American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA : When FDR Put the Nation to Work (43 page)

But the adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity did not hold true for the Theatre Project and the WPA’s other arts programs, because
Cradle
and the drama surrounding it caused conservatives to train their guns more squarely on these projects.

4. SACCO AND VANZETTI

T
he FTP was not alone in provoking the attentions of the right. The Federal Writers’ Project also helped cement the notion among conservatives that the arts projects were overly influenced by Communists and leftists of all stripes. Whatever truth there was to this, it was not initially the case.

After Vardis Fisher won his race in January 1937 to make Idaho’s the first state guide of the American Guide series to be published, the Writers’ Project went on to produce a series of state and city guides that met with great acclaim. The Washington, D.C., guide, which project director Henry Alsberg had hoped would precede Idaho’s, appeared that April. It was bound in black cloth, was 1,141 pages long, and weighed five and a half pounds. Jokes about its size were irresistible. Hefting it, Hopkins observed that it would make an excellent doorstop. Roosevelt, not to be outdone, asked, “Where is the steamer trunk that goes with it?”

Yet despite its intimidating bulk,
Washington: City and Capital
got reviews that echoed the praise for the Idaho guide. The lengthy gestation period now seemed to be worthwhile; reviewers such as the
New York Times’
R. L. Duffus wrote that the guides, “taken together, will enable us for the first time to hold the mirror up to all America.”

New England was the next to weigh in, not initially with the state guides but with a piece that fell into the project’s lap by accident.
The Cape Cod Pilot
was an idiosyncratic, anecdote-filled introduction to Cape Cod that writer Josef Berger had contracted with a local bookseller, Paul Smith, to produce long before he joined the Writers’ Project. Smith’s intention was to publish it under a new imprint, the Modern Pilgrim Press. Once the Writers’ Project hired Berger, he worked four days a week researching and writing content for the project’s Massachusetts guide, but spent his remaining time on his own book, which went to the printer in the spring of 1937. Soon afterward, two project administrators dropped in on Berger while he was reviewing his galley proofs, started reading, and then insisted on publishing
The Cape Cod Pilot
under the aegis of the Writers’ Project. After an initial protest, Berger agreed, with the stipulation that it would carry his own byline—the pseudonym Jeremiah Digges—and that he, not the government, would earn the royalties. The book appeared that June, met with universal praise, and immediately sold out its first two editions of 5,000 copies each.

Four of the New England state guides—Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Connecticut—appeared that summer and fall. The Massachusetts guide was the first of these, rolling off the press in August, but rather than garnering the praise and sales momentum that the earlier guides had generated,
Massachusetts: A Guide to Its Places and People
generated a storm of controversy. Once again, the enemies of the New Deal in general and the arts programs in particular found ammunition for attack.

Alsberg had inadvertently added to this storm. He had persuaded Ellen Woodward to journey to Boston for a public ceremony announcing the guide’s publication. Handing Massachusetts governor Charles F. Hurley a leather-bound copy, Woodward praised the federal government’s “helping hand to the development of our cultural resources.” Hurley echoed the comments he had made in the introduction, in which he wrote that he was “happy that this valuable work is being made available to the citizens of Massachusetts and the nation.”

But this mutual happiness was short-lived, for the next day the
Boston Traveler
published an incendiary story that counted the number of lines the book had given to the notorious Sacco and Vanzetti case. This case of two Italian American anarchists charged with bank robbery and murder had transfixed the nation during the Red Scare of the 1920s. Nicola Sacco and Bartolemeo Vanzetti were eventually convicted and executed in the Massachusetts electric chair, but in the seven years between the crime with which they were charged and their execution in August 1927, their case had become a touchstone for political divisions in America. One side held them to be “un-American,” and therefore guilty, primarily because they were radicals who had been involved in labor strikes and other forms of agitation. Progressives and liberals defended them, saying their trial had been flawed and prejudicial, and arguing that they were convicted less on the evidence than on their radicalism. Though all this was history by the time the Massachusetts guide appeared ten years later, the memories and divisions remained. When the
Traveler
wrote that the guide had devoted thirty-one lines to the Sacco-Vanzetti case but only fourteen to describe the Boston Tea Party and five for the Boston Massacre, the anti–New Deal press seized the opening and all hell broke loose.

