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chapter four Protecting the High-Minded Actor and the High-Minded Manager in Equal Part Occupational Unionism in the American Theater Industry, 1919–1929 Members when they are wrong should be held to account and disciplined just as the Association proceeds against and disciplines Managers when they are wrong. —Paul Dulzell, 1926 On the rare occasions that scholars have turned their attention to the organizational impulse that animated the acting community in the early twentieth century, they have tended to assume that the actors’ strike of 1919 marked a point of closure—the moment when art was finally reconciled with labor.1 As a consequence, actors’ unionism and its implications for acting as an occupation and for the American theater industry as a whole remain largely unexamined outside the pages of a handful of industrial relations studies, the most recent of which was published almost fifty years ago.2 But as labor historians have often observed, when workers organize, they face a series of collective choices about how to proceed organizationally, a generalization that holds no less true for stage performers than for any other group of workers in industrial America. Though the Actors’ Equity Association had succeeded by late 1919 in forcing the theatrical employers to terms, it had yet to establish itself as the sole legitimate bargaining agent of the American acting community or, indeed, to determine where in organized labor’s many-mansioned house its members would reside. Over the next decade, the choices that its leaders made about how best to deliver on their promises of workplace equity gave rise to a uniquely theatrical brand of occupational unionism that integrated the men and women of the AmeriHolmes_Weavers text.indd 87 12/7/12 8:28 AM can stage into the mainstream of the labor movement while simultaneously setting them apart from their brothers and sisters in other lines of work. In terms of the wider sociopolitical context, it would appear at first glance that the circumstances under which the AEA, a body whose legitimacy was still very much in question at the end of 1919, set out on its quest to consolidate its position could not have been less propitious. Having benefited from full employment and the efforts of the Wilson administration to foster labor peace during the war years by upholding the right of workers to join unions and to bargain collectively, the organized labor movement entered the postwar era in apparently rude health. Buoyed by an upsurge in recruitment that had seen union membership rise from 10.3 percent of eligible workers in 1913 to 16.7 percent in 1920, laborites of every hue from socialists and syndicalists to the bread-and-butter unionists of the American Federation of Labor sensed that labor’s moment had come. Between 1919 and 1922 a strike wave of unprecedented magnitude swept the United States as workers walked off the job in pursuit of a variety of goals ranging from union recognition and wage increases to workers’ control and the nationalization of basic industries. But by 1923 organized labor was in headlong retreat. Confronted by obdurately open shop employers and the coercive powers of an increasingly hostile state, it had experienced decisive defeats in a series of massive strikes in the steel, coal, textile, meatpacking, and railroad industries. In the wake of these setbacks, union membership plummeted to just 11.3 percent of the workforce, and it would continue to fall for the remainder of the decade as the unionized sectors of key industries like textile manufacture and coal mining slipped into terminal decline.3 The picture that emerges from this narrative is one of demoralized trade unions struggling to maintain a toehold in American industry and of an unaccustomed quiescence among laborites that would not give way to renewed militancy until the rebirth of industrial unionism in the 1930s. Over the last three decades, however, labor historians have begun to move away from the “lean years”/“turbulent years” dichotomy that underpins this view of the labor movement in the 1920s and to look for elements of continuity in the history of organized labor between the wars.4 Though union membership as a percentage of the industrial workforce continued to decline throughout the decade, the number of workers who belonged to unions was still higher in absolute terms when the fortunes of organized labor reached their nadir in the early 1930s than it was in 1913. For some unions, moreover, the 1920s were years of vigorous experimentation. Having...

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