the modern world. The melodrama examines family and social issues in

7275-515: The pool of dispossessed farmers and laborers willing to work for roughly forty percent less than their Northern counterparts. As was the rest of economic life, the textile industry was strictly segregated and drew only from white workers in the Piedmont. Until 1965, when passage of the Civil Rights Act broke the color line in hiring, less than 2% of textile workers were African American. Throughout

7372-490: The private sphere of the home, focusing on morality, family issues, love, and marriage, often with challenges from an outside source, such as a "temptress", a scoundrel, or an aristocratic villain. A melodrama on stage, film, or television is usually accompanied by dramatic and suggestive music that offers further cues to the audience of the dramatic beats being presented. In scholarly and historical musical contexts, melodramas are Victorian dramas in which orchestral music or song

7469-559: The promise of the right to join a union had an electrifying effect on textile workers: the United Textile Workers (UTW), which had no more than 15,000 members in February, 1933, grew to 250,000 members by June, 1934, of whom roughly half were cotton mill workers. Textile workers also put tremendous faith in the NIRA to bring an end to the stretch-out, or at least temper its worst features. As one union organizer said, textile workers in

7566-476: The report, then urged employees to return to work and the manufacturers to accept the commission's recommendations. The UTW took the opportunity to declare victory and held a number of parades to celebrate the end of the strike. In fact, the strike was a total defeat for the union, particularly in the South. The union had not forced the mill owners to recognize it or obtained any of its economic demands. The employers refused, moreover, to reinstate strikers throughout

7663-453: The rights of workers to form unions, and stimulate an economic recovery. The NIRA rarely, if ever, lived up to its promises: employers usually dominated the panels that created these codes, which often offered far less than what workers and their unions demanded, and the NIRA and the codes themselves were toothless, since the Act did not provide any effective means to enforce the standards. Even so,

7760-431: The same amount of work in those forty hours as they had in the previous fifty- to sixty-hour week. By August 1934, workers had filed nearly 4,000 complaints to the labor board protesting "code chiseling" by their employers; the board found in favor of only one worker. Union supporters often lost their jobs and found themselves blacklisted throughout the industry. Workers, both north and south, wrote thousands of letters to

7857-431: The scope of the strike. They immediately took the position that these flying squadrons were, in fact, coercing their employees to go out on strike. Governor Blackwood of South Carolina took up this theme, announcing that he would deputize the state's "mayors, sheriffs, peace officers and every good citizen" to maintain order, then called out the National Guard with orders to shoot to kill any picketers who tried to enter

7954-507: The screen the Victorian melodramas in which he had played a villain in his earlier theatrical career. These films, which include Maria Marten or Murder in the Red Barn (1935), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936) and The Ticket of Leave Man (1937) are a unique record of a bygone art-form. Classic melodrama is less common than it used to be on television and in movies in

8051-517: The stage plays of the Osvobozené divadlo as melodrama (most notably the opening prologue of the anti-Fascist farce Osel a stín (1933), delivered by the character of Dionysus in bolero rhythm). Czech melodramas' practice tapered off after the Nazi Protectorate . The Victorian stage melodrama featured six stock characters : the hero, the villain, the heroine, an aged parent, a sidekick, and

8148-613: The text of which was written in 1762; it was first staged in Lyon in 1770. Rousseau composed the overture and an Andante, but the bulk of the music was composed by Horace Coignet . A different musical setting of Rousseau's Pygmalion by Anton Schweitzer was performed in Weimar in 1772, and Goethe wrote of it approvingly in Dichtung und Wahrheit . Some 30 other monodramas were produced in Germany in

8245-401: The third week of the strike and directed the National Guard to arrest all picketers throughout the state, holding them in a former World War I prisoner of war camp for trial by a military tribunal. While the state only interned a hundred or so picketers, the show of force effectively ended picketing throughout most of the state. The strike was, in fact, already falling apart, particularly in

8342-588: The time this occurred, many jobs in the textile industry were already moving overseas, a trend that accelerated in the 1980s. Books Publications Melodrama A modern melodrama is a dramatic work in which plot, typically sensationalized and for a very strong emotional appeal, takes precedence over detailed characterization. Melodramas typically concentrate on dialogue that is often bombastic or excessively sentimental , rather than on action. Characters are often flat and written to fulfill established character archetypes . Melodramas are typically set in

