Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930–1950

Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, & Trade Unionists

Gerald Horne

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780292750135
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"A taut narrative in elegant prose... Horne has unearthed a vitally important and mostly forgotten aspect of Hollywood and labor history." — Publishers Weekly As World War II wound down in 1945 and the cold war heated up, the skilled trades that made up the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU) began a tumultuous strike at the major Hollywood studios. This turmoil escalated further when the studios retaliated by locking out CSU in 1946. This labor unrest unleashed a fury of Red-baiting that allowed studio moguls to crush the union and seize control of the production process, with far-reaching consequences. This engrossing book probes the motives and actions of all the players to reveal the full story of the CSU strike and the resulting lockout of 1946. Gerald Horne draws extensively on primary materials and oral histories to document how limited a "threat" the Communist party actually posed in Hollywood, even as studio moguls successfully used the Red scare to undermine union clout, prevent film stars from supporting labor, and prove the moguls' own patriotism. Horne also discloses that, unnoticed amid the turmoil, organized crime entrenched itself in management and labor, gaining considerable control over both the "product" and the profits of Hollywood. This research demonstrates that the CSU strike and lockout were a pivotal moment in Hollywood history, with consequences for everything from production values, to the kinds of stories told in films, to permanent shifts in the centers of power.

INTRODUCTION

In March 1945, as victory over fascism loomed, the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU)—a federation of craft unions in the film industry that was accused of being dominated by Communists—went on strike in Los Angeles.

By October the strikers’ patience was dissipating, just as temperatures in Southern California were reaching record highs. The studio executives’ discontent was also rising as the strike dragged on.

Then a dramatic moment occurred that was encapsulated neatly in a Los Angeles Times headline: “Film Strike Riot.” Dozens were injured in a melee at the entrance to Warner Bros. studio in Burbank as strikers confronted scabs and police officers. Some among the hundreds of strikers and their supporters were “knifed, clubbed and gassed,” while others were swept off their feet by spray from fire hoses. The glass of smashed windshields littered the pavement. There were “tear gas bomb blasts” and overturned cars. Periodic fistfights at times engaged a dozen men or more. The studio had built “barricades of long tables against the barrage. The pickets pulled the three overturned cars together to form a defense of their own…. Their ammunition was replenished by soaked and bedraggled women strikers.”¹

This event was not the last—just the most dramatic—episode of violence to punctuate that bitter struggle. A year later violence flared once more, this time as CSU charged the studios with a “lockout.” Douglas Tatum, a set erector at Warner Bros, was driving to work in September 1946. Objecting to Tatum’s crossing of the picket line, a striker “shoved his hand or some object into the right front window,” which “immediately disintegrated into a thousand small particles,” one of which “penetrated” Tatum’s right eye. Earlier, Arthur Maurer, also a painter at Warner Bros, had been riding to work in a company bus. Security on the vehicle was insufficient, for a “large man … swung at the driver of the bus with his fist and began to beat the driver about the face, head and body.” The assailant then shellacked Maurer, before being joined by a dozen other men who began to break the windows of the bus. Maurer was left with damaged teeth, a jaw that felt “paralyzed,” and “pain in chewing or using his mouth.”²

Ronald Reagan, a leader of the Screen Actors Guild, recalled later that during this time “homes and cars were bombed…. [W]orkers trying to drive into a studio would be surrounded by pickets who’d pull open their car door or roll down a window and yank the worker’s arm until they broke it, then say, ‘Go on to work, see how much you get done today.’” Reagan crossed the picket lines, albeit with some difficulty. The studio provided transportation, but one day when he approached the bus for the always adventurous ride to work, he found it “going up in flames, the target of a fire bombing.” Reagan was outraged by this “Soviet effort to gain control over Hollywood and the content of its films.” His shock and fury compelled him to collaborate with the FBI. It had “a profound effect on me. More than anything else, it was the Communists’ attempted takeover of Hollywood and its worldwide weekly audience of more than five hundred million people that led me to accept a nomination to serve as president of the Screen Actors Guild, and indirectly at least, set me on the road that would lead me into politics.” These harrowing days convinced Reagan that “America faced no more insidious or evil threat than Communism.”³

