#USIH2020 Roundtable: African-American Intellectuals and Their Critics

From 1935 to 1939, the United States federal government funded the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a national theatre that produced dozens of original plays celebrating left-wing ideals as American values. As a state-sponsored program tasked with creating American cultural products, the FTP was an inherently nationalist enterprise. It was more than just a jobs program, although it employed over 30,000 actors, writers, and technicians; it also sought to create a left-wing nationalist mythology.[1] The FTP asserted that leftist beliefs like anti-fascism and anti-racism were fundamentally American, connecting it to the long history of anti-racist and anti-fascist movements in the U.S. Americans today often think of nationalism as a right-wing ideology but the left has a historical claim to nationalism as well.

As part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, the FTP occupied a unique position within the cultural Popular Front, the transnational leftist movement of the 1930s.[2] As government officials, FTP administrators could credibly argue that Popular Front values like anti-fascism and anti-racism were fundamentally American. This was a profound statement in a nation uncertain of its own democratic future, threatened by fascist regimes abroad and at home by laws excluding many African Americans and non-white immigrants from the right to vote and full citizenship. Equally as important as its message, the FTP was a popular and affordable source of entertainment during the Great Depression. Forty million people attended productions held in dozens of cities nationwide, usually for a free or subsidized ticket price.[3] The intimacy and immediacy of theatre as a medium allowed the FTP to bring anti-fascist and anti-racist stories to life for millions of audience members who embraced left-wing ideals as American values.

The FTP’s 1936 adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ anti-fascist novel It Can’t Happen Here was an ambitious undertaking, unprecedented in scale for the American theatre. FTP national director Hallie Flanagan described their objective to “present on a national scale a play with a definitive American theme by an American author” in adapting it.[4] It Can’t Happen Here was a best-selling but controversial novel; the film industry’s self-regulatory agency essentially banned studios from making a film adaptation because it might anger fascist regimes abroad.[5] Telling the story of the resistance movement against an American fascist demagogue, the FTP adapted the novel into a play which premiered simultaneously in fifteen cities nationwide on October 27, 1936. There were twenty-eight productions of the play in total and each tailored the story and setting to the local community, including Black productions which emphasized fascist racism, a Spanish-language production in Florida, and Yiddish language productions which included a concentration camp scene omitted in other productions.[6] It Can’t Happen Here was not critically adored but it was a hit with audiences; over 15,000 Americans saw it on opening night and most productions ran for six months to a year.[7] “It is propaganda for an American system of Democracy,” Sinclair Lewis told reporters. “Very definitely propaganda for that.”[8]

The FTP created dozens of new plays about historical events and figures to educate audiences about left-wing nationalist ideals. After the FTP’s first original history play, the biographical Jefferson Davis (1936), was roasted by critics, FTP officials adhered more closely to their own values and premiered Battle Hymn (1936), about the abolitionist John Brown. Its New York performances so frequently sold out that the FTP opened productions in other northern and West Coast cities.[9] The FTP’s Boston unit produced Created Equal (1938), a historical epic exploring economic inequality from the 1770s to the 1930s.[10] The FTP attempted to use its history plays to validate leftist ideals as American values but the majority of these plays centered on white historical figures. There were some exceptions, however. Haiti (1938) was a critical and commercial success which argued for the importance of the Haitian Revolution in world history. A biographical Harriet Tubman play, Go Down Moses, would have likely found similar success had it premiered before the FTP was shut down in 1939.[11] Although representation in the FTP’s history plays was imperfect, audiences embraced its history plays with leftist Popular Front themes.

The FTP’s Negro Theatre Unit (NTU), with seventeen divisions in cities across the U.S., employed thousands of African-American actors, playwrights, and technicians to create Black art.[12] Many of the NTU’s original plays and classic revivals were among the FTP’s most popular shows, including the “Voodoo” Macbeth (1936), Turpentine (1936), and Theodore Ward’s now canonical family drama Big White Fog (1938).[13] Although some NTU plays addressed Black nationalism and the African diaspora, as FTP productions these plays can also be interpreted as works of American nationalism. While many New Deal programs established discriminatory policies to disqualify African Americans from relief work, the FTP employed a significant number of Black workers and fired local and regional officials who discriminated against African Americans. Considering the segregationist policies of both the federal government and the commercial theatre at the time, the NTU can be viewed as both a segregated program and as a space where Black workers contributed to the production of American nationalist culture.

