“He was, rather, an opportunistic, America-first, anti-immigrant, anti-labor, racist politician with few scruples, for whom power and popularity mattered more than ideology.”
“He saw how easy it was to garner headlines by attacking progressive plays as “un-American’.”
"He saw that scaring people (your children are being indoctrinated and Black men want to sleep with your daughters) was a lot more effective than the arduous and consensus-building business of legislating.”
Although the mention of America will allow readers to understand which country this is about, I am also sure of two things:
- You wouldn’t guess the year
- Today, all of us, coming from different countries, we can see here the description of a number of populist and also far-right politicians.
This is why it’s called “The Playbook”.
So, the year
is 1938. Congressman Martin Dies, the politician described aboved, is heading
the Un-American Activities Committee (also known as The Dies Committee). The
Committee’s main target was the Federal Theatre Project. It was the only Works
Progress Administration project, within President Roosevelt’s 1930 New Deal, to
be eliminated.
One reads in James Shapiro’s preface that, between 1935 and 1939, the Federal Theatre Project, headed by theatre professor Hallie Flanagan:
- Staged over a thousand productions in twenty-nine states seen by approximately thirty million Americans, two thirds of whom had never seen a play before.
- Offered both classic theatre plays (like Shakespeare) and contemporary plays on issues that mattered to Depression-era audiences (slum housing, racism, flood control, food and drugs, tuberculosis, the threat of fascism, war).
- Employed, at its peak, over twelve thousand struggling artists (among whom, Orson Welles and Arthur Miller would soon be famous).
- Established the "Negro Units" to support Black actors and playwrights.
- Brought entertainment to work camps where those hiking trails were being dug; children's plays on touring trucks; works in foreign languages to reach immigrants; free theater to asylums, orphanages, hospitals, prisons, and veterans' homes.
- Revived playgoing in rural states where the movies had all but ended it.
- Took theatre to ten million listeners a week through radio broadcasts.
Is Shapiro’s
words, “It was the product 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. (…) Its closing would have a lasting impact on
American cultural life, and, inevitably, on the resilience of the nation's
democracy, for the health of democracy and theater, twin-born in ancient
Greece, has always been mutually dependent.”
It was
fascinating and, at the same time, so hard to read this book. To once again
confirm that the playbook exists, we know it and, still, we tend to relativise the
warning signs when we see them. References to “a mainstream press more
interested in selling papers than in investigating unsubstantiated claims” (p.
219-220); to a young congressman from Illinois named Everett Dirksen who “recognized
how much savage comedy and newspaper coverage could be extracted from stringing
together the titles of Federal Theatre plays and reading them aloud, punctuated
by sarcastic commentary” (p.252 – I shuddered, as it brought to my ears the
voice of far-right Lisbon Municipal councillor Margarida Bentes Penedo reading
the names of artists in the programme of Teatro do Bairro Alto, whose artistic director’s
contract was not to be renewed); to Dies shattering protections and violating
rights “in ways that no one had dared before”, while the fact that administration
officials “did not push back on obvious falsehoods and insinuations (…) gave him
confidence to press even further.” (p.237) – all this rings a bell today, one
we choose not to hear for some time. Like others did before us.
There is
individual and collective responsibility in this, there always is. Malcolm
Cowley, literary editor of The New Republic, writing in 1941 about the
termination of the Federal Theater Project said that one could blame "the
newspapers and magazines that attacked it" or the "congressmen who
hated it so much that they refused to be told the truth about it" or even
with "the bureaucrats in Washington who were quite willing to sacrifice
the project so long as their own jobs were saved". But Cowley put the
blame on himself as a writer and on his readers, who liked the project, went to
some plays, but when it came under attack, did “not exactly nothing, but not
really enough to matter.” (p. 259)
There are
mainly two issues on my mind: this individual and collective responsibility; and
the words we use when trying to avoid hearing the bells ringing.
In a text I
wrote back in February, Canaries
in the coalmine and democracy fitness, I was questioning the quality of our
democracy and a number of signs I consider early warnings regarding its
deterioration, inspired by an article in The New York Times entitled “How will we know when we have lost
our democracy?. I
shared a list of common everyday problems and attitudes which show how we
relativise and normalise authoritarianism – we can also call it “contempt of the
spirit of democracy”. Reading
more recently an interview with Hélène Landemore, author of “Politics
without politicians”, she defends that in the 18th century ee invented a form
of legitimate oligarchy based on popular consent. Power is not truly shared
equally, but it’s concentrated at the top (among the wealthy, the educated,
people with connections and a certain psychological predisposition to want to
rule). Landemore argues that democracy isn’t actually broken, we’ve just been
doing it wrong. We should give it a thought, both individually and collectively.
As we try
to adapt to (or not to bother about) the early warnings, it is essential to acknowledge
how we also manipulate the language we use in order to make things sound nicer
or less threatening. A few days ago, I heard the leader of the far-right
Portuguese party – the main opposition party in the parliament – pushing for a
constitutional revision and stating that we shall have a “neutral” constitution,
“free of ideology”. This might not surprise us coming from that politician, but
it does become more concerning when we hear it from cultural agents ("We
don't want ideological or political pressure" in Lisbon's culture”). As
this is yet one more cultural war we are going through, words matter. Praising “neutrality”
and “freedom from ideology” at this point means erasing what “others” think and
goes against one’s own beliefs, eliminating dialogue, critical thinking and
freedom of expression – silencing those who don’t share one’s worldview. All
too often, politicians these days use the argument that they were elected and that
they represent some kind of majority. From Aristotle to Landemore, we have been
repeatedly warned about this. We should see it for what it is, we should say
the words that truly define it.
In this
sense, it was interesting to see four
scholars from Griffith University (Brisbane, Australia) questioning a familiar
expression in the arts, ‘social cohesion’ – and actually placing it in
quotation marks. They
quote Hugh de Kretser, president of the Australian Human Rights Commission,
who argued that social cohesion is a ‘loaded and coded term’ that ‘sounds
positive but can be used to mean conformity and assimilation’; “an implied
instruction to not talk about things that make people uncomfortable, like
racism or injustice”. The four scholars see in this as a different set of
meanings where ‘social cohesion” becomes a concept around consent, coercion and
control. In this context, ‘social cohesion” was invoked in order to implement a
number of acts of censorship in the Australian cultural sector, among which, Creative
Australia’s rescission of Khaled Sabsabi’s Venice Biennale selection, the
Adelaide Festival cancelling Randa Abdel-Fattah’s invitation to Adelaide
Writers’ Week or the National Gallery of Australia covering Palestinian
flags in an artwork for ‘security reasons’. Lecturer Samuel Cairnduff and
lawyer Greg Barns named this “Cultural
McCarthyism” and it currently conditions artistic freedom in Australia and
other democracies.
This is a
cultural war. It is about individualism and community; physical needs and spiritual
values; fear and trust; material goods and poetry; the capacity to be free.
Reading about the Federal Theater Project makes one wonder: if we know what the
playbook says (and we certainly do), how is it possible that we still haven’t
created our own?
More readings
Maria
Vlachou, Has
it become “essential “to control” Culture?, in Público, 12.3.2026
(translated from Portuguese)
Rob Riemen
(2011), The eternal return of fascism (published in Dutch and translated
into Greek, Portuguese, French and Croatian)
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