American Experiment (310 page)

Eleanor Roosevelt supported the cultural programs at key junctures, put “federal” art in the White House, and spoke up against censorship of art, telling a group of museum directors in December 1933 that it was “unbelievable that a great nation” could fail to use “its creative talents to the fullest.” Aiding and abetting the effort were tough-minded administrators—Ickes, Morgenthau, Hopkins, and many less known—who early on glimpsed the need for a qualitative as well as a quantitative liberalism. But the true heroes of the effort were the unsung or less sung leaders of the national and local programs, along with the artists, actors, musicians, and writers who, working for a pittance, responded by producing a cornucopia of cultural productions, notable always for quantity but often too for quality.

The New Deal art program had got off to an early start because the federal government owned thousands of post offices and other buildings whose walls were temptingly empty. Roosevelt had been in office hardly two months when muralist George Biddle, one of the Philadelphia Biddies and a Groton and Harvard schoolmate of Roosevelt, wrote FDR about the grand achievements of muralists of the Mexican revolution. Young American artists were eager to capture the “Roosevelt-guided social revolution” on the public walls of the nation. The President directed him to the Treasury, central custodian of federal buildings. With tentative support from such leading muralists as Thomas Hart Benton, Edward Laning, Reginald Marsh, and Henry Varnum Poor, Biddle plunged into the field of federal subsidy of the arts, amid fears that it was a briar patch.

A briar patch it was—not only of bureaucratic rivalries, but of ancient conflict between traditionalists and the avant-garde, between artists of competing schools. Biddle and his colleagues were soon dealing with problems that had always bedeviled subsidized art, whether sponsored by state, church, or private patrons. Any relationship between free-spirited artists and institutions dealing with art involved an “awkward embrace” that the honeyed words of politicians and bureaucrats could not ease. To what degree should established artists be favored over the mainly needy ones? To what extent should the “feds” yield to local control or even institutionalize it? How much artistic freedom should be allowed for projects subsidized by the taxpayers? To what degree should artists be supervised—for example, the time they were putting into their work? Who should decide what art should be not only subsidized but chosen for exhibit? What are the criteria for excellence in art?

These problems rolled in on the public works art directors in the form not merely of in-basket paper but of raging conflicts in the field. In San Francisco, newspaper editors were given a “pre-vue” of new murals in the Coit Tower created under the public works art program, only to discover a miner in one panel reading a well-known local communist weekly, in another panel a hammer and sickle and a call that the “Workers of the World Unite,” and—worst blow of all—renditions of many left-wing front pages but no representation of the establishment San Francisco
Chronicle.
During the ensuing flap the city park commission locked the big doors to the tower, the local Artists’ and Writers’ Union picketed the closed edifice, and the lower opened again after several months, with only one “subversive” item—a Soviet emblem—missing.

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 boards 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.”