8439-631: The turn of the century include melodramas for two-stage plays by Julius Zeyer : Radúz a Mahulena (1898) and Pod Jabloní (1901), both of which had a long performance history. Following the examples of Fibich and Suk, many other Czech composers set melodramas as stand-alone works based on the poetry of the National Revival, among them Karel Kovařovic , Otakar Ostrčil , Ladislav Vycpálek , Otakar Jeremiáš , Emil Axman, and Jan Zelinka. Vítězslav Novák included portions of melodrama in his 1923 opera Lucerna , and Jaroslav Ježek composed key scenes for

8536-401: The typical melodramatic format, the characters work through their difficulties and surmount the problems. A common point of plot tension sees characters feeling trapped by the typical melodramatic of the domestic sphere of the home or small town. Filmmakers often add flashbacks to expand the otherwise constant settings of melodramatic films. Feminists have noted four categories of themes in

8633-476: The union also devote the resources necessary to follow up with renewed, systematic organizing efforts in the immediate aftermath of the strike, instead of concerning itself with the futile effort to win reinstatement for discharged strikers through the Textile Labor Board. The memory of blacklisting and defeat soured many Southern textile workers on unions for decades. The 1934 defeat was less cataclysmic in

8730-508: The woolen, silk and rayon workers at a date to be set later. Mill owners had seen the strike threat as more empty talk from the union. The White House took a largely "hands off" attitude, leaving it to the first National Labor Relations Board to set up a meeting of the parties. The employers refused to meet with the union. The strike swept through Southern cotton mills , outpacing the union organizers and employing "flying squadrons" which traveled by truck and on foot from mill to mill, calling

8827-417: The words of what is written, while the orchestra recapitulates the music of their first love from Act I: this is technically melodrama. In a few moments, Violetta bursts into a passionate despairing aria ("Addio, del passato"): this is opera again. In a similar manner, Victorians often added "incidental music" under the dialogue to a pre-existing play, although this style of composition was already practiced in

8924-498: The workers out. In Gastonia, where authorities had violently suppressed a strike led by the National Textile Workers Union in 1929, an estimated 5,000 people marched in the September 3rd Labor Day parade. The next day union organizers estimated that 20,000 out of the 25,000 textile workers in the county were out on strike. It is not clear whether the UTW expected to have this much success so easily and so quickly in

9021-496: The years that followed. Anti-union sentiment in the South kept wages low for decades, but also acted as a catalyst for development later when industries moved there from the North and Midwest because of lower costs. Employers resisted integrating textile mills ; when they were forced to do so by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, researchers found that African Americans were accepted overall by other employees, although they continued to face discrimination in job training and advancement. By

9118-403: Was looked down on as a genre for authors and composers of lesser stature (probably also why virtually no realizations of the genre are still remembered) - though there are examples by Robert Schumann ( Ballads for Declaration , 1850s) and Richard Strauss for narrator and piano ( Enoch Arden (1897). The English composer Stanley Hawley made many such settings, some of which were performed at

9215-527: Was organized in 1916. They played in a league which featured other St. Johns clubs and businesses. The Portland Woolen Mills organized a baseball team for their workers in the 1920s. They played in a league with different companies and town teams including Standard Oil and Camas, Washington . In the mid-1920s, the Portland Woolen mills organized a basketball team who played in a city-wide league. A case brought by female Portland Woolen Mills employees to

9312-426: Was used to accompany the action. The term melodrama is now also applied to stage performances without incidental music, novels, films, television, and radio broadcasts. In modern contexts, the term melodrama is generally pejorative, as it suggests that the work in question lacks subtlety, character development, or both. By extension, language or behavior that resembles melodrama is often called melodramatic; this use

9409-523: Was very popular. The first English play to be called a melodrama or 'melodrame' was A Tale of Mystery (1802) by Thomas Holcroft . This was an example of the Gothic genre, a previous theatrical example of which was The Castle Spectre (1797) by Matthew Gregory Lewis . Other Gothic melodramas include The Miller and his Men (1813) by Isaac Pocock , The Woodsman's Hut (1814) by Samuel Arnold and The Broken Sword (1816) by William Dimond . Supplanting

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