Weavers of Dreams, Unite!

Actors' Unionism in Early Twentieth-Century America

Sean P. Holmes

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780252094682
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Published to coincide with the centenary of the founding of the Actors' Equity Association in 1913, Weavers of Dreams, Unite! explores the history of actors' unionism in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the onset of the Great Depression. Drawing upon hitherto untapped archival resources in New York and Los Angeles, Sean P. Holmes documents how American stage actors used trade unionism to construct for themselves an occupational identity that foregrounded both their artistry and their respectability. In the process, he paints a vivid picture of life on the theatrical shop floor in an era in which economic, cultural, and technological changes were transforming the nature of acting as work. The engaging study offers important insights into the nature of cultural production in the early twentieth century, the role of class in the construction of cultural hierarchy, and the special problems that unionization posed for workers in the commercial entertainment industry.

CHAPTER ONE

THE GREAT TEXT IN OUR ECONOMY TODAY

The American Theater in an Age of Organization

Up to that period bookkeepers, scrubwomen and actors were about the only body of people who had not combined for protective purposes.

—FRANCIS WILSON, Francis Wilson's Life of Himself

“Nearly every trade, profession, and occupation has its organization,” actor Frank Gillmore observed in a speech to the small and exclusively male group of performers, playwrights, and producers in attendance at the inception of the Actors' Equity Association (AEA) in early 1913. “Indeed,” he went on, “‘organization’ might be called the great text in our economy today.” A self-appointed spokesperson for a section of the acting community that was both proud of its classlessness and inveterately class-conscious, Gillmore ignored the fundamental conflict of interests that divided organized labor from organized capital and, whether deliberately or not, glossed over the differences between trade unions and professional associations. Neither an economist nor a political scientist, he had little or no interest in exploring the distinctions between the competing modes of organization at work in industrial America in the early twentieth century. His point was simply that the failure of American stage actors to respond collectively to the problems that they encountered in the theatrical workplace set them apart from most other occupational groups and did so in ways that worked entirely to their detriment. By clinging to an anachronistic individualism, he asserted, they were condemning themselves “to accept injustice with seeming gratitude and sometimes [to] eat humble pie as a daily meal.” “Such a condition,” he warned them, was “apt to sap one's manhood and to rob one of that healthy self-respect without which no work of supreme artistic importance can be done.”¹

Less a manifestation of what Richard Hofstadter, in his classic history of Progressivism, termed “the complaint of the unorganized against the consequences of organization” than a warning to the unorganized against the consequences of not organizing, Gillmore's speech had a galvanizing effect on the theatrical community in the United States.² For all of its evasions, elisions, and omissions, it resonated with the men and women who earned their living on the so-called legitimate stage, a group whose collective sense of identity was inextricably bound up with a wider set of debates about cultural hierarchy and the nature of acting as work. For actors and actresses who were able to lay claim to it, theatrical legitimacy was a source of status, something that identified them as artists rather than mere entertainers and thereby set them apart from other, supposedly lesser performers. Regardless of whether they plied their trade on Broadway, in the opera houses of small-town America, or under canvas on the tent-rep circuits of the rural South and Midwest, they saw themselves as the elite of the American stage. Since the mid-1890s their privileged position within the American theatrical community had been under threat, both as a consequence of a thoroughgoing transformation in the system of production in the theater industry and of a series of even more far-reaching cultural shifts that were redrawing the boundaries of theatrical legitimacy. By 1913 they were more than ready to embrace the gospel of organization as it was preached to them by Frank Gillmore and other like-minded actor-activists. What form their organizational efforts would take, however, was still very much up for grabs.

