It may not quite be on the scale of the Roman Empire, but the rise and fall of the Federal Theatre Project in the United States during the period leading up to the Second World War was often as dramatic and frightening.
Columbia University Professor James Shapiro has built a strong reputation as an expert on Shakespeare but now demonstrates impressive knowledge of a more recent period in a book subtitled “A Story of Theatre, Democracy and The Making of a Culture War”. As this suggests, Professor Shapiro draws strong parallels between events leading up to the defunding and closure of the Federal Theatre and attacks on the arts and liberal projects in the United States and more widely today.
The background is fuelled by The Depression, which left millions of Americans homeless and close to starvation. Taking a radical approach, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced his New Deal, which was designed to alleviate the worst of the pain. As part of this, he introduced the Works Progress Administration (“WPA”) relief program, aimed at job creation offering pay, succour and a little bit of pride to some of the dispossessed. In British terms, this might be seen as equivalent to post-war Labour nationalisation policies such as the introduction of the National Health Service and the welfare state.
As part of this scheme, WPA created several arts-led streams including the Federal Theatre, which operated over a four-year period from 1935, eventually putting on 1,000 productions in 29 states, which were seen by over 30 million people. In addition, at its peak, the theatre entertained 10 million radio listeners every week. As the author, who provides an exemplary preface, notes, “it was the product of a moment when the arts, no less than industry and agriculture were thought to be vital to the health of the republic and deserving of its support.”
Many readers will find both the tale of the project’s rise led by Vassar Professor Hallie Flanagan and some of its successes heartening. She worked herself into the ground over a job creation scheme that has met some of the same goals as the recent coronavirus furlough but on a much larger scale.
Along the way, some might argue that the greatest achievement was the introduction of Living Newspapers, described by Arthur Miller as, “the only new form that was ever introduced into the American theatre.”
Before that, there was a slow start featuring a couple of failures before an iconic success with an all-black “Voodoo” Macbeth. This was helmed by 20-year-old directing debutant Orson Welles, starting out in Harlem before moving to Broadway and then a controversial national tour.
Somehow, many of the theatre’s greatest hits were equally controversial as this book demonstrates. It Can’t Happen Here was a play based on Sinclair Lewis’s novel of the same title creating a dystopia in which America is taken over by fascists. One Third of a Nation was also a classic example of political theatre hitting its target, in this case by depicting and bemoaning a nationwide housing crisis. Liberty Deferred featured a coruscating attack on racism, including lynchings which were still common in the late 1930s, as anti-lynching laws were regularly rejected by those in political power.
While Professor Shapiro not unreasonably chooses some of the more controversial productions for detailed analysis, for the most part, the Federal Theatre did a fine job of providing work at the same time as entertaining audiences across the nation, thereby fulfilling its mission. However, this was part of its problem, since reactionary forces in positions of power felt threatened by the prospect of ridicule on a national scale.
The fall of the theatre seemed almost inevitable, as it became a pawn in a wider political game where the real targets were the New Deal and Roosevelt with hidden agendas of several combatants to boost their own profiles. Strangely, what started out as a stealthy attack and gradually became more overt was led by members of Roosevelt’s own party, the Democrats, which at the time were largely split along the Mason Dixon line, with those to the south still propagating overtly racist views.
As a precursor to J Edgar Hoover’s House Un-American Activities Committee’s hounding of supposed communists after the war, Texas Democrat Martin Dies, a man eager to ban immigration and deport three million immigrants already in the USA, set up a special congressional committee in 1938, which was ostensibly created to expose the activities of both Nazis and communists. Somehow, the Federal Theatre became a symbolic whipping boy of the committee whose quality is best summed up by a question from one member: “is Marlowe a communist?”
Increasingly, the committee’s hounding of Hallie Flanagan and the project began to resemble a kangaroo court of the kind that became de rigueur a couple of decades later, intended to destroy its target and doing so by any means necessary. Instead of reasonable question-and-answer sessions, allowing witnesses to present their cases to the best of their abilities, there was a spread of conspiracy theories, featuring lies that repeated enough then take on a veneer of truth, as powerful politicians play the victim. This may sound worryingly familiar to those following political events in the United States and, to a lesser degree, in this country and many others.
James Shapiro has delivered a book that is well-researched (demonstrated by a 71-page bibliographical essay) and shocking but always highly entertaining and therefore strongly recommended.