Cuts

Robertson	There’s something, Doctor.  I feel a conflict…
Rosman	That’s what we’re here for.

Rosman	Have you talked to your colleagues?
Robertson	They won’t listen.  We’ve been tossing the whole country onto a crap table in a game where nobody is supposed to lose….. I sold off a lot two years ago, but when the market opens tomorrow, I’m cashing in the rest. BEAT  I feel guilty.

Quinn

It’s a long story, but I love to tell it. I started out working as a clerk in a factory that manufactured bulbs for auto headlights. The manufacturing process was not too accurate, so you had to make nine thousand bulbs to come out with five thousand perfect ones.  So… one night on my own time, I went through the records and came up with a new average.  My figure showed that to get 5,000 bulbs, we only had to make 6200 bulbs instead of 9,000. Result was, that company saved a hundred and thirty thousand dollars in one year.  BEAT So the boss and I became friendly and one day he says, “I’m selling out to General Electric. They’re coming out from Wall Street, and I’m going to let you pick them up at the depot.” He figured out I’d be the first to meet them and they’d rehire me.   I (was) hardly slept all night tryin to figure out how to make an impression.  I suddenly thought of that wall,… see the factory had this brick wall a block long.   It went through my mind that one of them might ask me how many bricks were in that wall.    These three bankers arrive, and I get them into the boss’s limousine.  Nobody asks me anything.  Anyway, we round the corner, and doesn’t one of them turns to me and says, “Mr. Quinn, how many bricks you suppose is in that wall!”  And I told him!  He wouldn’t believe it and got out and counted himself.  It broke the ice and one thing then another and they made me the manager of the plant and that’s how I got into GE.

Quinn

I might set up an advisory service for small business. I can teach a small business man how to develop a concept and market it.  With this terrible Depression, an individual man is not worth a bag of peanuts.

Robertson

I guess the most shocking thing is what I see from the window of my Riverside Drive apartment.  It’s Calcutta on the Hudson. Thousands of people living in cardboard boxes. At night you see their campfires flickering, and some nights I go down and walk among them.  Remarkable, the humor they still have, but of course, people still blame themselves rather than the government. But there’s never been a society that hasn’t had a clock ticking on it, and you can’t help wondering… how long?  How long will they stand for this?  So now Roosevelt’s got in, I’m thinking… boy, he’d better move.

How scary and beautiful the Mississippi is.  How do they manage to live?  Every town has a bank boarded up and all those skinny men sitting on the sidewalks with their backs against the storefronts.  It’s all stopped: like a magic spell.  And the anger, the anger when they were handing out meat and beans to the hungry and the maggots wriggling out of the beef, and that man pointing his rifle at the butcher demanding the fresh meat the government had paid him to hand out.  How could this have happened?  Is Marx right?  Paper says twelve executives in tobacco made more than the  thirty thousand farmers who raised it.   How long can they accept this?  The anger has a smell, it hangs in the air wherever people gather… fights suddenly break out and simmer down.  Is this when revolution comes?   And why not? How would Mark Twain write what I have seen?  Armed deputies guarding cornfields and whole families sitting beside the road, staring at that food which nobody can buy and is rotting on the stalk.  It’s insane. 

Irene

I believe it too….. you so educated you sooner die than say brother.  Now lemme tell you people. The time had come to say brother. My husband  pass away and leave me with three small children.  No money, no work… I’s about ready to stick my head in the cookin stove.  Then the city marshal come and take my furniture and leave me sittin on an old orange crate in the middle of the room. And it come over me, Mister, come over me to get mean.  I go down in the street and start yellin and howlin like a real mean woman.  And the people crowd around the marshal truck, and  ‘fore you know it that marshal turn himself around and go on back downtown – empty-handed.  And that’s when I see it.  I see the solidarity,and I start to preach it up and down.  Some days I goes to court with my briefcase, raise hell with the judges.  Ever time I goes into court the cops commence to holler, “Here comes that old lawyer woman!” But all I got in here is some old newspaper and a bag of cayenne pepper.  Case any cop start musclin’ me around… that hot pepper, that’s hot cayenne pepper.  And if the judge happen to be Catholic, I got my rosary layin’ in there, and I kind of let that crucifix hang out so they think I’m Catholic too.

Lucille	This spring Mom actually called me to spend the day cleaning her house.
Fanny	What’s so terrible!  We used to have the most marvelous times the four of us cleaning the house….
Fanny	It’s turning into an oven in here!
Lucille	I’m going to faint.

Moe	Because we are.  So this nervousness every night is unnecessary.   I saw a terrible thing on the subway.  Somebody jumped in front of a train.  Seems he was a very young man.  Seems he was trying to sell flowers.

Lee -but what she really longed for was some kind of height where she could stand and see out and around and breathe in the air of her own free life.  With all of her defeats she believed to the end that the world was meant to be better… I don’t know;   all I know for sure is that whenever I think of her, I always end up… with this heedful of life!??????

Irene	That’s what the good Lord said when he made the jackass, but he decided to knuckle down and try harder.  People been thrown out on the sidewalk, mattresses, pots and pans and everything else they own.  Right on A Hundred and Thirty eighth Street.  They goin back in their apartments today or we goin raise us some real hell.
Ryan	I got no more appropriations for you til the first of the month, Irene.
Irene	Mr. Ryan, you ain’t talkin to me, you talkin to Local 45 of the Workers Alliance, and you know what that mean.
Dugan	The Communist Party.
Irene	That’s right, mister, and they don’t mess.  So why don’t you get on your phone and call Washington.  And while you’re at it, you can remind Mr. Roosevelt that I done swang One Hundred and Thirty-ninth Street for him in the last election, and if he want it swung again he better get crackin.
Lee	Yesterday you told me to bring my father.
Ryan	Get off my back, will ya?
Moe	I hope I can get out by eleven.  I got an appointment with a buyer.
Toland	Looka this -Helen Hayes gonna put on forty pounds to play the Queen of England.  I picked up Helen Hayes when I had my cab.
Moe	You lost it?
Toland	What’re you gonna do?  The town is walkin.  But thank God, I got into the Housing Project.
Moe	What do you pay?
Toland	Nineteen-fifty a month. It sounds like a lot, but we got three nice rooms – providing I get a little help here. What’s your line?
Moe	I sell on commission right now.  I used to have my own business.
Toland	Used-ta.   Whoever you talk to, “I used-ta.”  I tell ya, one of these days, this used-ta be a country.
Irene	Solidarity, folks, - together.  That’s what we gotta have.  Join the Workers Alliance, ten cents a month, and you git yourself some solidarity.
Kapush	Mobocracy – gimme, gimme, gimme, all they know.
Dugan	So, what’re you doing here?
Kapush	Here’s my bankbook, see that?  Bank of the United States. Four thousand six hundred and ten dollars and thirty-one cents, right?  Who’s got that money?  Savin thirteen years, by the week.
Ryan calls	Patrick Dugan

Doris

Because she’s spreading it all over the class!  And I still don’t understand how you could have said a thing like that.