American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA : When FDR Put the Nation to Work (42 page)

2. THE RISE OF THE RED-BAITERS

I
n 1930, a young lawyer named Martin Dies Jr. had followed his father into the House of Representatives from Texas’s Second District, in the east Texas oil patch around Beaumont. A tall man with a gunslinger’s swagger and eyes that squinted like a cowpoke scanning the range for a lost steer, at thirty he was the youngest member of the Congress, and when Roosevelt first entered the White House, Dies joined his fellow Democrats in supporting the New Deal. By 1937, however, under the mentoring guidance of his fellow Texans Vice President Garner and House Majority Leader Sam Rayburn, he had joined the growing ranks of conservative defectors whose goal became to dismantle the New Deal coalition. These southern and rural conservatives, allied with Republicans, implacably opposed unions, wage-and-hours legislation, and the third term that they had now begun to suspect Roosevelt desired.

The following spring, Dies found a new springboard for the pursuit of this agenda, and for enhancing his own political reputation. Up to that point his notoriety, such as it was, rested on his unofficial chairmanship of a loose gathering of House members who loved to hear themselves talk and called themselves, only half in jest, the “Demagogues Club.”

Congressional investigating committees had had a largely positive effect on American political affairs and, on occasion, on the reputations and political fortunes of their star performers. Senator Thomas Walsh, Roosevelt’s choice for attorney general until he died on his way to the inauguration in 1933, had revealed corruption at high levels of the Warren Harding administration in hearings on the Teapot Dome oil leasing scandal in 1923 and 1924. Investigator Ferdinand Pecora, working under both Republican and Democratic chairmen of the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, had exposed practices that led to several banking and securities reform laws in 1933 and 1934. Since 1936, Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette had chaired a committee examining the methods used by employers to squelch unions and collective bargaining. These ranged from workplace spies to private police forces to gangs of strikebreaking thugs. Its title was a mouth-clotting gruel of Washington verbiage—the Subcommittee Investigating Violations of Free Speech and the Rights of Labor—but most people called it the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee, and its hearings produced evidence that was cited on behalf of the wage-and-hours law before it was passed in 1938. As a matter of course, each of these committees took testimony from both sides of the issues it was studying, and allowed witnesses to have their lawyers present.

But investigative committees also presented temptations that were hard to resist, especially when patriotism could be invoked. In 1930 and 1931, Republican representative Hamilton Fish of New York had toured the country as the chair of a committee investigating Communist activities in the United States, and after hearing from 275 witnesses in fourteen cities introduced bills to suspend the rights of free speech for Communists. These failed to pass, and the committee’s overheated report was dismissed as witch-hunting: professional patriotism. The dawn of the Hitler era brought another House committee into being. Chaired by Massachusetts Democrat John W. McCormack, it was charged with investigating Nazi and other forms of propaganda. This committee took 4,350 pages of evenhanded testimony but then lost credibility because of the anti-German rants of one of its members, New York Democrat Samuel Dickstein, on the House floor, after which an irritated Congress let the committee die.

McCormack’s had been the first committee to have a title that specified its the task as investigating “un-American activities,” and early in 1938, two incidents led to its revival. That April, on East 86th Street in New York City, in the middle of a neighborhood of German immigrants called Yorkville, a hundred or so Jewish members of the American Legion mingled with the crowd of 3,500 entering the Yorkville Casino for a special event. The German-American Bund, an obstreperous group of pro-Nazi ethnic Germans formed in 1936 and headed by a dedicated anti-Semite named Fritz Kuhn, was throwing a party to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. Young men in the audience were clad in gray storm trooper uniforms bedecked with eagles, iron crosses, and swastikas, which they also wore on goosestepping weekend marches through the neighborhood. When the program in the casino started, German-speaking orators harangued the crowd with recitations of Nazi Germany’s accomplishments. Finally one of the Legionnaires rose and shouted out a pointed question: was this crowd German or American? “Storm troopers” hauled out billy clubs and descended on the questioner. The Legionnaires stood up, put on the blue overseas veterans’ caps they had been hiding in their pockets, and waded into the fight. By the time the police broke up the melee, seven were injured, and two Bund members and two Legionnaires were in jail on riot charges.

