At about this time the Actors’ Equity Association was formed and pulled a real battle for their rights against the absurd and vicious standards of the business. That they won that battle is well-known and that they deserved to win it is fully admitted by fair-minded and honest managers of the Sam Harris type—although, of course, if all managers had been of his type no fight would have been necessary.

The actors’ strike at this time closed all the theaters and, as usual, the author, who wasn’t in the fight at all and had nothing to win whatever the outcome, lost much more money than any actor and rather resented the row being pulled in his front yard. Most authors were in sympathy with the actors but I know that for one I wished they had chosen to fight with some other weapons than my three plays, the runs of which were interrupted and from which I had been drawing a very considerable royalty.

Hit in the dramatist’s tenderest spot, we met and organized and from that day to this many of my hours have been given up to service to the authors’ societies. I was at that time the last president of the old Society of American Dramatists and Composers and a member of the Authors’ League. With the help of a handful of ardent spirits, I brought all the active dramatists of the day into the old society and merged it with the Authors’ League as the Dramatists’ Guild of the Authors’ League of America. A group of strong men and women came to the front and served faithfully on hundreds of committees and through long hours of conferences. Among the most active of these were Augustus Thomas, James Forbes, Gene Buck, Rupert Hughes, Channing Pollock, Edward Childs Carpenter, Percival Wilde, Rachel Crothers, Ann Crawford Flexner, Jules Goodman and Montague Glass; then later Arthur Richman, George Middleton and William Cary Duncan and a number of others.

I remained as president of this group until I resigned to take up the presidency of the Authors’ League and gave, as all these others gave, a very considerable part of my life for many years. At present, thanks to our efforts, the dramatists are as well organized as the actors and like the actor eager at all times for a battle, but we are unfortunately quite without an adversary, one of the peculiar things about the manager being that he is unable to agree to anything whatever that any other manager thinks would be a good thing.

At meetings of the managerial society one man will frequently say: “I don’t know what Mr. Blank wants to do about this problem, but anything he thinks I think different.” It is a truly tragic thing that the men who should be the leaders of the great institution that the American theater should be have been incapable of enough business foresight to bind themselves firmly together to protect their interests. Always we have been out-generaled by the motion picture men, bled white by the ticket speculator and discriminated against by the railroads, the labor unions, and even the newspapers, who are by rights our natural allies and our traditional friends. If the theater is the cultural and the educational force I have always claimed it was, surely it has a right to public loyalty and support and I must always think that, if we have in large part lost that support, it is because the dignity and the importance of the drama has been hidden by the lack of dignity and the lack of importance of many of our leaders.

I thought these things in the time of which I am now writing, 1912-1913, but naturally I had neither the independence of age nor circumstance at that time to dare to fully express myself. Just before the war I had begun to be impatient of the machine-made plays I had been writing for so long and began to listen to my wife’s pleadings to cut down the quantity and try to improve the quality of my work. She had been begging me to do this for ten years or more, and like other good husbands I rather like to do any little thing my wife asks of me—after she has been asking it for ten years. I really think I wanted to please her, but I also think that I had by this time outgrown the sentimental comedy-drama as once before I had outgrown the cheap melodramas. Naturally enough as soon as I lost my own belief in my form of expression I was no longer successful in it.

Let no man go unchallenged who in your presence talks of purposely “writing down” to an audience, or of “giving them what they want” or any other fish-bait of that description. I am here to tell you that no man ever successfully wrote or produced any play, or any novel below his own mental level at the moment. When I wrote NELLIE, THE BEAUTIFUL CLOAK MODEL, I was honestly deeply moved by the lady’s many misfortunes or I couldn’t have put it over, and when I wrote the comedy-dramas that followed it I truly believed in them or no audience in the world would have sat through them. This is always true, I think, of writers or of managers. We are entirely emotional people and our work reflects us. I know of several supremely successful producers who made great fortunes selling the piffle they loved and who, as soon as their money brought them contacts that resulted in an increase in their taste and knowledge promptly appointed themselves judges of the drama and even more promptly went broke.

You may well afford to laugh at the faker who boasts of skill great enough to assume a mood and color different from his own. The next time he tells you of how he “wrote down to the boobs” simply tell him he is either a liar or a fool—probably both. For surely, if he is not a liar, he must be the greatest fool on earth to use for a cheap success a genius great enough to have brought him a real one.

Faithfully yours,
J. Jefferson
(From the Messmore Kendall Collection)