“Directions in Arts Policy History”

Over the past four decades, historians of politics, diplomacy, society, and culture have joined scholars from fields of art history, cultural studies, American studies, political science, and public policy to create an exciting body of work defining the field of art policy history. It tells us not only about the arts that we enjoy (or sometimes do not) but also much about who we have been as a nation, who we are, and what we hope for our future. Arts policy history is a vibrant and growing field, and many of its current contributors are still building on the ideas Jane De Hart delved into early in her career. In 1967, Jane De Hart published The Federal Theatre Project: Plays, Relief, and Politics. A reviewer of the book for the Journal of American History stated that the book “should serve as a model for future studies of governmental agencies and projects . . . [it is] written with clarity, grace, and understanding . . . [and] could scarcely be improved upon.”¹ De Hart’s book was one of the first monographs ever to analyze arts policy and the reviewer predicted correctly that it would influence future scholars.² This article will trace some of the directions arts policy history has taken since De Hart’s publication of The Federal Theatre.

De Hart’s study of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration’s theater project still serves as an excellent example of how to study society, culture, and politics combined. It is a wonderful articulation of the passion and possibilities of the theater project specifically and the dash, vigor, and hope of the New Deal at the height of its achievements. De Hart interweaves the broader history of the WPA with the particular leadership of the Theater Project under the dynamic figure of Hallie Flannigan. Her goal was not only to provide relief for unemployed artists but to use the WPA project as a springboard to form a permanent, truly national theater designed to outlast the New Deal itself and to provide (in Harry Hopkins’s words) “free, adult, uncensored theater” to the masses. De Hart beautifully juxtaposes Flannigan’s heady—and sometimes naive—plans with the political realities the federal theater faced. These realities included difficulties with bureaucratic red tape and funding, overcoming the urban centralization of the theater, and a congressional investigation by the then-new HUAC charging that the theater was communistic. Ultimately, De Hart argues that the theater proved unable to reconcile its social and artistic goals with politics.

By 1938, the WPA programs that had been founded on the principle of relief for the unemployed were cut back as aid was no longer needed and reform no longer tolerated on such a large scale (especially in the wake of FDR’s court-packing plan). The first of the WPA arts projects to be canceled was the federal theater. And surely no program went down in such a blaze of glory, as De Hart illustrates in a chapter entitled “Congress Kills Pinocchio.” When federal theaters learned of their midnight closing on June 30, 1939, a number of productions ended with more than the usual final curtain. Some sang “Auld Lang Syne” or knocked down their sets in full view of their audiences. At the Ritz Theater in New York when the play Pinocchio closed, De Hart tells us, “instead of becoming a living boy, Pinocchio died, symbolizing the fate of the federal theater,” and actors and crew marched in a funeral procession out into the night.³

While the door closed on the WPA projects, a window opened for scholars. De Hart’s book was the beginning of a fresh, new breeze of work on policy and politics as well as social and cultural history. She followed up on the Federal Theatre monograph with her article “Art of the People: The New Deal Quest for Cultural Democracy” in the Journal of American History. This article expanded on the history of WPA art projects beyond theater, to include an overview of the music, writers’, and arts projects. De Hart argues that the arts projects went beyond mere relief, although 90...