FTP

In his book, The Trojan Horse in America, Dies casts the committee's investigation of the WPA, which created the Federal Theatre Project, as a battle against Stalin.

Following a series of controversial investigations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and Subcommittee on Appropriations into leftist commentary on social and economic issues, the Federal Theatre Project was terminated in 1939 by congressional action.

It was as if the Group Theatre, the Federal Theatre Project and other populist stage efforts earlier in the century had never existed: Postwar American theater accepted as natural the idea of the "ordinary" American as someone who neither wanted nor needed to see plays.

The Federal Theatre Project's Spirochete, part of an effort to raise awareness about syphilis, is performed in Chicago.

Saal also gives much attention to the labor musicals and Living Newspapers of the Federal Theatre Project, pointing out that the popular, The Cradle Will Rock, while leftist in plot actually reaffirmed the New Deal reformist agenda and the theater's new middle-class identity with consumerism and cultural nationalism.

Graff, in gracious, blessedly un-academic prose, reminds us that the federal government's first attempt to fund creators and performers, the dance wing of the Federal Theatre Project (set up by the Roosevelt Administration under the WPA in 1936) was also a storm-tossed affair.

The Living Newspaper program, part of the Federal Theatre Project, is described as "a New York theatre unit engaged in portrayal of the news of the day, by writers who are attempting to dramatize salient situations objectively."

Although no one took Dunlap seriously enough at the time to demand the legislation necessary to create such a theater, a century later, with workers of all kinds desperate for employment during the Depression, something like a national stage was established through the Federal Theatre Project division of the Works Progress Administration.