Broadway's Actors Unionize

On May 26, 1913, 112 professional theater actors met at the Pabst Grand Circle Hotel in New York City, adopted a constitution, and elected the comic actor Francis Wilson as their first president. That was the birth of the Actors' Equity Association. For decades producers had set actors' pay and hours on their own terms: no pay for rehearsals, no limit on how long rehearsals ran, no real recourse if a producer stiffed you. An earlier actors' group, the Actors Society of America, had folded that same year after seventeen years of trying and failing to change any of it. Equity took six more years to prove it had teeth, joining the American Federation of Labor in 1919 and calling a strike that shut Broadway houses and nearly quadrupled its membership in a month.