The fight at the Yorkville Casino occurred after earlier reports about a German spy ring operating in the United States. What with Nazi spies and the Bund’s would-be storm troopers parading on the streets of New York and other cities with large German populations, Congressman Dies saw his opportunity.

Soon afterward, he rose in the House to argue that an investigative committee be appointed. He stressed the need to monitor the Nazi threat. “I am not inclined to look under every bed for a Communist,” he said, “but I can say to this House that there is in my possession a mass of information showing the establishment and operation of some thirty-two Nazi camps in the U.S., that all of these camps have been paid for, that they claim a total membership of four hundred and eighty thousand…'that in these camps men are marching and saluting the swastika.” He also charged that among the Nazis’ aims was assassinating Roosevelt.

Dies offered no source for his “mass of information,” and the
Public Opinion Quarterly
ascribed “heated inaccuracy” to his claim that there were almost half a million Nazis in the country. Nevertheless, the House approved Dies’s resolution in a voice vote on May 26, 1938, and the Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities was reborn. The leadership, still displeased with Dickstein’s harangues, left him off the new committee and named Dies chairman. Its charge was to investigate the extent and character of anti-American propaganda and subversion, whether of foreign or domestic origin. This last distinguished it from the original McCormack committee that had been authorized to look only at foreign-generated activities, and it gave the new committee freer rein. Nor was it aimed specifically at Nazis, though that was clearly the intent when it was formed.

Five of the committee’s seven members were conservatives. Two of these were Republicans: J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey and Noah Mason of Illinois. The Democrats, in addition to Dies, were Arthur Healey of Massachusetts, Harold Mosier of Ohio, John J. Dempsey of New Mexico, and Joe Starnes of Alabama. Only Healey and Dempsey could be termed even remotely liberal. After almost three months of preliminary interviews, Dies convened hearings in August. They were closed to the public, but open to reporters and photographers. He announced as the hearings began that the committee would not permit them “to become a three-ring circus. Neither will we permit any individual or organization to use the committee as a sounding board to obtain publicity or to injure others.” The investigation would be “fair and impartial,” and witnesses would not be permitted to smear innocent people, make reckless charges, or indulge in character assassination. “The chair,” he said, “wishes to make it plain that the committee is not ‘after anyone.’”

Indeed, Dies made a brief stab at investigating Nazi agitation. The committee’s first subpoena went out to George Sylvester Viereck, a German-born poet and writer who had been an apologist for German causes since before the world war. After the ascension of Hitler and the Nazis, the German consulate in New York paid him to promote the German point of view, which he did through magazine articles, friendships he cultivated with isolationists in Congress, and advice to German officials on American attitudes. Viereck initially defied the subpoena, saying he was booked to sail for Europe where, according to Dies, he was going to meet with Hitler at his retreat in the Bavarian mountains. Then he agreed to meet with the committee, and Dies consented to his departure after reaching a “gentleman’s agreement” in which Viereck promised to testify on his return. A single day followed in which two other witnesses—a committee staffer and a former member of the Chicago chapter of the Bund—testified about the activities of Nazi groups. But thereafter, the Dies Committee largely abandoned its original emphasis on right-wing sedition and shifted its focus to Communism and labor organizing. Despite its chaiman’s initial promises, the hearings rapidly degenerated into anti-Communist hysteria, paranoid rantings, and political and personal score settling.

None of the fevered testimony the committee heard was substantiated, and none of it was contradicted by opposing witnesses. The sheer volume of its accusations was astounding. A few days of testimony produced charges that 483 newspapers, 280 labor unions, and 640 organizations, including the Boy Scouts, the Camp Fire Girls, and various Roman Catholic groups, were “Communistic.” The parade of colorful and high-strung crackpots and the lurid fantasies they related produced a bumper crop of headlines. The columns of the
New York Times, Washington Post,
and other major dailies swelled with coverage of the hearings. The
Times
alone devoted more than 500 column inches to the committee in August and September.

