A marvelous article by Max Eastman on 1919’s Actors’ Equity strike, the first mass actors’ strike in the United States, and part of a larger radical working class wave of that year. With original cartoon panels on the strike by Art Young and Frank Waltz. Solidarity.

‘The Lesson of the Actors’ Strike’ by Max Eastman from The Liberator. Vol. 2 No. 10. October, 1919.

THE Actors’ Strike was not the social revolution, but it was a very complete picture of it. If anybody wants to know just exactly what Bolshevik Socialism is, let him imagine that what happened last month in the theatrical industry of New York and Chicago, has happened in all the industries of the world.

The dramatic workers-those who actually produce the dramatic goods- sick of paying an increasing tribute to a little group of millionaires who “own the industry,” simply combined together, walked out from under these unnecessary “owners,” and proceeded to organize and produce drama for their own benefit and the benefit of mankind. They hired their own managers instead of being hired by them, disposing of the profits themselves through their own organization, and discovering in the process that friendly and joyful, free creative exuberance that has not been seen on the stage since the Age of Pericles.

The workers of all the world are in the same position, paying an unnecessary tribute out of their toil to the little minority who “own” the world, and they will take the same action some coming day, and make it permanent.

For they have the same power to be joyful. It is not likely that many of the actors who played in this picture realized its significance. Some of them did. When George Broadhurst tried to persuade the caste of “The Crimson Alibi” to stay in the theatre, by offering them more money, Harrison Hunter said to him:

“If you and Lee Shubert with your millions think you can stop the movement of the world towards industrial control, you are very much mistaken.”

“What do you mean by that?” said Broadhurst.

“I mean just exactly what I say, although I don’t expect you to comprehend it.”

Walter Hampden revealed the same penetration in his speech at a meeting of the Actors’ Equity in which he vigorously urged them never to settle with the managers on any terms, but to perpetuate the great social and artistic movement which they had begun.

Ed Wynn expressed it more briefly, when somebody told him the Producing Managers’ Association was contemplating a settlement. “We might engage one of those little fellows as manager at 75 a week,” he said.

But few of the actors understood or imagined so much. They thought they were fighting against the immorality and injustice of the men who own them, instead of against the immorality and injustice of being owned.

They thought they were against the managers because they are bad, instead of because they are managers. To them the marching over to the Lexington Theatre, and producing drama without the interference of a private capitalist, was merely an incident in the struggle for better wages; they will find out that it was a perfectly inevitable step, and will be the only possible outcome of the struggle.

Professional Agitators

It was our intention to publish a complete story of the Actors’ Strike, but those conventions in Chicago interfered, and the strike is no longer news. So we will content ourselves with a little general moralizing about. And first let us moralize, about the terrible crime of being a “professional agitator.” When we decided to find out the facts which underlay this revolt of the actors, we went straight to Harry Mountford, the organizer of the Vaudeville- Artists’ Union, which used to be called, and perhaps always will be, “The White Rats.” We went to him because we know that the man who is best hated and vilified by the owners of an industry, and by the press which they own, is always the man who has at heart the rights and liberties of those who do the work. We had read often enough in certain papers that Harry Mountford is a cheap crook and notoriety hunter, to feel that he is a man of unusually forceful integrity and idealism. And we were not mistaken.

He met us in his little anonymous office on Fifth Avenue, with a sagacious and genial smile, and in about three hours of conversation he told us, and explained to us, and showed us, and proved to us with documents, practically everything that a journalist could possibly ask to know about the theatrical situation in New York and everywhere else in the world. And his conversation was as free from those little superfluous egotisms that most of us slip in when we talk about our jobs, and when we talk about other things, as it was expert and witty and sincere.

“The actors are nothing but chips the Managers gamble with. It costs the actor more to get in the stage-door of a theatre than it costs the patron to get in the front.”

That is the way he summed up the position of the creative workers in this industry, and that was the thought continually in his mind. Art Young has drawn a picture of him which shows the round good-natured face and square brow, and the peculiar ease and sense of adequacy which his personality conveys, but I think his picture is a little too satisfied looking.

The revolt of the American actors began about the year 1900, when the White Rats were first organized. George Cohan went out on strike in those days- not because his character was different, but his economic position. He belonged to the working-class. So did Weber, and Fields, and Sam Bernard, and “the great Maurice, Barrymore,” who was then appearing in vaudeville. But, that little preliminary wave of rebellion soon passed, or was beaten down by the power of capital, and in 1907 when Harry Mountford came to this country, the White Rats were crawling before the Managers, their presiding officer actually receiving a salary from E. F. Albee, the Vaudeville King.

