Lynchotopia is an afterworld where “all lynch victims go”. On New Year’s Eve, the Keeper of Records, a rope around his neck, announces how many lynch victims died that year, and everyone debates who gets the prize for the worst murder. Hearing that two new entrants were tortured with blowtorches, the Keeper is impressed at the mobs “going modern”.
This is a scene from Liberty Deferred, a play nearly staged nationally in 1938 by the United States Federal Theatre, before it was deemed simply too daring by the theatre’s administrators.
The theatre had a reason to be nervous. Right-wing critics were looking to accuse it of subversiveness and shut it down, James Shapiro writes in The Playbook, his fascinating account of the short-lived programme and the culture wars that destroyed it.
In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration had allocated $27m to the Federal Theatre Project, one of many New Deal initiatives to get Americans working again after the Great Depression. It was administered by Hallie Flanagan, a Vassar College professor, producer and playwright. Within a year, the project employed 15,000 people, renting closed theatres, parks, schools, churches, hospitals, trucks and factories for its performances. Within four years, it had gone.
But in the Federal Theatre’s brief existence, its productions were seen by 30m people—roughly one in four Americans—despite rising poverty and competition from the film industry. Many had never seen a play before. Some 10m tuned into the programme’s radio broadcasts.
Shapiro describes a different production in each chapter, but his overall purpose is clear from the double meaning of the book’s title: the “playbook” used by conservative senators to shut down the theatre’s funding is, he argues, the same one used by US Republicans today—with book and play bans and campaigns targeting any subject, teacher or topic considered perilously woke.
The ‘playbook’ used by conservative senators to shut down the Federal Theatre Project’s funding is the same one used by US Republicans today
Many of the Federal Theatre’s actions were radical for their time. The programme established “Negro Units”, one of which produced its first hit: a 1936 staging of Macbeth set in 19th-century Haiti with an all-black cast. A troupe of African drummers performed, and voodoo magic replaced Scottish witchcraft. The play was directed by a young Orson Welles, who would go on to describe it as “my great success in my life”. On opening night, mounted police struggled to clear a path through the thousands of excited people gathered outside the theatre.
The voodoo in the play was much more disturbing to audiences than medieval Scottish witches, and its setting played on the audience’s fear of impending war. “Voodoo Macbeth,” Shapiro writes, “ticked all three boxes” of 1930s American fears: fear of fascism, fear of racial equality and fear of global violence. Critics raved about the production, albeit with undertones of racial condescension: a young Martha Gellhorn wrote in the Spectator that she’d been seated next to an “enormous black lady” and described the crowds beneath her as “a checker board” of “blonde heads and black wool”.
One critic, Percy Hammond of the Herald Tribune, left the play early and reviewed it negatively. The next day, he fell ill and soon died of pneumonia. The night of his illness, the play’s producer, John Houseman, wrote, “the basement had been filled… with unusual drumming and with chants more weird and horrible than anything that had been heard on stage.” The rumour—happily spread by Houseman, Welles and even the usually sensible Flanagan—that a powerful curse had been performed by the African drummers only added to the play’s intrigue.
Much of what was progressive in the 1930s would not look that way today. The choreographer Helen Becker, who called herself Tamiris, designed How Long, Brethren? (1937), a dance project featuring “several Negro songs of protest”. Although a black chorus provided the music, all of the dancers were white. Becker wrote in her unfinished memoir that “I understand the Negro people so well!” Today, it would look close to minstrelsy.
Many other productions were explicitly politically driven. One Third of a Nation (1938), whose set was a tenement which appeared to catch fire, covered the ills of social housing. Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1936) depicted a near-future America that had succumbed to fascism. The theatre’s directors were careful to avoid being accused of putting on propaganda. The director of promotion wrote a note forbidding any references to “dictatorships, pro or con” in press releases, and banned posters bearing a figure who looked too obviously like Adolf Hitler.
But any attempts to stave off criticism from the right didn’t work. In 1938, the House Un-American Activities Committee was established to investigate pro-Nazi and pro-communist sympathies. It was led by cigar-smoking Texas congressman Martin Dies—“an opportunistic, America-first, anti-immigrant, antilabor, racist politician with few scruples, for whom power and popularity mattered more than ideology”. He saw, in the Federal Theatre, a relatively easy target for his attempts to demonise FDR’s political agenda—as well as a means of enhancing his credentials as a rising figure in American politics.
At the Dies Committee, as it was subsequently known, witnesses alleged that the Federal Theatre’s plays had communist leanings and subverted American values. Joe Starnes, a congressman from Alabama, questioned Flanagan about her time studying theatre in Russia—where, he implied, she was likely radicalised.
He read from Flanagan’s own description of theatres having a “certain Marlowesque madness” and demanded to know whether Marlowe—Christopher, the 16th-century playwright—was a communist. Undeterred by the laughter that followed, he then accused “Mr Euripides” of teaching class consciousness.
Some critics argued that the programme’s art just wasn’t any good. Senator Clifton Woodrum held a copy of one play and promised to eat the whole manuscript if he found anything that contributed to America’s cultural or educational benefit.
But for the theatre’s defenders, good art wasn’t necessarily the point. Indiana senator Sherman Minton castigated those sneering at the play. “I don’t think the play is very ‘hot’ myself,” he said. “But here was a poor man, who sweats, perhaps, over that little play and tried to do the best he could with the tools he had at hand in order to make a dollar or two for his wife and children.” It’s hard to imagine such a defence being made for funding simply the labour of art, not the product, today.
Countering the attack of “un-American activity” was extremely difficult. As Maury Maverick, a liberal Texan congressman, put it: “Un-American is simply something that somebody else does not agree to.” Flanagan, meanwhile, ironically said her aim was to combat “un-American inactivity”—by giving Americans jobs.
As one congressman put it, ‘Un-American is simply something that somebody else does not agree to’
But the committee managed to move public opinion, and in 1939 legislators voted to eliminate the programme. Roosevelt grudgingly signed the legislation. After the Second World War, as Senator Joseph McCarthy whipped up anti-communist fear, the House Un-American Activities Committee would go on to investigate disloyalty and subversion more generally, leading to the blacklisting of hundreds of artists and Hollywood figures.
Shapiro makes the case that the strategies used in the successful campaign against the Federal Theatre Project formed a playbook that is still widely used today. And you can’t read the account of the project’s closure without thinking of modern Republicans, many of whom would call themselves defenders of free speech yet work to silence progressive voices. Last year, the New York Times reported that high school productions, including of Oklahoma! and Fences, as well as plays that deal with homosexuality or adultery, have been censored in red states after objections from right-leaning parents and officials. The first half of the 2023 to 2024 school year saw more than 4,000 book bans in America. Campaigners such as Moms for Liberty successfully pressure school administrators to remove popular fiction including The Handmaid’s Tale from their libraries.
Would a permanent Federal Theatre have changed any of this? Shapiro seems to think so. He argues: “A more vibrant theatrical culture extending across the land might well have led to a more informed citizenry, and by extension, a more equitable and resilient democracy.” Wishful thinking, perhaps. But its loss is still something to mourn.
When news of the closure reached actors performing Pinocchio on Broadway, they changed the play’s ending: instead of the puppet becoming a living boy, he dies. “Thus passed Pinocchio,” they announced. “Died June 30, 1939. Killed by act of Congress.”
Hallie Flanagan grieved her failure to save the theatre for the rest of her life. In her nursing home, her stepdaughter recorded, she would sometimes hear voices in the corridor. In moments of self-doubt, she’d wonder if they were whispering that she was a communist.
