When the Culture Wars Came for the Theater

From our current vantage point it may be hard to believe this, but during the worst economic crisis the United States has ever seen, the government decided to spend more than half a billion of today’s dollars to support the arts. Federal Project Number One, an offshoot of the Works Progress Administration, was a New Deal program that employed artists to make meaningful work all over the nation. One of its initiatives, the small but mighty Federal Theatre Project, accomplished something remarkable: From 1935 to 1939, it created a truly national theater with a distinctly American character, and revitalized an industry that was losing a war with the movies for both audience numbers and cultural impact. Unlike the state theaters of continental Europe, which were largely based in capital cities and set an artistic standard for their country, the FTP opened shows simultaneously across the nation, with scripts lightly tailored to their region, making theater relevant to everyone.

The Federal Theatre Project is best remembered for launching the career of Orson Welles, inventing a new documentary-theater form called the Living Newspaper, and investing in Black art through its Negro Units—as well as for its ignominious downfall. In 1939, Representative Martin Dies and the House Un-American Activities Committee accused the program of being a Communist front and of producing New Deal propaganda. These accusations were difficult for the FTP and its director, Hallie Flanagan, to fight, both because the project lacked public support from the WPA and because some of the claims were at least partly true. Only four years after its launch, the FTP’s budget was eliminated by Congress, and it shut down.

Theater folk love a romantic lost cause, as anyone who has seen Les Misérables can attest, so it’s hard to spend time in the industry and not become enamored of the FTP. The latest to do so is the renowned scholar James Shapiro, author of Shakespeare in a Divided America and the brilliant The Year of Lear. His new book, The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War, documents the rise of both the Federal Theatre Project and its antagonist Martin Dies, along with the death of the former at the hands of the latter.  Shapiro sees this collision of American art, the federal government, and the reactionary right as a precursor to and source of our present culture wars, in which Communist has been replaced with woke and certain right-wingers seek to use the power of the state to control the books we read and the culture we produce. While these two eras have things in common, the search for parallels puts a presentist filter over the story of the FTP that is ultimately the book's undoing.

Throughout, Shapiro depicts the history of the FTP as a battle between titanic, eternal forces. In one corner is Dies, portrayed as the Reactionary With a Thousand Faces, the man who “begat Senator Joseph McCarthy, who begat Roy Cohn, who begat Donald Trump, who begat the horned ‘QAnon Shaman.’” Fighting against these forces are the Federal Theater Project and Flanagan. Together, they represent the noble art of theater, which has “always been about social conflict and questioning the status quo.” This clash “would have a lasting impact on American cultural life, and, inevitably, on the resilience of the nation’s democracy,” Shapiro asserts, “for the health of democracy and theater, twin-born in Ancient Greece, has always been mutually dependent.”

Although theater was born at roughly the same time and place as democracy, Shapiro is mistaking correlation for causation. It’s particularly odd for a Shakespeare scholar of Shapiro’s immense gifts and knowledge to assert that democracy and theater go hand in hand. Shakespeare and his brilliant colleagues in London’s theater scene lived and worked during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James. Both of these rulers were many things, but enthusiasts for democracy they were not. Playwrights of this era wrote under an official censorship regime, and one of the early traveling companies during Elizabeth’s reign was run by her spymaster. The model of tragedy they worked from was based on the works of the Roman writer and stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger, who was the tutor, and later adviser, of Emperor Nero. Some of Russia’s greatest dramatists wrote within an even more extreme censorship system under the czars. America’s own theatrical golden age, which began in the late 1940s, did take place during a time of progressive democratic gains, but it was also a period when Jim Crow laws and white-supremacist terrorism effectively shut Black Americans out of democratic participation in large swaths of the country.

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Dissident art creates a vital outlet for the democratic spirit, but when it comes to the mainstream, the arts’ most durable relationship is not with democracy but with nationalism. Theater has long been a way for societies to declare their greatness and define their national character; investment in theater has often coincided with countries’ emergence onto the world stage. Domestic theater grew dramatically in sophistication and popularity in Russia after the defeat of Napoleon in 1812, in England under Elizabeth I, in Spain during the rise of its empire in the 16th century, and in the United States after it became one of the world’s two superpowers at the end of World War II. When federal arts funding was resurrected in the U.S. more than a decade after the FTP’s death, it was in part so that artistic work could showcase the superiority of America to the Soviet Union.

