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- I think one of the horrors of our society,

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

American society, maybe it's true of others

but I know of this country,

is this break with the past, a lack of continuity.

Young people know nothing of the past.

For that matter, even people who lived in the past have forgotten it. .

and I think the New Deal,

The Arts Project, is a good case in point.

It's as though it never existed!

Not even in history books, but not in memories of people!

♪ (dramatic drum music)

- [Orson Welles] The 21st of October, 1929. .

It was not just Variety

that gave the market crash a bad notice.

Many had idolized Herbert Hoover.

Only a year before he had said:

"We in America today are nearer to the final triumph

over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. "

By 1931, 12 million Americans were out of work

and farm prices hit bottom.

♪ (banjo music)

The Bonus Army:

thousands of angry World War I veterans marched

on Washington, and many spoke openly of revolution.

Federal troops under General MacArthur attacked the veterans.

Still undaunted, Hoover kept telling the country

that prosperity was just around the corner.

- ♪ [singer] Which side are you on,

♪ Which side are you on?

♪ Which side are you on, boys,

♪ Which side are you on?

♪ (banjo music)

♪ (upbeat music)

- [Orson Welles] In 1932, the hero of the hour arrived:

Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The popular governor of New York would be president

of the United States for the next 13 years.

He brought new enthusiasm,

a New Deal.

- So first of all. .

let me assert my firm belief

that the only thing we have to fear is. .

fear itself!

♪ (upbeat music)

- [Orson Welles] Roosevelt didn't offer only rhetoric,

he offered realities.

The New Deal provided jobs for close to 1/3

of the nation's labor force.

Public works like highways, dams,

parks, and public housing. .

♪ (upbeat Swing music)

These projects also had a larger purpose.

The New Deal promised to restore meaning

to the lives of millions.

♪ (upbeat Swing music)

The WPA did not just help workers,

it also puts unemployed artists to work.

Jobs were created for thousands of musicians,

painters, actors, dancers, and photographers.

♪ (upbeat Swing music)

For $23. 86 a week,

the standard WPA compensation,

they gave the country an unprecedented artistic Renaissance.

- The New Deal had this wonderful idea,

not just about theatre. It extended to all professions;

that it was better to take people off the relief rolls,

let's say, to give them a small check each week

to keep them alive. .

rather than do that, it was better to put them to work,

even though receiving the same amount of money

and give them some self-respect

that they were earning this money instead

of just receiving it as charity.

♪ (indistinct singing)

- [Orson Welles] In the performing arts,

jobs were provided for playwrights,

directors and actors, by the Federal Theater Project.

♪ (indistinct singing)

The Federal Writers' Project sent hundreds

of writers to talk to people all over the country.

They found a vision of a better world

in the lives of ordinary people.

- It gave the writer a sense of his own country

and of his immediate environment.

He had to explore that environment in order

to produce the books

that the Writers' Project was preparing.

- You went to the small towns and called a meeting

in the city hall and asked them what their history was.

No one had ever asked them before, probably, ever.

"And what is your history?"

And they came in hoards to tell us.

- [Orson Welles] Such experiences were not only recorded

by writers, but also by some of the country's leading photographers.

They were hired by the Farm Security Administration

to visually document the devastating effects

of the depression on rural America.

- There were some of us, including President Roosevelt,

who realized that we were passing through a time

which we hoped would never be repeated in American history. .

and to have a record of it seemed very important at the time.

- There was a need to produce a collection of photographs

that would show the American people

the terrible conditions under which

farm people lived: the rural poverty,

the migrant labor conditions,

the environmental problems such as the Dust Bowl,

and the great drought that took place in those years,

and the general effects of the Great Depression.

And there was a need to explain these problems as well

as to justify the programs

that Roosevelt and Tugwell had developed

to alleviate these situations.

- Before the '30s, the United States was an unknown island

so far as art is concerned. Certainly, we had the eight. .

We had a rather nice tradition of early American art,

but it was not a world shaker,

and after the '30s, just because every Tom, Dick,

and Harry was able to make a good or a bad painting,

and so many people got their training,

so many different points of view were encouraged.

They didn't ask whether you painted this way

or whether you painted that way, they asked

whether you needed help or wanted help.

- [Orson Welles] Murals, posters and paintings by thousands

of New Deal artists were mounted in public buildings,

and public places.

In the past,

artists had been patronized by kings,

bishops, and wealthy individuals.

In this country too,

the arts had to rely on private benefactors.

Government sponsorship of the arts

in the '30s was a unique experiment in American history.

Of course, government sponsorship has its shortcomings.

Often the bureaucracy may feel entitled

to its own ideas about art and sometimes artists believed

that they should only convey social and political messages.

In both cases, art can become boring and propagandistic.

When government sponsors the arts,

success or failure largely depends

on the individual administrators involved.

WPA appointments were good ones.

Most often than not, administrators took the artist's side

and thank God,

protected them from government interference.

The Federal Theatre was led

by an energetic young woman, Hallie Flanagan.

She'd been director of the theatre workshop

at Vassar College and was well known as the author

of a travel report on her experience

with the avant-garde theatres in Europe

and in the Soviet Union.

She was concerned with new forms of theatre,

and with reaching audiences who had never seen live theatre before.

- It was the first time, and in many ways,

the only time that I knew of. .

a federally sponsored theatre

that regarded theatre as a communication,

and therefore a social responsibility.

- We're having a book burning on the green tomorrow night.

- A what?

- We're going to burn up all this subversive literature.

A lot of smutty stuff that's trumpin' public knowledge.

Have you got any objection?

- Well, you won't find any subversive books here!

- Ohhh. .

Now, how about this fella?

Now this fella, Charles Dickens. . wasn't he a communist?

- The line that I always quote

because I think it's the best line that's ever been written

on the subject was from Brecht's "Galileo" when he said,

"A man cannot un-see what he's seen. "

And a lot of people with a very strong morality of some sort

which was inculcated. . and a part of the tradition. .

saw things in the late '20s and the early '30s

that they could not un-see.

- [Orson Welles] One of the things the Federal Theatre people

could not un-see was the plight

of minorities in American society.

For the first time in American history,

the Federal Theatre offered black actors real opportunities.

The first plays by and for blacks were done in Harlem

at the new Lafayette Theatre under the direction

of the actress, Rose McClendon,

and the young producer, John Houseman.

- The question was what kind of, just artistically,

what kind of shows should you do?

Because there were those who said we should go back

and do the old stock company thing of using

black actors to play in successful white plays.

I was against that and the community generally

had turned now to being against that sort of thing.

There were those who had great ambitions for the theatre,

there were those who

felt the theatre should concern itself entirely

with contemporary and indigenous problems, and so on.

I did a lot of thinking and talking to a lot of people,

and I finally came to the decision

with. . this advice that I got,

that the only way to run it was

to cut the theatre into two halves.

- [Orson Welles] One group was formed to produce dramas

of contemporary black life.

It was led by Carlton Moss.

- Well, we opened that theatre,

the Federal Theatre, the Lafayette section,

the Lafayette Theatre with "Walk Together Children,"

which as I said,

was a play that did not challenge the status quo.

It was based on the scripture,

"The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth. "

That was its message that eventually

the bad people can be persuaded to be good people. .

if everybody follows the scripture.

- Then, simultaneously with this,

but it took longer to get going,

we decided that we would treat the black actors simply

as an actor, and that we would do great plays.

We would do classics, we would do any kind of play we wanted

and we would simply not admit that there was any. .

question of color one way or the other.