Much of this torrent of accusations targeted Roosevelt and the members of his administration who were most outspokenly opposed to Dies’s tactics, notably Harold Ickes and Labor Secretary Frances Perkins. But one committee member had the WPA, and especially its theater and writing projects, in his gunsights. These most politically oriented of the arts projects had in all but a few cases operated under the assumptions Hopkins had created with his promise of a “free, adult, uncensored” theater. But where playwrights, producers, and writers saw art and drama in the struggles of human beings and institutions in society, politicians saw Marxian class warfare. And while the arts project administrators believed—naively—that art stood on its own apart from politics, the warriors of the right admitted to no such distinction. They saw only sedition on the march, and they went all out to stop it. Thus when HUAC—the committee was often referred to by its initials or its sounded-out acronym—declared war on these projects in the late summer and fall of 1938, the administration and the WPA were unprepared. They failed to take the opposition seriously until it was too late.

3. THE “RUNAWAY OPERA”

T
he turmoil of the year before had lingered in the memories of conservatives. When the New York arts units took to the streets with strikes and protests against the pending job cuts in 1937, it had hardened the conviction that those projects had to go. The obvious sin was that they were radical hotbeds that flaunted their radicalism under the protection of the Congress itself, in the form of the rule—ironically designed mainly to ensure that Republicans had access to WPA jobs—that said no one could be barred from working for the WPA because of political affiliation. They also exemplified the ever-present dilemma confronting publicly funded arts: the tension between creative free expression and political sensibilities.

This tension had been present in one form or another in the theater and writing projects, and to a lesser extent in the art project, since their beginning. Hallie Flanagan had learned early on of the Federal Theatre’s vulnerability to oversight when she was forced to cancel the Living Newspaper
Ethiopia
over its depiction of Mussolini. But Flanagan was the least likely of WPA administrators to shrink from a fight. The “wild little woman” described by producer John Houseman was unafraid to stand foursquare behind her conviction that the theater might become a force for social change in the public interest. She was “a fanatic,” Houseman wrote, meaning it kindly. Under Flanagan, the project had continued to produce plays and Living Newspapers that saw the issues of the day through a lens of New Deal social activism and reform.

The Living Newspapers seemed especially designed to provoke conservatives by their choice of subjects, if not their very titles.
Power
told the story of the TVA, presented as a case of government aiding consumers in a region ignored by private power companies. “Some people will say it’s propaganda,” Harry Hopkins enthused after seeing it. “Well, I say what of it? It’s propaganda to educate the consumer…'It’s about time.”
Injunction Granted
reported on the American labor movement in pro-labor terms that even Flanagan objected to, sending its writer and director a letter saying, “I will not have the Federal Theatre used politically.” Still, she called for no changes in the script.
One-Third of a Nation
looked scathingly at slum life, deploying its actors on a stage overhung by fire escapes and battered garbage cans in a mute statement of what it meant to be, as the president had put it in his 1937 inaugural address, “ill-housed.”
Spirochete,
a production of the theater project in Chicago, told the story of syphilis and the fight, in those days before the availability of penicillin, to bring the deadly venereal disease under control.

Social reactionaries were not the only ones who bridled at these treatments, although some of the responses could not have been foreseen.
Spirochete,
for which Surgeon General Thomas Parran and noted
Microbe Hunters
author Paul de Kruif had helped supervise the research, was supported by doctors, public health systems, and the press everywhere it opened. But the Knights of Columbus chapter in Philadelphia protested the play’s mentioning the introduction of syphilis to Europe by Christopher Columbus’s crewmen returning from America, and lobbied successfully to have his name omitted.

It was the musical
The Cradle Will Rock,
however, that so inflamed conservatives against the arts programs that it brought to a head the ongoing war between the WPA’s creative workers and its politically wary administrators. In the process it also provided one of the singular moments in the theatrical history of the United States.

