This Day in Labor History: May 26, 1913
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On May 26, 1913, actors unionized in Actors Equity Association. This necessary move to professionalize actors as workers fighting for decent conditions played an important role in bringing the field into the modern age and was perhaps the first important union of creative workers that make up some of the publicly known unions today. After all, when actors or writers go on strike, the world notices as their TV shows go away.
Conditions for actors were really quite terrible. Conditions for actors declined significantly by the late 19th century for the same reasons that conditions for all sorts of workers declined: monopoly capitalism. The industry went through a wave of mergers that led to the Theatrical Syndicate effectively controlling most big-city theater productions. A booking monopoly was created, taking power out of the hands of the actors. Actors had to pay for their own travel and costumes, rehearsal was unpaid with as many hours as managers required, and they could go months without payment. If a show was cancelled because of low attendance, the actors did not get paid. Often, if an evening show was cancelled on the last night in a city, they would travel overnight and perform 2 matinees in the new town the next day–but the actors would only be compensated for one. Moreover, contracts had what was called the “satisfaction clause.” This meant that managers could fire actors for any reason they wanted. Presumably, it was for poor acting, but also allowed them to just cut salaries at will and call it unsatisfactory work. There were some actors’ organizations that theoretically worked for actors’ rights, but they were closer to fraternal societies and were simply unequipped to respond to monopoly capitalism taking over a field that does not seem a natural target.
112 actors formed the initial union, meeting at the Pabst Grand Circle Hotel. Producers were outraged. George M. Cohan stated, “I will drive an elevator for a living before I will do business with any actors’ union.” So AEA members responded by placing a sign in Times Square reading, “ELEVATOR OPERATOR WANTED. GEORGE M. COHAN NEED NOT APPLY.” Ha ha.
The AEA quickly expanded to 1,500 members and began to work on a master contract it could present to the managers’ monopoly as a way to demand fair rights on the job. That limited the free rehearsals, demanded overtime pay for more than 8 performances a week, a two-week notice before firing, and paid travel and costumes. The managers completely ignored them. Finally, the AEA approached the American Federation of Labor about affiliating, hoping that the backing of the AFL would show the managers how serious they were. The actors were torn about this. They didn’t consider themselves workers. They were artists. But they were artists being driven into the ground by greedy capital. At first, this did not go well, because as per typical AFL policy, they had already granted a charter to represent actors to a group called the White Rats, which was one of the fraternal-like societies. The White Rats hadn’t actually done anything, but for the AFL, that didn’t matter. They had jurisdiction. So the AFL offered the AEA a short of co-share with the White Rats, but that did not interest them at all.
By 1915, the AEA started its own journal, Equity. Said its editor, Francis Wilson, in its first issue: “Why should the Actors’ Equity…have a journal of its own? Because the Association has grown so strong numerically, grown so helpful and powerful professionally, that a publication of its own has become a necessity.” The ideas behind this union were interesting. It wasn’t really a socialist thing. It was a modern thing. In other words, as actor and unionist Frank Gillmore noted at the AEA’s opening convention, “Organization might be called the great text of our economy today.” Rather than hold onto an individualism that was the remnants of the 19th century that allowed workers across the economy to be exploited, the 20th century was the age of the organization. Otherwise, workers allowed themselves “to accept injustice with seeming gratitude and sometimes to eat humble pie as a daily meal. Such a condition 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.” Gillmore would serve as the union’s executive secretary from 1918-29 and then moved into the president role from 1929-37.
As for the gendered nature of Gillmore’s language, everything in society is based around gender roles and the idea that we are just going to transform ideas of gender in the working class to fit some sort of liberal ideal is absolutely laughable, or would be if it wasn’t so politically disastrous, as we are seeing with working class politics in the twenty-first century.
The AEA succeeded as a union. They went on a big strike in 1919, striking New York theaters in a movement that spread to pretty much every major theater city from Chicago to Atlantic City. Fred Astaire, the Barrymore family, Eddie Canton, Lillian Russell–the entire theater of elite of the 1910s refused to work. The theater owners completely caved in the face of this action, getting rid of their union blacklists, providing a master contract that owners had to follow, implementing overtime pay, and many other big wins for the workers. That year, the AEA joined the American Federation of Labor.
Today, the AEA remains a major union of actors. Brooke Shields is president at the time of writing. It has over 50,000 members. In 1933, the Screen Actors Guild was created in a union split. It focused mostly on Hollywood, while the AEA focused on live theater. Unlike the SAG, the AEA refused to kick any workers out in the horrible Cold War era for being communist. In 1959, directors and choreographers left the AEA and formed their own unions. Craft unionism most certainly has its limitations as an organizing model and it is a real problem for solidarity actions, but for a lot of workers it makes more sense than an industrial model and that is very true for the artistic workers.
Much of the information in this post comes from Sean Holmes, Weavers of Dreams, Unite!: Actors Unionism in Early Twentieth-Century America.
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