And obviously, the first playwright with whom one

should try this experiment is obviously William Shakespeare.

I had formed a great friendship with Orson Wells,

who was then only 19 years old,

but I had this total conviction that he was a genius.

I asked him to try his hand

at directing a Shakespearian play with black actors,

and he was enormously enthusiastic.

And immediately, the parallel between Macbeth and Scotland

in the 13th Century, and the

history of Christophe in Haiti,

which was again, the rise of a soldier who becomes a dictator,

and finally ends in a bloodbath. .

that seemed a very interesting and close parallel.

♪ (dramatic adventurous music)

- Arm! Arm and out!

There is nor flying hence nor tarrying here.

I a'gin to be aweary of the sun,

and wish th' estate o' th' world were now undone.

Ring the alarm bell!

(bell rings) ♪ (trumpet blows)

Blow, wind! Onward!

At least we'll die with harness on our back.

What's he that was not born of woman?

Such a one am I to fear, or none!

- Let me find him, fortune!

Tyrant, show thy face!

I cannot strike at wretched kerns,

whose arms are hired to bear their staves.

If thou be'st slain, and with no stroke of mine,

my wife and children's ghosts will haunt me still!

- What is thy name?

(gunshot)

(wind howls)

(Macbeth cackles)

- My name's Macbeth!

(gunshots)

(wind howls)

Lay on Macduff,

and damned be him that first cries, "Hold enough!"

(shouting & commotion)

- Our position was that we should get into that theatre

a cross section, or get the largest possible audience,

and in order to do that you had to go

to where most people were. .

and I remember in the opening of "Macbeth,"

we went to the Elks,

which is a fraternal organization,

and made an arrangement with them to supply a band for us,

and then we went to the city and we got a permit

and we had a parade.

♪ (jazz parade music)

I had a crew of about eight people who plastered the town

with placards and we used to write

on the sidewalk on the corner.

Then we visited every church in the community,

so we got the clergymen involved.

We began to get sell-out audiences.

These were solid black audiences.

Then you had, of course,

you had all of these people coming from Downtown,

white people who would have been attracted

by exotic quality.

- From his mother's womb, untimely ripped!

(witches laugh)

- Accursed be that tongue that tells me so!

(witches laugh & screech)

And be these juggling fiends. . no more believed.

(cheering & commotion)

- Hail king!

♪ (dramatic music)

- [crowd] Hail king!

- [Macduff] Behold! Where stands the usurper's cursed head.

The time is free!

All hail Malcolm!

- See. . !

the charmed. .

wound up!

- The most significant thing about the Federal Theatre,

particularly the Harlem section of it,

was that it gave for the first time in the history

of the American theatre,

black technicians an opportunity to get experience,

and it broke the

anti-black stronghold that the stage hand union had.

♪ (soft guitar music)

- [Orson Welles] All the arts suddenly became available

to a vast audience.

It was the beginning of a truly popular culture.

♪ (soft guitar music)

Stage productions toured the country,

actors played in high schools, public libraries,

in tents and on truck platforms.

The WPA encouraged painters to seek public places

for their work.

Artists used to brush, canvas and easel,

received instruction in mural painting techniques and soon,

large tableaus sprang up in court buildings,

post offices and libraries.

One of the leading painters on the Chicago Arts Project

was Aaron Bohrod.

- I guess my own inclinations were to go

to ordinary subject matter in an effort to. .

come up with an aesthetic result on the basis

of everyday life. .

unglamorous life.

Went into every nook and cranny of the city of Chicago

for the materials that I was interested in getting,

and this is a South State Street subject that I did

in the city of the storefronts

and of the characters walking back and forth

in the atmosphere there.

The American artist was finally looking at his own country

for his subject matter,

whereas formerly it was the business

of the talented young American painter going to Paris,

not only for his tutelage,

but for his subject matter, so that he came back

and he painted some pretty impressionist paintings modelled

after sturdier models.

But here the American artist was looking

at ramshackled red barns,

at city streets which were either tumbled down

or reasonably sturdy.

But in any case, at his own country, his own city,

his own back yard.

♪ (soft guitar music)

- [Orson Welles] The post office lobby became the main stage

for the rediscovery of populist traditions.

♪ (soft banjo music)

Particularly in the middle and Southwest,

this led to the creation of a new realism.

It recorded the history of regions whose spirit

had never before been expressed artistically.

♪ (soft banjo music)

Gallup, New Mexico was a small town

near the Navajo Reservation.

Before 1935, Gallup never had paintings, and the Navajo,

not to mention Navajo painters,

had no way to make their views known.

♪ (soft banjo music)

Now, Gallup's Library has an impressive collection

of works by important painters of the Southwest,

most of them native Americans.

- Now, I regard this as probably

the most exciting

painting of all, and this is done by Harrison Begay.

This is the famous

Yébîchai.

They dance, the nine-day dance, where women and men dance.

- [Orson Welles] Harrison Begay is one of the most important Navajo painters.

His career as a painter began with the Federal Arts Project.

- My style of painting changed very little.

I follow the old traditional Indian painting mostly. .

although sometimes I do other kind of paintings.

This is the painting I do.

It's an everyday life of my people.

But most of the demands. .

by my people are these old,

traditional paintings with designs,

different kinds of legendary designs,

traditional symbolic designs.

That's what I do most of.

- [Orson Welles] In the '30s,

most of the Indian painters created their finest work.

Unimpeded by financial pressures

and commercial considerations, they could follow

their own dictates rather than work for the trading post

and curio shops.

The leading Navajo muralist,

today an arts teacher at an Indian school,

was Andrew Tsinnahjinnie.

- Well, we were in a group. .

Indian artists were in groups,

and you will work at a certain place,

like Oklahoma and Tulsa.

I was trained to. .

to do the mural job large-scale.

I had a helper, some boys helped me to. .

put up some large murals, scaffolding. .

and I painted some murals in Phoenix, Arizona,

in an administration building.

♪ (soft guitar music)

- [Orson Welles] To give a voice to the voiceless,

either by encouraging them to speak for themselves

or by calling attention to their plight,

this could be the motto for all New Deal art.

The voiceless, the deprived, included farmers,

especially in the Midwest.

They had fallen victim to sand storms and droughts.

Many had lost their property and their work.

Few across the country could grasp

the catastrophe that had occurred.

To understand and cope with the situation,

Roosevelt and his secretary for agriculture,

Henry Wallace, created a special division

within the Department of Agriculture,

The Resettlement Administration,

later called the Farm Security Administration, FSA.

It was headed by one of Roosevelt's intellectual advisors,

the young Columbia university economics professor,

Rexford Guy Tugwell.

- This was a peculiar time when agriculture was changing.

(clears throat)

Not only was there were a depression,

but the techniques of agriculture were changing.

The cotton picker was just coming into use,

and this meant that a great many people in the South,

sharecroppers and others, had their jobs taken away

from them, and there began this terrible

movement to the cities.

- [Orson Welles] Tugwell understood that the suffering

of the farmers had to be publicized to the country,

and photographs seemed to be the best medium.

During his days at Columbia,

he had published the first economics textbook

to use photographs as illustrations.

The pictures for this book had been assembled

by his assistant, Roy Stryker.

Tugwell now hired him to head the FSA photography section.

- So when I went to Washington and took charge

of this work that we were doing

in the Department of Agriculture

and then the Resettlement Administration,

it seemed quite natural to me to send for Roy,

and tell him that he was the kind of person we needed

to make a visual record of what was being done.

