The Federal Theatre Project (1935-1939)

 

[Though short-lived, the Federal Theatre Project was the largest effort by the United States Government to produce theatrical events.  It was an effort of the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945; 32nd President of the United States: 1933-45) to provide work for unemployed theater professionals during the Great Depression (1929-41) which followed the stock market crash of 24 October 1929, “Black Thursday.”

[The Federal Theatre Project was one of five arts-related projects, called Federal Project Number One, established under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during Roosevelt’s first term (4 March 1933-20 January 1937).  

[The WPA was created by executive order on 6 May 1935.  The five arts divisions were the Federal Music Project (FMP; established 6 May 1935), the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP; established, 27 August 1935), the Federal Theatre Project (FTP; established 27 August 1935), the Federal Art Project (FAP; established, 29 August 1935), and the Historical Records Survey (HRS; established as program of the FWP, 16 November 1935 – independent section of Federal One, 15 October 1936).

[While the primary aim of the FTP was the reemployment of theater workers on public relief rolls, including actors, directors, playwrights, designers, vaudeville artists, and stage technicians, it was also the hope that the project would result in the establishment of theater so vital to community life that it would continue to function as a “national theater” after the FTP program was completed. 

[This goal was never realized, although several attempts have been made since the New Deal era to create an “American National Theatre” in the United States.  The last attempt was probably Roger Stevens’s (1910-98) foray at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., of which he was founding Chairman, 1961-88.  With Peter Sellars (b. 1957) at the helm, the ANT lasted one ignominious season in 1985-86.

[(Back in 2016, in “Zelda Fichandler, Valiant Striver in the Arena,” posted on Rick On Theater in “Zelda Fichandler (1924-2016), Part 2” [20 October 2024], actor and teacher Andrew Weems [1961-2019] proposed redesignating our regional theaters collectively as our national theater.)

[I have just published a post called “America’s Culture War—Now at Your Local Theater” (25 October) which includes “America’s War on Theater” by Daniel Blank, the review of a new book by James Shapiro (The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War) that tells the story of the FTP as the target of anti-theater Americans.  That post gave me the impulse to post a history of the New Deal agency that produced Orson Welles’s Voodoo Macbeth, the Living Newspapers, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can't Happen Here, The Swing Mikado, Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s Porgy, plus dance dramas, foreign-language productions, and theater-oriented radio broadcasts.]

The 1929 stock market crash actually began in September when the prices of shares dropped precipitously on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), and ended in the middle of November.  This launched the worst financial crisis in U.S.—and, indeed, world—history.

On 24 October 1929, known as Black Thursday, investors sold off a record number of shares, setting off a panic on Wall Street leading to a historic drop in the market’s value of 9%.  Over the next five days, culminating on 29 October, dubbed Black Tuesday, of a total loss of market value of another 25%. 

The reasons for the panic and the historic loss of market value are irrelevant here, and have been a subject of debate, analysis, and re-analysis by economists and financial historians for almost 100 years.  The upshot was, however, that the following Depression resulted in an estimated rate of unemployment of almost 25% at its height.  About 13 million Americans became unemployed out of a population, according to the 1930 census, of just under 123 million. 

President Herbert Hoover (1874-1964; 31st President of the United States: 1929-33) was widely blamed for an insufficient and inadequate response to the crisis and on election day, 8 November 1932, he was swept out of office in a landslide.  Roosevelt’s mandated economic recovery plan, on which he’d campaigned, the New Deal, instituted unprecedented programs for relief and recovery.

Major programs and agencies of Roosevelt’s New Deal included the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA), the Social Security Administration (SSA), and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which was the parent agency of the FTP.  Reforms were initiated in banking and finance, business and manufacturing, labor relations, the economy, and Wall Street.  By the end of Roosevelt’s first term, unemployment fell by two-thirds.