“Sacco Vanzetti Permeate New WPA Guide,” read the
Traveler
’s headline. Others picked up the theme, and before long, an editorial lynch mob was in full cry, demanding that the books be seized and burned. Further readings revealed more “evidence” of the apparent radicalism of the Writers’ Project: passages that were deemed pro-labor and anti-establishment. Several Massachusetts mayors banned the book from their cities, and Governor Hurley now demanded that the writers responsible be fired.

Hopkins, who had other matters on his mind that August, when his wife, Barbara, was dying and he feared that he too had cancer, treated the outcry as an annoyance. Asked about it at a news conference, he said, “Lots of people might object to lots of things, but if we turn handsprings every time somebody objects, we could spend all day doing it.” He said he doubted he would delete the Sacco and Vanzetti section as requested. “Hopkins Jeers Book’s Critics,” went the headline in the
Boston Globe,
and the
Christian Science Monitor
soberly pronounced the matter a “melodramatic comic-tragedy.”

Dora Thea Hettwer, Alsberg’s secretary, suggested several changes in her red-penciled copy of the Massachusetts guide. One would have changed the reference to the “notorious” Sacco and Vanzetti trial to the “celebrated” trial, and another proposed eliminating references to the lack of indoor plumbing in Boston tenements, but most of her suggestions simply softened mentions of episodes in the state’s labor history. Few of these changes made it into print, however, and the guide sold out its 10,000-copy first edition and two editions more.

Still, the damage was real. The uproar over the Massachusetts guide drew attention to the struggles of the New York Writers’ Project office to retake its own project from its collection of opinionated, vocal radicals. Most of them were Stalinists and Trotskyites, and each group disdained the commitment of the other to class struggle. As a result, they warred incessantly, haranguing each other with pamphlets and invective. Each time a new manager tried to bring them into line, they found reasons to protest his politics. Indeed, they spent all their time objecting and none producing copy.

This esoteric foolishness was highlighted by other hijinks that told the public the project was not only radical, but also undisciplined and prey to the more common vices. Orrick Johns, the poet and former newspaper reporter who was hired to head the New York project after arguing that it took a radical to manage one, made the news in the fall of 1936 when a jealous husband caught Johns with his wife, beat him, doused his wooden leg with brandy, and set it on fire.

Johns recuperated and returned to work, but he was never able to bring peace among the warring factions, and he soon joined the ranks of those dismissed for ineffectiveness. The office’s main project, the New York City guide, was nowhere near completion. It would not appear until 1939. The New York State guide was even more hopelessly behind. It was being compiled by the state project office operating out of Albany, which was a dumping ground for political hacks who couldn’t write. Still, the guides that did appear continued to generate good press. So did the fiction and creative writing published in book form under the title
American Stuff
by the handful of serious writers in the New York project who worked on their own and reported to the office once a week with the tacit approval of Alsberg. Among these were Maxwell Bodenheim, Claude McKay, Harry Roskolenko, and Richard Wright, who had moved from Chicago. Eda Lou Walton, writing in the
New York Times Book Review,
said Wright’s “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” about growing up black in Mississippi, was a piece “that hit me squarely between the eyes,” and that the collection was evidence “that our WPA writers know their craft and know present-day America.” But the attempt to turn
American Stuff
into a New York–based magazine with contributions from WPA writers nationwide fell prey to the same internal divisions that were slowing progress on the New York State and New York City guides. The Stalinists and Trotskyites advanced their own versions of what the magazine should include and what the writing should reflect, and each side took issue with editorial appointments, with the result that the magazine itself was an undistinguished and only occasionally interesting miscellany.

The real result of all of the creative fury, the ideological haggling, and the sideshow distractions that were erupting in the theater and writers’ projects was to help arm conservatives against the projects. The view advanced that they were riddled with Communists, that they embraced every left-wing and labor cause, and that even if they sinned in no other way at all, they were at the very least propaganda wings of the New Deal. Vulnerable on so many fronts, they were increasingly subject to attack. By the summer of 1938, when the Dies Committee was ready to begin its hearings, the guns were aimed and ready to be fired.

