It was October 5, 1945. The Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), a union representing craft laborers in Los Angeles, including painters, carpenters, set designers, cartoonists, and others, was seven months into a major strike that was causing Hollywood studio moguls to panic. Although major studios, including Columbia, RKO, and Universal, had over 100 unreleased films in the can, ready to be released, the CSU’s strike actions, as well as movie theater boycotts, were an effective blow against the post-war studio system.

Now, the strikers gathered at the Warner Bros. employee entrance to protest.

The violent standoff that followed, in which strikebreakers, armed with chains, hammers, pipes, and other weapons, descended upon the workers, with county police forces closely behind, would become known in Hollywood as “Black Friday.”

With moguls, Los Angeles Police, private police forces, and organized crime on one side and striking trade unionists on the other, the episode fanned the flames of anti-communism in Hollywood, and led directly to the union’s downfall the following year. In the years to come, the strike would be used as a cudgel against progressive trade unionism inside and outside of the film industry, leading to the blunting of it in Hollywood—and in the United States, more generally.

The strike of 1945 started after the CSU became embroiled in a dispute with a rival union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE). The conflict centered on 77 set decorators who had broken away from IATSE, and established their own group, the Society of Motion Picture Interior Decorators, in 1937. The CSU initially represented these breakaway set decorators during their independent contract negotiations with some studios. Eventually, IATSE began to dispute CSU’s jurisdiction, and after studio producers sided with IATSE—contradicting an arbiter appointed by the War Labor Board—the CSU went on strike.

Competing interests in Hollywood, from studio moguls like Cecil B. DeMille, to mobsters like John Roselli, saw the unions’ dispute as a threat. It wasn’t just about disrupting the flow of capital in and out of the film industry. They also understood that cinema served—and still serves—a vital role in shaping and massaging mass consciousness. Which is why, for moguls and organized crime organizations alike, combating the perceived infiltration of Moscow-backed Reds in Hollywood was as important as any financial concern.

Studio moguls widely alleged the strike of 1945 to be Communist-led—though the Communist Party was initially opposed to the strike. CSU president Herbert Sorrell personally faced accusations by Walt Disney, IATSE leadership, and others of being a Communist dupe. (Though when he was dragged before the California Legislature’s Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities a year later, there was scant evidence linking him to the Communist Party—his militant trade unionism was homegrown.)

Regardless of the facts, the anti-communist hysteria of studio moguls and state and federal investigators ultimately spelled the downfall of the CSU. The congressional investigations into the alleged infiltration of communism in Hollywood and trade unions like those in which Sorrell was interrogated, resulted in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which sought to purge not only communists, but also class-conscious workers, from union leadership roles. The law severely limited the power of unions: It required union leadership to sign non-communist affidavits and outlawed jurisdictional strikes like the one enacted by the CSU.

Following on the heels of Taft-Hartley came the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, which culminated in the well-known Hollywood blacklist and the eventual jailing of the “Hollywood Ten,” film industry members who refused to testify. The notorious Smith Act trials between 1949 and 1958 saw the jailing and deportation of Communist leadership, including Benjamin Davis Jr. and Claudia Jones, across the United States. The rise of Sen. Joseph McCarthy saw the persecution of the gay and lesbian community under the Lavender Scare as well as the continued attack on Black radicalism. From the ashes of the destruction of the CSU also came the ascendency of former B-movie actor Ronald Wilson Reagan. Reagan, who had formerly served as the president of the Screen Actors Guild, would go on to administer a mighty blow against unions. In 1981, as U.S. president, he fired over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, locking them out of federal employment for life, employing strikebreaking tactics he may have rehearsed during his anti-communist tenure in Hollywood. The knock-on effects from the Red Scare in Hollywood would resonate for decades to come, setting back progressive trade unionism in the United States for generations of workers.

Today, we are witnessing a similar parallel: In tandem with the labor actions in Hollywood and elsewhere across the country, there is a new Red Scare heralding a burgeoning neo-fascism in the United States. Ron DeSantis’s “Stop Woke” campaign, the banning of critical race theory in Florida, Arkansas, and elsewhere, the persecution of the African People’s Socialist Party, Rick Scott’s “travel ban” for socialists traveling to Florida, bipartisan hysteria over the economic rise of China and the BRICS nations, as well as antisemitic tropes like the threat of “cultural Marxism” all point in this direction.

In Hollywood, specifically, we can look to right-wing hysteria over so-called “woke” films such as Barbie and other “culture war” trends perpetrated by pundits who flirt with, if not outright endorse, anti-Blackness, anti-trans ideology, and antisemitism—often in the same breath. The perceived threat of “wokeism” and “identity politics” bear a striking resemblance to the Red Scare tactics of the 1940s and 1950s, insofar as they function as coded attempts to discredit individuals and collectives alike by coding progressive politics as adjacent with Marxism or communism—only today, instead of Moscow, Beijing has become the primary boogeyman.