And besides, to make a historic record

of what the times were like,

because the times were very bad.

- [Orson Welles] There was only one major record

of the catastrophe in American agriculture.

It was accompanied by an extraordinary collection

of photographs, something unheard of at the time.

It was written by a young economist from California,

Paul Schuster Taylor.

- Well, why did I want a photographer?

I said because of the conditions that I see

in the field are the conditions that need to be

remedied. .

and the only way that I can show the people

who make the decisions in the cities what the conditions

and the needs are is by showing them photographs

to supplement my analysis

- [Orson Welles] The young photographer who traveled with

Taylor, and whom he later married, was Dorothea Lange.

Her work revealed both her political commitment

and her acute powers of observation,

qualities Tugwell and Stryker were looking for,

and Dorothea Lange was hired as the first FSA photographer.

- ♪ [singer] When the farmer comes to town

♪ With his wagon broken down

♪ Oh, the farmer is the man that feeds them all

♪ If you'll only look and see, I think you will agree

♪ That the farmer is the man that feeds them all

♪ The farmer is the man, the farmer is the man

♪ He lives on credit 'till the fall

♪ Then they take him by the hand

♪ Then they lead him through the land

♪ And the merchant, he's the one that gets it all

- [Orson Welles] While Lange tried to capture people

in motion with small cameras,

the second photographer Stryker hired preferred

the large plate camera and the tripod.

Walker Evans was already acknowledged as one

of the great photographic artists of the time

when he joined FSA.

♪ (fiddle music)

Evans refused any touch of the exotic.

His photos never deprived people or things of their dignity.

He never degraded a subject into a mere illustration.

Ben Shahn, the next photographer to join FSA,

was already famous at the time as a painter.

His wife, Bernarda Bryson Shahn,

remembers why he took up photography.

- Once it is made into a work of art,

it becomes a symbolic thing.

In other words, it becomes the universal. .

and he had a very strong feeling about that,

and particularly in the days when he was using a camera,

he had a very strong feeling of the importance

of specific things.

♪ (fiddle music)

- [Orson Welles] Three things left their mark

on FSA photographs:

Dorothy Lange's precise sense of the moment

of highest intensity,

Walker Evans' 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.

These techniques were extensively practiced

by the younger photographers Stryker hired.

Among them was Arthur Rothstein,

who during the '30s shot over 50,000 photographs

for FSA before going on to become chief photographer

for Look Magazine.

- The type of photography that we did,

whether we did it consciously or unconsciously,

could be called a social documentary type of photograph,

and that type of photograph,

to my way of thinking, is characterized

by a selection of significant details. .

significant details which comment on the relationship

between people and their environments,

and significant details which make the photograph

more meaningful than just a mere record of the scene.

This is from the very first assignment

that I did in October, 1935.

The photograph is interesting,

not only because it shows this man with dignity,

reading a book, the sign on the wall,

"Christ is the head of this house,

the silent listener to every conversation,"

combined with a picture of Clara Bow over here,

and the Colosseum over there.

And, from this, you get an idea, perhaps,

of this man's interests. This is his home: neat,

well-organized, a little lace cover for the table,

and these other aspects of his environment.

♪ (guitar music)

- [Orson Welles] Rothstein was a New Yorker.

The West for him was unknown territory,

strange at times, surprising and exotic.

♪ (guitar music)

Quite the opposite holds true for painter/ photographer, Russell Lee.

He grew up in the West,

and had a great commitment to its ways and people.

- This is actually a picture of a family

in Southwestern Iowa, that is eating Christmas dinner,

as it so happened.

This was on the first assignment that I had,

which is the family of Earl Pauley.

The character of the room, this. .

cream separator. .

All of these things are important to tell

the surroundings of this particular family,

or. . here's a detail, very simple,

of the entrance to a home that tells quite a bit

about the home there,

the general disrepair.

This was in Oklahoma, and. . much before the days

of electricity as you can see.

You have the old fashioned washboard here,

and the woman did the work as you can well see.

People at that time had very little idea

of what was going on in one part of the country

that they were not from.

The communication was very poor.

Transportation was very poor at the time.

There was no television.

Radio was not. .

too prevalent,

and electrification, rural electrification, was not existent.

♪ (banjo music)

- [Orson Welles] Lee's familiarity with Westerners

and their world could best be seen in his most famous work,

in one of the very first picture essays,

a series about a self-help community called Pie Town.

- Pie Town was isolated. . really,

and here was a contact with the outside world.

This was the post office,

the gas station, and the stage down.

Well, there was a woman here a long time ago,

who would bake very good pies.

It so happened that this was on the road west

from Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas,

and many people who were displaced by the tractor,

or by the drought or whatever,

were moving to California, trying to find work. .

and this was one place where many people had stopped,

and they had begun to form a community there,

of these displaced people. They were farmers,

and here was a chance to get some cash money right away

to get established.

So people in the community would welcome the newcomers.

They would help them to. . construct their own house.

About the only thing that the newcomer needed

was maybe a dollar to buy some nails with.

There was one building in particular that was a school,

it was a community hall,

and it was a church,

and they used it at the right time.

This was a community sing,

and just a detail of three of the ladies.

- Well, most of us were familiar with the work of Lewis Hine. .

and before that, Jacob Riis.

They were sociologists with cameras,

and we thought that we would follow along those same lines,

to be sociologically oriented with our photographs.

♪

- [Orson Welles] Jacob Riis, the Danish immigrant who wrote

"The Making of an American"

and "How the Other Half Lives," was the pioneer

of socially conscious documentary photography.

In the late 19th Century,

working as a police reporter in the slums

of Manhattan's steaming Lower East Side,

he took his famous photos.

Riis hoped they would make clear to the well-off

just how necessary progressive reform was.

Reform was also the goal of Lewis Hine's photographs.

Taking pictures of Ellis Island before the First World War,

Hines found ways of arranging people

and things to give him striking documentary images.

♪ (soft music)

He asked people to look directly at the camera,

something portrait photographers and

studios had deliberately tried to avoid.

♪ (soft music)

The social documentary, both photographic and written,

was at once a historical record, and a tool to change society.

♪ (soft music)

It was rediscovered in the '30s as the most characteristic way

to express the American vision.

♪ (soft guitar music)

The social documentary, with its emphasis on

significant detail, became the form most widely practiced

by the more than 10,000 members of the Federal Writers' Project.

Between 1935 and 1940, they produced over 3,000 publications,

most of them dealing with local history.

The major work was a series of 50 travel guide books

to the United States.

Each volume contains a social history

of the state it covers.

In charge of the travel guide series was the national editor

of the Writers' Project, Jerre Mangione.

- Robert Cantwell, who strikes me as one

of the most discerning of the critics of the '30s. .

thought that the books were extremely valuable

because they presented America in a way that no one

had ever seen America before.

Far from being the very thrifty,

sober kind of people that Americans had been considered,

he found in these volumes much evidence

that they were ingenuous and naive,

and that they were gamblers, and. . for example, they would. .

they would toss a coin to see where a boundary line should be.

Or they would. . they were. .

sort of childish in some respects. They were. .

You've heard of spite fences, where a person would put

up a fence just be hostile to his neighbors.

There were also spite hotels, and spite railroads,

just to get even with some competitor.

♪

- [Orson Welles] The depression hit worst in the very region

which most attracted the populist-minded artists,

writers and photographers of the time: the Midwest.