Like other branches of the commercial entertainment industry in the United States, the legitimate theater underwent a radical restructuring in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Prior to the early 1870s the basic organizational unit in the American theater was the resident stock company, a small troupe of professional performers attached to a specific theater and permanently located in a community that was large enough to make it commercially viable. The typical resident stock company operated under the direction of a proprietor who combined the functions of theater management and play production, performing a broad repertoire of plays for an almost exclusively local audience. The seeds of the demise of what was an essentially preindustrial mode of production had been sown as early as the 1820s by the rise of the star system, a set of practices imported from the British theater that allowed leading performers to exploit their success by moving from company to company. Over the next three or four decades, American theatergoers had grown progressively less willing to patronize shows that did not offer the promise of a star, leaving theater managers with little alternative other than to cut the size of their companies in order to meet the salary demands of big-name performers. With the subsequent decline in the quality of resident stock companies, many stars had begun to put together their own supporting casts, eventually engaging entire companies—or combinations—to perform a single play for the duration of a national tour. What finally sounded the death knell for the resident stock company, however, was the Panic of 1873 and the economic downturn that it precipitated. As Peter A. Davis has argued, the majority of resident stock companies operated on very tight margins and were ill equipped to survive under anything other than the most propitious circumstances. The theater managers who were able to ride out the storm were, for the most part, those who were willing to reduce their outgoings by laying off permanent company members and embracing the “combination system” in its entirety. Between 1872 and 1880 the number of first-class stock companies in the United States declined from fifty to just eight, while the number of combination companies rose from five to over one hundred.³

The displacement of the resident stock company by the combination company had far-reaching consequences in that it detached theatrical production—that is, the process of putting together shows for the stage—from theater management. Having abandoned their role as producers, theater managers had to reinvent themselves as theatrical shopkeepers, traveling each summer to New York City, the emergent capital of the entertainment industry, to book attractions for the upcoming season. The advantages of the nascent combination system were manifold: it freed provincial theater managers from the expense of maintaining a permanent stock company; it provided New York–based producers with access to a national market; and it offered audiences across the United States a far more varied and polished product than ever had been available to them in the era of resident stock. Though a lengthy New York run would remain the apogee of success in American show business (as it had been since the early nineteenth century) and stock companies would not disappear altogether, it would be the road that drove the expansion of the theatrical economy for the next thirty years. In every season between 1880 and 1910, there were upward of 250 first-class combination companies leaving New York City on national tours, and their numbers were supplemented by hundreds of smaller companies that operated out of smaller theatrical centers such as Chicago and Kansas City.⁴

In its early years, however, the combination system was characterized by intense competition and frequent contract breaking. In an effort to combat the problems that this raised, theater managers began to group their theaters into circuits, a strategy that strengthened their bargaining position immeasurably because it made it possible for them to offer touring companies the opportunity to book several weeks of business in a single transaction. Sensing a money-making opportunity, enterprising businessmen in New York City responded by setting up booking agencies to broker agreements between theaters seeking attractions and combination companies seeking routes. As their businesses prospered, they began to expand their operations, investing in theaters of their own and thereby consolidating the functions of booking and theater management. In 1896 the most successful of these new-style theatrical entrepreneurs—Marc Klaw and A. L. Erlanger, Samuel F. Nixon and J. Fred Zimmerman, Charles Frohman and Al Hayman—agreed to pool their resources, the culmination of a set of processes that installed middlemen with little interest in theater as a creative process as the lynchpins of the theatrical economy in the United States. Klaw and Erlanger, the biggest players in the American theater industry at the end of the nineteenth century, had invested heavily in theatrical real estate in the South and negotiated exclusive booking rights to an additional two hundred theaters, an arrangement that enabled them to control the market for theatrical entertainment from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans. Nixon and Zimmerman owned the two most important playhouses in Philadelphia and a string of first-class theaters in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio. Frohman and Hayman owned or had controlling interests in theaters not only in Boston and New York but also out on the West Coast. Of the six men, only Frohman was directly involved in the process of producing shows.⁵

