It’s the writer’s business to meet the mood of the hour, and all he has to do to meet this mood is to learn to sympathize with it. Just so long as I feel myself a part of the life around me there is no reason why I shouldn’t keep on writing, and at present I most decidedly do feel that. If the time ever comes when I find myself bewildered and afraid of a strange world that I no longer understand, I’ll stop—or rather, on second thought—perhaps I’ll write a play about how hard it is to understand it!
At this time I stepped out of my job as President of the Dramatists’ Guild and took the presidency of the Authors’ League of America. This, as it happens, is not an honorary position, but comes under the head of honest labor, and during the long fight between the Dramatists and the Theatrical Managers’ Association that resulted in the present Dramatists’ contract, I served on all of the many committees in addition to my work as President of the League. I loved the work; the friendships I formed among the members of the fighting committees are among the pleasant and most helpful contacts of my life.
There are about a dozen men and women who mean a lot to me with whom I have worked for sixteen years to bring about decent conditions for writers. There are many more than a dozen now who are working faithfully for the Authors’ League, but often, when I attend one of the meetings and sit at the crowded council table, I catch the eye of one of the old timers and wink pleasantly—we can remember years when there weren’t enough authors around to fill the room with cigar smoke. We used to ask one another if it was worth while to keep on fighting. James Forbes always said that this was positively his last effort, but he always came back; so did the rest of us, all busy men, not one of us needing the help of any one to get decent contracts. We were proud of our calling and wanted to advance its dignity and importance, and I think that in the end our many years of hard work justified itself. The American Theatre is to-day under a temporary cloud. It may be one year or two years or three years before its old prosperity returns, but the Dramatists’ Guild is the strongest and most powerful body of writing men in the world and there are plenty of strong men of half my age who are able and willing to keep it as powerful and as sane and moderate as it is to-day. No matter what you hear don’t for a moment believe that the prosperity of our theater is not going to return,—the theater is safe and it always has been. Just so long as little boys instinctively pick up a stick and become brave knights and gallant soldiers, and as long as a girl child hugs a doll to her breast and becomes a mother, the theater will live. A combination of circumstance, novel inventions, stupidity and greed, plus lack of leadership and the arrogance of organized labor, has resulted in sad days for many of us, but the turn of the wheel is already bringing about changes and sooner than most of you are yet ready to believe better days are coming.