(The recovery from the Depression was ultimately accomplished by the huge surge in federal spending in the build-up for the U.S. entry into World War II.  Once the government began its wartime manufacture and purchase of military equipment and materiel, the New Deal recovery programs ended.  That, however, didn’t occur until years after the FTP was disbanded.)

The WPA, headed by FDR’s trusted adviser Harry Hopkins (1890-1946), provided paid employment to the jobless during the Great Depression while upgrading the country’s public infrastructure, such as parks, schools, roads, bridges, airports and railway stations, housing, public buildings like post offices, and the like.  

Though most of the jobs were in construction and went to unskilled or low-skilled workers, the New Deal, as already noted, also found work for artists.  This was under the auspices of Federal Project Number One—known as Federal One or just Fed One. 

Those public buildings, for instance, were decorated with murals and painted ceilings, and statuary depicting national and local history, culture, and lore.  Those artworks, by the Federal Art Project, can still be seen today in the post offices and other public facilities from the WPA period (1935-43) that still stand.

The Historical Records Survey, which started as a section of the Federal Writers’ Project, employed many interviewers to collect the life stories of former slaves in the South.  These narratives are of immense importance to American history.  (Playwright, scholar, and English professor James de Jongh [1942-2023] drew the text for his 1978 play, Do Lord Remember Me, from the WPA slave narratives.  See “Two Theater Personages of Note: James de Jongh (1942-2023),” 12 June 2023.)

Theater and music groups toured throughout the United States and gave more than 225,000 performances.  I’ll be discussing the Federal Theatre Project in more detail shortly, but a word or two more about the Federal Music Project.

The employees of the FMP, along with the thousands of concerts they performed, taught music classes, offered training for music teachers, and hosted music festivals.  More interestingly, they researched and collected traditional American music and folk songs from around the country, including the music of black Americans, Latinés, and Creole-speakers.  These songs were also put on records to preserve what would otherwise have been lost.  (The recordings are in the Library of Congress, as are the unpublished slave-narrative manuscripts.)

The FTP is arguably one of the best known of the five Fed One divisions, along, perhaps, with the FAP—largely, I suspect, because the evidence of its work is still visible around the country.  (The post office in downtown San Antonio, Texas, near the Alamo, is, itself, a tourist stop because of the murals depicting Texas history in its entrance lobby.)  As we shall also see, FTP was also the WPA’s most controversial and provocative program.

WPA administrator Harry Hopkins knew a young Vassar College teacher who was an avid student of contemporary theater and was developing some ideas about experimental theater.  Her name was Hallie Flanagan (1889-1969) and she had already been appointed the director of the actors’ group of George Pierce Baker’s (1866-1935) renowned 47 Workshop dramatic production studio at Harvard College.  Flanagan was a student at Radcliffe, the women’s college of Harvard University, but Baker’s theater courses were open to students at both institutions.  (The appointment to the director’s position was made by Baker, himself.)

In 1924, Flanagan was hired to direct the division of speech in the English department at Vassar in Poughkeepsie, New York.  (There was no theater program, so all drama courses and activities were conducted in the English department.)  In 1926, however, Flanagan left Vassar when she became the first woman to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

For 14 months in 1926-27, Flanagan traveled around Europe to study the theater practices on the Continent.  While doing so, she met some of the most influential figures in modern theater including John Galsworthy (English novelist and playwright; 1867-1933), Konstantin Stanislavsky (Russian actor, director, teacher, and theorist; 1863-1938), Edward Gordon Craig (English actor, director, and scenic designer; 1872-1966), and Lady Gregory (Anglo-Irish dramatist, folklorist, and theater manager; 1852-1932).  Later, she wrote Shifting Scenes of the Modern European Theater (1928) based on her experiences.

When she returned to Vassar in 1927, Flanagan launched the Vassar Experimental Theatre, where she introduced the new ideas she picked up in Europe.  Her first production at the new theater was Anton Chekhov’s The Marriage Proposal, which took place on the evening of 12 November 1927.  Chekhov (1860-1904) was, by the 1920s, a staple of American theater, and the “experimental” element in Flanagan’s production came not from its text but from Flanagan’s staging.  The company performed the 1890 one-act play three times: first, in a Realistic style; next, in an Expressionist style; and last, in a Constructivist style.