What contemporary commentators referred to as the Theatrical Syndicate rapidly came to exercise an iron grip over the theater industry, compelling both theater managers and independent producers to work through it and freezing out anyone who refused to do so. At the height of its power, it was responsible for booking more than seven hundred theaters across the country. Its dominance of the theater industry in the United States did not last for long, though. After the turn of the century, the Shuberts, three brothers with a chain of theaters in upstate New York, challenged the Theatrical Syndicate's virtual monopoly by buying up theatrical real estate across the country and offering their services to theater managers and producers who had fallen victim to its exclusionary practices. In 1905 Sam Shubert, the eldest of the Shubert brothers and the driving force behind their business operations, was killed in a railroad accident, but his younger siblings, Lee and J. J., proved capable executors of his vision. Masquerading as advocates of fair play and a free market for theatrical entertainment, they adopted what they termed an “open door” policy, opening their theaters to any production regardless of whether it had played in a Syndicate house. No sooner had they achieved their objectives, however, than they slammed shut the open door, embracing with enthusiasm the type of restrictive practices that had been pioneered by their rivals in the Syndicate. By 1990 they had achieved parity with the Theatrical Syndicate in terms of the booking and routing of attractions. In the subsequent struggle for market dominance, they took advantage of recently developed corporate techniques of capitalization, management, and strategy to establish themselves as the preeminent purveyors of theatrical entertainment in the United States.⁶

Seduced perhaps by the antimonopoly rhetoric of Progressive-era commentators on the entertainment business, historians have tended to overplay the parallels between the so-called theater trusts and the oligopolies that came to dominate other sectors of the American economy in the early twentieth century. As Michael Schwartz has recently observed, the Theatrical Syndicate and the Shuberts “would pave the way for future producing organizations complete with executive levels of management: departmental managers, auditors, and bookkeepers overseeing a clerical staff.”⁷ In terms of the scale of their operations, the levels of capitalization that underpinned their businesses, and the number of workers they employed, however, even the most powerful theatrical producers were small-time operators by comparison with the mighty corporations that had emerged from the second industrial revolution. Moreover, the managerial revolution that underpinned the rise of the modern business enterprise left the theater industry largely untouched. Even the most cursory trawl through the Shubert Archive reveals that Lee and J. J. Shubert, rather than salaried managers, remained the key decision makers within the Shubert organization through the 1920s. Nor was their control of the market for theatrical entertainment entirely unchallenged. Though the Theatrical Syndicate and the Shuberts exercised a tight grip over the metropolitan market, resident stock companies offering cut-price versions of Broadway hits and repertory companies performing on the small-time circuits of the rural hinterland continued to account for some four-fifths of theatrical production in the United States. Even so, the achievements of the new-style businessmen of the theater are undeniable. By creating national entertainment networks that integrated the processes of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception, they transformed American show business and, by extension, the conditions under which theatrical workers sold their labor.

Like other culture industries in the United States, the theater industry in the early twentieth century was increasingly geared toward the production of a standardized commodity.⁸ Although the need to differentiate one show from another fostered some degree of experimentation and left space for theatrical innovators to work, the general tendency was toward imitation and repetition, and what drove the biggest theatrical producers was the desire to identify a successful formula and to replicate it. In an era when American dramatists and composers had yet to find a distinctive voice, the majority of hit shows were either direct imports or repackaged versions of British musical comedies and European operettas. The Shuberts were atypical of the businessmen who controlled the commercial theater in that, unlike all but Charles Frohman among their rivals in the Theatrical Syndicate, they were actively involved in the process of theatrical production. The business over which they presided, however, both exemplified the trend toward mass production in the commercial entertainment industry and took it to its logical extreme.

Recognizing the importance of establishing clear lines of authority within their theatrical empire, the brothers divided producing responsibilities between them, with Lee Shubert supervising dramas and comedies and J. J. Shubert overseeing musical offerings. Lee Shubert was not directly involved in the task of putting together shows, preferring to delegate creative authority to theater professionals and comparing his role to that of a newspaper magnate directing the activities of a team of editors and reporters. “Why should the theater manager be required to oversee every detail or to be his own director throughout rehearsals?” he asked in an interview in the Green Book magazine in 1910.” Is not the owner of a metropolitan paper or magazine able to put his own individuality into his publication even though he must hire a corps of editors to handle the mass of material? I have never been distinctly and specifically a stage director and yet if I were not able to judge and direct my stage managers and, when necessary, make changes, how could I continue in the business?” J. J. Shubert, by contrast, took a hands-on approach, running what theater historian Foster Hirsch has termed “a theatrical sweatshop” in which a team of largely uncredited writer-lyricists, directors, and choreographers working to his specifications put together the operettas and musical revues that came to define the Shubert brand. His principal director, J. C. Huffman, directed five Broadway shows each season and was responsible for overseeing up to ten Shubert road companies. Though titles, settings, routines, and casts changed, the content of the shows varied very little from one theatrical season to the next. The Shuberts' Winter Garden revues, for example, followed a format—elaborate sets, comic sketches, and big production numbers performed by scantily clad chorus girls—that guaranteed commercial success but, as contemporary critics frequently pointed out, left little space for innovation. “For the twentieth time, the Shuberts have changed the show or at least the title of the show at the Winter Garden,” began one review of the Shuberts' Show of Wonders in December 1916. “You would scarcely realize that anything is new, however.”⁹

