From the book's title and publisher's “blurb,” one would assume that this is primarily a history of trade unionism in the American theatre at the commencement of the twentieth century. It is much more than that. The book entertains as much as it educates. The author's research into show business archival material enables him to bring to life the period's actors and actresses, some of whom were household names but many of whom were and remained unknowns, as well as portraying the theatre owners and managers who held such power over their employees until the intervention of the Actors Equity Association (AEA). There are many illustrative anecdotes, for example Al Jolson was known to stop shows at the interval and ask the audience if they wanted to see the second half or have him perform his solo act. If the latter, the rest of the cast had the night off on full pay.

Apart from the final chapter, which gives an overview of the AEA and the movie business over two decades, the chapters are in chronological order. Holmes analyses the relationship between class and cultural hierarchy, the distinctiveness of acting as a profession and the impact of new technologies on acting as work, whilst depicting the precarious lives of most actors. If you were a star, your income could be huge, sometimes in six figures annually. If you were below the pinnacle but on the next level, income was modest, between $100 and $250 a week. But regular work was not easy to find and theatre owners paid for neither rehearsal time nor travel expenses when on tour. The poorest-paid, those in the chorus, even had to pay for their own costumes and put up with the perils of the casting couch, long before Hollywood producers and directors practised this black art.

The main issue facing the AEA was reconciling art and labour, a problem greater than negotiating with theatre businessmen. Indeed, in the early days, relations between the two sides were cordial, as the AEA sought a uniform contract for its members with all theatre managers and owners. Unusually in the history of American labour unions, there was no violence. However, management stalled the AEA for more than two years, seemingly agreeing to the uniform contract and then reneging and driving the union into an umbrella relationship with the American Federation of Labor. This was not an easy sell for AEA. Actors thought of themselves as professionals, not “labour.” Hence there was a class issue to resolve, a rarity in the history of American labour strife, complicated by the participants' desire to be elevated.

Arguably, the most surprising development of the AEA was its ambition to raise the status of the profession to respectability by seeking to remove the taint of immorality. It saw its mission to establish and “patrol the boundaries between the respectable and unrespectable and to purge the acting community of … undesirable elements” (119). The AEA involved itself in obvious issues such as drunkenness onstage and unreliability, as well as interfering in private lives when examining members' sexual behaviour, particularly male homosexuality.

The jewel of the book is the chapter detailing the story of the actors' strike of 1919, when thousands of members of the acting profession withheld their labour and marched along the Manhattan avenues. Holmes has many anecdotes where the stars weighed in. Marie Dressler, the new president of the Chorus Equity Association, laid out plans to help the chorus, only to turn volte-face when the strike ended. George M. Cohan, portrayed by James Cagney in the Hollywood movie Yankee Doodle Dandy as a man who went out of his way to help his fellow actor, did nothing of the kind in real life and worked hard to break the strike.

It would have been interesting to learn more about the AEA leadership. The author confines himself to Frank Gillmore, a successful actor who took a considerable drop in salary to $2,500 to become union secretary, effectively chief executive. There are also occasional gaps in the evidence. During the 1919 strike, Broadway theatres were dark as owners fought actors, but some theatres opened for charity benefits. Who were the owners and how were they dealt with by their fellow owners?

During the Great Depression, theatres closed, never to be reopened, and membership of the AEA fell dramatically. The AEA's efforts to recruit movie actors proved unsuccessful. The actors wanted to protect what they held and joining a union might have ended their careers, especially between 1929 and 1933 when a third of movie theatres closed. However, Holmes does not draw the parallel that, post-1933, eighty million Americans each week would pay their ten cents to watch a moving picture, thus ensuring plenty of work for movie actors and other workers in the movie business.

Currently, publishers exclude bibliographies and it is a pity that this is the case here. The endnotes demonstrate the breadth and depth of the author's extensive research, which includes newspaper and AEA archives, contemporary magazine articles and academic studies, the most helpful of which are listed in the Introduction and Epilogue.

Overall, the book is a superlative read.