5. IN THE CROSSHAIRS

R
epublican Representative J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey feasted on his hate for the New Deal. An investment banker before winning his House seat in the 1936 election, Thomas viewed its progressive reforms with almost pathological aversion. It was, he said in a 1938 radio broadcast, a plan “to sabotage the capitalist system.” Within the administration’s far-flung array of programs, Thomas reserved his harshest hostility for the Federal Theatre Project. He hurled his first accusations even before the Dies Committee hearings opened, when it was still interviewing witnesses privately. The theater project, said Thomas, was “a patronage vehicle for Communists,” in which “practically every play presented…'is sheer propaganda for Communism or the New Deal.” He vowed to give it a “thorough cleansing.”

Practically alone among the WPA’s adminstrators, Hallie Flanagan viewed these rumblings with alarm. When she read Thomas’s charge in a New York paper that project workers were required to belong to the pro-Communist Workers Alliance, she issued an immediate denial. But the Dies Committee’s potential to do serious damage had not penetrated the WPA’s hierarchy because Flanagan had been reined in. David K. Niles, who headed the Information Division and advised Hopkins on press matters, had told her that only his office was to respond to press reports. At this point the WPA’s official policy on the Dies Committee was apparently to laugh at it or ignore it altogether.

But as Flanagan wrote later, “It never seemed funny to me.” Indeed, as the committee opened hearings and immediately shifted its focus from Nazis to Communists, Dies trotted out a parade of witnesses hurling charges against the theater project and completely ignored suggestions that he try to balance the testimony by calling project officials or theater experts. Flanagan found it “increasingly incredible” that the WPA let the charges go unanswered.

One early star witness was a woman named Hazel Huffman. Dies announced her as representing “a committee of theatrical workers on relief.” Huffman was in fact strongly prejudiced. She had worked in the mail room of the New York project office, where her duties included handling the mail and, unbeknownst to Flanagan, opening her letters and reporting their contents to the New York administrator, Somervell, who was seeking to confirm his own suspicions of leftist influence. Huffman had been discovered and dismissed before her testimony, but Dies ignored this history and her meager credentials, and treated her as an authority on a wide range of project activities. She flung charges far and wide: most of the workers had no theatrical experience, a Communist paper was circulated among employees, she had seen portraits of Lenin and Stalin in a meeting room, and while she could not prove Flanagan was a Communist, the Theatre Project head was “an active participant in communist activities.” The proof Huffman offered was that a play of Flanagan’s had been described in the Communist magazine
New Masses
as the “best revolutionary play yet produced in America.”

Testimony from other witnesses produced more of the same: a “dangerous un-American atmosphere on the project” Communist propaganda sold on government property; a blond Austrian-born actress who complained that she was asked for a date by a Negro, and that blacks and whites on the project fraternized “like Communists” in pursuit of social equality and race mixing.

Flanagan maintained her public silence through September but wrote Dies asking that she and the six regional directors who made up the project’s policy board be allowed to testify. They were the only people, she noted, who could speak to the direction and intentions of the theater project. But she received no reply, the hearings continued, and the WPA continued to officially ignore the wild charges they produced.

Not only was Flanagan concerned by the damage the project was suffering; she was also mystified by the way Thomas interpreted its plays. He had even found fault with
Prologue to Glory,
about young Abraham Lincoln: because the play portrayed Lincoln “battling with the politicians,” it was “simply a propaganda play to prove that all politicians are crooked.” Flanagan had considered it a patriotic look at the sixteenth president, and when she encountered Thomas on a train from Washington to New York she approached him in the hope that she could decipher his objections. He described a scene in which the Lincoln character had objected to an abstract debate topic—the value of bees versus ants—and suggested instead that “the subjects for debate before this forum ought to be alive—subjects for action, useful for living.”

“That is Communist talk,” she recounted him saying.

Indeed, Flanagan herself was perplexed by much of the adverse reaction, not just from Thomas but from some project workers, even with plays that had no obvious political content. The New Jersey project was rehearsing
Created Equal,
a drama that retold the history of the Constitution. Half the cast supported the play, but the others claimed it was un-American, and sent Thomas a petition saying it should not be allowed to open. This contingent believed that the play’s stress on the roles of ordinary citizens in the revolution, as opposed to leaders, smacked of “collectivism.” They also thought that when the characters of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Lincoln did speak, their lines made them sound like Roosevelt. Ludicrous though charges such as these were, Flanagan could not find much humor in them; their implications for the future of the project were just too scary.

