History
At a meeting held at the Pabst Grand Circle Hotel in New York City, on May 26, 1913, Actors' Equity was founded by 112 professional theater actors, who established the association's constitution and elected Francis Wilson as president. Leading up to the establishment of the association, a handful of influential actors—known as The Players—held secret organizational meetings at Edwin Booth's old mansion on Gramercy Square. The Players included Frank Gillmore, who from 1918 to 1929 was the Executive Secretary of Actors' Equity and its eventual President, a position he held from 1929 to 1937.
Actors' Equity joined the American Federation of Labor in 1919, and called a strike seeking recognition of the association as a labor union. The strike ended the dominance of the Theatrical Syndicate, including theater owners and producers like Abe Erlanger and his partner, Mark Klaw. The strike increased membership from under 3,000 to approximately 14,000. The Chorus Equity Association, which merged with Actors' Equity in 1955, was founded during the strike.
Equity represented directors and choreographers until 1959, when they broke away and formed their own union.
Read more about this topic: Actors' Equity Association
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“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
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“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)