(Constructivism is an early 20th-century—that is, 1920s-’30s—Russian movement in art and architecture, as well as stage design, characterized by the creation of nonrepresentational geometric objects using industrial materials.  The theatrical metaphor was that the stage set was a “machine for acting” rather than a Realistic, or even Expressionistic representation of an actual place.  In constructivistic acting and movement, the body is used so as to approximate a machine or an automaton.  Meyerhold’s “biomechanics” [note below] are a manifestation of Constructivism.)

In the second version, played closer to tragedy, the actors were masked, and in the third the actors were all dressed in work suits in a playground, tossing a ball between them.  The third version sounds a lot like the biomechanics exercises of Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940), the Russian and Soviet theater director, actor, and theatrical experimentalist, but the second iteration of the play is reminiscent of the work of Russian actor, director, teacher, and theorist Michael Chekhov (1891-1955), nephew of Anton and director, at the time of Flanagan’s trip to Europe, which included Russia, of the Second Moscow Art Theater.

We know that Flanagan met Stanislavsky, the father of modern Western acting and the founder and director of the Moscow Art Theater.  Stanislavsky and MAT were world-renowned for their interpretations of Chekhov’s plays, famously in a Realistic style, and she might have met Meyerhold as well.  

It seems likely, though, that she’d have also met Michael Chekhov, whose acting and directing were the talk of the Moscow and Saint Petersburg theater scene, especially after his groundbreaking Expressionistic Hamlet which had premièred in 1924.  (See “Michael Chekhov” on this blog [2, 5, and 8 November 2019], especially Part 2.)  

(In MAT practice, plays that have been successful remained in the repertoire for years and were frequently revived.  It’s possible that performances of Michael Chekhov’s Hamlet were on the MAT 2 stage when Flanagan was in Moscow.)

Chekhov, however, was under serious political attack by the government of Joseph Stalin (1878-1953; General Secretary of the Communist Party: 1922-52; Chairman of the Council of Ministers: 1941-53) by 1926.  He and his wife left Moscow ahead of an expected arrest warrant in July 1928.  They stayed in Germany until 1931, when they moved to Paris.  After a brief sojourn in Lithuania and Latvia, he set up a school in England in 1936, and then, with the advent of World War II in Europe looming, he decamped with his school and many of his students for the United States in 1938.  (The war broke out in Europe on 1 September 1939.)

In 1931, Flanagan attracted national attention for mounting Can You Hear Their Voices? A Play of Our Time, a play she co-adapted from the short story, published in the American Marxist magazine closely associated with the Communist Party USA New Masses, “Can You Make Out Their Voices” (6.10 [March 1931]) by Whittaker Chambers (1901-61).  (If the writer’s name looks familiar, that may be because he’s the former Soviet spy who later defected and informed on the espionage cell that included Alger Hiss [1904-96], who was subpoenaed to testify before HUAC in 1948 and was ultimately convicted of perjury.)

Can You Hear Their Voices? a 70-minute one-act, premièred at Vassar on 2 May 1931.  (It ran Off-Off-Broadway June 3-27, 2010 in a production by the Peculiar Works Project in what Variety dubbed “A Pop-Up Space”: “a nondescript storefront space wedged between the toes of the overbearing NYU footprint in Noho” [2 Great Jones Street, at Broadway].  Reviewer Marilyn Stasio asserted in Variety that “it foreshadowed the Living Newspaper productions that defined Flanagan’s political agenda as head of the Federal Theater Project.  As it was during the Depression, the raw material is dynamite” (“Can You Hear Their Voices?” 7 June 2010).

