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CHAPTER 4
The WPA and “Americanism”
The Federal Music Project also featured ethnic music. In different regions of the country,
the FMP sponsored musical groups which reflected the ethnic makeup of the regions. On her
activity-packed 1940 Detroit trip, Eleanor Roosevelt heard a Hungarian Roma (Gypsy) band
perform, the Detroit Gypsy Orchestra. The FMP sponsored another ethnic band in Detroit, the
Tamburitzans, a group of Serbs and Croats. The existence of such ethnic musical groups served a
number of functions. For one, the musical groups acknowledged and celebrated the ethnic music
and other traditions familiar to residents of particular geographic areas. These ethnic groups
provided a ready-made audience for the WPA-affiliated ethnic musical groups. Enthusiastic
audiences for the groups meant that by extension, the Federal Music Project and the WPA had
public approval. Once again, the WPA chose specific projects to garner public involvement and
support for the WPA.
WPA administrators hoped that this public support of the WPA and the Federal Music
Project would translate into support of the American government and American ideals. While the
FMP’s projects may have celebrated individual ethnic cultures (and targeted different ethnic
groups), the United States government (the WPA/FMP) played a prominent role in creating and
promoting such projects. For example, units of the Detroit FMP dispatched musicians and
instruments to local schools and played concerts in various venues in the area, including
hospitals.104 Through these visible efforts which reached many, the WPA/FMP reminded the
public that although different ethnic groups may have been performing, they all were part of a
single country, the United States. With such efforts, the Federal Music Project and the WPA
104Bindas,All of This Music Belongsto the Nation,102.

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sought to create and celebrate a larger American culture. Kenneth J. Bindas contends that the
FMP, “like the New Deal itself, was part of a great social movement toward homogenization in
American society.”105 The WPA tried to define and create an “American” way of life.
The WPA emphasized specific aspects of American life for practical reasons. For
example, the WPA taught people about the United States by offering classes about American
culture. The courses sometimes taught students the English language. This instruction was
useful, as the United States had many recent immigrants and descendants of immigrants who
were accustomed to other languages. Such instruction would help students find work and
communicate with others more easily.
By teaching English, the WPA also promoted political agendas. The WPA’s English
classes helped emphasize assimilation and the adoption of American ideals. Other WPA projects
promoted this assimilation. Beth Wenger and H. K. Blatt argue that the WPA/Federal Writers’
Project survey “Jews of New York” helps “underscore America’s ‘rags to riches tradition’” and
shows how Jews “fitted into situations, seized and often created opportunities.”106 According to
Wenger,
the project framed the East Side neighborhood as a testimony to American
pluralism and possibility. The Lower East Side created by the Federal
Writers’ Project was an ethnic tourist attraction that confirmed the
standard American narrative of immigrant assimilation.107
While the Federal Writers’ Project touted an individual ethnic group, they also touted the United
States and its philosophies as well. According to these philosophies, assimilation meant adapting
105Bindas,All of This Music Belongsto the Nation,116.
106Beth Wenger,“Memory as Identity: The Invention of the Lower East Side,” American Jewish History 1 (March
1997): 15, Wenger cites H. K. Blatt’s introduction to “Jews of New York,” unpublished,first draft, Microfilm 175,
Box 7, Folder 229, 10, WPA.
107Wenger,“Memory as Identity,” 15-16.

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American capitalist values, namely striving for–and achieving–the “American dream” of
financial success.
The Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), much like the Federal Music Project and its
Hungarian Roma (Gypsy) bands, did in fact depict ethnic cultures within the United States as
“ethnic tourist attractions.” In the FWP’s view, these tourist attractions were foreign and exotic
but not indicative of the United States as a whole, not an ideal assimilated society. The program
considered the ethnic projects to be curiosities one could visit briefly but were not suitable places
to live and certainly not homes. The larger American culture would signify home, a place to set
down roots, a place to live permanently, and a place encouraging morality and responsibility.
The WPA’s arts projects implied that American institutions could provide this stability.
The Federal Music Project featured ethnic music, often in institutions such as schools and
hospitals. While schools and hospitals were venues large enough to host such events, they were
also great places to reach the American public in a symbolic way. They were venues that
represented the American government and American daily life. Compared to the newer WPA
projects, schools and hospitals had more people affiliated with them, more money, more
recognition, and had existed before, during, and after the WPA projects. These schools and
hospitals were established American institutions hosting ethnic cultural events. The host and
guest relationship indicates that the hosting hospitals and schools had a permanence and
importance while their guest WPA projects were fun, yet temporary, programs. Public schools
and hospitals served the community in a fundamental way. These hospitals and schools were
physical reminders of American government and its place in everyday life. This place was a
prominent one.
The Federal Music Project, as part of the WPA, also was the government. The Federal

