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chapter five For the Dignity and Honor of the Theatrical Profession Respectability and Unrespectability in the Actors’ Equity Association, 1919–1929 The actor, because of his calling, is constantly in the public eye. He owes it to himself, to his profession, and to the public to conduct himself with discretion always and to remember that by his actions on and off the stage, his profession is given honor and dishonor. —Actors’ Equity Association Bluebook, 1926 Though mediating the relationship between actors and their employers was central to the activities of the Actors’ Equity Association in its formative years, this was not its only function. Just as significant was its campaign to raise the status of acting as an occupation, a project that was entirely consonant with the principles of craft unionism and that played upon the anxieties of a group of workers who had long struggled to rid themselves of the taint of immorality. In pursuing their goal of collective uplift, Equity leaders focused much of their energy on challenging anti-theatrical sentiment in American culture wherever they encountered it and especially as it manifested itself in the press and in the pulpit. Their chief preoccupation, however, was with the conduct of their own members. Embracing a model of occupational unionism that sanctioned an extension of their authority far beyond the theatrical workplace, they made it their mission to patrol the boundaries between the respectable and the unrespectable and to purge the acting community of what they perceived as its undesirable elements. As historian Benjamin McArthur has demonstrated in his pioneering study of actors and American culture, the vexed question of how to improve the collective standing of the theatrical profession was one that had preoccupied Holmes_Weavers text.indd 119 12/7/12 8:28 AM leading stage players ever since the 1880s. Anxious to win the approval of the arbiters of respectable behavior, they had urged their fellow performers to look to the white-collar professions for models of social advancement and to observe the middle-class canon of propriety both on and off the stage.1 Rooted as they were in the cult of domesticity and a gender ideology that prescribed clearly differentiated roles for men and women, however, Victorian notions of respectability were incompatible with the realities of working in the commercial theater. As workers in an industry in which the supply of labor perennially outstripped demand, all but the most successful male performers struggled to measure up to a set of ideals that equated respectable manhood with providing for the material needs of one’s family by earning a steady income. And whatever freedoms a career on the stage may have afforded American women in the late nineteenth century, very few female performers were able to reconcile working for wages in an occupation that was defined by nonconformity and transgression with the responsibilities of motherhood and homemaking. What had changed by the 1920s was that the distinctions between the respectable and the unrespectable had blurred as the culture of Victorianism gave way to the new and more expressive culture of the Jazz Age, a process in which actors had played a highly visible role. Not only was the theater a central institution in the rapidly expanding commercial entertainment industry and a potent symbol of modern urban nightlife, but it also was a key arena for acting out and intervening in the debates that accompanied the social, political, and cultural upheavals of the early twentieth century. On the stage theatrical performers took part in a creative reimagining of gender roles that broke down many of the old distinctions between masculinity and femininity and allowed them to experiment with new sexual identities that were entirely at odds with the so-called civilized morality of the old cultural order. Off the stage they emerged as objects of popular fascination, endlessly profiled in the nascent mass media and held up as exemplars of a new metropolitan lifestyle that was defined by commercialized recreation and the pursuit of pleasure.2 The reconfiguration of American culture bestowed upon the men and women of the stage an unaccustomed degree of social acceptance. Among the old theatrical elite, however, it also aroused considerable concern. Cultural conservatives for whom theatrical legitimacy was indivisible from nineteenth-century notions of respectability , they were anxious to make sure the acting community did not become too closely associated with what they saw as an inversion of traditional standards. Through the institutional apparatus of the AEA, they set out to...

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