Barbara Garson (born July 7, 1941 in
BrooklynBrooklyn is one of the five boroughs of New York City, located southwest of Queens on the western tip of Long Island. An independent city until its consolidation with New York in 1898, Brooklyn is New York City's most populous borough, with 2.5 million residents, and second largest in area...
,
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States, and the center of the New York metropolitan area, which is among the most populous urban areas in the world. A leading global city, New York exerts a powerful influence over worldwide commerce, finance, culture, fashion and entertainment...
) is an American
playwrightA playwright, also known as a dramatist, is a person who writes dramatic literature or drama. These works are usually written to be performed in front of a live audience by actors...
,
authorAn author is defined both as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created...
and social activist.
Garson is best known for the play
MacBirdMacBird! was a notorious 1967 counterculture drama by Barbara Garson that accused President Lyndon Johnson and First Lady Lady Bird Johnson of criminal responsibility for the Kennedy assassination.....
, a notorious 1966
countercultureCounterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition...
dramaDrama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a collective...
/political
parodyA parody , in contemporary usage, is a work created to mock, comment on, or poke fun at an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...
of
MacbethThe Tragedy of Macbeth, commonly just Macbeth, is a play by William Shakespeare about a regicide and its aftermath. It is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy and is believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607...
that sold over half a million copies as a book and had over 90 productions world wide. The play was originally intended for an
anti-warThe term anti-war usually refers to the opposition to a particular nation's decision to start or carry on an armed conflict, unconditional of a maybe-existing just cause. The term can also refer to pacifism, which is the opposition to all use of military force during conflicts. Many activists...
teach-inA teach-in is similar to a general educational forum on any complicated issue, usually an issue involving current political affairs. The main difference between a teach-in and a seminar is the refusal to limit the discussion to a specific frame of time or an academic scope of the topic. Teach-ins...
at the
University of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley is a public research university located in Berkeley, California, United States. The oldest of the ten major campuses affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley offers some 300 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines...
. The first published edition was printed on an offset press that Garson had restored the year before in order to print
The Free Speech Movement Newsletter which she edited.
Barbara Garson (born July 7, 1941 in
BrooklynBrooklyn is one of the five boroughs of New York City, located southwest of Queens on the western tip of Long Island. An independent city until its consolidation with New York in 1898, Brooklyn is New York City's most populous borough, with 2.5 million residents, and second largest in area...
,
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States, and the center of the New York metropolitan area, which is among the most populous urban areas in the world. A leading global city, New York exerts a powerful influence over worldwide commerce, finance, culture, fashion and entertainment...
) is an American
playwrightA playwright, also known as a dramatist, is a person who writes dramatic literature or drama. These works are usually written to be performed in front of a live audience by actors...
,
authorAn author is defined both as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created...
and social activist.
Garson is best known for the play
MacBirdMacBird! was a notorious 1967 counterculture drama by Barbara Garson that accused President Lyndon Johnson and First Lady Lady Bird Johnson of criminal responsibility for the Kennedy assassination.....
, a notorious 1966
countercultureCounterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition...
dramaDrama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a collective...
/political
parodyA parody , in contemporary usage, is a work created to mock, comment on, or poke fun at an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...
of
MacbethThe Tragedy of Macbeth, commonly just Macbeth, is a play by William Shakespeare about a regicide and its aftermath. It is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy and is believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607...
that sold over half a million copies as a book and had over 90 productions world wide. The play was originally intended for an
anti-warThe term anti-war usually refers to the opposition to a particular nation's decision to start or carry on an armed conflict, unconditional of a maybe-existing just cause. The term can also refer to pacifism, which is the opposition to all use of military force during conflicts. Many activists...
teach-inA teach-in is similar to a general educational forum on any complicated issue, usually an issue involving current political affairs. The main difference between a teach-in and a seminar is the refusal to limit the discussion to a specific frame of time or an academic scope of the topic. Teach-ins...
at the
University of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley is a public research university located in Berkeley, California, United States. The oldest of the ten major campuses affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley offers some 300 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines...
