American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  In Washington, the artist Rockwell Kent had his own little joke. Illustrating the expansion of the postal service in a mural for the capital’s Post Office Building, he portrayed Alaskan Eskimos dispatching a letter in one panel and black Puerto Rican women receiving it in a second. All very patriotic—except that on close scrutiny the message was found to be a call for freedom for both dependencies. After much amusement over Kent’s joke, the Treasury paid the artist off and blanked out the message. When Paul Cadmus portrayed sailors frolicking with “curvaceous damsels of obviously insecure reputation” in his “The Fleet’s In,” an admiral denounced it, the Navy asked that it be withdrawn from a forthcoming exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery, and it was.

  These and other imbroglios hardly dampened cultural productivity. During the first few months of the public works program artists turned out well over 10,000 pieces of art and craft—over 3,000 oils, almost 3,000 watercolors, numerous prints, etchings, woodcuts, poster panels, and a lesser number of carvings, decorative maps, pottery, tapestries, mosaics. But even these figures were dwarfed by the productivity of artists working under the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, which behind the strong leadership of Harry Hopkins and the Project’s chief, Holger Cahill, got underway with heavy funding in 1935. The Art Project was designedly a relief effort, part of the overall WPA cultural program embracing artists, writers, musicians, actors, and others. But by enabling artists to do their own work, even at $20 or $30 a week, it produced an explosion of “people’s art” without parallel in American history. If the output of the public works projects could be numbered by the thousands, that of the FAP could be by the tens or hundreds of thousands—over 100,000 easel works (oil, watercolor, tempera, pastel), 17,000 pieces of sculpture, an estimated 240,000 copies of over 10,000 original designs in varied print media.

  Enormous quantity—but quality? The level of work under the FAP was so varied as to defy generalization. Such artists, later to be famous, as Willem de Kooning, Anton Refregier, Chaim Gross, and Peter Hurd would credit the program with helping them in their careers. But the aim was to include as many artists as possible, good or bad, and to bring the people’s art to the people, in regional and local centers across the nation. The FAP not only promoted art exhibits and gallery tours on a vast scale but stressed art as a learning experience for the masses by sponsoring educational programs under hundreds of teachers in settlement houses, hospitals, clubs, parks, and even—especially for children—zoos. A disciple of John Dewey, Cahill believed that art was a matter less of the rare masterpiece than of vitalizing “democracy in the arts” through community participation.

  The more the FAP reached out to the wider public, however, the more controversial and hence political it became. The conflicts that had plagued the public works program bedeviled the FAP even more. Cutbacks in the program in response to Roosevelt’s post-election economizing produced anger and resentment in art centers. New York artists, the most militant in the nation, marched in December 1936 to WPA headquarters on East Sixty-ninth Street, occupied the offices of New York City FAP chief Audrey McMahon, and stayed on despite threats of being blacklisted. The artists locked arms to confront the police, who dragged them out amid the thud of nightsticks, shrieks of pain, and the wounding of a dozen artists and policemen. As total WPA rolls were cut by one million from the preelection high of two and a half million, artists and other recipients could have bitterly recalled the words of FDR’s Madison Square Garden speech: “For all these things”—including useful work for the needy unemployed— “we have only just begun to fight.” Both FDR’s retrenchment and the protest of the artists helped trigger the congressional counterattack of 1937 and 1938.

  One reason the art program aroused such controversy was its sheer visibility on the public walls and in the new and old art centers of the nation. Even more visible—and vulnerable—was the Federal Theatre Project. The FTP shared many of the ecstasies and the burdens of the other cultural programs—wide outreach to needy theater people, enormous output, some brilliant productions, support from the Roosevelts, especially Eleanor, along with parsimony in funding, bureaucratic tangles, censorship, red-baiting, and cutbacks. But the Federal Theatre, like the figure over a Broadway marquee, was always larger than life—in its leadership, its daring, its visibility, and its downfall.