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Music Project featured ethnic music from other countries, but was a visibly American
government program often operating in American government spaces. In this view, ethnic music
was a diversion, not as substantial or powerful as the American government institutions which
allowed ethnic musicians the space to be heard.
The WPA was eager to tout American culture and ideals largely because critics thought
that the program’s workers and projects were often so un-American. Critics wondered if the
agency as a whole was committed to promoting American values. Questions of Americanism–
what it meant to be an American and represent American characteristics and ideals–haunted the
WPA throughout its tenure.108 For example, the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project (FTP), as well as
the FTP’s actual productions, drew criticism like a lightning rod. Harry Hopkins and other New
Dealers hoped that the WPA would be apolitical, but the FTP had a stormy relationship with
politics, to put it lightly.
The Federal Theatre Project’s reputation for political controversy is earned, yet not
entirely accurate. Not all of its productions were controversial. For example, half of the Detroit’s
Federal Theatre Project’s repertoire consisted of classic plays. The final play the Detroit FTP
produced was William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor.109 Yet the Detroit Federal
Theatre Project also staged more modern, politically-charged productions. It presented Sinclair
Lewis’s antifascist play It Can’t Happen Here at the city’s Lafayette Theatre. The Federal
Theatre Project also staged this play simultaneously in several cities across the nation. Echoing
108My use ofthe term Americanism and its relation to communism are partly based on courses taught by Professor
Daniel Clark, Oakland University, Rochester, MI, 2004 and 2005; and various sources,including Victor S. Navasky,
Naming Names (New York: Penguin, 1981); and Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyismin America
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998).
109Elizabeth Clemens, “The Works Progress Administration in Detroit (1935-1943),” presentation offered as part of
And Still They Prospered: Living through the Great Depression lecture series, Macomb County Community
College, Lorenzo Cultural Center, Clinton Township, MI, 16 April 2010.

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the WPA’s multiculturalism, productions of this play included African American versions and a
Yiddish version. The FTP also produced “living newspapers,” plays offering social commentary
on the issues of the day. The titles of some living newspapers reveal their political perspective.
They include The Triple-A Plowed Under, a play about the demise of the New Deal’s
Agricultural Adjustment Act (also known as Triple-A or AAA), as well as productions with
names such as Injunction Granted, One-Third of a Nation, and Power. Not surprisingly, these
living newspapers created controversy for the Federal Theatre Project and the WPA.110
The Federal Theatre Project’s personnel were controversial as well. Its director, Hallie
Flanagan, studied theatre in the Soviet Union. Flanagan’s ties to the communist Soviet Union
proved unfortunate for the FTP. Congressman Martin Dies Jr., a Republican from Texas,
sponsored extensive hearings on communism in the late 1930s. Dies was the head of the House
Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), a congressional committee which later
famously investigated communism after World War II. Some of Dies’s allegations about
communists in the FTP were at least partially true. Communists and people with left-wing views
were affiliated with the WPA. Art Bernstein discussed these allegiances in his reminisces of his
parents, Henry (an artist with the Michigan WPA) and Thelma Bernstein. According to Art
Bernstein:
Although my parents were definitely left-leaning, and my mother, among
other things, was a professional union organizer, they were never Communists....
Still, my father went to a couple of Communist meetings, and supported many
liberal causes such as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade which solicited Americans to
fight against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War in the mid-1930s.111
110Milton Meltzer, Violins& Shovels, 31-44.
111Art Bernstein, “Where Are Your WPA Paintings? A Portrait of a Michigan Realist,” New Deal/WPA Art Project,
accessed 15 December 2005, http://www.wpamurals.com.

