By CHARLES WALKER
“CLASS STRUGGLE IN HOLLYWOOD, 1930-1950”
By Gerald Horne.
University of Texas, Austin, 2001.
331 pp., $22.95, paper.
By May 1945 (World War II ended in August) more than half a million workers voted for strikes in National Labor Relations Board polls, compared to only 43,000 in the same period of 1944. The early 1945 polls foreshadowed the 1945-46 strike wave of a combined 5 million strikers that was rightly called American labor’s greatest upsurge.
The chief issue was workers’ standard of living. Although workers “had raised their output per man-hour by 26 percent during the war years, their average hourly rates had risen only six-tenths of one percent,” wrote labor journalist and socialist Art Preis in “Labor’s Giant Step.”
Enraged by organized labor’s strike power, bosses and politicians launched a bipartisan counterattack-including the notorious Taft-Hartley Act (“a slave labor act,” said organized labor), redbaiting, and witch hunting-that led to the ouster of countless union militants from their jobs and unions.
Among the earliest strikers were 10,000 workers in Hollywood’s studios. Painters, carpenters, electricians, set designers, grips, and script clerks were on the bricks three times in 1945-46. “Class Struggle in Hollywood ” is a many-faceted account of those movie studio workers’ decades-long battle with their bosses, as well as gangsters and strikebreaking unions, primarily the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE).
At the center of the movie workers’ resistance was the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), a partially successful attempt to build a united front of studio unions in order to overcome the many centrifugal jurisdictional disputes common to craft unions. Though many AFL unions made up the CSU, the Teamsters did not join, nor did the actors’ and writers’ guilds.
The CSU’s top leader was Herbert Sorrell, a militant painters’ union leader who was often called a Communist, a charge that the author disbelieves. If Sorrell had been in the Communist Party, Horne points out, he would have been breaking with the Communists’ wartime no-strike policy. Eventually, the Communists did back the strike, perhaps because of its popularity with the studio workers (even some IATSE local unions joined in).
The immediate cause of the strike was a jurisdictional dispute between CSU and IATSE over representation of set designers and decorators. Although management claimed that it was an innocent bystander, Horne convincingly argues that management was using the dispute to weaken the militant CSU. He notes that IATSE’s president, Dick Walsh, later “confessed unabashedly that he collaborated with the [studio] moguls to break the strike.”
As the strike lengthened, more and more Los Angeles unions offered their support, on and off the picket lines. The Newspaper Guild unanimously voted “not to permit their members to handle publicity material from picketed studios.” Longshoremen from San Pedro’s wharves helped beat back scabs attempting to break through mass picket lines.
Strikebreakers and goons “were armed with chains, bolts, hammers, six inch pipes, brass knuckles, wooden mallets, and battery cables.” Steel-helmeted county sheriffs were armed with “30-30 Garrand rifles and two were weighted down with an arsenal of tear-gas bombs.”
Teamster chieftain Joe Tuohy-“who eventually took a lucrative position with the studios”-ordered his members to go through the lines. “There isn’t much work,” Tuohy said, “but they get a full week’s pay anyway.” Admitting that his members were driving IATSE recruits inside to replace CSU strikers, Tuohy said that “this they rebelled against at first. … [It was] “very embarrassing.”
As the lines grew tougher, Tuohy exclaimed that the Teamster ranks “refused to go through under these conditions and I don’t blame them because I had a lot of trouble ducking the flying missiles even from my vantage point across the street.”
While many actors continued to work, some stars-such as Bette Davis, Marsha Hunt, John Garfield, Rex Ingram, Joe Louis, and Arte Shaw-stood with the strikers.
“By 29 October the strike was settled …. the moguls were bent on ousting CSU-they had failed.” Then in July 1946 the CSU called a second strike. This time IATSE observed the picket lines, “and within hours CSU had won a stunning 25 percent wage increase, along with a thirty-six-hour workweek with time-and-a-half pay for any overtime.”
But the fight wasn’t over. In September, the studios locked out the carpenters, provoking the CSU to walk out. IATSE was bought off with a 25 percent wage deal, Eastern gangsters were imported, cops and goons raided the picket lines, mass arrests were made, and judges ordered pickets to return to the courtrooms each day, keeping hundreds of pickets away from the studios.
That didn’t keep some actors, such as John Garfield, Harpo Marx, and Eve Arden from rallying in support of the CSU ranks. But by the middle of 1947, if not before, the CSU membership was beaten down. Token picket lines and legal actions by CSU continued for several years, but the small union federation was defeated.
The author, a professor at the University of North Carolina, attributes the CSU defeat to numerous factors, including the end of the “Popular Front.” However, Horne does not acknowledge that the purpose of the so-called Popular Front during the war was to subordinate workers’ and minorities’ struggles to the bosses’ leadership, hence the no-strike pledge.
He also credits the defeat to the burgeoning Red Scare; the labor movement’s failure to ally with Blacks seeking to end the studios’ and the unions’ racist refusal to provide fair hiring opportunities for Blacks; and things that the author considered were tactical “errors,” such as supporting the lowly paid screen extras in their disputes with the Screen Actors Guild.
But the lessons of pre-war strikes, under tougher conditions, suggests that what the studio workers needed in order to win was an organized political union leadership, along the lines of the radical and socialist leaderships that led the Teamsters, auto workers, and longshore strikes of 1934, and that later led the historic auto sit-down strikes.
In a conversation with this writer, Horne maintained that the CSU was left-led, but admitted that the leftists were not an organized force, but only workers who had been influenced by the IWW and other radical groups.
Horne correctly concludes that “‘Class Struggle in Hollywood’ may be the greatest story never told-by the studios.” Too bad, because an accurate film dramatization of the studio strikes would mean a colorful, dynamic cast of characters and a riveting story line.
