Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/271

Rh The Lambs, of course, is the hotbed of Equity and was the keystone of the actors' strike of 1919. The thought of union and collective bargaining by a profession of rampant egoists and artists was laughable until that brief and sweeping strike turned out the lights of Broadway and kept them out until the managers agreed to end a number of ancient and cruel abuses of the theater. The sufferers from those abuses and the beneficiaries of the victory were the journeymen actors and actresses, not the Lambs, who are, for the most part, leading men and stars. It was such spectacles as the solidarity of the Lambs that heartened the generality of the profession to hold out until they had won. Frank Bacon, after a lifetime of obscurity in the theater, had reached Broadway with a phenomenal success. With his show sold out for weeks in advance, with nothing to gain and much to lose from the strike, he closed "Lightnin'" and threw all his weight into the cause. It was precisely the absence of this solidarity that defeated the earlier strike of the White Rats, the vaudeville actors' union. There the big names stood neutral on the side lines and watched the little fellows carry the ball.