But this time, the tables may be turning. When Screen Actors Guild president Fran Drescher gave a rip-roaring speech dripping with the authority of class struggle this summer, nobody accused her of being a communist for speaking out against labor conditions. Likewise, Bryan Cranston, who portrayed Trumbo in a biopic of the same name, wasn’t labeled a “Communist dupe” when he delivered a fiery, pro-union speech in July.

And in a year of unprecedented labor actions throughout the nation, the Writers Guild of America’s (WGA) months-long strike, which secured better contracts for writers in a radical victory for labor last month, and the tentative agreement the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) just reached after 118 days on the picket lines, have highlighted the efforts of the working-class members of the film industry.

The efforts go far beyond the entertainment studios, too. In August, thousands of Los Angeles city workers engaged in a one-day strike to put pressure on Mayor Karen Bass. In recent months there have also been a hotel workers strike and job actions by Los Angeles Unified School District teachers. That’s why to talk about those struggling against the citadel of capital, disproportionately cited in Southern California, it’s important to understand that what is happening in Hollywood is part of a broader labor movement.

That’s why, though some onlookers, even on the political left, have not taken the Hollywood strikes seriously, to be dismissive of the gravity of the labor movement in Hollywood is to commit a fundamental political blunder. Tinseltown has a rich, though too often unacknowledged, history of class struggle that is intimately connected with the kickoff of Red Scare politics in the 1940s and 1950s. The CSU strike provides a sober reminder of how the violent proliferation of Red Scare hysteria and anti-labor sentiment in Hollywood in the middle of the 20th century were connected, and of how far the capitalist class is willing to take its moral panics.

As we heed the lessons of this previous era, it allows us to understand why the labor actions this time around—Hollywood culture workers, United Auto Workers, the 75,000 striking Kaiser employees, graduate students, contingent faculty, and other teachers across the country, and the others too numerous to mention—portend good signs to come for labor in the United States.

The post How Hollywood’s Black Friday Strike Changed Labor Across America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the time, the New York Tribune expressed disbelief that so many people could be killed or injured because “two actors quarreled!” But the conflict was about so much more than which actor was better: it was a watershed event, signaling the growing penetration of celebrity culture into the national zeitgeist—and into the individual identities of everyday Americans.

Even before the Civil War, celebrities—their appearances, behaviors, expressed attitudes, their biographies, their failings, their scandals—were becoming a structuring force whose influence would increase with each new medium and communications technology, leading to the ever-beaming, constantly beckoning celebrity-driven media engulfing us today. In this light, we can see that the infamous Astor Place Riot was a flashpoint in a larger battle about class identity, resentments over economic and cultural privilege, and manhood and national pride, expressed through two Shakespearean actors: the British performer William Charles Macready and the American Edwin Forrest.

While Macready had quickly met with professional acclaim for his controlled performances in London and Paris, Forrest had played small, rough theaters in the South and West as he honed his more melodramatic style and worked his way towards bigger theaters. By the time they met in New York, Forrest was hailed as the country’s first great tragic actor, an extravagant performer deemed to embody the “American” style of acting.

Today, we associate Shakespeare with “high art” and culture, but in the nineteenth century his plays were performed in venues from opulent theaters to saloons, and many audience members knew key lines so well they would recite them along with the actors. These theaters were rowdy places where the audiences (mostly men) were spatially segregated by income, line of work, class, and race. The expensive boxes above and to the side of the stage were reserved for the wealthy.

Below the boxes (what we would today call the orchestra) was “the pit,” where the emerging middle class of manual laborers, sailors, mechanics, tradesmen, and, in New York, the Bowery B’hoys sat. Known for their boisterous (and often drunken) behavior, bright clothes, and love of the theater, the b’hoys were single, working-class men, mostly firemen and mechanics.

Above and behind the pit were the cheap gallery seats (today’s mezzanine) occupied by newsboys, apprentices, and other lower wage workers; segregated from everyone in the upper third tier were African Americans (assigned the very worst seats), and prostitutes and their clients. Those in the gallery were known to pelt actors who displeased them with rotten fruit, eggs, peanuts (hence the peanut gallery), and pennies. Those in each sector of the theater resented the others. So the theater was both a producer of celebrity and a tinderbox of class resentment.

This segregation within theaters began to give way to segregation between theaters. When the new, luxurious Astor Place Opera House opened late in 1847, it was meant for the rich. In May 1849, Macready, known for his restrained, intellectual style, was slated to perform Macbeth there.

At the same time, Forrest was also to portray Macbeth at another theater just a few blocks away. A feud had begun between them, and Macready had already denounced Forrest’s “deficiency in taste and judgement” and especially “the facetious applause of his supporters, the ‘Bower lads.’” In retaliation, Forrest, still smarting from having been hissed when he performed in England, declared that Macready “should never be permitted to appear again upon the stage” in New York City. The “penny press,” tabloid-style papers that had risen to prominence along with the theaters, fanned the conflict to increase circulation and sales.

