Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [107]
Both sides vied for SAG’s support, because if the stars honored the CSU’s picket lines, the studios—which were being kept running by IATSE’s seventeen thousand members—would be forced to shut down. From the start Murphy and Montgomery took the position that the strike was jurisdictional—a dispute between unions, rather than labor and management—
which meant that under American Federation of Labor (AFL) rules SAG
members were not obligated to honor the picket lines. The CSU called for a national boycott of stars who crossed the lines, but it didn’t stop most marquee names—including liberals such as Bogart, Judy Garland, and Lucille Ball—from continuing to report for work.122 (Edith Davis’s Republican friend Lillian Gish waved demurely at the strikers on her way into the Selznick studio, where she was filming Duel in the Sun. )123
The 1945 strike dragged on inconclusively for seven months before reaching a violent climax outside Warner Bros. On the morning of October 5, some one thousand CSU strikers massed at the studio’s front gate and began overturning cars to block the entrance to IATSE workers. Warners’ security force, backed by local police, responded with fire hoses and tear gas.
In the ensuing riot, each side accused the other of using chains, pipes, clubs, and knives. Black Friday was followed by Bloody Monday, and the fighting went on for two more weeks, spreading to MGM, Paramount, and Republic. Earl Warren, California’s moderate Republican governor, refused 1 7 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House demands to send in the National Guard. The so-called Battle of Burbank was finally brought to an end on October 25, when the AFL’s national executive council issued the Cincinnati Directive, ordering the strikers back to work and both sides to the negotiating table. Three AFL vice presidents—
W. C. Doherty, head of the mail carriers, Felix Knight, head of the railway car-men, and W. C. Birthright, head of the barbers—were chosen to arbi-trate outstanding disputes. The day after Christmas, the Three Wise Men, as they were called, handed down a ruling that gave the CSU jurisdiction over the set decorators. But it also allowed the studios to transfer 350 set-construction jobs from CSU carpenters to IATSE stagehands. The carpenters protested to the AFL, and Sorrell threatened to shut the studios down with another strike. Jack Warner declared that the studios were victims of
“a gigantic Communist conspiracy” and swore he would never make another “liberal” movie, because “liberalism was just a disguise for Communist propaganda.” He also swore that he would never vote for a Democrat again.124
That is where matters stood when Reagan entered the picture with SAG’s emergency committee in July 1946 and helped settle the two-day strike.
Six weeks later, however, the Three Wise Men delivered their August Clarification, which appeared to favor the carpenters. In response, IATSE leaders threatened to shut down not only production but also distribution if the studios complied. In secret meetings held in August and September, the Producers Labor Committee plotted with IATSE representatives to break the CSU once and for all. Their plan was for the studios to demand that CSU carpenters and painters work on sets started by IATSE stagehands. If they refused, as expected, they would be fired for violating a moratorium on work stoppages agreed to in the Treaty of Beverly Hills, and be replaced