All the World's a Stage! The Actors' Strike of 1919

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely strikers! —New York Tribune, August 22, 1919 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

Capitalism · Economics · Economy · Market economy · Metaphor · Monopoly · Political science · Politics · Sociology · History · Industrial relations · Law · Theater, Performance, and Music History · Industrial Relations

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