Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  In December, the IATSE and the CSU agreed to abide by the decision of three arbitrators appointed by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) Executive Council to settle their dispute, which involved the contested 350 jobs.* The AFL arbitrators decided in favor of IATSE (which meant they now controlled the Carpenters Union). But the decorators (carpenters), represented by their president, William Hutcheson, refused to accept this decision. The unions were at loggerheads again and the question of those 350 jobs could—if an all-industry strike was called—have thrown 30,000 people out of work.

  Accusations spread by the IATSE began to fly that the CSU was infiltrated with Communists. The labor dispute now took on the particularly ugly hue of Red-baiting (CSU president Herbert K. Sorrell was accused of being a Communist by IATSE, an unsubstantiated accusation). From this point on, the labor dispute would be inseparable from the exploitation of, and investigation into, a Communist party takeover of Hollywood. Actor Sterling Hayden (who joined the party in 1946) later claimed he was part of a nucleus group within the SAG who worked to solicit support from his fellow actors for the strike. “The inner nucleus finally simmered down to about 10. They would hold special meetings to devise methods of procedure in advance of SAG meetings,” he said.

  Reagan, then (summer 1946) still a member of HICCASP and also a confidential informant for the FBI, raised his profile at the SAG by speaking out more at board and special meetings in opposition to the nucleus group’s tactics.

  “There was an agenda drawn up, which was to be followed if any member of the group was able to get the floor and speak [a filibuster in favor of the CSU],” Hayden later testified.

  Reagan was appointed by the board to the (Strike) Emergency Committee.* He later stated that while he was shooting the last scenes of Stallion Road out at Hidden Valley, he “was called to the telephone at an oil station.… I was told that if I made a report to the Screen Actors Guild that the strike was jurisdictional, rather than over wages and hours, a squad was ready to take care of me and fix my face so that I’d never be in pictures again.” The threat was real enough to Reagan, who for several months thereafter carried a gun in a shoulder holster.†

  As the summer progressed, the strike threat increased. Meetings of the Emergency Committee and dissenting (strike-oriented) SAG members were held at various private homes. Hayden recalled one meeting at Ida Lupino’s when Howard da Silva “roughly pulled” John Garfield from the house when Garfield sought a “hearing” for Reagan. “Da Silva clutched Garfield by the lapels, shook his fists in Garfield’s face and waved a finger at him violently,” Reagan added to Hayden’s statement.

  The IATSE, according to Roy Brewer, was in direct danger “of being raided” by the CSU, for if the IATSE surrendered the 350 decorators, other small unions under their aegis would be forced out of IATSE and into the CSU. “I thought he was an alarmist,” Reagan said. “I thought he was just being uncooperative. Later a representative of the CSU [he did not state who] said that was exactly the case—they were making further raids on the jurisdiction of IATSE.”

  Max Silver, a former CSU member, testified in 1954 that “the [Communist] Party was very much interested in the success of the CSU. Its interest lay in the main to establish what we called a progressive center in Hollywood instead of the IATSE, the unions who are affiliated with the IATSE, which was at that time the center of influence, and you might as well say control of the work of the trade unions in Hollywood. The Party was interested in establishing a nerve center that would be to some extent influenced by Party policy and Party people.”

  “It was pretty well established,” Reagan later said, “that the objective of the strike was to force the studios to accept an industry-wide union [CSU] by Harry Bridges.”*

  Reagan was attempting to juggle three balls at one time—the SAG, his marriage and his career. The only one he seemed to have a firm grip on was the Guild. As a member of the Emergency Committee, he met with local representatives of the IATSE, the carpenters, and the producers in an effort to find some means of avoiding the threatened work stoppage.† “If IATSE puts replacements for carpenters in the studios in order to keep them in operation,” Jack Dales explained to the board in its September 17, 1946, meeting, “picket lines will immediately be established by the carpenters. If the producers decide to close the studios entirely, the IATSE has indicated that it will take some other kind of action against them, which means the closing of theaters throughout the country.”