Reagan was not alone in arriving at this apocalyptic conclusion. California State Senator Jack Tenney also captured the sentiments of many when he told Governor Earl Warren that this labor agitation was a “Communist” plot. How else to explain the “pickets armed with blackjacks, chains, broken bottles, etc.[?]” Tenney asked. This unrest, he argued, was the “spearhead of [the] long range Communist strategy to control [the] motion picture as [a] potent medium of propaganda.”⁴ Grace Dudley told Governor Warren that it might be “necessary for us to organize the vigilentes [sic] in true California tradition.… I have never seen anything like [this violence] in this state,” she complained, “and I was born here.”⁵

If Grace Dudley were paying attention to the troubled state of labor-management relations in the film industry, she would not have been overly surprised that such strife gripped the industry. For years, film labor had been controlled by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), which had historic ties to organized crime; the union originated in the 1890s, though its mob ties did not accelerate until the 1930s.⁶ In the years leading up to the strike of 1945, CSU—which was led by painters and encompassed film workers ranging from carpenters to screen story analysts—had become embroiled in increasingly tense jurisdictional disputes with IATSE, which had a similar mix of members. For years the studios had buttressed their hegemony by playing one union faction against another; in the 1930s, for example, IATSE battled the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.⁷

When Johnny Roselli, the mob’s main liaison with the industry and IATSE, was indicted, tried, and convicted of extortion in 1944, insiders thought that CSU’s fortunes would expand, enabling this latecomer to oust the previously established IATSE from its preeminent position among film workers. However, this optimism proved premature. After the lockout of 1946, CSU was never again a meaningful force in the industry.

According to one study, CSU’s demise likewise meant the end of “decentralization and democracy” within the film union movement; it “took away from the other progressive unions and guilds throughout the film industry a dependable source of labor solidarity.”⁸ Carey McWilliams agrees, arguing that the crushing of CSU set the stage for the purges and blacklists, a process that culminated in the case of the Hollywood Ten, a group of screenwriters and directors who resisted this trend.⁹ More than this, says blacklisted screenwriter Abraham Polonsky, blacklisting was “mainly an attack on the major unions”; the “blacklist,” he argues, “went on among them before it hit” the writers, directors, and actors.¹⁰

In the following pages, I will portray in detail the labor unrest that rocked the film industry in 1945 and 1946; but more than this, I will examine the major forces—moguls, mobsters, stars—and above all, trade unionists and Communists, that drove this crisis. During the few years between 1945 and 1950, as the Red Scare took hold, the influence of militant trade unionism in the film industry was drastically reduced. Of course, this drama took place in many venues nationally, but Hollywood—where illustrative drama has been a primary staple—presented this well-known story in a way that gripped the public’s imagination; the dramatis personae, from Ronald Reagan to Gene Kelly to Katharine Hepburn, were familiar faces that audiences from coast to coast watched routinely with rapt attention. The creation of celebrity actors seemed to spawn a group of uncontrolled Frankenstein’s monsters who might use their tremendous influence on behalf of labor, not management.¹¹ With the Cold War dawning and those on the left—particularly alleged Communists—being demonized, this struggle gained a resonance that was echoed by analogous trends in literature, drama, and painting.¹²

A contributing element to this explosive mix was the backdrop of California, the heart of the western United States: for “perhaps nowhere in the country was the effect of decades of Cold War felt more intensely than in the lands west of the Mississippi River.” Not coincidentally, two of the leading Cold War politicians—Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan—hailed from Southern California, where enormous defense spending helped to reinforce notably virulent anticommunist politics.¹³

Inevitably, the role of ideology—principally anticommunism and anti-Semitism—will be a primary concern in these pages. The strike and the lockout formed not only a momentous chapter in the history of the film industry and in the increasingly important region of Southern California; they were also critical in the evolution of the Red Scare and the concomitant undermining of unions—and Communists—that accompanied it.