They felt the attitudes they found

among farmers and miners would help to build a new society.

These ideas are most clearly expressed

by a labor journalist, feminist,

poet and novelist who was the driving force

behind the Minnesota Writers' Project. . Meridel Lesueur.

- And all those struggles. .

I think the first taking over of a grocery store was

in Minneapolis, where everybody just leaned against the glass

and it broke and then we all went in and took groceries.

The best ham I ever had

I took out of that grocery store.

(chuckles)

The Midwest. .

it has a deep democratic populist history, because. .

it was settled really by the Homestead Act,

where an amazing thing happened and it never happened

in the world before, where you got 160 acres of land

for simply developing it.

What is little known is that in North Dakota,

the people actually took over the state,

actually voted in what was called the Nonpartisan League.

It was really for one year in 1918,

a socialist state in the middle of the United States,

and then it was smashed down in the First World War.

I think that a lot of the pressure on the Roosevelt regime

for relief, and for. .

the projects, and the WPA projects, and the CCC it was called,

came from the Middle West.

In fact, many of the laws like social security

and unemployment insurance were created in North Dakota

in the Nonpartisan League days.

♪ (banjo plays)

- [Orson Welles] Thus, it was the Midwestern countryside

with its small towns that became the setting

for the most influential novel of working class life.

"The Disinherited" by Jack Conroy.

Conroy, a miner's son, grew up in Moberly,

a small mining town in central Missouri

and spent most of his life there.

- This used to be the Wabash Railroad Station

in the days when Moberly was a great railroad center.

Eight trains daily came in here, from all directions.

Now there are no passenger trains at all.

You can see the station is boarded up.

The freight trains come through, but no passenger trains at all.

When I think of coming back to Moberly,

I think of Vachel Lindsay's lines

about Springfield, Illinois.

People going into Springfield see nothing

but a dingy little mining town. .

but I think of Vachel's lines about Springfield, Illinois.

He said "Let not our town be large, remembering

that little Athens was the Muses' home,

that Oxford ruleth the heart of London still,

and Florence brought the Renaissance to Rome. "

♪ (banjo music)

- [Orson Welles] Writers thought that only from such small towns

as Florence, Athens or Moberly,

a genuine civilization could originate.

Some anthropologists of the 1930s looked

for enduring culture in primitive tribes.

Conroy looked for it in Moberly.

This insistence that the American small town

had world importance was expressed by Conroy's publication

in Moberly of two magazines:

"The Anvil," which later merged with "Partisan Review,"

and "The Rebel Poet. "

♪ (banjo music)

"The Rebel Poet's" manifesto outlined the mood

and outlook of the writers of the period.

- "We champion the calls of the weak and defenseless.

We combat the greed of industrial barons,

who are converting American laborers

into abject serfs.

We ridicule the musty echoes of the Fin de siècle slogan,

"Art for art's sake,"

and inscribe on our banner, "Art for humanity's sake. "

- ♪ [singer] When you're asked about living

♪ This is what you say

♪ We're so darn poor and ragged we can never get away

♪ And it's hard times, and old coalmans and mines

♪ A hard time, poor boy. .

- I come back. .

to Moberly here, from Toledo. .

you know?

Scrambling around as best I could,

selling some stories to the American Merkley,

that kept me alive.

My wife's wages working at a shoe factory,

for about $6 a week. .

and some book reviews for the St. Louis Post Dispatch. .

and in the meantime, I'd been communicating with Nelson Algren,

an old friend who had contributed to "The Anvil"

and all that.

So he got me to come up there

and I stayed at his pad until I finally got

on the Chicago Project.

- I was just knocking around the country from 1931 to 1935. .

and so I was very pleased when I found I could go up

to his office and get a regular check,

which was about $85 a month to begin with,

but I rose very rapidly to $125 a month

within about four years' time. .

but it gave me leisure,

that is, I could go up there at 10 in the morning

and sign out at noon, and say you were going to the library

and go to the racetrack.

- The singer and dancer named Katherine Dunham. .

you know, is also a specialist in West Indian folklore,

and folk dancing, and all that.

So she was our supervisor, and she quit. .

and they put Arna Bontemps and I on the job.

Arna and I worked together out there,

and we were doing a study

called the "The Negro in Illinois. "

♪

- [Orson Welles] "The Negro in Illinois,"

later published under the title

"They Seek a City,"

was only one in a large number of studies

in black history the Federal Writers' Project produced.

The most important were the "Ex-Slave Narratives,"

interviews with several hundred former slaves

of whom over 10,000 were still alive in the '30s.

♪ (soft upbeat banjo music)

This concern to document local and regional history

was accompanied by an equally strong interest

in the great themes of American and Western civilization.

♪ (soft guitar music)

One of the more successful attempts could be seen

in the Bronx Post Office in New York City,

the mural competition for which was won

by the late Ben Shahn, and his wife,

Bernarda Bryson Shahn.

- Probably well over a hundred artists

entered that competition,

and it was certainly a great day for Ben

when the telegram came that he had won it,

and he was terribly happy.

I had submitted some sketches, too. .

and they accepted me as an assistant.

If one is involved with people,

and with politics, and with ideas,

certainly he could never find a readier audience

than he could in a big post office like that.

And Ben chose for his theme Walt Whitman's poem,

"I See America Working. "

And so he had all of the kinds of working in the mural,

and then on the end wall that he had Whitman

and the words of the poem,

and so that was the key to the whole thing.

Whitman's total song of his "Song of Myself"

was not really a song of myself,

it was a song of myself as everybody,

and I would say that that would correspond

to Ben's view 100% that Ben felt his identification

with people, just totally.

- [Orson Welles] Shahn had learned mural painting

from Diego Rivera, the famous Mexican artist who came

to the United States in the '30s.

One of Rivera's famous murals was a dramatic rendering

of the Ford assembly plant in Detroit, commissioned

by Henry and Edsel Ford.

♪ (upbeat banjo music)

New Deal artists emulated Rivera's realism.

They wanted to apply his methods

to early American themes and traditions.

♪ (upbeat banjo music)

One painter who admired Rivera was George Biddle,

the brother of Roosevelt's first attorney general.

The huge mural of Biddle's commands the staircase

of the Justice Department in Washington.

The painting quotes Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis:

"If we would guide by the light

of reason, we must let our minds be bold. "

♪ (soft flute music)

The mural vividly illuminates the reformed vision of the New Deal.

It shows the path of the immigrant leading

from hard work and dirty sweat shops

to the richly set table of the New Deal.

Biddle portrayed several members

of Roosevelt's first cabinet seated at the table.

♪ (soft flute music)

(footsteps)

The treasury employed artists and paid them a modest salary.

It wasn't until 1935 under the WPA that a program was set

up specifically for the unemployed artist.

♪ (guitar music)

The museum curator, Holger Cahill,

was appointed head of the Federal Arts Project.

Cahill had made a name for himself pioneering exhibitions

of American folk art.

He was considered a compromised candidate

who could satisfy both the radical

and the more academic artists of the time.

Treasury Department artists worked exclusively

on murals and sculptures for federal buildings,

often with patriotic themes.

The Art Project artists,

thematically much less restricted,

worked in many other areas.

There were print shops

where they prepared posters urging examinations

for the eyes, the teeth,

and for venereal diseases.

♪ (guitar music)

Berenice Abbott photographed New York City

for The Arts Project.

Fashion designers worked in WPA workshops.

WPA artists designed postage stamps and even the nickel.

♪ (soft guitar music)

And they created a unique inventory

of American popular arts and design.