As recorded in Wikipedia, the February 1932 issue of the Vassar Miscellany News, then the semi-weekly student paper, stated that after the unknown play premièred the previous May, “the fame of this propaganda play has spread not only throughout America, but over Europe and into Russia, China, and Japan” (“Vassar Drama Arouses World-wide Interest,” 16.26 [24 February 1932]).

New Masses reviewed the play in June 1931 (Frances Strauss, “Vassar College Presents A Play,” vol. 7, no. 1), then proceeded to advertise the play’s availability in book form in the June, July, and August 1931 issues, reporting requests for the rights from parties from all around the globe.

In September 1935, WPA head Hopkins, who knew Flanagan from Grinnell College (Grinnell, Iowa) when they were both undergraduates—Flanagan was class of ’11; Hopkins, class of ’12—and had read her 1928 book, asked Flanagan to lead the Federal Theatre Project.

Of course, FTP was controversial from the start as soon as Flanagan’s appointment was announced, given her apparent left-leaning political preferences.  (I say “apparent” because in the ’20s and ’30s, an attraction to Russian theater innovations, from Constructivism to Meyerhold and Michael Chekhov, as well as an affinity for European experimentalism, which would include the Epic Theater techniques of Bertold Brecht—another commie!—would have been de rigueur for a committed theater-maker.)

But, as James Shapiro, author of The Playbook (see “America’s Culture War—Now at Your Local Theater,” referenced in the introduction above), points out, “anti-theatricalism” is part of America’s political make-up, especially on the right.  Theater, for some reason, is always suspect to a certain segment of our population; it’s an off-shoot of American anti-intellectualism.

Marry that to Hallie Flanagan’s résumé and you’ve got a stink bomb ready to go off.  It eventually did.

Meanwhile, the FTP provided a pretty wide variety of programs, in part because under its heading came also dance and radio.  I’m going to focus on the theater, but here’s a run-down of some of the other FTP programs.

The Federal Dance Project (also sometimes called the Federal Dance Theatre) was a short-lived unit of the FTP.  Formed in January 1936, it was originally a semi-autonomous component of the Federal Theatre Project, but lobbying by New York City dancers, under the leadership of Helen Tamiris (choreographer, modern dancer, and teacher; 1905-66), led to the creation of a separate dance unit, the Federal Dance Project. 

The FDP employed professional dancers, choreographers, musicians, designers, and technicians, and set before them the task of producing socially relevant dance pieces for the American people, in particular, audiences that had not previously had access to the theater.  Alongside Tamiris, choreographers affiliated with the project included Doris Humphrey (1895-1958), Charles Weidman (1901-75), Ruth Page (1899-1991), and Katherine Dunham (1909-2006).

When funding cutbacks hit the Federal Theatre Project, the FDP was absorbed back into the theater project in October 1937.  Dance productions continued, however, under the aegis of the Federal Theatre Project, until further political controversy led to the dismantling of the FTP in 1939.

The first production was Monde in the summer of 1936, described as a “dance drama” and a “jazz ballet,” inspired by a poem by Walt Whitman (1819-92) and focused on bringing diverse groups together.  Another production that year was Young Tramps, a play about young, unemployed men who took to the road.  Both productions showcased experimental elements, combining modern dance, special costumes, and changes of scenes and props.

One of its notable productions was How Long, Brethren? (May 1937-January 1938), choreographed by Helen Tamiris, that set dances to Black protest songs.  The show was performed by an all-white cast, and inspired a protest after one of its performances. 

In the 1930s and ’40s, radio drama was a popular form of theater across the country.  It’s pretty much died out here, though abroad there are still broadcasts of radio plays—and there are occasionally radio dramas performed in the U.S. as well. 

Like all other fields of endeavor, the Great Depression destroyed the employment opportunities for actors who worked in radio.  It was a specialty until, in the 1950s, television ate away the audience for radio plays.  So, during the Depression, the WPA became the producer of radio drama and other radio programs in order to reemploy the radio performers who’d lost their jobs.

