Weavers of Dreams, Unite!: Actors' Unionism in Early Twentieth-Century America

Notes

Notes Introduction 1.Among the studies that I have found most useful and interesting are the following : Robert W. Snyder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); William R. Taylor, ed., Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991); Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Michael Schwartz, Broadway and Corporate Capitalism: The Rise of the Professional Managerial Class, 1900–1920 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Gillian M. Rodger, Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima: Variety Theater in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010). Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby, eds., The Cambridge History of American Theatre, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998–2000), also contains some outstanding scholarship. 2. On commercialized leisure in the early twentieth century, see, for example, Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of Commercialized Leisure, 1890–1930 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981); John F. Kasson, Amusing the Millions: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusement: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Work and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1880–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). For an official history of the formative years of the Actors’ Equity Association, see Alfred Harding, The Revolt of the Actors (New York: William Morrow, 1929). On industrial relations in the American theater industry, see Paul Fleming Gemmill, Holmes_Weavers text.indd 179 12/7/12 8:29 AM Collective Bargaining by Actors: A Study of Trade Unionism among Performers of the English-Speaking Legitimate Stage in America, Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, No. 402 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1926); and Leonard I. Pearlin and Henry E. Richards, “Equity: A Study of Union Democracy,” in Labor and Trade Unionism: An Interdisciplinary History, ed. Walter Galenson and Seymour Martin Lipset (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1960), 265–81. 3. On the evolution of the term “legitimate theater,” see Benjamin McArthur, Actors and American Culture, 1880–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), x–xi; Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 75–76. Mark Hodin,“The Disavowal of Ethnicity: Legitimate Theatre and the Social Construction of Literary Value in Turn-of-the Century America,” Theatre Journal 52 (May 2000): 212. 4. On the commodification of actors’ labor, see Barry King, “Stardom as an Occupation ,”in The Hollywood Film Industry: A Reader, ed. Paul Kerr (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 154–84; Barry King, “Articulating Stardom,” Screen 26 (September-October 1985), 27–50; Barry King, “The Star and the Commodity: Notes towards a Performance Theory of Stardom,” Cultural Studies 1 (May 1987): 145–61; Danae Clark, Negotiating Hollywood: The Cultural Politics of Actors’ Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 5. Thomas Postlewait,“Autobiography and Theatre History,” in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, ed.Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 252. 6. Kathryn J. Oberdeck, The Evangelist and the Impresario: Religion, Entertainment , and Cultural Politics in America, 1884–1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); M.Alison Kibler, Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 7. Linda Mizejewski, Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema (Durham , NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 8. Peter A. Davis,“The Syndicate/Shubert War,”in Taylor, Inventing Times Square, 147–57; Foster Hirsch, The Boys from Syracuse: The Shuberts’ Theatrical Empire (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998). Chapter 1 1. Frank Gillmore speech, February 14, 1913, box 4, folder 9, Actors’ Equity Association Records, WAG 011, Tamiment Library/Robert Wagner Labor Archives, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University Libraries (hereafter, AEA Records ). 2. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 216. 3. Alfred Bernheim, The Business of the Theater (New York: Actors’ Equity As180 notes to introduction and chapter 1 Holmes_Weavers...