 Ghosts of Strikes Past: Class Struggle, Strike Breaking & Blacklisting In Hollywood | Dec. 24th, 2007 @ 02:11 pm  |
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I highly recommend
Class Struggle In Hollywood, 1930 – 1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, & Trade Unionists
by
Gerald Horne for anyone who wishes to gain an historical perspective on the current situation that led to the WGA strike and in union movements in general.
This book has been on my reading list for a long time, combining as it does my interest in labor history and in the history of Hollywood. The occasion of the WGA strike has brought me to finally pick up the book. What I am most interested in is to read about the origins of disunion between the Hollywood unions, and the role of the WGA and IATSE in this history. As Gerald Horne says in the preface of his book:
This is a book about labor-management conflict in Hollywood. It concerns the attempt of the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), a federation of craft unions led by painters and carpenters, to confront not only the major studios but also a competing union, International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) and its allies in organized crime. CSU went on strike in 1945 and was locked out in 1946. However, it fought its antagonists to a standstill in 1945. They were routed in 1946. The vanquishing of CSU erased progressive trade unionism for generations to come in one of this nation's most significant industries. (vii)
I hope to offer a complete review of
Class Struggle In Hollywood, 1930 – 1950 in a future post. For now, I would like to write about something more personal -- the circuitous route of how I came to know about the events detailed in Gerald Horne's book.
When I first moved to New York in the early 80s, I met some veterans of some of the incidents that led to one of the first post-war strikes. It was the 1945 strike by the CSU and the 1946 lockout by the moguls of the CSU in Hollywood. Vince, who was in that strike, had been a carpenter and was living in Hoboken when I met him. He and his friends were black-listed for their participation in the strike. In fact they were black-listed not for being communists – the Communist Party had actually opposed the first post-war strike – but for being militant union leaders. What is little known, and generally suppressed by all parties as an inconvenient fact, is that the blacklist was not primarily used against Communists but against union organizers and militants. Further, the blacklist was not primarily used against writers, actors, and directors, the people we usually read about, but against set-designers, carpenters, painters, lighting-designers, etc. It is convenient for us at this late date to think of Hollywood blacklisting as mainly an activity of the past, and an activity that occurred during a limited period of time during the height of the cold war. This is indeed the case when we talk about stars and other well-known creative talent. The best way to discipline "troublesome" creative talent was to accuse them of being a communist, a homosexual. or a drug addict. Essentially, this was a form of blackmail by the bosses. But carpenters like Vince were not blackmailed in this way. If they were union militants of any type they were simply blacklisted. After the passage of the
National Labor Relations Act in 1935 this kind of blacklisting of pro-unon employees was illegal, but it was still maintained, and especially advocated by extreme right-wing bosses like those who ran Disney. The blacklist of Hollywood union militants began long before the well-known Hollywood anti-Communist blacklist and lasted for a long time after. I would argue that it is still maintained to this day. For example, I think there is evidence that animation writers who try to organize with the WGA, instead of with IATSE, are
still blacklisted in the industry. The current labor laws are so toothless that there is not much that can be done about this legally.
But even before Vince told me about the Hollywood strike and lockout of 1945-46, I had known about some of the incidents in this strike because of my love of film noir. The first time I heard of this strike was when researching a movie I was obsessed with since about age 13, "
The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers." It is a strange title for a strange movie. It existed at the cusp of the collapse of the studio system. The movie was a very operatic film noir. In fact the fact that nobody has made an opera of it is either an indication of copyright problems or of the lack of a modern
Donizetti to write the piece.
"Strange Loves" starred Barbara Stanwyck, who is also an obsession of mine, and was written by Robert Rossen, and directed by Lewis Milestone. Barbara Stanwyck, was one of those great self-trained actors, and one of the few to make her own way through the Hollywood star-system. She was also a right-winger and one of the first to jump on the anti-communist band wagon. Curiously, her politics never stopped her from working with left-wing talent. What she most desired for herself and other people was hard work, morning and night, and a little political hypocrisy went a long way in allowing her to work with people that she would otherwise want blacklisted. Milestone was a director who got around. He had been in Hollywood since the silent days. He was a good director but not someone I consider spectacular.
Robert Rossen is probably best known now days for writing and directing "
The Hustler," but he also directed "
Body and Soul" and wrote and directed the 1949 version of "
All the Kings Men." He was one of those screenwriters who got fed up with having his scripts gutted by producers and directors, and decided that he might as well trying directing his own work. The movie also has the distinction of being one of Kirk Douglas's first starring roles.