  In the event of a strike that would close the studios for many months, actors would have been one of the groups hardest hit. Members of most of the craft unions could obtain work outside the industry, but that was not true of actors. A motion was made and passed by the board (Anne Revere and Boris Karloff being the only dissenting members) that “members of the Guild be instructed to go through picket lines and live up to their contracts… and that the Guild make every effort to see that the studios provide adequate physical protection for its members when crossing picket lines.”

  A letter with this information was sent out to SAG members on September 19, creating tremendous controversy among them. A mass membership meeting was called by the Emergency Committee for October 1. Montgomery was to chair it, but he was unable to attend. The committee voted Reagan to take his place. “Reagan had always struck me as being quiet, unassuming, and not the two-fisted fighter we [SAG] needed for the position,” actress-columnist Hedda Hopper opined in the Chicago Tribune. “I was never more wrong.” The meeting was fraught with anger from both sides. “Reagan was a one-man battalion,” Sterling Hayden recalled. His refusal to allow “the Red nucleus” to gain the floor alerted Hollywood to a new political presence in their community. Only the naive could have been unaware of Reagan’s emerging power, and only those who wore mental blindfolds could have remained under the impression that he was still the young and ideological bleeding-heart liberal.

  Robert Montgomery, following a new trend in Hollywood, had begun to produce his own films, placing him in the three-headed category of actor-producer-director—a growing concern in the Guild, which felt this could lead to a conflict in interests.* His new pressures also called for greater demands on his time, and Reagan began to step in for him.

  A convention of the entire AFL had been scheduled to take place in Chicago on October 7. Montgomery had planned to attend with a member of the SAG staff, “blond, affable, Englishman” Pat Somerset, who was in charge of SAG labor relations. In a private meeting, the Emergency Committee, led by Reagan, had decided “that consideration should be given to sending a much larger delegation to Chicago in order that sufficient importance may be given to the issue” (to make every effort to force acceptance of the theory of arbitration of jurisdictional disputes). The board agreed and so the committee flew from Los Angeles on October 6 on a flight “which involved recalcitrant landing gears and conked-out motors.” Reagan arrived in a nervous state from the trip (he still had a tremendous fear of flying), but seemed to have regained his full energies by the next day. (Montgomery was to stay in Chicago only a day—he had a theater commitment in New York.)

  The SAG minutes from October 21, 1946 (when the Emergency Committee made its report to the board), reveal that in Chicago the group met with William Green, George Meany, Herbert Sorrell, Matthew Woll, Richard Walsh, William Hutcheson and the three members of the AFL Executive Council who wrote the jurisdictional arbitration award of December 26, 1945, and later issued the clarification of August 16, 1946. Edward Arnold was the major spokesman for the SAG group, Reagan its organizer. Arnold spoke for the Guild before the convention “in the strongest wording,” urging the passage “for the establishment of permanent arbitration machinery.”

  Reagan and the rest of his committee met first with William Green, president of the AFL, and told him they were prepared “to fly stars to every key city in the United States to make personal appearances and show films of the violence outside the studio gates, and to tell the people that one man—the first vi
ce-president of the AFL, Bill Hutcheson, was responsible.” This was a heretofore unprecedented extension of the use of executive power—and was without Guild sanctions. (Green supposedly “burst into tears,” a bizarre image for a strong labor leader.)

  The committee next went to see Hutcheson, “a jolly, Santa Claus of a man who became far less jolly as the discussion went on, well past midnight. Hutcheson was not willing to give an inch. Finally the group rose to leave. ‘Tell Walsh [IATSE president] that if he’ll give in… I’ll run Sorrell out of Hollywood and break up the CSU in five minutes. I’ll do the same to the Commies.’“

  Sorrell was present at the next morning’s confrontation. “It doesn’t matter a damn what Hutcheson says,” he told them. “This thing is going on, no matter what he does! When it ends up there’ll be only one man running labor in Hollywood and that man will be me!”