  Its head was the most striking of all the persons who ran WPA cultural projects, Hallie Flanagan. Creator of an experimental theater first at Grinnell College and then at Vassar, she had participated at Harvard in George Pierce Baker’s noted theatrical laboratory, the 47 Workshop, and studied European and Russian theater abroad before establishing her own reputation for experiment. Broadway impresarios were still underestimating the daring and determination of this small, mild-mannered woman when Hopkins recruited her, but he did not. Soon she was making the hard decisions: dealing with the tough stage unions, giving preference in hiring to skilled professionals, choosing the most controversial plays for production and at the same time dreaming of creating a great and enduring national theater out of the relief project. She collected a remarkable staff and set of associates: Eddie Dowling, national director of vaudeville; Elmer Rice, head of the New York City project, and his assistant Philip Barber; Charles Coburn, director for New England; Jasper Deeter, director for Pennsylvania.

  “We live in a changing world,” Flanagan told her associates when they first met at her headquarters in the old McLean mansion on Dupont Circle; “man is whispering through space, soaring to the stars, flinging miles of steel and glass into the air. Shall the theatre continue to huddle in the confines of a painted box set? The movies, in their kaleidoscopic speed and juxtaposition of external objects and internal emotions, are seeking to find visible and audible expression for the tempo and psychology of our time. The stage too must experiment—with ideas, with psychological relationship of men and women, with speech and rhythm forms, with dance and movement, with color and light—or it must and should become a museum product.” The theater, she added, must not ignore problems of wealth and poverty, peace and war, the role of government—or the changing social order would ignore the theater.

  Flanagan followed up this rhetoric with arresting productions. In spring 1936 the Federal Theatre put on the New York premiere of Murder in the Cathedral, T. S. Eliot’s verse drama about Thomas à Becket. The play, which had been turned down by the Theatre Guild, left audience members, including Eleanor Roosevelt, deeply moved. An especially innovative production was Macbeth, set in a castle in Haiti during Napoleonic times, produced by John Houseman, directed by Orson Welles, and staged in Harlem with black actors. On opening night the Negro Elks’ eighty-piece brass band marched past the Lafayette Theatre in their scarlet-and-gold uniforms, while thousands lined up for tickets. The show got enthusiastic reviews from Burns Mantle of the New York Daily News and other critics. Everyone knew, a black woman watching the show for the fifth time told a London reporter, that “this Mr. Shakespeare had always intended his plays to be acted by Negroes.”

  But by far the boldest venture of the Theatre Project was the “Living Newspaper.” Conceived by Flanagan and sponsored by the Newspaper Guild, the Living Newspaper Unit operated like a city room with editors and reporters. “Great ingenuity was displayed,” Edmond Gagey observed, “in devising new technical methods or devices—employment of a loudspeaker for the voice of the Living Newspaper or of an old tenement house; frequent use of scrim, projection, and moving pictures; action on different levels of ramps with imaginative use of spotlight and blackout; playing of scenes in silhouette; clever stage business and properties to illustrate abstract points.”

  No issue, no matter how thorny, seemed to daunt Flanagan & Co. The White House in effect killed the first Living Newspaper, Ethiopia, on the ground that it involved the impersonation of foreign leaders, Haile Selassie and Mussolini. Despite frantic appeals by Flanagan through Eleanor Roosevelt and the angry resignation of Elmer Rice, the show reached the boar
ds only for the press. But other productions were equally provocative. Triple-A Plowed Under dramatized the farm problem in a series of sharp vignettes: mortgages foreclosed, farms auctioned off, crops dumped, all amid ravaging drought. Attacks on the greed of middlemen and words of Earl Browder interspersed with those of Jefferson and Al Smith did not win favor from the right—especially when it was not Browder who was booed. Injunction Granted, originally designed as a balanced picture of labor’s treatment in the courts, turned out on opening night to be a strong dose of militant unionism. Even Flanagan was upset by its leftward tilt, but the play went on, with a few modifications. Power, an attack on the utilities and a call for public ownership, was a piece of calculated propaganda; the Living Newspaper staff, Brooks Atkinson wrote, had “come out impartially against the electric light and power industry, and for the TVA.” Perhaps the most powerful of the plays, One-Third of a Nation, was the most brilliant, the most professional, and the best received by the critics. With its set showing a four-story tenement full of rickety stairs, beat-up furniture, dirt and disarray, One-Third of a Nation was a pointed reminder of New Deal promises made and still unfulfilled. It Can’t Happen Here, a dramatization of Sinclair Lewis’s novel showing how fascism could, was seen by hundreds of thousands in New York and a score of other cities.