♪ (soft guitar music)

Weather vanes, ship figureheads,

silverware, doorknobs. .

This index was the pet project of folklorist, Holger Cahill.

These meticulous drawings allowed hundreds

of artists to practice their craft,

and to prepare for later careers in the applied arts.

More than any other achievement,

the index fulfilled the two major goals

of The Arts Projects:

to develop skills, and to provide relief for the unemployed.

- A New Deal did provide jobs.

Many such programs that have been, of course,

maligned by those who hated the New Deal, here in Chicago

and the "Chicago Tribune,"

when the leading opponents had front page cartoons

all the time, damning the New Deal.

And the usual clown was the guy with the glasses,

the radical professor. .

and generally the man leaning on the shovel was the attack

on the Works Projects Administration, the WPA,

and so "These guys are getting money for nothin' "

- [Orson Welles] "Reds in charge of Federal Writers' Project. "

The attacks on the WPA Arts Projects soon

became politically charged.

It was in this atmosphere of suspicion

that the man who was later

to become Henry Wallace's campaign manager

was made state supervisor

of the Illinois Writers' Project, Curtis MacDougal.

- Well, it was a part of an entire anti-New Deal,

anti-Franklin Roosevelt.

The camp there was easily reactionary,

the economic royalists, he called them.

We've called them fascists and worse since,

and they deserve all they were called.

They did everything they could to throw obstacles in the way.

- [Orson Welles] Martin Dies, a congressman from Texas, began

to make a political career out of anti-New Deal sentiment.

In 1938, Dies set up a committee

to investigate un-American activities.

Among the first called before Dies' committee

were the directors of the Federal Theatre

and the Federal Writers' Project.

- It was obvious to all of us that Mr. Dies

and his committee were using the arts projects,

especially the Writers' Project and the Theatre Project,

as a whipping boy, as a way of attacking the New Deal.

It's very easy to attack artists,

much easier than, say,

to attack the larger groups of WPA

workers, such as construction workers and so on.

So, the writers

and the theatre people were constantly under attack.

- Well during the three years,

more than three years that I was the state supervisor,

probably 1000-person. . the Art Project in Illinois

was by far the largest in the country.

New York, which gets so much of the publicity, and the

books and articles had only 10% of the total population. .

and we had about. . probably 500 at a time. .

and of those are so many

that have become very prominent since,

very successful, and who if they hadn't

had been kept alive during those horrible days,

never would have come where they are.

- [Orson Welles] Saul Bellow, the Nobel prize winner,

was involved with the project.

So it was Ralph Ellison,

the author of the "Invisible Man. "

Studs Terkel became famous for his collections

of oral history.

The poet, Conrad Aiken, was involved,

as was Maxwell Bodenheim,

already a well-known successful writer.

Richard Wright was supported when he wrote his novel

"Native Son," probably the most important book

which owes its existence to the Federal Writers' Project.

- All of those people were these lazy bums that worked

for me on the Writers' Project,

people that were looked down upon

and condemned by the old guard taxpayers

who resented the whole New Deal Project.

- [Orson Welles] All of the projects put to work skills

and talents, which might've stayed undeveloped.

The record of The Arts Project is the most staggering.

Practically without exception,

every American artist born between 1900

and 1915 spent his formative years in The Arts Project.

Most of their work from this time has been lost,

and today we have to rely on black

and white archive photographs.

Willem de Kooning painted this ship's figurehead.

♪ (guitar music)

Jackson Pollock did these harvest and factory scenes.

♪ (guitar music)

Mark Rothko painted this landscape.

Stuart Davis did this abstract painting.

Arshile Gorky did this mural.

Joseph Stella painted this silo.

- They were different types of people, the artists were,

but at the same time they were in warm sympathy

with the efforts of people who were in trouble, and people. .

various people to organize.

- [Orson Welles] Most New Deal art was quite unpolitical.

However, some artists felt that the political message

was what counted.

Artists like William Gropper at the time tried

to make a hero out of the industrial worker.

Unlike the FSA photographers who showed a genuine concern

for the individual, Gropper's workers seemed

to have no individual identity at all.

There's a vast difference

between the social documentaries of the FSA photographers,

and the proletarian realism of some WPA painting.

♪ (upbeat banjo music)

Social and political commitment did not necessarily

mean superhuman workers.

Much more subtle is Ben Shahn's portrayal

of textile workers in a large mural painted

for a town now called Roosevelt, New Jersey.

♪ (upbeat banjo music)

The town built in the 1930s was a New Deal experiment

in urban planning, with workplace

and housing located together.

Shahn's mural is an argument

for the ideal printed on the poster.

The principle of American labor,

the right of every man and woman to work.

♪

- And many theorists were communist.

I was a communist at that point. .

and the central committee

of the Communist Party was breaking its neck

to dominate what was going on,

and they were giving out orders which were happily ignored

because artists don't take orders.

♪

- [Orson Welles] Bernada Bryson Shahn was an editor

of "Art Front" magazine.

It acted as a forum for the radical artists of the time.

In spite of quarrels with the Communist Party,

many artists remained either members or close sympathizers.

Outside their work, they submitted to the frequent shifts

of the Moscow Party Line, and supported the party's campaigns

against more independent artists like Diego Rivera.

- The tragedy of Rivera was that he wanted to be accepted.

The dream of his life was to be thoroughly accepted

by the Communist Party,

but he was natively intransigent.

He couldn't be controlled, and they hated him. .

and so anybody who worked with him,

including Ben, became a target for their disapproval, and. .

they constantly excoriated poor Rivera,

who constantly sought to be accepted by them.

- I attended that famed meeting in a thronged hall,

where Diego Rivera began. .

his speech, which was

translated by Luis Lazarich,

a well-known lithographer. .

and his translation continued for about 15 or 20 minutes

and then he threw his hands up in disgust

and an unwillingness to continue

with what he called the bourgeois notions

that Diego Rivera was introducing

to the radical New York audience,

which were members of the John Reed Club,

and people began shouting and pushing and shoving,

and there were characters who I got to know later,

such as Jacob Burck who was a cartoonist for the Sun Times,

who stood up in a corner and denounced Diego Rivera

for every utterance he made,

and principally it was based,

it seemed to be, on the fact that he chose to speak

in French, bourgeois French, instead of proletarian Spanish.

It was just before the 1936 insurrection in Spain,

of course, and that kind of fired up tempers.

- [Orson Welles] It was not so much doctrinaire party communism

but an emotional solidarity with the oppressed

that moved people to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade

and fight in Spain.

"Communism is 20th Century Americanism. "

This inscription graced the halls

of the American Communist Party headquarters.

- The Communist Party was a respectable party at the time. .

and it's a difficult question now.

You say, "Were you a communist?"

Of course, everybody who had any grain of knowledge

of what was going on was a communist.

The only trouble is. .

the climate of the word, the connotation of the word

was something quite different now.

- There was a law. .

it was mandatory that when people were hired

on these projects, there was to be no questioning

of their political affiliation.

The republicans insisted on that provision

because they were afraid that they would be left out.

- [Orson Welles] Paradoxically, there were many on the left

who had moral difficulties with joining projects sponsored

by the government and designed, perhaps,

to co-opt radicals into the reformist camp.

One such critic was the Writers' Project nature editor,

the poet Kenneth Rexroth.

- Taking money, I mean,

for the left to take money from the bourgeois state,

St. Paul has a phrase for this.