What I mainly knew about these Rosen and Milestone at the time I started my research on "Strange Loves" was that, later in their careers, they had both been called before
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to testify. Both Milestone and Rossen were members of the original Hollywood Nineteen, which later became the
Hollywood Ten, when ten of the 19 were indicted. They were both suspected left-wingers but both avoided indictment each in a different way. Milestone took the 5th Amendment and somehow, I don’t know how, avoided blacklisting. Yet in the aftermath of his refusal to testify his movie-making abilities went downhill. My guess is that after his refusal to testify he did not look for controversial subjects, nor did he take chances in his movie-making. He certainly sought out controversial subjects previous to his testifying, and "The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers", was the kind of loopy movie making that no one would expect from an old-time director like Milestone. The whole thing feels like some strange combination of a modern dress western (lone gambler-gunman comes to town to confront his past) and haunted house tale, completely with dark old mansions that mysteriously carry memories of past murders.
At first, in 1951, Robert Rossen also took the 5th Amendment in front of HUAC, but in 1953 he testified. His testimony was classic self-justification and makes a wonderful read. In Victor Navasky's
Naming Names one can find the following account of Rossen's testimony.
Certainly many of those who named names resisted the informer label. Consider the exchange between the Committee and the writer-director Robert Rossen (BODY AND SOUL [1947], ALL THE KINGS MEN [1949], etc.), who in 1951 refused to name names but appeared again in 1953 ready to go through the name-naming ritual. "I don't think," he told the congressmen, "after two years of thinking, that any one individual can even indulge himself in the luxury of individual morality or pit it against what I feel today very strongly is the security and safety of this nation." Congressman Clyde Doyle of California tried to paraphrase Rossen's position: "In other words, you put yourself, then, in a position as a result of your patriotism or patriotic attitude toward your nation, which you came to subsequent to January 25, 1951, where you were willing to be labeled a stool pigeon and an informer, but you felt that was perhaps the privilege rather than a disgrace?"
MR. ROSSEN: I don't feel that I'm being a stool pigeon or an informer. I refuse--I just won't accept that characterization.
CONGRESSMAN KIT CLARDY: Well, Mr. Doyle means--
MR. ROSSEN: No; no. I am not . . . disagreeing with Mr. Doyle, but I think that is a rather romantic--that is like children playing at cops and robbers. They are just kidding themselves, and I don't care what the characterizations in terms of--people can take whatever positions they want. I know what I feel like within myself. Characterization or no characterization, I don't feel that way.'
Navasky, Victor S. NAMING NAMES. New York: The Viking Press, 1980, "A Note on Vocabulary"
Rossen not only named names but gave as many details on his political life as possible. He dramatized himself in world-historical terms. He was a good writer I think, because the coil of his thought could be seen through every bit of what he said, and often what he wrote.
I am trying not to be judgmental, because even though I believe that the committee and all of the red-baiters were scoundrels, I don’t believe that we can judge every individual who
named names on a predetermined moral scale. None of us know what we would do in a similar situation. I don’t believe in heroes and it seems to me that the demand that people act as heroes is a demand for a special elite of humans who sacrifice themselves for the future. I would like to get as far away from the ideology of heroism as possible. As Bertolt Brecht wrote in his play Galileo, "Pity the nation that needs heroes."
What does all of this have to do with "
Class Struggle in Hollywood" or with "The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers"?
During the filming of "Strange Loves" the painters and carpenters from the
Conference of Studio Unions went on strike. Milestone refused to cross the picket line and briefly filming stopped.
One day in October 1945, Barbara Stanwyck and some of the other actors went up to the roof of the studio and what they saw was cops and
IATSE thugs beating up the CSU pickets. There was a battle raging outside of the studio. Kirk Douglas, who was in his first big role with a starring actress, agonized over the fact that he had crossed a picket line. Milestone and Rossen both did not know whose side to take. The CSU was a truly militant union that wanted to organize everybody in the industry on an equal basis. This strike could have been a beginning of true industry-wide union solidarity in Hollywood. And there Milestone was, a sympathetic leftist sitting the battle out. And there was the cast and crew of "Strange Loves" standing on the roof watching the battle between police and strikers, watching the barricades set up in front of the studios, the burning police cars, cars tipped on their sides and dragged to the middle of the street to serve as barricades against the high-pressure fire-hoses and the club-wielding thugs. Hundreds of CSU picketers, but none of the strike-breaking thugs, were arrested. Eventually the CSU was defeated and I would argue that the Hollywood union movement never completely recovered. The reverberations of this defeat can still be felt today in the lack of solidarity between the IATSE leadership and the WGA, and IATSE's traditional pro-company stance.