Mountford had organized the Variety Artist’s Federation of England, and in 1906 they had closed every vaudeville theatre in London for seven weeks. He had been an honorary officer of that organization without salary, but when the strike was done there were no more jobs for him on the English stage, although he had been a successful actor for twenty years, and so he came to America.

“The salt wasn’t out of my hair,” he said, “when I was met by a group of variety actors, members of an International league with, which I had been connected, who said that they were not able to get any contracts on the American stage, and wanted me to do something about it.

“We had a meeting and talked it over.

“The next day E. F. Albee sent for me, and asked me what I meant by going to that meeting! He also asked me whether I would ‘keep still if they would make me comfortable’.

“I didn’t prove sufficiently interested in comfort, and the result was that I was, never able to get any contracts on the American stage either. In 1908 the White Rats engaged me, and I took my first salaried position as an organizer.”

Many another man has been forced into the profession of organizing rebellion in the same way; It is a good thing to remember when you see the capitalist press denouncing somebody as a “walking delegate,” a “paid,” or “professional agitator.” There is not an agitator of any significance in this country who has not had opportunities to sell out for a price that would make his “pay” look like dirt.

A professional agitator is a man who would rather stand out all alone in the social storm, serving his ideals, than give up his independent soul for a comfortable job.

Drawing The Battle Line

The most scientific objection that is ever made to the Socialistic theory is the assertion that the world really isn’t sharply divided into two classes, the workers and the capitalists. There are lots of people who are both worker and capitalists. There are capitalists who work, and workers who own a little capital. That is true. But it is also true that when conditions grow unbearable and the fight begins, then the world automatically divides itself into these two classes. Arid every man and every woman has to take his stand on one side or the other, whether he wants to or not.

That is what the Actors’ Strike so clearly illustrated, and that is the main reason why I want to turn it into a sermon. It was a complete picture of what is gradually happening all over the world. Six months ago there were actors and managers, and actor-managers, and manager-actors, and friends of actors and managers, and clubs for actors and managers, and magazines and papers for actors and managers, and courts of justice for actors and managers. There were all kinds of people and institutions which for business or personal reasons stood on the middle ground between these two classes, and there was E. H. Sothern in whom the “To be or not to be” of Hamlet had become a mental habit. Today there are Managers and those loyal to them on one side, and Actors and those loyal to them on the other, and not even a single tight-rope walker to be found who can balance himself on the line between them. Even the Courts of the United States, which are supposed to be dedicated to the ideal of abstract justice, have shown themselves to be obedient and perfect servants of those who own the dramatic industry.

It was hard for the actors to learn this last lesson- so well known to the rest of the working-class in their struggle. Judge Walker of Chicago issued an injunction to the actors and actresses in “Up in Mabel’s Room,” forbidding them to move, breathe, or open their mouths from the time it was served on them. I saw the terrifying document at the headquarters of the Federation of Labor, and heard about the state of mind in which Ed Nockels found the actors when he went over to the theatre to call them out. They were sitting around with this stupendous “instrument” in their laps, gasping for breath. But there is nothing in a little legal phraseology to terrify Ed Nockels, and when he got through telling them some things about labor and the law courts, there was nothing to terrify them. They walked out singing, and took the Judge’s signature along for a souvenir.

“We’ve got a leader now,” said Hazel Dawn, “and we know what to do and we’re going to do it. I’d just like to take one ride in a patrol wagon anyhow.”

They have been cited for Contempt of Court, but what of it? The battle-line is drawn and there isn’t room in No Man’s Land for anybody.

The Fidelity League

It is to the interest of the capitalists to conceal this sharp conflict of interest, and make it appear that they are not alone, but that many of the workers are with them in their campaign for owning the earth. And so they always bribe or flatter some shallow-hearted persons into organizing a body of “faithful,” or “loyal,” or “patriotic” workers- a scab union we call it, although the word “scab” was politely taboo in the superior ethics of this strike. And there are always a certain number of workmen who are ready to be so organized- even at their own expense.