Radio broadcasting became the concern of the Federal Theatre of the Air, a division of the Federal Theatre Project.  It began weekly broadcasts on 15 March 1936, and for three years, according to Wikipedia, the Federal Theatre of the Air presented an average of 3,000 programs annually on commercial stations and networks.  The major programs originated in New York, but radio divisions were also established in 11 states.

The Federal Theatre of the Air presented a wide range of programs, such as plays specifically written for radio (Contemporary Theatre, presenting plays by modern authors), docudramas, dramatized works of prose fiction (Repertory Theatre of the Air, which presented literary classics), as well as plays originally written for the stage (Ibsen's Plays, presenting performances of the 12 major plays), including musical theater, and opera (Gilbert and Sullivan Light Opera, which broadcast the complete works performed by Federal Theatre actors and recordings by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company).

There were also programs for children, such as Once Upon a Time, and informational programs on health and safety, art, music, and history. 

The Federal Theatre Project established five regional centers in New York City, Boston (Northeast), Chicago (Midwest), Los Angeles (West), and New Orleans (South).  New York was sort of the headquarters and many, even most, of the productions started there.  New York City, after all, was then, as it is now, the center of theater in the United States: the talent is there in large numbers and the facilities, rehearsal studios, and theaters are there.

Productions would rehearse in New York, then première there.  Then they’d go out on tour.  Projects would also be initiated in any one of the regional centers (which, readers may notice, are all “theater towns”) and tour from there. 

Stage productions fell into several categories: new plays (including the Living Newspapers, plus plays like It Can't Happen Here); classical plays; plays formerly produced on Broadway (Paul Green’s Hymn to the Rising Sun); modern foreign plays (Leonid Andreyev’s The Sabine Women); stock plays (Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones); children’s plays (Mother Goose Goes to Town and Mother Goose on the Loose); revues and musical comedies; vaudeville; dance productions (Candide, from Voltaire); Early Americana; American pageants; puppet and marionette plays.  

Capitalizing on the FTP’s national network and inherent diversity of artists, the Federal Theatre established specific chapters dedicated to showcasing and celebrating the work of previously under-represented artists.  These included the French Theatre in Los Angeles, the German Theater in New York City, and the Negro Theatre Unit which had several chapters across the country, with its largest office in New York City.  The FTP set up 17 so-called Negro Theatre Units (NTU) in cities throughout the United States.

By the project’s conclusion, 22 American cities had served as headquarters for black theater units.  The New York Negro Theatre Unit was the most well known.  The two sections of the New York City NTU presented some 30 plays.  The third production was the most popular: the Voodoo Macbeth (1936), as it came to be called.  Director Orson Welles adapted Shakespeare’s play set on a mythical island suggesting the Haitian court of King Henri Christophe (1767-1820; King of Haiti: 1811-20).

The New York Negro Theatre Unit also oversaw the African American Dance Unit featuring Nigerian artists displaced by the Ethiopian Crisis (a dispute between Italy and Ethiopia in 1935 that escalated, ultimately resulting in Italy’s annexing Ethiopia in 1936).  These projects employed over 1,000 black actors and directors.

The Federal Theatre Project was distinguished for its focus on racial injustice.  Flanagan expressly ordered her subordinates to follow the WPA policy against racial prejudice.  Flanagan took action several times against FTP staffers who acted out of racial prejudice against black artists.  The FTP overtly sought out relationships with the African American community.

Flanagan’s crusade for equality eventually became a sticking point for the Dies Committee (i.e., HUAC; Dies was chairman of the predecessor to HUAC, 1938-44), which pulled funding for the Federal Theater Project, arguing that “racial equality forms a vital part of the Communist dictatorship and practices.”

It was not feasible to operate Federal Theatre Project companies in towns where only a few theater professionals were on relief rolls.  In order to serve a wide geographic area, however, FTP projects toured in rural areas and small towns.  FTP tours ranged widely within their regions and companies covered a number of sections of the country where residents saw theatrical productions infrequently.