One reason why Rossen and Milestone did not know what position to take in relation to the CSU strike was because the Communist Party, had opposed the strike as a break of the World War II no-strike pledge. This is ironic because the CSU was accused of being a "Communist" union. It was not a Communist union, far from it. In fact there were no communists leading this particular union. But the union was red-baited and the leadership was jailed. The studios launched a media campaign against the union. The studios also made sure that IATSE got preferential treatment. IATSE at this time was very close to the mob, and it was in fact the Los Angeles gangsters who supplied the anti-CSU IATSE goon-squad. This was the story I was told by some of the veterans of the strike.
The historical lesson here is something that every unionist should know. In the post-war period government and management all opposed the threat of militant unions. At this time there were more militant unions than corrupt unions. One way that management opposed militant unions was by red-baiting them. In many cases the unionists who were being red-baited were not communist or even "leftists". They were simply good union leaders. This was the case with the CSU. Another strategy that management used in opposing militant unions was to find unions that were friendly with management and to promote the interest of those unions over and above the militant unions. A related strategy, and one of the most important, was for management to call in the mobsters and the unions allied with the mobsters. In every case across the U.S. in the post-World War II years – among electrical workers opposing General Electric and Westinghouse, among dock-workers in the east, among Midwestern Teamsters – management and government promoted unions allied with mobsters in order to defeat unions that actually had the worker’s interest as part of their program. The story of Gerald Horne’s "Class Struggle in Hollywood" is the story of how this happened in Los Angeles.
As I read this book I will provide significant quotations. I am enjoying the book immensely, and I would highly recommend it as winter reading for all writers who are on strike, and all their supporters.
"The strife of the mid-1940s was also important for other reasons. At stake was nothing less than control over an industry that was essential in forging people’s consciousness. The titans of Hollywood had invested mightily in creating a "star system" that had captivated the imaginations of millions worldwide who followed the doings of actors – on and off the screen. Hollywood was surely a ‘dream factory.’ And these iconic actors lived lives that were the stuff of dreams as they instructed and mesmerized. But how would the multitudes respond to the sight of their favorite stars on picket lines, embroiled in a class struggle? How would the masses react when the Oz-like curtain of illusion was ripped away, revealing that the issues in Hollywood were not that different from those in Detroit, Pittsburgh, and other labor-management battlefronts? Yet there was at least one significant difference: class struggle in Hollywood could grab attention and provide lessons in ways unmatched by other labor-capital conflicts.
"Other factors help explain the ferocity of the onslaught on Hollywood labor [in the post-war years]. The screenwriters, which did include a complement of Communists, were indispensable to the production process. Though the moguls sought to show otherwise, making a decent movie without a competent screenplay based on a sound idea was tough. Even in the digital era of the twenty-first century, dispensing with writers – unlike other guilds and unions – will be difficult. Moreover, screenwriters, who were genuinely interested in intellectual exchange and foreign film were countered by moguls who were desperately interested in constructing firm protectionist walls to keep international cinema out of the U.S. market. When the screenwriters – who actively fought against tariff walls that kept foreign films from U.S. audiences – were denuded of Communist influence, it became easier for the moguls to bar foreign films while conquering markets abroad. This protectionism provided a comfortable cushion of profitability that proved critical to the industry in the post-World War II era in the face of a stiff challenge from television, independent film producers, and a successful antitrust lawsuit that disrupted the vertical integration of Hollywood. In fact, labor unrest in Hollywood erupted at an unpropitious moment for the moguls, confronted as they were by all manner of challenges – not least of which was anti-Semitism. Bulldozing CSU seemed all the more important in a context where nettlesome problems seemed to be proliferating and metastasizing."
At one point Horne comments: "By the time the unions went on strike in 1945… the studios were the ones exhibiting ‘class consciousness,’ standing shoulder-to-shoulder to confront a common foe, while the unions were busily knifing one another. The conflict in Hollywood illustrated an age-old lesson: class consciousness does exist in abundance in the United States; it is just painfully deficient among the working class."
Here I would like to point out that the owners of the multinational corporations are the most class-conscious of groups in history. They are constantly engaged in, often deadly, class struggle against those who challenge any bit of their power and dominance.
Jerry Monaco24 December 2007
New York City
[Caveat: I am not a member of the WGA, nor do I speak for any of the officers or members of that union or any other union. I have been a member of other unions in the past and I am a supporter of a stronger union movement in the United States. J.M.]
This work is licensed under a
Creative
Commons License.
28 December 2007
P.S. Ms. R. Kafrissen has a wonderful post on the mechanics of the blacklist at
Rootless Cosmopolitan Mechanics of the Blacklist, Part 1. I highly recommend it.
