Musicians in Hollywood: Work and Technological Change in Entertainment Industries, 1926–1940

Abstract

Musicians in Hollywood: Work and Technological Change in Entertainment Industries, 1926-1940 JAMES P. KRAFT Research in American labor history has increasingly focused on the dynamic relationship between work and technological change. Studies of various trades and industries have shown how new methods of production revamped the labor process and capsized the traditional “world of workers.” While some historians have explained how laborsaving machinery simplified work tasks and reduced skill levels, others have shown how it generated demands for new skills and talents and occasionally increased rather than decreased labor’s bargaining power. Still others now argue that mechanization did indeed create new skilled jobs but fragmented new craft workers into complex bureaucracies and narrow, task-oriented roles.1 A critical look at how workers tried to Dr. Kraft is assistant professor of history at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, where he teaches American business and labor history. This article is based on research undertaken for his 1990 University of Southern California dissertation, “Stage to Studio: American Musicians and Sound Technology, 1890-1946.” He wishes to thank Edwin Perkins, Steven Ross, Terry Seip, Robert Locke, Idus Newby, David Sicilia, and the Technology and Culture referees for their comments on earlier versions of this essay. One version was presented at the 1993 meeting of the Business History Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 'See Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation ofWork in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1974), which emphasizes that new technology separated the “concep­ tion” of work from its actual “execution.” In Contested Terrain: The Iransformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (NewYork, 1979), Richard Edwards explains that the rise of impersonal bureaucracies increased management’s control over labor. Both Braverman and Edwards raise the question of whether management deployed new technology to increase production or gain more control over the workforce. Michael Burawoy, The Politics ofProduction (New York, 1985), pp. 21-84, and David Noble, Forces ofProduction: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York, 1984), suggest that the total number of new skilled jobs that technical innovation creates falls far short of the number it destroys. In October 1988, Technology and Culture devoted an entire issue to the subject of technological change and the workforce (“Labor History and the History ofTechnology,” vol. 29, no. 4). Articles that have been particularly helpful to this study include Stephen Meyer, “Technology and the Workplace: Skilled and Production Workers atAllis-Chalmers, 1900-1941,” pp. 839-64; Michael Nuwer, “From Batch to Flow: Production Technology and Work-Force Skills in the Steel Industry,” pp. 808-38; Philip Scranton, “None-Too-© 1994 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/94/3502-0001$01.00 289 290 James P. Kraft influence managerial initiatives to modernize the workplace has hand­ somely complemented this literature on technology and the labor process. Imaginative scholars have offered new ways of understanding how workers struggled to control the pace of industrial change in order to preserve as many traditions, privileges, and jobs as possible.2 This article is a contribution to these discourses. It describes and assesses the impact of new technologies on one atypical group of American workers—musicians in Los Angeles—during a particularly important and stressful time of economic upheaval, the 1920s and 1930s. Between the two world wars, the “music sector” of the economy shifted from a diffused structure to a concentrated, highly mechanized setting. This shift transformed the musicians’ working world. With sound movies and network radio, business firms reproduced and marketed musical performances on a far wider scale than was previously possible. The mass dissemination of music eliminated thousands of jobs in silent-movie theaters and radio stations across the nation, while simul­ taneously creating a much smaller number of new opportunities in a few expanding media centers—especially Los Angeles. This article emphasizes that new opportunities in Los Angeles were lodged in elaborate occupational frameworks characterized by new patterns of hiring, wages, working conditions, and definitions of skills. It also shows that musicians, like other skilled workers, rejected the notion that modernization should benefit only entrepreneurs and their customers and sought instead to influence to their own advantage the changing work environment. The question of...