Hundreds of Forrest’s supporters, many of them the b’hoys, bought tickets to Macready’s first performance on May 8, stoked in part by broadsides—provocative posters—signed by “The American Committee” that asked, “Working Men, Shall Americans or English Rule in this City?” The handbills urged them to “express their opinions” at the “English Aristocratic Opera House,” which indeed they did. As Macready sought to perform, Forrest’s supporters shouted him down and threw rotten eggs, potatoes, and other vegetables.

Macready tried again to perform on May 10. The b’hoys were ready, and so were Macready’s supporters—and the police, all 250 of them. But in addition to those in the Astor Place Opera House, an estimated 10,000 fans of both actors had gathered outside the theater. By the fourth scene, Macready could not proceed given the hissing, booing, and the hurling of more rotten vegetables—including a bottle containing the Indian spice asafetida, which “diffused a most repulsive stench throughout the house.”

The police burst in to eject the culprits, and Macready rushed through the play to finish. But the b’hoys outside were not having it, and began hurling bricks and paving stones at the theater. The police called in the state militia, 350 of them. But they were unable to calm or break up the group, some of whom were throwing bricks and paving stones at the police.

So the militia fired a volley over the crowd, and then one into the crowd, and then more.

The next day, the Astor Place Opera House gained the monikers “Massacre Opera House” and the “Disaster Place.”

But of course, this was not really about Macready and Forrest; conflicts about celebrities are never only about the celebrities. This one was over national pride and identity, class position and resentments, and different versions of masculinity. Macready personified Britain’s sense of its cultural superiority. His fans were the growing elite in New York City who embodied upper-class snobbery. The b’hoys, through their identification with Forrest, were rebelling against such cultural hierarchies and the special privileges of elites. Through their jeers and their rotten fruit, they sought to project onto Macready—and then exorcise—a needling sense of cultural inferiority, of not having “class,” and of not being the “right” kind of “cultured” men.

The Astor Place Riot was an exemplar of how popular culture is rarely “just entertainment,” and that battles over which entertainments and stars are worthy of admiration are always battles about larger norms, values, attitudes, and the social order itself. And while the riots were an extreme example, they demonstrated that fans had become active and participatory meaning makers, key players in the production of celebrities and their significance.

WWE wrestlers Dolph Ziggler and Charlotte give high-fives to fans Danny and Manny Gomez, ages six and nine, at a New York mall. Image courtesy of Stuart Ramson/Associated Press.

This was a crucial precedent, but it was not the only instance of the transformation of how Americans related to entertainers in those times. Possibly the greatest maestro of celebrity production during this era, P. T. Barnum, saw a growing market among urban audiences with more leisure time for entertainment, especially sensational and eye-catching acts. In 1842, he opened his “museum” in downtown Manhattan and filled it with oddities like the infamous “Fiji mermaid,” which was in reality the torso and head of a small, mummified monkey sewn onto the bottom half of a fish.

Barnum was also one of the earliest and most wildly successful creators of celebrities. Dubbed “the Shakespeare of advertising,” he used newspaper advertisements, pamphlets, press releases, and provocative broadsides to publicize his shows.

Barnum “discovered” Jenny Lind, a successful and famous Swedish opera singer who was unknown in the United States. To promote her, Barnum launched an unprecedented press campaign extolling her virtues as a charitable and benevolent woman who spent most of her time engaged in philanthropy, tending to “the afflicted and distressed;” he believed that most Americans would be unfamiliar with opera music but would be charmed and attracted by her morality. Indeed, Barnum understood that for certain types of people to become admired stars, they had to be connected to certain values that resonated with the aspirations of their audiences. Thus he cast Lind as an unparalleled talent who regarded her “artistic powers as a gift from heaven” yet was so selfless that she gave benefit concerts for orphanages and hospitals.

Billing Lind as “the Swedish Nightingale,” Barnum auctioned off tickets to see her. By the time she got to the United States in 1850, tens of thousands turned out to greet her ship. She performed before sold-out crowds, her 95 concerts grossing $712,161, the equivalent of $21 million in 2016 dollars. “Lindomania” resulted, with a host of products named after her, from gloves to hats to paper dolls.

By midcentury, the penny press, Barnum, and theatrical producers had established the mechanisms by which individuals became famous, and promoted certain ideological visions that celebrities represented. Meanwhile, a distinctive sociological change was occurring in American life, especially in the cities and larger towns, as people learned to assume the role of a mass audience, witnessing spectacles with hundreds and even thousands of other people they did not necessarily know.

People began to feel that allegiances to certain stars, and animosity towards other ones, were tied into their own individual and group identities. They were appreciating that publicity would help them be an informed, with-it person by promoting certain experiences they really should not miss—such as a particular, well-hyped theatrical performance. And they were coming to expect that publicity would frame how they were meant to receive such a major event.

Americans were picking up the new, publicity-driven language of celebrity, acquiring a new vocabulary about who and what should be celebrated and why. Crucially, people were learning how to inhabit a new, mass mediated persona: that of the fan.

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