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. Read more