  “One of us (old liberal me) was so wide-eyed by this time it seemed my eyes could never close again,” Reagan commented about this meeting.

  On the last day of his stay, Somerset (remaining one extra day) was told by Walsh “that jurisdiction over set erection [the set decorators] should definitely belong to IATSE, and that if the award were repudiated, it was IATSE’s further intention to resign from the AFL Executive Council.” The situation was still at an impasse.

  While in Chicago, Kelly, Pidgeon and Smith had also discussed with IATSE official Matthew Woll his attack on various motion-picture players as being Communists and informed him of his error. “It is hoped,” the minutes of October 21, 1946, state, “that some retraction will be forthcoming.”

  Reagan had been asked to speak at a meeting of film technicians (IATSE Local 683) that had voted to observe the CSU picket lines. “The invitation was not received until late in the afternoon on Friday [October 18], and as the meeting was to be held that night it was possible to get in touch with only part of the Executive Committee. However, inasmuch as there was no secret about what went on in Chicago, it was felt that it would be proper for Mr. Reagan to give a factual report to the technicians meeting in spite of the fact that such a report had not yet been made to the Guild Board of Directors.” The contents of his speech convinced the film technicians to reverse their decision.

  Reagan and the Guild received letters of protest from the CSU immediately afterward. In the SAG board meeting held Monday, October 21, Reagan moved that all AFL studio unions be invited by the Emergency Committee to attend a “round-table discussion [at the SAG] to find some means of settling the current motion picture strike”—a motion that was unanimously carried.

  Reagan was stepping into the center of the arena.

  Father George H. Dunne, a young rebel Jesuit priest who taught at Loyola University in Los Angeles, was committed to Christian Advocacy and very much involved in labor strife in Hollywood. What Dunne believed was what the most progressive edge of the Democratic party—men like Hubert Humphrey—supported. A man with a colorful, if disjointed, way of describing happenings, he emerged publicly in 1946 and immediately became popular with the press—who were always looking for a good story.

  “[I can tell you just how] the gangsters took over the IATSE. Willie Bioff, the former pimp from Chicago, had come out with two gunmen, and Willie Bioff dropped off in Phoenix, the two gunmen came on to Hollywood… each one with a violin case under his arm,” Father Dunne told an interviewer in 1981. “They just walked into a union meeting one night [this would have been 1933] in Union Hall (which then was on Santa Monica Boulevard near Western, as I recall), just walked into the union, and announced that they were taking over. They telephoned Bioff in Phoenix and said, ‘We’ve taken over the union,’ and Bioff came over the next day.… [In 1946] I went to see Roy Brewer who had succeeded Willie Bioff [actually there had been a four-year interval].… He said to me, among other things, he was rather bitter and angry at his own IATSE workers. He spoke about them the way you might expect to hear a management man talk about a unionist. He complained bitterly about, you know, ‘They always want more money, more money, more money.’ And he said to me, ‘There’s not room in Hollywood for the IATSE and the CSU.’ (That’s Herb SorrelPs group.) It’s a war to the finish.”

  Father Dunne’s opinion was that the “whole strike had been manipulated in a conspiracy between the major producers and Roy Brewer and the IATSE union… to precipitate a situation in which the CSU would have no choice but to strike, then, once they were out of the studio, freeze them out until time, attrition, and everything else simply destroyed them.” The week before the Chicago convention of the AFL, “there was a series of hush-hush, very top secret meetings in Hollywood between the major producers… and the IATSE union. Brewer, himself, attended some of the meetings [and guaranteed] the [producers] that if they forced the CSU people out on the streets, he could supply IATSE people if they refused to take their jobs, to work on what they called ‘hot sets,’ he himself would force them to do so.”*

  Herbert Sorrell had called the set decorators (Carpenters Union) out on strike on September 24, 1946, just two weeks before the Chicago convention. Three days later, he said he had been kidnapped at gunpoint by hired gunmen of the Chicago syndicate, driven up into the foothills (in Los Angeles), beaten badly, pistol-whipped and left for dead. The next day he was found and hospitalized, and released on the following Sunday with head bandages, both eyes badly blackened and bruises on his face. There were rumors that the beating was “a put-up job.” “I don’t think even Herb, who had all kinds of courage [he had been a boxer] would submit to getting badly beaten up,” Father Dunne insisted. “The doctors in the hospital certainly examined him. They never gave any support to this theory.”