Black artists in the NTU claimed that Black art was American art and asserted their agency in shaping how the American experience was portrayed on the stage. The American theatre had long popularized racist stereotypes – Jim Crow laws were named after the blackface minstrel character of the early 19^th century – but African Americans understood the power of that medium to influence society at large. The cultural production of the NTU was so important to the Black community that when officials proposed shutting down its acclaimed Harlem unit in 1938, dozens of community leaders came together to demand that the program be saved from budget cuts. “One of the objectives that the Negro in America must always keep before him,” the Negro Labor Committee’s Frank Crosswaith said at a meeting of civic leaders, “is to compel the rest of America to appreciate his cultural expression.”[14] Through the NTU, African Americans contributed to the nationalist cultural production of the FTP while creating distinctly Black art.

In 1938 and 1939, the House of Representatives investigated several Works Progress Administration programs for allegedly employing communists and members of other “un-American” groups. Rep. Martin Dies, Jr.’s (D-TX) Special Committee on Un-American Activities, the precursor to the McCarthy-era House Un-American Activities Committee, captured the attention of the press but the Dies Committee was not solely motivated by anti-communist fervor. Even if the FTP did employ members of Communist Party USA, FTP officials were forbidden by Congress from asking relief workers about their political affiliation so there was no way of knowing if they did employ communists.[15] Committee member Rep. J. Parnell Thomas (R-NJ) still insisted that the FTP “favors giving jobs to radicals” and “fosters New Deal propaganda,” inadvertently revealing one of the Dies Committee’s true motivations.[16] Under Martin Dies, the House Special Committee switched from investigating the growing threat of fascist groups in the U.S. to attacking the New Deal under the guise of investigating communists.

The Dies Committee represented an anti-New Deal coalition which used “communism” as a catch-all term for whatever contradicted their views of what it meant to be American. Dies and other conservative southern Democratic committee members had switched from supporting the New Deal to opposing it after the passage of the Wagner Act, which strengthened workers’ rights, and the introduction of the Costigan-Wagner Anti-Lynching Bill in the Senate. Dies was a white supremacist and nativist, viewing anti-racism, one of the core tenets of left-wing nationalism, as un-American. Dies and other southern anti-New Deal Democrats formed a coalition with anti-labor Republicans from the Midwest and North, like J. Parnell Thomas, to discredit New Deal programs. For the Dies Committee, international communism was a less imminent threat the New Deal, which they believed threatened established class and racial hierarchies.[17]

Part of the reason Dies and his cohort viewed the FTP was un-American was because it employed African Americans to create nationalist art. Members of the Dies Committee attacked plays created by or featuring Black writers and actors, especially the NTU’s Haiti, as well as the prospect of racial integration on- and off-stage.^[18] The FTP’s musical revue Sing for Your Supper (1939), with an ensemble of over one hundred Black and white performers, was the first truly integrated Broadway musical. Earlier “integrated” shows like The Southerners (1904) and Show Boat (1927) had segregated choruses.^[19] Sing featured topical songs and comedy sketches and a rousing anthem to American diversity, “Ballad for Uncle Sam.”^[20] Dies and Rep. Joe Starnes (D-AL) questioned Sallie Saunders, a white, Austrian-born former cast member of Sing, who testified that a Black WPA photographer had asked her on a date. Saunders said she voluntarily transferred to another show because her Sing supervisors encouraged “social equality and race merging.”^[21] Dies and Starnes, as southern segregationists, weaponized racist tropes about Black men pursuing white women to discredit the FTP as a jobs program. Dies did not acknowledge the FTP’s internal investigation of Saunders’ allegations, in which she stated that she would move back to Nazi-annexed Austria if African Americans were given equal rights in the U.S.^[22] Later congressional hearings chaired by Rep. Clifton A. Woodrum (D-VA) also criticized Sing as un-American because of its racially-integrated cast.[23]

The House defunded the FTP in its next relief bill and at the risk of losing the majority of WPA jobs, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed that bill in June 1939. Still, the FTP was important because it used the authority of the federal government to insist that left-wing ideals were American values. To characterize the demise of the FTP as the result of anti-communist backlash oversimplifies the role that racism, particularly fear of racial integration, also played. The prospect of African Americans one day enjoying full citizenship was a more immediate threat to Dies and his colleagues than international communism. As people on the left and right debate American nationalism today, we should remember that during the tumultuous 1930s, the federal government sponsored popular theatre celebrating left-wing nationalist values like anti-racism and anti-fascism.

[1] Hallie Flanagan, “WHAT WAS FEDERAL THEATRE?” Dec 1936, 3, Folder 3.1.76, Box 566, Federal Theatre Project Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. This collection will be referenced as FTP Collection, LOC.

[2] For more on the FTP as part of the Popular Front, see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (Verso, 1998); Leslie Elaine Frost, Dreaming America: Popular Front Ideals and Aesthetics in Children’s Plays of the Federal Theatre Project (Ohio State University Press, 2013).

[3] Flanagan, “WHAT WAS FEDERAL THEATRE?” FTP Collection, LOC; Elmer Rice, “TICKETS GOING DOWN,” New York Times, Sep 24, 1939, 129.

