The New Deal for Artists (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Thomas Doherty

Written, directed, and produced by Wieland Schulz-Keil in collaboration with Olaf Hansen, Lawrence Pitkethly, and Anson Rabinbach; edited by Waldemar Korszeniowski, Jim Burgess, and Trudy Bagdon; cinematography by Mike Shea, Mario Masini, and Barbara Becker; sound by Rosetta Rust and Sukhdeo Doobay; music by Bill Winnawer; narrated by Orson Welles. B&W and color, 90 min., 2021, originally telecast in 1981. A Corinth Films release.

Written and directed by Wieland Schulz-Keil, a German filmmaker whose unconscious was colonized by the Americans; introduced by diehard Popular Fronter Studs Terkel, author of Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970); and narrated by Orson Welles, who was there for the opening nights, The New Deal for Artists is a celebration of four of the more high-profile abbreviations in the alphabet soup of agencies created in the heady days of FDR’s basically reformist but still revolutionary New Deal. To beat back the horrors of the Great Depression, the federal government, for the first time in American history, recognized a duty to alleviate the suffering of the one third of the nation (and that was a conservative estimate) who were ill-fed, ill-housed, and ill-clothed. No less remarkably, the feds sought to nurture an appetite for literature, painting, theater, and photography with a phalanx of kindred bureaucracies—the Federal Writer’s Project (FWP), the Federal Art Project (FAP), and the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), all under the umbrella of the omnibus make-work agency, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration (after 1937, the Farm Security Administration [FSA]), whose special province was photography. (The film does not address the New Deal’s limited ventures into motion picture production, notably Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938). FDR knew not to compete with his friends in Hollywood.)

First telecast by WNET on July 5, 1981, the documentary—exceptionally rich in archival footage and eloquent eyewitnesses—has been released by Corinth Films in a remastered version, digitally restored from the 16mm negative. At the time of the original telecast, the film served as an implied rebuke to the efforts of the Reagan administration to defund PBS and NEH for tilting too far to the left, the selfsame tendency that doomed their spiritual predecessors. Then as now—and then before in the 1930s—debates over federal subvention of the arts served as a proxy for other kinds of ideological warfare.  

Schulz-Keil’s sympathies are unabashed: the film unspools with the didactic certainty of a labor anthem sung by Pete Seeger, where you are either a union man or a thug for J. H. Blair. FDR (“the hero of the hour”) is a benevolent patriarch, his beaming profile (the iconic portrait with the cigarette holder clenched in his teeth jauntily pointed upward, the tobacco delivery system long since airbrushed out of stamps and statues) offering the American people (“my friends,” in his fireside chats) surcease from suffering and reassurance that a steadfast and sympathetic pilot was at the wheel. “The New Deal promised to restore meaning to the lives of millions,” intones narrator Welles. “Jobs were created for thousands of musicians, painters, actors, dancers, and photographers,” an infusion of cash that gave rise to “an unprecedented artistic renaissance” and spawned “the beginning of a truly popular culture.” The largess sustained a generation of artists in their chosen vocations and saved them from a lifetime of quiet desperation in the straight life. “That $23.86!” Schulz-Keil exclaimed to The New York Times in 1981, marveling that his interview subjects still recalled their paycheck down to the cent. “The first thing they remember today is that magical figure!”

By now the story of the hand the New Deal dealt the arts is familiar and oft-told, the topic of innumerable Ken Burns–style, or Ken Burns-made, PBS American Experience and American Masters episodes, but when Schulz-Keil first pitched the project, no U.S. network expressed interest in financing. His fellow Germans stepped up to bankroll the film, which aired in 1978 on German television in four one-hour episodes. For the American telecast, PBS flagship WNET insisted the quartet be cut into a single documentary for a ninety-minute slot. (It’s a shame the Corinth DVD didn’t include the original German shows; some fascinating footage must have been left on the cutting room floor.)

In 1976, propelled by deutschmarks, Schulz-Keil took to the road—by automobile not boxcar—and interviewed some fifty-five directors, writers, painters, actors, and bureaucrats. He hit the sweet spot for archival retrieval and eyewitness testimony about the momentous events of the first half of the twentieth century, a period that lasted roughly from the mid-Sixties to the mid-Eighties, when most of the principal players were alive, alert, and happy to talk, and motion picture equipment was mobile and easily set up. The lineup of talent with first-hand expertise confirms the old saw about doing oral history: “better to be five years too soon than one day too late.” (When I first watched the film, I realized that the only on-camera eyewitness still alive was Norman Lloyd, age 106. Two days later, Lloyd passed away.)

The film tracks in turn the four major arts patronized by the New Deal. Photography wound up under the aegis of the Farm Security Administration because Rexford Guy Tugwell, the former Columbia economics professor FDR tapped to lead the agency, and Roy Stryker, the dynamic head of the Historical Section, understood the power of the still image to make vivid the poverty of rural America. They also understood that the bone-dry, beaten-down heartland was experiencing a blight of historic magnitude. “To have a record of it seemed very important at the time,” understates Tugwell.  