  Father Dunne was now revved for action—violence, which he strongly opposed, had been used. Believing that the key to ending the strike was held by the SAG, he went on the air (KXLA, February 5, 1947) and declared that if the members of the SAG “would simply refuse to cross the picket line” the strike would be “settled in twenty-four hours.” Explaining this at a later time he said, “The producers, as long as they could continue to make pictures, would be making money. But the moment the actors and actresses stopped coming into the studios to make pictures for them, they’d have to shut down, you see. That’s the end of their flow of income, cash.… This brought an immediate reaction from Ronald Reagan.… [Late] the very next night he came down here to Loyola… and into [the] parlor… downstairs.… He was accompanied by Jane Wyman, and by George Murphy [Jack Dales was also present]…. Jane Wyman contributed nothing to the discussion except her charming looks, you know.… [Murphy had] an arrow-collar kind of good looks.… He contributed very little except an embarrassed smile from time to time… the leader, the articulate spokesman for the three, was Ronald Reagan… we were together for about three hours’ discussion… until two o’clock in the morning, as I remember. The whole thrust of his discourse was to persuade me that Herb Sor-rell and the CSU and all these people were Communists, and this was a Communist-led and inspired strike, and that I was simply being a dupe for the Communists.

  “He said, and I don’t question that it was true, that he and Murphy, the two of them, had made a trip back to [Chicago] where they had discussions with… Doherty, Knight, and Birthright [the three men on the AFL arbitration committee]… and the committee men told them that it was definitely their intention that this work [the set decorators] should go to the IATSE union. [This statement was later contradicted by “the Three Wise Men”—as they were called—during a congressional hearing into labor activities.]

  “… [The meeting between Father Dunne and the SAG group] was calm and collected.… Reagan… was very aggressive of course.… I had the very definite impression, this is a dangerous man. I remember saying this to myself. Murphy was totally harmless.… But Reagan, I had a definite view, this is a dangerous man, because he is so articulate, and because he’s sharp. But he can also be very ignorant, as he clearly was, in my judgment, interpreting everything in terms of the Communist thr
eat, you see, Communist danger.” Father Dunne then adds, “He had his facts wrong both to the alleged Communism of Herb Sorrell and the CSU union and as to the rectitude of the jurisdictional issue. He was all wrong… then [he ran around] trying to solve it… being a Rover Boy.”

  Dunne did not believe that Reagan had been a “mouth piece” for Brewer, but he did feel certain that “he was doing a job for the producers.… I have never had much use for [Reagan] ever since my dealings with him in the Hollywood strike, because he played a key role in cooperation with… the thoroughly immoral Chicago gangster outfit [IATSE] to destroy what was the only honest and democratic trade-union movement in Hollywood [the CSU]. They [IATSE and the producers] did this to them, and Reagan played a key role in that destruction.”

  Reagan gave a different version of his meeting with Father Dunne. “[He] took to the air waves and blasted the SAG and opponents of the CSU eloquently and with vigor.… George Murphy and I decided he must be a victim of a snow job. We knew he had never been exposed to the Guild side of the controversy, and he was saying some pretty harsh things about us. We called and asked if we could see him, and then went down to the university one evening, armed with our records. We were a little taken aback when he introduced us to his lawyer, and coldly informed us he had asked the lawyer to sit in on our meeting. It was a short meeting. The next night he was back on radio kicking our brains out. But not for long; someone else began to teach political science [at Loyola] and he was on the other side of the country.”