Throughout all this, Sorrell was trying to negotiate a new wage contract for his unions. The studios offered a ridiculous 10 percent wage increase; Sorrell demanded an equally ridiculous 50 percent. Both sides finally agreed to 25 percent, but then the “jurisdictional disputes” once again providentially intervened. This time, the conflict centered on the machinists who had gone out on strike with Sorrell’s CSU in 1945 and the rival machinists who had been hired to replace them. These strikebreakers, with IATSE support, insisted on their right to keep their jobs. Sorrell called all his unions out on strike again on July 1. The studios quickly decided to avoid combat. Everyone gathered at a conference and worked out a truce known as the Treaty of Beverly Hills; everyone returned to work while negotiations continued. Sorrell gloated at the prospects after what seemed another victory. “From now on, we dictate,” he said.
The most difficult problem involved not the machinists but the carpenters, who traditionally had enjoyed the right to build and install all movie sets. IATSE challenged that right, partly because it represented the “grips” who moved props and furniture around, partly because the carpenters belonged to Sorrell’s CSU. When both sides appealed to AFL president William Green, since all these quarreling unions were members of the disorganized coalition that called itself a federation of labor, Green characteristically appointed a three-man committee to consider the problem. These three implausible judges were William C. Doherty, head of the postal workers union, Felix H. Knight of the barbers, and William C. Birthright of the trainmen. Given thirty days to resolve a dispute that had baffled more experienced experts for many years, the three journeyed to Los Angeles, spent several hours touring one studio, Paramount, interviewed a few of the rival combatants, and then retreated to write their report.
That report turned out to be a marvel of ambiguity. “All trim and millwork on the sets and stages” should be done by the carpenters, said the three Solomons, while IATSE men should undertake “the erection of sets on stages.” Both sides immediately began arguing about the meaning of the word “erection,” whether it meant building sets or simply putting together things already built. IATSE claimed the former, and thus claimed some three hundred jobs held by Sorrell’s carpenters. Although IATSE had no unions specifically chartered for such work, it immediately organized a new local designated as “set erectors.” The producers, predictably, sided with IATSE and gave its members the work; the carpenters, just as predictably, appealed to AFL headquarters for a “clarification.”
Now the carpenters were not just a few handymen who hammered nails in the back lots of Warner Bros. Their commander in chief, Bill Hutcheson, was a crusty old swashbuckler who had risen to the exalted role of an AFL vice-president, a man who, when he asked for a clarification, wanted things clarified very much his own way. The three wise men responded, that August, much as Hutcheson wished. They had never meant, they clarified, to deprive a single Hollywood carpenter of a single job. All carpentry of all sorts, they said, should be done by the carpenters. The IATSE chiefs were furious. Their lawyers argued that the AFL committee had long since completed its work and had no right now to “clarify” its own decision at the expense of the IATSE workers. The studios, as usual, sided with IATSE. They did more. In a series of secret meetings with IATSE’s Roy Brewer, the studio negotiators agreed to confront another strike by Sorrell. Brewer, in turn, promised that his IATSE workers would crash through Sorrell’s picket lines and keep the studios open. According to the minutes of a producer’s meeting, subsequently read to a congressional hearing, the plan was ruthlessly simple: “By 9 A.M., Monday, clear out all carpenters first, then clear out all painters, following which proceed to take on IA men to do the work.”
Whether this represented an unprovoked strike by aggressive leftists in the CSU or a deliberately calculated provocation and lockout by the producers remains arguable to this day. In any case, Sorrell called his ten thousand workers out on strike, and Brewer sent his sixteen thousand workers in to do their jobs. The first major clashes occurred outside Warners, where strikers threw bricks and rocks at IATSE workers trying to get through the gates. Burbank police fired shots into the air. Some two hundred people engaged in another fracas outside the M-G-M studio in Culver City. Stones, shouts, shovings—each side accused the other of using “goon squads.” Eight studios in all were involved, eight studios at work on the filming of fifty pictures. Amid all the uproar, IATSE’s Roy Brewer soon demonstrated that he could provide the workers to keep the studios open and operating. The studio chiefs were grateful. Work went on.
