This Day in Labor History: October 10, 1936

On October 10, 1936, movie projector unionists in New York lobbed tear gas into a theatre on Times Square in New York. Although unrelated to striking American Federation of Musicians members going after movies replacing their members withe recorded music, it was connected in the public mind. This event demonstrates both the limits of direct action and the struggles with solidarity between union members, especially when the issues are irrelevant for other unions. It also is a moment in the history of labor resistance to automation, which has greater relevance today.

Like today, automation was a major issue for a lot of workers. One of the big issues in the 2024 strike of the International Longshoremen Association was the introduction of unexpected automation in the Mobile port, for example. Now, we don’t usually see the rise of recorded music as a technology of automation, but it absolutely is in the movies. Originally, musicians provided this live, every single showing. That’s a lot of jobs! A theater could have a single organist, but it could also have a 15-piece orchestra. The quality varied tremendously.

Now, quite a few of the musicians themselves didn’t really think of themselves of workers. But more and more did. In 1896, Joseph Weber became the first president of the American Federation of Musicians. A clarinetist who had immigrated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the age of 14, he had performed, mostly through the west, before getting involved with musician unionism while in Cincinnati. After he helped form the AFM, he remained its president for the next 40 years and was still president during the New York strike. The AFM was a growing concern. By 1926, there were 22,000 musicians working in theaters around the country. Not all were union of course, but in New York, most were and provided the core of the AFM’s membership.

Not surprisingly, the studios and theater owners were interested in standardizing the music. Paying musicians cost a lot of money and sometimes musicians undermined the film through their own interpretation. As early as 1910, Wurlitzer and other companies introduced photoplayers, which was a sort of automated music that still required someone to run the machine, but it had rolls that had about 30 songs for just about every possible emotion, easily enough to get through the shorter films of that era. Sound film technology really changed everything though. Especially by the early 30s, you could record sound onto the films themselves. The early technologies introduced by the studios after 1929 were really rudimentary and often included heavy discs played along with the film that included the sound, but they often broke. Still, it did not take the technology long to threaten musicians’ jobs. Sound films also meant fewer employees of the theaters and the elimination of the vaudeville acts that often opened for movies, so costs for attending a film declined and attendance skyrocketed.

This of course was an existential crisis for the AFM. The number of employed theater musicians plummeted from 22,000 in 1926 to 14,000 in 1930 to 4100 by 1934. A very few of these musicians found work in studio bands, but not very many and they were almost all in Hollywood. As early as 1927, musicians in St. Louis struck for wages when they were idle when a theater showed some early Vitaphone films and they won that strike too. By the next year, the rise of the talkies was the major theme at the AFM convention in Louisville. Weber pushed for a public relations strategy to convince the public that live musicians were better than recorded music. A lot of the locals were skeptical of this strategy and in New York, the local union developed a strategy of limiting work for union members to spread the available work around.

But none of these ideas worked. Audiences didn’t care. Theater owners were happy to cut costs, especially during the height of the Depression. They simply rejected AFM demands. So AFM Local 802, based in New York, decided on a confrontation strategy. On September 10, they held a meeting that included such leading musicians as W.C. Handy and famous union leaders such as Rose Schneiderman to start a strike. They picketed theaters. But to be honest, most of the rest of labor was indifferent or even hostile. Most musicians didn’t show up to picket. The public really didn’t care. Movie attendance did not decline. So on October 10, someone threw a homemade tear gas bomb into the Times Square Theater. This was not the only time someone took the issue into their own hands. This time, they tear gassed eight theaters on the same day.

Interestingly, it was the not the musicians as it turned out who did this. It was members of the Motion Picture Operators Union, who had their own issues of the owners trying to replace with a company union. The cops raided their union the next day, but the tear gassings continued until November. Worse, this got associated in the public mind with the mass picketing annoying theater goers. So it discredited the musicians too.

The AFM tried to continue the strike through the winter of 1937, but it was a hard slog. Musicians in Harlem especially were crossing picket lines. Not enough members showed up for union meetings to have a quorum. In March 1937, it decided to focus its energies just on RKO owned theaters. It dropped its demands to bring back the vaudeville performers and just focus on the orchestras. It still didn’t work. Soon after, the national AFM disowned Local 802’s actions. The strike ended on July 8, 1937.

The AFM survived though by focusing on radio and the rising record industry and came out of World War II as a very strong union. Its continued struggle for relevance as the twentieth century went on is a subject for another post.

I’ve seen a few live musical performances to provide the soundtrack at silent movie showings over the years and it’s pretty great. Especially when, say, you are watching Chaplin’s The Kid and the guitarist Marc Ribot is providing the one man soundtrack.

I borrowed from Robin D.G. Kelley’s chapter in the edited volume Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century to write this post.

This is the 538th post in this series. Previous posts are are archived here.