They act from a kind of disinterested ideal- the ideal which we have to call “aristocratic” instead of “snobbish,” I suppose, while we are saying “strike-breakers” instead of “scabs.” At any rate it is a trait in human nature that makes people willing to sacrifice the real things of life, including their own personal independence, in order to feel that they “belong” to the wealthy classes. They would rather belong to them the way Fido belongs to his master than not belong at all, and “Fidelity” is a very happy name with which to describe their special kind of virtue. The reason there is such haste to get these organizations formed, and their existence advertised, is that the bosses themselves are so few in number that if the public could once clearly see them all alone, the monstrous injustice of their owning the earth would overwhelm every, body. It is not more than one hundredth of one percent of the people actually engaged in the theatrical industry who own it. In the nation at large it is about 2 percent of the people who own the main body of all productive industry. Obviously, it is necessary for these bosses to conceal the actual position of the battle-line, and make it appear that vast bodies of workers are on the side of capital, vast bodies of actors on the side of the managers. And hence result such hollow and ludicrous assemblies as the Actors’ Fidelity. League.

Never have I seen the folly and weakness of being insincere exhibited as it was at their great meeting in the Hotel Biltmore, when George M. Cohan was crowned king of the “faithful.” The audience- composed largely of society friends and elderly rich patrons of the theatre- trickled in whisperingly, very genteel, finding their places in a politely perfunctory manner, and then just sitting there waiting for the celebrities. They reminded me of those lifeless old ladies who go to prayer meeting in order to be worked up by the minister into a pious emotion which they are not able to feel at home. And even when the celebrities arrived, and lined up handsomely behind the long thin table on the platform, there was a weakness in the enthusiasm. William Collier, David Warfield, Louis Mann, all managers, I am told, as well as actors- Mrs. Fiske, whose husband is a manager, Holbrook Blynn, who confessed that a financial interest controlled his decision, Allan Dinehart who played the part of the yellow Socialist in “The Challenge” and must have got that sickly color into his blood. Others were there, of course, for reasons less easy to guess- Julia Arthur, Janette Beecher, Marjorie Wood -her face, so magnetic in comic action, seeming vacantly earnest here- Lenore Ulric, with her soft cloud of dusky hair over the devil eyes and those rich red lips which she opens by raising the upper one, wolf-like but not dangerous. I wondered what their true motives were for being here, but I felt too much like an interloper myself, to find out.

All I know is that they were not deeply moved. It was not thrilling. And when Louis Mann- looking like a gorilla dressed up for circus purposes in a superhuman white collar- took the gavel and tried to conduct the proceedings, it was ludicrous. Because there were no proceedings. There was nothing to do. After trying in vain to extract some reports out of some officers, begging Warfield and Willie Collier to “give an entertainment” (which they did more or less), pleading again and again with the audience to make some suggestion for the “good and welfare” of the League, dropping his gavel in a glass of water with surprise when somebody did get up, and himself earnestly orating on all the subjects he could remember, he finally fell back upon the delightful expedient of reading the audience an editorial out of the New York Times!

Finally the great moment arrived. “Mr. William Collier,” said the chairman, “has an important announcement to make.”

Mr. Collier rose with that tentative manner and those queer quizzical wrinkles, which always make you hope and believe there is going to be a joke even when there isn’t. “Mr. George M. Cohan,” he said, “will positively appear here tonight and take the gavel.” There was a round of applause. 

“What, take the gavel away from Louis?” said Warfield. “That’s impossible!” It was the best thing that happened.

And then at the psychological moment George M. Cohan steamed in the doorway, and down the aisle, and up to the table, looking very angry and superficially resolute, and enduring with a kind of heroic impatience the applause for which his entrance had been so carefully timed and adjusted. It was a joke. But there was no humor in him. There was no lightness, and yet there was no weight. He made every move wrong, as a man does who is indignant but not honest with himself, and succeeded in dismaying. and chilling the audience a little, instead of stirring them to action.

He took the gavel with a gesture and a word of noble sacrifice and devotion, and then handed it back with the statement that he had to leave town on business in about half an hour.

He announced that he had not come here as manager but as an actor. “I have resigned from the Producing Managers’ Association,” he said amid renewed and resounding applause.

“Have you resigned from the firm of Cohan & Harris?” a reporter asked him.

“I have not,” he said, “I have contracts to fulfill as a member of that firm, and I intend to fulfill them.” Everybody remembered that Harris is still the president of the Producing Managers’ Association, but nobody smiled or said anything.

Then he proceeded to read with excessive earnestness, the lordly and benevolent terms which the managers had empowered him to offer to the Fidelity Association, granting all the demands for which the Actors’ Equity had been striking and in each case a little more besides. Everybody in the room concealed in his heart the knowledge that the Equity Strike had compelled him and the managers to grant those terms. But Cohan did not have enough wit to leave this knowledge concealed. He dragged it right up into full consciousness, where it became painful, by saying: “Now I don’t want to hand myself any bouquets, but don’t let anybody tell you the Actors’ Equity is responsible for these concessions!”