As an industry that produced great wealth while massaging the public consciousness, film had long received the keen attention of labor and capital alike. In 1929 the movie moguls met in Manhattan at the Hotel Montclair to assess their handiwork. Film, those gathered were told, “represents an investment of two and a half billion dollars…. It costs between $70,000,000 and $100,000,000 a year to advertise the product in our newspapers. 235,000 people are employed…. 100,000,000 people go to the moving theatres weekly…. More silver is used [in film developing and related processes] than in the minting of coin.” Cotton was used by “the hundreds of bales” for the “basis of celluloid film is cotton.”

Colonel F. L. Herron, treasurer and manager of the Foreign Department of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors, was almost giddy in noting the ideological content of this product; Hollywood showed “people having fun. They depict freedom; prosperity; happiness; a higher standard of living in clothing, houses … motor cars—in fact, all the components of good living. And the world, seeing these things, quickly responds and demand the same thing…. American pictures do more to sell our products than 100,000 salesmen.”¹⁴

A few years before these gleeful words were uttered, the Senate Finance Committee estimated that in the United States between $750 million and $1 billion were spent on movies. The industry—taken broadly—employed 250,000 in 1921, and investments that year totaled a hefty $250 million. Before the rise of the aerospace industry in Southern California during World War II, the film industry was the prime engine for growth in this region whose population increases were establishing records.¹⁵

By 1950 the film industry’s economic importance had not diminished dramatically despite being challenged by television. One analyst concluded that the “building industry, electricity supply trade, transportation, printing, heating equipment, fuel, installation, and servicing of sound among others, are … dependent for a considerable portion of their prosperity upon the continued growth and stability of the [film] industry.”¹⁶

Though often viewed as irrelevant fluff, the film industry actually rested close to the heart of the U.S. economy. As the lockout of 1946 got under way, Communist screenwriter John Howard Lawson filed away information that the Chase Bank was the largest shareholder in 20th-Century Fox. The Rockefeller interests had holdings in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) was owned by Irving Bank and Atlas Corporation at various periods. The other studios, including Columbia and Warner Bros., all had strong ties with major banks. The iconoclastic pundit George Seldes concluded that “all movie companies are dependent upon the House of Morgan.”¹⁷

The industry was dominated by eight companies: the aforementioned plus Paramount, Universal, and United Artists. The industry was integrated vertically with the studios also controlling theaters that garnered 75 percent of box office revenues.¹⁸

Because of Hollywood’s involvement with major financial interests, the strike and lockout assumed dramatic importance. Filmmaking was notoriously labor intensive, but it also involved substantial financial outlays; the studios spent $50 million to build sound stages in 1929, while production cost per film averaged about $300,000 at Warner Bros. and $500,000 at MGM during the Depression. Banks particularly had been active investors; though much has been made—understandably—about directors as “auteurs” of films and the different film styles of various studios, banks with their ability to “review … scripts and production projects” had an “awesome potential for control” of the industry. Their “lending policies” could “validate or disapprove a company’s plan for future operation.” The California-based Bank of America was known as the “movie bank”: its board membership over the years even included, e.g., Will Rogers, Wallace Beery, Harry Cohn of Columbia, Jack Warner, Daryl Zanuck, et al.

The banks, which were apprehensive about the impact that alleged Red domination of unions might have on their sizable investment, reportedly initiated the blacklist—formalized in November 1947—against alleged Communists and their sympathizers in the industry. Of course, the bankers were also displeased by the spectacle of supposedly Red film strikers marauding in the streets of Los Angeles.¹⁹

Capitalists and Communists alike took the movies seriously. IATSE frequently cited the portentous words of the Bank of America’s A. P. Gianinni: “They who control the cinema can control the thought of the world.”²⁰ From Moscow, V. I. Lenin concurred, arguing that “of all the arts the cinema is the most important.”²¹ Left and right alike agreed that investment in—and attention to—the cinema industry was of paramount importance.

Diana ...