Then began an elaborate series of efforts at mediation. One of the first and most important of these efforts was led by Ronald Reagan, who had just succeeded Robert Montgomery as president of the Screen Actors Guild, and who reacted to the prevailing spirit of violence by carrying a .32 Smith & Wesson in a shoulder holster. Reagan later condemned Sorrell as a Communist, but at this point he still regarded himself as “a near-hopeless hemophiliac liberal,” and he decided, not unreasonably, that the major force behind the strike was Bill Hutcheson of the carpenters union. So he led a delegation of movie actors to the AFL convention in Chicago and asked for a meeting with Hutcheson. Hutcheson gruffly refused. Reagan’s group then “wangled,” as he put it, a meeting with the three arbitrators who had first ruled for IATSE and then “clarified” their ruling in favor of the carpenters. Under questioning, Reagan said, the three had admitted that their clarification “was a mistake,” but they added that “a third clarification would be another mistake.” They had acted, they told Reagan, “as a result of . . . months of ceaseless pressure on the part of Hutcheson.”
Reagan’s committee included some rather celebrated names: Walter Pidgeon, Dick Powell, Gene Kelly, Robert Taylor, George Murphy, Alexis Smith, and Reagan’s own wife, Jane Wyman. They all went to AFL president Green, according to Reagan, and blamed the strike on Hutcheson. They threatened to fly movie stars to every major city in the country to denounce Hutcheson. “To our consternation,” Reagan recalled, “Green burst into tears. With his cheeks still wet, he said brokenly, ‘What can I do? We are a federation of independent unions. I have no power to do anything.’ ”
Reagan finally arranged a meeting with Hutcheson and found him mired in twenty-year-old conflicts, thirty-year-old conflicts, between his carpenters and other unions. They wrangled over how many carpenters’ jobs were jeopardized by the strike, how many carpenters were involved, even how many carpenters there were in Hutcheson’s union. But finally Hutcheson told Reagan, according to Reagan, that if the actors could get IATSE to back down on the three hundred disputed jobs, “I’ll run Sorrell out of Hollywood and break up the CSU in five minutes.”* The actors reflected on this remarkable proposition as they rode down in the elevator from Hutcheson’s hotel room, and then in the deserted lobby they met Herb Sorrell. They told him, perhaps naively, perhaps maliciously, what Hutcheson had said. “It doesn’t matter a damn what Hutcheson says,” Sorrell retorted, according to Reagan. “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!”
The membership of the Screen Actors Guild voted overwhelmingly on October 2, 1946, to back Reagan’s leadership, denounce the CSU strike as a jurisdictional dispute, and cross the picket lines. The SAG also took the lead in organizing a declaration by twenty-four other Hollywood unions to that effect. The year before, Sorrell had been saved by Washington, by the National Labor Relations Board’s ruling in his favor. Now there was no sign of any such rescue. On the contrary, the national elections of 1946, which took place less than two months after Sorrell’s unions went out on strike, were ruinous. A nation weary of wartime restrictions voted overwhelmingly for whatever alternatives a renascent Republican party could offer. In their strongest showing since the stock market crash of 1929, the Republicans won most of the governorships, a narrow majority in the Senate, and a large majority in the House.
Important positio
ns changed hands. One of them was the chairmanship of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which had been bumbling along, since the retirement of Martin Dies, under the aegis of Democratic Representative Edward J. Hart of New Jersey. It now acquired the spirited Republican leadership of another New Jerseyan, J. Parnell Thomas, who seemed to believe that the entire New Deal was a nightmare to be exposed, illuminated, and destroyed. One of the newly elected congressmen assigned to help him in his efforts was a young Los Angeles lawyer named Richard Nixon, victor over the hapless liberal Jerry Voorhis. Another newcomer who would soon achieve a considerable celebrity was the freshman senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy. But the national sickness subsequently known as McCarthyism was already being nurtured by President Truman. Just three weeks after the Republican triumph in the election, Truman assigned an interagency committee to start checking the “loyalty” of more than two million government employees.