The play was the story of a steel strike. It was as current as any of the Living Newspapers, and so were the passions it stirred up. Marc Blitzstein had written it in 1936, but the following winter and spring had brought an uncanny reality to his imaginings. In March 1937, when U.S. Steel recognized the steelworkers union, smaller steel producers had continued to fight the union with strikebreakers, private police, and guns. The United Auto Workers had unionized General Motors with its six-week sit-down strike, and strikes had also shut down the Chrysler and Hudson auto factories. Union sentiment was at a high, but so was the outrage of conservatives over the sit-downs, plant takeovers that they viewed as crimes against property. Blitzstein’s play took the union view. His none-too-subtle characters included a grasping steel baron named Mr. Mister; a poor steel-town woman, Moll, forced by hunger into prostitution; and a labor hero, Larry Foreman. Houseman and Orson Welles, who had moved from the Negro theater to the classical theater in the New York project, decided that same March that
The Cradle Will Rock
would be their next production and cast it.

If
Cradle
dramatized the labor-management divide, the WPA itself was being torn by similar issues. The job cuts brought on by the mirage of an improving economy and the ensuing protests had galvanized the ever-busy Communists. Already represented in the leadership of the Workers Alliance, where Communist Herbert Benjamin was the secretary-treasurer, they now used the fear of pink slips to step up recruiting for both the party and the union. In fact, president David Lasser was fighting a losing battle against the Communists’ growing influence on the union’s executive board. The May 27 one-day strike of arts project and white-collar workers in New York idled not only actors, writers, artists, musicians, and dancers, but also architects, engineers, and teachers, a total of some 10,000 workers. Individual performance units conducted their own sporadic strikes, which often morphed into all-night sit-downs in the company of their sympathetic audiences. The dance unit of the theater project concluded a recital at the Nora Bayes Theatre on West 44th Street by occupying the theater overnight and mingling with audience members in the seats and on the stage, while other arts workers and supporters picketed outside, forcing police to close the street. Flanagan told the American Theatre Council that the project workers were “striking for what was once described as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Actions like these drew press coverage that helped to paint WPA workers as ingrates who were not sufficiently thankful for their public jobs. People who never liked the arts programs to begin with now saw their dislike vindicated. Meanwhile, Houseman and Welles speeded up the pace of their rehearsals.

As May ended and June began, tensions on the labor front escalated further. On Memorial Day 1937, the Chicago police shot striking workers at the Republic Steel plant in South Chicago. (Ten would die, and the La Follette committee hearings would reveal that seven of them had been shot in the back.) Five thousand protesters shut down the business district of Lansing, Michigan, over the arrests of union pickets. Johnstown, Ohio, was placed under martial law after a night of riots. Akron, Ohio, and Pontiac, Michigan, had already experienced labor riots. In those days before the passage of the wage-and-hours law, both sides were battling not only for a stake in the economic recovery that appeared to be at hand but also for their starkly different versions of what was best for the country. And as they fought, rumors began to circulate in Washington that
Cradle
was a dangerous play.

In the second week of June, cuts caused by the new lower WPA appropriation were announced. The arts projects across the nation were taking a 30 percent hit that would eliminate entirely the theater components in Delaware, Rhode Island, Nebraska, and Texas. Seventeen hundred New York theater project workers received pink slips. In Harlem, a Lafayette Theatre audience joined the cast and crew of a Negro Theatre production in an all-night sit-in. A Brahms concert at the Federal Theatre of Music, put on by the music project, ended similarly. Houseman and Welles redoubled their efforts to finish their production, assuming that if they were able to open before the end of June, they would be spending this fiscal year’s money, so would not be affected by the cuts. They set June 16 for the first of two weeks of public previews, with the official opening two weeks later, on July 2. The official opening would trigger reviews, but in all other respects the performances would be the same.

On June 12, after more than 14,000 tickets had been sold, an announcement from Washington stunned all the arts projects. Citing the budget cuts and ensuing reorganization, it barred “any new play, musical performance, or art gallery” from opening before July 1. The ban included
Cradle
’s previews.

Flanagan viewed this as “obviously censorship in a different guise.” Indeed, she said, it was “more than a case of censorship. It marked a changing point of view in Washington,” and one that she feared would prove disastrous.

Cradle
had by then absorbed a large investment in rehearsal time and in the construction of Welles’s elaborate sets. Flanagan appealed for an exception, but to no avail. Houseman opened the Maxine Elliott Theatre on June 14 and rounded up an audience for the final rehearsal. The next day WPA guards sent by Colonel Brehon Somervell, the New York administrator, moved in and cordoned off the theater. This was followed by a flurry of regulations, from both the administration and unfriendly unions, that seemed designed specifically to keep
Cradle
from being seen.

