Typed Letter. Hallie Flanagan to Agnes Inglis, October 1, 1942.

In one of its most controversial moves, the Works Progress Administration decided to provide jobs for unemployed writers, actors, artists, and musicians. The social content of the books, plays, and murals produced by federal projects was anathema to conservatives, but the level of achievement appears very high as the decades have passed. At its peak the Federal Theatre employed 10,000 people, over half of them in New York City. Twelve million people attended its performances there. Under the Project, many theatre companies sprang up throughout the country as well. Many of the Federal Writers’ state and local guides have been reprinted in recent years.

Hallie Flanagan, who had gained attention with her work at the Vassar Experimental Theater, headed the Federal Theater Project. The Special Collections Library has some of her correspondence with Agnes Inglis, the first curator of the Labadie Collection, and with Professor Kenneth Rowe of the English Department at the University of Michigan, who promoted the plays of students in his courses here and worked for ties with the Federal Theater. Flanagan returned to Vassar in 1939, became Dean and Director of Theatre at Smith College in 1945, and retired in 1952.

Hallie Flanagan appeared less spirited when she was admonished by the Dies Committee for such productions as One Third of a Nation by seventeenth-century playwright Christopher Marlowe. It was at this hearing that Congressman Joe Starnes of Alabama asked if Marlowe was a Communist and wanted to investigate him. See Thirty Years of Treason: Excerpts from Hearings before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, edited by Eric Bentley (Viking, 1971).