Many of the notable artists of the time participated in the Federal Theatre Project, including Susan Glaspell (playwright; 1875-1948) who served as Midwest bureau director.  (Glaspell won the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Alison's House.)   The legacy of the Federal Theatre Project can also be found in beginning the careers of a new generation of theater artists. Arthur Miller (playwright; 1915-2005), Orson Welles (stage and film director; 1915–85), John Houseman (actor and producer; 1902-88), Martin Ritt (director, producer, and actor; 1914-90), Elia Kazan (film and theater director, producer, and screenwriter; 1909-2003), Joseph Losey (movie director; 1909-84), Marc Blitzstein (composer, lyricist, and librettist; 1903-64), and Abe Feder (lighting designer; 1908-97) are among those who became established, in part, through their work in the Federal Theatre.

The Federal Theatre Project employed around 12,700 people at some point between 1935 and 1939.  It had projects in 40 cities, the most of which went to New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—the three largest cities in the country. 

During its nearly four years of operation, 30 million people attended FTP productions in more than 200 theaters nationwide, many of which had been closed.  The FTP also produced events in parks, schools, churches, clubs, factories, hospitals, and closed-off streets.  It produced an approximate total of 1,200 shows, not including its radio programs.

The FTP was created to employ and train people, not to generate revenue, so 65% of its productions were presented free of charge; the rest charged 25¢, 50¢, or 75¢ (the equivalent today of about $5.50-16.40).  The total cost of the Federal Theatre Project was $46 million (about $1.04 billion in 2024).

In May 1938, Congress convened the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC).  The committee first targeted the Works Progress Administration (WPA) overall for investigation, and soon the Federal Theatre Project specifically.  Texas conservative Democrat Martin Dies, Jr. (1900-72; Member of Congress: 1931-45; 1953-59), spearheaded the committee.  

Hallie Flanagan’s character and motives were attacked both by the Dies committee and by disgruntled FTP members called as witnesses.  Federal Theatre Project productions were branded as propaganda for communism.  Flanagan responded that they were in fact propaganda for democracy since they utilized constitutional freedoms to point out America’s most pressing problems.  Against a background of Hitler’s march on Europe, Congress slashed relief funding as America’s focus turned toward war.

(Hitler had reincorporated the Saarland into Germany in March 1935 and remilitarized the Rhineland in March 1936; he assisted Francisco Franco [1892-1975] in the Spanish Civil War [1936-39] from its start in July 1936; the Anschluss with Austria was accomplished in March 1938; Germany annexed the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia in October 1938.)

Federal Project Number One, the parent agency for the five arts projects, ended in 1939 when, under pressure from Congress, the theater project was cancelled and the other projects were required to rely on state funding and local sponsorship.  Congress cut federal funding completely as of 30 June 1939, immediately putting 8,000 people out of work across the country.

[Theater professionals from around the country protested the demise of the Federal Theatre Project.  Despite the furor over communist infiltration of the WPA, in the end it wasn’t anticommunism that felled the FTP, but the view in Congress that the average American saw no value in spending tax dollars to aid performers and encourage the arts. 

[Flanagan’s anti-racist stance and her willingness, even eagerness, to engage with social issues really set the conservatives in Congress and certain corners of the press off, however.  The money was just the excuse—it gave them cover.

[Federal funding for the arts was controversial in Roosevelt’s New Deal, although the budget for the Project amounted to less than 1% of the WPA’s total allocation.  If readers will scan my 11-part post on “A History of the National Endowment for the Arts” (5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, and 30 November, and 3, 13, 16, and 19 December 2023), you’ll see that the situation is still just as fraught and dire.  And if that’s not recent enough for you, check out “‘When the Arts Become a Partisan Issue, We All Lose’” by Cristina Pla-Guzman, in “America's Culture War—Now at Your Local Theater” (link above).]