In the reconfigured theatrical economy of the early twentieth century, the market for actors' labor was highly segmented. Even in an era of expanding opportunities, the majority of the thirty thousand or so professional performers in the United States never made it onto the New York stage or toured with a first-class combination company. Hundreds of actors and actresses spent their entire careers laboring in obscurity with the traveling repertory companies that continued to be the main source of theatrical entertainment in the rural heartland of the South and Midwest, even as the forces of centralization and standardization were transforming the metropolitan theater. By around 1910, motion pictures had begun to displace live theater from the opera houses of small-town America, but small-time theatrical entrepreneurs had responded to the challenge of the movies by creating new performance spaces in highly portable canvas tents. According to some estimates, these “tent-rep” companies reached a larger audience than Broadway and all the rest of the theater industry combined. Even as late as 1926 (by which time the road was in seemingly terminal decline), there were some three hundred such companies in the United States, together playing to audiences in excess of 18 million.¹⁰

The theater of the rural hinterland bore scant resemblance to its metropolitan counterpart. Tent-rep companies played unashamedly to the tastes and the prejudices of their small-town audiences. Firmly grounded in an agrarian myth that located the yeoman farmer as the cornerstone of the American republic, they performed a repertoire made up largely of melodramas and comedies that juxtaposed rural virtue and urban vice. In their heyday in the early twentieth century, they were indivisible in the public mind from what were known as “Toby Shows,” comedy-dramas that caricatured the stock figures of small-town life—the pastor, the gossip, the old eccentric and, most memorably, Toby, the quintessential rube.¹¹ Holdovers from an older system of production that was local and regional in its orientation, they had more in common with the preindustrial craft workshop than the “theatrical sweatshop” of the Shuberts. As actor-manager Dan Sherman's vivid description of what he could offer to a prospective employer demonstrates, the typical tent-rep company was a small-scale operation that relied as heavily on the labor of the proprietor and his family as it did on hired hands.

I am not good enough to play violin in a jazz orchestra. I can only play the rube tunes and can't read. Now I have six good-looking chorus girls up here that have worked for me and all good lookers and fair singers…. My daughter, soubrette, can lead numbers. The man that plays the opposite part to me either straight or rube. The clown part would be played by one or more people also the dummy that sits in the seats…. My daughter is a fine looking plump girl and can do an old time song and dance, a monologue, and sing ballads…. Mrs. Sherman can play any character and so can I. I can lead the orchestra and get a lot out of it. Mrs. Sherman can also play a compliment [sic] banjo for it.¹²

The relatively small proportion of actors and actresses who were able to find work in the metropolitan theater had to negotiate the vagaries of an occupational hierarchy—the so-called star system—hat afforded vast salaries to the handful of players who occupied its upper strata but meager rewards to the far greater number of performers who eked out a living at its base. If the often rather sensationalistic reports that appeared in popular periodicals during the period have any basis in fact, the stars of the legitimate stage were astonishingly well remunerated for their labor. Well placed by virtue of their perceived exchange value to negotiate lucrative deals with the producing managers who employed them, they were often paid both a fixed weekly salary and a percentage of the profits from the show in which they were performing. For a forty-week national tour in 1911, for example, John Drew, the senior member of the Drew–Barrymore acting family, was reportedly able to command a salary of $500 a week and a cut of the box office takings that ultimately amounted to $85,000. So great was his annual income that it afforded him a lifestyle that placed him on a par with the social elite. He played polo and owned a stable of horses; he spent the summers at his country home in the exc...