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All the World's a Stage!
The Actors' Strike of 1919
Sean P. Holmes
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely strikers!
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| —New York Tribune, August 22, 1919 |
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| To borrow a metaphor current in theatrical circles in the early twentieth century, actors are "weavers of dreams"—artists engaged in the creation of the intangible and, in their own estimation, set apart from other occupational groups. For the most part, historians have allowed the dreams that actors weave to take precedence over the process of weaving. In investigations of the emergence of mass culture in the United States in the early twentieth century, they have prioritized the moment of consumption over the moment of production. As a consequence, the experience of work and the character of labor relations in the realm of commercialized leisure remain largely unexamined outside the pages of official trade union histories and a handful of rather dated industrial relations studies. Yet the men and women of the American stage were key workers in a rapidly expanding and increasingly important sector of the service economy. As such, they are no less worthy of careful scholarly analysis than are producers of other, more tangible, commodities. Their dealings with their employers, like those of many other wage laborers in industrial America in the early twentieth century, were fraught with tension. Locked by the remorseless logic of monopoly capitalism into an unequal relationship with the businessmen who controlled the American theater industry, actors and actresses at every level of the theatrical hierarchy struggled for workplace equity. In August 1919, that struggle culminated in a work stoppage that left theaters across the United States dark for more than a month.1 |
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The actors' strike reveals much about cultural production in the early twentieth century, showing how the concentration of economic power and the related centralization and standardization evident throughout the economy were transforming the nature of work in America's culture industries. It also sheds light on special obstacles to the unionization of actors: a sense of occupational distinctiveness that hinged on their position in an increasingly unstable cultural hierarchy and a definition of their work derived from a genteel individualism that disdained collective action. The way the dispute played itself out on the streets of New York City and other centers of theatrical production demonstrates the extensive resources available to actors and other strategically located service workers in their struggles with their employers. It also highlights the growing theatricality of worker protest as public performance became increasingly important to the productive process across the service sector. |
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According to the historian Stuart Ewen, a defining feature of the emerging culture of consumption was the "obliteration of the factory" as the economic world was divided into an unpleasant sphere where goods were produced and a gratifying sphere where they were consumed. In the American theater industry, however, the two spheres overlapped, leaving the men and women who earned their living on the stage awkwardly suspended between the forces of production and the forces of consumption. As film theorists have reminded us, performance is an unusual commodity in that it is a labor process exhibited before and consumed by an audience. The individual actor both produces the commodity and embodies it—the weaver and the dream are inextricably bound together. Under normal circumstances, the system of production in the entertainment industry masks this duality. In transforming actors into fetishized objects of consumption, it diverts attention from the economic realities of the theatrical shop floor, detaching actors from the world of work and defining acting almost entirely by the rewards that accrue to it. In the 1919 strike, however, the denizens of the American stage were able to exploit their commodity status in ways their employers had never anticipated.2
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