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introduction Weavers of Dreams, Unite! Until quite recently, the history of the American theater was a neglected scholarly field. Though there were some fine overviews of the development of theatrical entertainment in the United States, relatively few works existed that set out to tackle the wider significance of the theater as a cultural institution. In part, this was because theater history fell into an intellectual lacuna between theater arts programs, with their emphasis upon theater as performance, and literature programs, with their emphasis upon drama as written text. But there were other factors at work as well, not least a tendency on the part of many social and economic historians to dismiss the theater as inconsequential and, by extension, peripheral to their concerns. Over the last twenty-five years or so, however, the anti-theatrical prejudices of the historical profession have steadily dissipated, and scholars working in a range of fields have finally begun to explore the significance of the American theater as an arena in which important debates about class, gender, race, ethnicity, and national identity have played themselves out. As a consequence, what was once a quiet crossroads where literature met theater studies is now a bustling intersection where a variety of academic disciplines converge in new and intriguing configurations.1 But if this body of scholarship has succeeded in stripping the American theater of layers of anecdote and nostalgia that have accumulated on it over the years, it has yet to come to grips with the history of the American stage actor as worker. In the early twentieth century, the men and women of the American stage were fond of describing themselves as “weavers of dreams”—artists engaged in creative endeavors and, in their own estimation , set apart from other occupational groups.The metaphor they invoked was a powerful one—and one that raises important questions about the processes by which actors’ labor is transformed into its commodity form. Holmes_Weavers text.indd 1 12/7/12 8:28 AM In studying theatrical performers, however, scholars have generally shown more interest in the dreams the performers weave than in how those dreams are woven. In their investigations into the emergence of a mass culture in the early twentieth century, they have tended to prioritize the actor as commodity/cultural signifier over the actor as wage laborer, paying scant attention to the nature of work in the expanding realm of commercialized leisure. As a consequence, the experience of American stage actors in the workplace and the particularities of labor relations in the American theater industry remain largely unexamined outside the pages of official trade union histories and a handful of rather dated industrial relations studies. Yet the men and women of the American stage were key workers in a rapidly expanding and increasingly important sector of the economy. As such, they are no less worthy of careful scholarly attention than producers of other, more tangible commodities.2 Setting out to rescue the men and women of the American stage from what the great Marxist historian E. P. Thompson memorably termed “the enormous condescension of posterity,”this book traces the history of the Actors ’ Equity Association (AEA) from its inception in 1913 to the early 1930s. The story it tells is bookended by two major economic crises: the Panic of 1873, which destroyed the preindustrial system of theatrical production in the United States and cleared the way for what many commentators have termed an “industrial revolution” in the theater, and the Great Depression of the 1930s, which brought down the curtain on an era when theatrical entertainment stood at the center of American culture.Though institutional in its orientation, this book is not a labor history in the traditional sense. Like much of the most innovative work in the field of social history over the last two decades, it combines the concerns of the so-called new labor history with the lessons of post-structuralism and cultural studies. Conceptualizing occupational identity as something that is fluid and often hotly contested, it explores the efforts of American actors to define what it meant to earn a living on the stage at a historical moment when the cultural landscape of the United States was undergoing seismic changes. In so doing, it sheds light on a number of larger issues: the nature of cultural production in the early twentieth century; languages of class and their role in the construction of cultural hierarchy; and the special problems that unionization posed for workers in the...

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