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How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art out of Desperate Times
Walker & Company
July 2008
On Sale: July 8, 2008
336 pages
ISBN: 0802716989
EAN: 9780802716989
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction History
A vivid portrait of the turbulent 1930s and the Roosevelt
administration as seen through the WPA’s Federal Theater
Project.
Under the direction of a five-foot redheaded firecracker,
Hallie Flanagan, the Federal Theater Project managed to
turn a WPA relief program into a platform for some of the
most inventive and cutting-edge theater of its time. This
daring experiment by the U.S. government in support of the
arts electrified audiences with exciting, controversial
productions. Plays like Voodoo Macbeth and The Cradle Will
Rock stirred up politicians by defying segregation and
putting the spotlight on social injustice, and the FT P
starred some of the greatest figures in twentieth-century
American arts—including Orson Welles, John Houseman, and
Sinclair Lewis. Susan Quinn brings to life the politics of
this desperate era when FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the
chain-smoking idealist Harry Hopkins furiously improvised
programs to get millions of hungry, unemployed people back
to work. Quinn’s compelling story of politics and idealism
reaches a dramatic climax with the rise of Martin Dies and
the House Un-American Activities Committee, which turned
the FTP into the first victim of a Red scare that would
roil the nation for the next twenty years.
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