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By Root 979 0

became available to people across the country. The project split theater, as Flanagan noted, between commercial theater, whose aim was to make money, and those in the public theater who wanted to make a new social order. By the end of the first year the project had more than fifteen thousand men and women on its payroll, and by the time the project was shut down four years later, its productions had played to more than thirty million people in more than two hundred theaters and school auditoriums, on portable stages, and in public parks across the country.27 Those working in the project were professional actors, directors, designers, writers, clowns, and musicians left unemployed by the financial collapse. They produced high-quality works that spoke to ordinary lives and the misery that had engulfed the country. Orson Welles and John Houseman directed the Negro Theatre Unit of the Federal Theatre Project in Harlem and set Macbeth in the Haitian court of King Henri Christophe. Voodoo witch doctors were recruited to play the weird sisters. The incidental music was composed by Virgil Thomson. The play, which premiered at the Lafayette Theatre on April 14, 1935, was sold out for each of its nightly performances. New plays, classical drama, modern drama, radio drama, puppet plays; Yiddish-, Spanish-, Italian-, and German-language theater; children’s theater, dance drama, musicals, religious drama, vaudeville, and circuses—hundreds and hundreds of productions in every state of the union poured out of the project. It was the high point of American theater.

The productions—which took on factory owners, bankers, coal mine owners, government bureaucrats and industrialists—led to howls of protest from the power elite. It Can’t Happen Here, a drama that illustrated how fascism could take hold in the United States, was based on the novel by Sinclair Lewis. It opened in twenty-one theaters in seventeen states on October 27, 1936. The Hollywood Citizen-News reported that “the project has been the target of criticism from sources holding the play will antagonize sympathizers of the Hitler and Mussolini regimes.” Welles and Houseman were preparing to mount a production called The Cradle Will Rock, a musical written by Marc Blitzstein—who would be blacklisted in the 1950s—set in “Steel-town, U.S.A.” The musical followed the efforts of a worker, Larry Foreman, to unionize steel workers. His nemesis is the heartless industrialist Mr. Mister, who controlled the press, the church, the arts, the local university, politics, the community’s social organizations, and even the local doctor. The Cradle Will Rock spared no one, from Mr. Mister’s philanthropic wife and spoiled children to Reverend Salvation, who used religion to bless war and capitalism, to the corrupt editor of the local paper, Editor Daily. Mr. Mister, a trustee of the local university, forced the college president to fire professors who did not laud the manly arts of war and capitalism to students. The artists Yasha and Dauber, considered themselves too “cultured” and dependent on the largesse of Mr. Mister’s family to engage in politics. They sang with Mrs. Mister: And we love Art for Art’s sake,

It’s smart, for Art’s sake,

To Part, for Art’s sake,

With your heart, for Art’s sake,

And your mind, for Art’s sake,

Be Blind, for Art’s sake,

And Deaf for Art’s sake,

And dumb, for Art’s sake,

They kill, for Art’s sake,

All the Art for Art’s Sake28

Mr. Mister and Reverend Salvation, who preached peace and love before World War I was declared and blessed the war once it began, sang a duet:War! War! Kill all the dirty Huns!

And those Austro-Hungarians

War! War! We’re entering the war!

The Lusitania’s an unpaid debt!

Remember Troy! Remember Lafayette!

Remember the Alamo! Remember our womanhood!

Remember those innocent unborn babies!

Don’t let George do it, you do it,

Make the world safe for democracy!

Make the world safe for liberty!

Make the world safe for steel and the Mister family!29

“Of course it’s peace we’re for,” Reverend Salvation added. “This is the