On Hallie Flanagan and the Federal Theatre Project

August 27 was both the founding day of the Federal Theatre Project (1935-39) and the birthday of its only director Hallie Flanagan (Hallie Ferguson, 1889-1969).

Even if the FTP had never existed, Flanagan would have been a significant person in the history of American theatre. A widowed single mom, the Grinnell College grad (Iowa) enrolled in George Pierce Baker’s 47 Workshop at Radcliffe/Harvard in the early ’20s. She proved to be one of Baker’s star pupils; he put her in charge of the actors’ group which workshopped the plays. She graduated with an MA from Radcliff in 1924, and was hired as a professor at Vassar the following year. In 1926 she became the first woman to receive a Guggenheim award for theatre. She used the funds to do a 14 month fact-finding tour of Europe, during which she met and learned from Gordon Craig, John Galsworthy,Pirandello, and Stanislavski. She returned to found the Vassar Experimental Theatre, where she implemented the techniques of the Expressionists, Meyerhold, and others. Their most famous production was a 1931 adaptation of Can You Hear Their Voices?, adapted from a Whitaker Chambers story about a group of starving Arkansas sharecroppers who commandeer a supply of food from the Red Cross at gunpoint.

In 1935, Harry Hopkins, head of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) put her in charge of the newly formed Federal Theatre Project, with the approval of President Roosevelt. As a young person, the Federal Theatre Project captured my imagination, because that’s the way it was taught and promoted in school. Where I’m from, we were taught to basically worship at the altar of the New Deal-New Frontier-Great Society continuum, and to a large extent, I still hold a revered place in my heart for it. The WPA was a Depression Era jobs program, and the Federal Theatre Project was designed to put actors and other theatre professionals to work.

Because Democrats did things right back then, all the New Deal programs like this were framed in irresistible patriotic branding iconography. I have always been a huge sucker for this. It’s seldom couched in these terms, but the U.S. was partaking of the same propaganda techniques they were using in the USSR and the Fascist countries at the time. The difference was that in the U.S., the government branding was competing with all of the commercial branding that was already flooding the public consciousness even then, from MGM to Coca Cola to Campbell’s Soup. Implicit in this fact was the eventual doom of the FTP. In a capitalist country, with a commercial theatre, ailing as it was, there was bound to be substantial pushback against the palpably left-wing nature of this program, and it didn’t take long.

First, what the Federal Theatre Project accomplished. Based out of five regional centers (New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New Orleans) the program employed up to 12,500 people in over a thousand projects in 28 states. Its most famous productions included Orson Welles’Voodoo MacBeth and The Cradle Will Rock; the rapid-response Living Newspaper project, which dramatized items from the headlines; The Federal Theatre Project of the Air, which produced radio shows; the Variety Unit which employed vaudeville people; and the Negro Theatre Units, possibly the FTP’s most lasting legacy. There were also Yiddish, Spanish, and German productions.

The most dubious claim made on behalf of the agency to my mind is that it “introduced thousands to the theatre who had never attended a professional production before”. Scarcely more than a generation earlier all that had EXISTED for entertainment amounted to live theatre of one kind of another. Theatre was ailing, even possibly dying, but it hadn’t been raptured. If anything, the theatrical culture of that time was more virulent and vital than it is today.

Which brings up another problematic element having to do with the mission of the FTP, the art of live theatre was indeed dying. Obviously it still exists, and is wonderfully far from dead even as I write this, though I believe that technology and the recent pandemic have contributed to the slow shrinking of its footprint by yet another couple of notches. At the time of which we speak however, 90 and more years ago, it shrank catastrophically over a very short time, not only because of the Depression, but because it had been displaced by radio and cinema. A couple of decades later television would deliver another haymaker. So the job loss in the theatrical business in the 1930s was not solely (maybe not even primarily) a factor of the temporarily depressed economy, but of a permanently reduced industry. Some calculated at the time that theatre itself was obsolete. But many (smarter) people knew what was unique about the art form which could never be replaced by technology, and it had been no more rendered obsolete than painting had been by photography. It just would no longer be the universal default entertainment as it had been but a short time earlier. It would now only be appreciated by a small subset of Americans.

Given that reality, what ought to be the goal of “full employment” in the theatre in the 1930s? The new, much smaller industry appropriate for the smaller market? Or at previous levels, prior to the coming of radio and cinema? This was a jobs program, after all. Does there actually need to be a market for the product the employees make? That seems a no-brainer, but I have no doubt there are some would argue otherwise. And at the very least it had to be clarified. Lord knows governments in all places and all times have wasted the resources of their citizens on some truly absurd and even tragic boondoggles. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve mellowed into a pragmatic socialist in my old age. I have evolved. Health care, housing, education, and employment for all! But surely it’s too much to guarantee that all aspiring thespians can star in their own productions of Romeo and Juliet. Obviously, that wasn’t what it was. As with the later NEA, you had to apply, you had to propose, you had to make the case, and prove your qualifications, and so forth. But the NECESSITY of it to the American taxpayer, as little an investment as it was or has ever been, was never adequately or convincingly articulated to the factions that needed to be placated, if that were even possible. And how can that ever be anything but fatal in the long term?

New Deal successes notwithstanding, there remained a substantial conservative contingent in Congress. And these were yer PALEO-conservatives of the Taft-Harding-Coolidge-Hoover variety. They didn’t like the lefty tone of a lot of the FTP’s productions, less the idea that Americans were having to pay for them. The idea that such agencies are independent and their artists enjoyed First Amendment rights the same as anyone else is nice in theory, but to much of the public some of what was being presented seemed outrageous. And you can say, “tough shit” all you want, but the result was the shuttering of the FTP after only four years, presaging the Culture Wars of the ’90s, and the savage counterrevolution now happening at the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian, PBS, NPR, NEA, and NEH even as we pen this. (In related news, it’s also LBJ’s birthday, he noted with a dash of irony).

(I don’t know what the answer is. I do know that somehow with all their vaunted brains and imagination the artists have failed to outsmart the barbarians. Yes, I know the far right acts mainly through force, intimidation, and the excitement of emotion, but the fact remains that they won somehow. The left lost what was theirs to win through failures of strategy and a basic ignorance of what motivates their own voters, as well as an inability to size up the willingness of their opponents to shatter all norms in their quest for power. They were outsmarted. I speak of recent days now, but it applies to earlier cultural battles like this one too.)

So Flanagan was called on the carpet and had to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Congress canceled the Federal Theatre Project midway through 1939. The following year, her second husband, a professor of Greek at Vassar, died of a stroke. These had to have been miserable times for her. But she rebounded. In 1942 she was named the Dean of Smith College, as well as the Chair of the Drama Department. Four years later, she resigned the Dean position in order to focus entirely on theatre instruction at the college. She retired in 1955.

By that time, the Parkinson’s Disease with which she had been diagnosed a decade earlier was worsening. The disease progressed over her remaining fourteen years until she passed away in 1969. By that time, the NEA was just beginning to get cooking. But that agency, too, is mortal.

At any rate, Hallie Flanagan has never been widely known among the public at large, but to folks who are deeply in the not-for-profit theatre, she is a much revered figure. In Tim Robbins’The Cradle Will Rock (1999), Cherry Jones plays her like Joan of Arc — muse of the communist Brecht and the socialist Shaw! Not the first nor the last independent woman ever to be burned at the stake.