. The first published edition was printed on an offset press that Garson had restored the year before in order to print
The Free Speech Movement Newsletter which she edited. She was one of 800 arrested with
Mario SavioMario Savio was an American political activist and a key member in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. He is most famous for his passionate speeches, especially his "put your bodies upon the gears" address given at Sproul Hall, University of California, Berkeley on December 2, 1964:-Early...
during these early student protests of the 1960s. Garson's self-published edition of
MacBird had sold over 200,000 copies by 1967 when the play opened in New York in a production starring Stacey Keach,
Bill DevaneWilliam Devane is an American film and television actor.-Life and career:He was born in Albany, New York, the son of Joseph Devane, who was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's chauffeur when he was Governor of New York...
,
Cleavon LittleCleavon Jake Little was an American film and theatre actor, best known for his lead role as Bart in the 1974 Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles and as the irreverent Dr. Jerry Noland in the early 1970s sitcom Temperatures Rising. In 1978 he played "The Prince of Darkness" in the radio station...
, and
Rue McClanahanRue McClanahan is an American actress, known for her roles as Vivian Cavender Harmon on Maude, Fran Crowley on Mama's Family and Blanche Devereaux on The Golden Girls...
. While these then unknown actors went on to become fixtures in American theater, movies and
televisionTelevision is a widely used telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images, either monochromatic or color, usually accompanied by sound. "Television" may also refer specifically to a television set, television programming or television transmission...
, the author disappeared from public view at the height of fame.
In 1968 Garson had a child, and in 1969 she went to work at
The Shelter HalfThe Shelter Half was a coffeehouse in Tacoma, Washington, from 1968 to 1974. Like its namesake, a Shelter-half is a simple tent to provide shelter, the Shelter Half's purpose was to provide a place for GIs at Fort Lewis military base in Washington State to resist the war in Vietnam...
, an anti-war GI coffee house near
Fort LewisFort Lewis is a census-designated place and United States Army post in Pierce County and Thurston County, Washington, United States. The territory of Fort Lewis is not conterminous with the CDP, and is in fact much larger. As of the 2000 census, the CDP, which includes the most densely populated...
Army base in
Tacoma, WashingtonTacoma is a mid-sized urban port city in and the county seat of Pierce County, Washington, United States. The city is on Washington's Puget Sound, southwest of Seattle, northeast of the state capital, Olympia, and northwest of Mount Rainier National Park...
. Her only known publications from the coffee house period were articles in a Seattle anarchist newsletter and contributions to
FTAThe FTA Tour was an anti-Vietnam War road show designed as a response to Bob Hope's USO tour....
, the
Jane FondaJane Fonda is an American actress, writer, political activist, former fashion model and fitness guru. She rose to fame in the 1960s with films such as Barbarella and Cat Ballou and, excluding a 15 year hiatus, has appeared in films ever since. She has won two Academy Awards and received several...
and
Donald SutherlandDonald McNicol Sutherland, OC is a Canadian character actor with a film career spanning over 50 years. He is currently working in the American television series, Dirty Sexy Money. Some of Sutherland's more notable movie roles included offbeat warriors in such war movies as The Dirty Dozen, in...
anti-war show for soldiers that toured G.I. venues in the U.S. and abroad. Garson is said to have written skits performed at the coffee house during her tenure there.
Garson moved to
ManhattanManhattan is one of the five boroughs of New York City, located primarily on Manhattan Island at the mouth of the Hudson River.New York County, which has the same boundaries as the Borough of Manhattan , is the most densely populated county in the United States, with a 2008 population of 1,634,795...
in the early 1970s and began publishing short, humorous essays and theater reviews primarily for
The Village VoiceThe Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper in New York City, United States featuring investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts reviews and events listings for New York City...
. Her next full length play
Going Co-op, 1972, was a comedy about residents of an
Upper West SideThe Upper West Side is a neighborhood of the borough of Manhattan in New York City that lies between Central Park and the Hudson River above West 59th Street....
