For a nation still comparatively young among world powers, the United States approaches its Semiquincentennial (250th birthday) with a muscular, impressive, often shameful history, cycles of progressive reform and reactionary fallout that supposedly lead to a more perfect union, forever over the horizon. And yet it’s the byways and cul-de-sacs where we find some of our country’s most revelatory episodes, fertile not only for scholars but also for popular enrichment; recent examples include the television series, Franklin, which recounts the Founder’s tenure as a diplomat in France, or Manhunt, which narrates the twelve days John Wilkes Booth eluded capture after he assassinated President Lincoln in Ford’s Theater.
Booth fired the fatal shot and then leapt onto the proscenium, shouting “Sic Semper Tyrannis!,” or Thus always to tyrants, spotlighting the intersection of theater and politics. In his superb The Playbook, Columbia professor James Shapiro unearths a forgotten gem of the New Deal, “a once thriving WPA relief program that did not survive and has left little trace: the Federal Theater Project, which from 1935 to 1939 staged, for a pittance, over a thousand productions in twenty-nine states seen by thirty million, or roughly one of four Americans, two thirds of whom had never seen a play before.” In the pre-film age, people of all classes thronged to drama houses for entertainment; even small Midwestern towns could boast a couple in the hearts of their communities. Traveling shows were common. The Federal Theater Project, Shapiro writes in his Introduction, “offered traditional fare, like Shakespeare, mixed in with contemporary plays on issues that mattered to Depression-era audiences, such as slum housing and the threat of fascism, topics largely shunned by Hollywood and the commercial stage. Led by a theater professor, Hallie Flanagan, it employed, at its peak, over twelve thousand struggling artists.”
A remarkably gifted dramaturge and teacher, Flanagan was a real-life version of a scrappy Horatio Alger character. Born in South Dakota in 1890 and raised in Iowa, she studied German and Philosophy at Grinnell College, where she met Harry Hopkins, a future architect of the New Deal. She was active in Grinnell’s thespian troupes and later taught at Vassar; a brief marriage ended in her husband’s tragic death, though she eventually remarried a fellow academic. As the Works Progress Administration rolled out, Hopkins recruited her to oversee the Federal Theater, which would create jobs for actors, playwrights, stagehands, lighting crews, and costumers, funneling dollars into the pockets of unemployed, desperate Americans. A disciplined organizer, Flanagan scrupulously concentrated on cities such as New York, Chicago, and Denver while enlisting local venues and their patrons to her cause. She hired regional administrators familiar with the tastes of their audiences, from Seattle to Cincinnati to Hartford. A network emerged from her vision.
A few early ideas never made it off the drawing board, auguring trouble, but then came a singular production of Macbeth, reimagined in Haiti, which premiered at Harlem’s Lafayette Theater in April, 1936. A brilliant neophyte, 20-year old Orson Welles, directed the run, and a young John Houseman served as producer. (The pairing of two white men with an all-Black cast raised the eyebrows of Black intellectuals like Langston Hughes.) A fiery prodigy, Welles drove his cast through a brutal regimen of rehearsals and revisions; the cast was usually on the verge of revolt. The reviews vacillated from laudatory to outright racist, but crowds mobbed the Lafayette, downtown Whites mingling with Black Harlemites, a cultural touchstone to this day. Shapiro underscores Macbeth as a mass-market phenomenon: “Over the next six months this so-called Voodoo Macbeth (set in nineteenth-century Haiti, with voodoo replacing Scottish witchcraft) was seen by nearly 120,000 playgoers, first in Harlem, then on Broadway, and after that on a national tour that took the all-Black cast to parts of the country where Jim Crow still ruled. It was the Federal Theater’s first and arguably greatest hit, one that quickly erased memories of the project’s shaky start.”