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Ellen Schrecker notes that artists and intellectuals “had been attracted to the communist
movement during the 1930s” and that such artists sometimes worked on WPA projects.112
WPA workers also had diverse backgrounds. This diversity was indicative of the United
States as a whole, as the country had experienced heavy immigration in the preceding decades.
By the 1930s, the country had many immigrants as well as several first and second-generation
Americans. The WPA hired large numbers of people to work on and administer its projects. The
sheer number of people involved meant that the program would contain people of different
backgrounds and people with different ideas.
Given its controversial projects and personnel, commentators viewed the WPA as a
hotbed of foreign people and ideas. As a consequence, the WPA intended to prove its American
mettle. By offering ethnic bands and writings about ethnic neighborhoods, the WPA’s Federal
Music Project and Federal Writers’ Project acknowledged different cultures while it also
endorsed the larger American culture. By teaching English as a second language, the WPA
taught and promoted American culture. These classes had the dual purpose of making foreign-
born residents become more Americanized while making the WPA appear more American as
well. Discussing the New Deal in New York City, Barbara Blumberg writes that some viewed
WPA classes in American culture as a “way to assimilate and indoctrinate potentially dangerous
foreigners.”113 In these ways, the WPA could promote American culture and position itself as an
American institution.
These efforts paralleled other New Deal efforts to promote American ideals through the
arts. During the depression, the WPA, state, and local governments helped private donors and
112Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 402.
113Blumberg, The New Deal and the Unemployed, 173.

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others create a number of regional art centers throughout the United States. The founders had
hoped that these centers would bridge cultural and geographic distances among Americans.
These centers provided physical spaces for communities to meet. The art centers allowed
Americans to experience art and share culture.114 These shared experiences are reminiscent of
American government ideals. In these centers and in American government, people of different
backgrounds participate in common activities for the common good. With these centers, isolated
people took steps toward becoming American communities. The WPA used American art and art
centers to promote American culture and political ideals. These centers helped the WPA create
an American identity for itself as the promoter of such American culture and ideals.
In its efforts to appear more American, the WPA took other measures to appease critics.
It also allowed others to change the program. By 1939, federal appropriations for the WPA had
undergone a series of cuts, and the WPA continued to garner considerable controversy in
Congress. Critics often accused the arts programs of being frivolous and expensive, and now,
they were politically controversial, especially in the late 1930s, as war and political conflict
raged in various regions around the world.115 In 1939, Dies and the House Committee on Un-
American Activities (HUAC) issued a report on what they deemed “alien” organizations and
groups. HUAC’s report included depictions of Nazi groups in the United States. It also included
descriptions of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). According to the report, many of the FTP’s
114John Franklin White, Art in Action: American Art Centers and the New Deal (Metuchen: The Scarecrow Press,
1987), introduction, 1-6.
115The “news from Europe is dark,” and there were hints of a “fresh warning of an approaching catastrophe,”
according to the Detroit News article “War Sentiment,” Detroit News 13 April 1939, p. 24; in a 1940 speech to
Congress,South Carolina Democratic representative Clara G. McMillan spoke of “every day new and more striking
evidence of the futility of invoking treaties, covenants,and moral sanctions against a well-prepared aggressor,” and
McMillan also advocated “military and naval preparedness,” Clara G. McMillan, Congressional Record, 76th
Congress,third session,3 April 1940, 3954, as cited by the Office of History and Preservation, Office of the Clerk,
Women in Congress, 1917-2006 (Washington,D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2007), accessed on the
Internet at http://www.womenincongress.house.gov.

