HOSTILITY TO THEATER has been a virulent feature of American life since before the country was founded. In 1774, the First Continental Congress passed the Articles of Association, which aimed to restrict trade with Britain. But the Articles also discouraged “every species of extravagance and dissipation,” which included stage plays among “other expensive diversions and entertainments” like horse racing and cockfighting. The consequences were real: playhouses sat empty, and acting companies toured abroad. This was an early attempt, though hardly the last, to ban theater in the soon-to-be United States—the result of a centuries-old prejudice that has never completely faded from our cultural discourse. Anti-theatrical efforts are not historical blips; they’re an American tradition.
James Shapiro’s The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War (2024), a brilliant and absorbing account of the 20th-century effort to establish something like a national theater in the United States, doesn’t go back quite as far as the Revolutionary Era. Between 1935 and 1939, a New Deal work relief program, the Federal Theatre Project, staged over a thousand productions nationwide, reaching an estimated audience of 30 million people. It was an astonishing undertaking, one whose impetus can be difficult to grasp from a 21st-century perspective. “It was the product,” Shapiro writes, “of a moment when the arts, no less than industry and agriculture, were thought to be vital to the health of the republic and deserving of its support.” That moment turned out to be brief, and the Federal Theatre was short-lived. Its inevitable demise was the result of a sustained effort by a group of lawmakers who were determined to end funding for a program they saw to be “spreading a dangerously progressive as well as a racially integrated vision of America.”
One of those lawmakers was Martin Dies Jr., a racist congressman from Texas who quickly emerges as the villain in Shapiro’s story. Ambitious and undaunted, Dies “saw which way the political winds were blowing” and set sail in that direction, eventually finding himself at the helm of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities (laying the groundwork for Joe McCarthy’s crusade a decade and a half later). The Federal Theatre proved an easy target, and casting its productions as “un-American” and “Communist” earned Dies national attention. He sought to make a name for himself and to shut down the relief program: by 1939, he had succeeded on both counts. A disappointed President Franklin D. Roosevelt reluctantly signed off on the Federal Theatre’s termination, and it soon faded into obscurity. (Its materials—playbooks, programs, and other theatrical ephemera—were unceremoniously deposited in an airplane hangar in Maryland, where they remained unnoticed until the 1970s.)