Manhattan apartment house going co-op and a floundering left wing political collective that comes home to help organize the tenants who cannot afford to change from renters to owners. It was written with Fred Gardner. Gardner is credited with founding the first of the Vietnam era GI Coffee Houses.
Garson's children's play
The Dinosaur Door, set on a class trip to the Natural History Museum, was awarded an
OBIEThe Obie Awards or Off-Broadway Theater Awards are annual awards bestowed by The Village Voice newspaper to theater artists and groups in New York City. As the Tony Awards cover Broadway productions, the Obies cover off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway productions...
for playwriting in 1977.
A full-length play,
The Department (1983), written for and performed by the organizing group Women Office Workers (WOW), is set in a bank's back office that is about to be automated.
The Department, though a light farce, sets out many of the problems that Garson expanded on in her 1989 book
The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past.
In addition to plays, Garson is the author of three non-fiction books:
- All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work, Doubleday & Co., N.Y., 1975; Penguin, N.Y., 1977,; Expanded edition, Penguin, 1994.
- The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers Are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past, Simon & Schuster, N.Y., 1988; Penguin, N.Y., 1989.
- Money Makes the World Go Around: One Investor Tracks Her Cash Through the Global Economy, Viking, N.Y., 2001, Penguin, N.Y., 2002.
All three books explain complex
capitalistCapitalism is an economic and social system in which the means of production are privately controlled; labor, goods and capital are traded in a market; profits are distributed to owners or invested in technologies and industries; and wages are paid to labor...
phenomena —
TaylorismScientific management is a theory of management that analyzes and synthesizes workflows, with the objective of improving labor productivity...
in the first two, global finance in the third — through dramatic anecdotes and interviews. They each describe a historical turning point through the voices of a range of people who may (or may not) themselves, understand the changes happening in their own lives.
MacBird is remembered as an attack on then U.S. President Lyndon Johnson. In fact, it presented Johnson's predecessor,
John KennedyJohn Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....
, and his would-be successor
Robert KennedyRobert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy , also referred to by his initials RFK, was an American politician. He was a younger brother of President John F. Kennedy and acted as one of his advisers during his presidency. From 1961 to 1964, he was the U.S...
as equally unacceptable but more dangerously alluring. Garson wanted her fellow 1960s activists to step away from the
Democratic PartyThe Democratic Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. It is the oldest political party in continuous operation in the United States and it is one of the oldest parties in the world. In the U.S...
and create their own institutions including a third party. To that end, she could sometimes be seen outside of California theaters where
MacBird was playing, gathering signatures to put the Peace and Freedom Party on the ballot.
In
Money Makes the World Go Around, Garson explained the global economy by depositing her book advance in a one branch small town bank, then following it around the world. At one point, her money was invested in Suez, the
FrenchFrance , officially the French Republic , is a country located in Western Europe, with several overseas islands and territories located on other continents. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean...
company that owned
JohannesburgJohannesburg also known as Jozi or Jo'burg, is the largest city in South Africa. Johannesburg is the provincial capital of Gauteng, the wealthiest province in South Africa, having the largest economy of any metropolitan region in Sub-Saharan Africa...
's water system. When protesters were arrested for opposing price increases and water shut offs, Garson organized a "shareholders" demonstration on their behalf in front of the South African consulate.
Garson insists that activism is essential to her writing. But her plays and non-fiction feature layered characters and plot twists that are often irrelevant or even inimical to
liberalLiberalism in the United States is a broad political and philosophical mindset favoring individual liberty. According to Louis Hartz, it differs from liberalism in the rest of the world, because America never had a hereditary aristocracy and therefore never turned to socialism, as many European...
and socialist tenets. Indeed,
Money Makes the World Go Around was largely ignored by the
anti-globalizationCriticism of globalization is skepticism of the claimed benefits of the globalization of capitalism. Many of these views are held by the anti-globalization movement however other groups also are critical of the policies of globalization....
movement within which Garson was active, while a
Wall Street Journal review said "Ms. Garson recounts her travels with a disarmingly balanced combination of amazement and social concern" and
Business Week said "...her voice is so persistently good-natured and her intelligence so obvious that by the end of this curious capitalist's
BaedekerVerlag Karl Baedeker is a Germany-based publisher and pioneer in the business of worldwide travel guides. The guides, often referred as simply "Baedekers" , contain important introductions, descriptions of buildings, of museum collections, etc., written by the best specialists, and...
you can't help but trust her gentle judgments."