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employees were “either members of the Communist Party or ... sympathetic with the Communist
Party.”116
Such suspicions and accusations–which linked Nazis, communists, and WPA workers in
one report–prompted Congress to act. T. H. Watkins notes that in 1939, “inspired by the Dies
committee, the House Subcommittee on Appropriations passed a resolution that would require
the investigation of all projects for possible subversion.”117 The WPA submitted to these
stipulations because its funding and political survival hinged on them. By portraying itself as a
truly American institution, the WPA could survive the budget and political battles in Congress. It
could convince Congress and the American public that it was an all-American program worthy
of their political and financial support.
The WPA did not survive 1939 intact, though. Milton Meltzer writes that the WPA had
always been a balancing act: “If the WPA did anything that displeased the men in power, the
projects risked being crippled or destroyed.”118 Even with its new stipulations, the Federal
Theatre Project proved too controversial and displeased those in power; it ended in 1939.119 T. H.
Watkins, Milton Meltzer, and Kenneth J. Bindas have argued that the Roosevelt administration
agreed to the changes in the WPA, including the dismantling of the Federal Theatre Project, in
order to save other aspects of the WPA.120 With state funding and new restrictions, the rest of the
116“Dies Files Report on Alien ‘Isms,’” Detroit News, 3 January 1939, pp. 1, 4, report quotation from p. 4.
117Watkins,The Hungry Years, 510, italics are from Watkins.
118Meltzer, Violins& Shovels,22, 137-141; Bindas, All of This Music Belongs to the Nation,30-34.
119Tim Robbins, Cradle Will Rock (Buena Vista, 1999), film. This film contains both nonfictional and fictional
elements and provides an overview of the Federal Theatre Project and specific information about some of its
productions.
120Watkins,The Hungry Years, 511; Meltzer, Violins & Shovels,137-141; Bindas, All of This Music Belongs to the
Nation,105-116.

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WPA arts programs continued until the 1940s. The controversy also continued.
Political controversy and productivity issues surrounded another WPA arts project head,
Federal Writers’ Project/Program (FWP) head Henry Alsberg. In 1940, Colonel F. C.
Harrington, who had succeeded Hopkins as the head of the WPA, replaced FWP head Alsberg
with John Dimmock Newsom, who was the state director of the Michigan Writers’ Project.
Why? According to a 1940 article in Time magazine: “Alsberg seemed a little too pinko ... was a
little too slow in getting production started on the Guide Books and other projects.... Alsberg and
colleagues had started out to produce great Art. Congress by & large preferred results.”121
Katherine Kellock, a Federal Writers’ Project field supervisor and one of the key forces behind
the American Guide concept, compared Newsom to Alsberg when she observed that Newsom
“was not given to Greenwich Village dreams of sponsoring genius.”122 According to the Time
article, Newsom did ultimately succeed in getting a number of state guides published.
Trying to quell controversy, the WPA accepted changes by others. Controversial project
heads were replaced, and the Federal Theatre Project was disbanded while the rest of the
organization continued. The WPA itself also made changes to the program. The WPA eventually
barred people who were not citizens from participating in projects. It required workers to take a
loyalty oath. It fired alien workers and distanced itself from people who had ties to aliens. In one
notable instance, the Michigan Writers’ Project fired American-born Rebecca Shelley. After
World War I, Shelley had lost her American citizenship by marrying a German-born man who
was still an alien. Most people in this situation regained their citizenship by swearing allegiance
121“WPAchievement,” Time, 12 August 1940, Books section, 64.
122Kellock’s quotation appears in Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935-
1943 (New York City: Avon Books, 1972), 327, and is cited in Taylor, American-Made, 437.

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to the United States. Shelley, a well-known pacifist, claimed that the United States government
denied her citizenship petition because she refused to take an oath to bear arms for the country.
Shelley was still not considered an American citizen when the Michigan Writers’ Project
dismissed her in 1937.123 Thus, the WPA made a considerable effort to define itself as American
and distance itself from allegedly un-American people and practices. It also made efforts to
define itself in other ways.
123Rebecca Shelley Papers, 1890-1984. Box 1, Newspaper Clippings, 1930-1949 folder, articles from the Christian
Century, 25 August 1937, the Nation,25 November 1939, and Detroit News, 22 January 1940, Bentley Historical
Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.