Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Moe FonerMoe Foner
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Session:         Page of 592

don't want to burden my successor with an exhibition that I have not, you know, that he hasn't picked.” He says, “The only chance you've got in Washington is maybe the National Museum of American History -- maybe.” But he said, “That would be ideal for you.” He says, “If you get it, get it in the summer there, because hundreds of thousands of people go through that museum.”

I contacted Roger Kennedy and we talked and we talked, and I sent him the slides. I showed him what we were doing, and he finally said, “Okay.” Later I found out about the problem that existed in getting it. He didn't tell me about it until we got in to it. He assigned people on his staff -- if they do an exhibition, it has to have history. So they assigned someone on his staff, in the museum -- I forget her name, I worked with her -- on programming. It had to have a lot of things happening with it. We got Service Employees [SEIU], Lyn Goldfarb. I contacted Lyn, I said, “Lyn, you've got to get Service to do this.” They have an auditorium. “Let's do a film series. As part of Bread and Roses, Service Employees does this film series. So they schedule every single day for two months, twice daily, a series of labor films. The best! Rosie the Riveter, I Am Somebody, Like a Beautiful Child. And free! At lunch time and evening, they were packed to overflowing at every single performance.

Q:

Really!

Foner:

Because we got a lot of p.r., a lot of p.r. Edith something at the Smithsonian worked on the project with me. That was the way it was to open there.

Then when it opened, they said we ought to do a regular formal opening. I said, “What do you mean?” They said, “We'll have a,” you know, when you have an opening! “Roger will host it, and we'll get Senator Claiborne Pell and Gus Hawkins, and someone from the AFL- CIO” -- I said, “Tom Donahue” -- “we'll get Tom Donahue, and you, will be the speakers. We'll invite labor.” So I went to Washington, to an opening of Images of Labor in Washington. By then the press started. I went also a day in advance to do a press thing, and radio and t.v. and that kind of thing, for interviews. The Washington Post, big features. Also they were reprinting the schedule of the films -- a lot of very big stuff. At that time, through my friend who covered the Charleston Hospital Strike for the AP, Jules Coh, I got an AP national feature that appeared in hundreds of papers around the country about “Images of Labor,” but was about Bread and Roses. “The Soc Hurok of the Labor Movement,” with a picture of me with a book. The book





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help