It's called, "Making friends out of the mammon of iniquity. "

- Pigeons like men are easily tamed by food.

If you give a hungry man a job like that,

he's going to be less discontent. .

and it wasn't exactly an evil sort of thing,

but a humanitarian sort of thing.

- [Orson Welles] While conservative criticism mounted,

artists and writers demonstrated for the right

to continue to produce politically partisan art.

These pressures from inside

and outside presented great difficulties

for the project administrators.

A diplomatic wizard of sorts maneuvering

on two fronts was Henry Alsberg,

the director of the Writers' Project.

- The head of it was the man who got Emma Goldman

and Alexander Berkman out of Russia,

Henry Alsberg, who was

old time Pre-War I. . liberal anarchist.

So that in this period

of the attempted Bolshevization of America,

he was a kind of anomaly.

- [Orson Welles] In order to get his writers

to abandon fashionable proletarian realist styles,

Alsberg prescribed exposure to reality.

One writer who was sent from Manhattan

to explore Staten Island for the Writers' Project

was the poet, Harry Roskolenko.

- When I worked for the Writers' Project of the WPA,

I spent about three months traveling all over the place

just to get some data,

some background for the guide book,

the New York State Guidebook.

- [Orson Welles] Roskolenko was a political activist

at the time.

Like many others, he was convinced

that a revolution was just around the corner.

- I think I was sailing from Hamburg

to New York then, 1926. .

and we got wireless reports about the Paterson Strike,

and the amount of violence there.

Of course, like all sailors,

you're always thinking of revolution,

revolutionary terms, uprising.

We were very radicalized. . and we thought there

would be a revolution in the southeast,

starting in New Jersey and just swinging right through the East.

- [Orson Welles] Little of this revolutionary fervor

found its way into the fact-filled report

on a home for old sailors Roskolenko prepared.

- Now, these are actually the notes

that I sent in. . in 1936.

Sailors' Snug Harbor, Richmond Terrace between Tyson Street

and Kissell Avenue. . a home for retired seamen.

"Here the mariners spend their declining days provided

with everything from food and shelter to tobacco and movies.

To be admitted, a mariner must be 65,

an American citizen, and prove that he has been at sea

for at least five years.

- [Orson Welles] But equally, often the radical writers

did sneak their political persuasions into the guidebooks,

and for the project administrator, that led to trouble.

- You know about what happened in Massachusetts;

there was a great to-do there when. .

a reporter discovered that many more lines were devoted

to the Sacco and Vanzetti case than were devoted

to the Boston Tea Party,

twice as many lines. .

and as a result of that,

the governor of the state, Hurley,

who had written a letter saying how happy he was

that this book was being published about Massachusetts. .

changed his mind and began to attack the book,

and attack the project, and demanding an investigation,

a congressional investigation and whatnot.

And a former governor suggested

that all the Massachusetts guidebooks be placed

in the common and burned. .

and certain libraries refused to carry the book

and there was a great noise made about it.

♪ (upbeat piano music)

- [Orson Welles] It was the unabashed political tendency

in the seemingly most innocent work

that most annoyed conservatives.

The children's theatre is a good case in point.

Traveling all over the country,

groups of actors brought theatre to millions of young people,

most of whom didn't even know what a stage show was.

- We had trucks where the side came down

and became a platform.

The top canvas rolled down and became dressing rooms

on either side.

You carried your own generator, and you would play

for 25,000 people in different parts,

so it was a wonderful going-to-the-people theatre.

♪ (upbeat piano music)

- [Orson Welles] Although children had to be and were entertained,

to the actors and directors, children

were the revolutionaries of the future.

The "Revolt of the Beavers. . "

a delightful play and the most successful production

of the Children's Theatre,

illustrates this attitude.

The play showed class structures in beaver society,

with its robber-barren beavers protected by police beavers.

- I played the Gestapo kind of beaver.

I was tough.

We had a team called "Rough, Tough and Gruff. "

We were all made up like beavers, and. .

and it was very exciting. I mean, that's the kind

of acting that I would love to do today.

♪ (upbeat piano music)

- [Orson Welles] The poor exploited worker beavers

are busy planning a revolution to overthrow a government

which only represents rich beavers.

Of course, the revolution succeeds.

♪ (upbeat piano music)

- We were accused of being communists. .

a communist play, because the beavers

were stripping the bark off the trees.

And the Boy Scout troop 248 from the Bronx. .

were supposed to protest this terrible thing

that was going on, and the kids loved the play.

- [Orson Welles] More serious political repercussions came

with the last black production of the Federal Theatre:

a play called "Haiti," directed by Maurice Clark.

- This play was about the struggle. .

of a Negro people in Haiti, against an invasion. .

of Napoleon's army.

The original script called for a French drawing room,

and I changed all that to a big central section

of one of these old plantation homes,

with a winding staircase.

I got some drummers from the Congo, and finally we cast it

with some of the leading black actors,

like Canada Lee,

and Rex Ingram, and some

of the prominent people in the Negro Theatre.

It was about equally divided,

the white cast and the black cast. .

and this is as exciting and important

to me as the play itself,

the whole production itself was what happened to these actors.

- [Orson Welles] "Haiti" marked one of the first times

in the history of the American professional theatre

that black and white actors worked together

on the same stage.

- A whole kind of different relationship started developing.

They were laughing together, playing a piano. .

and instead of just a work relationship,

a social relationship developed.

- [Orson Welles] "WPA Theatre upheld Negro dating here.

Project heads encourage race mixing as part of communism. "

These headlines played on racist sentiments

and used them as a basis for political attack.

The one division of the Federal Theatre

which, more than any other, attracted left wing actors

and directors was the next to come under fire:

The Living Newspaper.

- The great innovation was The Living Newspaper.

We were full of tricks and wheezes,

but in fact, nothing that we did

was theatrically particularly revolutionary in its essence.

The Living Newspaper was a whole new idea.

It was the notion of using the news of the day.

It was sort of a magazine technique for telling a story.

The first one they did was Ethiopia.

That ended badly. There were protests,

and the state department actually demanded certain changes be made.

- There was undoubtedly congressional pressure against

what was seen as extreme left-wing influence

in the Federal Theatre,

or at least in some of the Federal Theatre, but. .

particularly perhaps in The Living Newspaper.

- [Orson Welles] After the first show was cancelled,

Joseph Losey, together with two others, took over.

In a new show, they refused to compromise

The Living Newspaper's stark radicalism.

After a political showdown with Federal Theatre director

Hallie Flanagan, Losey opened a great success on Broadway.

The play was "Triple A Plowed Under. "

♪ (drum music)

It dramatized the problems of the farmers and workers.

The farmer gets a few pennies for his milk,

while the worker pays a high price for it.

The middleman gets rich.

Norman Lloyd, now a well-known television actor and director,

regularly acted in The Living Newspaper.

- The second play was "Injunction Granted. "

It's interesting. Losey directed that,

and Nicholas Ray, who became a film director,

was the stage manager. .

and Virgil Thompson did the music.

And this was a story

of the history of labor in the courts.

- I was developing a form which was towards circus,

toward vaudeville, using ballet as well as actors, music,

mime and film,

influenced I suppose to some extent by (mumbles),

and to some extent by Brecht, and to some extent

by the Political Cabaret, which I had already done.

- I played a clown in that. It was all in pantomime,

commenting on the stories that went along

with the various cases which were acted out

in rather black and white terms,

but always with the clown commenting. .

both to illuminate things for the audience,

and hopefully for humor, and so on.