During its short lifespan, the Federal Theater delivered high-caliber plays and musicals while pushing the envelope of artistic expression. Nobel laureate Sinclair Lewis’s dystopian It Can’t Happen Here, published in 1935, was translated into a screenplay by the acclaimed dramatist Sidney Howard; Louis B. Mayer himself was shepherding the project through MGM when it ran afoul of the Hays Office, Hollywood’s censor. Flanagan snapped up the screenplay despite its “inflammatory” throughlines: American detention camps, kangaroo courts, rescinding rights for women and minorities, a coup d’état in Washington. Other controversies followed: an interracial dance composition, How Long, Brethren? with its “Negro songs of protest”; a play about Lynchotopia, a kind of bardo where victims gather to compare horrific accounts of suffering; and One Third of a Nation, a searing indictment of housing policies for poor folks.
There were also flirtations with Communism, in vogue among elites. Flanagan let her own leanings dictate the works she commissioned, leaving herself vulnerable to right-wing agents and hostile demagogues. Amid flashes of backlash against the New Deal, Congress took stock of its budgets, reluctant to target an admired President, but targets like the Federal Theater tempted them. Helmed by a charismatic Dixiecrat from Texas, Martin Dies, the House of Representatives lobbied to investigate the ideologies and dealings of Flanagan and various luminaries.
[Right: Rep. Martin Dies] The Playbook sparkles with passionate arguments and stylish anecdotes. Shapiro reminds us that the partisan battles of our current moment have many antecedents in the past, beyond the build-up to the Civil War. The fate of the Federal Theater dangled by a gossamer thread, then snipped by bizarre circumstances. “We have four thousand American Nazis goose-stepping in Andover, New Jersey, three weeks before the House voted to authorize the Dies Committee, to thank for the demise of the Federal Theater,” Shapiro observes. “Or perhaps responsibility should be shared with the doctors who failed to save Randolph Perkins’s life at Georgetown Hospital, where the moderate New Jersey congressman died of a kidney infection. Had Perkins survived, J. Parnell Thomas would not have been chosen in a special election to succeed him. And had those American admirers of Hitler not paraded in Thomas’s backyard, the congressman might not have changed his mind and supported the creation of the special committee.”
Once the committee was seated, Dies and his colleagues went to work, swearing in Flanagan and other witnesses, boosted by anti-New Deal colleagues and even a nurse from Ohio with an axe to grind. A decade before the rise of Senator Joe McCarthy, Dies chaired the House Un-American Activities Committee, with the Federal Theater in its crosshairs. Although the book’s denouement is dispiriting and predictable — no fault of the author — it glimmers with bits of inspiration, as ordinary citizens stared down authoritarian forces within its own government.
For Shapiro, the four-year career of the Federal Theater is no mere footnote to history but rather a link in a chain of movements that reveal the complexity and contradictions of the American Experiment, whose triumphs are often tenuous. As the WPA wound down and the prospect of a global war loomed, Americans withdrew from collective bonds and a shared mission, reconnecting only after Pearl Harbor. (Republican Wendell Wilkie campaigned against FDR on a platform of isolationism in 1940.) The legacy of the New Deal, too, has narrowed over the intervening century, its concrete achievements pared to seven “sole survivors,” among them Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. (As a child I spent summer afternoons on TVA’s Lake Chickamauga, my family’s Cobia cruiser hauling waterskiers across the chop.)
The New Deal endures as a template for progressive government, though, seeding the Great Society and the Affordable Care Act. The Playbook is itself a felicitous testament to how literature engages its political context; it can’t pretend to do otherwise. In this regard Shapiro’s book falls squarely in the line of our best recent narrative nonfiction, from David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon to Jonathan Blitzer’s Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here to Ross Perlin’s Language City. Shapiro has written a rip of a read and a cautionary tale with parallels to 2024, as today’s tensions have scrambled conventional wisdom: Republican-friendly demographics are shifting away from affluent, educated voters, and fissures are opening between foundational Democratic constituencies, such as people of color, Jews, and under-30s. An unexpected realignment has arrived. Shapiro has the last word in this chilling sentence: “As the nation changed, so have its culture wars, which have always been with us and rarely serve as precursors to each other.”
[Published by Penguin Press on May 28, 2024, 384 pages, $30.00 US hardcover]