Garson is the author of over 100 articles in publications including
Harper's,
The New York TimesThe New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded in 1851 and published in New York City. The largest metropolitan newspaper in the United States, "The Gray Lady"—named for its staid appearance and style—is regarded as a national newspaper of record...
,
McCalls,
NewsweekNewsweek is an American weekly newsmagazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
,
The Village VoiceThe Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper in New York City, United States featuring investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts reviews and events listings for New York City...
,
Ms.,
The Washington PostThe Washington Post is the newspaper with the largest circulation in Washington, D.C. and is the city's oldest paper, founded in 1877. Being located in the nation's capital, it has a particular emphasis on national politics and international affairs...
,
The Los Angeles Times,
NewsdayNewsday is a daily American newspaper that primarily serves Nassau and Suffolk counties and the New York City borough of Queens on Long Island, although it is sold throughout the New York metropolitan area...
,
Modern Maturity,
Mother JonesMother Jones is an independent, nonprofit magazine rooted in liberal and progressive political values. It is widely known for its investigative reporting...
,
The NationThe Nation is a weekly United States periodical devoted to politics and culture, self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865 at the start of Reconstruction as a supporter of the victorious North in the American Civil War, it is the oldest continuously published weekly...
, and
Znet.
She was awarded an OBIE for
The Dinosaur Door and a Special Commission from the New York State Council on the Arts, for the Creation of Plays for Younger audiences. She has received a
Guggenheim FellowshipGuggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
, a
National Endowment for the ArtsThe National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...
Fellowship, a Louis M. Rabinowitz Foundation Grant, the
New York Public LibraryThe New York Public Library is one of the leading public libraries of the world and is one of the United States's most significant research libraries. It is composed of a very large circulating public library system combined with a very large non-lending research library system...
Books to Remember award and
Library JournalLibrary Journal is a trade publication for librarians. It was founded in 1876 by Melvil Dewey . It reports news about the library world, emphasizing public libraries, and offers feature articles about aspects of professional practice...
's Best Business Books of 1989 award, and a
MacArthur FoundationThe John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a major grant-making private foundation based in Chicago that has awarded more than US$4 billion since its inception in 1978...
Grant for reading and writing.
In 1992, Garson was the running mate for
J. Quinn BrisbenJohn Quinn Brisben was the Socialist Party USA candidate for President of the United States in the 1992 U.S. presidential election. His running mate was initially Bill Edwards, but after Edwards died during the campaign he was replaced by Barbara Garson.Extremely active in the civil rights...
on the
Socialist Party USAThe Socialist Party USA is one of the heirs to the Socialist Party of America of Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas. It is a democratic socialist, multi-tendency party, advocating a broad-based, democratic social revolution from below...
ticket, replacing Bill Edwards, who died during the race. In August 1992, she received a message on her
answering machineAn answering machine, also known as an answerphone , and sometimes/formerly ansaphone or ansafone or telephone answering device , is a device invented in 1935, by Benjamin Thornton, and independently in Switzerland by Willy Mueller...
: "We're sorry to tell you that the Socialist Vice-Presidential candidate, Bill Edwards, has died. We would like your help in writing a press release for the newspapers. And also, would you like to run for Vice President?", which she initially believed to be a joke.
See also
- American literature
American literature is the written or literary work produced in the area of the United States and Colonial America. For more specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the United States and Theater in the United States. During its early history, America was a series of British...