  The FTP offered much more than these electrifying productions. It embraced regional efforts, most notably in Chicago and Los Angeles, and a host of state amateur theater groups—eighteen in North Carolina alone. At its height it involved not only great actors and directors but a peak work force of about ten thousand stagehands and electricians and cue girls as well as actors and playwrights. Flanagan recognized that modern dance could express vital ideas and encouraged Helen Tamiris to develop an independent dance unit that had a brief but stormy and creative life until it was merged again with the Theatre Project.

  But the FTP never shed its image of being centered in New York City, radical, and iconoclastic. Hence it was all the more vulnerable to the budget-cutters in Washington, and to both the red-baiters in Congress and the communists themselves who attacked it from the left. The FTP was the first of the cultural programs to be killed on Capitol Hill. Said the chastened but indomitable Flanagan, “The theatre, when it’s good, is always dangerous.”

  It was acutely ironic that the theater and other New Deal cultural programs should have been shut down because of their “radicalism,” for they were at the heart of the revival of cultural nationalism in the 1930s. That decade, in Charles Alexander’s look back four decades later, brought a “remarkable celebration in American thought and culture of the goodness and glory of the nation and its people.” This was true “as much in architecture, where modernists linked adaptable, utilitarian design to the task of social reconstruction, as it was in music, where composers were often willing to exploit native folk and popular resources, or in the literary or visual arts, where the social and artistic values of realism prevailed.” Coming home from European or spiritual exile, intellectuals and artists not only rediscovered the American present; “as the decade progressed they more and more explored the national past, seeking enduring values, precedents for action, even meaningful legends with which to fashion the most elaborate version thus far of a usable past.”

  Throughout the decade public arts programs existed side by side with private ventures. The public was not always clear as to what was “socialistic” and what was “commercial.” Thus it was the FTP that put on the musical drama The Cradle Will Rock, but it was the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union that produced the equally pro-union and anti-capitalist Pins and Needles. The federal art programs covered public buildings with murals and paintings, but independent and established artists like Reginald Marsh, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood were painting on their own. Rather than crushing private or commercial ventures, the federal cultural programs appeared to stimulate them. On occasion, feds fought one another. WPA officials in Washington, fearful about the approaching Federal Theatre production of The Cradle Will Rock during the bitter struggle between labor and Little Steel, put off the presentation at the last moment. After vain protests and appeals, author Marc Blitzstein and director Orson Welles led the opening-night audience from the Maxine Elliott Theatre twenty blocks to the old Venice Theatre, where actors and stagehands improvised a performance that would be talked about— and reenacted—decades later.

  The Federal Writers’ Project was a prime example of the easy coexistence of public and private cultural enterprise. When the FWP came under the usual attack on Capitol Hill, forty-four publishers wrote a joint letter to the investigating subcommittee asserting that the work of the writers was a “genuine, valuable and objective contribution to the understanding of American life” and not a vehicle of propaganda. While the publishers unduly played down the left bias in enclaves of the project, prestigious houses such as Random House and Houghton Mifflin had enough confidence in the FWP to undertake cooperative publishing with it. Certainly the FWP needed every friend it could mobilize, as it suffered along with the other cultural projects from the usual congressional barrages about reds, waste, administrative incompetence.

