Screen Cartoonist's Guild

The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 as well as bank holidays enacted by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 made it impossible for Wall Street investors to supply the major Hollywood film studios with the cash flow they needed. Studio executives cut salaries for their employees but took no cuts for themselves, leading to a mass spree of unionization in Hollywood.[3] The executives retaliated by firing union members and picketers at a steady rate.

In Hollywood, animators were originally unionized under the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which was founded in 1914. Noticing that there was not a union to solely represent animators, Bill Nolan unsuccessfully tried to form such a union in 1925 named "Associated Animators" and a group formed by Grim Natwick, Shamus Culhane, and Al Eugster in 1932 was disbanded after executives began to threaten its employees and many members lost their jobs.[4][5]

In New York City, where studio unions were generally better off, Bill Littlejohn, along with Hicks Lokey, John McManus, and Jim Tyer, formed the Unemployed Artists Association, which became the Commercial Artists and Designers Union (CADU) due to Roosevelt's policies,[6] and later the Animated Motion Picture Worker's Union (AMPWU).[7][8] These two unions were the most immediately approached in New York when employees were mistreated.

By 1940 the Guild had 115 members, representing cartoonists at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Walter Lantz Studios. It was able to "significantly raise" the wage paid to animators through collective bargaining.[12] The union won recognition in 1941,[17] and Herbert Sorrell became union president the same year.

The SCG was joined throughout its life by animators from Van Beuren and Fleischer (and its successor, Famous Studios), as well as Leon Schlesinger Productions (later Warner Bros. Cartoons), the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio, and the Screen Gems cartoon studio, all of whom it secured contracts with.[4]

From 1940 to 1941, animators at Walt Disney Studios were successfully organized.[18] The SCG would be instrumental in the strike at Walt Disney Productions in 1941, which began when studio head Walt Disney fired Art Babbitt for being a member of the SCG, prompting more than 200 employees to go on strike.[2][19][20]

The strike ended with a victory for the Guild and defeat for Disney and the company union known as Federation of Screen Cartoonists (FSC), following the end of the strike.[5][21][22] The strike resulted in half the studio's employees leaving for other studios, such as David Hilberman and John Hubley, who formed United Productions of America. Disney himself was left with a permanent distrust of pro-union employees, and blamed Babbitt among others for the strike.[4][2]

In 1944, the union sent organizers to New York City to form a local chapter, Local 1461.[12] Three years later, in 1947, the Guild had an unsuccessful twenty-eight-week strike against Terrytoons, Inc. despite receiving support from other unions. Terrytoons hired students from New Rochelle High School as scabs, and Paul Terry outlasted strikers with a "large backlog of unreleased films".[23][24] The strike was later described as the animation industry's "most devastating blow" for animators.[25]

On January 18, 1952, the union was succeeded by "The Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists Guild, IATSE Local 839",[12] also known as "Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists Guild" for short. It still exists today and has been named named The Animation Guild, I.A.T.S.E. Local 839, or "The Animation Guild", since 2002.[26][27][28]