Who's Going Out of Business?

In Washington last summer, before a House Labor subcommittee, James Caesar Petrillo was asked if he thought that Thomas A. Edison had done a disservice to humanity by inventing the phonograph. "Not to humanity," piped Petrillo, "but to musicians."

Last week Caesar Petrillo, whose power over U.S. musicians extends from Toscanini to Harry James, decided that it was time to call a halt on the progress of Edison's handiwork. He ordered the 216,000 members of his American Federation of Musicians to stop making all recordings and radio transcriptions after Dec. 31. He was playing a familiar tune. He had once cracked: "What do I care about science; my boys gotta eat." But this time Caesar Petrillo brought his tune to a crashing crescendo. Said he: "We stop making recordings once and for all--period."

Instruments of Destruction. Czar Petrillo's aim as a union leader was understandable: he wants to keep his union big and his income fat.* Actually, Petrillo's union is big and rich only because he has been able to keep it heavily featherbedded. Of the 216,000 members, only about 35,000 are full-time professionals; about twice as many are part-timers who, says Petrillo, "are not quite making a living at it." But more than half are onetime musicians who, like Petrillo, have put aside their instruments and make their living in other occupations.

Instruments of Law. In his long fight against' canned music, Petrillo has managed some lucrative compromises with technological progress. Five years ago he called a ban on recording, kept it on tight for 27 months, eventually won a settlement under which the recording companies paid A.F.M. a royalty on every disc they made. Last year the royalties amounted to about $2,000,000 (every cent of it went to unemployed musicians, says Petrillo).

But in recent months things have not been going so smoothly. The Taft-Hartley Act, in a section aimed directly at Petrillo, banned payment of record royalties to a union. The Lea Act, enacted to prevent Petrillo's "coercing" of broadcasting studios (forcing them, among other things, to hire stand-by musicians), had passed its first test in the Supreme Court. Last week in Chicago, a charge of violating the act was filed against Caesar; if convicted, he could be sent to jail for a year.

So Petrillo has been searching his nimble brain to find new ways to make radio programs, records and juke boxes play cash-jingling tunes on his union till. His edict against recording did not sound like a true pitch to the broadcasting and recording companies. It sounded more like bargaining bluster. His Dec. 31 deadline coincides with contract renewal time for the record 'makers.

Instruments of Business. This time the little Czar's antagonists had seen him coming. The $250,000,000-a-year recording industry has been working overtime in recent weeks to pile up backlogs; there were trade estimates that some companies had built up a supply of unissued records for two or three years, that at least a year's supply of new popular tunes was already transcribed in Hollywood cinema libraries. And there was nothing to prevent repressing from old master records.

But radio stations were more vulnerable targets than juke boxes. Broadcasters .would probably soon feel the pinch of Petrillo's ban on transcribed programs (of the 900-plus stations in the U.S., only about one-third employ musicians; many a small station owes its livelihood to the transcribed singing commercial). Petrillo had another threat up his sleeve; he might bar his musicians from playing on programs carried across the country by radio networks.

Little Caesar left no doubt that he meant to make a showdown fight of it: "I don't know who's going out of business, but I know we're going out of business if we continue making records."

*Ex-Cornetist Petrillo is the world's best-paid labor leader. He gets $20,000 a year from A.F.M. and $26,000 from its Chicago local (which also pays his income tax and provides him with a new car whenever he gets tired of the old one). He also has an $18,000 annual expense account.

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