The men and women behind the camera looked upon themselves as “sociologists with cameras,” recalls veteran Arthur Rothstein, progressive activists working in the reformist tradition of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine for whom photography was “both a historical record and a tool to change society.” Surveying the portrait gallery, Schulz-Keil insightfully summarizes the characteristic outlooks of the three best-known practitioners of the art, hailing Dorothea Lange’s “precise sense of the moment of highest intensity, Walker Evans’s great respect for the dignity of human beings and objects, and Ben Shahn’s conviction of the meaning of details seen in the right context.”

The photo album has left a permanent imprint: to think of the vistas of the Great Depression today is to conjure the photographs—the hard faces of migrant mothers and unfamous men, the advertising billboards and posters—all smiles, Coca-Cola, and prosperity—set against a backdrop in which no one can spare a nickel much less a dime. The commercial newsreels distributed by the major studios self-censored the breadlines and Hoovervilles: no sense reminding moviegoers of what they came into the theater to forget. The FSA insisted that attention must be paid.

The Federal Writers Project —which kept ten thousand writers off the dole and produced three thousand publications—is fondly recalled by Jack Conroy, author of The Disinherited (1933), called here “the most influential novel of working-class life.” Embracing the social realist ethos imported from Moscow, Conroy used his typewriter as a machine to kill fascists, not a formula for prose that stands the test of time. (The FWP’s biggest return on investment was Richard Wright’s Native Son.) Conroy is interviewed in the small former mining town of Moberly, Missouri, the setting for his novel, a place that must have been even bleaker in the 1930s because it sure looks plenty bleak in 1976. (You can tell the date of filming from the movie marquee in the background—Lee Marvin in Shout at the Devil [1976].) The trademark publications of the Writers Project were its travel guides to the states, but its most important jobs of cultural retrieval, the narration rightly asserts, were the oral histories conducted with former enslaved people, of whom some ten thousand were still alive in the 1930s.

In the Federal Arts Project, the government played Lorenzo the Magnificent. “Every artist born between 1900 and 1915 spent his formative years in the Federal Arts Project,” asserts Welles. The Index of American Design, an extraordinary compendium of watercolor illustrations of American decorative arts, is its signature reference volume, but its most visible legacies are the museum-quality murals decorating government buildings and post offices—at least in places smart enough to preserve them. A poignant, heartbreaking interlude in the film occurs when the camera pans the empty walls of the Marine Terminal at LaGuardia Airport, once filled by an elaborate, wraparound mural painted by James Brooks, “twelve feet three inches by 135 feet, a rather complex job,” he says. In an act of stupidity or malice, it was painted over in institutional green by the New York Port Authority.

The Federal Theatre Project had a history as dramatic as any of the productions it mounted. Founded in 1935, it was run by a ball of fire named Hallie Flanagan, a former Vassar professor, the first female recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, and a theater director with a penchant for the activist and avant-garde. Flanagan had the impossible task of balancing the political, the artistic, and the commercial. From the moment the first curtain went up, the FTP was a site of controversy—probably because its programming defiantly trafficked in material that defiantly waved a red flag, whether with its innovative “Living Newspaper” productions, drawn from the tumultuous news of the day, or incendiary plays such as It Can’t Happen Here (1936), Sinclair Lewis’s nightmare vision of a fascist dystopia descending on America, a scenario too hot for Hollywood, or Haiti (1938), a celebration of Black revolution on the Caribbean island that just may have had pertinence for Jim Crow America. (The film shows a brief, unidentified clip from It Can’t Happen Here in which a Gestapo-like trooper enters an American home to confiscate works by Charles Dickens.)  

At this juncture, one expects narrator Welles, who directed the FTP’s productions of Macbeth and The Cradle Will Rock, to break in with a juicy anecdote or two, but he appears nowhere on camera and shares no intimacies about the pivotal role he played in the theater history he is narrating. Welles is literally self-effacing—nothing like the credit hog portrayed in Mank. Fortunately, the other half of the partnership, John Houseman, is on hand to be erudite. Ever the stately British gentleman (he, too, is nothing like the prissy toady portrayed in Mank), Houseman speaks from the sunny deck of his California beach house. Though thirteen years older than the nineteen-year-old Welles, he considered himself the apprentice to the young sorcerer. (“I had a total conviction that he was a genius.”) What a thrill it would have been to watch the two old veterans trade war stories.

By way of compensation, a rich assortment of directors and actors recall their salad days. You needn’t be a red diaper baby to savor the misty recollections of Will Geer and Howard Da Silva, two activist-actors blacklisted in the postwar era, on the epochal opening night of Marc Blitzstein’s opera The Cradle Will Rock on June 16, 1937. (Da Silva still remembers his lines.) The topic of the musical—a steel strike—was too close to the day’s headlines, so the WPA rescinded permission to perform the play and thereby precipitated one of the most fabled show-must-go-on moments in the annals of American theater. Locked out from the booked theater, the cast and a pissed-off audience of six hundred paraded twenty blocks uptown to a hastily secured alternative venue. Composer Blitzstein took to the stage behind an upright piano ready to play the entire score solo— and then, from the audience, the voice of the first singer rang out, followed by the rest of the cast. By performing from their seats, the players were not violating an Actors Equity directive forbidding union members from taking part in an unauthorized stage production.