This funding took two forms, one covert and one official. As the journalist and historian Frances Stonor Saunders documented in The Cultural Cold War, the CIA secretly steered funding and career opportunities to American artists and writers via various front groups, such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom. These groups sponsored musical events, including concerts presenting orchestral works that had been censored in Eastern Europe and tours featuring Louis Armstrong. In the literary world, it supported The Paris Review (co-founded by the CIA employee Peter Matthiessen); influenced PEN International, the literary free-speech organization, to pursue American interests; and had a hand in the publishing of at least a thousand books. The Congress for Cultural Freedom also helped the Museum of Modern Art mount multiple shows of abstract expressionists and New York School painters in Europe. Ironically, these same artists were simultaneously being denounced in the Capitol. The iconoclasm that made them such great representatives of America’s individualist genius also made them dangerous nonconformists and suspected Communists.

More overtly, in the 1960s Congress created the National Endowment for the Arts. Its founding legislation is explicitly nationalistic in tone. “The world leadership which has come to the United States,” Congress declared, “cannot rest solely upon superior power, wealth, and technology, but must be solidly founded upon worldwide respect and admiration for the Nation's high qualities as a leader in the realm of ideas and of the spirit.” Partly as a way of differentiating the NEA from the Soviet model, the endowment established a peer-review panel for selecting grantees that was meant to shield recipients from political interference.

This system of independence lasted until the early 1990s, when modern heirs to Martin Dies, such as Senator Jesse Helms, worked to break the NEA’s spine, killing its most innovative programs, doing away with almost all of its grants to individual artists, drastically cutting its funding, and inserting decency language into its funding guidelines. (The peer-review system is still in place today, but it no longer supports individual artists other than writers and translators, and as Michael Brenson writes in his book Visionaries and Outcasts, the work the NEA backs now is far more conservative and populist than what came before.) It’s not a coincidence that the crushing of the endowment occurred immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union; with its major rival vanquished, the U.S. government didn’t need the arts to advertise the greatness of the American way of life anymore. Lacking a nationalistic purpose, many arts advocates have struggled to make a compelling case for arts funding.

One argument frequently floated is that the arts are fundamentally virtuous, and make us better people. There are many versions of this claim, from music assisting with the development of math skills, to fiction's ability to expand our empathy, to Shapiro's assertion that theater is good for democracy. The arts can aid in enriching our democracy; they can make us more alive, more human, less lonely, and wiser. But they will never do so if we simply assume that they’re good for us by the mere fact of their existence. The arts deserve appreciation and funding even when they may not be good for us. Art is where we go to express the fullness of ourselves, including the parts that are broken, and to bear witness to the fullness of the other. Art reflects the dreamworld of the self, and our dreams are not always virtuous, nor are they under our control. But it is precisely this complexity that makes the arts necessary.

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In reducing the Federal Theatre Project’s story to a parable for the present day, The Playbook misses an opportunity to mine that complexity. The FTP produced more than a thousand shows, ranging from boulevard comedy to experimental dance. It operated all over the country and employed hundreds of people. Yet The Playbook focuses only on a small handful of shows in chapters that fail to connect to one another, or give the overarching story of the FTP its due. The resulting book is a number of exegeses of specific productions bookended by a couple of chapters about the House Un-American Activities Committee, rather than a coherent story. Some of the specific productions Shapiro chooses to highlight—which include an all-white dance performance set to Black protest music and a satire on racism by two Black men that the FTP insisted be rewritten so as not to offend white viewers—also make a poor case for theater as a bastion of democracy.  

The primary purpose of history is not to find lessons for our time, but to understand the past. Sifting through the complex record of the Federal Theatre Project and the Dies Committee to find contemporary resonance risks covering up as much as is reveals. What makes Hallie Flanagan’s stewardship of the FTP so inspiring is that she never took the virtue or relevance of theater for granted. Flanagan and her colleagues made theater an important expression of the American democratic experiment through force of will, passion, and ingenuity. And although, yes, that experiment was destroyed through a mix of reactionary perfidy and liberal wimpiness, the meaning of its story is not solely contained in its ending. The life of the Federal Theatre Project—filled, as the democratic project itself is, with triumphs and failures, arguments and coalitions, power, rage, love, and pain—is suffused with complicated, contradictory meaning, all on its own.