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Moe FonerMoe Foner
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Session:         Page of 592

liked that kind of thing. It comes out of the left culture, and struggle was synonymous. That's why he always gave me a free hand. “Do what you want to do. Fine, great. Great, do it” -- that kind of thing. So that was a very very important kind of thing.

I'm sorry, you have a question.

Q:

No, it just seems to me that one thing we haven't talked about so much is how tricky it is to “bring culture to workers.” Especially because it seems to me that there is a disjuncture in 1979 between all the different kinds of cultures that our floating around in the society.

Foner:

I know. Remember, I wasn't a 1980 type culture person. That was a problem. But we had on the staff someone like Nonni Perry, who was an organizer, and was then put on the Bread and Roses staff. Her job was to work with the members and work with the hospitals in lining up the places and getting the organizers, you know, to getting the members out for it, and to evaluate every particular show with notes as to what went wrong, and what can we learn for the next time, because we were going to be around for a couple of years.

Q:

What was her background?

Foner:

She had been a member of the union in clerical. Black woman.

[END TAPE THREE, SIDE TWO; BEGIN TAPE FOUR, SIDE ONE]

Q:

She had worked with you in cultural programming.

Foner:

Yes -- before Bread and Roses, and she was anxious for the job. So we put her on the staff, and she became part of the Bread and Roses staff. We had an administrative director, Nonni, and me, and the secretary. Anybody else that we hired was hired as a consultant. Occasionally a curator, that kind of thing. So one of the things that impressed everybody -- and I was insisting on doing this anyway -- is that we were not going to overload the staff with a lot of people. Because there was nothing that they could do. We had the arms of seventy-five organizers, and we had hundreds of stewards who could do it. That was a match in some of the grants with the government -- we are matching with this labor from the union. But the fact that we could produce that meant that we could accomplish it with a small staff.

Q:

But come back to the question of --

Foner:

Culture.





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