In the narrow little world of Hollywood, the immediate effect of this conservative shift was that there was no longer any New Deal to help Herb Sorrell and his strikers. They were on their own, without either the numbers or the weapons to defeat the forces that they had committed themselves to challenge. Under a court injunction to limit the number of pickets to no more than eight at any studio gate, Sorrell sent 1,500 to lay siege at Columbia. Police arrested 610 men, including Sorrell, and 69 women. By the end of that November week, the arrests totaled 802, on various charges of assault with deadly weapons, conspiracy to commit extortion, unlawful assembly, and interference with the orderly administration of justice. Bail was set at five thousand dollars each.
Sorrell later charged that these prosecutions were all part of a “conspiracy to destroy the CSU,” that Warners put policemen from Burbank and Glendale on the studio payroll, that M-G-M paid thirty-two dollars per day for every policeman used at the Culver City studio, and that M-G-M manager Eddie Mannix “told the policemen when and when not to cause trouble with the pickets.” The studios seem to have engaged in still more clandestine maneuvers. The efforts of IATSE workers to break through Sorrell’s picket lines naturally depended heavily on which side the teamsters union would take. The teamsters local voted to honor the CSU picket lines, but the chief of the local, Joe Touhy, threatened to bring in out-of-state teamsters to support the IATSE strikebreakers “and see that they are carried through.”
Touhy naturally would not have attempted such coercion without the approval of the corrupt union’s leaders, Dan Tobin and Dave Beck, but what was particularly interesting was Touhy’s negotiations with Joe Schenck, who had been pardoned by President Truman for his intrigues with Willie Bioff, released from prison, and reinstalled in the executive offices at 20th Century–Fox. Several months before the strike began, Schenck promised to hire Touhy as “industrial relations director” for National Theaters, a chain of movie houses of which Schenck was an executive officer. Touhy, who had been getting $175 per week from the teamsters, went on Schenck’s payroll on January 1, 1947, roughly three months after he helped break the strike, at $400 a week, plus $100 in expenses, on a seven-year contract that escalated to $500 a week for the last three years.
Then there were the more direct methods. Early in March of 1947, Sorrell and his wife were going to a union meeting at a church in Glendale. Shortly after he had dropped off his wife, he was stopped by three men in another car. One of the three was in police uniform and had a police badge and a police gun. “I didn’t resist,” Sorrell said later, “because I thought I was going to a police station. He put handcuffs on me. When I went to get into the car somebody hit me on the side of the head. . . . They tied me, and every time I moved or tried to get up, they hit me over the head with a gun.” Sorrell said he heard the men discussing a reward for killing him, but then they drove away. He was found at the side of the road by a passing motorist, who took him to a nearby hospital. In this case, in contrast to the strikers’ picketing outside the movie studios, nobody was ever arrested or prosecuted.
The strike went on. It is virtually impossible, of course, for workers to win a strike unless they can shut down the employer’s plants, or else persuade the government to intervene on their side. Since Sorrell and his CSU could do neither of these things, they were doomed to stand on the sidewalks outside the studios and shout insults at the IATSE men going to work every day. Their last remaining hope was that by their persistence they might somehow win over that nebulous force known as public opinion. This was highly unlikely, since the press showed little interest and less sympathy. And Sorrell’s opponents kept bringing in the issue of communism.
This question dragged on even longer than the strike. Lawrence P. Lindeloff, the head of the painters union, testified before a House subcommittee in 1948 that he had talked to Sorrell several times about the matter and concluded that “he may be a radical, but I couldn’t accuse him of being a Communist.” More impartial corroboration came from Pat Casey, who had served as chairman of the Motion Picture Producers Association Labor Council for twenty years, and who testified: “I’ve dealt with Herb Sorrell since 1937 or 1938. In my opinion, he’s not a Communist.”