Finally in a grand climax he re-donated to the Fidelity League the one hundred thousand dollars which they had already been compelled to reject four times because “It might look to the public as if we were dependent on the money of the managers.” It may be predicted that when Cohan has had a little more experience, he will make these contributions to the “faithful” in secret. As it was, he was irritated at the failure of his money to flow.

“I insist that you take it,” he cried, “and if you don’t, I will give it to the Actors’ Fund, and I will give another hundred thousand, and then another, and another, and another, and another, and another, until we put the theatre where it ought to be. That’s the kind of a little guy I am!” It was almost a shriek.

You can not help doubting whether George Cohan is really as silly and egotistical as that looked. And it will be to the benefit of our moralizing to assume that he is not. The one sincere thing about him is his indignation. He is stung and hurt and angry, and a little painfully bewildered to find himself in so unpopular a position. It is because he really had idealism, and a kind of philosophy of life. It was the philosophy of generosity and good friendship and benevolence. And that philosophy, and that mode of life- likeable as it may be- always

breaks down completely when it comes to a conflict between economic classes. Friendships are disrupted, gratitudes are forgotten, generosity is rejected, everything gives way to the formation of a clear line of conflict between the workers who produce the goods and the capitalists who take the profits. It is an inevitable law. And George Cohan will have to readjust his whole philosophy of life completely-so completely that he can realize that actors who “owe him gratitude” for individual assistance, are right in fighting against him for universal justice, before he will ever get over feeling chilled through and embittered.

Idealists and the Class Struggle

It is a hard philosophy which tells us that people line up inevitably in classes on the basis of their economic interest. It is just as hard as the truth. But fortunately for our feelings, and for our sense of the picturesque, there is an occasional individual exceptions to this truth, and they warm us up and keep us excited, and make us feel that if we could once get rid of economic classes altogether (as we did at the Lexington Theatre) human nature would be very lovable and interesting. Francis Wilson, the president of the Actors’ Equity, is one of the exceptions. He might have been either an actor or a manager in these later years of his life, for he was a distinguished and truly aristocratic success in both professions. But there is a vein of abstract and impersonal idealism in him; having arrived and succeeded for himself, he wanted to do something for the good of art and humanity. And so he did.

Ethel Barrymore is another in whom an impersonal ideal- an ideal whose ultimate implications she little realizes- furnished the motive to action. Her position was secure enough, and capitalistic enough without doubt, to place her selfish interest on the side of the managers. But she has imagination; a vision of the position of the actor in history; she has the great tradition of her family; and she has a very sweet and democratic feeling. She couldn’t be a manager, and so when the choice was forced upon her, she became a member of the Equity and the very heroine of the whole drama. For her one inmost conviction being that she can not make a speech, she made the best speeches to be heard on Broadway. They consisted of the following words uttered in a voice of breathless and unspeakable conviction. “I can’t say anything but just stick, that’s all. You stick, and I’ll stick, and we can’t lose. We’ll win!”

And there was Frank Bacon, a man who has spent almost a whole lifetime in patient and faithful struggle toward success on the American stage- and victory came to him only last year in his play, “Lightnin’,” the chief hit of the season on Broadway. It was a great day for the Equity when they could announce that “Lightnin’ has struck,” and introduce Frank Bacon at their mass meeting. He is the author and half owner of the production, as well as the leading actor, and everybody knew that his income was derived more from royalties and box office receipts than from his salary as an actor. I hope everybody who reads the Liberator will go to see Frank Bacon when “Lightnin'” goes on the road- and they may know that he has the same soft, slow, indefinite way of speaking in real life that he has in his character in the play. It always sounds as though he weren’t thinking, and weren’t really saying anything.

He stood up there on the platform altogether gentle and unpretentious. “Well,” he said, “I saw this coming and I said to Mother, ‘Mother,’ I said, ‘I guess the boys and girls are going on strike.’

“’Well, Frank,’ she said, ‘where are you going to stand?’

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘Mother, I guess I’ll have to stand with the boys and girls.’

“’That’s right, Frank,’ she said, ‘we began on the gas stove, and we can end up on the gas stove too, if we have to, for the sake of the boys and girls.’”

That speech and the speeches of Ethel Barrymore were points of high drama in the picture we are describing. But they had their counterparts, equally important, in the department of comedy. When we asked Ed Wynn what he expected to gain through his loyalty to the Equity, he said, “I am striking for the privacy of my dressing-room.”