- Again, the opening was postponed,

postponed, never quite banned,

and finally, again it came to a showdown,

and again we won, and again it opened.

But, it didn't have much chance and the spirit was gone,

and. . it didn't do as well as the other,

although it was more interesting, I think, by far.

And, it closed.

Then, I presented various other projects,

all of them were turned down, so I resigned.

It was as simple as that.

♪ (upbeat guitar music)

- [Orson Welles] The closing of The Living Newspaper

was the beginning of the end.

Soon John Houseman and myself came under attack.

We'd moved from Harlem to Broadway

and had formed a new group called Project 891.

- The actors we were given were in one sense,

sort of the dregs of the project.

All the other serious projects had already

snatched up all the. .

apparently, and snatched up all the conventionally good actors.

But, Orson had a passion for low comedians

and eccentric characters. So in the end, what we got

was a very interesting collection of actors,

and the first show we did was "Horse Eats Hat. "

♪ (nursery music)

- [Orson Welles] This project produced much controversy. .

and spelled perhaps the end

of what could've been a national theatre

in the United States.

♪ (nursery music)

- Our next venture was, again, not a classical venture at all,

but something that had been brought to us

and we'd heard it, and fallen in love with it,

and decided we wanted to do it,

and that was a labor opera or whatever you want to call it,

by Marc Blitzstein called "The Cradle Will Rock. "

- [Orson] Marc Blitzstein, an admirer of Brecht,

wrote words and music for this unique piece.

The play was cast with Will Geer and Howard Da Silva.

- Larry is the organizer,

the labor organizer, who's been pulled in

with the prostitutes and with street people and so on

in a cleanup of the town,

along with the powers that be,

Mr. Mister and the rest. .

and who, when the Moll, the whore,

asks him what he's doing here, he says,

"Who, me?"

While he was pulled in he says,

"Who, me? Making a speech and passing out leaflets.

The formal charges are inciting to riot.

Ain't you ever seen my act?

While I'm creeping along in the dark,

my eyes is crafty, my pockets is bulging, I'm loaded,

armed to the teeth! . with leaflets.

And am I quick on the draw! I come up to you very slow,

very snaky, and with one fell gesture. .

I tug a leaf in your hand.

And one, two, three, there's a riot.

I'm the riot. I incited you. "

- I went to play the original,

my old part, which I had rehearsed

with our repertoire company at Mr. Mister,

which is John D. Rockefeller,

sort of combined with some head of Republic Steel.

He is the owner of this town, in which all

of the people are prostitutes to him;

the owner of the paper, the doctors and the lawyers,

and they are all prostitutes, just as this little girl

on the street corner is.

The play is very exciting, and has wonderful music, really.

Best music Marc Blitzstein wrote.

- [actor] Cora, we're artists!

- ♪ (singing) 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

♪ Until for art's sake

♪ They kill for art's sake

♪ All the art for art's sake!

- It rehearsed beautifully and we were all madly

in love with what we were doing. .

Then, suddenly, there were a great many steel strikes

all over the country, where some of which ended

in considerable violence.

There were other strikes, but this happened to be

about steel, so that this was particularly dangerous,

and the federal government,

or rather, the WPA Administration,

who had to go back to Congress

that summer and get new appropriations,

because originally they'd only had it for two years,

and those two years were nearly up.

So, since they had to go to Congress,

they were very frightened of producing anything

that would create any kind of scandal

or any kind of backlash.

- The government clamped down on it,

and refused to have it open,

and Howard Da Silva and Hiram Sherman

and the rest of us had our wigs

and costumes snatched away from us.

The sets were removed,

the theatre was padlocked and the audience itself,

who was there for a preview, was thrown out into the streets

and began milling around.

John Houseman and some very enterprising people,

like Archibald MacLeish, went out to get a theatre,

and we went out in front,

and entertained the audience with little snatches of songs,

and everything I ever knew from Walt Whitman on through,

until they came by in a fire truck, and Marc Blitzstein

had a piano, and the fire people were helping

and they announced they had a theatre 20 blocks away,

up by the Central Park. .

and we moved, and asked the audience to move with us.

They walked with us from 38th Street to 57th Street.

- I think the audacity of the whole company of Will

and I having led the whole company with all of us up

the 6th Avenue and having produced it, despite the fact

that the Federal Theatre and Congress had locked us out

and closed down the theater,

was in itself such an audacious thing.

We probably pulled enough of an audience

with us along 6th Avenue who were wondering

where the hell this audience was walking to Uptown?

- ♪ (singer) Oh the press, the press, the freedom of the press

♪ They'll never take away the freedom of the press

♪ We must be free to say whatever's on our chest

♪ With a hey-diddle-dee and a ho-nonney-no

♪ Or whichever side will pay the best

- And on the stage Orson Welles gave a speech,

Archibald MacLeish made a nice speech,

our poet that's still living today,

and John Houseman talked. .

And Marc came out, they wheeled the piano out with the firemen,

and he sat down at the piano and began to play it

as he did at auditions.

And as he got to this first song,

the little girl, a Catholic girl,

and quite reactionary on most subjects,

got up suddenly in the box and began to sing.

- ♪ (girl singing) Maybe you wonder what it is

♪ Makes people good or bad

♪ Why some guy

♪ An ace without a doubt

♪ Turns out to be a bastard

♪ And the other way about

♪ I'll tell you what I feel

♪ It's just the nickel under the heel

- And as we came to each one of the parts,

the lawyers and the doctors,

Mr. Mister, Mrs. Mister,

Junior Mister, and all of them,

we all stood up in whatever part

of the auditorium we were,

we followed the lead of this little girl and sang our songs.

And it was a tremendous success! A smash.

Everybody got up, stood and cheered,

and so before the evening was over, we'd raised enough money

to put it on in a regular theatre.

We moved down the street to The Playhouse on 48th Street,

and it went on for a long run, with actors simply sitting

on the chairs, without any scenery,

without any real costumes,

and singing along with Marc Blitzstein on the piano.

- ♪ (singing) That's thunder, that's lightning

♪ And it's going to surround you

- [Orson Welles] The success of "The Cradle Will Rock,"

despite the official ban, brought down the Federal Theatre.

Before the actors and directors could even register

their protest, conservatives mounted such a heavy attack

on Washington that Roosevelt was forced to appease them

with drastic measures.

- ♪ (singing) The cradle will rock!

- What Roosevelt had done was to decide that in order

to stop this red-baiting attack against him,

he would allow the Federal Theatre to be dissolved.

Of course, it gained nothing because they went right

on to dissolve everything else.

This was the beginning of a whole new history

in the United States.

- Well, you can answer that can't you?

- [Orson Welles] Writers, actors and artists alike

had poked fun at Martin Dies and his committee.

Now his hour had come.

In hearings, broadcast nationwide,

Dies' House on Un-American Activities Committee

investigated hundreds of artists and intellectuals,

branding them subversive and Un-American.

- The only way that we can defeat their aims and purposes is

to expose them before they strike.

- And in one stroke of the pen, this whole thing was destroyed.

I went down to my office, which was. .

down in the 20s,

about 20th and Broadway, down in that area.

We had two floors of offices there for the Federal Theatre.

I went to go up to my office, and they. .

they had sent in workmen, with hammers, to destroy our offices,

which were partitions built

in this large loft-type building.

And believe it or not,

these men were taking joy in what they were doing.