A backstage eyewitness warranting more screen space is Carlton Moss, a veteran of the Federal Theatre Negro Project. Moss was a pioneering Black multihyphenate—a playwright, producer, director, and screenwriter (in the last capacity, perhaps best known for his contribution to Frank Capra’s wartime Why We Fight series, The Negro Soldier [1944]). Moss reminds us that the FTP broke a heretofore impenetrable color line. Being shut out from membership in the mobbed-up and notoriously racist International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees, Black technicians, stagehands, and other craftsmen got their first practical workplace experience due to the FTP.

Tellingly, the best remembered FTP production for the Negro Theatre was directed by the white man, Orson Welles’s Macbeth, mounted in April 1936, the so-called “Voodoo Macbeth” that transplanted the Scottish play to the East Indies. “White people,” Moss comments drily, were “attracted by the exotic quality.” “With John Houseman in charge, [the Federal Theatre’s Negro Project] could never be truly a Negro theater,” complained Roi Ottley in the New Amsterdam News, which is true enough, but, in context, the production was a daring, groundbreaking step forward for Black performers. Consider the mindset of the Variety reviewer Wolfe Kaufmann—“the Negro players strut about the stage in grandiloquent costumes mouthing antiquated Elizabethan language which, quite obviously, they don’t understand themselves.” Presumably, the Shakespearean cadences should have been rendered in Amos ’n’ Andy patois. (The film unspools synch-sound motion picture footage of the play, featuring the charismatic Jack Carter in the title role and Edna Thomas as Lady Macbeth, that gives the lie to Variety’s take.)

The New Deal funding of the arts ended, Studs Terkel sneered, “when the primitives, the Neanderthals took over”—that is, the taxpayers who didn’t want their money funding Communist-flavored agitprop. Like many paeans to the Popular Front, the film wants both to condemn the know-nothing politicians who engaged in red baiting while celebrating the hammer-and-sickle red-ness in the ranks. “Anybody with any grain of knowledge of what was going on was a communist” is the proud if dubious assertion of writer Nelson Algren, still enveloped in the 1930s version of a Woke Twitter bubble. Thus, the WPA field guide for Massachusetts gave the Sacco and Vanzetti case twice as much ink as the Boston Tea Party—the kind of blinkered perspective that hands ammunition to your political enemies.

And the enemies of FDR were locked and loaded. The high value target in the crosshairs was a production from the Children’s Theatre branch of the Federal Theatre Project called The Revolt of the Beavers, which premiered on May 20, 1937. It was a too-perfect example of Moscow-inspired subversive art—designed to enlist innocent American children in a Bolshevik Revolution.

The play unfolds as the thinnest of allegories. Two young children wander into the late capitalist stronghold of Beavertown, a repressive society ruled by a rapacious beaver boss who exploits the beaver proletariat; he owns the means of bark production; they are denied the fruits of their gnawing. With the help of the outside-agitator juveniles, however, the beavers of the world unite and overturn the unjust economic order. “Here is the setup of modern society!” gushed Mary Morrow’s rave review in The Daily Worker. “The fat chief beaver, his stooges and gang on one side, and the workers on the other.”[i] The mainstream press was less enthusiastic. Apparently, groused Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times, Mother Goose “has been studying Marx.”

Appalled by the prospect of legions of brainwashed first-graders manning the barricades, opponents of the New Deal swooped in for the kill. In 1938, Texas congressman Martin Dies, chairman of the pre-Cold War iteration of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, launched an attack on the FTP for two aligned instances of un-American activity: communist stagecraft and brazen race mixing (Disturbing rumors had reached the committee that the on-stage integration the FTP fostered extended off stage to socializing, dancing, and worse.) Hauled before HUAC, Hallie Flanagan gamely defended the FTP as a troupe dedicated to “propaganda for democracy not for communism,” a company with the “widest most American base that any theatre has ever been built upon.” During her testimony, Flanagan used the word “Marlowe-esque” to describe a production, at which point Alabama congressman Joe Starnes accused her of “quoting from this fellow Marlowe—and he’s a communist, of course.” When the snickers from the gallery died down, Flanagan explained that she was referring to the sixteenth-century playwright Christopher Marlowe.

The Dies committee had the last laugh. By spring 1939, Congress had pulled the plug on funding for the FTP and soon the curtain came down on the short-lived role of the New Deal as sugar daddy to the arts. The experiment that had “blossomed for merely three or four years,” laments Welles, met a “sudden and tragic demise.” Still, he concludes, it left “the gift of memory,” and memory, unlike murals, cannot be so easily painted over.  

Thomas Doherty, professor of American Studies at Brandeis University, is author of numerous books, including, most recently, Little Lindy Is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century (Columbia University Press, 2021).  

Copyright © 2021 by Cineaste Magazine

Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 4