[4] Press Release, Sep 14, 1936; Folder 1, Entry #29: “It Can’t Happen Here” – Promotion Material; Records Relating to Productions of “It Can’t Happen Here,” 1936-1937, Box 119; Records of the Federal Theatre Project; Records of the Work Projects Administration, Record Group 69; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. This collection will be referenced as FTP Records; RG 69; NACP.

[5] Thomas Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration (Columbia University Press, 2009), 117–19.

[6] Press Release, Sep 14, 1936; Folder 1, Entry #29: “It Can’t Happen Here” – Promotion Material; Box 119; FTP Records; RG 69; NACP. Hallie Flanagan, Arena: The History of the Federal Theatre (New York: Arno Press, 1940), 121–24.

[7] “15,460 SEE “IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE” OPENING,” Nov 1936; Folder 1, Entry #29: “It Can’t Happen Here” – Promotion Material; Box 119; FTP Records; RG 69; NACP.

[8] “”IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE” SET FOR OCTOBER 27,” Oct 1936; Folder 1, Entry #29: “It Can’t Happen Here” – Promotion Material; Box 119; FTP Records; RG 69; NACP.

[9] Bosley Crowther, “ONCE OVER THE WPA,” New York Times, Mar 15, 1936, X1; L.N., “THE PLAY: John Brown,” New York Times, May 23, 1936, 12.

[10] “THE STAGE: COPLEY THEATRE “Created Equal”,” Daily Boston Globe, Jun 14, 1938, 10.

[11] “FIGHT MOVING OF LAFAYETTE,” New York Amsterdam News, Jun 25, 1938, 11.

[12] For more on the Negro Theatre Unit, see Kate Dossett, Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

[13] Hallie Flanagan, “Brief Delivered before the Committee on Patents, House of Representatives,” Feb 8, 1938, Folder 1.1.57, Box 4, FTP Collection, LOC; “WPA STAGE END BLAMED ON THE RACE QUESTION,” New York Amsterdam News, Jul 29, 1939, 16.

[14] “FIGHT MOVING OF LAFAYETTE,” New York Amsterdam News, Jun 25, 1938, 11.

[15] “Federal Theatre Head Denies Red Influence,” New York Amsterdam News, Sep 10, 1938, B6; Flanagan, Arena: The History of the Federal Theatre, 349.

[16] “FEDERAL THEATRE HELD UN-AMERICAN,” New York Times, Sep 13, 1938, 28.

[17] To conflate anti-racism and communism because the Popular Front championed both ideologies has often led historians to center communism in analyses of the FTP at the expense of anti-racism, which has a long and independent history in the U.S. See Dossett, Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal, 29.

[18] ““THEATRE PROJECT FACES AN INQUIRY,” New York Times, Jul 27, 1938, 19;” “PLAY TOUR BY WPA FACES FIGHT HERE,” New York Times, Aug 26, 1938, 19.

[19] Contemporary Black newspapers identified Sing for Your Supper as the first truly integrated Broadway musical but it has been overlooked by theatre historians, who instead credit On the Town (1944) or Finian’s Rainbow (1947); see “Fifty Colored Performers in Cast Of WPA’s “Sing for Your Supper,”” New York Amsterdam News, Apr 22, 1939, 21; “’Sing For Your Supper’ Setting A Precedent,” Chicago Defender, May 20, 1939, 21; “WPA Revusical Called Tribute,” New York Amsterdam News, May 20, 1939, 20; Katherine Baber, “‘Manhattan Women’: Jazz, Blues, and Gender in On the Town and Wonderful Town,” American Music 31, no. 1 (2013): 73–105, https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.31.1.0073; Chase Bringardner, “‘A Rainbow in Ev’Ry Pot’: Southern Excess, Racial Liberalism, and Living Large in Harburg and Lane’s Finian’s Rainbow,” Studies in Musical Theatre 10, no. 1 (March 1, 2016): 117–32, https://doi.org/10.1386/smt.10.1.117_1.

[20] “Ballad for Uncle Sam” was later renamed “Ballad for Americans” and became a hit record for Paul Robeson. Arthur Pollock, “’Sing for Your Supper,’ WPA’s Debut in Revue,” Christian Science Monitor, Apr 28, 1939, 10.

[21] U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Special Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States. Hearings before a Special Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Seventy-Fifth Congress, Third Session-Seventy-Eighth Congress, Second Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1938), 860, http://archive.org/details/investigationofu193804unit.

[22] Ed Maulsby, “Statement for Congressional Record,” Jul 1939, 65-66, Folder 1.1.118, Box 6, FTP Collection, LOC.

[23] U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, Investigation and Study of the Works Progress Administration. Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, Seventy-Sixth Congress, First[-Third] Session, Acting under House Resolution 130 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1939), 203, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015011720920.