  The Federal Writers’ Project shared much else with its sister programs in the arts—a gifted leadership, though often erratic in the case of the writers’ program, the unswerving support of Eleanor Roosevelt and the cautious backing of her husband, the inadequacy of funds in view of the need, and the image of being a New York project despite the existence of strong state programs, fourteen of which were headed by women. It could boast of the usual huge output: around 6,500 writers in four years produced several hundred publications on a wide diversity of subjects, with the help of thousands of volunteer consultants, most of them college teachers, who helped prepare FWP manuscripts. And the quality of the output, as in the other projects, varied wildly. It was at worst pure hack stuff and at best enduring work, such as the two thousand slave narratives based on interviews with former slaves and collated in seventeen volumes.

  The showcase of the Writers’ Project was its American Guide Series. Rising almost spontaneously from under the noses of the WPA planners, the idea was to employ writers, editors, historians, researchers, art critics, archaeologists, map draftsmen, geologists, and other professionals to prepare local, state, and regional “Baedekers.” But some hoped that these would be more than Baedekers—that they would dig into the roots of American history and culture and hence would become, as Alfred Kazin later put it, part of an “extraordinary national self-scrutiny.”

  The series was most impressive for its sheer size and range—as though it wished to manifest the size and range of the nation it covered. By 1942 the collection consisted of 276 volumes and 701 pamphlets; even so, the FWP had still not published any of the regional guides originally planned.

  Once again the quality was grossly uneven, but at its best the series presented known and unknown writers at their most creative and imaginative. For the Massachusetts guide Conrad Aiken anonymously described the “wonderful ghostliness” of old Deerfield as “the perfect and beautiful statement of the tragic and creative moment when one civilization is destroyed by another.” He also paid tribute to the “profound individualism” of which Massachusetts had been such a prodigal and brilliant source— only to provoke the wrath of leftists who argued that the good in America had stemmed from popular, collective action. The guide calmly published both views, “each in effect arguing against the other.”

  Not all the difficulties of the Massachusetts guide were settled so easily. The day after the first copy off the Houghton Mifflin press was presented to the governor, the Boston Traveler headlined “Sacco Vanzetti Permeate New WPA Guide.” It seemed that the guide described the Boston Tea Party in nine lines and the Sacco-Vanzetti case in forty-one. Other “revelations”—and headlines—followed about the guide’s handling of the Boston police strike, the great 1912 strike of textile workers, child labor, and other skeletons in the Bay Stale close
t. The governor denounced the book, declared that the writers should go back to where they came from if they didn’t like America, and collaborated with the state librarian in an effort to strike from the guide references to organized labor, welfare legislation, and Labor Day. In Washington, Harry Hopkins laughed off the affair, and in Boston the guide sold like hotcakes.

  Other state guides came under literary attack for poor style or for history that was only guidebook-deep. But their critics missed the essential point of the guides and of the whole Writers’ Project—to mobilize hundreds of writers who in turn could dig into the heart and mind, the very bone and sinew, of the nation. They wrote mainly about people—famous and infamous, heroic and villainous, remembered and forgotten. “It is doubtful,” wrote Robert Cantwell in The New Republic, “if there has ever been assembled anywhere such a portrait, so laboriously and carefully documented, of such a fanciful, impulsive, childlike, absent-minded, capricious and ingenious people.”

  So the guides abounded in people, presented often in exquisite and loving detail, like the jobless man whose opening words to the FWP interviewer were: “I admit it, I’m a hog. In other words human. I enjoy women and a pair of doughnuts like anybody else. Say tomorrow I wake up I’m covered in communism, say I can go and get what I want by asking—I want six wives. You maybe want twenty-four suits. .. .” Or like John D. Rockefeller golfing in Florida, wearing a straw hat tied with a shawl-like handkerchief under his chin as he bicycled “from stroke to stroke, followed by two valets, one with milk and crackers, the other with a blanket to be spread on the ground when he wishes to rest.”