But Houseman and Welles were determined to mount the play regardless of the consequences. They sneaked past the WPA “cossacks” guarding the Maxine Elliott and set up a war room in a downstairs powder room. From there, using the still-open phone lines, they tried to find another theater while reassuring the theater clubs and others who had purchased tickets that they would open somewhere. Meanwhile, another bombshell dropped. Actors’ Equity, the theatrical union, ruled that a company that had rehearsed a play for one producer could not take the stage for another producer without permission from the first. Houseman and Welles were the new producers by default; the Federal Theatre had been the old one and was not likely to grant permission, effectively keeping the cast of
Cradle
off the stage. The ruling said nothing, however, about the actors singing or speaking from elsewhere in the theater. The powder room war council decided this meant they could perform as long as they did not take the stage.

On the afternoon of June 16, the audience gathered outside the theater, along with reporters and the simply curious, and everyone waited. Houseman gave an assistant $10 and sent her out to rent a piano and find a truck to bring it to a destination that had yet to be determined.

Alternative venues fell through one by one. All seemed lost until, at 7:40, twenty minutes before curtain time, the distraught group in the powder room finally focused on a theatrical real estate agent they had been ignoring. He had been trying to offer them the Venice Theatre, twenty-one blocks north on Broadway. Houseman snapped it up for $100 for the night, and the troupe, the audience, and the growing crowd of curiosity seekers began making their way north by cab, the subway, and on foot.

At the Venice, the piano arrived, the curtain time was pushed back to nine o’clock, and monumental exercises in improvisation began. The lead actors—Will Geer as Mr. Mister and Howard da Silva as Larry Foreman—were part of the small non-relief contingent who didn’t need their jobs in order to eat. Houseman had told the cast members who were on relief that he would understand if they took the safe course and chose not to perform their parts, even though they were technically within their rights as long as they weren’t onstage. At a little after nine, before a standing-room-only crowd, the performance began.

Blitzstein sat at the piano on an otherwise bare stage. He was prepared to be the entire show, playing and singing and reading the stage directions. But as he laid down the first bars of the opening number and started to sing, the audience gradually realized with a shock and a thrill that he was not singing by himself. The spotlight moved into the audience and settled on a frightened redhead wearing a green dress. It was Olive Stanton, the young relief worker playing Moll, standing at her seat. Houseman recalled that she was “glassy-eyed, stiff with fear, only half audible at first in the huge theatre but gathering strength with every note.” When Blitzstein caught on, he shut up and let her sing. Her bravery braced her fellow actors. The audience applauded the end of her number and Blitzstein had uttered only the next stage cue before Stanton’s partner in the next scene rose and spoke his part from ninety feet away. From that uncertain opening the momentum gathered, with actors rising in the orchestra, the balcony, the boxes. Blitzstein still had to speak some parts, and some actors filled in for others, but the chorus sang, and even the union accordionist, who had been part of the orchestra now barred from performing, began to play along with Blitzstein while staying carefully out of sight. At the end, with Larry Foreman’s triumph over the corrupt and frightened Mr. Mister lingering in the fading strains of the title song, the curtain fell. For a beat: dead silence. Then the crowd, 2,000 strong, went wild.

The standing, cheering ovation might have been expected. In the pro-labor audience, Blitzstein had in effect been preaching to the choir. But the crowd was applauding more than the experience of seeing its own convictions brought to life. The play’s renegade performance had transcended its content to become an event in itself, with the supreme irony that it also exposed conflicts between management and labor.

The “runaway opera” made all the city’s front pages the next day. The publicity allowed Houseman and Welles to stage a two-week run of
Cradle
privately, performed by the same WPA actors on the maximum two-week leave they were allowed before they lost their relief status. Later, Houseman and Welles mounted the production successfully at their new Mercury Theatre, formed after Welles resigned from the FTP and Houseman was fired under a new rule which said that only American citizens could work for the WPA. (Art Project painter Willem de Kooning, who had arrived in the United States as a stowaway from Holland, was forced to resign as a result of the same rule.)