They were swinging their axes and hammers

and they were not only breaking up these partitions,

they were splintering them. .

and I found my desk under a whole pile of broken boards,

and dug in there to get out what records I could salvage.

And that's how the Federal Theatre went.

- [Orson Welles] Attacks on the project mounted daily.

The next concession hit the Writers' Project.

Control was transferred

to the individual states, while responsibility

for publications remained in Washington.

The doors were open for censorship.

- We had. . one of our. . best books was censored.

The Washington office absolutely refused to publish it.

That was the history of civil liberties

in the state of Illinois.

It was done under the supervision of Marion Knoblauch

who's since then been a leader

in the Chicago Civil Liberties Committee,

and finally it was published by the Civil Liberties

Union with no mention whatever of the Writers' Project,

all the work that was done over a period of several years.

- All right, there's a chapter on censorship. .

There's a chapter on rights of aliens,

and that was a very sad chapter during World War I and Illinois.

There's a chapter called "Rights of Political Minorities. . "

and "The Rights of Labor," and so forth.

"Rights of the Unemployed," or did I mention that before?

"Unconstitutional Police Methods," you see, these were all. .

and "Anti-semitism. "

- And it's a very factual account! Nothing controversial.

They were just afraid that their congressional

and journalistic critics would descend on them,

and so they weren't going to take a chance,

and they just said, "No, you're not going to publish it. "

- So they sent two people out from Washington,

investigators, and they came to the project,

they interviewed almost everybody but me,

and. .

then they did tell me that it was a good book,

and they wanted it to be published,

only there were a few little places that needed

to be toned down.

♪ (upbeat banjo music)

- [Orson Welles] In the Federal Arts Project,

the most violent attacks were those provoked

by these paintings in Coit Tower

on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill,

especially Bernard Zakheim's mural, "Library. "

It shows a worker taking a volume of Karl Marx down

from a bookshelf.

♪

But still, the artist felt ready to fight.

In some of the newspaper headlines he painted,

Zakheim commented on the attacks leveled against his work.

♪ (upbeat banjo music)

Later, when the rumors spread

that the whole Arts Project was to be axed,

intellectuals and artists mounted protests,

but often in terms which only gave more ammunition

to their conservative enemies.

- "As this issue of The New Anvil goes to press,

the Federal Arts Project,

which has rendered invaluable service in bringing culture

to the people are threatened by the onslaught of Torries,

who would either abolish these projects altogether

or seriously hamper their effectiveness

by drastic curtailments and strangling restrictions.

No section of the Works Progress Administration

has justified its existence more than the Cultural Projects.

The efforts to destroy them remind one forcibly of the words

of a Nazi arbiter of public taste:

When I'd hear the word culture, I'd cock my rifle. "

♪ (upbeat guitar music)

- [Orson Welles] But it wasn't only the political statements

by theater people, artists and painters that antagonized conservatives,

it was also the appeal to reform of the FSA photographs.

♪ (upbeat guitar music)

- It just came in that there were concerted efforts to try

to get rid of this organization.

And it was called. .

and, I don't think it was ever called "Communistic,"

but it was not considered by some people

as being too desirable.

- At first we weren't noticed much,

but. . congressmen,

being politicians, always look for something

to criticize if they can,

and I happened to become a controversial figure

for other reasons by that time,

and so we were pretty liberally attacked by the politicians.

- [Orson Welles] For a while, the FSA photographers managed

to stave off their critics by making some pretty pictures. .

but it was of little use in the long run.

Soon, the FSA photographers

were no longer documenting daily life in America. Instead,

they would record the life in the armed forces.

In 1940, the FSA photography section was transferred

to OWI, the Office of War Information.

All their pictures, over 300,000,

are preserved in the Library of Congress.

A whole decade of American history is stored

and cataloged here.

It is the best organized

and publicly accessible visual record of the 1930s.

Unfortunately, there were no archives for the work

of painters and designers.

In the '30s,

James Brooks, now a well-known abstract expressionist,

painted a mural for New York's LaGuardia Airport.

- I heard from a friend,

he was the director of the Boston Museum,

when he was down visiting a friend,

that he had come through the terminal on the way down,

and there was nothing on the walls anymore.

And he wondered what happened. I didn't know.

So I asked and I heard that it had just been painted out,

without asking anyone,

by the port authority who had recently

taken over the building.

The Marine Terminal was the building

that I did a circular mural in

that circumscribed the lobby, 10 feet up from the floor,

10 and a 1/2 feet up from the floor.

The height of the mural actually was 12 feet,

3 inches by 235 feet.

It was a quite a complex job.

It's about the idea of flight.

It starts with man's thoughts about flight. .

And this is early man being oppressed by nature

and wondering what it's all about

and where the lightning comes from.

Then here's a modern man and a woman walking

under a plane with the shadow of a plane coming across her,

and the compass there.

♪ (soft music)

- [Orson Welles] Today, no trace is left

of Brooks' gigantic mural.

It is painted over in institutional green.

The fear and suspicion of the post-war years left no place

for muralists' social criticism and political art.

Hundreds of murals and thousands of easel paintings

and posters were simply lost, or destroyed.

♪ (soft music)

- How The Arts Project died, of course,

is part of history few know about.

The primitives took over.

The Neanderthals took over, it's simple as that.

By the way, we say right one or beat left,

that doesn't mean anything. I think the idea that a Neanderthalism took over,

not just anti-intellectual,

it's contempt for working people too.

- Our committee is the only agency of government

that has the power of exposure.

Therefore, this investigation must go on,

without fear or favor,

and our slogan must be:

"No quarter to the enemies of our country. "

- The the ending of the Federal Arts Project,

or WPA itself, was also a diminishing

of the vision of possibilities. .

and I think this is one of the horrors,

aside from making the young ignorant of history,

particularly of labor,

but also making us zombies in a sense.

And of course, it's not accidental that. . when the war,

of course, happened, a mobilization occurred,

but. . within the hot war itself against fascism,

the seeds of the cold war being sewn.

- I used to run under different names like everybody did.

"True Confessions," Boston's "True Confessions"

started here in Minneapolis.

So you used to try and write a true confession

under a different name. .

and. .

I wrote for women's magazines under a different name.

I had about four or five names.

I'd. .

get a job waiting on tables, and in a week the boss

would come and say, "I'm sorry. . the FBI has been here. "

- [Orson Welles] Ironically and sadly after the war,

many people were punished for their involvement.

They were investigated

by the Un-American Activities Committee

by Senator McCarthy . and the FBI.

Not only their work was destroyed,

but the very memory they stood for was obliterated.

The WPA and its Arts Projects blossomed

for a merely three or four years. .

then they fell victim to powerful forces:

conservatism, the war,

the prosperity of the post-war years. .

but despite their sudden and tragic demise,

these projects left us an important cultural legacy.

The New Deal left us a belief in ordinary people,

in older American values,

in a truly popular American culture.

The artists of the '30s gave a shape,

a vision, a form to the period.

They bestowed on us the gift of memory of our people,

our places, and ourselves.

- ♪ (singing) I saw an honest farmer

♪ His back was bending low

♪ Picking out his cotton

♪ He couldn't hardly go

♪ He piled it up in the rail pen

♪ Until the merchant come

♪ That he might take his cotton

♪ That he might give them some

♪ Goodbye, boll weevil

♪ For you know you've ruined my home

♪ You know you've got my cotton

♪ And the merchant's got my corn

♪ I saw him in the summer

♪ 'Twas hot as it could be

♪ Strolling through the harvest field

♪ The sweat was running free