It was little consolation that the Federal Theatre Project was neither the only target of the committee nor the only one being accused with neither documentation of the charges nor a chance to answer them. Colonel John P. Frey, an official of the American Federation of Labor, charged that the AFL’s competitor, the CIO—the Congress of Industrial Organizations—was riddled with Communists. Asked to give a source for a specific charge, Frey said, “I cannot openly give the source of my information.” But he assured Dies that he was convinced of its authenticity, and the testimony was allowed to stand. Similarly, a committee investigator charged that Communists dominated the Hollywood movie industry, and that labor organizer Harry Bridges was a Communist guilty of terrorism, crop sabotage, and murder in fomenting labor strife on the West Coast. Bridges’s accuser was Edward F. Sullivan, a longtime labor spy who had actively supported anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic activities in the United States. And when the HUAC spotlight turned again to the WPA and one Edwin P. Banta testified to Communist domination of the Federal Writers’ Project in New York, he turned out to be a professional informer and a Nazi sympathizer.

Yet it was not until Dies allowed Michigan Republicans to hurl charges against the state’s Democratic governor, Frank Murphy, who was locked in a tight reelection battle, that the administration made any response at all. The so-called issue was Murphy’s handling of the General Motors sit-down strike in January 1937. Fearing lethal violence, he had resisted calling out the National Guard to remove the strikers. GM capitulated, and much of the auto industry except for Ford had unionized as a result. The parade of politically motivated witnesses against Murphy included Detroit police officials, the Flint city manager, and a judge, all of whom testified to Communist activity in Michigan, Communist control of the unions, Communist links to Murphy, and Murphy’s “treasonous” failure to remove the union members from GM property. As usual, Dies called no rebuttal witnesses and did not allow Murphy to respond.

When the polls showed Murphy losing ground, Roosevelt finally struck back. He issued a statement accusing Dies of allowing the committee “to be used in a flagrantly unfair and un-American attempt to influence an election.” It had made “no effort to get at the truth, either by calling for facts to support mere personal opinion, or by allowing facts or personal opinion on the other side,” he said.

But Dies was unmoved; the administration, he said, was trying to discredit the committee’s work with “a well-planned campaign of misrepresentation, ridicule, and sarcasm.” He also announced that he planned to investigate Communism among Democratic officeholders in California, Minnesota, and Ohio. The California charges were discredited, and the election had passed before the committee could turn to Minnesota and Ohio, but in a close race Murphy lost.

The reporters and photographers who were the only public witnesses to the sensation-mongering parade were unsure what to make of it. They felt they were being used, yet the charges of Communism in high places were too juicy to ignore. The Dies Committee hearings sold newspapers. Dies shrugged off accusations that he was allowing witnesses to make wild, defamatory, and unsubstantiated charges. He blamed this on the administration-backed leaders of the House, who had given him a budget of only $25,000 to conduct his investigations after he had asked for $100,000. What was more, he said, the WPA and other agencies had ignored his requests for investigative help. The WPA had lent staff to help the La Follette Civil Liberties committee, but Hopkins refused it to Dies on grounds that its most recent relief appropriation had stipulated that its personnel not work for other agencies. Attorney General Homer Cummings declined Dies’s request for FBI agents to work with the committee as investigators. The Labor Department under Frances Perkins also turned him down.

“I offered them the chance to put their own choice of attorneys, clerks, investigators, office boys, everything,” said Dies. “Without help from the administration…'I have still gone on the best I could.”

He did acknowledge that the witnesses had shortcomings. “Some of it’s no good. I know that. I admit it. I don’t believe a lot of the testimony myself.” But what could he do? “I haven’t the money or the trained men,” he pleaded. “I have to rely on the testimony of witnesses who are willing to testify.”

And an “unfortunately large number” of them, according to an article in
Public Opinion Quarterly,
were “professional patriots, vigilantes, political stool-pigeons, labor spies, anti-Semites, Nazi-sympathizers, and criminals.”

Thus the hearings continued: a riot of false accusations, publicity ploys, and grandstanding. And as the “evidence” from these fusillades against the WPA and the two arts projects mounted, it was countered by nothing at all. Again Flanagan wrote to Dies asking to appear before the committee. She was concerned for the jobs of thousands of theater project workers, she said, and that there was much good to be said about the project, if only the committee would listen. Yet again, her letters were ignored. So were those of playwright Emmet Lavery, the head of the project’s Play Bureau, which coordinated the selection and clearance of plays nationally, who told the committee that he had never permitted a Communist play and wished to be heard. Like Flanagan, he never received a reply.