“And what do you mean by that?”

“I mean that my dressing-room is so full of people who come in to complain about the way they are treated by the managers that I never get five minutes to myself.” Ed Wynn is young and gay-hearted enough to enjoy the experience of being an agitator instead of an actor for a few weeks, and we are not paying any tribute of admiration to his self-sacrifice. We are saving all our admiration for his genius. By the grace of the Law Courts he was enjoined from appearing on the stage at the Lexington Theatre, so he appeared in the aisle. He was enjoined from giving a performance, so he told the audience all about the performance he would have given if he had appeared. And it was one of the few humorous things our generation has heard that rise to the heights of the “humorous talk” of Mark Twain and Artemus Ward.

Another one who never knew she was a “workingman,” until the strike broke, was Marie Dressler. She had never been a member of the Equity, and she had just gone away for a month’s rest- the first after three years of work for the war- but she took the train back to New York, and came charging into battle at the very first note of the trumpet. And when I asked her why, she really couldn’t tell me. “I knew I belonged there, that was all. I began in the chorus, and now I’ve got back with the chorus once more and I’m glad’ of it!”

There was nothing in the Actors’ Strike to equal Marie Dressler. There isn’t an agitator in America that could hold down a soap-box in the same alley with her. She could start a revolution in an Old Ladies’ Home. She went over to the Hotel Astor, to the first class-conscious meeting of chorus girls ever held -she and Ethel Barrymore- to give them the courage to organize and walk out. And she stood up in front of them like a great, warm, generous, homely fighting mother, magnetic and dependable-and before fifteen minutes were past, she had been elected organizer, president, commander-in-chief forever of the choruses of the United States. I have to smile a little at Marie Dressler – her activities have gone so far ahead of her ideas. She still thinks in the terms of Fifth Avenue in her private and more reflective moments.

“There is one thing about this, you know,” she said to me. “We must all try to bring capital and labor together. We must allay this terrible unrest that is going all through the country and all over the world.

That same night I saw her at the Lexington Theatre, standing down at the foot-lights, shaking her fist out over the orchestra- a restless army of “labor” that she had pulled out of the Hippodrome having just marched across the stage for unbelievable minutes amid storm and thunder, from the audience. “I’m in this fight,” she shouted, “to win. And I can tell you, and I can tell those managers, that I’ll stick through till justice is done to these people, or every last ounce of fighting strength that I have is exhausted!”

When Marie Dressler realized that all the “unrest” all over the world is composed only of strong men and women saying those identical words, with those identical emotions, and the same unescapable reasons for saying them, she will forgive my using her example also in order to point a moral.

The “labor unrest” is the one great, beautiful and hopeful thing in these sad and terrible times. It shows that the spirit of life still inhabits this bloody globe, and that out of all the devastation and death which our insane commercial civilization has brought upon itself, a new, and free and democratic society may yet be born. The strike of the actors has added enthusiasm and courage and a new flavor of the picturesque to the revolutionary struggle of labor, the “movement of the world toward industrial control.” It could do nothing better and greater than that.

The crowning feature of the Lexington Theatre performance was a mob scene, supposed to portray the struggle and determination of the Equity Association. Brandon Tynan appeared as a kind of Mark Antony or Bill Haywood addressing an actual crowd of fifteen hundred people in a dim crimson light. One could hardly help seeing something greater in that scene, than the thing he intended to portray. It was a pageant of the social revolution. And when he recalled to his hearers that in Italy, France, Spain, England, the actors have long had the right to organize which the managers of America are denying them, he needed only to add, in order to complete the pageant and enforce the moral of the whole drama: “Yes, and in Russia, the actors possess and conduct the theatres themselves as we are conducting the theatre, without any capitalists to suck their greedy profits out of our emotions, distorting our impulses to that sordid end, commercializing our playfulness, standardizing our spontaneity, destroying and making impossible the natural consecration of our genius to the spirit of life!”

The Liberator was published monthly from 1918, first established by Max Eastman and his sister Crystal Eastman continuing The Masses, was shut down by the US Government during World War One. Like The Masses, The Liberator contained some of the best radical journalism of its, or any, day. It combined political coverage with the arts, culture, and a commitment to revolutionary politics. Increasingly, The Liberator oriented to the Communist movement and by late 1922 was a de facto publication of the Party. In 1924, The Liberator merged with Labor Herald and Soviet Russia Pictorial into Workers Monthly. An essential magazine of the US left.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/liberator/1919/10/v2n10-w20-oct-1919-liberator-hr.pdf