By this time, though, the authorities had unearthed a Communist Party membership card made out to Herbert Stewart, Stewart being Sorrell’s mother’s maiden name. A Los Angeles handwriting expert, Clark Sellers, said that the signature on the card was by Sorrell, but Sorrell denied it, denied that he “ever saw a Communist Party card.” Republican Congressman Thomas L. Owens of Illinois, a member of the House subcommittee investigating the strike, handed Sorrell the card and asked him if he didn’t think the handwriting looked like his.
“I’d say it looks very much like my handwriting, but it is not my handwriting,” Sorrell said. He acknowledged that his mother’s name had been Stewart and added, “I suppose that’s why they put it on there.”
Owens pointed out to him that the second letter in the name on the card looked like both a t and an o. “It looks like you started to write Sorrell and then wrote Stewart, doesn’t it?” Owens asked. “That’s the way it looks,” Sorrell said.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover resolved these contradictions by telling the subcommittee that the Communist Party card had definitely been signed by Sorrell. At that time, such a judgment by Hoover was considered definitive. Now that more is known about his corrupt and capricious rule of the FBI, his testimony seems considerably less authoritative, though it may quite well have been true.
This was all secondary, however, to the painters and carpenters and other pickets parading to and fro outside the gates of Warners or Metro. They had been trapped, as they increasingly realized, in a battle they could not win. They marched, they shouted slogans, but nothing happened. Winters are not hard in Los Angeles, and this was not like a strike in Chicago or Boston, but still, the strikers had to go without pay while they watched the IATSE workers ride through the gates to their jobs in the flourishing studios. There seemed to be no end in sight, and scarcely the possibility of an end.
The end came, as it usually does, obliquely, blurred by a smoke screen of lies and equivocations. The painters, Sorrell’s own union, voted in October of 1947 that the members of their union were entitled to cross the CSU picket lines if they were suffering personal hardships. And who among them, after a year of striking, was not suffering personal hardships? Sorrell officially supported the move. How could he do otherwise? He could not win. So they all trickled back to work, on whatever terms they could get. The progressive labor movement in Hollywood had been broken, and the studios left it to the machinery of the AFL to settle with Herb Sorrell. The defeated CSU simply disintegrated and faded away, but there were punishments to be inflicted, scores to be settled. The international headquarters of the painters union demanded in 1951 that Sorrell be expelled from the leadership of Hollywood’s Local 644 on the ground that he had “willfully and knowingly” associated with “organizations and groups which subscribe to the doctrines of the Communist parties.” Sorrell said he would resign i
f the members of Local 644 asked him to do so. Local 644, numbering perhaps three hundred painters, refused. It voted to support its battered leader. The international headquarters thereupon revoked the local’s charter early in 1952, thus depriving it of all authority. Sorrell’s paychecks of $255 per week stopped. When he sued the international headquarters on the ground that he had a three-year contract, the suit didn’t come to trial until the summer of 1955. By this time, Sorrell claimed that the union owed him $20,670. Sorrell lost.
“How could this man so methodically take these women out and cut them up and burn them in his incinerator, and then tend his flowers, with the black smoke coming out of the chimney?” It was almost a rhetorical question that Charlie Chaplin blurted out to his oldest son, in the spring of 1946, as he neared the end of his script for Monsieur Verdoux. Charles Chaplin, Jr., by now twenty-one and newly discharged from the army, could offer no answer, but that was hardly expected. “In the next instant,” the son recalled, “he would snap out of his brown study and start pantomiming the gruesome episode, turning it into such comedy that I couldn’t help laughing.” That summer, the same pantomime became one of the opening scenes of Monsieur Verdoux: Chaplin pruning his roses, the incinerator gushing smoke in the background, Chaplin nearly stepping on a caterpillar, shuddering at the possibility of such cruelty, tenderly rescuing the caterpillar from harm’s way.
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